Silo 49: Going Dark

Eavesdropping on Death

Graham bustled through the mess that was IT but stopped short when he met Tony the Toady coming out of one of the workrooms. Tony’s eyes—the greedy eyes of a man with more ambition than was healthy—lit up when he saw Graham.

“Boss!” he exclaimed, his slick smile settling into place. “So glad you could make it in today. That error has been blinking all day.” He jerked a thumb down the hallway toward the server room doors. He lifted his ubiquitous clipboard and ran a perfectly groomed fingernail down the page.

Before Tony could get started, Graham needed to nip this in the bud. Tony had become almost nauseatingly efficient and in-his-face obsequious in the years since Graham’s shadow had died. The man had a nose for advancement and while he didn’t know the details of what the Head of IT did, he knew it was more than it seemed. And it was clear that he wanted it for himself and was angling for the shadow position, knowing that eventually it would have to be filled. Graham was old and couldn’t live forever, after all. To Graham’s way of thinking, anyone who wanted this job was exactly the sort of person who shouldn’t have it.

“Tony, we’re going to need to meet later. I’ve got to get that error fixed soon or we’ll have a server backup.” There was no such thing but that was enough to strike alarm into Tony, who believed—like everyone else—that the servers kept them alive. It worked again.

“Of course, boss, of course! I should have realized that. Shall I meet you afterward?” he asked, all politeness and conciliation, his finger poised over his clipboard. “We have quite a list,” he added.

Graham nodded even as he began walking, brushing past Tony without another word. The few workers on shift were all busy and overworked. He had no intention of disturbing whatever they were engaged in, so he merely waved as he passed the open doors where they toiled. At the outer server room door, he saw blinking red lights casting a lurid red glow into the hallway through the small pane of thick glass. At least whoever it was still waited on the line.

He used his card and key code to unlock the thick door and let it swing open just enough to slip inside. Stopping the momentum of the door once it got moving in a direction was impossible so he left that to the machines, slapping the red button that would close it again. He waited for the slow process to complete, tapping a foot impatiently as he did so. It was a major rule that one didn’t leave the door untended while opened even the barest sliver. He was half convinced that the red lights would stop blinking just before he got there.

He looked up at the camera, certain that Silo One would be watching if that was, in fact, who was calling him. He gave a little wave toward the dark eye of glass. He held up a finger to indicate it would be just a moment longer and pointed at the closing door. He took a deep breath and tried to recapture a feeling of calm while the door creaked closed. The final soft thud of closure closed Graham off from the last sounds of IT except the servers behind him and set his feet into motion.

Once he scrambled down into the lair under IT, making a great show of hurrying for the cameras in the server room, he grabbed the headset and slipped the jack into the slot for Silo One. He checked his nerves again, decided he wasn’t quite where he liked to be in terms of calm and then adjusted the headset so the pads were pushed back a bit, barely resting on the outer curves of his ears.

He jacked up the volume to make up for the distance, cleared his throat and said, “This is 49.”

“Standby. You will be contacted shortly,” answered a flat, tinny voice. It was cold and distant, then cut the connection without waiting for an answer.

Above him, the red lights winked out and didn’t return. The short response and the time it took him to get down to the lair probably meant that whoever had been trying to call him got tired of waiting and now had to be fetched again. He imagined some person—not quite male or female in his mind—wriggling in their seat with a need to pee while they waited. He felt vaguely satisfied with the image but suppressed a smile.

That satisfaction didn’t quell the disquiet he felt entirely. The hair on his neck stood on end whenever he heard that cold and sexless voice. It always had. Graham barely suppressed the urge to peer into the corners of the room once again as he settled in for the wait. He’d searched this area beneath IT at least a hundred times, looking for whatever they used to watch him in here. He had not been successful at finding it, if such actually existed.

It would be reasonable to assume there was no camera after so much fruitless searching. But Graham didn’t feel very reasonable and he knew they watched him here. Why wouldn’t they? He could feel their eyes itching across his skin in the way they asked questions that always seemed to mirror what he felt. Unless they lived in his body alongside him, he had to assume they knew these things because they watched.

