Silo 49: Going Dark (2 page)

He jacked up the volume to make up for the distance, cleared his throat and said, “This is 49."

"Standby. You will be contacted shortly," answered a flat, tinny voice. It was cold and distant, then cut the connection without waiting for an answer.

Above him, the red lights winked out and didn’t return. The short response and the time it took him to get down to the lair probably meant that whoever had been trying to call him got tired of waiting and now had to be fetched again. He imagined some person—not quite male or female in his mind—wriggling in their seat with a need to pee while they waited. He felt vaguely satisfied with the image but suppressed a smile.

That satisfaction didn’t quell the disquiet he felt entirely. The hair on his neck stood on end whenever he heard that cold and sexless voice. It always had. Graham barely suppressed the urge to peer into the corners of the room once again as he settled in for the wait. He'd searched this area beneath IT at least a hundred times, looking for whatever they used to watch him in here. He had not been successful at finding it, if such actually existed.

It would be reasonable to assume there was no camera after so much fruitless searching. But Graham didn't feel very reasonable and he knew they watched him here. Why wouldn’t they? He could feel their eyes itching across his skin in the way they asked questions that always seemed to mirror what he felt. Unless they lived in his body alongside him, he had to assume they knew these things because they watched.

He remained curious, though. No number of rules could completely eliminate that inside him. He knew that sometime soon, when enough time had passed after this call, when no contact was expected and any interest they had in him had waned, he would search again for cameras down here. The fact that most cameras in the silo were plainly visible if one chose to look but could be almost invisibly hidden in spaces like the cafeteria, kept him looking and kept him from being too much himself down here in the private domain of the Head of IT.

The wait for their return call seemed to last for days, though in truth it was only a few short minutes. To Graham, time always seemed to drag so very slowly when he was in these rooms beneath IT. Here he felt most exposed even though this was certainly the most hidden place in the entire silo.

A sudden lurching buzz behind him gave him a start and he almost fell off the little stool he was sitting on, yanking the cord out of the jack in the process of scrambling to keep his seat. He fumbled for his cord and jammed the jack home under the flashing light. "This is Silo 49, Graham Newton speaking," he said in a carefully modulated voice.

"You have the report?" asked a slightly different voice, this one equally tinny and flat.

In all the years he had been participating in calls with Silo One, every voice sounded almost exactly the same. There were differences for a careful listener to catch though. Some spoke quickly and others slowly, some used strange flat tones on some words while others drew out vowels. He never mentioned the differences. He had the feeling they wanted him to always think it was the same person speaking, some ultimate authority he could rely on. But people needed sleep over there as much as here, didn't they? It seemed to him he might relate better to them, perhaps be a little less nervous, if they acted more human with him.

"Yes, I do," he said aloud and paused while he settled the headset more firmly around his head, yet still not quite on his ears. "It's about the water quality issue I brought up before. I have the results."

"Go ahead."

"It's confirmed. The water table has been contaminated by the toxins matching the information you provided. The results are mixed though."

"Mixed? Explain," the voice, so eerily distant, sounded no more moved than it would if Graham had announced that his favorite color was yellow. This was, in fact, his favorite color and probably why he always had a soft spot for Supply.

"Water intakes are receiving water from the ground at different levels, of course. The ones in the down deep have very little contamination but it is still present at low levels in the source water. Regular filtration doesn't change the levels," he said and paused again as some distant sound tickled his ears through the headset.

He could clearly hear the rustle of paper on the other end of the line and the faintest whisper of conversation in the background. The man at the other end of the line didn't appear to notice so he hurried on. "The contamination levels increase in different water plants as we rise in the silo towards the Up-Top, with very high levels present after processing at the uppermost plant. We did the correlation that you asked for based on the levels present and..."

"Yes?"

Graham shuffled his own papers until he found the summary sheet he had written just that day. The faint background noises had resolved into words and he could hear snippets of conversation going on in at the other end of the line more clearly. He strained to pick up anything distinct and heard the words "unsupportable" and "terminate" amongst the garbled speech, those words rising with emphasis somewhere else in that other room.

Such words from another silo, in a room where people existed that controlled them all, made his stomach churn uncomfortably and he swallowed hard. He looked at his paper, past the wet marks along the margins left by his sweat dampened hands, and to the words.

Graham kept his voice even and said, "The concentrations were tested in a selection of people and it does correlate, at least roughly, to the miscarriages and cancers. There is a lot of leeway there though. Some of it we think we know the reason for."

For the first time the voice seemed interested and said, "Please, go on. We’d like to know what you found. Anything might be important. We're here to assist."

Graham fought the urge to make a face at the very idea of them actually helping anyone and instead read off his bullet points. "Those who either live or work where one water source provides and then work or live at a different level where another plant provides water show lower tendencies for cancer and miscarriage than those who both live and work at the higher concentration level water source." He thought the words sounded confusing and he hoped what he said was at least understandable. There was no reply from the other end of the line, so he decided to push on.

"Also, when I started...uh...dosing the water again, as per your instructions, to combat the degradation in mood, the miscarriages started spiking. Really increasing."

"What do you suggest be done about that?" asked the voice.

"Stop the dosing," Graham replied bluntly. He held his breath, fearful of what the voice on the other end might say, and then hurried on. "Whatever it is supposed to do, it obviously makes the situation we're already dealing with even worse."

