First Shift - Legacy

stay ahead of schedule. She says the two of you make a great team.”

Donald nodded. He felt a blush of pride—and also the sinking feeling of extra responsibilities, more bites out of his ever-dwindling time. Helen wouldn’t like hearing that his involvement with the project might grow. In fact, Mick and Anna might be the only people he could share the news with, the only ones he could talk to. Every stupid detail about the build seemed to require convoluted layers of clearance. He couldn’t tell if it was the fear of nuclear waste, the threat of a terrorist attack, or the likelihood that the project would fall through. Everything for their political party seemed to hinge on this. Across the aisle, lips were chapped from all the licking going on at the prospect of failure. It created a situation where it was better to keep mum than risk being the one who blew it.

The agent returned and took up a position beside the Senator, shopping bag in hand. Donald had the feeling that someone was watching him, then and always. It reinforced the need to keep quiet. He didn’t even know who was seeing the plans he was working on; Thurman said others were impressed with his work, but he’d sent partial files only to Anna.

The agent studied him through those impenetrable sunglasses. Donald wondered if they had access to his computer—and whether it mattered. The files were for them, anyway.

Senator Thurman shook Donald’s hand and said to keep him posted. Another agent materialized from nowhere and formed up on Thurman’s flank. Donald felt a flush of heat as the two men marched the Senator through the jangling door.

Damn the secrets and the intrigue. He cursed the need for them. Donald wished he could just call his wife and let her know about his day, his job, what he was working on. Standing there in that bustling hive of a bookstore-turned-coffee shop, he considered the web of deceit and misdirection being spun in every direction, how a few slender threads could grow from seemingly innocent beginnings.

He already felt caught up in it, keeping things from his family, from his secretary—even from Mick, his only real friend on the Hill. He had wandered with innocence and naivete into this web, and now every move would wrap him tighter. Each lie would stick to the others, until one day he would find himself in a tight little cocoon, trapped and suffocating from the thousands of little fibs that living and working in that cursed swamp of a city seemed to require every man to ooze.

8

2110 • Silo 1

The Book of the Order lay open on his desk, the pages curling up from a spine stitched to last. Troy studied the upcoming procedure once again, his first official act as head of Operation Fifty, and it brought to mind a ribbon- cutting ceremony, a grand display where the man with the shears took credit for the hard work of others.

The Order, he had decided, was more recipe book than operations manual. The shrinks who wrote it had accounted for everything. And like the field of psychology, or any field that involved human nature, the things that made no sense usually served some deeper purpose.

It made Troy wonder what his purpose was. How necessary was his position? He had studied for a much different job, had been promoted at the last minute, and somehow that made him feel arbitrary. Anyone could be slotted into his place.

Of course, even if his office was mostly titular in nature, perhaps it served some symbolic purpose. Maybe he wasn’t there to lead so much as to provide an illusion to the others that they were being led.

This was a terrifying thought. Troy imagined the great ship he was helming, this long night shift of six months duration, all of humanity crammed onboard. He could spin the spoked wheel and feel that the linkage to the rudder had been lost. But his job was to turn it nonetheless, to gaze over the bow and pretend that all was in hand as the swell and foam of human nature tossed them to and fro. The deckhands, seeing him at the helm, could then coil lines and trim sheets and sleep soundly in their bunks.

Troy skipped back two paragraphs in the Order. His eyes had looked at every word, but none of them had registered. Everything about his new life made him prone to distraction, made him think too much. It had all been perfectly arranged, but for what? Maximum apathy?

Glancing up, he could see Victor sitting at his desk in the psych office across the hall. It would be easy enough to walk over there and ask. They, more than anyone else, had designed this place. He could ask them how they did it, how they managed to make everyone feel so empty inside.

Sheltering the women and the children played some part. Troy was sure of that. The women and children of his silo had been gifted with the long sleep, had been whisked into lifeboats while the men stayed and took shifts steering that gutted wreckage off the icebergs. It removed the passion from the plans, forestalled the chance that the men might fight among themselves.

Troy wondered if two bull elk had ever butted heads without a doe watching from a grassy rise. What would be the point?

And then there was the routine, the mind-numbing routine. It was a castration of thought. Like 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 singular bunker at the heart of it all.

Checking the clock on his computer, Troy saw that it was time to go. He closed his copy of the Order and locked it away in his desk. As he headed for the communications room, he considered the office building analogy and realized it didn’t quite cover it. There was something else. The word that summed up the place was on the tip of his tongue. He tried to puzzle it out as he shuffled down the hall.

It had something to do with the stupor he saw everywhere, with the daily pills in the little plastic cups, the dozens of communal rooms with movies playing in loops on flat-panel TVs, dozens of unblinking eyes in comfortable chairs, staring.

No one was truly awake. Not really. It was just different types of sleep. And by the time Troy got to the end of the hallway, he had his finger on it. He remembered who designed this place, who had really laid out the plans. It was the shrinks. They had built a goddamn insane asylum. The world wasn’t being steered by a rudderless captain—it was being run from a loony bin! The entire world and everyone in it.

As he entered the comm room, Troy wasn’t sure if he should laugh or cry at the realization. Then he remembered how the world was run before, and that nothing had really changed. He chuckled sadly.

A pair of heads turned from the radio stations as he walked in, frowns and lowered brows. Troy pulled himself together. This wasn’t an asylum, he lied to himself. This was an office. It was a job. Everything was all right. 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 knew from his orientation, from before his long sleep.

Saul introduced him to the other tech, who waved and kept his headset on. The name would probably fade 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 a wide array of empty 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 probably 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.