Second Shift: Order

Page 16

“I remember you telling me she was on them.” Thurman said. “We were in the bookstore—”
“Do you remember your dosage?” Henson asked. “How long were you on it?”
“I started taking it after I was given the Order to read.” He watched Thurman for any hint of expression and got nothing. “I guess that was two or three years before the convention. I took them nearly every day right up until then.” He turned to Henson. “I would’ve had some on me during orientation if I hadn’t lost them on the hill that day. I think I fell. I remember falling—”
Henson turned to Thurman. “There’s no telling what the complications might be. Victor was careful to screen psychotropics from administrative personnel. Everyone was tested—”
“I wasn’t,” Donald said.
Henson faced him. “Everyone was tested.”
“Not him.” Thurman studied the surface of the pod, spoke to Henson. “There was a last minute change. A switch. I vouched for him. And if he was taking her meds, there wouldn’t have been anything in his medical records.”
“We need to tell Erskine,” Henson said. “I could work with him. We might come up with a new formulation.” He turned away from the pod like he needed to get back to his office.
Thurman looked to Donald. “Do you need more time down here?”
Donald studied his sister a moment. He wanted to wake her, to talk to her. Maybe he could come back another time just to visit.
“I might like to come back,” he said.
“We’ll see.”
Thurman walked around the pod and placed a hand on Donald’s shoulder, gave him a light, sympathetic squeeze. He led Donald away from the pod and toward the door, and Donald didn’t glance back, didn’t check the screen for his sister’s new name. He didn’t care. He knew where she was, and she would always be Charlotte to him. She would never change.
“You did good,” Thurman said. “This is real good.” They stepped into the hall and closed the thick doors with their massive locks. “You may have stumbled on why Victor was so obsessed with that report of yours.”
“I did?” Donald didn’t see the connection.
“I don’t think he was interested in what you wrote at all,” Thurman said. “I think he was interested in you.”
•23•
They rode the lift toward the cafeteria rather than drop Donald off on fifty-five. It was almost dinnertime, and he could help Thurman with the trays. While the lights behind the level numbers blinked on and off, following their progress up the shaft, the idea that Thurman might be right haunted him. What if Victor had been curious about his resistance to the medication? What if it wasn’t anything in that report at all?
They rode past level 40, its button winking bright and then going dark, and Donald thought of the silo that had done the same. “What does this mean for 18?” he asked, watching the next number flash by.
Thurman stared at the stainless steel doors, a greasy palm print there from where someone had caught their balance.
“Vic wanted to try another reset on 18,” he said. “I never saw the point. But after his death—“ Thurman hesitated. “Maybe we give them one more chance.”
“What’s involved in a reset?”
“You know what’s involved.” Thurman faced him. “It’s what we did to the world, just on a smaller scale. Reduce the population, wipe the computers, their memories, try it all over again. We’ve done that several times before with this silo. There are risks involved. You can’t create trauma without making a mess. At some point, it’s simpler and safer to pull the plug.”
“End them,” Donald said, and he saw what Victor had been up against, what he had worked to avert. He wished he could speak to the old man, now that he knew what he knew. Anna said Victor had spoken of him often. And Erskine had said he wished people like Donald were in charge. What did that mean, all that nonsense about names being all that mattered and doing what was right for a change?
The elevator opened on the top level. Donald stepped out, and it was strange to walk among those on their shift, to be present and at the same time invisible, a body moving among the chatter while not a part of it all.
He noticed that no one here looked to Thurman with deference. He was not that shift’s head, and no one knew him as such. They were just two men, one in white and one in beige, grabbing food and glancing at the ruined wasteland on the wallscreen.
Donald took one of the trays and noticed again that most people sat facing the view. Only one or two ate with their backs to it, preferring not to see. He followed Thurman back to the elevator while longing to speak to these handful, to ask them what they remembered, what they were afraid of, to tell them that it was okay to be afraid.
“Why do the other silos have screens?” he asked Thurman, keeping his voice down. The parts of the facility he’d had no hand in designing made little sense to him. “Why show them what we did?”
“To keep them in,” Thurman said. He balanced the tray with one hand and pressed the call button on the express. “It’s not that we’re showing them what we did. We’re showing them what’s out there. Those screens and a few taboos are all that contain these people. Humans have this disease, Donny, this compulsion to move until we bump into something. And then we tunnel through that something, or we sail over the edge of the oceans, or we stagger across mountains—”
The elevator arrived. A man in reactor red excused himself and stepped between the two. They boarded, and Thurman fumbled for his badge. “Fear,” he said. “Even the fear of death is barely enough to counter this compulsion of ours. If we didn’t show them what was there, they would go look for themselves. That’s what we’ve always done.”
Donald considered this. He thought about his own desire, his mad urge, to escape the confines of all that pressing concrete. Even if it meant death out there. The slow strangulation was worse, he decided. It was all about choosing the lesser of two evils.
“I’d rather see a reset than extinguish the entire silo,” he said, watching the numbers race by. He didn’t mention that he’d been reading up on the people who lived there. Bad things would happen to many of them, but there would be a chance at life afterward.
“I’m less and less eager to gas the place, myself,” Thurman admitted. “When Vic was around, all I did was argue against wasting our time with any one silo like this. Now that he’s gone, I find myself pulling for these people. It’s like I have to honor his last wishes. And that’s a dangerous trap to fall into.”
The elevator stopped on twenty and picked up two workers, who ceased a conversation of their own and fell silent for the ride. Donald thought about this process of cleansing a silo only to watch the violence repeat itself. The great wars he remembered from the old days came like this, a new generation unremembering, so that sons marched into the wars their fathers had fought before them.
