Shift

Washington, D.C., 2049. Donald Keene, a freshman congressman from Georgia and an architect by training, waits outside the office of Senator Paul Thurman, a family friend: trim, white-haired, pushing seventy and kept young by nanobath treatments. Thurman’s first lesson for a newcomer: “Denial is the secret sauce in this town.” His job for Donald comes in a folder holding a building Donald drew in college. He wants it redesigned as a shelter for the workers at a facility to store the world’s spent nuclear fuel in Fulton County, Georgia, and it is going underground.

The lead engineer is Thurman’s daughter Anna, Donald’s college girlfriend, on sabbatical from M.I.T., who has a second monitor installed in his office before he has even said yes. Donald’s wife, Helen, at home in Savannah with their young dog, Karma, is not pleased. The project is split up so that no one sees the whole of it, and Donald keeps his plans secret even from Mick Webb, his old college friend and a fellow congressman, who is coordinating materials and crews. Donald finds he loves designing again.

In the nanobiotech wing of a hospital, Donald is stripped, scanned, dressed in green scrubs and sealed into a long capsule with the Senator, whose body is full of tiny repairing machines. Thurman warns that the same science can make machines too small to see that tear people apart, and gives Donald a heavy book to memorise: the Order. At home Donald tries to explain invisible machines to Helen and sounds crazy even to himself. By 2051 he has been calming his nerves for two years with pills filled under his sister Charlotte’s name, a habit that will matter a century and a half later.

Fulton County, 2052. On the man-made hills over the finished site, the National Convention camps one state’s delegation in each grassy bowl, a buried silo beneath every one. The day before, Mick drives Donald to South Carolina’s bowl and walks him down a ramp to see what he built: Donald’s own bunker design, which he thought stood only under Tennessee’s. On convention day Charlotte, an Air Force drone pilot home from the war, turns up as the Senator’s surprise; Helen texts that she is in Tennessee, though Donald has been messaging her to meet at the Georgia stage. As the noon anthem ends and jets roar overhead, flashes light the sky toward Atlanta. Anna and Charlotte haul Donald down a ramp into the earth while the crowds are herded underground, and Helen goes down with the Tennessee delegation, into another silo. Donald designed the lifeboats without knowing what they were for.

The book actually opens here, a lifetime later, as a man called Troy “returned to the living” in a frosted coffin beneath the hills of Fulton County. Rows of sleepers stretch away under a low ceiling. He is given water, bitter pills and the courtesy every waking man passes to the next: the others let him weep. He is to run Silo 1, the silo that runs the other forty-nine, for the first of ten six-month shifts he never volunteered for. Silo 1 is staffed only by men; its women and children sleep through it all.

Silo 1 runs on the Order, and the Order is mostly procedures for silos that fail. When Silo 12 does (crowds on its stairway, its airlock breached, a deputy begging for orders) Troy is playing solitaire. He has the canisters fired, watches white fog fill the airlock and crosses Silo 12 off the chart. His report blames a shadow whose nerve failed and an IT head blind to the trouble at her feet; what haunts him is that he made someone else push the button.

The pills fight his grief and lose. “Troy was tired of forgetting. He had decided to remember.” He spits them into his palm and smiles across the hall at Victor, the grey-haired psychiatrist who doles them out. He watches Hal, an old man from the cafeteria, wake into a moment of clarity, roaring that his name is Carlton, and signs the waiver that sends him back to the freeze. Then Troy goes looking for his wife among the frozen women, wipes the frost from one window after another and finds auburn hair: Anna, not Helen. The truth comes in a rush: the bombs were for show, the real threat was in the air, his wife is gone, and the name Troy was one he chose to honour her. His own name stays on the tip of his tongue. When the night-shift doctor comes, Troy says he would like to stay there among the pods, and is put back under. One of his last thoughts is that she is in Tennessee.

Order opens on a cliffhanger: in 2212 he is woken again, still thinking of himself as Troy, and a white-haired man he knows only as the Thaw Man tells him the trouble has only begun. It is Thurman. Donald waves the pills away, and his urine runs charcoal with dead machines. The drug, Thurman tells him, was in the water all along, and it fails on him, most likely because of the pills he once took in Charlotte’s name. They need him remembering, because silos are going dark.

