The lights flickered out. The system's hum faded, plunging the Silo into ice-cold darkness.
"Aw, crap, seriously?" Jace cursed.
He waited. Minutes later, emergency power hummed on. Routine. The Silo was dying.
Disorientation vanished—time stretched and blurred. Jace lost track of how long he'd been trapped in the Silo. Sometimes he marked the days by how many times he circled the upper deck, or by how many times the power failed and he had to tinker the backup generator back to life. "At this rate, I'll have rewired every circuit in this place before I see the sun again," he grumbled, tools jangling at his belt.
With every system check, every scavenged part, and every jury-rigged fix, Jace felt the Silo becoming something more than a prison. It was his labyrinth now, a world of dim-lit corridors and stubborn machinery, a puzzle always in need of solving.
He talked to himself just to fill the silence. "Day whatever. Rations: low. Hope: lower. Optimism:...let's not go there."
But he kept going—because every flicker of emergency light and every hum of a successful repair was proof of life, and proof of his stubborn, gnawing will to survive.
He slipped the ring—the biometric key—onto his finger and pressed it to the console to access it. The data confirmed the Old World's collapse. Buried in the research files were chilling details: a nuclear exchange, world governments falling one by one, and desperate plans to preserve something—anything—underground. Jace grimaced, his hand tightening on the ring. "No wonder this place is built like a vault. Not going outside until I have a damn plan."
He glanced at the time log again.
"I've been asleep for one hundred years," Jace muttered. The log didn't show 2040, but it did show JAN 2142. The gap shocked him.
He couldn't reconcile the numbers. One hundred years gone, but only two since he woke. Tracking time lost means a slow spiral. Still, he fought.
For two years, he scavenged the Silo's wreckage, slowly shaping it into his Labyrinth. To endure history's weight, he fixed his attention on the next essential task.
He watched tapes, read books, and learned the Silo's logic. In the control archives, he found old manuals—half the pages in a language he barely recognized, half burned or water-stained. He pieced together the basics of the Silo's design: a wartime bunker, built when the world above was already falling apart. Posters in the maintenance tunnels featured grim-faced soldiers and slogans such as "GLORY TO UGF."
In the far corner of the archives, a forgotten terminal blinked to life under his tinkering. Its display sputtered, then played a fragment of a corrupted message: "To any survivors... FOOLS PROJECT containment failed. It's loose—do not engage... evacuation failed..." The rest degenerated into static and error codes. Jace stared at the screen. "Great. More secrets. And whatever it is, it's not gone."
He scavenged for parts—motors, wiring, batteries—turning storerooms into graveyards of half-salvaged junk. Sometimes he got lucky and found a new tool or a box of precious canned food; more often, it was just dust and the echo of old, desperate voices. He started to decorate his base in the AVR lab: taping up a faded comic cover, lining up his scavenged books, even pinning the FOOLS PROJECT folder to the wall—a reminder, he told himself, that knowledge was the only real weapon he had left.
Scars marked lessons from tinkering. He was sick of rations, tired of stale water. The Silo, sustained by remnants of the past, became his sanctuary. But even as he patched the old place together, he couldn't shake the sense he was fixing a tomb.
Exhausted by delaying failures, he used the ring to access controls, hack regulators, and reroute power. One particularly close call—rewiring a blown circuit—almost fried the backup generator. "Red to blue, blue to...screw it, they should've color-coded these for idiots," he grumbled. The lights cut out, the Silo plunged into darkness, and Jace found himself cursing as he scrambled for a flashlight. Consoles and lights were eventually stable. The Silo was dying, but his part worked.
After routine checks and final repairs, Jace wiped grime from his face. Survival's tension wore him down. Ignoring the bed, he slumped to the cold floor—better for sudden wakes.
"Fuck...I'm too tired for this shit," he muttered, dozing off.
His internalized trauma burst.
The nightmare gripped him—vivid, merciless. He was screaming, not at a monster or shadow, but for someone whose name hovered just out of reach. The memory struck: sharp, unfiltered, and painfully real.
The young man—his protector, maybe a brother or a friend, someone Jace trusted more than anyone—stood on the other side of the cryo chamber. His long, slightly golden hair clung to his forehead, damp with sweat and rain. Behind fogged glasses, his eyes brimmed with guilt and pleading, his face streaked with tears as he fumbled desperately with the pod controls.
Jace's fists beat uselessly against the thick glass. He tried to shout, "No! Don't leave me here!" but his words were swallowed by icy fluid, nothing escaping but a rising stream of bubbles. Panic clawed at him as the pod's lid pressed down, locking him away.
On the other side, the young man wiped his glasses and pressed his palm to the viewport, his lips moving in frantic syllables Jace couldn't hear. There was urgency—a promise, or maybe an apology—but the sound was lost, smothered by mechanical hissing and the rush of liquid.
Jace strained, desperate to understand, but the final, crucial phrase dissolved into silence. The young man lingered, looking back one last time, hope and regret mingling in his eyes. With a trembling breath, he turned and hurried toward the sealed door. The heavy bolts crashed shut, echoing in the void. That was the last thing Jace remembered—abandoned, but for reasons he still couldn't grasp, maybe, just maybe, saved.
---
The dream ended with a blinding, real pain in his skull. He woke gasping, trauma eclipsed by present horror.
The noise—no warning, but a single, piercing A major shriek—registered in his ear.
Jace blinked against the frantic red strobes that washed his surroundings in a dizzying, furious light. He was scrambling to his feet when the cold, synthesized voice cut through the distorted siren:
"Warning. Silo 4, main hatch breach. All personnel seek immediate cover. Warning. Silo 4, main hatch breach."
Jace's eyes widened in panic at the words Silo 4 and main hatch. He flung up his hands, the blare pushing him to yell over the siren.
"No, no, no. You gotta be kidding me!"
He knew the schematics of this entire facility better than he knew his own name. The main hatch wasn't just an entrance; it was the only thing standing between them and total collapse. If that hatch was open, everyone was toast. He hurled the door open, plunging into chaos. Each red flare kept pace with his pounding heart.
"Move, you idiot, move!" He raced toward the central operations room, his bare feet thudding against the cold metal floor. He burst into the command room. Consoles shrieked, torrents of green code and red warnings flooding every screen. The central holographic display was engulfed by a single, colossal, flashing alert.
notification that screamed the single, terrifying truth:
MAIN HATCH BREACH.