You’d spend most of your life traveling through a few floors, depending on where you worked and lived. If the only way you could “travel” involved going up and down stairs, it would take a few days to travel from the top to the bottom–and vice versa. As one would imagine, over a hundred levels of community levels would create a stratified living. Deeper still is mechanical (down deep or lower levels) which pumps the water, oil, and energy from the earth to power the silo and its inhabitants so they can have power to light their lives. Below yet are the hydroponic and soil-based farm levels (mid-level). Below are living quarters and computer IT (upper level). The silo is a city based on the floor you live on: the mayor and sheriff work on the main floor, just under the surface. What would life be like for humanity to live this way? What kinds of rules would exist to keep society going? How would it all work?

To never be outside, except for those final few minutes of life where you die of radiation poisoning, instead living out your life deep in the earth. Once finished, the condemned walk away, but never far enough to make it up the hill to see what’s beyond–instead dying very likely from the radioactive fallout from some long-forgotten war. Then you can see the wasteland outside, the dirt and crumbling buildings. Imagine being on the inside of the silo as you watch the condemned man or woman exit the exterior doors in their safety suit, and the cameras slowly become clearer as the condemned scrubs the film from the lenses. Cleaning is a death by execution, but with the chance to help the silo before they die. “Cleaning” forces rule-breakers to the outside, where they are supplied with a suit that keeps them alive long enough to clean the sensors and cameras that allow the silo to see outside.

They only have a chance at this lottery when another inhabitant dies of old age, accident–or by cleaning. Couples aren’t allowed to even try to have a child without permission unless they win a lottery placement that gives them a chance at a year of trying.

We open WOOL with Sheriff Holston, the law for the silo and the underground city that lives there.īut the silo’s population is strictly controlled.

Living on the surface has become life-threatening, and as a result humanity has retreated to underground.

Silo omnibus