Status Updates From Dust (Silo, #3)

“I’ve seen men happy enough to get through their shifts. I’ve watched others go mad. I used to… I used to play solitaire for hours on my computer upstairs, and that’s when my brain was truly off and I wasn’t miserable. But then, I wasn’t really alive, either.”

“I don’t know. Some of them are happy enough, I suppose. They get married and have kids. They have jobs. They don’t know anything beyond their walls, so I guess they don’t have some of the stress about what’s out there that you and I feel. But I think they have something else that we don’t have, this deep feeling that something is wrong with how they’re living. Buried, you know.”

“Cave bears hibernated for a season. Humans hibernated each night. Daytime was a shift, each one endured like a quantum of life, all the short-term planning leading up to another bout of darkness, little thought given to stringing those days into something useful, some chain of valuable pearls. Just another day to survive.”