Okay so here's the rundown of the Silo Saga, since mine takes place after I need you to have a frame of reference. First Howey wrote a six chapter short story called Wool, which was about Holston the Sheriff of a Silo being sentenced to a cleaning, which is actually way worse than it sounds. You see, the Silo is an underground bunker protecting everyone from a toxic atmosphere, which they are reminded of by a screen that shows what's going on outside, which is nothing, all they see is dust in the wind sweeping across the barren crater their Silo is in. There are a group of people who are supposedly trying to monitor the situation so that people can go back outside one day, but every now and then somebody gets impatient and decides they want to go outside now. These people are given what they ask for, they go outside and clean the dust off the cameras that get the video and the other sensors used to collect data about the conditions outside. And then they die. Through the eyes of Sheriff Holston, whose wife went out for a cleaning three years ago, we find out just what a cleaner goes through. Holston feels he has nothing to lose because his wife had won the population control lottery and they were going to have a child and she threw it away to go outside and he wants to know why. So he puts on his hazmat suit and goes out the airlock, pulls the wool pads out of his pocket and wipes the cameras clean. But the weird thing is that when he gets out there, the sky is blue and the ground is covered with green grass and he thinks what they see on the screens must be a lie. He walks up the edge of the crater seeking freedom, and then suddenly the world briefly turns back to the horror he has always known for an instant and then it goes dark and he dies. I was so depressed I did not want to go on to the next part, but fortunately I had the fully printed omnibus from the library so I knew there was more. The next part follows Mayor Jahns and Deputy Marnes as they go searching for a new Sheriff, and their candidate is a mechanic named Juliette who lives all the way at the bottom of the Silo. This story drags on as they walk down the stairs and visit certain important floors, including IT where they make the hazmat suits for cleaning, and where we meet Bernie, a fat...I can't think of a noun that properly fits Bernie, there just isn't anything vile enough in my vocabulary, but right away you get the gist this guy is no good. They also meet Juliette's father, a doctor in the nursery who reveals Juliette had a brother who died due to a power failure in his incubator after he was born slightly premature. We know that Juliette moved from the upper levels down to mechanical, which is usually seen as an act of rebellion, the Silo equivalent of running away, but now we get the perspective that she actually just wants to work in maintenance to make sure nobody else has to lose someone to a failed machine. The Mayor and the Deputy finally get down to the bottom floor where they find Juliette, who is described as beautiful yet rugged(I pictured Michelle Rodriguez) she doesn't care about her appearance, she only cares that if she doesn't keep everything working somebody might die. The only way they can convince her to take the sheriff job is to reduce power so she can switch to the backup generator and fix the main generator. The Mayor and the Deputy walk back up and it's as slow and painful as the walk down, but they finally admit to each other that they were in love all along...and then Mayor Jahns dies. So far this pattern is not promising, but Jules has her first case. Part three shifts the focus to the de facto protagonist, Juliette, who investigates the death of the Mayor, who seems to have been poisoned from her canteen, or rather the Deputy's canteen, since they found it easier to drink from the canteen on the other's back rather than reach around to tack it off their own backpack, a fact which Bernie observed before refilling their canteens on their return trip, but only the Deputy was present to know this and fails to figure it out before taking his own life out of guilt. Jules is missing details so it takes time for her to catch up during which time she meets Lukas, a young man from IT who has not yet learned how horrible his department really is, but he will. Jules and Lukas develop feelings for each other, but Juliette's investigation leads her to the truth that the suits were made to fail, Holston's wife was sent to clean for figuring out IT was lying, and Mayor Jahns was killed because making a mechanic Sheriff meant bringing up someone smart enough to put it all together. But before she can arrest him, Bernie has assumed leadership because the Head of IT is interim Mayor in case of a vacancy according to the laws of the Silo. Bernie realizes she's too smart and too close to he truth so he sentences her to a cleaning. However, Jules has friends in the right places, and they arrange for better heat tape to be sent to IT so that her suit will actually last outside. Jules is sent to clean but then she does something nobody has ever done in the history of the Silo, she refuses to clean and heads right over the edge of the crater, where she sees the truth, that there is a simulation programmed into the helmet that presents a convincing illusion of the world outside, but it only reaches to the top of the crater and after that the illusion fails, which is why every death is timed to happen before that. Bernie knows she was supposed to die before getting above a certain altitude and the fact that she does make it alarms him, and those who witness it are motivated to rebel. Lukas is selected to be the next head of IT so Bernie can train him, and he learns the horrible truth, there are fifty Silos, and they are all that is left of the world after it was destroyed-by the same people who built the Silos to control the population, a group known as World Order Operation Fifty, with fifty represented by the Roman numeral L the acronym is WOOL. Meanwhile, Jules learns some of that when she sees the other Silos from the outside and finds her way to an adjacent abandoned Silo where it seems everyone has died. Then she meets a man named Solo and six children who have survived alone against all odds. She finds a radio in the IT department where Solo was living and contacts her Silo, learning from the numbered switchboard that she is in Silo 17 and her home was Silo 18. Her first message is to tell Bernie "You sent me to die you sick fuck! I'm coming back to clean!" (I really hope that makes it into the movie) Lukas gets to talk with Jules and eventually her old friends down in mechanical figure out how to talk to her too. Of course there is a happy ending with Jules making a new suit and crawling back to Silo 18 to reunite with Lukas and liberate everyone from Bernie's tyranny.
