Silo-tude

I made my usual breakfast: fried spam and beans mixed with canned crushed tomatoes, seasoned with salt and pepper. It was far from a gourmet delicacy but each ingredient had the key benefit of having an extremely long shelf-life. For a moment, I stared at my bright yellow ceramic plate and missed the toast which used to be included before the bread had run out. Then I picked up my fork and began eating mechanically, hardly tasting the food.

Three months had passed since I had last left the decommissioned missile silo I now called my home. It was situated deep in the Nevada desert, far from any towns, and I had inherited it from Uncle Rufus when he had passed away - not from a nuclear holocaust but from a clogged artery. A man in his Eighties, it had hardly been a surprise when he passed. Yet I had been the last member of the family who still kept in touch with him, and so he had apparently seen fit to leave me this modified relic of the nuclear age in his will. Convinced the world would one day blow itself apart with nuclear weapons, Uncle Rufus had acquired the missile silo in a government auction and had converted it into his home that doubled as a nuclear fallout shelter. And as it turns out, he had been right.

I cleaned up the remnants of my meager breakfast and checked the calendar on the fridge. It had been three weeks since I had last checked the exterior air quality using the particle analyzer apparatus upstairs. The last reading reported Extremely Unsafe Pollution levels, which meant I had a long wait ahead of me. Still, protocol was to check once per month. I would need to check again in a week.

I made my way around the curved hallway at the center of the compound, climbed up a steel ladder, and continued through the lower hallway. Before long, I reached a heavy steel door which swung inward, opening into the top of what used to be the missile launch tube at the heart of the silo. The hatch above remained completely sealed off, and the tube itself had been divided into floors, leaving a series of round rooms in the midst of the silo.

On the top floor, where I now stood, there was a modest but complete collection of free weights and resistance training machines. Stopping at the analog music station, I picked an album at random, dropped the needle, and started curling dumbbells. In the past few months, I had made it a daily routine to lift weights or at least do cardio to avoid going crazy. Solitude was one thing, isolation another.

After about thirty minutes, I was finishing my last set training my upper body when the music stopped. I walked over to the turntable, slightly sweaty and out of breath, and flipped the record. The soulful vocalizations of Mavis Staples continued and I made my way over to the squat rack. A discordant note disrupted the music. Beep. It certainly wasn’t part of the song, but I didn’t recognize it from any of the equipment Uncle Rufus had installed in the silo. I waited several moments but didn’t hear it again, so I completed my exercise routine. 

Stepping back into the hallway half an hour later, I climbed somewhat arduously back down the steel ladder to the walkway below. I made my way back to the kitchen and drank greedily, filling and emptying my glass multiple times. Then I heard it again. Beep. The only other sound I could hear now that the music was off was the background hum of the built-in air purifiers - which were really only detectable if you knew to listen for them. I estimated it had been half an hour since the last beep. When I had followed the instructions Uncle Rufus left behind for testing the air quality monitors and various alarms on the equipment he had installed, none of them had had such a long delay. As a rule, they were incredibly obnoxious - providing a physical impetus for taking them seriously. This then must be something else. 

Shaking my head, I made my way out of the kitchen and completed the circuit of the second-floor walkway. On the way, I opened panels and inspected instruments used for detecting everything from atmospheric changes by the parts-per-million to geological vibrations so sensitive they could pick up a landslide in Brazil. Everything seemed normal, no alarms or flashing lights, nothing to indicate the source of the beeping noise. 

Scratching my chin, I turned and opened the steel door into the central chamber on this level, headingto my bedroom and bathroom. I stripped and turned on the hot water in the shower, waiting for it to warm up. Uncle Rufus had been wise about this as well, equipping the silo with a water reclamation system which meant that the same water could be used, filtered, and reused nearly indefinitely without the need for an external supply. It would have been much simpler to pipe water in from the surface but of course such a supply would have been contaminated by nuclear fallout. 

Shutting off the water, I stepped out and began to towel myself off. Just as I was scrubbing my hair, I heard it faintly - Beep. I stopped and lowered the towel, listening intently. Once again, nothing else followed. Sighing, I finished toweling off and finished my hygiene regimen before getting dressed. Going to the dresser, I pulled out my favorite pair of jeans and a comfortable t-shirt advertising the fresh mountain waters of Coors Brewery in Golden, Colorado. Wondering if I would ever get around to re-inventing beer, I tied on my tennis shoes and decided to spend the rest of the day hunting for the source of the phantom noise.

