Silo 49: Going Dark

Waiting is the Hardest Part

Waiting was hard for Graham and he could see the difficulty it caused for Wallis as well. It was writ large in his nervous movements and stiff gait. What Grace was going through, he couldn’t know. Their paths didn’t cross in daily life and though he certainly had cause to contact her now, her being the de facto head of the electricians, he didn’t. He wanted to reserve that for when he had something concrete to give her. He stuck with the regular forwarded emails as needed with the code for ‘nothing yet’ in each one.

While he waited, feeling helpless and with an ear halfcocked for the blast that would bring down his silo, the people in Silo 40 were busy. They were the hub and the coordinators for this great ‘going offline’ that would take place. Every twelve hours, as directed, he sat at the hacked radio and waited for their call. The buzz he had grown to love would come from the radio and then he took their updates and answered their questions with a growing sense of hope tinged with the ever present nervousness.

By the third day of this waiting, he had been required to give the medic and one of his IT technicians the order to begin scanning in medical records. His orders on which to start with and what kind of information to scan would, he hoped, mean that the information Silo One so desperately wanted would not come quickly or comprehensively and thereby give the conspirators more time. It was a dangerous and close game to play and every bang that echoed up the column of the stairwell made him flinch.

During his fourth-day check in with Silo One, he was compliant and did his very best to convey his trust in them, in the Order he no longer believed in and to convey that their solutions were the answer he waited for. Inwardly, he cringed at the lies. So far, they seemed satisfied with the data coming in and to Graham that meant they were probably not examining it thoroughly. He thought, perhaps, that they felt like they had all the time in the world and had no reason to hurry.

He was both glad and worried that he had no further instances of an open microphone leaking information from that other silo. Glad because it meant it was less likely they would discover he had heard anything and worried because he couldn’t know what new machinations were taking place there. His imagination ran wild when he considered the possibilities.

The buzz that signaled Silo 40 calling him woke him from a fitful sleep very late in the sleeping cycle on what would be his fifth day waiting. It wasn’t the scheduled time for a call and he jumped from his bed, simultaneously groggy and unnerved. He fumbled the radio not once but twice as he tried to turn it on and answer. His whole body felt shaky as he pressed the microphone button and said hello.

“Graham, we’ve got resolution. How soon can you be ready to go?”

“Go? You mean disable the system on Level 72?”

“Yes, that. Listen. A whole lot has happened and I want to get you up to speed, just in case we lose contact for any reason. You good to listen?” John asked, his voice full of excitement.

“Yeah. I’m good. Let me get some paper for notes,” Graham replied, hugging the radio under his arm and rooting about his messy sleep area for paper with any blank space remaining on it and a writing utensil.

“Your water situation first. Did you try the vapor compression distiller? Pumping it upward? Anything like that?”

Graham sighed. He had already gone over this with Nella and he hoped this wasn’t an indicator of a loss of organization. “No. I told Nella earlier. There is no way I can get that kind of obvious project started over here and do it inconspicuously. It will have to wait until after. And if the distiller doesn’t work, then I’ll figure out a way to get water, whatever that may take, from the down deep to the upper levels until we figure out something else. But I will figure it out.”

“Sure, sure,” said John, his speech a bit rapid, his voice weary. “Sorry about that. I’ve been running on adrenaline and strong tea for the past few days. Nella did tell me that. Anyway, my guy in water says that vapor compression distillation should work and since you’ve got two down in mechanical, you’ll either need to figure out a way to build another near the upper plant or string a whole lot of pumps together to get that much lift. Whatever you choose, you’ve got the specs, right? You still have the techs to do it?”

“Yes, to both questions. I looked it up in the Legacy too. VCD is supposed to make even water that has raw sewage in it or any chemical contamination clean and pure,” Graham replied. When he read the entry in the Legacy he felt pure hope for a glorious but brief moment. Then he remembered how far it was from the down deep to Level 1 and the nightmare of logistics he would be facing soon.

He shook that train of thought away for the moment. “We can do it. I know it. Even if I have to port the water up on our lifts for a while, we will.”

“Good. I just wanted to make sure, in case something goes wrong. So, this is what we’re looking at. No one else but us is ready to go yet,” John said it casually but Graham could feel his heart plummet at the words.

“We can’t wait for them! We don’t have that kind of time over here!”

“Hey, hey. Calm down. Don’t panic, Graham! They aren’t ready to go offline, but we are,” John said, his voice conveying his satisfaction. “And, they may not be going offline but everyone is cutting the destruct lines on 72 along with your silos and ours.”

Graham wondered at this. Hadn’t all of this preparation been because the others were concerned that if one went offline Silo One might figure out a way to ensure the others didn’t? He said as much.

“Graham, you’re right. But then we thought we would do it like we did the disconnection outside. You probably don’t know this but we sent someone out to do that. A volunteer. A good suit, extra air and walking below the line of the hills on the outside of our grid in the dim time…well, he cut them all where they go to the trunk line. And that is how you are talking to us now. Extra transmitters he installed below ground while he was doing the cutting,” John laughed as he told him. It was a naughty laugh.

All Graham could think of was that a volunteer had gone out to die just to cut lines for people he didn’t know.

“You still there, buddy?” John asked.

“Sorry. Yeah, just thinking. I didn’t know that, about the volunteer.”

