Shift (Silo, #2)

by Hugh Howey

IN 2007, THE Center for Automation in Nanobiotech (CAN) outlined the hardware and software platforms that would one day allow robots smaller than human cells to make medical diagnoses, conduct repairs and even self-propagate. That same year, CBS re-aired a programme about the effects of propranolol on sufferers of extreme trauma. A simple pill, it had been discovered, could wipe out the memory of any traumatic event. At almost the same moment in humanity’s broad history, mankind had discovered the means for bringing about its utter downfall. And the ability to forget it ever happened.

He saw what the Senator meant, how truth and lies seemed black and white, but mixed together they made everything grey and confusing.

‘It’s in our nature to dream of open space,’ he said. ‘To find room to spread out in.

And then there was the routine, the mind-numbing routine. It was the castration of thought, the daily grind of an office worker who drooled at the clock, punched out, watched TV until sleep overtook him, slapped an alarm three times, did it again.

‘Everyone thinks they’ve got all the time left in the world.’ She levelled her cool grey eyes at him. ‘But they never stop to ask just how much time that is.’

There was something about forced confinement that brought people together.

‘That word means something else, you know,’ his father had told him once, when Mission had spoken of revolution. ‘It also means to go around and around. To revolve. One revolution, and you get right back to where you started.’

‘Predict the inevitable,’ she said, ‘and you’re bound to be right one day.’

‘When there’s only God to blame, we forgive him. When it’s our fellow man, we destroy him.’

You don’t get the fire back in the box once you’ve unleashed it.

Erskine smiled. ‘I asked him precisely that. His response was that it was a burden doing what he knew to be correct, to be sound and logical.’ Erskine ran one hand across the pod as if he could touch his daughter within. ‘And how much simpler things would be, how much better for us all, if we had people brave enough to do what was right, instead.’

Amazing that he could live under the rules of a document he’d never read. He just assumed others had, all the people in charge, and that they were operating by its codes in good faith.

Donald was verging on the sad realisation that humanity had been thrown to the brink of extinction by insane men in positions of power following one another, each thinking the others knew where they were going.

So this was all Donald had: a liar’s account of what a dead man had said. Liars and dead men – two parties unskilled at dispensing the truth.

He grabbed the stiff rag he’d left in the chalk tray, stood before his poem, and went to erase the line that wasn’t right. But something stopped him. It was the fear of making the poem worse by attempting to fix it, the fear of taking a line away and having nothing good to put in its place. This was his voice, and it was too rare a thing to quash.

His discovery was that evil men arose from evil systems, and that any man had the potential to be perverted. Which was why some systems needed to come to an end.

The hard things got easier the more you did them. It didn’t make it any more fun to do the hard things, though.