This book is a 10/10#

Everything about this setting engrossed me. The characters are flawed in all the right ways, and the way the story is told kept me on the edge of my seat.

I will not retell much of the story as I tend to, I want to get away from that habit, but rather will talk about the parts of the story that captured me. The story definitely has a few acts, and the first one was one of my favorites.

Holston#

At the top of the ramp, Holston saw the heaven into which he’d been condemned for his simple sin of hope.

The story of Holston is how we are introduced to the Silo. Holston is the Silo’s sheriff, and has been for long enough to have become a fixture of the silo, but not much longer. He is well loved by those around him - his deputy, the mayor, and at one point, his wife.

Unfortunately, Holston’s wife is no longer in the silo, for she committed the most unforgivable sins in this world, she wanted to leave. Simply saying that wish out loud is enough to send one to a cleaning. See, the silo this story takes place in is fully underground, the world having become uninhabitable long ago. How long is not clear yet, but long enough for the general populace to sometimes doubt much of what they have been told existed in the outside world. Elephants are once brought up as something that must have been made up for the children’s books, and not something that actually existed. Since the silo is fully underground, there is would be no view of the outside world, except there is. There is a sensor array outside, that provides a video feed to the silo of the outside world. However, these cameras get a film over them rather quickly due to the toxins in the air outside. The solution to this problem is an interesting one - those who are sentences to death are instead sentenced to a cleaning, where they are put into a suit to keep them alive for a period of time and sent outside to clean the sensors.

You might ask, if the person sent to cleaning has just been condemned to death by those around them, why would they do this final task for those who would kill them? This is an interesting question that I will not give away, but none the less, they always clean.

A cleaning is a holiday inside the silo. People from all levels come to the top levels to view the large screens of the outside while the view is as clear as possible. This joy and excitement is starkly contrasted by Holston’s remembrance of the day his wife was sent out to clean. He remembers being one of the only ones who was present while she actually did the cleaning - no one else cared enough about his wife to want to deal with the emotional moment where she cleaned the cameras and then wandered off to a nearby hill to die. But he was there, he watched her smiling as she did her final chore. Now every time he looks at the screens that show the outside, he can see his wife’s body hidden away in her cleaning suit, forever memorialized.

But why did she even say she wanted out if she knew it was a death sentence? Why did anyone? Many do because they can no longer take being cooped up in the silo. Something in their brain breaks and they crave the outside. Some do it as a form of suicide. Holston’s wife did it for a different reason. She had learned how to recover deleted files, and recovered some data from before the uprising, which caused much IT’s* servers to be deleted. What she found deleted on that server was a program to fake images on a screen. She determined that it must be to fake the image that the sensors of the outside show to trick people into thinking it was a desolate wasteland, when in reality it was green and lush. She wanted to go outside because she believed she could live freely there. After years of researching what his wife had found, Holston one day decided to find out for himself, and said the words that were not allowed to be said. What he found out, I will leave out for now. But on the camera feeds in the silo, there are now two bodies next to each other on that hill, forever together once again.