“It was a long time ago. Before you or I were making these decisions, for sure. And they didn’t have any way of knowing who they were cutting lines for. They just had to cut the whole group to be sure they got their own. Anyway, here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to be your diversion. We’re going to get them all riled up and focused on us and then all of us are going to cut their control lines on Level 72. That way, no matter what they do they can’t actually destroy us unless they come over and kick the door down.”

“Won’t Silo One notice?”

“Nope, they only know what they monitor and they’ll be looking at us,” John replied, voice confident. “They can go back and look for stuff, we’re pretty sure, but there won’t be anything to see. When we go offline they are going to go off the rails and try to blow us up but it won’t work and we won’t answer. They’ll be focused on us for a bit. We are reasonably certain there aren’t as many of them over there doing the work as they would have us believe. We’ve got a main conduit for the cameras and communications, which includes their little remote destruction lines, and all we have to do is cut it at Level 72. But we won’t cut the cameras until after we cut the remote destruction. That way, they just won’t know what happened.”

To Graham it seemed like the plan was overly complicated and missing some pretty key elements. Again he wondered if he wouldn’t be better off doing this on his own. So he asked, “Uh, exactly how are you going to know when they hit the kill button? I mean, why not just cut it at once and get it over with? Why all this complicated stuff?”

“Hah! Good questions! And I have equally good answers. Graham, we’ve been working on this for years and have a pretty good group of smart people who do nothing but think about this stuff. We don’t dose all the water over here and haven’t for a very long time. Anyway, the last question is easiest to answer,” he said and Graham could hear him moving around on the other end of the radio, probably getting comfortable.

Graham decided he might as well get comfortable too. While John spoke, he started water to boil for a cup of tea.

“So, why all the complicated stuff, you ask. The simple answer is we don’t know what more they can do. Whoever is the first to go is really the test case for everyone else. We’re taking the biggest risk so we need to gain as much information as we can when we do it. For instance, we don’t know if these two kill switches are the only ones they have. We think so, but we don’t know so. We’ve gone over every single place where a pipe or conduit or anything else breeches our silo walls. We’ve checked schematics and so on. But the cold deep truth of it is that we just don’t know. They may have some other way to do us in. We’ll be the ones to test that theory.”

“You’re taking all the risk, then,” Graham replied and let the sentence hang.

They both knew what it might mean. He wondered if they shouldn’t switch around this order. His silo was the one in trouble and contained only a weak population of potentially dying people. He knew they were the most expendable if anyone in this horrible situation could be said to be so.

As for the lines that led back to Silo One, he had certainly checked his schematics too. Especially after making contact with these others and learning of what they had done. He agreed that it looked like just two big trunk lines led to Silo One, one just under the surface and another at Level 72. If there were others, they weren’t on their schematics.

“Eh, yeah, and I know what you’re thinking. Don’t bother even talking about it. You don’t have the population to do this. An uprising from you guys wouldn’t raise the same stink it would over here. They already know they are going to lose you, but us not so much. That will be yanking the treads from underneath them,” John replied so matter-of-factly that it was almost like he wasn’t talking about the lives of everyone he knew. To Graham it seemed like John almost relished the possibility of tweaking the noses of those others.

“Okay, sorry, go on and tell me the rest,” Graham said and finished making his tea, balancing the steaming hot metal cup on a wad of rags as he took it to his chair and sat.

“Basically, this is a test of their system and their backups. If they think that our problems are too big to control then they’ll try to wipe us too. We’ve got signal traps on all the lines, including the one up top that is already cut. Once we cut the lines below, there’s no turning back. We’ll cut the ones for the remote detonate, but not the communications. We already have a watch set in that area and that will be doubled and go round the clock once we actually do the cutting. When the traps indicate a signal is coming through for destruction, they’ll cut the communications lines and that will take out most of the cameras. The only ones that won’t go are the ones that show our view of the outside. We might have to take care of those some other way, but I don’t actually think those are critical.

“But no matter what, that should make it so they think the cameras went out because the silo was destroyed. If nothing else gets sent our way, then we’ll know that is the best way to go about it for everyone else. The safest way. If they send something else—and who knows what that might be—then you all know what will happen and can alter your plans accordingly. But no matter what happens everyone will have their destruction lines cut and that will increase your safety margin a little.”

“John, we will owe you a great debt. We’ll all owe everyone in that silo,” Graham said. He wondered if John’s perpetual energy and happy way of speaking was genuine or simply his way of dealing with what must be an incredible strain. Was he really that confident? He wasn’t betting a few chits on a game. He was betting the lives of his entire people.

“Nah. We’ll talk about that some other time. It’s not like I can come over and borrow some tools or a few baskets of seed, is it?” John dismissed the notion, sounding embarrassed. Then he laughed and said, “Though I would like to take you up on that offer to taste the corn hooch you were talking about. We don’t get a whole lot of that around this part of the neighborhood.”

“What about the other silos?” Graham asked, worried about the answer.

John sighed, “They just aren’t ready for different reasons. Some only have a few people that even know what’s going on and they are, naturally, having a hard time making the decision for everyone else. You can bet though, that they’ll become a lot more willing if trouble starts brewing. No one wants to be another Silo 12.”

“Yeah, or another Silo 49.”

“Don’t worry, Graham. We’re going to do this before this day is done. Get your people in position and ready within,” he paused and Graham heard tapping on a distant keyboard, “by my clock you have eleven hours and seventeen minutes. Got that? Can you get there in time?”

Graham wiggled the mouse on his computer and made a note of the time. “Got it. We’ll be ready.”