Donald had shrunk away from those grisly exhibits, losing his sister in the darkness. Here was a museum of horrors never to be repeated. Mass burials performed with whatever the opposite of ceremony was. Apathy. That was the absence of ceremony. People calmly marched into showers.
He sought refuge in a new exhibit called Architects of Death, drawn to the blueprints, to the promise of the familiar and the ordered. He found instead a claustrophobic space wallpapered with schematics of slaughter. That exhibit had been no easier to stomach. There was a wall explaining the movement to deny the Holocaust, even after it had happened. Here were those who willed themselves not to forget, but to not know in the first place.
The array of blueprints was shown as evidence. That was the purpose of the room. Blueprints that had survived the frantic burnings and purges as the Russians closed in, Himmler’s signature on many of them. The layout of Auschwitz, the gas chambers, everything clearly labeled. Donald had hoped the plans would give him relief from what he saw elsewhere in the museum, but then he had learned that Jewish draftsmen had been forced to contribute. Their pens had inked in the very walls around them. They had been coerced into sketching the home of their future abuse.
Donald remembered fumbling for a bottle of pills as the small room spun around him. He remembered wondering how those people could’ve gone along with it, could have seen what they were drawing and not known. How could they not know? Not see what it was for?
Blinking tears away, he noticed where he was standing. The pods in their neat rows were alien to him, but the walls and floor and ceiling were familiar enough. Donald had helped design this place. It was here because of him. And when he’d tried to get out, to escape, they had brought him back screaming and kicking, a prisoner behind his own walls. And he still didn’t know what it was all for.
The beeping of the keypad outside chased away 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 working its way down his temple. His heart continued to race from the memory of that dark place in that dark past. 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 his fourth shift. We’re just waiting on you.” He gestured toward 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.
Silo 17
Year Two
17
Jimmy couldn’t bring himself to write on the paper. He was drowning in paper, was surrounded by 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 labeled “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 this 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 the days off at night. It seemed premature to do it in the morning.
The Project started sloppy. 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 realized he would need to start adding marks up above, so he had scratched through the ones he’d already made and went 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 some number of people. Maybe that meant 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. Quiet, but he could still hear faint bangs echo from some 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 felt a primal sense stripped away. He was partially blind, could now see only a small slice of his world, and that made him feel broken. The desire was strong to open the door, like cracking 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, and who he was.
“I’m nobody,” Jimmy told them when he had the courage to talk. “Nobody.”
He didn’t have the 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 was Jimmy? 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 like this forever, could they?
Maybe they could.
Time had become strange. It was a thing believed rather than seen. There was no dimming of the stairwell and lights-out to signify a night. No trips to the Top and the glow of sunshine to say 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 he was alive. Every day like a school day, numbing with its foreverness, a feeling like he didn’t want to live any more, but he got hungry and ate. He got sleepy and slept. And so a life was lived accidental. It was lived because he wasn’t brave enough to do anything else.
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 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.
18
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 like 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 latter into the former had posed a puzzle. He made the task a Project, like his father 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—all arranged 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 favorite. 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 tins. “Be” for “Beach” had led to “Oa” 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 a hazard of 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 favorite 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 were still in operation back when he’d learned that lesson. Jimmy missed the toilets something fierce.
He worked his way through the peaches, savoring 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 favorite. 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, it was 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 like 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 with the good news. Good news for him, anyway. Still, that was another number down, which meant time was running out. Twelve-eighteen was the number. Jimmy cursed himself for even thinking the code; 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. It was a bit of human contact, if scary. On the server behind him, he had done the math. He assumed they’d started at 0000 and were working their way up. That’s how he would do it. 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 going 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 chirped angrily at the good news, he was slow to relax 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 toward his lap and punctured the can, listening closely.
The pineapples whispered back. They told him they were safe to eat.
19