Shift - Omnibus Edition (7 page)

And then there was the routine, the mind-numbing routine. It was the castration of thought, the daily grind of an office worker who drooled at the clock, punched out, watched TV until sleep overtook him, slapped an alarm three times, did it again. It was made worse by the absence of weekends. There were no free days. It was six months on and
decades
off.

It made him envious of the rest of the facility, all the other silos, where hallways must echo with the laughter of children, the voices of women, the passion and happiness missing from this bunker at the heart of it all. Here, all he saw was stupor, dozens of communal rooms with movies playing in loops on flat-panel TVs, dozens of unblinking eyes in comfortable chairs. No one was truly awake. No one was truly alive. They must have wanted it that way.

Checking the clock on his computer, Troy saw that it was time to go. Another day behind him. Another day closer to the end of his shift. He closed his copy of the Order, locked it away in his desk and headed for the communications room down the hall.

A pair of heads looked up from the radio stations as he walked in, all frowns and lowered brows in their orange coveralls. Troy took a deep breath, pulled himself together. This was an office. It was a job. And he was the man in charge. He just had to keep his shit together. He was there to cut a ribbon.

Saul, one of the lead radio techs, took off his headset and rose to greet him. Troy vaguely knew Saul; they lived on the same executive wing and saw each other in the gym from time to time. While they shook hands, Saul’s wide and handsome face tickled some deeper memory, an itch Troy had learned to ignore. Maybe this was someone he had met at his orientation, from before his long sleep.

Saul introduced him to the other tech in comm room orange, who waved and kept his headset on. The name faded immediately. It didn’t matter. An extra headset was pulled from a rack. Troy accepted it and lowered it around his neck, keeping the muffs off his ears so he could still hear. Saul found the silvery jack at the end of the headset and ran his fingers across an array of fifty numbered receptacles. The layout and the room reminded Troy of ancient photographs of phone operators back before they were replaced with computers and automated voices.

The mental image of a bygone day mixed and fizzed with his nerves and the shivers brought on by the pills, and Troy felt a sudden bout of giggles bubble beneath the surface. The laughter nearly burst out of him, but he managed to hold it together. It wouldn’t be a good sign for the head of overall operations to lurch into hysterics when he was about to gauge the fitness of a future silo head.

‘—and you’ll just run through the set questions,’ Saul was telling him. He held out a plastic card to Troy, who was pretty sure he didn’t need it but took it anyway. He’d been memorizing the routine for most of the day. Besides, he was sure it didn’t matter what he said. The task of gauging a candidate’s fitness was better left to the machines and the computers, all the sensors embedded in a distant headset.

‘Okay. There’s the call.’ Saul pointed to a single flashing light on a panel studded with flashing lights. ‘I’m patching you through.’

Troy adjusted the muffs around his ears as the tech made the connection. He heard a few beeps before the line clicked over. Someone was breathing heavily on the other end. Troy reminded himself that this young man would be far more nervous than he was. After all, he had to
answer
the questions – Troy simply had to ask them.

He glanced down at the card in his hand, his mind suddenly blank, thankful that he’d been given the thing.

‘Name?’ he asked the young man.

‘Marcus Dent, sir.’

There was a quiet confidence in his young voice, the sound of a chest thrust out with pride. Troy remembered feeling that once, a long time ago. And then he thought of the world Marcus Dent had been born into, a legacy
he
would only ever know from books.

‘Tell me about your training,’ Troy said, reading the lines. He tried to keep his voice even, deep, full of command, although the computers were designed to do that for him. Saul made a hoop with his finger and thumb, letting him know he was getting good data from the boy’s headset. Troy wondered if his was similarly equipped. Could anyone in that room – or any other room – tell how nervous he was?

‘Well, sir, I shadowed under Deputy Willis before transferring to IT Security. That was a year ago. I’ve been studying the Order for six weeks. I feel ready, sir.’

Shadowing
. Troy forgot it was called that. He had meant to bring the latest vocabulary card with him.

