Wool (Silo #1)

by Hugh Howey

“You’re saying that someone wiped out our history to stop us from repeating it?”

“No good coming from the truth? Knowing the truth is always good. And better that it’s us discovering it than someone else, right?”

At the top of the ramp, Holston saw the heaven into which he’d been condemned for his simple sin of hope.

Could someone have decided that the truth was worse than a loss of power, of control?

Holston could see. His eyes burned from the effort, from not being able to breathe, but he could see. He blinked the tears away and tried to suck in a deep, crisp, revitalizing lungful of blue air. What he got instead was like a punch to the chest. Holston gagged.

And her great fear, unspoken but daily felt, was that this world of theirs probably wouldn’t stagger very far along without her.

Being in that nursery reminded her of all she had lost, all she had given up for her work. For her ghosts.

wasn’t until her mother died that she took to blaming the incubator that had failed. Well, not the incubator, but the poor condition it was in. The general state of rot all things become.”

Whatever the silo had been, or had been originally designed for, she knew without asking or being told that these strange machines were some organ of primacy.

He disappeared from view as he approached the door, the handle flicked down, and the small man whose job it was to keep IT running smoothly strode into the room.

“Pardon my language, Mayor.” Jahns wanted to tell her it was quite all right, but the woman’s attitude, her power, reminded her too much of a former self that she could just barely recall. A younger woman who dispensed with niceties and got what she wanted.

She had found it impossible to sit across from such a broken soul and be expected to think.

people were like machines. They broke down. They rattled. They could burn you or maim you if you weren’t careful. Her job was not only to figure out why this happened and who was to blame, but also to listen for the signs of it coming. Being sheriff, like being a mechanic, was as much the fine art of preventive maintenance as it was the cleaning up after a breakdown.

Juliette shook her head. “No, what if it’s to make conversing with each other more difficult? Or at least costly. You know, separate us, make us keep our thoughts to ourselves.”

He looked her up and down for something broken, a habit formed from a lifetime of being brought small devices that needed repairing.

Walker looked up and met her gaze. “Your joke is truth,” he said. “The heat tape. It’s engineered to fail.”

that they didn’t want people talking. Thinking was fine; they would bury you with your thoughts. But no collaboration, no groups coordinating together, no exchange of ideas.

One silly woman with fire in her blood stirring the hearts of a legion of fools?

And now the discovery of a second supply chain, a series of parts engineered to fail, a reason behind the lack of progress in prolonging survival time on the outside. IT had built this place and IT was keeping them there.

And that’s when Juliette realized what she had to do. A project to pull the wool back from everyone’s eyes, a favor to the next fool who slipped up or dared to hope aloud.

He had watched nearly a dozen cleanings in his day, always enjoying that first pirouette as they took in their surroundings.

What were any of these various reactions but the proud reminder of a system that worked? That no matter the individual psychology, the sight of all their false hopes eventually drove them to do what they promised they wouldn’t.

It wasn’t as if she would survive, she couldn’t possibly survive, but his mandate, second only to preserving the data on these machines, was never to let anyone out of sight. It was the highest order.

“Silo one? This is silo eighteen.” He licked the sweat off his lips and adjusted his mic. His palms suddenly felt cold and clammy, and he needed to pee. “We, uh . . . we might have a, uh . . . slight problem over here . . .”

He remembered her voice being magical, the way she carried herself mesmerizing, and her arrival into his boring routine had been as unexpected as the parting of clouds.

The sky was not real. The grass was not real. Her death was real. The ugly world she had always known was real.

It meant this tower below her . . . was not hers. And these dunes, these great mounds of dead earth, were not meant to block out the winds or hold back the air. They were meant to shield curious eyes. To block this sight, this view, of some other.

Killing a man should be harder than waving a length of pipe in their direction. It should take long enough for one’s conscience to get in the way.

You laughed either to keep yourself sane or because you’d given up on staying that way. Either way, you laughed.

Images flashed through her mind of some of the scenes she’d found while scrounging for materials, like the two men who had committed suicide in the head office of Supply, their hands interlocked, opposite wrists slit, a rust-colored stain all around them.

“What we control,” Juliette said, “is our actions once fate puts us there.”

This stuff was even more frightening: chapters on group persuasion, on mind control, on the effects of fear during upbringing; graphs and tables dealing with population growth . . .

Her curiosity was much stronger than her fear.

It made her sad, thinking about the consequences of their anger, their thirst for revenge.

Back then she’d been unfairly treated, but at least she’d been safe. There had been injustice, but she’d been in love. Did that make it okay? Which sacrifice made more sense?

“Do you know the worst part of my job?” the hollow voice asked. Lukas dropped his hands. “What’s that, sir?” “Standing here, looking at a silo on this map, and drawing a red cross through it. Can you imagine what that feels like?” Lukas shook his head. “I can’t, sir.” “It feels like a parent losing thousands of children, all at once.” A pause. “You will have to be cruel to your children so as not to lose them.”

“Welcome to Operation Fifty of the World Order, Lukas Kyle. Now, if you have a question or two, I have the time to answer, but briefly.”

“Consider this . . .” The deep voice paused. “What if I told you that there were only fifty silos in all the world, and that here we are in this infinitely small corner of it.”

“Going forward, I suggest you concentrate on what’s beneath your feet. No more of this business with the stars, okay, son? We know where most of them are.”

“The man I spoke to, he said we were it. Just the fifty silos—” “Forty-seven,” Bernard said. “And we are it, as far as we know. It’s difficult to imagine anyone else being so well prepared. But there’s always a chance. It’s only been a few hundred years.”

“That’s my theory, at least. From decades of reading. The people who did this, they were in charge of a powerful country that was beginning to crumble. They could see the end, their end, and it scared them suicidal. As the time began to run out—over decades, keep in mind—they figured they had one chance to preserve themselves, to preserve what they saw as their way of life. And so, before they lost the only opportunity they might ever have, they put a plan into motion.”

“We can’t control where we are right now,” he mumbled, “just what we do going forward.”

“It’s a very big deal,” Bernard said. “George Wilkins was a dangerous man. A man of ideas. The kind we catch in whispers, the kind who poisons the people around him—” “What? What do you mean?” “Section thirteen of the Order. Study it. All insurrections would start right there if we let them, start with men like him.”

“Ideas are contagious,

Think about it. Instead of manipulating people, why not empower them? Let them know what we’re up against. And have that drive our collective will.”

In nature, optimists taste great.

For me, Wool has never been a story about the end of humanity. It’s been a story about humanity prevailing against all odds. And the heroes of this story are those who go against the grain of pessimism, fear, doubt, and despair.

For Those Who Dare to Hope.

there is nothing out there as dark as our doubts, nor as dangerous as our inaction. Go out. See for yourselves. And if what you find there is broken, know that together we can fix it.

The children were playing while Holston climbed to his death.