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m_findlowTitle: Beyond the hill
Fandom: Wool (The Silo Trilogy) by Hugh Howey
'I told you this was a terrible vacation spot.'
Juliette wanted to laugh at her own comment. In all the years she'd toiled away in the darkness of Mechanical, she'd never once had a vacation. What would have been the point? Few of the workers who lived in the bottom one hundred levels of the Silo had ever bothered with leisure time, what small amounts their chits could afford. It was better to spend those chits on new items from Supply. Even a week’s worth of leave was useless to most. Some talked of one day saving up enough to journey to the top of the Silo and gaze out through the wallscreens at the world outside, just to see it for themselves.
If you're desperate enough, there’s another way to see it, Juliette thought. It would be a one way vacation, but it would serve its purpose - a cleaning.
Even then, the journey from Mechanical would take a week up the steps to reach it, and that was without taking a break at the Mids. Things always slowed down around the Mids as porters hurried in both directions carrying impossible loads up and down through the levels of the Silo. They were the lifeblood of the silo, keeping everyone alive with the vital precious goods manufactured in Supply. And if Supply were the lifeblood, then IT was the head of the enormous beast; one that Juliette would have sorely loved to have cut off.
None of what she was seeing was real, she knew, yet it all appeared so impossibly real. It was that sixty-four bit resolution, she remembered. When she'd been Sheriff she'd questioned why they’d even need technology that good, and for what purpose, but now she knew. It was why all the people sent for cleaning did so happily and without complaint. As soon as they stepped out from the airlock up the ramp leading to the surface, they saw what she was seeing now. Perfect blue skies and rolling green hills. Nothing like what the wallscreens on Level One showed. Blackened skies and inhospitable red sands were a distant memory.
How did IT do it? Make what she was seeing look so real? She felt like her body didn't belong to her because what she felt under her feet didn’t equate with what she was seeing through her visor. Hard rock crunched underfoot but her brain was telling her it was lush grass. She walked towards another rock, this time reaching down to touch it. Just like the others she'd seen, it was no rock. What she felt through the thick glove of her suit was jagged and illformed. By moving her hand across it, closing her eyes against the visual lies she was being fed, she could picture it perfectly. A skeleton. One of the people sent to clean in years gone by. It was the familiar shape of the rib cage, all that remained after the suit IT made for them had failed like clockwork.
She opened her eyes again and the rock came back into view, sitting there surrounded by grass and small whie flowers swaying in the breeze. She could see her own hand moving across it, so it wasn’t as if she was just seeing a preprogrammed vision. Her visor was translating reality right then and there. All this technological brilliance for what? Ten minutes of survival for the average cleaner who would be dead by now. Such a lot of work to keep the spectators back down in the Silo believing that cleaners wanted to be out here in this wasteland, performing their final duties.
Not Juliette though. She wanted to think about Bernard in IT losing his mind right now as she wandered around, refusing to clean the lenses. He'd lose his mind even more when he realised that the heat tape holding her protective suit together wasn't going to perish and fail, giving her the time she needed to move up and over the hill to see what lay beyond the other side.
When she did begin that journey, something strange happened. The perfect image in front of her began to falter. Just a little at first and then more and more, the fictitious paradise giving way to the harsh reality of the world beyond the Silo. She reached the top of the hill and the imagery failed altogether, giving her the first realisation that even IT had no idea what lay beyond the hill. Their programs had taken a million images of the areas around the Silo and built up an ingenious program to morph it into something else.
Beyond the hill, it was like she was staring once more at the wallscreens in the cafeteria. The skies swirled dark grey and black with patches and whorls of brown. The ground swept up in gusts of hot wind, moving around the rust-coloured sands, whipping themselves against the boulders that this time were real and not the bodies of condemned humans.
More startling was what else she finally saw. Had she imagined that once upon a time they truly had lived above ground? Seeing it now, she felt her heart sink. There it was, a whole city standing on the surface, glass and steel, broken and rotting as it had stood there for thousands of years abandoned to the elements. In coming out here she'd hoped to uncover a marvel, some existence beyond their own, and to prove that the world outside wasn’t what IT had led them to believe, and yet here it was, finally the truth laid bare for her to see with her own eyes. There was nothing out there but ruin. A time and place from so long ago that it was now becoming buried in the coarse red sands that ate away at it like the beetles that consumed the dead, leaving nothing but a few fragments of bone behind.
This was what she'd sacrificed her life to find - an empty nothingness.
Fandom: Wool (The Silo Trilogy) by Hugh Howey
Characters: Juliette
Author: m_findlow
Rating: PG.