"That might lead to even more serious problems, as you well know, Graham." The voice somehow added a note of chiding to the otherwise almost featureless words. Graham wondered, not for the first time, if he could survive long enough to get as far as Silo One just so he could fling a bag of chicken poo on their sensors. The dosing of the water he’d been directed to begin contained an aggressive combination of the calming drugs and a small dose of the forgetting drugs. It was the kind of combination that might be used in another silo close to an uprising, the population disturbed and aggressive. His silo didn’t meet those descriptions in even the smallest way.

He shook the thought away and felt the heat rise in his neck, which, when joined with his roiling belly, made him feel as if he might disgorge the contents of his stomach. The prospect of doing so in the confines of his little lair beneath IT, where the smell would linger, was unpleasant. To avoid it, he focused on what the voice was saying to him and kept away thoughts on how much he had come to loathe whoever owned those voices over the years. Whoever they were, they didn't seem to care one whit that they were dying slowly over in this silo. He felt quite sure they were facing no such problems over there.

"Our population is down to 1563 as of this morning. There’s a little
figure
for you to
chew
on. That is down more than four hundred in less than a year. Some were age or accident or what have you, but the majority of deaths were from cancers, children who were just too weak to survive or problems during pregnancy. They bleed, you know. Pregnant women sometimes bleed for no reason and it doesn't stop and then they die. I can't think of a lot more serious than that. Did you realize that we had more than 5000 people here once? No one else seems to care about that anymore."

"You'll be able to resolve that once we resolve your water problem. The two problems go together, Graham,” the voice said, the embodiment of calm or perhaps simply that of disinterest.

"That may be so, but the impact of the dosing is much more serious than it has been before and I don't know why," Graham replied as calmly as he was able to, ensuring the pads for the earphones were perched as far back on his ears as possible. He distrusted the way they spoke to him when he was upset. It made him feel as if there was some danger, but of course, there was always danger when speaking to Silo One.

What he really wanted to do was scream at them, elicit something like humanity or compassion from them and then beg for help. And if he couldn’t have that, he just wanted an answer for what was happening that he could believe was true. Perhaps then he might be able to do something himself. What was happening couldn’t be the way things were meant to be.  No silo was expendable or why go to all the trouble of building the silos in the first place.  Why put people inside them, sheltered deep inside the blasted earth, to save the human race and then let them die?  It made no sense.  But then again, he had sat in this very spot while Silo 12 was shut down, everyone inside lost forever.  If Silo One could do that, then they were capable of anything and any silo could be lost.

He knew what his people were dealing with wasn’t what other silos dealt with, though they had their own problems to be sure. He often wondered if he were allowed to choose his problems, which he would choose. Would he select the uprisings and death that happened with such frightening regularity in the other silos or the slow and lingering decline of his own? The truth was, at least according to Graham’s simple viewpoint, neither should be happening. There was no reason for any of it.

His brief reverie was interrupted again and it was only when the voice spoke that he realized he had been hearing murmurs from the other end of the line again.

"Impact? Be specific with what you mean when you say impact," the voice, no longer totally emotionless, sounded more interested, almost eager and for some reason this made Graham think of Tony the Toady’s smile. All long white teeth and avid eyes. He shivered.

Graham could hear more conversation on the other end of the line and though he couldn't make out the words, he could at least tell that those speaking were men and their voices weren't strange like the one he was supposed to be talking to. Whatever might be going on over there, he needed to make sure they didn't catch on that he could hear it. He reached down and grabbed a notebook by his chair and flipped to the page he needed. He took a deep breath. He would be useless to his silo if they had some way to eliminate him or did something worse.

"Some side effects due to memory degradation are to be expected but this is much worse. I've got a list here of incidents that fall well outside the norm." He ran his fingers down the list looking for some examples that would make his point and found one. He jabbed his finger on a line of neat writing and continued, "Nine different reports have been submitted of parents not picking up children from childcare because they forgot they even had kids. And that is just the reported ones so there are probably a lot more incidents that weren’t reported."

"Anything else?"

Graham snorted and then tried to cover it up by clearing his throat. Sarcasm wouldn’t be helpful, he knew. But really, did they think that a parent forgetting the existence of their child was a minor glitch?

"Lots of people not showing up to work because they forget they have a job or forget which job they have. People who already have been diagnosed with cancer keep showing up complaining of illness because they forget they have it. Can you imagine getting that news every day for the first time?"

"Perhaps that is better than dwelling on a diagnosis," said the voice in an utterly reasonable, yet chilling, response.

"Okay, I'll grant you that one but we don't have enough medics for this and they are just as forgetful so it's a mess. Every single dimming the deputies and maintainers find people asleep on floors all over the place because they don't remember where they live," Graham continued and then he gave up. He slammed the book closed and dropped it to the floor again. The bang reverberated in the space and made him wince.

"I understand your frustration. Those are rather extreme reactions and it is probable that the weakened condition of the ill make this more likely. Or perhaps there is some exaggeration in the effect due to the contaminants. I think you need a slight the alteration in the dose level. Stand by."

Graham heard a rapid and whispered conversation behind the louder sounds of something rubbing across the microphone, but he could make out no specific words. It was but a quick moment before the voice continued and gave him a new concentration, which he dutifully wrote down.

Silo One's voice then asked, "And the suicides?"

"Significant decreases, yes. Actually, that’s one good thing. There have been none since our report last month. But that might just be because there are fewer left to do it. Everyone is needed critically. We don't have enough people to fill any but the most urgent jobs as it is. That’s especially true when people don’t show up to work. Whole sections of this silo are empty now and there aren't any spare people to even close them up properly. We don't even have a sheriff as of two days ago!"

"What happened to him?"

"Cancer. What else?"