Shift (Silo, #2)

by Hugh Howey

Unlike that first day, it no longer bothered him to see the scorched world outside. The view had grown oddly comforting. It created a dull ache in his chest, which was near to feeling something.

‘It’s the bad stuff,’ Hal said, staring off towards the lifts. ‘Have you noticed that? It’s just the bad stuff that slips away. All the unimportant things, we remember well.’

The video quality was amazing. You could see people turning to look up to the heavens in surprise, could see the last moments of their lives, could cycle through the video frame by frame and decide – after the fact – if this had been your man or not. He knew what his sister did, what she dealt with.

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.

His voice sounded like someone else’s. He ground his teeth together to keep them from chattering. Something was wrong with him. Powerfully wrong.

a printer hummed and shot four pages out of its mouth. Troy took them; they were still warm as he slid them into the folder, these reports on the newly dead and still dying. He could feel the life and warmth draining from those printed pages. Soon, they would be as cool as the air around them.

‘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.’

Probably painted by some kid born above the mids and full of self-loathing, some kid who couldn’t abide their own good fortune.

‘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.’

Vic turns to me and says how hard it is to sit there at that desk of his and see what we’re doing to the men across the hall.

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.’

One slip of a tongue could land a body out there, rotting on the hills, and his friend Rodny was known to wag his dangerously.

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 imagined voices in the hallway, men and women showering and chatting, towels being snapped at asses, someone looking to borrow a razor, a shift of pilots sitting at these desks where coffee could lie perfectly still in steaming mugs as death was rained down from above.