Shift (Silo Trilogy #2)

by Hugh Howey

The reports on his keyboard told a story of a shadow who had lost his nerve, an IT head who couldn’t see the darkness rising at her feet, and an honest enough Security chief who had chosen poorly. All it took was for a lot of seemingly decent people to put the wrong person in power, and then pay for their innocent choice.

Donald realized he sounded crazy, that every bit of this was already online and in podcasts that radiated out from lonely basements on lonely airwaves. The Senator had been right. Mix truth and lies and you couldn’t tell them apart. The book on his coffee table and a zombie survival guide would be treated the same way.

“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.”

A typhoon kills a few hundred people, does a few billion in damage, and what do we do?” Erskine interlocked his fingers. “We come together. We put the pieces back. But a terrorist’s bomb.” He frowned. “A terrorist’s bomb does the same damage, and it throws the world into turmoil.” He spread his hands open. “When there’s only God to blame, we forgive him. When it’s our fellow man, we destroy him.”

“But that’s not what really struck me. I’ve never seen him sadder than when he said the following. He said . . .” Erskine rested a hand on the pod. “He said that sitting there, watching you people work at your desks, getting to know you—he often thought that the world would be a better place with people like you in charge.” “People like me?” Donald shook his head. “What does that even mean?” 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.”

Donald was verging on the sad realization 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.

Victor had argued for Donald to be pulled from the deep freeze, but hadn’t been able to get Erskine or Thurman to side with him. 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.

The only other item in the bag was a coin, a quarter. The shape and heft of something once so common made it difficult for him to breathe. Donald thought of an entire civilization, gone. It seemed impossible for so much to be wiped out, but then he remembered Roman coins and Mayan coins sitting in museums. He turned this coin over and over and contemplated the only thing unusual about him holding a trinket from a world fallen to ashes—and that was him being around to marvel at the loss. It was supposed to be people who died and cultures that lasted. Now it was the other way around.

Donald wanted to know who these people were, what their lives were like, what they were thinking. For six months, they served three meals a day, and then hibernated for decades. Then they did it all over again. They must believe they were heading somewhere. Or did they not care? Was it a case of following 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?

Victor had written of old experiments where guards and prisoners switched places, and the abused soon became the abuser. Donald found the idea detestable, that people could change so swiftly. He found the results unbelievable. But he had seen good men and women arrive on the Hill with noble intentions, had seen them change. He had been given a dose of power on this shift and could feel its allure. 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.