“I see what you’re saying, I really do. This has been going on for a long time. Since before I was born though we didn’t know that then. What I want to do now is try to fix it if I can but first I just want to stop them from blowing us up or whatever they do. Can I do that?”
Graham could hear his counterpart take a deep breath over the line. The static was still hissing but less so now and the words came through loud and clear. “You can. We all can.”
Waiting is the Hardest Part
Waiting was hard for Graham and he could see the difficulty it caused for Wallis as well. It was writ large in his nervous movements and stiff gait. What Grace was going through, he couldn’t know. Their paths didn’t cross in daily life and though he certainly had cause to contact her now, her being the de facto head of the electricians, he didn’t. He wanted to reserve that for when he had something concrete to give her. He stuck with the regular forwarded emails as needed with the code for ‘nothing yet’ in each one.
While he waited, feeling helpless and with an ear halfcocked for the blast that would bring down his silo, the people in Silo 40 were busy. They were the hub and the coordinators for this great ‘going offline’ that would take place. Every twelve hours, as directed, he sat at the hacked radio and waited for their call. The buzz he had grown to love would come from the radio and then he took their updates and answered their questions with a growing sense of hope tinged with the ever present nervousness.
By the third day of this waiting, he had been required to give the medic and one of his IT technicians the order to begin scanning in medical records. His orders on which to start with and what kind of information to scan would, he hoped, mean that the information Silo One so desperately wanted would not come quickly or comprehensively and thereby give the conspirators more time. It was a dangerous and close game to play and every bang that echoed up the column of the stairwell made him flinch.
During his fourth-day check in with Silo One, he was compliant and did his very best to convey his trust in them, in the Order he no longer believed in and to convey that their solutions were the answer he waited for. Inwardly, he cringed at the lies. So far, they seemed satisfied with the data coming in and to Graham that meant they were probably not examining it thoroughly. He thought, perhaps, that they felt like they had all the time in the world and had no reason to hurry.
He was both glad and worried that he had no further instances of an open microphone leaking information from that other silo. Glad because it meant it was less likely they would discover he had heard anything and worried because he couldn’t know what new machinations were taking place there. His imagination ran wild when he considered the possibilities.
The buzz that signaled Silo 40 calling him woke him from a fitful sleep very late in the sleeping cycle on what would be his fifth day waiting. It wasn’t the scheduled time for a call and he jumped from his bed, simultaneously groggy and unnerved. He fumbled the radio not once but twice as he tried to turn it on and answer. His whole body felt shaky as he pressed the microphone button and said hello.
“Graham, we’ve got resolution. How soon can you be ready to go?”
“Go? You mean disable the system on Level 72?”
“Yes, that. Listen. A whole lot has happened and I want to get you up to speed, just in case we lose contact for any reason. You good to listen?” John asked, his voice full of excitement.
“Yeah. I’m good. Let me get some paper for notes,” Graham replied, hugging the radio under his arm and rooting about his messy sleep area for paper with any blank space remaining on it and a writing utensil.
“Your water situation first. Did you try the vapor compression distiller? Pumping it upward? Anything like that?”
Graham sighed. He had already gone over this with Nella and he hoped this wasn’t an indicator of a loss of organization. “No. I told Nella earlier. There is no way I can get that kind of obvious project started over here and do it inconspicuously. It will have to wait until after. And if the distiller doesn’t work, then I’ll figure out a way to get water, whatever that may take, from the down deep to the upper levels until we figure out something else. But I will figure it out.”
“Sure, sure,” said John, his speech a bit rapid, his voice weary. “Sorry about that. I’ve been running on adrenaline and strong tea for the past few days. Nella did tell me that. Anyway, my guy in water says that vapor compression distillation should work and since you’ve got two down in mechanical, you’ll either need to figure out a way to build another near the upper plant or string a whole lot of pumps together to get that much lift. Whatever you choose, you’ve got the specs, right? You still have the techs to do it?”
“Yes, to both questions. I looked it up in the Legacy too. VCD is supposed to make even water that has raw sewage in it or any chemical contamination clean and pure,” Graham replied. When he read the entry in the Legacy he felt pure hope for a glorious but brief moment. Then he remembered how far it was from the down deep to Level 1 and the nightmare of logistics he would be facing soon.
He shook that train of thought away for the moment. “We can do it. I know it. Even if I have to port the water up on our lifts for a while, we will.”
“Good. I just wanted to make sure, in case something goes wrong. So, this is what we’re looking at. No one else but us is ready to go yet,” John said it casually but Graham could feel his heart plummet at the words.
“We can’t wait for them! We don’t have that kind of time over here!”
“Hey, hey. Calm down. Don’t panic, Graham! They aren’t ready to go offline, but we are,” John said, his voice conveying his satisfaction. “And, they may not be going offline but everyone is cutting the destruct lines on 72 along with your silos and ours.”
Graham wondered at this. Hadn’t all of this preparation been because the others were concerned that if one went offline Silo One might figure out a way to ensure the others didn’t? He said as much.
“Graham, you’re right. But then we thought we would do it like we did the disconnection outside. You probably don’t know this but we sent someone out to do that. A volunteer. A good suit, extra air and walking below the line of the hills on the outside of our grid in the dim time…well, he cut them all where they go to the trunk line. And that is how you are talking to us now. Extra transmitters he installed below ground while he was doing the cutting,” John laughed as he told him. It was a naughty laugh.
All Graham could think of was that a volunteer had gone out to die just to cut lines for people he didn’t know.
“You still there, buddy?” John asked.
“Sorry. Yeah, just thinking. I didn’t know that, about the volunteer.”
“It was a long time ago. Before you or I were making these decisions, for sure. And they didn’t have any way of knowing who they were cutting lines for. They just had to cut the whole group to be sure they got their own. Anyway, here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to be your diversion. We’re going to get them all riled up and focused on us and then all of us are going to cut their control lines on Level 72. That way, no matter what they do they can’t actually destroy us unless they come over and kick the door down.”
“Won’t Silo One notice?”
“Nope, they only know what they monitor and they’ll be looking at us,” John replied, voice confident. “They can go back and look for stuff, we’re pretty sure, but there won’t be anything to see. When we go offline they are going to go off the rails and try to blow us up but it won’t work and we won’t answer. They’ll be focused on us for a bit. We are reasonably certain there aren’t as many of them over there doing the work as they would have us believe. We’ve got a main conduit for the cameras and communications, which includes their little remote destruction lines, and all we have to do is cut it at Level 72. But we won’t cut the cameras until after we cut the remote destruction. That way, they just won’t know what happened.”