SILO: The Day the World ENDED — "In the Air" Explained

[00:00:00]The Silo trilogy showed you the men who ended the world, the senator, the scientists, the architects who buried humanity underground to save a chosen few.

[00:00:10]But it never showed you the day it actually happened. The last day of the old world. The day 12 billion people died in a matter of minutes without ever knowing why.

[00:00:21]Hugh Howey wrote that day down in a short companion story called In the Air.

[00:00:27]And he told it through the eyes of one of the men who helped build the machinery of death.

[00:00:32]His name is John.

[00:00:34]He's a government killer.

[00:00:36]And on the last day of the world, he has to decide [music] what to do with the one thing he has left. His own family.

[00:00:44]This is a companion story to the trilogy set 500 years before wool.

[00:00:49]And it's one of the most quietly devastating things in the entire saga.

[00:00:53]Full spoilers ahead.

[00:00:55]Let's step outside into the last blue sky. First, you need to understand the shape of the horror John lives inside because he helped build it.

[00:01:05]>> [music] >> Everyone alive has already been poisoned.

[00:01:08]That's the secret at the heart of the whole saga.

[00:01:12]Over years, invisible machines, nanos, were quietly disseminated across the whole world, carried on the very air, drifting over cities until they had settled into every lung and every bloodstream on Earth.

[00:01:26]Every person [music] is now a ticking time bomb.

[00:01:30]And at a fixed moment the planners call the anointed hour, those machines will switch on and shut their hosts down all at once, everywhere.

[00:01:41]The only people who will survive are the ones given a second set of nanos, an inoculation, slipped in like a simple medical treatment that kills the killers.

[00:01:51]The chosen few.

[00:01:53]And those few are meant to gather at a great national convention outside Atlanta and be funneled down into the buried silos to wait out 500 years underground.

[00:02:05]John is one of the chosen.

[00:02:07]Not because he's innocent, but because he's useful.

[00:02:11]John is a killer for his government.

[00:02:13]A quiet man in a clean room suit sealing poison into envelopes.

[00:02:18]A spotter lying beside a sniper calling the wind as a stranger [music] drops in the distance.

[00:02:24]He has ended targets and sometimes the wrong targets.

[00:02:28]The wrong car in a line of black cars, [music] a family, a curious child.

[00:02:34]Every morning he stands at the mirror and whispers that he's a hero.

[00:02:38]And every morning the words come out with a little less conviction.

[00:02:42]He's a man who goes along, who does what he's told, who never leads.

[00:02:48]And now the machine he served has handed him his reward.

[00:02:52]A slot underground.

[00:02:54]His job on the other side, security in the command silo, >> [music] >> silo one.

[00:03:00]But there's a price and John knows exactly [music] what it is.

[00:03:05]To take that slot, he has to fly his wife and daughter to Atlanta and seal them into cryogenic coffins with his own hands telling them one last time that everything will be okay.

[00:03:19]And John has read the rule book.

[00:03:21]The one they call [music] the order.

[00:03:23]He knows the truth the way only a man who's doomed people for a living [music] can know it.

[00:03:28]Not everyone who goes into that bunker comes back out.

[00:03:32]When the powerful say you'll be fine, they mean the opposite.

[00:03:37]He would be sealing his family away forever and he can't stop hearing [music] it. So John is offered a second door and it comes from a woman named Tracy.

[00:03:48]Tracy is a colleague and once a mistake.

[00:03:52]A single night in Milan that John has never told his wife about. But now Tracy is calling for a very different reason.

[00:04:00]She's thrown in with another group entirely, a circle of scientists [music] out in Colorado led by a Professor Karpov.

[00:04:08]People who believe they can cheat the whole system.

[00:04:11]Survive the end their own way, on their own terms, without answering to the men who planned it.

[00:04:17]Tracy begs John to come to Colorado instead of Atlanta.

[00:04:21]She swears they can guarantee his safety and his family's.

[00:04:26]All he has to do is walk away from his life, his orders, everything, and run to her.

[00:04:32]Her advice on how to bring Barbara along, lie to her. You're good at that.

[00:04:38]And that's the trap John finds himself in on the last full day of the world.

[00:04:42]Two envelopes, two sets of plane tickets [music] tucked inside that leather rule book on his dresser.

[00:04:49]One to Atlanta, obedience, the bunker, sealing his family in coffins.

[00:04:55]One to Colorado, betrayal, defection, running to the woman he cheated with, and a lifetime of explaining why.

[00:05:04]Two ways to survive, and John can't stomach either one.

[00:05:09]He stands in front of the mirror one more time.

[00:05:12]He watches his wife pack a nice dress she is never going to wear.

[00:05:16]He rehearses, [music] for the 10,000th time, the confession he will never actually say out loud.

[00:05:23]The truth about the tiny machines in their blood, about what he's done, about where they're really going.

[00:05:31]And then he makes the only choice a man like John can make.

[00:05:35]He refuses to choose.

[00:05:37]He carries both sets [music] of tickets out to the garage, digs out an old camping stove, sparks the burner, and he burns them.

[00:05:46]Both of them.

[00:05:47]Atlanta and Colorado. Obedience and escape up in smoke over a camp stove that once made his daughter terrible burnt flapjacks she loved anyway.

[00:05:57]For the first time in his life, the man who always goes along refuses the assignment.

[00:06:04]He won't seal his family in a coffin.

[00:06:06]And he won't run to Tracy.

[00:06:09]Instead, he tells Barbara one more small lie.