Three hours later, after much searching, I had narrowed it down to the decommissioned control room on the bottom floor. Panels of blinking lights and banks of controls which I hadn’t ever bothered to adjust stared back at me as I mopped the sweat from my brow and quietly cussed out my uncle for his decision not to include this part of the facility in his instructional manual.

Several control panels had to do with the entrance and egress chambers originally used by NORAD staff. The foot-thick steel doors to my home had long since remained firmly sealed against the nuclear holocaust announced by every major news agency in the world the last time I had come through them. While I had had time to explore the rest of the compound in great detail, I refrained from coming down here since it seemed akin to trespassing into a restricted area. It had retained many of its original features, including thick steel bulkheads with doors that locked with huge levers and cranks. Now, as I stared fruitlessly at the wide array of switches and knobs, I regretted not getting more familiar with the systems of command and control. I reassured myself that anything to do with actually launching the nuclear warheads once stored and maintained here would have been dismantled before my uncle came into possession of the facility. No matter what combination of buttons I pushed or levers I pulled, nothing dangerous would happen. To my surprise, however, lights still blinked next to a few of the buttons and knobs. Checking my watch, I estimated it would be five or ten minutes until the next beep. 

The next several minutes passed excruciatingly slowly, which I spent wandering around the control room trying to make sense of the government abbreviations and codes inscribed on control panels. There was a large diagram of the compound on the wall, showing a detailed cross-section of the structure before it had been modified by my uncle. It was strange seeing a blueprint of my home - eerily familiar and strange at the same time. As I studied the map of the place I had been effectively entombed for the past few months, I mentally reconciled the similarities and differences. 

Then I heard it again, loud and clear, definitely close by. I had been absorbed in studying the blueprint with my back to the room, but I still felt that the noise must have come vaguely from the right side of the room, closest to the door. I walked over to a chest-high collection of steel cabinets festooned with dead lights and lifeless displays. I began reading off the labels under the displays and sets of status lights, each one green, amber, and red in succession though they remained unlit. 

Suddenly, at the edge of my vision, I saw a green light flash and then disappear. One of the status lights had glowed momentarily. I rushed over to the panel where I was fairly certain I had seen the tiny light bulb illuminate for a split second. It was covered with an array of yet more nonsensical government jargon. 

I checked my watch. It had been five minutes since the last beep. Was it possible that the light blinked every five minutes while the sound was emitted every thirty minutes? Perhaps. I blinked my eyes firmly and realized I hadn’t had a drink since my workout. So I wasn’t doing a good job staying hydrated while searching the entire complex for a phantom noise like a madman. Go figure. With a sigh, I left the control room and made my way slowly back up to the kitchen on the second floor. As I climbed the third ladder, I began to seriously regret lifting so heavy during my morning exercise. 

I gulped down a glass of water, then refilled my glass and down another third of that one as I contemplated the possibilities. The control panels had been nearly impossible to interpret. Yet there was one label that seemed relatively straightforward: MSG Rec’d. Message Received. From where? Who would still be sending messages to a decades-old decommissioned missile silo after the nuclear apocalypse? For a moment, I considered the possibility that I had imagined it all. I felt a compulsion to run back down to the control room and pick up one of the phones attached to a lifeless landline. But no, the weeks of chaos in the news leading up to the sudden escalation of violence between Russia and NATO had been all too real. The glow of nuclear detonations on the horizon had been all the confirmation I needed before sealing myself inside. 

Another week passed, each day exactly as the others had been for months, only now punctuated every thirty minutes by that faint beep from the control room. I did my best to ignore it and focus on my routine: eat breakfast, exercise, shower, and do chores. I tossed and turned fitfully at night, haunted by the possibility that a message had actually been received by one of the communication relays. Finally, the day had come to check the air quality spectrometer to see if anything had changed. 

