Refuse

3

Alexander told her that out there… outside…. the sun warmed the earth naturally, and that there were seasons, and storms, and temperature swings. Weather.

The silo existed underground, he said, where the warmth of the sun and the warm temperatures in the core of the earth barely reached it. This meant that the dirt surrounding the silo stayed cool, and kept the silo at the same temperature. “Men aren’t supposed to live here,” Alexander had told her. “…At least not forever.”

Leah scanned the room again, this time not looking at the people, but instead she looked at the room itself. Typical of the silo. Plastic life. Artificial. It’s all fake. The grow lights in the dirt farms. The motors that cycled water from the down-deep up through the hydroponic gardens. The heating. The wallscreen up on the top floor that showed the bleak and desolate outside. But it was more than just those things. It was the chits and the economy and the endless stairs and the lottery and the jobs—all of these things revolving (like the stairs in the silo) around maintaining that plastic life. Alexander saw it all and he wrote about it too. She wondered whatever happened to the beautiful things that Alexander wrote. Probably recycled and used to print chits.

Leah noticed a large heap of shredded paper stuffed into the bottom of the bag she was sorting. Chit reports from IT, or portage documents, or perhaps these scraps had been the expired records from the Sheriff’s office. Papers documenting the lives and crimes of the dead—no longer needed (the dead and the reports)—shredded and sent down the chutes for recycling. When you died, your body was buried in the dirt of the farms to become food for the rest of the silo, but your records… those were shredded, because in reality, to the cold silo, you never really existed.

For a black-market papermaker, pre-shredded paper is a godsend. Almost unconsciously, she ducked down to make it look like she was struggling with a heavy bag from the kitchen. With practiced precision, she balled up the shredded mass, and, unzipping the front of her coveralls, she stuffed the paper into the area around her midsection, smoothing it carefully before zipping up again. She ran her hands around the area where she’d stuffed the paper until there were no lumps or obvious protrusions.

“You look like you’ve gained a few pounds,” Ivan said, winking.

“Shut up, Ivan!” she snapped, playfully. “Besides,” she whispered, “if I could pull off getting a couple of pounds of paper out of here without someone noticing, I would do it. That would be a huge accomplishment.”

“Ahh,” Ivan waved at her dismissively with his hand, “you’re so skinny, you’re lucky to get a few ounces out of here in a shift.”

“Keep talking like that, buddy, and I’ll take you to meet my mother.”

“Oh no! Not me!” he said, laughing. “I’m waiting for my dream girl… maybe a cute little porter or someone like that. I’d never marry a picker. They have a smell to them that I can’t get used to.”

Leah growled and threw a plastic container at him, but he ducked and the container bounced harmlessly among the sacks stacked behind him. He winked at her again and went back to sorting.

They flirted a lot, but nothing much had ever come of it. She’d known Ivan for most of her life, and she liked him well enough. He was handsome in a mids kind of way, and she probably would respond if he ever showed any real interest, but both of them were too wrapped up in their world of making paper—and writing—to expend too much energy in the pursuit of romance. She was happy with the way things were, and she didn’t want to lose Ivan as a friend. Or maybe I just tell myself that because Ivan has never done anything other than flirt with me.

When the shift was over, the pickers stacked their bins in the packing area. Overnight, packers would come into the section and bundle the salvaged material for delivery by the porters to the different areas of the silo that engaged in manufacturing new things from the salvaged materials. A lot of this refuse—the paper waste—would go to the official paper manufacturing section, where it would be pulped and bleached and made into new paper. Then it would be cataloged and traced and tracked and used for approved purposes only.

You could get paper for your family if you had enough chits, and as long as you weren’t a trouble maker. You could draw and paint—even write—if (and only if) whatever you drew, painted, or wrote was acceptable and was in conformity to the laws of the silo. It had to be pre-approved. As a result, almost no one wrote books, other than the handful of officially sanctioned writers who wrote lukewarm, un-challenging tripe for the widest possible audience. There was no room in the literature of the silo for metaphor, or irony, or for a bracing, cold waltz with the truth.