2
2110
• Silo 1 •
TROY HELD HIS breath and tried to remain calm while the doctor pumped the rubber bulb. The inflatable band swelled around his bicep until it pinched his skin. He wasn’t sure if slowing his breathing and steadying his pulse affected his blood pressure, but he had a strong urge to impress the man in the white overalls. He wanted his numbers to come back normal.
His arm throbbed a few beats while the needle bounced and the air hissed out.
‘Eighty over fifty.’ The band made a ripping sound as it was torn loose. Troy rubbed the spot where his skin had been pinched.
‘Is that okay?’
The doctor made a note on his clipboard. ‘It’s low, but not outside the norm.’ Behind him, his assistant labelled a cup of dark grey urine before placing it inside a small fridge. Troy caught sight of a half-eaten sandwich among the samples, not even wrapped.
He looked down at his bare knees sticking out of the blue paper gown. His legs were pale and seemed smaller than he remembered. Bony.
‘I still can’t make a fist,’ he told the doctor, working his hand open and shut.
‘That’s perfectly normal. Your strength will return. Look into the light, please.’
Troy followed the bright beam and tried not to blink.
‘How long have you been doing this?’ he asked the doctor.
‘You’re my third coming out. I’ve put two under.’ He lowered the light and smiled at Troy. ‘I’ve only been out myself for a few weeks. I can tell you that the strength will return.’
Troy nodded. The doctor’s assistant handed him another pill and a cup of water. Troy hesitated. He stared down at the little blue capsule nestled in his palm.
‘A double dose this morning,’ the doctor said, ‘and then you’ll be given one with breakfast and dinner. Please do not skip a treatment.’
Troy looked up. ‘What happens if I don’t take it?’
The doctor shook his head and frowned, but didn’t say anything.
Troy popped the pill in his mouth and chased it with the water. A bitterness slid down his throat.
‘One of my assistants will bring you some clothes and a fluid meal to kick-start your gut. If you have any dizziness or chills, you’re to call me at once. Otherwise, we’ll see you back here in six months.’ The doctor made a note, then chuckled. ‘Well, someone else will see you. My shift will be over.’
‘Okay.’ Troy shivered.
The doctor looked up from his clipboard. ‘You’re not cold, are you? I keep it a little extra warm in here.’
Troy hesitated before answering. ‘No, doctor. I’m not cold. Not any more.’
Troy entered the lift at the end of the hall, his legs still weak, and studied an array of numbered buttons. The orders they’d given him included directions to his office, but he vaguely remembered how to get there. Much of his orientation had survived the decades of sleep. He remembered studying that same book over and over, thousands of men assigned to various shifts, tours of the facility before being put under like the women. The orientation felt like yesterday; it was older memories that seemed to be slipping away.
The doors to the lift closed automatically. His apartment was on thirty-seven; he remembered that. His office was on thirty-four. He reached for a button, intending to head straight to his desk, and instead found his hand sliding up to the very top. He still had a few minutes before he needed to be anywhere, and he felt some strange urge, some tug, to get as high as possible, to rise through the soil pressing in from all sides.
The lift hummed into life and accelerated up the shaft. There was a whooshing sound as another car or maybe the counterweight zoomed by. The round buttons flashed as the floors passed. There was an enormous spread of them, seventy in all. The centres of many were dull from years of rubbing. This didn’t seem right. It seemed like just yesterday the buttons were shiny and new. Just yesterday, everything was.
The lift slowed. Troy palmed the wall for balance, his legs still uncertain.
The door dinged and slid open. Troy blinked at the bright lights in the hallway. He left the lift and followed a short walk towards a room that leaked chatter. His new boots were stiff on his feet, the generic grey overalls itchy. He tried to imagine waking up like this nine more times, feeling this weak and disoriented. Ten shifts of six months each. Ten shifts he hadn’t volunteered for. He wondered if it would get progressively easier or if it would only get worse.
The bustle in the cafeteria quietened as he entered. A few heads turned his way. He saw at once that his grey overalls weren’t so generic. There was a scattering of colours seated at the tables: a large cluster of reds, quite a few yellows, a man in orange; no other greys.
That first meal of sticky paste he’d been given rumbled once more in his stomach. He wasn’t allowed to eat anything else for six hours, which made the aroma from the canned foods overwhelming. He remembered the fare, had lived on it during orientation. Weeks and weeks of the same gruel. Now it would be months. It would be hundreds of years.
‘Sir.’
A young man nodded to Troy as he walked past, towards the lifts. Troy thought he recognised him but couldn’t be sure. The gentleman certainly seemed to have recognised him. Or was it the grey overalls that stood out?
‘First shift?’
An older gentleman approached, thin, with white and wispy hair that circled his head. He held a tray in his hands, smiled at Troy. Pulling open a recycling bin, he slid the entire tray inside and dropped it with a clatter.
‘Come up for the view?’ the man asked.
Troy nodded. It was all men throughout the cafeteria. All men. They had explained why this was safer. He tried to remember as the man with the splotches of age on his skin crossed his arms and stood beside him. There were no introductions. Troy wondered if names meant less amid these short six-month shifts. He gazed out over the bustling tables towards the massive screen that covered the far wall.
Whirls of dust and low clouds hung over a field of scattered and mangled debris. A few metal poles bristled from the ground and sagged lifelessly, the tents and flags long vanished. Troy thought of something but couldn’t name it. His stomach tightened like a fist around the paste and the bitter pill.
‘This’ll be my second shift,’ the man said.
Troy barely heard. His watering eyes drifted across the scorched hills, the grey slopes rising up towards the dark and menacing clouds. The debris scattered everywhere was rotting away. Next shift, or the one after, and it would all be gone.
‘You can see further from the lounge.’ The man turned and gestured along the wall. Troy knew well enough what room he was referring to. This part of the building was familiar to him in ways this man could hardly guess at.
‘No, but thanks,’ Troy stammered. He waved the man off. ‘I think I’ve seen enough.’
Curious faces returned to their trays, and the chatter resumed. It was sprinkled with the clinking of spoons and forks on metal bowls and plates. Troy turned and left without saying another word. He put that hideous view behind him – turned his back on the unspoken eeriness of it. He hurried, shivering, towards the lift, knees weak from more than the long rest. He needed to be alone, didn’t want anyone around him this time, didn’t want sympathetic hands comforting him while he cried.