[00:06:12]That they're going camping.

[00:06:14]And he drives them toward a quiet cabin by a lake to spend whatever time is left in the open air. The last morning of the old world looks like any other.

[00:06:23]Blue sky, a passenger [music] jet drawing a white line across it.

[00:06:28]Traffic humming along Interstate 80.

[00:06:31]John is driving his family across the country, camping gear packed to the roof. The clock in his head counting down.

[00:06:38]And when the anointed hour gets close, he pulls off the highway, down the shoulder, and backs the car up against the concrete base of a billboard advertising [music] cheap gas and cigarettes.

[00:06:51]Barbara is frightened and confused.

[00:06:53]Little Emily just wants to know if this is where they're camping and whether she can go pee.

[00:06:59]John tells his daughter to buckle up in the back and hold her stuffed rabbit tight [music] against her chest.

[00:07:05]And then, the second hand twitches and the hour strikes.

[00:07:10]For a moment, nothing.

[00:07:12]John almost lets himself believe he was wrong about all of it.

[00:07:16]And then the world stops [music] breathing.

[00:07:19]Ahead of them, a pickup truck drifts off the Interstate and cartwheels through the air, doors flung wide, bodies spilling out limp, the driver already dead at the wheel.

[00:07:32]Then a tractor-trailer at 90 miles an hour jackknifing off the blacktop, tearing open, hurling packages across the embankment. Cars everywhere veering, crashing. Their automated safety systems the only things still reacting.

[00:07:48]Machines protecting themselves while the humans inside them die.

[00:07:53]All at once.

[00:07:54]Everywhere.

[00:07:56]The invisible machines in 12 billion bloodstreams switching on and shutting their hosts down.

[00:08:02]But not John.

[00:08:04]Not Barbara.

[00:08:05]Not Emily.

[00:08:07]The three of them were inoculated. The killers in their blood already killed.

[00:08:12]They live.

[00:08:13]A trailer clips their car and throws it aside.

[00:08:16]A van comes barreling across the grass.

[00:08:19]They scramble out into the dirt and they survive.

[00:08:23]They crawl up, grass-stained and shaking, alive in a world that is just gone silent.

[00:08:29]The quietest silence there has ever been.

[00:08:32]And they drive on to the cabin by the lake.

[00:08:36]A slice of green paradise John visited once years ago with an old friend from the service.

[00:08:42]A boathouse. A little fishing boat in its sling. Deer grazing at dawn. Fish and game that will never run out now.

[00:08:50]Because there's no one left to take them.

[00:08:53]As they unload the car, a jetliner glides low over the treetops. Engines dead, silent, [music] bone dry. No fireball when it comes down in the woods across the lake. Just the crack of splitting timber.

[00:09:08]Thousands of planes all over the world gliding gently down out of an empty sky.

[00:09:13]Their autopilots holding them level over a dead planet.

[00:09:17]No one will ever go and look.

[00:09:19]No one will identify the bodies.

[00:09:22]And John stands on the deck with his wife leaning against him, watching birds stir in a cloudless blue sky.

[00:09:29]Alive, above ground, unburied. A strange, quiet, doomed little life stretching ahead of them.

[00:09:37]No bunker, [music] no coffins, no orders, no lies left to tell.

[00:09:43]Just this.

[00:09:44]The open air and whatever time is left in it. So, what does In the Air actually add to the Silo saga?

[00:09:52]The trilogy is huge and cold. 50 silos, 500 years, a whole species managed like a machine.

[00:10:01]This little story shrinks all of that down to one car, one family, one man's face in a mirror.

[00:10:08]It's the human scale of the apocalypse the founders engineered.

[00:10:12]The 12 billion who were never given a choice and one of the killers who suddenly had one.

[00:10:19]John spent his whole life going along, doing what he was told, sealing poison into envelopes and [music] telling himself he was a hero.

[00:10:27]And on the very last day, when it mattered most, he finally refused an assignment.

[00:10:33]He wouldn't bury his family to survive.

[00:10:36]He wouldn't run to save himself.

[00:10:38]He just chose to be honest and free and above the ground for however long that lasts.

[00:10:45]And that's the quiet argument buried in this whole saga. [music] The men who built the silos were certain that survival was worth [music] any price, any lie, any cage, any coffin.

[00:10:58]John looks at that same bargain and turns it down.

[00:11:02]He'd rather have one real day in the open air than 500 [music] fake years underground.

[00:11:07]It's the same choice in the end that Juliette [music] makes generations later at the other end of the story.

[00:11:14]That a smaller, freer, truer life in the daylight beats a managed one in the dark.

[00:11:21]It's a small story, but it's the last blue sky the old world ever had and one damned soul deciding to spend it honestly.

[00:11:30]And this is only the first of three.

[00:11:33]In the air is one of three companion stories Hugh Howey wrote around the edges of the saga.

[00:11:39]And the next two go [music] even deeper.

[00:11:41]Part two, In the Mountain, reveals the founders own secret bunker hidden in a mountain far from the silos.

[00:11:49]And part three, In the Woods, gives us the true final fate of Juliette herself.

[00:11:55]Subscribe so you don't miss them.

[00:11:58]If you want the bigger picture these stories sit inside, how the silos were built and how it all ends, check out my full breakdown of the trilogy.

[00:12:07]And tell me in the comments, in John's place, which ticket would you have burned?

[00:12:13]Thanks for watching.

[00:12:14]I'll see you in the next one.