He remained curious, though. No number of rules could completely eliminate that inside him. He knew that sometime soon, when enough time had passed after this call, when no contact was expected and any interest they had in him had waned, he would search again for cameras down here. The fact that most cameras in the silo were plainly visible if one chose to look but could be almost invisibly hidden in spaces like the cafeteria, kept him looking and kept him from being too much himself down here in the private domain of the Head of IT.

The wait for their return call seemed to last for days, though in truth it was only a few short minutes. To Graham, time always seemed to drag so very slowly when he was in these rooms beneath IT. Here he felt most exposed even though this was certainly the most hidden place in the entire silo.

A sudden lurching buzz behind him gave him a start and he almost fell off the little stool he was sitting on, yanking the cord out of the jack in the process of scrambling to keep his seat. He fumbled for his cord and jammed the jack home under the flashing light. “This is Silo 49, Graham Newton speaking,” he said in a carefully modulated voice.

“You have the report?” asked a slightly different voice, this one equally tinny and flat.

In all the years he had been participating in calls with Silo One, every voice sounded almost exactly the same. There were differences for a careful listener to catch though. Some spoke quickly and others slowly, some used strange flat tones on some words while others drew out vowels. He never mentioned the differences. He had the feeling they wanted him to always think it was the same person speaking, some ultimate authority he could rely on. But people needed sleep over there as much as here, didn’t they? It seemed to him he might relate better to them, perhaps be a little less nervous, if they acted more human with him.

“Yes, I do,” he said aloud and paused while he settled the headset more firmly around his head, yet still not quite on his ears. “It’s about the water quality issue I brought up before. I have the results.”

“Go ahead.”

“It’s confirmed. The water table has been contaminated by the toxins matching the information you provided. The results are mixed though.”

“Mixed? Explain,” the voice, so eerily distant, sounded no more moved than it would if Graham had announced that his favorite color was yellow. This was, in fact, his favorite color and probably why he always had a soft spot for Supply.

“Water intakes are receiving water from the ground at different levels, of course. The ones in the down deep have very little contamination but it is still present at low levels in the source water. Regular filtration doesn’t change the levels,” he said and paused again as some distant sound tickled his ears through the headset.

He could clearly hear the rustle of paper on the other end of the line and the faintest whisper of conversation in the background. The man at the other end of the line didn’t appear to notice so he hurried on. “The contamination levels increase in different water plants as we rise in the silo towards the Up-Top, with very high levels present after processing at the uppermost plant. We did the correlation that you asked for based on the levels present and…”

“Yes?”

Graham shuffled his own papers until he found the summary sheet he had written just that day. The faint background noises had resolved into words and he could hear snippets of conversation going on in at the other end of the line more clearly. He strained to pick up anything distinct and heard the words “unsupportable” and “terminate” amongst the garbled speech, those words rising with emphasis somewhere else in that other room.

Such words from another silo, in a room where people existed that controlled them all, made his stomach churn uncomfortably and he swallowed hard. He looked at his paper, past the wet marks along the margins left by his sweat dampened hands, and to the words.

Graham kept his voice even and said, “The concentrations were tested in a selection of people and it does correlate, at least roughly, to the miscarriages and cancers. There is a lot of leeway there though. Some of it we think we know the reason for.”

For the first time the voice seemed interested and said, “Please, go on. We’d like to know what you found. Anything might be important. We’re here to assist.”

Graham fought the urge to make a face at the very idea of them actually helping anyone and instead read off his bullet points. “Those who either live or work where one water source provides and then work or live at a different level where another plant provides water show lower tendencies for cancer and miscarriage than those who both live and work at the higher concentration level water source.” He thought the words sounded confusing and he hoped what he said was at least understandable. There was no reply from the other end of the line, so he decided to push on.

“Also, when I started…uh…dosing the water again, as per your instructions, to combat the degradation in mood, the miscarriages started spiking. Really increasing.”

“What do you suggest be done about that?” asked the voice.