Shift tells a different story that explains what happened in WOOL. The first of three parts tells two stories, one of Donald Keene, a brand new congressman from Georgia, and the other story is of Troy, the head of Silo 1. Donald was an architect who got caught up working for Senator Thurman, a lifelong friend who is also the father of Donald's ex-girlfriend Anna who still works on Capitol Hill and makes Donald's wife Helen uncomfortable. Thurman has arranged for a nuclear waste dump just outside Atlanta and as part of the project, he wants Donald to design a safety bunker to protect workers in case something goes wrong. Donald is pushed to treat this project as top priority and grows more elaborate, although he has no idea why. Meanwhile, we learn seemingly unimportant details of Thurman, such as how he had invested in cryogenics only to sign a law against it, and how he swears by nanotechnology therapy. Finally there is a political convention in Georgia, a sort of ribbon cutting ceremony for the completion of the building of the dump, with each state having 4,000 people representing at their respective bunkers. and then, while a girl sings the national anthem, written in such a way to seem like slow motion, bombs drop on Atlanta and everyone gets in the bunkers. Troy goes through almost a full six months of his shift as head of Silo 1 before his memories come back and he realizes he is Donald Keene and he was cryogenically preserved as well as everyone else in Silo 1. To keep the same people in control of the project, everyone is cryogenically frozen and released for six shifts of six months each, and almost everyone is drugged to forget the past, but now that it's not working for Troy/Donald he's being put back under permanently. Second Shift sees Donald waking up and meeting with Thurman to try to figure out a problem in Silo 18. We get to see what happened in Silo 18 as well, but I find it to be unimportant to the larger story, thought good on it's own, and I urge you to read it yourself. The main point is we learn the truth from Thurman and just what a....again, I don't really have a noun for how vile this guy is, but the creepiest thing is that he really believes he's doing what's best and explains it in such a way that you start to believe he may have a point. Apparently his motivation is that nanotech can be programmed to target certain individuals by DNA, which means they can be used as the ultimate bioweapon, targeting a specific group, suggesting that in the Middle East that they were designing nanites to attack Israelis and Arabs and it was just a matter of who finished and released their weapon first. Thurman believed the outcome was inevitable, and since they couldn't stop it, they would at least control it. Donald tries to escape, but he gets put back in deep freeze. Third shift brings us to the present, relatively speaking. It starts with a 16-year-old boy named Jimmy being put in a safe room in IT in Silo 17, and then watching as everyone dies around him. Jimmy struggles to survive over the course of decades while we see Donald awakened due to a clerical error in which everyone believes he is Thurman. The story ends with Jimmy, who turns out to be Solo, meeting Jules and Donald talking to Lukas, which reveals he was in fact the person on the other end of the call when Lukas gets sworn in as the new head of IT, which frankly I saw coming from page one 'cause why would we care unless it catches up to the original story.
Okay here are the really big spoilers, so SPOILER ALERT! Dust puts together Jules, Lukas, Jimmy/Solo, Donald, and Donald's sister Charlotte who he wakes from cryogenic stasis because he can't trust anyone else in Silo 1. Jules discovers a machine that can dig through to Silo 17 where she rescues her friends and unites the Silos. Jules also goes outside to do research and discovers that the air reaches a critical point of destruction at the elevation where everyone dies, meaning this whole thing is a setup. She and Lukas continue to talk with Donald who is getting sick and swears he is trying to help them. Donald had made an attempt to kill Thurman, but doesn't realize there are enough nanites in his system to bring him back to life and Thurman tries to stop Donald and Silo 18. Jules leads as many people as she can through to Silo 17 and seals off silo 18. Since there are still a bunch of unused hazmat suits, Jules leads an exodus overland with the theory that there is a limit to the reach of the toxic atmosphere, and people follow realizing they may be doomed either way, but trust Jules enough to lead them to freedom. Donald helps Charlotte escape but sacrifices himself in the process blowing up Silo 1, leaving Charlotte as the sole survivor of that Silo and wandering off desperately seeking any chance of salvation. Happy ending though, as it turns out, the toxic air is actually a cloud of nanintes localized over the Silos and as soon as they get past the horizon as seen from the outermost Silo, the outside world actually is full of life, just not human life. There is a vault that was set up for the survivors that were to be chosen at the end of five hundred years, which they were only half way through, and they break in and collect the supplies and seem to adapt to the outside world, and by they I mean not only Jules and Jimmy's group, but also Charlotte, who manages to catch up with them. Jules and Charlotte recognize eachother from the radio conversations they had. Jules had some trust issues before, but believes Charlotte isn't a threat and invites her to join the others. We are left believing that they begin rebuilding the world and all is well.
I read these books being aware of Kindle Worlds, and planning to write my own story all along. At first I was going to do a 7th Moon knockoff titled Silo 7, but that title was taken before I could finish reading the trilogy. I then had to think of something else. As I finished Dust, I thought about what would happen if everyone else stayed in the Silos for the remaining two and a half centuries and then came out to find the people descended from Charlotte and the survivors from Silos 17 and 18 settled outside already. It actually took me a few minutes of thinking, "someone should write that story" before I realized this was the angle I was looking for. For National Novel Writer's Month last November, I wrote a story that would be named Aftermath or Surface. Aftermath was taken by the time I finished so I went with Surface. I apologize to my readers for the poor quality the reviewers have pointed out, but with the fast pace of publishing, I was afraid to wait since I already lost two titles, I needed my story out there before I had to think of another title, or worse, if someone else came up with the same story, so the day I finished typing the last word, I submitted it without editing. I believe 7th Moon is much better than my Kindle worlds fanfic, but sales say otherwise. You can get all these books for Kindle on Amazon and judge for yourself.
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