Anna has been awake for almost a year, hidden in a war room in the armory; women are not supposed to be woken at all. Silo 40 hacked the system and went dark first, others followed, and Anna, whose M.I.T. work was in wireless, is tripping the collapse charges of rebel silos by radio. Victor, who wrote the Order, “shot himself at his desk two days ago,” and left Donald’s old Silo 12 report on top of his papers.

On the morning of Victor’s funeral, Donald searches the records for Helen and finds her under their dog’s name: Karma Brewer of Silo 2, the Tennessee silo. Teacher, school master, judge; dead at eighty-two, survived by “Rick Brewer,” who was Mick, and two children. He has slept through her whole life. The funeral turns out to be Victor’s body going into the deep freeze, and there Erskine, the thin British engineer who built the medical nanos, stands at the pod where his daughter sleeps and tells Donald the rest. Weapon nanos were already loose in the world; he had found them in her blood. The founders ended it first, on their own terms, and put fifty silos of survivors underground for the centuries it would take their own machines to scrub the air; the shifts are meant to run five hundred years. That night Anna comes to him, and he lets her. Wandering the armory, Donald finds a laminated map with a line running from every silo to a single point beyond them all, a clue he cannot read.

Victor, who wrote of the silos’ fifteen-to-twenty-year cycle of bloody upheaval, left notes all over Donald’s old report, and they point to Silo 18. Someone there remembers the old world and feeds each uprising, so Donald searches the database for a mind like his own, one that doesn’t even trust the water, and finds an ancient teacher. Thurman has already begun Silo 18’s reset, as Silo 1 has done there before: fewer people, wiped computers, wiped memories. Donald insists on riding the lift with him to make the call. On the radio is a young shadow in Silo 18’s IT, Rodny, whose pulse and sweat spike on the monitors as Thurman turns him.

After a week shut away below, Donald suits up, climbs out through the drones’ launch bay and walks into the poison toward Silo 2, meaning to die where Helen lived. He pulls off a glove and nothing happens. He is in sight of her silo, her last resting place, when a hand grips his shoulder and he is dragged back. While Donald sleeps, his name is swapped with Thurman’s.

These chapters give no year, only The Year of the Great Uprising: the same uprising Silo 1 is watching in 2212. “Deathdays were birthdays.” In a silo that allows a birth only when someone dies, Mission Jones is about to turn seventeen, seventeen years after his mother was sent out to clean for hiding her pregnancy with him. He has left his father’s farm to be a porter, hauling loads up and down the stair in white coveralls, and he is fond of the old teacher everyone calls the Crow: Mrs. Crowe, whose electric wheelchair runs on a cable from the ceiling and who tells children about blue skies and green fields as if she had seen them. “I was beautiful, once, you know.”

The Crow sends Mission with a note for Rodny, his childhood friend, now a shadow held behind IT’s steel doors, and Rodny slips him one back: help me. Then, as Mission chases another porter, Cam, down the stairwell, a bomb tears a landing out of the down deep. Cam is dead, and the silo blames the porters. Fighting spreads, the farms are attacked, and he learns that his twelve-year-old brother, Riley, slipped off to join the fight and was found dead with a kitchen knife in his hands. He climbs to the Crow’s schoolroom, where she waits with his friends Allie and Frankie, and Rodny arrives with armed men, dressed in white now, blaming her stories and songs for the silo’s anger. Mission is shot in the stomach. The Crow is killed.

Three years later, Mission scrubs the dirt from his hands while Allie makes dinner. Their lottery ticket has come up and she is pregnant. If it’s a boy, he says, maybe Cam; he doesn’t know any Cams, he just likes the name. Silo 18 has forgotten everything again.

