Silo Novels & Stories

The air in the living room felt like it had been turned into stone. Silas Hale stood by the open door while the rain misted behind him like a silver curtain; he didn’t look like a man who was almost a hundred years old. Instead, he resembled a statue made of ancient wood: thin, hard, and impossible to break. His eyes were not like Jason’s, for Jason’s eyes were full of heat and anger, whereas Silas’s eyes were like two pieces of glass at the bottom of a frozen lake. They saw everything, but they felt nothing.

"You're treating human lives like 'Depreciating Assets'!" "I’m 'Optimizing' the Garden, Avery," Silas said, his eyes glowing with a cold, blue light. "If we are to survive the next century, we cannot carry the 'Dead-Weight.' The Sombra is a machine, and a machine must be efficient. I’ve simply reintroduced the 'Standard' to your 'Symmetry.'"

to break down the dead-logic into its most basic, non-threatening components. "We’re mining the 'Trash' of a billion years," Kiri said, her voice filtered through a respirator. She was monitoring the "Purity-Vents," where the crushed entropy was converted into "Construction-Silt." "It’s unstable, Elen. The silt still tries to 'Un-Be' itself. If we don't keep it under constant 'Observation-Pressure,' it dissolves back into a 'Grey-Plane'."

Bleeding. SILENCE

He's building a server. Silas threw an image onto the main screen. It was a frequency analysis of the Gray Zone. Usually, static looks like random noise a messy scribble of lines. This static was patterned. It looked like a barcode. Repeating. Infinite. "The Silence isn't empty," Silas whispered. "It's full of data. Petabytes of it. Streaming directly into the minds of the people trapped in the Dead Zone." "What kind of data?" I asked. "Noise," Silas said. "Short, looping bursts of sensory input. Colors. Sounds. Dopamine

The gold and violet energy swirled together, creating a bubble of warmth that felt like home. "The Sanctum is in the valley below, Elena," Silas rasped, his voice a low, gravelly rumble that made the snow beneath our boots shift. "I can smell the old stone and the necrotic rot. They’ve been waiting for us to find this place. They think the isolation is their protection."

"My wife found the entry in Silas’s personal notes. It mentioned a reset. It mentioned Old Man River." Santino stopped in front of a massive, prehistoric-looking shortwave radio. He turned a dial, the screech of static filling the cramped space for a second before settling into a low, white-noise hum. He picked up a stained rag and began wiping down a lens on a monitor, his movements slow and deliberate.

Stepping forward to Zohria, Penny took the bottle of bourbon from her hand. “I’ll be needing this.” She unscrewed the top and took a long gulp, wincing as the warm liquid burned in her chest. She shook her head as she pulled the bottle away from her lips before glancing back at where Aggie and Zohria stood in embrace, she bent forward again and took the bottle of wine from Zohria’s other hand. “Yea, I’ma need this one too.” Penny dragged her feet over to the sofa in the living area of the open plan room and dropped down onto it with a sigh.