“Stop the dosing,” Graham replied bluntly. He held his breath, fearful of what the voice on the other end might say, and then hurried on. “Whatever it is supposed to do, it obviously makes the situation we’re already dealing with even worse.”

“That might lead to even more serious problems, as you well know, Graham.” The voice somehow added a note of chiding to the otherwise almost featureless words. Graham wondered, not for the first time, if he could survive long enough to get as far as Silo One just so he could fling a bag of chicken poo on their sensors. The dosing of the water he’d been directed to begin contained an aggressive combination of the calming drugs and a small dose of the forgetting drugs. It was the kind of combination that might be used in another silo close to an uprising, the population disturbed and aggressive. His silo didn’t meet those descriptions in even the smallest way.

He shook the thought away and felt the heat rise in his neck, which, when joined with his roiling belly, made him feel as if he might disgorge the contents of his stomach. The prospect of doing so in the confines of his little lair beneath IT, where the smell would linger, was unpleasant. To avoid it, he focused on what the voice was saying to him and kept away thoughts on how much he had come to loathe whoever owned those voices over the years. Whoever they were, they didn’t seem to care one whit that they were dying slowly over in this silo. He felt quite sure they were facing no such problems over there.

“Our population is down to 1563 as of this morning. There’s a little figure for you to chew on. That is down more than four hundred in less than a year. Some were age or accident or what have you, but the majority of deaths were from cancers, children who were just too weak to survive or problems during pregnancy. They bleed, you know. Pregnant women sometimes bleed for no reason and it doesn’t stop and then they die. I can’t think of a lot more serious than that. Did you realize that we had more than 5000 people here once? No one else seems to care about that anymore.”

“You’ll be able to resolve that once we resolve your water problem. The two problems go together, Graham,” the voice said, the embodiment of calm or perhaps simply that of disinterest.

“That may be so, but the impact of the dosing is much more serious than it has been before and I don’t know why,” Graham replied as calmly as he was able to, ensuring the pads for the earphones were perched as far back on his ears as possible. He distrusted the way they spoke to him when he was upset. It made him feel as if there was some danger, but of course, there was always danger when speaking to Silo One.

What he really wanted to do was scream at them, elicit something like humanity or compassion from them and then beg for help. And if he couldn’t have that, he just wanted an answer for what was happening that he could believe was true. Perhaps then he might be able to do something himself.

What was happening couldn’t be the way things were meant to be. No silo was expendable or why go to all the trouble of building the silos in the first place. Why put people inside them, sheltered deep inside the blasted earth, to save the human race and then let them die? It made no sense. But then again, he had sat in this very spot while Silo 12 was shut down, everyone inside lost forever. If Silo One could do that, then they were capable of anything and any silo could be lost.

He knew what his people were dealing with wasn’t what other silos dealt with, though they had their own problems to be sure. He often wondered if he were allowed to choose his problems, which would he choose? Would he select the uprisings and death that happened with such frightening regularity in the other silos or the slow and lingering decline of his own? The truth was, at least according to Graham’s simple viewpoint, neither should be happening. There was no reason for any of it.

His brief reverie was interrupted again and it was only when the voice spoke that he realized he had been hearing murmurs from the other end of the line again.

“Impact? Be specific with what you mean when you say impact,” the voice, no longer totally emotionless, sounded more interested, almost eager. For some reason this made Graham think of Tony the Toady’s smile. All long white teeth and avid eyes. He shivered.

Graham could hear more conversation on the other end of the line and though he couldn’t make out the words, he could at least tell that those speaking were men and their voices weren’t strange like the one he was supposed to be talking to. Whatever might be going on over there, he needed to make sure they didn’t catch on that he could hear it. He reached down, grabbed a notebook by his chair and flipped to the page he needed. He took a deep breath. He would be useless to his silo if they had some way to eliminate him or did something worse.

