Read Silo 49: Going Dark for Free Online

getting done even without him.
    After that, things went well so it wasn’t an entirely lost day. As long as he was able to do what needed doing remotely, using the impersonal communications of the wires, then he was able to keep that façade in place. He could do things without a person to look at and backspace when his fumbling caused mistakes. Also, writing the words ‘inarticulate scream’ didn’t carry the same impact as actually doing it so he felt no temptation to do that in a wire.
    It was with relief that he wired down to each of the water plants to lower the additive levels. They had no idea what it was, of course. It was labeled as a water additive just like every other additive, but the regular water workers could adjust the concentrations on the conditioning machines. It was good that they could because he had enough worries just trying to figure out how the last remaining IT agent that worked in chemistry would be able to manufacture and deliver the next load of additives, let alone how that same fellow would get to every plant just to twiddle a knob or push a button.
    He knew from a lifetime of experience how fast the dosing took effect when it was turned on and how quickly it faded when turned off. He could expect some slight improvement right away, but the improvement was often a dubious form of goodness. There was always someone who would break from remembered grief or whose confusion might manifest in an act against the Order.
    His experience of dosing was both personal and professional. As a child he had been no different from any other member of the silo up until the moment his uncle had decided he would make a good successor. Until that moment he had been subject to whatever might be added to the water just like everyone else.
    The minor uprising that happened when he was small hadn’t affected him personally nor done anything more than bring about some confusion to his young mind. It was a mostly verbal confrontation, punctuated by distant skirmishes, over power between almost identical factions within administration and law. But it had resulted in a lot of cleanings.
    The water had been dosed with calmatives during the event, which did end it more quickly than it might otherwise have. Afterwards, a minor dose of the forgetting drugs had been administered and, as a child not much impacted by the uprising, it did little but smooth out the memories Graham carried. That was not true of others, including his parents, whose foggy memories of that time had been a puzzle to his childhood self.
    He remembered hearing about one of those cleanings—there were several over a period of a few days—when whoever was outside decided revenge didn’t stop with death. Apparently, the cleaner had done all that was expected, but had then stumbled around like a blind man, feeling about on the ground like a person looking for a lost chit in the dark. Eventually, he had found and then fallen down on top of another recent cleaner and proceeded to beat and kick the corpse until he finally succumbed in his turn. According to the story he heard later, when he was old enough to understand it, it had caused equal amounts mirth and anger in the population but nothing came of it in the end.
    Even then, as a young teen not yet aware of all the truths he would learn in the years ahead of him, he had been appalled at anyone laughing at anything related to a cleaning. But those stories always seemed to be limited to the young or those who had no personal feelings about the situation. Had he been smarter, perhaps a bit more cynical, he would have figured out more about this world before it was told to him. Maybe he would have understood before it was too late to avoid being a part of it.
    Later, during his shadowing years, his uncle told him about the dosing and when it was done and how it worked. Then he understood the reactions, or lack of reactions, that he saw around him. There was more than one form of dosing and the stronger