Part 1 Holston
3
Three years earlier
“You’ve gotta be kidding me,” Allison said. “Honey, listen to this. You won’t believe this. Did you
know there was more than one uprising?”
covered the bed like a quilt—stacks and stacks of old files to sort through and new complaints to
manage. Allison sat at her small desk at the foot of the bed. The two of them lived in one of the silo
condos that had been subdivided3 only twice over the decades. It left room for luxuries like desks and
wide nonbunk beds.
hair behind her ear. Holston jabbed a folder at her computer screen. “All day long you’re unlocking
secrets hundreds of years old, and I’m supposed to know about them before you do?”
She stuck out her tongue. “It’s an expression. It’s my way of informing you. And why don’t you
seem more curious? Did you hear what I just said?”
that it was the most recent. If I’ve learned one thing from my job, it’s that no crime or crazy mob is
ever all that original.” He picked up a folder by his knee. “You think this is the first water thief the
silo’s known? Or that it’ll be the last?”
blinked with the scraps7 and fragments of data she had pulled from the silo’s old servers, the remnants
of information long ago deleted and overwritten countless8 times. Holston still didn’t understand how
the retrieval process worked, or why someone smart enough to come up with it was dumb enough to
love him, but he accepted both as truth.
“I’m piecing together a series of old reports,” she said. “If true, they mean something like our old
uprising used to take place regularly. Like once every generation or so.”
“There’s a lot we don’t know about the old times,” Holston said. He rubbed his eyes and thought
about all the paperwork he wasn’t getting done. “Maybe they didn’t have a system for cleaning the
sensors9, you know? I’ll bet back then, the view upstairs just got blurrier and blurrier until people
went crazy, there’d be a revolt or something, and then they’d finally exile a few people to set things
Allison shook her head. “I don’t think so. I’m starting to think …” She paused and glanced down
at the spread of paperwork around Holston. The sight of all the logged transgressions11 seemed to make
her consider carefully what she was about to say. “I’m not passing judgment12, not saying anyone was
right or wrong or anything like that. I’m just suggesting that maybe the servers weren’t wiped out by
the rebels during the uprising. Not like we’ve always been told, anyway.”
That got Holston’s attention. The mystery of the blank servers, the empty past of the silo’s
ancestors, haunted them all. The erasure13 was nothing more than fuzzy legend. He closed the folder he
was working on and set it aside. “What do you think caused it?” he asked his wife. “Do you think it
was an accident? A fire or a power outage?” He listed the common theories.
Allison frowned. “No,” she said. She lowered her voice and looked around anxiously. “I think we
wiped the hard drives. Our ancestors, I mean, not the rebels.” She turned and leaned toward the
monitor, running her finger down a set of figures Holston couldn’t discern from the bed. “Twenty
years,” she said. “Eighteen. Twenty-four.” Her finger slid down the screen with a squeak14. “Twenty-
eight. Sixteen. Fifteen.”
worked his way toward the desk. He sat on the foot of the bed, put a hand on his wife’s neck, and
peered over her shoulder at the monitor.
“Are those dates?” he asked.
She nodded. “Just about every two decades, there’s a major revolt. This report cataloged them. It
was one of the files deleted during the most recent uprising. Our uprising.”
She said our like either of them or any of their friends had been alive at the time. Holston knew
what she meant, though. It was the uprising they had been raised in the shadow of, the one that
seemed to have spawned16 them—the great conflict that hung over their childhoods, over their parents
and grandparents. It was the uprising that filled whispers and occupied sideways glances.
“And what makes you think it was us, that it was the good guys who wiped the servers?”
She half turned and smiled grimly. “Who says we are the good guys?”
that might—”
“I’m kidding,” she said, but it wasn’t a thing to kid about. It was two steps from traitorous18, from
cleaning. “My theory is this,” she said quickly, stressing the word theory. “There’s generational
upheaval19, right? I mean for over a hundred years, maybe longer. It’s like clockwork.” She pointed20 at
the dates. “But then, during the great uprising—the only one we’ve known about till now—someone
wiped the servers. Which, I’ll tell you, isn’t as easy as pressing a few buttons or starting a fire.
There’s redundancies on top of redundancies. It would take a concerted effort, not an accident or any
“That doesn’t tell you who’s responsible,” Holston pointed out. His wife was a wizard with
computers, no doubt, but sleuthing was not her bag; it was his.
“What tells me something,” she continued, “is that there were uprisings every generation for all
this time, but there hasn’t been an uprising since.” Allison bit her lip.
