Shift Omnibus (Shift 1 - 3) by Hugh Howey

Author:Hugh Howey [Howey, Hugh]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2013-04-14T04:00:00+00:00

43

• Silo 1 •

DONALD’S BREAKFAST OF powdered eggs and shredded potatoes had long grown cold. He rarely touched the food brought down by Thurman and Erskine, preferring instead the bland stuff in the unlabelled silver cans he had discovered among the storeroom’s vacuum-sealed crates. It wasn’t just the matter of trust – it was the rebelliousness of it all, the empowerment that came from taking command of his own survival. He stabbed a yellowish-orange gelatinous blob that he assumed had once been part of a peach and put it in his mouth. He chewed, tasting nothing. He pretended it tasted like a peach.

Across the wide table, Anna fiddled with the dials on her radio and sipped loudly from a mug of cold coffee. A nest of wires ran from a black box to her computer, and a soft hiss of static filled the room.

‘It’s too bad we can’t get a better station,’ Donald said morosely. He speared another wedge of mystery fruit and popped it into his mouth. Mango, he told himself, just for variety.

‘No station is the best station,’ she said, referring to her hope that the towers of silo forty and its neighbours would remain silent. She had tried to explain what she was doing to cut off any unlikely survivors, but little of it made any sense to Donald. A year ago, supposedly, silo forty had hacked the system. It was assumed to have been a rogue head of IT. No one else could be expected to possess the expertise and access required of such a feat. By the time the camera feeds were cut, every failsafe had already been severed. Attempts had been made to terminate the silo, but there was no way to verify them. It became obvious these attempts had failed when the darkness started to spread to other silos.

Thurman, Erskine and Victor had been woken according to protocol, one after the other. Further failsafes proved ineffective, and Erskine worried the hacking had progressed to the level of the nanos, that the machines in the air were being reprogrammed, that everything was in jeopardy. After much cajoling, Thurman had convinced the other two that Anna could help. Her research at MIT had been in wireless harmonics; remote charging technology; the ability to assume control of electronics via radio.

She’d eventually been able to commandeer the collapse mechanism of the afflicted silos. Donald still had nightmares thinking about it. While she described the process, he had studied the wall schematic of a standard silo. He had pictured the blasts that freed the layers of heavy concrete between the levels, sending them like dominoes down to the bottom, crushing everything and everyone in-between. Stacks of concrete fifty feet thick had been cut loose to turn entire societies into rubble. These underground buildings had been designed from the beginning so they could be brought down like any other – and remotely. That such a failsafe was even needed seemed as sick to Donald as the solution was cruel.

All that now remained of those silos was the hiss and crackle of their dead radios, a chorus of ghosts.

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