First Shift - Legacy

“—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 quite sure it didn’t matter what he said. Like the phone operators of old, the task of gauging fitness was better left to the machines and the computers, all the sensors in some distant headset.

“Okay. There’s the call.” Saul pointed to a single flashing light on a panel studded with flashing lights. The entire room was full of flashing lights. Troy was surprised any sort of alert stood out to these men. They reminded him of those expert astronomers who could glance up at the night sky and spot a distant supernova, could see a new pinprick that was out of place among all the others.

“I’m patching you through,” Saul said.

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 on the other side. 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 the voice, the sound of a chest thrust out with pride, a young man proudly reporting for duty. 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. 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. In the old days, this was when they asked your name on a lie detector to establish a normal response. Troy’s palms felt sweaty thinking of someone hooking him up to a machine and asking him his name.

“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 dripped with pride.

There was a pause, then the sound of a deep breath 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, remembered feeling daunted in his last job, 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. Troy pictured him and the current head of the silo sitting in a room together, master studying student.

“I lost my 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. The muffs were hot against his skin.

“Everything in there is absolutely true,” he said.

Which was partially correct. He didn’t add that not every true thing was written in the Legacy. Much was left out. And there were other things he suspected that none of them knew, things that had been wiped clean, had been edited out of books and brains alike.

The Legacy was the truth allowed, he wanted to say, the truth that was carried in all the silos for future generations. But the lies, he thought to himself, were what they carried there in Silo 1, in that drug-hazed asylum charged insanely with humanity’s survival.

9

2049 • Fulton County, Georgia

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

Hills of fresh dirt were taking shape like this as far as he could see. Heavy machinery skittered like an infestation of ants, each one carrying a mouthful of dirt at a time and beeping to one another in audible pheromones as they occasionally backed up. Their tracks crisscrossed through the soil in a knot of furrows, angry engines