Third Shift - Pact

•14•

Donald waited in the comm room for his first briefing with the Head of 18. To pass the time, he twisted the knobs and dials that allowed him to cycle through that silo’s camera feeds. From a single seat—like a throne but with torn upholstery and squeaky wheels—he had a view of all a world’s residents. He could nudge their fates from a distance if he liked. He could end them all with the press of a button. While he lived on and on, freezing and thawing, these mortals went through routines, lived and died, unaware that he even existed.

“It’s like the afterlife,” he muttered.

The operator at the next station turned and regarded him silently, and Donald realized he’d spoken aloud. He faced the man, whose bushy black hair looked like it’d last been combed a century ago. “It’s just that … it’s like a view from the heavens,” he explained, indicating the monitor.

“It’s a view of something,” the operator agreed. He took another bite of his sandwich. On his screen, one woman seemed to be yelling at another, a finger jabbed in the other woman’s face. It was a sitcom without the laugh track.

Donald worked on keeping his mouth shut. But it really did seem like an afterlife of sorts. He dialed in the cafeteria on 18 and watched its people huddle around a wallscreen. It was a small crowd. They gazed out at the lifeless hills, perhaps awaiting their departed cleaner’s return, perhaps silently dreaming about what lay beyond those quiet crests. Donald wanted to tell them that she wouldn’t be coming back, that there was nothing beyond that rise, even though he secretly shared their dreams. He longed to send up one of the drones to look, but Eren had told him the drones weren’t for sightseeing—they were for dropping bombs. They had a limited range, he said. The air out there would tear them to shreds. Donald wanted to show Eren his hand, mottled and pink, and tell him that he’d been out on that hill and back. He wanted to ask if the air outside was really so bad.

Hope. That’s what this was. Dangerous hope. He watched the people watch a wallscreen, feeling a kinship with them. This was how the gods of old got in trouble, how they ended up smitten with mortals and tangled in their affairs. Donald laughed to himself. He thought of this cleaner with her two-inch folder and how he might’ve intervened if he’d had the chance. He might’ve given her a gift of life if he were able. Apollo, doting on Daphne.

The comm officer glanced over at Donald’s monitor, that view of the wallscreen, and Donald felt himself being studied. He switched to a different camera. It was the hallway of what looked like a school. Lockers lined either side. A child stood on her tiptoes and opened one of the upper ones, pulled out a small bag, turned and seemed to say something to someone off-camera. Life going on as usual.

“The call’s coming through now,” the operator behind them said. The man with the sandwich put it away and sat forward. He brushed the crumbs off his chest and switched the soap opera scene to a room full of black cabinets. Donald grabbed a pair of headphones and pulled the two folders off the desk. The one on the top was two inches thick. It was about his doomed mortal, the missing cleaner. Beneath that was a much thinner folder with a potential shadow’s name on it. A man’s voice came through his headphones.

“Hello?”

Donald glanced up at his monitor. A figure stood behind one of the black cabinets. He was pudgy and short, unless it was the distortion from the camera lens.

“Report,” Donald said. He flipped open the folder marked Lukas. He knew from his last shift that the system would make his voice sound flat, make all their voices sound the same.

“I picked out a shadow as you requested, sir. A good kid. He’s done work on the servers before, so his access has already been vetted.”

How meek this man. Donald reckoned he would feel the same way, knowing his world could be smote at the press of a button. Fear like that puts a man at odds with his ego.

The operator beside Donald leaned over and peeled back the top page in the folder for him. He tapped his finger on something a few lines down. Donald scanned the report.

“You looked at Mr. Kyle as a possible replacement two years ago.” Donald glanced up to watch the man behind the comm server wipe the back of his neck.

“That’s right,” the Head of 18 said. “We didn’t think he was ready.”

“Your office filed a report on Mr. Kyle as a possible gazer. Says here he’s logged a few hundred hours in front of the wallscreen. What’s changed your mind?”

“That was a preliminary report, sir. It came from another … potential shadow. A bit overeager, a gentleman we found more suited for the security team. I assure you that Mr. Kyle does not dream of the outside. He only goes up at night—” The man cleared his throat, seemed to hesitate. “To look at the stars, sir.”

“The stars.”

“That’s right.”

Donald glanced over at the operator beside him, who polished off his sandwich. The operator shrugged. The silo Head broke the silence.

“He’s the best man for the job, sir. I knew his father. Stern sonofabitch. You know what they say about the treads and the rails, sir.”

Donald had no idea what they said about the treads and the rails. It was nothing but stair analogies from these silos. He was reminded of how city people used to make him feel, growing up in Savannah. He wondered what this Bernard would say if the man ever saw an elevator. It would be like magic. The thought nearly elicited a chuckle.

