Refuse (The Silo Archipelago Series Book 1) (2 page)

Having plentiful paper was no easy thing, and making it outside of regulated and well-monitored channels was both a chore
and a crime
.  Considering her reality, Leah knew that
spiritually
she was born into a long line of criminals.

“You gonna be there today, Leah?”

It was Ivan, cohort in crime and fellow picker.  The two friends usually teamed up together as they worked through the stacks of reclamation bags.  Ivan was twenty years old, fully five years younger than Leah, but he was smart and kind, and to her he always seemed to be older and wiser than his years.  He smiled as he pulled half a dozen square metal containers from a bag with both hands and dropped them into a recycling bin.

“Yeah.  I’ll be there,” she answered as she ran the back of a gloved hand across her forehead, pushing some stray wisps of her dark hair out of her face.  “I have to help my mother with the apartment today, though.  She gets tired a lot now, and Dad’s been in the down-deep for… (
what was it?)
…weeks now helping re-design and upgrade the heating vents.”

As she talked with Ivan, her mind—as always—churned on in another direction altogether.  She thought of the heating vents, and that thought brought forth for her the
texture
of her artificial environment.  Heating. 

The ever evident
coolness
of the recycling section—of the whole silo—pressed in and down on her.  Cool radiated from the surrounding dirt and through the thick concrete walls and permeated everyone and everything.  The omnipresent cold could only be combated with brute force.  Alexander had explained it all to her, and so had her father.  The human body exists in its healthy state at 37 degrees Celsius.  Now, in this silo, humans were unnaturally populating a concrete silo that, without brute force being applied, wanted to maintain a temperature of around 12.78 degrees Celsius.  There were some minimal amounts of heat provided by the existence of so many bodies and machines and activity, but that was not enough to raise the temperature to the point where most people could be comfortable without wearing more than just their coveralls.  So heating became a reality of life.

Heating.  Brute force alteration of the environment.

“But you’ll be there, right?” Ivan said.  He looked around the floor trying to act casually even though what he was really doing was making sure that no one was watching them.  When he was certain that no one was looking their way, he bent over and Leah watched as he tore a white cardboard carton into flat strips that he then tucked up into the pants leg of his work coveralls.  He pulled his socks up over the strips and then smoothed the pants legs back down into place.

“I’ll be there,” Leah replied.  She also scanned the room to see if anyone was paying them any undue attention.  Paul and Joseph were working together near Chute #3, and both seemed to be in some kind of restrained argument.  Neither looked over to where Leah and Ivan sorted under Chute #1.  Paul she liked, though she really didn’t know him.  Joseph Kind was another story altogether.  She felt sorry for Paul having to work with Joseph, and she was thankful that she always had Ivan when she needed to talk.  Joseph was a strange bird, secretive and brooding, always looking at everyone else like he rejected their right to live and breathe.  Maybe she was being harsh in her judgment of Joseph—she really didn’t know him either.  But the way he watched and scowled made her want to give him a w
ide berth.

The tumbling sound of a reclamation bag bouncing down twenty stories of stainless steel ducting drew her attention and provided emphasis to the unspoken fact that the work of recycling in an artificial world made by man was never done.

Alexander told her that out there…
outside
…. the sun warmed the earth naturally, and that there were seasons, and storms, and temperature swings. 
Weather
.

The silo existed underground, he said, where the warmth of the sun and the warm temperatures in the core of the earth barely reached it.  This meant that the dirt surrounding the silo stayed cool, and kept the silo at the same temperature. 
“Men aren’t supposed to live here,”
Alexander had told her.
  “…At least not forever.”

Leah scanned the room again, this time not looking at the people, but instead she looked at the room itself.  Typical of the silo.  Plastic life.  Artificial.  It’s all fake.  The grow lights in the dirt farms.  The motors that cycled water from the down-deep up through the hydroponic gardens.  The heating.  The wallscreen up on the top floor that showed the bleak and desolate outside.  But it was more than just those things.  It was the chits and the economy and the endless stairs and the lottery and the jobs—all of these things revolving (like the stairs in the silo) around maintaining that plastic life.  Alexander saw it all and he wrote about it too.  She wondered whatever happened to the beautiful things that Alexander wrote.  Probably recycled and used to print chits.

Leah noticed a large heap of shredded paper stuffed into the bottom of the bag she was sorting. 
Chit reports from IT, or portage documents, or perhaps these scraps had been the expired records from the Sheriff’s office. Papers documenting the lives and crimes of the dead—no longer needed (the dead and the reports)—shredded and sent down the chutes for recycling
. When you died, your body was buried in the dirt of the farms to become food for the rest of the silo, but your records… those were shredded, because in reality, to the cold silo, you never really existed.

