To Graham it seemed like the plan was overly complicated and missing some pretty key elements. Again he wondered if he wouldn’t be better off doing this on his own. So he asked, “Uh, exactly how are you going to know when they hit the kill button? I mean, why not just cut it at once and get it over with? Why all this complicated stuff?”
“Hah! Good questions! And I have equally good answers. Graham, we’ve been working on this for years and have a pretty good group of smart people who do nothing but think about this stuff. We don’t dose all the water over here and haven’t for a very long time. Anyway, the last question is easiest to answer,” he said and Graham could hear him moving around on the other end of the radio, probably getting comfortable.
Graham decided he might as well get comfortable too. While John spoke, he started water to boil for a cup of tea.
“So, why all the complicated stuff, you ask. The simple answer is we don’t know what more they can do. Whoever is the first to go is really the test case for everyone else. We’re taking the biggest risk so we need to gain as much information as we can when we do it. For instance, we don’t know if these two kill switches are the only ones they have. We think so, but we don’t know so. We’ve gone over every single place where a pipe or conduit or anything else breeches our silo walls. We’ve checked schematics and so on. But the cold deep truth of it is that we just don’t know. They may have some other way to do us in. We’ll be the ones to test that theory.”
“You’re taking all the risk, then,” Graham replied and let the sentence hang.
They both knew what it might mean. He wondered if they shouldn’t switch around this order. His silo was the one in trouble and contained only a weak population of potentially dying people. He knew they were the most expendable if anyone in this horrible situation could be said to be so.
As for the lines that led back to Silo One, he had certainly checked his schematics too. Especially after making contact with these others and learning of what they had done. He agreed that it looked like just two big trunk lines led to Silo One, one just under the surface and another at Level 72. If there were others, they weren’t on their schematics.
“Eh, yeah, and I know what you’re thinking. Don’t bother even talking about it. You don’t have the population to do this. An uprising from you guys wouldn’t raise the same stink it would over here. They already know they are going to lose you, but us not so much. That will be yanking the treads from underneath them,” John replied so matter-of-factly that it was almost like he wasn’t talking about the lives of everyone he knew. To Graham it seemed like John almost relished the possibility of tweaking the noses of those others.
“Okay, sorry, go on and tell me the rest,” Graham said and finished making his tea, balancing the steaming hot metal cup on a wad of rags as he took it to his chair and sat.
“Basically, this is a test of their system and their backups. If they think that our problems are too big to control then they’ll try to wipe us too. We’ve got signal traps on all the lines, including the one up top that is already cut. Once we cut the lines below, there’s no turning back. We’ll cut the ones for the remote detonate, but not the communications. We already have a watch set in that area and that will be doubled and go round the clock once we actually do the cutting. When the traps indicate a signal is coming through for destruction, they’ll cut the communications lines and that will take out most of the cameras. The only ones that won’t go are the ones that show our view of the outside. We might have to take care of those some other way, but I don’t actually think those are critical.
“But no matter what, that should make it so they think the cameras went out because the silo was destroyed. If nothing else gets sent our way, then we’ll know that is the best way to go about it for everyone else. The safest way. If they send something else—and who knows what that might be—then you all know what will happen and can alter your plans accordingly. But no matter what happens everyone will have their destruction lines cut and that will increase your safety margin a little.”
“John, we will owe you a great debt. We’ll all owe everyone in that silo,” Graham said. He wondered if John’s perpetual energy and happy way of speaking was genuine or simply his way of dealing with what must be an incredible strain. Was he really that confident? He wasn’t betting a few chits on a game. He was betting the lives of his entire people.
“Nah. We’ll talk about that some other time. It’s not like I can come over and borrow some tools or a few baskets of seed, is it?” John dismissed the notion, sounding embarrassed. Then he laughed and said, “Though I would like to take you up on that offer to taste the corn hooch you were talking about. We don’t get a whole lot of that around this part of the neighborhood.”
“What about the other silos?” Graham asked, worried about the answer.
John sighed, “They just aren’t ready for different reasons. Some only have a few people that even know what’s going on and they are, naturally, having a hard time making the decision for everyone else. You can bet though, that they’ll become a lot more willing if trouble starts brewing. No one wants to be another Silo 12.”
“Yeah, or another Silo 49.”
“Don’t worry, Graham. We’re going to do this before this day is done. Get your people in position and ready within,” he paused and Graham heard tapping on a distant keyboard, “by my clock you have eleven hours and seventeen minutes. Got that? Can you get there in time?”
Graham wiggled the mouse on his computer and made a note of the time. “Got it. We’ll be ready.”
Old Men and Baskets
What he wanted to do after he finished that call was run like a mad person and grab Wallis and then fly the rails all the way down to Grace right after. Once he had them in sight he wanted to sit tight, tools clutched and ready, by the access plates on Level 72. But he couldn’t do that. Regardless of what his intentions were, he knew he could easily tip off those in Silo One with strange behavior.
So he went to his computer and read the wires that, even now with the population dwindling, filled his inbox. He was looking for a likely candidate to forward to Grace with the code that let her know it was time to act. Most of his inbox was just copied to him automatically by the system based on keywords programmed in. He hated that invasion of the privacy of others and he supposed that made him a bad fit for this job, though he had always been good at it.
This is one of the first things that would go. Penance for all the past invasions of privacy and all the past manipulations of people would have to be made. But that was for later, if they succeeded. No, he corrected himself, after they succeeded.
Most of those automated ones he could delete quickly and he cleaned out a good portion of his inbox that way in just a few keystrokes. One piece of good news had filtered through. A baby girl had been born healthy and on time in the down deep to a pipe fitter, who had also come through in good health. The new baby’s name was Jewel. Before he had even added her number to the population tally, Graham saw another email that balanced out that birth. One of the technicians in the mids had called for the bottle last night and passed peacefully at the age of thirty-three. No family left to notify. Graham sighed heavily and deleted the email. The one for the birth he retained. That was the way of life, he thought, to want to keep the good and purge the bad. Maybe what Silo One wanted to do to them was no different except in the scale of the purging.