“Your choice of shadow has been approved,” Donald said. “Get him on the Legacy as soon as possible.”

“He’s studying right now, sir.”

“Good. Now, what’s the latest on this uprising?” Donald felt himself hurrying along, performing rote tasks so he could get back to his more interesting studies. This truly had become a job.

The silo Head glanced back toward the camera. This mortal knew damn well where the eyes of gods lay hidden. “Mechanical is holed up pretty tight,” he said. “They put up a fight on their retreat down, but we routed them good. There’s a … bit of a barricade, but we should be through it any time now.”

The operator leaned forward and grabbed Donald’s attention. He pointed two fingers at his eyes, then at one of the blank screens on the top row, indicating one of the cameras that had gone out during the uprising. Donald knew what he was getting at.

“Any idea how they knew about the cameras?” he asked. “You know we’re blind over here from one-forty down, right?”

“Yessir. We … I can only assume they’ve known about them. They do their own wiring down there. I’ve been in person. It’s a nest of pipes and cables. We don’t think anyone tipped them off.”

“You don’t think.”

“Nossir. But we’re working on getting someone in there. I’ve got a priest we can send in to bless their dead. A good man. Shadowed with Security. I promise it won’t be long.”

“Fine. Make sure it isn’t. We’ll be over here cleaning up your mess, so get the rest of your house in order.”

“Yessir. I will.”

The three men in the comm room watched this Bernard gentleman remove his headset and return it to the cabinet. He wiped his forehead with a rag. While the others were distracted, Donald did the same, wiping the sweat off his brow with a handkerchief he’d requisitioned. He picked up the two folders and studied the operator, who had a fresh trail of breadcrumbs down his coveralls.

“Keep a close eye on him,” Donald said.

“Oh, I will.”

Donald returned his headset to the rack and got up to leave. Pausing at the door, he looked back and saw the screen in front of the operator had divided into four squares. In one, a roomful of black towers stood silent sentinel. Two women were having a row in another.

•15•

Donald took his notes and rode the lift to the cafeteria. He arrived to find it was too early for breakfast, but there was still coffee in the dispenser from the night before. He selected a chipped mug from the drying rack and filled it. A gentleman behind the serving line lifted the handle on an industrial washer, and the stainless steel box opened and let loose a cloud of steam. The man waved a dishrag at the cloud, then used the rag to pull out metal trays that would soon hold reconstituted eggs and slices of freeze-dried toast.

Donald tried the coffee. It was cold and weak, but he didn’t mind. It suited him. He nodded to the man prepping for breakfast, who dipped his head in response.

Donald turned and took in the view splayed across the wallscreen. Here was the mystery. The documents in his folders were nothing compared to this. He approached the dusky vista where swirling clouds were just beginning to glow from a sun rising invisibly beyond the hills. He wondered what was out there. People died when they were sent to clean. They died on the hills when silos were shut down. But he hadn’t. As far as he knew, the men who had dragged him back hadn’t either.

He studied his hand in the dim light leaking from the wallscreen. His palm seemed a little pink to him, a little raw. But then, he had scrubbed it half a dozen times in the sink the last few nights and each morning. The feeling that it’d been tainted couldn’t be shaken. But maybe it was his scrubbing that made it look red, that made it look like it needed even more scrubbing. He pulled his handkerchief out of his pocket and coughed into its folds.

“I’ll have potatoes ready in a few minutes,” the man behind the counter called out. Another worker in green coveralls emerged from the back, cinching an apron around his waist. Donald wanted to know who these people were, what their lives were like, what they thought about all this. For six months, they served three meals a day, and then hibernated for decades. Then they did it all over again. They must believe this is for some purpose, right? Or is this what any of them did for all their lives? Follow the tracks laid down yesterday. A boot in a hole, a boot in a hole, round and round. Did these men see themselves as deck hands on some great ark with a noble purpose? Or were they walking in circles simply because they knew the way?

Donald remembered running for Congress, thinking he was going to do real good for the future. And then he found himself in an office surrounded by a bewildering tempest of rules, memos, and messages, and he quickly learned to simply pray for the end of each day. He went from thinking he was going to save the world to passing the time until … until time ran out.

He sat down in one of the faded plastic chairs and studied the folder in his pink hand. It was two inches thick. Nichols, Juliette was written on the tab, followed by an ID number for internal purposes. He could still smell the toner from the printed pages. Seemed a waste, printing out so much nonsense. Somewhere, down in the vast storeroom, supplies were dwindling. And somewhere else, down the hall from his own office, a person was keeping track of it all, making sure there was just enough potatoes, just enough toner, just enough lightbulbs, to get them through to the end.

