Silo 49: Deep Dark Read Online Free PDF

this discovery had been foisted upon her. Though she had no frame of reference, she could only imagine that having such a letter and image would be enough to send her to remediation. It would have to be if expressing curiosity about the outside was enough to be sent for an evaluation at least.
    In all her years she had never even heard of such a thing as that image. She knew and remembered the endless array of stories that kids told to each other as they grew up, each one a lesson of consequences or morality. Many of them were entirely fantastical and unbelievable but even those didn't come close to this horrifying find of hers. It was evidence any eye could see. It was as logical and objective as a Historian's viewpoint. She turned a page in her knitting book unread as she considered all that she had heard in her life, whether from children's tales or classes or history.
    One of the most commonly whispered stories of the schoolroom was the scary story about the ghostly figure seen wandering across the screen Up Top, forever trying to get back into the silo. There were more about naughty chil dren being squeezed out by the silo walls and into some frightening netherworld. That one had kept Marina from walking too close to a wall for a long time for fear of it happening to her.
    There were others but one in particular , from a time when she was old enough to understand the way the world around her operated, tickled at her mind. Someone had jumped from the stairwell and those occurrences, while rare, were a fact of life. It happened. It was sad but people moved on.
    After one such jumper had made a particularly bad mess on a section of the stairs any child leaving the mid-level school rooms would encounter, they had been kept after school for what seemed like hours while the remains were dealt with. With nothing to do but wait, the telling of jumper stories was inevitable. Most dealt with a particularly gory jump or a jumper who had survived or some variation on that theme.
    One of the stories was different and it told the story of jumpers who fell like water drops sprayed from pipes in hydroponics, one after another. As each jumper passed the levels, the compulsion that made them jump passed from person to person like a disease and more came down from all the levels. To stop the spread, parents had braved the danger and dragged their children, screaming with the need to jump, back to their compartments and tied them down. They had stayed there, some of them starving to death for fear of opening their doors, rather than risk their children wanting to return to the railings and plunge to their deaths.
    It was a suitably gory story to satisfy children and Marina had sighed along with the rest as the hidden moral of the story unfolded. The moral was a simple one. When someone jumps, the sadness can spread to others so one must be careful. If you felt the great sadness, you went to remediation so you didn't hurt others.
    Marina had always thought the story was just a story but the note in side the watch made it seem that this story sprang from some past misery. Did that story come from that time? Did jumpers really fall like that? It was a horrible thought. But how long ago that happened was the real question and one she didn't have any clue to. What she did know was that note was not a part of silo history and that made it far more frightening than any childhood tale.
    Silo history was simple and logical. In the time before the silo there were no true humans. Instead, there were violent creatures that looked human but could not think like humans. Those were the Others.
    They could not reason and did not have the tenets to guide their actions and wouldn't have understood them even if they did. As humans came to be in that world, the silo called to them and they made the trek, each one alone and hunted, to the safety of the silo. And for each human that came, the silo bade them bring one thing. For some it was a seed and for others