Wool (Silo #1)

by Hugh Howey

“I’m not passing judgment, not saying anyone was right or wrong or anything like that. I’m just suggesting that maybe the servers weren’t wiped out by the rebels during the uprising. Not like we’ve always been told, anyway.”

“No,” she said. She lowered her voice and looked around anxiously. “I think we wiped the hard drives. Our ancestors, I mean, not the rebels.”

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

“What if the reason for the revolts was right there on the hard drives? What if some part of our known history, or some data from the outside, or maybe the knowledge of whatever it was that made people move in here long, long ago—what if that information built up some kind of pressure that made people lose their marbles, or go stir-crazy, or just want out?”

The saddest part of this journey had been this understanding she’d come to with Holston’s ghost. She could admit it now: a great reason for her hike, perhaps even the reason for wanting Juliette as sheriff, was to fall all the way to the down deep, away from the sad sight of two lovers nestled together in the crook of a hill as the wind etched away all their wasted youth. She had set out to escape Holston, and had instead found him. Now she understood, if not the mystery of why all those sent out to clean actually did so, why a sad few would dare to volunteer for the duty. Better to join a ghost than to be haunted by them. Better no life than an empty one—

Bernard twirled his own hand, stirring the air with his impatience. “Sign whatever she needs. I refuse to. Make copies. Take care of the rest.” He waved dismissively, turned and looked Marnes and Jahns up and down one final time as if disgusted with their condition, their age, their positions, something. “Oh, and have Sims top up their canteens. See that they have food enough to stagger to their homes. Whatever it takes to power their decrepit legs out of here and back to wherever it is they belong.”

One of the last things Mayor Jahns had told her had proved truer than she could imagine: 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.

“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.” Peter frowned. “Why would anyone want to do that?”

IT, then, was as far as it could get from any deputy station in the silo.

Juliette felt more saddened by it all than anything. She had set out to do something and had failed. And yet her friends were just happy to have her back.

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

“You think they killed Scottie?” he asked. Juliette nodded. “Walk, I think it’s worse than that.” She leaned closer, the compressor rattling, the hiss of released air filling the room. “I think they kill everybody.”

The silo was rotten to the core, an evil man was acting mayor, a puppet stood where a good sheriff had been, and all the good men and women were gone.

Was this the uprising they had learned about as children? Was this how it began? One silly woman with fire in her blood stirring the hearts of a legion of fools?

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. And it would be so easy. She wouldn’t have to build anything herself—they would do all the work for her. All it would take would be some convincing, and she was mighty good at that.

She felt, with absolute certainty, that she would not perform the act.

Juliette repeated the mantra from Walker’s note: No fear. No fear. No fear. Now is for laughing. The truth is a joke. And they’re in good Supply.

One boot slid through that crack, followed by another. And Juliette moved out into the world, dead set on leaving it on her own terms, seeing it for the first time with her own eyes even through this limited portal, this roughly eight-inch-by-two-inch sheet of glass, she suddenly realized.

He had only needed to see it once—to kill a man—but even that was too much.

Here was where he oversaw the refilling of their data drives with all that had been deleted from the last uprising.

“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 . . .”

“It isn’t . . .” His voice cracked. He tried again. “I came because I heard,” he whispered. “Jules. Out of sight.” He made a gesture with his hand, arching it over some imaginary hill running across the table. “But it wasn’t them in IT that figured nothing,” he said. He made eye contact with Marck and tapped his own chest. “I did it.”

Walker dipped his head over and over; it felt good to let out the truth. “They’ve been making those suits to fail. Not ’cause it ain’t bad out there, that’s not what I figure. But they don’t want your body wandering out of sight, no sir.” He stirred his oats. “They want us all right here where they can see us.”

“Silos have burned to the ground before because of one man’s hubris,” Bernard told him. “All it takes is improper planning, thinking you’ll be around forever, but because one man disappears”—he snapped his fingers—“and leaves a sucking void behind, that can be enough to bring it all down.”

“One of my people was taken, and it was the oldest of us, the wisest of us, who intervened on her behalf. It was the weakest and most scared who braved his neck. And whoever of you he turned to for help, and who gave it, I owe you my life.” Knox blinked away the blur and continued. “You gave her more than a chance to walk over that hill, to die in peace and out of sight. You gave me the courage to open my eyes. To see this veil of lies we live behind—”

“We are not here to cause trouble,” he said, “we are here to bring order! The uprising has already happened.” He turned to McLain. “Don’t you see? We’ve been living the uprising. Our parents were the children of it, and now we feed our own children to the same machine. This will not be the start of something new, but the end of something old. And if Supply is with us, we stand a chance. If not, then may our bodies haunt your view of the outside, which I now see as far less rotten than this blasted silo!”

Bernard guided Lukas through the servers, past number thirteen with its blank face and still fans, all the way to the back of the room.

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.