Silo 49: Deep Dark

Chapter Fourteen

The farm books had turned out to be an unexpected bonanza of information once they knew what to look for and the majority of the pile for the historian’s attention was made up of those thick, dirty volumes. Taylor had found an entire box of logs from IT. The green fabric covers hid a surprising array of information about IT’s past, including the almost unbelievable number of computers that used to be in active use. At one time, more than six thousand computers had hummed throughout the silo. Now they had, at best, two thousand.

It was at the end of another long day of dust, sneezing and endless books and records that they gathered at the table. It was quickly becoming custom that Greta gave them an update on her progress to close the day’s work. She had drawn rough timelines on one of her chalkboards and tried to match dates along those various lines using the references they brought her.

Greta filled them in on the various tiny additions to the timeline, but soon she started to look nervous, even twitchy. What Marina noted even as she realized that Greta’s discomfort was increasing was that all of the six lines representing distinct dirt farms were now connected by a single line at one point. She peered at it but couldn’t make out the numbers from this distance. What she could tell was that it wasn’t as far back as it should be if it referred to First People or First Heroes.

Greta retracted her pointing finger back into her fist as she reached the line and gave a little cough. When she extended her finger again, it was pointing directly at the joining line for all the various timelines. She ran it down the jagged path that joined them and said, “And this appears to be the events outlined in the time of the First Heroes.” She paused as they all gaped at her. She looked uncomfortable and added, “But I can’t be absolutely sure of it.”

Taylor rolled his eyes but focused immediately again on the timeline. He was closest to it and had the youngest and best eyes of the three listening to Greta. He said, “But that is what, maybe a hundred and twenty years ago. That isn’t possible. Is it?”

Greta somehow managed to combine a nod and a shake of the head into the same motion. It was the picture of uncertainty. Marina stepped toward the board and looked for herself. She found the burial of Graham directly on the line connecting three of the timelines. She pointed to it and asked, “How did you get that? I didn’t find that.”

In response, Greta dug through the pile of open books spread across the table. She retrieved one that Marina had put into the interest pile the day before. It was the one with the strange misspellings and handwriting. “I found a similar problem, though not as bad as this one, in several of the other books. They all seemed to last about the same amount of time. So I went back to the original book you found the burial record in and found this.”

She pulled out the book in question, the one they had started calling the Burial Book, even though all the other farm books also detailed burials, toward her on the table. It was already open to the burial page. All of them had looked at it so many times they had the shape the entries made memorized. She flipped it forward a few pages and pointed to the entries. “If you look at this one closely, you’ll see the same thing. The handwriting isn’t much changed, but it doesn’t make a lot of sense when you try to read it,” she said.

Greta waved her arm across the table to indicate all the books arrayed there and said, “They all have it. Every single dirt farm has this period of strangeness. One of them even has an entry where a farmer says he dreamed he had a child but woke up and there wasn’t one.”

“Could everyone have had Remediation? That can’t happen, right?” Marina asked.

Piotr shook his head and responded, “No way. That wouldn’t even be possible that I’m aware of. Who would do it? Who would monitor the people?”

“Right,” Greta agreed. “Whatever this was it seems very unlikely that it would just occur to farms like that at different times. While I really dislike saying these words, I have to assume that this was a silo-wide occurrence. Or else it affected all the farms at the same time.”

Taylor broke in. “No way. If all the farmers just started going loopy someone else would have written something or there would be some evidence of it being corrected. Like a gap or something. This just trickles off in all the books.”

Greta nodded again.

“But what about that timeline? That isn’t very long ago. I mean, it is, but not really. I thought the First Heroes were…I don’t know…like thousands of years ago or something,” Marina said. It made her uneasy that the length of that timeline was so short.

The historian sighed. “That’s what is making me feel very uncomfortable. Taylor was right. Given the uncertainty of using ‘Orchard Years’, this looks like 110 years, 130 at most, when Graham died. And since we are given to understand that he died in the battle…”

“Then the time of the First Heroes is only three times as old as I am,” Piotr said.

“How could we get that so wrong?” Taylor asked, sounding as confused as he looked.

With a shrug, Greta said, “I think that all those entries that looked like they were done by remediation are probably how that happened. I’m thinking the entire silo got remediated and somehow history got changed.”

Taylor had begun shaking his head as she said the words. As soon as she was done he burst out, “No. Not possible.”

Marina didn’t want to get into an argument so she interrupted it before it could begin. “Whatever. It doesn’t matter in the details. It only matters that it changes our timeline. Because you’re missing the big picture here, Taylor. If it happened that recently, then that means that the Others were aggressively seeking our destruction not too long ago.”

“And,” Piotr took up the thread, “then it is possible that the nuke or whatever it was didn’t happen as far back as we think either.”

“Exactly!” Marina exclaimed and gave him a grim smile.

“Assuming all this is true, what next?” asked Piotr.

“Now we see what we can find that goes back further. We see if we can find the First People,” Greta said and slammed the book closed.