Free Refuse (The Silo Archipelago Series Book 1) by Michael Bunker

 
     
    REFUSE
     
    Part 1 of the Silo Archipelago series
     
    Hugh Howey has been so gracious in encouraging other writers to participate in his fantastic Wooliverse by writing fan fiction within that universe.  It’s been exciting to read so many quality stories coming from fans of the WOOL books.  For the most part, I’ve been just a happy bystander and fan throughout the Wool phenomenon.  As a lark, for a writing competition put on by an e-magazine in England, I did write a little comedy/satire piece that included Hugh as a character, but that story (#NaNoWri War Z) was not literally fanfic, since it did not take place in the Wool universe.  Hugh happily gave me permission to use his story and likeness in that quirky little bit of zombie comedy, and I am so grateful to him for that.  Other than that, I’ve just been a reader and a fan.
     
    And then I had an idea.
     
    The Wool world is so ripe for stories and tales that might be completely different than the primary tale that Hugh was telling in his books.  Being a self-published writer who has seen some limited success, I wondered what someone like me would be doing if I were trapped in a silo.  Would I be writing and publishing my work?  I also happen to be a Russophile who loves Russian literature and history.  I’ve long been interested in the phenomenon of SAMIZDAT in the former USSR, which was the underground publishing system used by dissidents to publish unapproved books during the Soviet era.  My favorite author and hero is Alexander Solzhenitsyn, a brilliant writer and dissident who took on Stalin and the whole Soviet apparatus for the right to publish the things that he wrote.  He published his famous book A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch using SAMIZDAT, an underground group of individuals who hand-wrote or hand-typed illegal manuscripts and distributed them throughout the Soviet Union.  The word SAMIZDAT literally means “Self Publishing” so I thought that a parallel story taking place in the silo might be of interest to Wool readers.  I hope that it is.
     
    REFUSE is a short story about a woman named Leah, a picker whose job it is to sift through the refuse and waste of the silo in order to achieve the goal of recycling everything.  On her own time, Leah loves to make homemade paper and lives to write stories.  She just happens to exist in a dystopian world that has been destroyed by mankind, and lives in an underground silo full of mysteries and questions.  The problem is that both of these things, making paper and writing stories, if they are not approved by the authorities in the silo, are illegal.
     
    I thank Hugh Howey for giving me permission to write this story and to publish it.  I hope you all enjoy it.
     
    Michael Bunker
    May 2013

 
    Leah was a picker , and as a picker she now stood hip deep among the seemingly endless heaps of garbage, carefully opening the reclamation bags one by one, sorting through the contents and tossing the bits and pieces of refuse into the appropriate wooden separation bins for recycling.
    Wood .  The separation bins were made of wood.  Heavy, sturdy, ancient wood, hardened by time, shiny and smooth from use, and aged by the tempering of many hands.
    Leah had never seen a real tree, unless you count the little wispy olive trees on the farming floors.  She’d visited the farms as a girl in school, like every young person did, and there she’d seen the olive trees lined up in rows like emaciated soldiers standing erect under buzzing grow lights.  She knew, however, that those trees could never have produced enough wood to make even one of the sturdy bins she used daily to sort through and recycle the tons of waste produced continuously in the silo.  These bins were antiques, relics of another time and place.  They were reminders that everything in the silos originally came from somewhere else, and that there had once been another world and another kind of life—one that wasn’t