Silo 17, 2312, Hour One. “The Loud came before the quiet.” Jimmy Parker, sixteen, is pulled out of class by his mother as the bangs grow louder; the airlock has been opened and the silo is coming apart. In the crush on the stairs he loses her and falls. A man named Yani grabs him as bait, and his father, Russ, an IT man, shoots Yani and brings Jimmy into the server room. Russ shows him a radio, a hidden room beneath the servers and the silo’s key, tells him to open the door for no one but his parents, and goes back for his mother. His father is killed outside the steel door; when the men drag his mother there and demand the code, Jimmy’s frantic guess is wrong and the door stays shut.

Alone, Jimmy sees the jack for Silo 40 light up on the radio, then hears Silo 1 calling. Silo 1 shuts Silo 17 down: white steam from the vents that smells of nothing. It logs the call (some young shadow or tech), sends collapse codes as a precaution, and forgets. Jimmy lives on tinned food, pineapple his favourite. The men outside try three codes on the door every morning, his only human company. He marks the days on the side of a server and pores over the Legacy’s strange books. When the men finally get in, more than a year later, he shoots them.

The chapters now count years from the fall. In Year Seven (2318), hungry, he goes back to his old classroom, chalks a rhyme about watching ghosts and laughing corpses, and names himself Solo. In Year Twelve (2323) a trip to Supply ends with a new flashlight, a rifle shot into the dark and a headlong flight; then a cry like an infant’s draws him toward the flooded levels, and he finds a soaked black cat he calls Shadow. In Year Sixteen (2327), with Shadow’s help, he kills two intruders who break in while he sleeps. By Year Twenty (2331) he is wondering why the dead in the cafeteria never rot. In Year Thirty-Four (2345), nearly fifty, Shadow gone, he threads a rope through empty jugs and thinks of himself as one more rusty thing lying about the silo, waiting to be found. And now he has been: by Juliette, walking in from Silo 18. It is Wool’s meeting, seen from Solo’s side.

Donald wakes in 2345 to a staff who call him Mr. Thurman, and the Shepherd. A cleaner from Silo 18 has walked over the hill and out of sight; Silo 1 doesn’t know her name, but it is Juliette. Eren, the head of operations, expects her to find Silo 17 a hole in the ground. From Silo 1, Wool’s climax arrives as reports and radio traffic: Silo 18’s report on a mechanic who walked out of sight and refused to clean, then Mechanical’s revolt. Reading Silo 17’s old call log, Donald guesses from the boy’s talk of “forty” that Silo 40 was involved, and signs off on a bombing run he barely understands.

Logged in as Thurman, he reads old messages, Victor’s suicide note among them, and piece by piece works out what Anna did: she played Mick and her father to switch his silo at the last minute in 2052, keeping him from Helen, and she arranged for him to be woken as Thurman. He has her woken. Shivering in her pod, she tells him her father woke her for another shift while Donald was in the deep freeze; he steers a straw of poison to her lips, and she dies with her fingernails sunk in his shoulder. Wheeling the empty chair back to Dr. Wilson’s office, he finds a slender folder left for him, headed RE: THE PACT. One silo is to be let out. Silo 1 was never meant to be the one, and its sleeping women and children are to die with everyone else, so that the knowledge of nanos and bombs dies with them.

As the Shepherd, Donald opens the scripted induction of Silo 18’s new head of IT, Lukas Kyle, and Eren reads the welcome. Then, at three in the morning, he wakes Charlotte, one life he can give back instead of take, and hides her in the armory where Anna hid. After she has eaten his breakfast she flies a camera drone up the lift and out past the ring of silos. Before its feed dies Donald sees, or is sure he sees, the world healed: “There were blue skies and green grass out there, Charla!” Last, he finds the real Paul Thurman among the pods in shift storage, wakes him, binds his wrists, listens to him defend the plan of letting one silo go free and killing the rest, and shoots him.

In the epilogue Donald, having sent the comm room to lunch, sits among the abandoned hands of a card game and calls Silo 18 for Lukas. A woman answers. It doesn’t matter who she is, she says, but it is Juliette, now mayor. He warns her to be careful where she goes digging; they’ll be careful where they dig, she answers. She’d hate for him to hear them coming.