Holston sat up straight. He glanced around the room and allowed her observation to sink in. He
had a sudden vision of his wife yanking his sleuthing bag out of his hands and making off with it.
“So you’re saying …” He rubbed his chin and thought this through. “You’re saying that someone
wiped out our history to stop us from repeating it?”
“Or worse.” She reached out and held his hand with both of hers. Her face had deepened from
seriousness to something more severe. “What if the reason for the revolts was right there on the hard
drives? What if some part of our known history, or some data from the outside, or maybe the
knowledge of whatever it was that made people move in here long, long ago — what if that
information built up some kind of pressure that made people lose their marbles, or go stir-crazy, or
just want out?”
Holston shook his head. “I don’t want you thinking that way,” he cautioned her.
“I’m not saying they were right to go nuts,” she told him, back to being careful. “But from what
I’ve pieced together so far, this is my theory.”
Holston gave the monitor an untrusting glance. “Maybe you shouldn’t be doing this,” he said.
“I’m not even sure how you’re doing it, and maybe you shouldn’t be.”
“Honey, the information is there. If I don’t piece it together now, somebody else will at some
“What do you mean?”
“I’ve already published a white paper on how to retrieve23 deleted and overwritten files. The rest of
the IT department is spreading it around to help people who’ve unwittingly flushed something they
needed.”
“I still think you should stop,” he said. “This isn’t the best idea. I can’t see any good coming of it
—”
“No good coming from the truth? Knowing the truth is always good. And better that it’s us
discovering it than someone else, right?”
Holston looked at his files. It’d been five years since the last person was sent to cleaning. The
view of the outside was getting worse every day, and he could feel the pressure, as sheriff, to find
someone. It was growing, like steam building up in the silo, ready to launch something out. People
got nervous when they thought the time was near. It was like one of those self-fulfilling prophecies
where the nerves finally made someone twitch24, then lash25 out or say something regretful, and then
Holston sorted through the files all around him, wishing there was something in them. He would
overly full balloon with a needle, and Holston wanted to get that air out of it before she poked28 too far.
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收听单词发音
收听单词发音 |
1
folder
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| n.纸夹，文件夹 | |
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scattered
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| adj.分散的，稀疏的；散步的；疏疏落落的 | |
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subdivided
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| 再分，细分( subdivide的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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4
strand
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| vt.使（船）搁浅，使（某人）困于（某地） | |
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5
shrugged
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| vt.耸肩（shrug的过去式与过去分词形式） | |
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squealed
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| v.长声尖叫，用长而尖锐的声音说( squeal的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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7
scraps
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| 油渣 | |
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8
countless
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| adj.无数的，多得不计其数的 | |
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9
sensors
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| n.传感器，灵敏元件( sensor的名词复数 ) | |
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10
lottery
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| n.抽彩；碰运气的事，难于算计的事 | |
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11
transgressions
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| n.违反，违法，罪过( transgression的名词复数 ) | |
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12
judgment
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| n.审判；判断力，识别力，看法，意见 | |
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13
erasure
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| n.擦掉，删去；删掉的词；消音；抹音 | |
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14
squeak
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| n.吱吱声，逃脱；v.（发出）吱吱叫，侥幸通过；（俚）告密 | |
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15
plowed
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| v.耕( plow的过去式和过去分词 )；犁耕；费力穿过 | |
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16
spawned
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| （鱼、蛙等）大量产（卵）( spawn的过去式和过去分词 )； 大量生产 | |
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17
stiffened
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| 加强的 | |
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18
traitorous
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| adj. 叛国的, 不忠的, 背信弃义的 | |
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19
upheaval
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| n.胀起，(地壳)的隆起；剧变，动乱 | |
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20
pointed
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| adj.尖的，直截了当的 | |
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21
mere
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| adj.纯粹的；仅仅，只不过 | |
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22
genie
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| n.妖怪，神怪 | |
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23
retrieve
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| vt.重新得到，收回；挽回，补救；检索 | |
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24
twitch
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| v.急拉，抽动，痉挛，抽搐；n.扯，阵痛，痉挛 | |
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25
lash
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| v.系牢；鞭打；猛烈抨击；n.鞭打；眼睫毛 | |
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26
blurry
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| adj.模糊的；污脏的，污斑的 | |
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27
poking
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| n. 刺，戳，袋 vt. 拨开，刺，戳 vi. 戳，刺，捅，搜索，伸出，行动散慢 | |
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28
poked
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| v.伸出( poke的过去式和过去分词 )；戳出；拨弄；与（某人）性交 | |
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