“Some side effects due to memory degradation are to be expected but this is much worse. I’ve got a list here of incidents that fall well outside the norm.” He ran his fingers down the list looking for some examples that would make his point and found one. He jabbed his finger on a line of neat writing and continued, “Nine different reports have been submitted of parents not picking up children from childcare because they forgot they even had kids. And that is just the reported ones so there are probably a lot more incidents that weren’t reported.”

“Anything else?”

Graham snorted and then tried to cover it up by clearing his throat. Sarcasm wouldn’t be helpful, he knew. But really, did they think that a parent forgetting the existence of their child was a minor glitch?

“Lots of people not showing up to work because they forget they have a job or forget which job they have. People who already have been diagnosed with cancer keep showing up complaining of illness because they forget they have it. Can you imagine getting that news every day for the first time?”

“Perhaps that is better than dwelling on a diagnosis,” said the voice in an utterly reasonable, yet chilling, response.

“Okay, I’ll grant you that one but we don’t have enough medics for this and they are just as forgetful so it’s a mess. Every single dimming the deputies and maintainers find people asleep on floors all over the place because they don’t remember where they live,” Graham continued and then gave up. He slammed the book closed and dropped it to the floor again. The bang reverberated in the space and made him wince.

“I understand your frustration. Those are rather extreme reactions and it is probable that the weakened condition of the ill make this more likely. Or perhaps there is some exaggeration in the effect due to the contaminants. I think you need a slight the alteration in the dose level. Stand by.”

Graham heard a rapid and whispered conversation behind the louder sounds of something rubbing across the microphone, but he could make out no specific words. It was but a quick moment before the voice continued and gave him a new concentration, which he dutifully wrote down.

Silo One’s voice then asked, “And the suicides?”

“Significant decreases, yes. Actually, that’s one good thing. There have been none since our report last month. But that might just be because there are fewer left to do it. Everyone is needed critically. We don’t have enough people to fill any but the most urgent jobs as it is. That’s especially true when people don’t show up to work. Whole sections of this silo are empty now and there aren’t any spare people to even close them up properly. We don’t even have a sheriff as of two days ago!”

“What happened to him?”

“Cancer. What else?”

The voice at the other end of the line was silent a moment. The only sounds coming through to Graham were more whispers that were just beyond the edge of understanding. Finally, the voice spoke again and asked, “Why weren’t we notified that the sheriff was ill?”

To Graham’s mind, this question pointed more toward Silo One not being given due consideration in the notification and less toward the critical loss of the main law enforcement officer of the silo. He answered civilly, but it was a strain to do so. “He kept that information private and I didn’t know until he died. He told very few people, a deputy or two and a friend. His medic knew, of course.”

“What about the birth defects? Did you compile that data?”

Graham nodded, though no one was there to see it and he shuffled his papers once again to get the correct page. He delayed a little, straining to hear what might be coming over the line from the other side. Whatever the conversation was, it was either over or no longer close enough for him to hear. He gave in and snugged the earphones tightly over his ears, a move that wasn’t wise if he was put in a position requiring any impromptu truth stretching.

He didn’t know exactly why the headphones were important, but IT head after IT head had passed down the knowledge that putting them on askew, but not askew enough to be noticeable gave them a lot of leeway in how the conversation with Silo One might go.

“Ah, I have it,” he said and made a point of peering at the paper just in case they were watching him. He read off a string of numbers. Incidents of certain defects in the heart, the lungs and the digestive tract were increasing as was the prevalence of children being born who had difficulty learning and remembering.

“Hold on,” the voice said and Graham heard a click. That click usually signaled silence from the other end of the line, a faint static hiss the only thing that would escape through. He’d been kept waiting so many times in the decades he had trained for and later held this job that the hiss often sent him off to dozing while he waited. Even when he was stressed to the point of breaking, somehow that tuneless noise calmed him and freed his mind to drift.

This time the click did stop the somewhat mechanical sounds of breathing that came from the voice he had just been speaking to, but not those background sounds he had heard before. Those got louder and more distinct, as if the lack of competition in volume allowed for more to be heard. The voices were also very individual. Graham would bet that whatever they did to make all voices sound the same wasn’t turned on at whatever microphone he was hearing this speech from. It was unnerving but also irresistible.