Donald glanced over the reports. He spread them out across the empty table and thought of Anna and his last shift as he did so, the way they had smothered that war room with clues. There was a pang of guilt and regret that Anna so often entered his thoughts before Helen. An affair hung but a long sleep ago, while his marriage had eroded to dust in a more distant past.

The reports were a welcome distraction while he awaited the sunrise and food. Here was a story about a cleaner who had been a sheriff, though not for long. One of the top reports in her folder was from the current Head of 18, a memo on this cleaner’s lack of qualifications. Donald read a list of reasons this woman should not be given a mantle of power, and it was as though he were reading about himself. It seemed the mayor of 18—a politician like Thurman—had wrangled this woman into the job, had recruited her despite objections. It wasn’t even clear that this woman, a mechanic from the lower levels, even wanted the job. In another report from the silo head, Donald read about her defiance, culminating in a walk out of sight and a refusal to clean. Again, it felt all too familiar to Donald. Or was he looking for these similarities? Isn’t that what people did? Saw in others what they feared to see or hoped to see in themselves?

The hills outside brightened by degrees. Donald glanced up from the reports and studied the mounds of dirt. He remembered the video feed he’d been shown of this cleaner disappearing over a similarly gray dune. Now the panic among his colleagues was that the residents of 18 would be filled with a dangerous sort of hope—the kind of hope that leads to violence. The far graver threat was that this cleaner had made it to another facility, that those in another silo might discover they were not alone.

Donald did not think it likely. She couldn’t have lasted long, and there was little to discover in the direction she had wandered. He pulled out the other folder, the one on Silo 17.

There had been no warning before its collapse, no uptick in violence. The population graphs appeared normal. He flipped through pages of typed documents from various division heads downstairs. Everyone had their theory, and of course each saw the collapse through the lens of their own expertise, or attributed it to the incompetence of another division. Population Control blamed a lax IT department. IT blamed a hardware failure. Engineering blamed programming. And the on-duty comm officer, who liaisons with IT and each individual silo head, thought it was sabotage, an attempt to prevent a cleaning.

Donald sensed something familiar about the breakdown of Silo 17, something he couldn’t place. The camera feeds had gone out, but not before a brief view of people spilling out of the airlock. There had been an exodus, a panic, a mass hysteria. And then a blackout. Comm had placed several calls. The first had been answered by the IT shadow, 17’s second in charge. There was a short exchange with this Russ fellow, questions fired from both ends, and then Russ had broken the connection.

The follow-up call went unanswered for hours. During this time, the silo went dark. And then someone else picked up the line.

Donald coughed into his handkerchief and read this strange exchange. The officer on duty claimed the respondent sounded young. It was a male, not a shadow nor the Head. A flurry of questions. One stood out to Donald. The person in 17, with only minutes left to live, had asked what was going on down on level forty.

Level forty. Donald didn’t need to grab a schematic to check—he had designed the facilities. He knew every level like the back of his hand. Level forty was a mixed-use level with half to housing, a quarter to light agriculture, the rest to commercial. What could be going on down there? And why would this person, who must’ve been at the limits of survival, care?

He read the exchange again. It almost sounded as though the young man’s last contact had been with level forty, as if he’d just spoken with them. Maybe he’d come from down there? It was only six levels away. Donald imagined a frightened boy storming up the stairwell with thousands of others. News of an opened airlock, of death below, people chasing upward. This young man gets to level thirty-four, and the crush of people is too much. IT has already emptied. He finds his way into the server room—

No. Donald shook his head. That wasn’t right. None of that felt right. What was it about this that nagged him?

It was the blackout. Donald felt a chill run up his spine. It was the number 40. It was the silo, not the level. The report trembled in his hands. He wanted to jump up and pace the cafeteria, but all he had was the germ of a connection, the hint of an outline. He fought to connect the dots before the ideas shooed away, disturbed by a rush of adrenaline.

It was Silo 40 he had spoken with. The boy had found himself at the back of 17’s comm station. He didn’t know it was a silo calling at all. That would be why he’d called it a level, had wondered what was happening down there. This blackout, this lack of contact, it was just like the silos Anna had been working on.

Anna—

Donald thought about the note she had left, asking Thurman to wake her. She was asleep below. She would know what to do. She should’ve been woken and put in charge, not him. He gathered the reports and papers and put them back into the proper folders. Workers were beginning to arrive from the lifts. The smells of eggs and biscuits floated out from the kitchen, the swinging doors pumping the aroma with the traffic of the bustling food staff, but Donald had forgotten his hunger.