‘What is your primary duty to the … silo?’ He had nearly said
facility
.

‘To maintain the Order, sir.’

‘And what do you protect above all?’

He kept his voice flat. The best readings would come from not imparting too much emotion into the man being measured.

‘Life and Legacy,’ Marcus recited.

Troy had a difficult time seeing the next question. It was obscured by an unexpected blur of tears. His hand trembled. He lowered the shaking card to his side before anyone noticed.

‘And what does it take to protect the things we hold dear?’ he asked. His voice sounded like someone else’s. He ground his teeth together to keep them from chattering. Something was wrong with him. Powerfully wrong.

‘Sacrifice,’ Marcus said, steady as a rock.

Troy blinked rapidly to clear his vision, and Saul held up his hand to let him know he could continue, that the measures were coming through. Now they needed baselines so the biometrics could tease out the boy’s sincerity toward the first questions.

‘Tell me, Marcus, do you have a girlfriend?’

He didn’t know why that was the first thing that came to mind. Maybe it was the envy that other silos didn’t freeze their women, didn’t freeze anyone at all. Nobody in the comm room seemed to react or care. The formal portion of the test was over.

‘Oh, yessir,’ Marcus said, and Troy heard the boy’s breathing change, could imagine his body relaxing. ‘We’ve applied to be married, sir. Just waiting to hear back.’

‘Well, I don’t think you’ll have to wait too much longer. What’s her name?’

‘Melanie, sir. She works here in IT.’

‘That’s great.’ Troy wiped at his eyes. The shivers passed. Saul waved his finger in a circle over his head, letting him know he could wrap it up. They had enough.

‘Marcus Dent,’ he said, ‘welcome to Operation Fifty of the World Order.’

‘Thank you, sir.’ The young man’s voice lifted an octave.

There was a pause, then the sound of a deep breath being taken and held.

‘Sir? Is it okay if I ask a question?’

Troy looked to the others. There were shrugs and not much else. He considered the role this young man had just assumed, knew well the sensation of being promoted to new responsibilities, that mix of fear, eagerness and confusion.

‘Sure, son. One question.’ He figured he was in charge. He could make a few rules of his own.

Marcus cleared his throat, and Troy pictured this shadow and his silo head sitting in a distant room together, the master studying his student.

‘I lost my great-grandmother a few years ago,’ Marcus said. ‘She used to let slip little things about the world before. Not in a forbidden way, but just as a product of her dementia. The doctors said she was resistant to her medication.’

Troy didn’t like the sound of this, that third-generation survivors were gleaning anything about the past. Marcus may be newly cleared for such things, but others weren’t.

‘What’s your question?’ Troy asked.

‘The Legacy, sir. I’ve done some reading in it as well – not neglecting my studies of the Order and the Pact, of course – and there’s something I have to know.’

Another deep breath.

‘Is everything in the Legacy true?’

Troy thought about this. He considered the great collection of books that contained the world’s history – a carefully edited history. In his mind, he could see the leather spines and the gilded pages, the rows and rows of books they had been shown during their orientation.

He nodded and found himself once again needing to wipe his eyes.

‘Yes,’ he told Marcus, his voice dry and flat. ‘It’s true.’

Someone in the room sniffled. Troy knew the ceremony had gone on long enough.

‘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. And there were other things he suspected that
none
of them knew, that had been edited out of books and brains alike.

The Legacy was the allowed truth, he wanted to say, the truth that was carried from each generation to the next. 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.

9

2049

Fulton County, Georgia

The front-end loader let out a throaty blat as it struggled up the hill, a charcoal geyser streaming from its exhaust pipe. When it reached the top, a load of dirt avalanched out of its toothy bucket, and Donald saw that the loader wasn’t climbing the hill so much as creating it.

Hills of fresh dirt were taking shape like this all over the site. Between them – through temporary gaps left open like an ordered maze – burdened dump trucks carried away soil and rock from the cavernous pits being hollowed from the earth. These gaps, Donald knew from the topographical plans, would one day be pushed closed, leaving little more than a shallow crease where each hill met its neighbor.