Length: 1,000 words
Content notes: none
Author notes: Written for Challenge 134 - Wasteland at ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
fandomweekly
fandomweeklySummary: Juliette longs to discover what her death sentence has cost her.
'I told you this was a terrible vacation spot.'
Juliette wanted to laugh at her own comment. In all the years she'd toiled away in the darkness of Mechanical, she'd never once had a vacation. What would have been the point? Few of the workers who lived in the bottom one hundred levels of the Silo had ever bothered with leisure time, what small amounts their chits could afford. It was better to spend those chits on new items from Supply. Even a week’s worth of leave was useless to most. Some talked of one day saving up enough to journey to the top of the Silo and gaze out through the wallscreens at the world outside, just to see it for themselves.
If you're desperate enough, there’s another way to see it, Juliette thought. It would be a one way vacation, but it would serve its purpose - a cleaning.
Even then, the journey from Mechanical would take a week up the steps to reach it, and that was without taking a break at the Mids. Things always slowed down around the Mids as porters hurried in both directions carrying impossible loads up and down through the levels of the Silo. They were the lifeblood of the silo, keeping everyone alive with the vital precious goods manufactured in Supply. And if Supply were the lifeblood, then IT was the head of the enormous beast; one that Juliette would have sorely loved to have cut off.
None of what she was seeing was real, she knew, yet it all appeared so impossibly real. It was that sixty-four bit resolution, she remembered. When she'd been Sheriff she'd questioned why they’d even need technology that good, and for what purpose, but now she knew. It was why all the people sent for cleaning did so happily and without complaint. As soon as they stepped out from the airlock up the ramp leading to the surface, they saw what she was seeing now. Perfect blue skies and rolling green hills. Nothing like what the wallscreens on Level One showed. Blackened skies and inhospitable red sands were a distant memory.
How did IT do it? Make what she was seeing look so real? She felt like her body didn't belong to her because what she felt under her feet didn’t equate with what she was seeing through her visor. Hard rock crunched underfoot but her brain was telling her it was lush grass. She walked towards another rock, this time reaching down to touch it. Just like the others she'd seen, it was no rock. What she felt through the thick glove of her suit was jagged and illformed. By moving her hand across it, closing her eyes against the visual lies she was being fed, she could picture it perfectly. A skeleton. One of the people sent to clean in years gone by. It was the familiar shape of the rib cage, all that remained after the suit IT made for them had failed like clockwork.
She opened her eyes again and the rock came back into view, sitting there surrounded by grass and small whie flowers swaying in the breeze. She could see her own hand moving across it, so it wasn’t as if she was just seeing a preprogrammed vision. Her visor was translating reality right then and there. All this technological brilliance for what? Ten minutes of survival for the average cleaner who would be dead by now. Such a lot of work to keep the spectators back down in the Silo believing that cleaners wanted to be out here in this wasteland, performing their final duties.
Not Juliette though. She wanted to think about Bernard in IT losing his mind right now as she wandered around, refusing to clean the lenses. He'd lose his mind even more when he realised that the heat tape holding her protective suit together wasn't going to perish and fail, giving her the time she needed to move up and over the hill to see what lay beyond the other side.
When she did begin that journey, something strange happened. The perfect image in front of her began to falter. Just a little at first and then more and more, the fictitious paradise giving way to the harsh reality of the world beyond the Silo. She reached the top of the hill and the imagery failed altogether, giving her the first realisation that even IT had no idea what lay beyond the hill. Their programs had taken a million images of the areas around the Silo and built up an ingenious program to morph it into something else.
Beyond the hill, it was like she was staring once more at the wallscreens in the cafeteria. The skies swirled dark grey and black with patches and whorls of brown. The ground swept up in gusts of hot wind, moving around the rust-coloured sands, whipping themselves against the boulders that this time were real and not the bodies of condemned humans.
More startling was what else she finally saw. Had she imagined that once upon a time they truly had lived above ground? Seeing it now, she felt her heart sink. There it was, a whole city standing on the surface, glass and steel, broken and rotting as it had stood there for thousands of years abandoned to the elements. In coming out here she'd hoped to uncover a marvel, some existence beyond their own, and to prove that the world outside wasn’t what IT had led them to believe, and yet here it was, finally the truth laid bare for her to see with her own eyes. There was nothing out there but ruin. A time and place from so long ago that it was now becoming buried in the coarse red sands that ate away at it like the beetles that consumed the dead, leaving nothing but a few fragments of bone behind.
This was what she'd sacrificed her life to find - an empty nothingness.