He glanced up at the wallscreen. Would anyone on shift right now know of Silo 40? Maybe not. They wouldn’t have made the same connection. Thurman and the others had kept the outbreak a secret, didn’t want to cause a panic. But what if Silo 40 was still out there? What if they’d contacted 17? Anna said the master system had been hacked, that Silo 40 had hacked them. They had cut several facilities off from Silo 1 before Anna and Thurman had been awoken to terminate them all. But what if they hadn’t? What if this Silo 17 wasn’t destroyed? If it was still there, and this cleaner had stumbled into the bowl—

Donald had a sudden urge to go see for himself, to stroll outside and dash up to the top of the hill, suit be damned. He left the wallscreen and headed toward the airlock.

Perhaps he would need to wake Anna, just as Thurman had. He could set her up in the armory. There was a blueprint for doing this from his last shift, only he didn’t have anyone he could trust to help. He didn’t know the first thing about waking people up. But he was in charge, right? He could demand to know.

He left the cafeteria and approached the silo’s airlock, that great yellow door to the open world beyond. The outside wasn’t as bad as he had been led to believe. Unless he was simply immune. There were machines in his blood that kept him stitched up when he was frozen. Perhaps it was that. He approached the inner airlock door and peered through the small porthole. The memory of being in there struck him with sudden violence. He tucked the two folders under his elbow and rubbed his arm where the needle had bit into his flesh long ago, putting him to sleep. What was out there? The light spilling through the holding cell bars flickered as a dust cloud passed, and Donald realized how strange it was that they had a wallscreen in Silo 1. The people here knew what they’d done to the world. Why did they need to see the ruin they’d left behind?

Unless—

Unless the purpose was the same as for the other silos. Unless it was to keep them from going outside to see, a haunting reminder that the planet was not safe for them. But what did they really know beyond the silos? And how could a man hope to see for himself?

•16•

It took a few days of planning and building up the nerve for Donald to make the request, and a few days more for Dr. Wilson to schedule an appointment. During that time he told Eren about his suspicions of Silo 40’s involvement. The flurry of activity launched by this simple guess quickly consumed the silo. Donald signed off on a requisition for a bombing run, even though he didn’t quite understand what he was signing. Little-used levels of the silo—levels familiar to Donald—were reawakened. Days later, he didn’t feel the rumble or the ground shake, but others claimed to have. All he found was that a new layer of dust had settled over his things, shaken loose from the ceiling.

The day of his meeting with Dr. Wilson, he stole down to the main cryopod floor to test his code. He still didn’t fully trust the fib offered by his loose coveralls and the badge with someone else’s name on it. Just the day before, he had seen someone in the gym he thought he recognized from his first shift. It put him in the habit of slinking instead of strutting. And so he shuffled down the hall of frozen bodies and entered his code into the keypad warily. Red lights and warning buzzes were expected. Instead, the light above the “Emergency Personnel” label flashed green, and the door clanked open. Donald glanced down the hall to see if anyone was watching as he pulled the door far enough to slip inside.

The little-used cryochamber was a fraction of the size of the others and only one level deep. Standing inside the door, Donald could picture how the main deep freeze wrapped around this much smaller room. This was a mere bump along great walls that stretched nearly out of sight. And yet, it contained something far more precious. To him, anyway. There was danger in this room of square-jawed soldiers, but also glorious hope.

Donald picked his way through the pods and peeked in at the faces. It was difficult to remember being there with Thurman on his previous shift, hard to recall the exact spot, but he eventually found her. He checked the small screen and remembered thinking it didn’t matter what her name was, saw that there wasn’t one assigned. Just a number.

“Hey, Sis.”

His fingertips sang against the glass as he rubbed the frost away. He recalled their parents with sadness. He wondered how much Charlotte knew of this place and Thurman’s plans before she came here. He hoped nothing. He liked to think her less culpable than he.

Seeing her brought back memories of her visit to D.C. She had wasted a furlough on campaigning for Thurman and seeing her brother. Charlotte had given him a hard time when she found out he’d lived in D.C. for two years and hadn’t been to any of the museums. It didn’t matter how busy he was, she said. It was unforgivable. “They’re free,” she told him, as if that were reason enough.

So they had gone to the Air and Space Museum together. Donald remembered waiting to get in. He remembered a scale model of the solar system on the sidewalk outside the museum entrance. Although the inner planets were located just a few strides apart, Pluto was blocks away, down past the Hirshhorn, impossibly distant. Now, as he gazed at his sister’s frozen form, that day in his memory felt the same way. Impossibly distant. A tiny dot.

