How the Silo Learned to Kill
In the silo, there's only one crime punishable by death: hope.
I've seen a lot of dystopias on screen. Usually the villain is obvious—a tyrant, a corporation, an AI gone wrong. Silo does something more disturbing: it makes the killers sympathetic.
The people who run the silo believe they're heroes. They've inherited a system built to preserve humanity after an apocalypse. For 140 generations, they've kept 10,000 people alive underground while the toxic world above waits to kill anyone who leaves.
So when someone starts asking questions—when they start wondering if maybe, just maybe, the outside isn't as deadly as they've been told—the rulers face an impossible choice.
If they're right and the world is toxic, letting people hope means watching them die.
If they're wrong and the world is survivable, everything they've done is murder.
Neither option allows for questioning. Both demand silence.
So they built a system for killing that doesn't look like killing at all.
The Cleaning
Here's what happens when you commit the crime of curiosity.
First, there's a trial. Everything is proper. You're given a chance to recant, to admit you were wrong to question the founding myths. Most people do. They're scared, they have families, they want to live.
But some people can't unknow what they've learned. They say the words everyone has heard: "I want to go outside."
And that's when the true horror begins.
You're given a suit. You're told it will protect you long enough to complete one task: clean the camera sensors that show the silo what's outside. Every person who goes out does this. Even people who swore they wouldn't. Even people who wanted to prove the outside was safe.
Why?
Because the suit lies to you.
The visor shows you a beautiful world—green hills, blue sky, the paradise everyone dreams about. In your final moments, you desperately want others to see it too. So you clean the sensors. You participate in the myth one last time.
What you don't know is that you're seeing a hallucination. The real world is toxic death. The suit is designed to degrade within minutes. And every previous "cleaner" lies dead where they fell, bones scattered across a wasteland.
The silo watches you die on camera. They see the toxic truth. And they tell themselves it proves they were right all along.
The outside kills everyone. They just help it along.