Graham got a bit more comfortable on his little stool, just as he normally would. He didn’t want it to appear to anyone that might be watching that he was listening to anything other than silence. He didn’t fidget or play with his papers like he might have done at any other time, though, since that would make noise. Instead, he laid the papers down, flipped the microphone on his own headset upward and away from his mouth and then crossed his arms. He hoped he showed them the attitude of a tired person settling in for a long wait as he leaned back against the wall, closed his eyes and listened.

“…unsustainable at this point…” This came from a voice deeper than the one he had been speaking with and much further away. “…best to end it…” and finally, “…never developed robust population…”

Another voice, this one sounding younger and more energetic, came from much closer and he heard, “We have all the data we need, at least in theory. We can easily counter this same effect if it happens in any other silo. It’s too late for this one. This is teratogenic. Of this we’re reasonably certain, though we can’t be absolutely sure without actually physically examining a few of them. That we can’t do for obvious reasons, but it doesn’t matter. That possibility alone is a no-go from our standpoint. That isn’t something we want to, uh, carry forward.”

“And we’re certain this is from the catchment lake and not a problem they’ll all encounter at some point?” This again came from the deeper voice. It came through clearer now, perhaps a little closer.

The younger voice replied, “Reasonably so. The lake was originally quite large and deep and a part of the requirements for the cover facility. It was meant to act as a ready source of water in case of emergency, like a fire or something in one of the silos. For containment, you know? That catchment, along with the two depressions cut at other locations around the silo field, was really dug to provide drainage for the silo run-off. Basically, each is pretty much filled with the worst by-products imaginable from more than a dozen silos. Plus the heavy metals and oddments still falling out there are rolling downhill and settling. That silo is at the edge of our field and nearest to the lake, or what was the lake. And the next closest silo isn’t having a problem. Engineering reports indicate it is probably a crack in the bedrock that is leeching the contaminants down and through the area. There’s at least enough contact for water contamination below the surface.”

Graham felt the dread in him building as he listened to the men on the other end of the line. He knew what they were talking about. He had a map and there was a body of water on that map drawn off to one side, near their silo. It was a large enough body to be bisected by the edge of the paper, leaving just that ragged partial outline in blue. He had never known how large or small it might be.

He also knew that they were giving up on them and his mind went to Level 72 and the secret tucked inside the thick concrete walls of the silo. Big metal plates covered recesses in the concrete and hid what Silo One could use to destroy them. It had surprises inside, very nasty surprises. Three of these panels existed on that level and those would be enough to end all their problems once and for all if Silo One decided to use it.

Graham felt suddenly cold and unbearably hot at the same time. He didn’t know exactly how that system worked, but his imagination provided more than enough fodder for him to run several visuals through his mind, each more horrifying than the last. He swallowed and focused on keeping his eyes shut without squeezing them.

There was a short silence at the other end of the line and he wondered if they had discovered that he could hear them. If so, they would destroy this silo for sure; right now. After all, they had no other person in this silo to control him anymore, at least none that he knew of.

Finally, the deep voice spoke, coming through more faintly again as if the man who possessed that particular voice was moving away from the microphone, “Are we all agreed, then?”

Graham heard indistinct murmurs of assent and words of agreement from several voices. He couldn’t believe what he was hearing and his mind began to churn quickly over anything he might say or do that could stop them when he heard a new voice.

“Though I concur, I would like to delay this action until I can get more data. We have a lot, but what we don’t have is data from the very beginning of this, before any problem was noted. They don’t keep medical data on their computers for some reason so I have no access to it at all. Since we know about the water contamination and we could probably institute a testing protocol in other silos as a new requirement, we could do without the records but…”

“Having more information would be better. You’re quite right. This silo isn’t one that I would classify as a threat to the program. They aren’t viable, but not particularly dangerous.” The deeper voice finished the statement for the other and there were more murmurs of concurrence. Graham tried not to breathe a sigh of relief.