I made my way to the cluster of instruments which my uncle had installed to keep tabs on the world outside. Without leaving the shelter, it was possible to check the frequency and acidity of the precipitation, vibrations in the earth that could signal movement directly outside the compound or earthquakes in Japan, and the ambient level of radiation in the atmosphere above. Unsurprisingly, there had been virtually no precipitation over the past three months so there was insufficient data to determine if there was acid or radioactivity present. The read-off from the seismometer seemed normal, not that I had been trained in reading the dozens of fine, squiggly lines. Finally, I examined the gauge from the atmospheric particle analyzer. The needle on the gauge remained firmly in the red, capped out at the most dangerous level possible - unfit for human habitation. My shoulders slumped and I sat on the floor against the wall opposite the readout. I hadn’t ever bothered reading the gauge before taking shelter here, but at some point, it must have been in the yellow section - “CAUTION” - or even the green - “SAFE” - before the world ended. The faint beep sounded in the distance. Message Received.

Suddenly a thought occurred to me. I had been assuming this whole time that the instruments installed years, perhaps decades earlier, by my crackpot uncle were reading the conditions outside accurately. But had he actually set them up correctly? I leapt to my feet and stood in front of the panel. Just above the gauge for atmospheric radiation, there was a row of buttons: ON, OFF, and TEST. I pressed them in sequence. Nothing happened - the needle stayed exactly where it had been for the past three months, pegged out at the bottom of the gauge. I held down the TEST button, first for a few seconds then in increasingly longer increments. The needle stubbornly refused to move. 

My breath coming quicker and tighter in my chest, I moved to the seismographic chart. The lines had occasionally wiggled but for the most part, remained almost completely flat. It occurred to me then that the only vibrations it was likely detecting were my movements around the compound. I jumped up and down in front of it. Small squiggles appeared in the lines on the display then disappeared slowly as the readout continued. It was as much data as I had ever seen it record. Moving to the end of the instrument panel, I examined the set of small tubes making up the rainwater gauge. There was only a breath of moisture in the main tube. It made sense that there had been little rainfall - this place was deep in the Nevada desert, after all. But absolutely none? For months on end? 

A chill ran down my spine. I had spent hours examining these devices, poking and prodding them, building my life around them and hanging my hopes and dreams on their results improving over time, building towards some day in the future when I could finally step out of this capsule deep underground and walk again on the surface above. And yet to all indications, these baubles were as much use as a child’s toy when it came to measuring the outside world. It was no better than staring at the steel plate above my bed wondering each night how much longer I would have to hold out - and whether I was truly alone. 

Beep. A rage-filled shout tore through my vocal cords. My hands shook and tears streamed down my eyes. In frustration, I grabbed the nearest thing at hand - the logbook my uncle had left behind for recording the readings from these instruments. I began tearing pages from it - pages I had filled painstakingly over the past weeks and months in neat, precise lines - throwing them on the floor as I continued to growl and rage senselessly. Finally, I took the book in both hands and began beating the instrument panel with it - smashing gauges, bending the needles of the seismographic, and crushing the tubes of the rain gauge. 

When nothing was left and I was out of breath, I collapsed again on the floor. My shoulders shook heavily as sobs wracked my chest and I cried as a child does, without reason or restraint. Several long moments passed and finally, my breathing returned to normal. I wiped snot and tears from my face on the back of my hand and pulled myself up off the floor. I wandered upstairs to the bathroom and cleaned myself up. 

Afterwards, I wandered throughout the silo, observing each too-familiar room without any feeling other than emptiness. At length, I found myself in the control room on the bottom floor, surrounded by banks of control panels and blank, lifeless displays. I pushed a button, then another, rotated a dial, and then flipped a switch, recklessly and haphazardly, some quiet part of me within curious about what would happen and yet far removed from the consequences. Faster and faster I went through the control room, modulating and manipulating anything that would move. 

Then I saw it. Unmistakably - the green light next to “MSG Rec’d” flickered and then went dull as if it was fading out. I froze as my eyes went to the phone on top of the cabinet, resting on a cradle, with a long curling phone line connecting from the handset to the base. I had long ignored it, thinking it simply a somewhat humorous relic from a bygone era. I had never bothered to pick it up and check for a tone. I walked slowly over to the communications array and stared at the phone and the little green light. 

Reaching out slowly I touched the phone, hesitating. Slowly, I picked it up and held it up to my ear, trembling and breathing shallowly. As the phone rested against my ear, I heard a faint ringing sound - an echo from an analog era that was somehow familiar and jarring simultaneously. The ringing stopped and there was a click and a strange silence. 

Then a strange voice said, “Hello?”