Third Shift - Pact by Hugh Howey

of people. Maybe that meant twenty with him all alone. Twenty years. He stepped around the edge of the server and looked down the aisle between the rows. The massive silver door sat at the very end. At some point, he knew he would have to go out. He would go crazy if he didn’t. He was already going crazy. The days were much too full of the same.
    He went to the door and listened for some sound on the other side. It was quiet, as it sometimes was. Quiet, but he could still hear faint bangs echo from some memory. Jimmy thought about entering the four numbers and peeking outside. It was the worst sensation imaginable, not being able to see what was on the other side. When the camera screens had stopped working, Jimmy felt a primal sense stripped away. He was partially blind, could now see only a small slice of his world, and that made him feel broken. The desire was strong to open the door, like cracking an eyelid held shut for too long. A year of counting days. Of counting minutes within those days. A boy could only count so long.
    He left the keypad alone. Not yet. There were bad people out there, people who wanted in, who wanted to know what was in there, why the power on the level still worked, and who he was.
    “I’m nobody,” Jimmy told them when he had the courage to talk. “Nobody.”
    He didn’t have the courage often. He felt brave enough just listening to the men with the other radios fight. Brave to allow their arguments to fill his world and his head, to hear them argue and report about who had killed whom. One group was working on the farms, another was trying to stop the floods from creeping out of the mines and drowning Mechanical. One had guns and took whatever little bit the others were able to squeeze together. A lone woman called once and screamed for help, but what help was Jimmy? By his figuring, there were a hundred or more people out there in little pockets, fighting and killing. But they would stop soon. They had to. Another day. A year. They couldn’t go on like this forever, could they?
    Maybe they could.
    Time had become strange. It was a thing believed rather than seen. There was no dimming of the stairwell and lights-out to signify a night. No trips to the Top and the glow of sunshine to say that it was day. There were simply numbers on a computer screen counting so slowly one could scream. Numbers that looked the same day and night. It took careful counting to know a day had passed. The counting let him know he was alive. Every day like a school day, numbing with its foreverness, a feeling like he didn’t want to live any more, but he got hungry and ate. He got sleepy and slept. And so a life was lived accidental. It was lived because he wasn’t brave enough to do anything else.
    Jimmy thought about playing chase between the servers before he went to bed, but he had done that yesterday. He thought about arranging cans in the order he would eat them, but he already had three months lined up. There was target practice, books to read, a computer to fiddle with, chores to do, but none of that sounded like fun. He knew he would probably just crawl into bed and stare at the ceiling until the numbers told him it was tomorrow. He would think about what to do then.

18
    Weeks passed, scratches accumulated, and the tip of the key around Jimmy’s neck wore down. He woke to another morning with crust in his eyes like he’d been crying in his sleep and took his breakfast—one can of peaches and one of pineapple—up to the great steel door to eat. Unshouldering his gun, Jimmy sat down with his back against server number eight, enjoying the warmth of the busy machine against his spine.
    The gun had taken some figuring out. His father had disappeared with the loaded one, and when Jimmy discovered the crates of arms and ammo, the method of inserting the latter into the former had posed a puzzle. He made the task a Project, like his father used to make their chores and tinkering. Ever since he was