The beeping of the keypad outside chased away these disturbing thoughts. Donald turned as the great slab of steel hinged inward on pins the size of a man’s arms. Dr Wilson, the shift doctor, stepped inside. He spotted Donald and frowned. ‘Sir?’ he called out.
Donald could feel a trickle of sweat work its way down his temple. His heart continued to race from the memory of the exhibition. He felt warm, despite being able to see his breath puff out before him.
‘Did you forget about our appointment?’ Dr Wilson asked.
Donald wiped his forehead and rubbed his palm on the seat of his pants. ‘No, no,’ he said, fighting to keep the shakiness out of his voice. ‘I just lost track of time.’
Dr Wilson nodded. ‘I saw you on my monitor and figured that was it.’ He glanced at the pod nearest to Donald and frowned. ‘Someone you know?’
‘Hm? No.’ Donald removed his hand, which had grown cold against the pod. ‘Someone I worked with.’
‘Well, are you ready?’
‘Yes,’ Donald said. ‘I appreciate the refresher. It’s been a while since I’ve gone over the protocols.’
Dr Wilson smiled. ‘Of course. I’ve got you lined up with the new reactor tech coming on to his fourth shift. We’re just waiting on you.’ He gestured towards the hall.
Donald patted his sister’s pod and smiled. She had waited hundreds of years. Another day or two wouldn’t hurt. And then they would see what exactly he had helped to build. The two of them would find out together.
75
2313 – Year Two
• Silo 17 •
JIMMY COULDN’T BRING himself to write on the paper. He was drowning in paper, but he didn’t dare use even the margins for notes. Those pages were sacrosanct. Those books were too valuable. And so he counted the days using the key around his neck and the black panels of the server labelled ‘17’.
This was his silo, he had learned. It was the number stamped on the inside of his copy of the Order. It was the label on the wall chart of all the silos. He knew what this meant. He might be all alone in his world, but his was not the only world.
Every evening before he went to bed, he scratched another bright silver mark in the black paint of the massive server. Jimmy only marked off the days at night. It seemed premature to do it in the mornings.
The Project started sloppily. He had little confidence that the marks would amount to much and so he made them in the middle of the machine and much too large. Two months into his ordeal, he began to run out of room and realised he would need to start adding marks up above, so he had scratched through the ones he’d already made and had gone around to the other side of the server to start anew. Now he made them tiny and neat. Four ticks and then a slash through them, just like his mom used to mark the days in a row that he was good. Six of these in a line to mark what he now thought of as a month. Twelve of these rows with five left over, and he had a year.
He made the final mark in the last set and stepped back. A year took up half the side of a server. It was hard to believe a whole year had gone by, a year of living in the half-level below the servers. He knew this couldn’t last. Imagining the other servers covered in scratches was too much to bear. His dad had said there was enough food for ten years for two or four people. He couldn’t remember which. That meant at least twenty with him all alone. Twenty years. He stepped around the edge of the server and looked down the aisle between the rows. The massive silver door sat at the very end. At some point, he knew he would have to go out. He would go crazy if he didn’t. He was already going crazy. The days were much too full of the same.
He went to the door and listened for some sound on the other side. It was quiet, as it sometimes was, but he could still hear faint bangs echo from his memory. Jimmy thought about entering the four numbers and peeking outside. It was the worst sensation imaginable, not being able to see what was on the other side. When the camera screens had stopped working, Jimmy had felt a primal sense stripped away. He was left with a strong urge to open the door, to crack an eyelid held shut for too long. A year of counting days. Of counting minutes within those days. A boy could only count so long.
He left the keypad alone. Not yet. There were bad people out there, people who wanted in, who wanted to know what was in there, why the power on the level still worked, who he was.
‘I’m nobody,’ Jimmy told them when he had the courage to talk. ‘Nobody.’