Standing on one of these growing mounds, Donald watched the ballet of heavy machinery while Mick Webb spoke with a contractor about the delays. In their white shirts and flapping ties, the two congressmen seemed out of place. The men in hard hats with the leather faces, calloused hands, and busted knuckles belonged there. He and Mick, blazers tucked under their arms, sweat stains spreading in the humid Georgia heat, were somehow – nominally, at least – supposed to be in charge of that ungodly commotion.

Another loader released a mound of soil as Donald shifted his gaze toward downtown Atlanta. Past the massive clearing of rising hills and over the treetops still stripped bare from fading winter rose the glass-and-steel spires of the old Southern city. An entire corner of sparsely populated Fulton County had been cleared. Remnants of a golf course were still visible at one end where the machines had yet to disturb the land. Down by the main parking lot, a staging zone the size of several football fields held thousands of shipping containers packed with building supplies, more than Donald thought necessary. But he was learning by the hour that this was the way of government projects, where public expectations were as high as the spending limits. Everything was done in excess or not at all. The plans he had been ordered to draw up practically begged for proportions of insanity, and his building wasn’t even a necessary component of the facility. It was only there for the worst-case scenario.

Between Donald and the field of shipping containers stood a sprawling city of trailers; a few functioned as offices, but most of them served as housing. This was where the thousands of men and women working on the construction could ditch their hard hats, clock off and take their well-earned rest.

Flags flew over many of the trailers, the workforce as multinational as an Olympic village. Spent nuclear fuel rods from the world over would one day be buried beneath the pristine soil of Fulton County. It meant that the world had a stake in the project’s success. The logistical nightmare this ensured didn’t seem to concern the back-room dealers. He and Mick were finding that many of the early construction delays could be traced to language barriers, as neighboring work crews couldn’t communicate with one another and had evidently given up trying. Everyone simply worked on their set of plans, heads down, ignoring the rest.

Beside this temporary city of tin cans sat the vast parking lot he and Mick had trudged up from. He could see their rental car down there, the only quiet and electric thing in sight. Small and silver, it seemed to cower among the belching dump trucks and loaders on all sides. The overmatched car looked precisely how Donald felt, both on that little hill at the construction site and back at the Hill in Washington.

‘Two months behind.’

Mick smacked him on the arm with his clipboard. ‘Hey, did you hear me? Two months behind already, and they just broke ground six months ago. How is that even possible?’

Donald shrugged as they left the frowning foremen and trudged down the hill to the parking lot. ‘Maybe it’s because they have elected officials pretending to do jobs that belong to the private sector,’ he offered.

Mick laughed and squeezed his shoulder. ‘Jesus, Donny, you sound like a goddamned Republican!’

‘Yeah? Well, I feel like we’re in over our heads here.’ He waved his arm at the depression in the hills they were skirting, a deep bowl scooped out of the earth. Several mixer trucks were pouring concrete into the wide hole at its center. More trucks waited in line behind them, their butts spinning impatiently.

‘You do realize,’ Donald said, ‘that one of these holes is going to hold the building they let
me
draw up? Doesn’t that scare you? All this money? All these people. It sure as hell scares me.’

Mick’s fingers dug painfully into Donald’s neck. ‘Take it easy. Don’t go getting all philosophical on me.’

‘I’m being serious,’ Donald said. ‘Billions of taxpayer dollars are gonna nestle in the dirt out there in the shape that
I
drew up. It seemed so …
abstract
before.’

‘Christ, this isn’t about you or your plans.’ He popped Donald with the clipboard and used it to point toward the container field. Through a fog of dust, a large man in a cowboy hat waved them over. ‘Besides,’ Mick said, as they angled away from the parking lot, ‘what’re the chances anyone even uses your little bunker? This is about energy independence. It’s about the death of coal. You know, it feels like the rest of us are building a nice big house over here, and you’re over in a corner stressing about where you’re gonna hang the fire extinguisher—’