Later that afternoon, she had dragged him to the Holocaust Museum. Donald had been avoiding going since moving to Washington. Maybe it was the reason he avoided the Mall altogether. Everyone told him it was something he had to see. “You must go,” they said. “It’s important.” They used words like “powerful” and “haunting.” They said it would change his life. From the day he arrived in Washington, Donald was urged to visit. Every mouth was in unison. But the eyes above those mouths—the eyes warned him.

His sister had pulled him up the steps, his heart heavy with dread. The building had been constructed as a reminder, but Donald didn’t want to be reminded. He was on his meds by then to help him forget, to keep him from feeling as though the world might end at any moment. Such barbarisms as that building contained were buried in the past, he told himself, never to be unearthed nor repeated.

There were remnants of the Museum’s sixtieth anniversary still hanging, somber signs and banners. A new wing had been installed, cords and stakes holding up fledgling trees and the air scented with mulch. Donald peered through the frosted glass at his sister and remembered what mulch smelled like. He remembered seeing a group of tourists file out, dabbing at their eyes and shielding themselves from the sun. He had wanted to turn and run, but his sister had held his hand, and the man at the ticket booth had already smiled at him. At least it’d been late in the day, so they couldn’t stay long.

Donald rested his hands on the coffin-like pod and remembered the visit. There were scenes of torture and starvation. A room full of shoes beyond counting. Walls displayed naked bodies folded together, lifeless eyes wide open, ribs and genitals exposed, as mounds of people tumbled into a pit, into a hole scooped out of the earth. Donald couldn’t bear to look at it. He tried to focus on the bulldozer instead, to look at the man driving the machine, that serene face, a cigarette between pursed lips, a look of steady concentration. A job. There was no solace to be found anywhere in that scene. The man driving the bulldozer became the most horrific part.

Donald had shrunk away from those grisly exhibits, losing his sister in the darkness. Here was a museum of horrors never to be repeated. Mass burials performed with whatever the opposite of ceremony was. Apathy. That was the absence of ceremony. People calmly marched into showers.

He sought refuge in a new exhibit called Architects of Death, drawn to the blueprints, to the promise of the familiar and the ordered. He found instead a claustrophobic space wallpapered with schematics of slaughter. That exhibit had been no easier to stomach. There was a wall explaining the movement to deny the Holocaust, even after it had happened. Here were those who willed themselves not to forget, but to not know in the first place.

The array of blueprints was shown as evidence. That was the purpose of the room. Blueprints that had survived the frantic burnings and purges as the Russians closed in, Himmler’s signature on many of them. The layout of Auschwitz, the gas chambers, everything clearly labeled. Donald had hoped the plans would give him relief from what he saw elsewhere in the museum, but then he had learned that Jewish draftsmen had been forced to contribute. Their pens had inked in the very walls around them. They had been coerced into sketching the home of their future abuse.

Donald remembered fumbling for a bottle of pills as the small room spun around him. He remembered wondering how those people could’ve gone along with it, could have seen what they were drawing and not known. How could they not know? Not see what it was for?

Blinking tears away, he noticed where he was standing. The pods in their neat rows were alien to him, but the walls and floor and ceiling were familiar enough. Donald had helped design this place. It was here because of him. And when he’d tried to get out, to escape, they had brought him back screaming and kicking, a prisoner behind his own walls. And he still didn’t know what it was all for.

The beeping of the keypad outside chased away disturbing thoughts. Donald turned as the great slab of steel hinged inward on pins the size of a man’s arms. Dr. Wilson, the shift doctor, stepped inside. He spotted Donald and frowned. “Sir?” he called out.

Donald could feel a trickle of sweat working its way down his temple. His heart continued to race from the memory of that dark place in that dark past. He felt warm, despite being able to see his breath puff out before him.

“Did you forget about our appointment?” Dr. Wilson asked.

Donald wiped his forehead and rubbed his palm on the seat of his pants. “No, no,” he said, fighting to keep the shakiness out of his voice. “I just lost track of time.”

Dr. Wilson nodded. “I saw you on my monitor and figured that was it.” He glanced at the pod nearest to Donald and frowned. “Someone you know?”

“Hm? No.” Donald removed his hand, which had grown cold against the pod. “Someone I worked with.”

“Well, are you ready?”

“Yes,” Donald said. “I appreciate the refresher. It’s been a while since I’ve gone over the protocols.”

Dr. Wilson smiled. “Of course. I’ve got you lined up with the new reactor tech coming on his fourth shift. We’re just waiting on you.” He gestured toward the hall.

Donald patted his sister’s pod and smiled. She had waited hundreds of years. Another day or two wouldn’t hurt. And then they would see what exactly he had helped to build. The two of them would find out together.