He didn’t have that courage often. He felt brave enough just listening to the men with the other radios fight. Brave to allow their arguments to fill his world and his head, to hear them argue and report about who had killed whom. One group was working on the farms, another was trying to stop the floods from creeping out of the mines and drowning Mechanical. One had guns and took whatever little bit the others were able to squeeze together. A lone woman called once and screamed for help, but what help could Jimmy be? By his figuring, there were a hundred or more people out there in little pockets, fighting and killing. But they would stop soon. They had to. Another day. A year. They couldn’t go on fighting for ever, could they?
Maybe they could.
Time had become strange. It was a thing believed rather than seen. He had to trust that time was passing at all. There was no dimming of the stairwell and lights-out to signify the coming night. No trips to the top and the glow of sunshine to tell that it was day. There were simply numbers on a computer screen counting so slowly one could scream. Numbers that looked the same day and night. It took careful counting to know a day had passed. The counting let him know that he was alive.
Jimmy thought about playing chase between the servers before he went to bed, but he had done that yesterday. He thought about arranging cans in the order he would eat them, but he already had three months’ worth of meals lined up. There was target practice, books to read, a computer to fiddle with, chores to do, but none of that sounded like fun. He knew he would probably just crawl into bed and stare at the ceiling until the numbers told him it was tomorrow. He would think about what to do then.
76
2313 – Year Two
• Silo 17 •
WEEKS PASSED, SCRATCHES accumulated, and the tip of the key around Jimmy’s neck wore down. He woke to another morning with crust in his eyes as though he’d been crying in his sleep and took his breakfast – one can of peaches and one of pineapple – up to the great steel door to eat. Unshouldering his gun, Jimmy sat down with his back against server number eight, enjoying the warmth of the busy machine against his spine.
The gun had taken some figuring out. His father had disappeared with the loaded one, and when Jimmy discovered the crates of arms and ammo, the method of inserting the bright casings into the machine had posed a puzzle. He made the task a Project, like his father had used to make their chores and tinkering. Ever since he was little, Jimmy had watched his dad disassemble computers and other electronics, laying out all the pieces – each screw, every bolt, the nuts spun back onto the bolts – in a neat pattern so he knew where they went again. Jimmy had done the same with one of the rifles. And then with a second rifle after he’d accidentally knocked the pieces from the first with his boot.
With the second, he saw where the ammo ended up and how it got there. The spring in the ammo holder was stiff, which made it difficult to load. Later, he learned that this was called a ‘clip’, after reading the entry for ‘gun’ under G in the tins full of books. That had come weeks after he’d figured out how the thing worked on his own, with a hole in the ceiling to show for it.
He kept the gun in his lap, across his thighs, and balanced the cans of fruit on the wide part of the stock. The pineapple was his favourite. He had some every day and watched with sadness as the supply on the shelves dwindled. He’d never heard of such a fruit, had to look the thing up in another of the books. The pineapples had led him on a dizzying tour through the book tins. Be for ‘beach’ had led to Oc for ‘ocean’. This one confused him with its sense of scale. And then the ‘fish’ under F. He had forgotten to eat that day as he explored, and the room with the radio and his little mattress had become cluttered with open books and empty tins. It had taken him a week to get things back in order. Countless times since then, he had lost himself in such excursions.
Pulling his rusty can opener and favourite fork from his breast pocket, Jimmy worked the peaches open. There was the whispering pop of air as he made the first cut. Jimmy had learned not to eat the contents if it didn’t make that pop. Luckily, the toilets had still been in operation back when he’d learned that lesson. Jimmy missed the toilets something fierce.
He worked his way through the peaches, savouring each bite before drinking down the juice. He wasn’t sure if you were supposed to drink that part – the label didn’t say – but it was his favourite. He grabbed the pineapples and his opener, was listening for the pop of air when he heard the keypad on the great steel door beep.
‘Little early,’ he whispered to his visitors. He set the can aside, licked his fork and put it back in his breast pocket. Cradling the gun against his armpit, he sat and watched for the door to move. One crack and he would open fire.