For a black-market papermaker, pre-shredded paper is a godsend.  Almost unconsciously, she ducked down to make it look like she was struggling with a heavy bag from the kitchen.  With practiced precision, she balled up the shredded mass, and, unzipping the front of her coveralls, she stuffed the paper into the area around her midsection, smoothing it carefully before zipping up again.  She ran her hands around the area where she’d stuffed the paper until there were no lumps or obvious protrusions.

“You look like you’ve gained a few pounds,” Ivan said, winking.

“Shut up, Ivan!” she snapped, playfully.  “Besides,” she whispered, “if I could pull off getting a couple of pounds of paper out of here without someone noticing, I would do it. 
That
would be a huge accomplishment.”

“Ahh,” Ivan waved at her dismissively with his hand, “you’re so skinny, you’re lucky to get a few ounces out of here in a shift.”

“Keep talking like that, buddy, and I’ll take you to meet my mother.”

“Oh no!  Not me!” he said, laughing.  “I’m waiting for my dream girl… maybe a cute little porter or someone like that.  I’d never marry a picker.  They have a smell to them that I can’t get used to.”

Leah growled and threw a plastic container at him, but he ducked and the container bounced harmlessly among the sacks stacked behind him.  He winked at her again and went back to sorting.

They flirted a lot, but nothing much had ever come of it.  She’d known Ivan for most of her life, and she liked him well enough.  He was handsome in a mids kind of way, and she probably would respond if he ever showed any real interest, but both of them were too wrapped up in their world of making paper—and writing—to expend too much energy in the pursuit of romance.  She was happy with the way things were, and she didn’t want to lose Ivan as a friend. 
Or maybe I just tell myself that because Ivan has never done anything other than flirt with me.

****

When the shift was over, the pickers stacked their bins in the packing area.  Overnight,
packers
would come into the section and bundle the salvaged material for delivery by the porters to the different areas of the silo that engaged in manufacturing new things from the salvaged materials.  A lot of this refuse—the paper waste—would go to the official paper manufacturing section, where it would be pulped and bleached and made into new paper.  Then it would be cataloged and traced and tracked and used for approved purposes only.

You could get paper for your family if you had enough chits, and as long as you weren’t a trouble maker.  You could draw and paint—even write—
if
  (and only if) whatever you drew, painted, or wrote was acceptable and was in conformity to the laws of the silo.  It had to be pre-approved.  As a result, almost no one wrote books, other than the handful of officially sanctioned writers who wrote lukewarm, un-challenging tripe for the widest possible audience.  There was no room in the literature of the silo for metaphor, or irony, or for a bracing, cold waltz with the truth.

Ivan reminded her again that he was really hoping she was going to make it tonight.  She assured him once again that she intended to be there.  Then they just talked, because that is what friends do.  Unfeigned and unguarded friendship leads to pure conversation, and she often experienced this kind of fellowship with Ivan.

As they spoke, she absentmindedly pressed her hand up against the almost imperceptible lump in her coveralls where she’d stuffed the shredded paper.  From some motivation that she deemed to be almost base and prurient, she felt an extreme amount of excitement and pleasure from the idea (and the act) of stealing raw materials to make homemade paper.  She’d often tried to quantify the feeling.  She’d analyzed it (or attempted to) and tried to make a judgment from that analysis about what her illegal activities had to say about her character.  She’d even hoped to feel guilty about it, because feeling guilty might mean that she still had a place in the social structures of the world around her, and that she hadn’t utterly forsaken the society of the silo in pursuit of her own selfish ambitions.  If she could feel guilty, then that would mean that she was still
one of them
.  Nevertheless, in her innermost thoughts, she could find no home for self-recrimination.  She knew that in her conscience, she’d already determined that it was the silo’s laws and culture that were criminal, and that her desire to write may be against the
letter
of the law, but it was not against any higher law that she could possibly imagine.

A subtle smile crept across her face as she embraced the feeling that the cocktail of adrenaline and whatever other self-manufactured chemicals gave her as it thrummed through her veins whenever she stole the raw materials for making paper.  She was a junkie and she knew it.

She only enjoyed her feeling of euphoria for a moment though, and the smile quickly melted from her face when she glanced up and saw Joseph Kind staring at her with a look of what she could only interpret as confident malevolence.  The high she’d just been on drained from her in microseconds, and at once she was overwhelmed with the feeling that all was lost.  Joseph Kind was a picker, but he was definitely one of
them
.  Maybe she was wrong about Joseph.  She’d been wrong about people before.  But she could not deny the way Joseph’s look made her feel.

He can’t know that I’ve stolen paper today… can he?