The two workers got off at the rec hall, resuming their conversation as the doors closed. Donald remembered how much he enjoyed punishing himself in the weight room. Now he was wasting away with little appetite, nothing to push against, no resistance.
“It makes me wonder sometimes if that was why he did what he did,” Thurman said. The elevator slid toward fifty-five. “Vic calculated everything. Always with a purpose. Maybe his way of winning this argument of ours was to ensure he had the last word.” Thurman glanced at Donald. “Hell, it’s what finally got me to agree to wake you up.”
Donald didn’t say out loud how crazy that sounded. He thought Thurman just needed some way to make sense of the unthinkable. Of course, there was another way Victor’s death had ended the argument. Not for the first time, Donald imagined that it hadn’t been a suicide at all. But he didn’t see where such doubts could get him except in trouble.
They got off on fifty-five and carried the trays through the aisles of munitions. As they passed the sleeping drones, Donald thought of his sister, similarly sleeping. It was good to know where she was, that she was safe. A small comfort.
They ate at the war table. Donald pushed his dinner around his plate while Thurman and Anna talked. The two reports sat before him, constant companions, a bevy of notes with a splatter of blood, a report that he’d been reading too much into, notes about him remembering, about this being the great why of it all.
Just a scrap of paper, he thought. No mystery. He had been looking at the wrong thing, assuming there was a clue in the words, but it was just Donald’s existence that Victor had remarked upon. He had sat across the hall from Donald and watched him react to whatever was in their water or their pills. Victor had watched him go mad. And now when Donald looked at his notes, all he saw was a piece of paper with pain scrawled across it amid specks of blood. Blood that had been copied over with the handwritten notes, both now black as copier toner.
Ignore the blood, he told himself. The blood wasn’t a clue. It had come after. There were several splatters in a wide space left in the notes. Donald had been studying the senseless. He had been looking for something that wasn’t there. He may as well have been staring off into space.
Space. Donald set his fork down and grabbed the other report. Once you ignored the large spots of blood, there was a hole, a vacancy where nothing had been written. This was what he should’ve been focused on. Not what was there, but what wasn’t.
He checked the other report—the corresponding location of that blank space—to see what was written there. He was grasping at air, he knew. Sure enough, when he found the right spot, his excitement vanished. It was the paragraph that didn’t belong, the one about the young inductee whose great grandmother remembered the old times. It was nothing.
Unless—
Donald sat up straight. Thurman had said the report wasn’t about its contents at all. But maybe they had been looking at the wrong contents. He took the two reports and placed them on top of each other. Anna was telling Thurman about her progress with the jamming of the radio towers, that she would be done soon. Thurman was saying that they could all get off shift in the next few days, get the schedule back in order. Donald held the overlapping reports up to the lights. Thurman looked on curiously.
“He wrote around something,” Donald muttered. “Not over something.”
He met Thurman’s gaze and smiled. “You were wrong.” The two pieces of paper trembled in his hands. “There is something here. He wasn’t interested in me at all.”
Anna set down her utensils and leaned over to have a look.
“If I had the original, I would’ve seen it straight away.” He pointed to the space in the notes, then slid the top page away and tapped his finger on the one paragraph that didn’t belong. The one that had nothing to do with Silo 12 at all.
“Here’s why your resets don’t work,” he said. Anna grabbed the bottom report and read about the shadow Donald had inducted, the one whose great-grandmother remembered the old days, the one who had asked him a question about whether those stories were true.
“Someone in Silo 18 remembers,” Donald said with confidence. “Maybe a bunch of people do, passing the knowledge down in secret from generation to generation. Or they’re immune like me. They remember.”
Thurman took a sip of his water. He set down the glass and glanced from his daughter to Donald. “More reason to pull the plug,” he said.
“No,” Donald told him. “No. That’s not what Victor thought.” He tapped the dead man’s notes. “He wanted to find the one who remembers, but he didn’t mean me.” He turned to Anna. “I don’t think he wanted me up at all. This isn’t about me.”
Anna looked up at her father, a puzzled expression on her face. She turned to Donald. “Are you saying there’s another way?”
“Yes.” He stood and paced behind the chairs, stepping over the wires that snaked across the tiles. “We need to call 18 and ask the head there if anyone fits this profile, someone or some group sowing discord, maybe talking about the world we—” He stopped himself from saying destroyed.
“Okay,” Anna said, nodding her head. “Okay. Let’s say they do know. Let’s say we find these people over there like you. What then?”
He stopped his pacing. This was the part he hadn’t considered. He found Thurman studying him, the old man’s lips pursed.
“We find these people—” Donald said.
And he knew. He knew Thurman had been right. There was that story of a medic wounded, there was Donald’s frustration with what had been done to the world. He imagined what it might take to save these people in this distant silo, these welders and shopkeeps and metalsmiths and their young shadows. He remembered being the one on a previous shift to press that button, to kill in order to save.
And he knew he would do it again.
Silo 18
Hush, my child, too late to cry
The skies are dark, the rivers dry
Our parents gave us lives to keep
Buried here beneath the deep
They sent us down below the dirt
They lied and said it wouldn't hurt
Their lies still shield us from our dread
Buried here beside our dead
We cannot leave, we must not cry
We'll show them that our cheeks are dry
Now sleep, my child, accept the dream
Buried here, unless you clean
-Mary Fonvielle, age 22
•24•
Mission’s throat itched and his eyes stung, the smoke growing heavier and the stench stronger as he approached Lower Dispatch. At least the pursuit from above seemed to have faltered, perhaps from the gap in the rails that had claimed a life.