Instead, he heard four beeps from the keypad as a set of numbers was entered, followed by a buzz to signal that it was the wrong code. Jimmy tightened his grip on the gun while they tried again. The screen on the keypad only had room for four digits. That meant ten thousand combinations if you included all zeros. The door allowed three incorrect attempts before it wouldn’t take any more until the following day. Jimmy had learned these things a long time ago. He felt as if his mom had taught him this rule, but that was impossible. Unless she’d done it in a dream.
He listened to the keypad beep with another guess and then buzz once again. One more number down, which meant time was running out. Twelve-eighteen was the code. Jimmy cursed himself for even thinking the number; his finger went to the trigger, waiting. But thoughts couldn’t be heard. You had to speak to be heard. He tended to forget this, because he heard himself thinking all the time.
The third and final attempt for the day began, and Jimmy couldn’t wait to eat his pineapples. He and these people had this routine, these three tries every morning. Though scary, it was his only daily dose of human contact and he had come to rely on its regularity. On the server behind him, he had done the maths. He assumed they had started at 0000 and were working their way up. Three a day meant they would stumble on the right code on day 406 on the second try. That was less than a month away.
But Jimmy’s counting didn’t figure for everything. There was the lingering fear that they might skip some numbers, that they had started somewhere else, or that they might get lucky if they were inputting the codes at random. For all Jimmy knew, more than one code could open the door. And since he didn’t pay attention to how his father had changed the code, he couldn’t move it higher. And what if that only got them closer? Maybe they started at 9999. He could move it lower, of course, hoping to pass one they’d already tried, but what if they hadn’t tried it yet? To take action and let them in by accident would be worse than doing nothing and then dying. And Jimmy didn’t want to die. He didn’t want to die, and he didn’t want to kill anyone.
This is how his brain whirled as the next four digits were entered. When the keypad buzzed for the third and final time that day, he relaxed his grip on the gun. Jimmy wiped his sweaty palms off on his thighs and picked up his pineapples.
‘Hello, pineapples,’ he whispered. He bent his head towards his lap and punctured the can, listening closely.
The pineapples whispered back. They told him they were safe to eat.
77
2313 – Year Two
• Silo 17 •
LIFE AT ITS essence, Jimmy learned, was a series of meals and bowel movements. There was some sleep mixed in as well, but little effort was required for that. He didn’t learn this great Rule of the World until the water stopped flushing. Nobody thinks about their bowel movements until the water stops flushing. And then it’s all one thinks about.
Jimmy started going in the corner of the server room, as far from the door as possible. He peed in the sink until the tap ran out of water and the smell got bad. Once that happened, he tapped into the cistern. The Order told him which page to look on and what to do. It was a dreadfully boring book, but handy at times. Jimmy figured that was the point. The water in the cistern wouldn’t last for ever, though, so he took to drinking as much of the juice in the bottom of the cans as he could. He hated tomato soup, but he drank a can every day. His pee turned bright orange.
Jimmy was draining the last drops out of a can of apples one morning when the men came to try their codes. It happened so fast. Four numbers, and the keypad beeped. It didn’t buzz. It didn’t bark or scream or sound angry. It beeped. And a light long red – red for as long as Jimmy could remember – flashed brilliant and scary green.
Jimmy started. The open can of peaches on his knee leapt away and tumbled to the ground, juice splashing everywhere. It was two days early for this. It was two days early.
The great steel door made noises. Jimmy dropped his fork and fumbled with the gun. Safety off. A click with his thumb, a thunk from the door. Voices, voices. Excitement on one side, dread on the other. He pulled the gun against his shoulder and wished he’d practised yesterday. Tomorrow. Tomorrow was when he was gonna get ready. They were two days too early.
The door made noises, and Jimmy wondered if he’d missed a day or two. There was the time he’d gotten sick and had a fever. There was the day he fell asleep reading and couldn’t remember what day it was when he woke. Maybe he’d missed a day. Maybe the people in the hall had skipped a number. The door opened a crack.