Shift (Silo Trilogy #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.

A simple pill, it had been discovered, could wipe out the memory of any traumatic event.

mankind had discovered the means for bringing about its utter downfall. And the ability to forget it ever happened.

Year 2110

We got a bunch of people sick, killed them and made space.” Thurman pointed at the folder. “Which brings me to this. I’ve got something I’d like you to work on.”

Containment and Disposal Facility, nicknamed

CAD-FAC,

He tried to imagine waking up like this nine more times, feeling this weak and disoriented. Ten shifts of six months each. Ten shifts he hadn’t volunteered for. He wondered if it would get progressively easier or if it would only get worse.

last. Troy studied the upcoming procedure once again, his first official act as head of Operation Fifty,

Deputy Willis before transferring to IT Security.

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

Troy didn’t like the sound of this, that third-generation survivors were gleaning anything about the past.

“Everything in there is absolutely true.” He didn’t add that not every true thing was written in the Legacy. Much had been left out.

But the lies, he thought to himself, were what they carried there in Silo One, in that drug-hazed asylum charged somehow with humanity’s survival.

Everyone simply worked on their set of plans, heads down, ignoring the rest.

Troy played a hand of solitaire while Silo Twelve collapsed.

“Fire the canisters now,” Troy said.

The view of the airlock filled with a white fog.

“Secure the server room,” Troy added. “Lock it down.” He had this portion of the Order memorized. “Make sure we have a recent backup just in case. And put them on our power.”

Knowing that tiny machines were coursing through the Senator’s body, picking through his individual cells and making repairs, repelled him.

The Order. He opened the heavy tome to a random page and started skimming.

“The National Convention is in a couple of years. I want you to go ahead and pencil it into your schedule. And make sure Helen is there.”

people suffocating and falling to their knees. Troy remembered giving the order. What he regretted most was making someone else push the button.

Troy was tired of forgetting. He had decided to remember.

“They’ll be able to reproduce. They’ll be invisible. There won’t be any warning when they’re set loose, just dust in the breeze, okay? Reproducing and reproducing, this invisible war will wage itself all around us while we’re turned to mush.”

It had something to do with his wife, some way to honor her, or some kind of secret and forbidden link so that he might one day remember.

a talk about the coming end of the world, about making room, about ending it all before it ended on its own. A controlled explosion. Bombs were sometimes used to put out fires.

Troy remembered a calamity, but it was all for show. The real threat was in the air, invisible. The bombs were to get people to move, to make them afraid, to get them crying and forgetting. People had spilled like marbles down a bowl. Not a bowl—a funnel. Someone explained why they were spared. He remembered a white fog, walking through a white fog. The death was already in them. Troy remembered a taste on his tongue, metallic.

Troy knew this as suddenly and swiftly as he knew that his wife was dead, that some other person had tried to take her place.

It was from Helen. What the hell was she doing in Tennessee?

There was an electricity in the air, the taste of dead metal on his tongue, a white mist rising around him. He remembered most of a book. He knew what this was, what was happening. His world was gone. A new one swallowed him.

The Year of the Great Uprising

uprising of ’78,

coroner’s office was on thirty-two, just below the dirt farm, tucked away at the end of those dark and damp halls that wound their way beneath the roots.

It was called a “tan,” and you could spot a farmer two landings away because of it.

until it was past the time the Pact allowed a child to be treated as a cyst.

Born behind bars, Mission had been allowed free while his mother had been sent outside to clean.

sample was the color of charcoal, dead machines flushed from his system.

Donny, the medication is in the water.”

“It started with Silo Forty,” she said. “It went dark about a year ago—”

“We’ve lost contact with eleven silos so far.” Anna peered into her cup. “I think I’ve got it contained, but we’re still trying to figure out how it happened or if anyone’s still alive over there. I personally don’t think so, but Dad wants to send scouts or drones. Everyone says that’s too big a risk. And now it looks like Eighteen is going to burn itself to the ground.”

“Victor’s dead,” she said. “He shot himself at his desk two days ago.”

Rick Brewer. The walls and ceiling bulged inward. Donald felt a chill. There were more pictures. He followed the links to other files. To her husband’s files. “Mick,” Anna whispered behind him. Donald startled and turned to find her reading over his shoulder. Drying tears streaked his face, but he didn’t care. His best friend and his wife. Two kids. He turned back to the screen and pulled up the daughter’s file. Athena’s.

He spread his hands open. “When there’s only God to blame, we forgive him. When it’s our fellow man, we destroy him.”

He didn’t know what to believe. But then he thought about the fear and rage he’d felt when he thought he’d been infected by something in that chamber. Meanwhile, he never worried about the billions of creatures swimming in his gut and doing so since the day he was born.

“We can’t tweak the genes of the food we eat without suspicion,” Erskine said. “We can pick and choose until a blade of grass is a great ear of corn, but we can’t do it with purpose. Vic had dozens of examples like these. Vaccines versus natural immunities, cloning versus twins, modified foods. Or course he was perfectly right. It was the man-made part that would’ve caused the chaos...

“Why travel through space,” Donald interrupted, “when you can travel through time?”

Donald remembered from orientation that the combined shifts would last five hundred years. Half a millennium of living underground.

She’d eventually been able to commandeer the collapse mechanism of the afflicted silos. Donald still had nightmares thinking about it. While she described the process, he had studied the wall schematic of a standard silo. He had pictured the blasts that freed the layers of heavy concrete between the levels, sending them like

fifteen-to-twenty-year cycle of bloody upheaval.