The deep voice continued, “Sir. You have our recommendations, but the decision is yours. We would like to gather all medical data from, say, the last thirty years. Just the relevant data if we’re pressed for time. More is always better. This will give us information on the younger adults. After that, we recommend termination of the silo.”

There was a cough, a very faint and ragged one, that came through the line and then the deep voice said, “You have something to add?”

A raspy voice, one that reminded him of his uncle’s voice as the cancer rampaged through him, now spoke in a tone like that of a patient teacher or parent engaged in gently scolding a child. “Have you not considered the possible ramifications of termination? If this is being caused by some crack in the bedrock or structural weakness then dropping the silo might simply spread that problem to other silos?”

The deep voice, one that Graham now thought of as Mr. Gloom, responded, “George, is that a possibility?”

The young voice answered and Graham now had a name for him too, George. “The silos collapse only on the inside, each level coming down upon the next. We just start the process remotely from here. The initial blasts at the top and in the middle of the silo initiate the process and the weight of the structure does the rest. It is designed to work the same way that one might use to bring down a skyscraper in a crowded area, collapsing in and downward and not spread outward. But…”

“But, what?” Mr. Gloom interrupted.

“Nothing is perfect. It is possible that if this is a crack, or series of cracks, that the stress of bringing down a silo could expand it or change the direction. It’s a risk,” George answered, his words slow and his voice hesitant.

Graham then heard the voice he was sure he had been speaking with again. There was something about the way he put his words together and the speed of his speech that made it seem familiar to Graham. And now he knew it was a man. Just a man. The man said, “Thank you, gentlemen. Good work. Go ahead and take me off mute, will you?”

There was a slight sound on the line, this time clearly from a mouth close to a microphone. Graham knew he had best react appropriately so he opened his eyes when the voice said, “Are you still there, Graham?”

“Yes, I’m here,” Graham said and thought he did a fine job of pretending. There was a pause on the line and then he heard the word “nervous” from a distant voice.

“Listen, Graham, I understand you’re worried and perhaps frightened, but I think we might be very close to a solution for you.”

He wanted to grind his teeth and call the voice out as a liar, but instead Graham worked up some reserve of calm and started lying too, pushing back the earphones a tad under the guise of settling them on his head. “I knew you would have a solution, sir. What should I do?”

Graham wanted to hear how they were going to do this great act of murder and get him to simply move along smartly, none the wiser.

“We have some good medical people over here and they say they’ll be able to provide you with a formula very soon that you can take to your own chemists. It should stop all the problems with your water, help with births and decrease future cancers. In the meantime, we’d like you to put all your medical records from the last 30 years on the computer so we can take a look at them.” A note of chiding entered the voice again as he continued, “We did request that you switch to electronic ones some time ago, didn’t we?”

This question confused Graham on top of his being horrified at how calmly the man on the line lied to him. “Uh, no, sir. It was discussed a few years ago but I wasn’t able to convince silo administration that it was desirable. What with so few people to do extra work. If you recall, our silo had a problem with some privacy issues in the past. It was a law enacted totally outside my sphere of control to keep physical records…”

Graham heard a rapid whispered conversation from that same open microphone somewhere in that other room but could make out no specific words. Eventually, the voice returned and said, “Ah, yes. My apologies. But there is no reason now not to get someone scanning in those documents when there is so much benefit for you all. Do it. Then contact us again so we can ensure we have access.”

“I will, sir. If it will help.” Graham resisted the urge to start calling the man vile names and slamming his headset down repeatedly. It was a close call but restraint won.

“It will. By the time you complete that, we should have a formula for you. Out.”

The implication was as clear as the disconnection of that circuit. They were going to hold out a chance for relief until they had what they wanted and then, boom goes the silo. He felt judging eyes on him so he hung up his headphones carefully, gathered his papers and tidied the room before leaving. His glance inadvertently fell on the little white numbers over the row of jacks and stopped at the number 40, but he pushed the temptation aside for the moment. This was not the time. He wanted to scream but what he needed to do was think. And he needed to do it someplace not likely to be watched. And he needed someone he could trust to tell everything to.