Silo's Safeguard Is Not a Fail Safe, It Is a Death Sentence by Design

The safeguard in Silo is not a fail safe at all. I believe it is a death sentence built into the design, and it decides whether anybody in Silo 18 was ever going to live. The founders never meant for everyone to come out safe. They wanted that pipe to be used.

Later in this piece, I explain why only one act has ever changed an outcome, and that is the woman with a welding torch.

The safeguard was never a deterrent, whatever the algorithm says

We tend to think of the safeguard as either a punishment for going against the pact or a way to control the crowd if people fall out of line. That is exactly what the algorithm wants us to think, and that idea was not planted by ourselves. When the algorithm insists that the safeguard is "not preventable" and suggests the pipe was installed in case something goes wrong, the implication is that if everyone falls in line, there probably will not be any need to gas them to death.

So the woman now bargaining with the algorithm, who does not know what people like Bernard know, is doing everything possible to prevent the unpreventable. But she does not understand why the safeguard exists or what its intended purpose is. People know about the pact and what happens if they break it: detention, the mines, or worse, being sent out to clean. That is the deterrent. Nobody knew there was a safeguard to begin with, so it cannot count as a deterrent measure.

It is only after knowledge of it gets out that the algorithm comes up with an unreasonable explanation to justify its existence. Since we know the whole system is built on a lie, we can never trust this machine. We have also already covered the case that it is not the gray goo that ends people, but the gas.

A fail safe is meant never to be used, and this one was built to go off

A fail safe has three things: a trigger, an operator and an idle state. The trigger is the condition that sets it off, and the operator is the person who decides when that condition has been met. Take a fire alarm in the house. Any day it does not ring counts as a success, and that is the idle state.

Compare that with the safeguard. There is a trigger, or something like one, and there is an operator making the judgment on when a condition has been met, and that is Silo 1, with Bernard's cluster diagram laying out the outlets and the branches feeding down into the grid. And just as you hope your fire alarm never rings, we hope the safeguard is never used and all 50 silos come out into the sunlight together, dust themselves off and shake hands. That is a happy ending.

I have to be the bearer of bad news: that was never meant to happen. For the founders, the safeguard is not there for safety. In my words, "it is a time bomb they set and wait for the right time to detonate." It is even wrong to call it a safeguard. That name is another lie the founders set up, and you and I are following in their footsteps by calling it a safeguard.

What Jimmy's mother proves about Silo 17

I want to return to Jimmy's mother, but for a different reason than before. That scene was used to prove the mechanism could be stopped, and it can. A cap held, and a welder beat the end of the world for a while. But turn it around and ask: when did the gas stop?

If the pipe is a punishment, it has a target. You gas the level where the uprising is, or you gas until the people who broke the rule are dead, and then the valve closes, because punishment corrects. Somebody is supposed to be alive afterward to have learned something. That is not what happened in 17. The gas did not stop when the ringleaders died or when the fighting stopped. It kept running, and the only thing that stopped it was a woman who opened a panel with her own hands, welded metal over it, then sat down in that room and died beside her work.

Nobody in Silo 1 called it off. "Punishment stops when the lesson lands." This thing was never going to stop because it had no target. What it had was a quota, and that quota was everybody. People see Silo 17 as simple cause and effect: they rebelled and got the gas. I think they were on the list to be eliminated anyway, same as every other silo. Silo 17 just got theirs earlier because of the rebellion.

Her bargain with the algorithm can only delay the inevitable

The woman making this deal thinks she is bargaining for the good of the silo. Make people fall in line, do whatever that thing says, and she saves her people, even if it changes her and her relationship with her family. She is not stupid and she is not a monster. She is a woman who thinks she has found the one honest deal.

What she does not know is that this is a dishonest system, so whatever she does only delays their extinction. Every drop poured into the water and every person taken off the board bought exactly what obedience was always going to buy, which is time.

Why I am taking back the idea that the most obedient silo wins

Book readers will say one silo will be chosen to repopulate the world, so it could be 18 if they fall in line. I said the same thing previously, that the algorithm hands the world to whichever silo behaved itself best. I want to take that back.

My question now is: what are the odds? One silo chosen out of 50, and with everything that has happened in Silo 18, the odds are against them. Who knows the deciding factor? Since everything is built on a lie, the idea that the algorithm will choose based on obedience could also be a lie.

Book spoilers: the Order, the shifts and the founders on ice

Book spoilers ahead. The pact is meant for the people, but the Order is what the founders in Silo 1 read from, and I would call it a management manual. There is a section giving orders on what to do with silos that keep demanding answers, especially asking questions that cannot be contained. There are also the shifts. The books have 49 plus one silos, while the show has 50 plus one.

The founders are on ice and thawed out six months at a time to keep watch, then put back under while somebody else takes the rotation. Why build it that way? So their ideology is preserved with them, and so nobody is ever awake long enough to develop a conscience. No operator sees two silos wiped out back to back. Each man wakes up, handles his portion and goes back on ice before empathy can form.

Silo 40 and Silo 17 went down, and no silo has ever passed an inspection and been marked safe. No community has been told it scored high enough and the pipe is coming out of its wall. The very best outcome a high score can buy is that somebody else's number comes up first. Isn't that very sad? They will keep eliminating until only one silo is left standing.

The seed is the only good news, and the pipe is the whole plan

There is one piece of good news. After every other silo is wiped out, the last population walks out into whatever is left outside and starts the world over. The founders call it the seed, a very pretty word for it. Notice how their words get prettier the worse the thing is: the safeguard, the cleaning, and now the seed.

The outside world has actually healed. Only the ground around the silos is kept poisoned on purpose by Silo 1, and the only shelter is for just one of the incubators. Metaphorically, every silo was built to raise a crop of human beings under observation for five centuries so one could be harvested and the rest turned under. The evidence supports that the pipe is not the failure of the plan. It is the whole plan. The farms, the pact, the relays, the cleanings, the mayors and all the clockwork of Silo 18 exist to keep people alive and sortable until Silo 1 makes its pick.

Silo 1 could choose not to open the valves, but the founders planned for that

Hear me out on a counterargument. A network with control lines and outlets means human beings deciding, and human beings can decide not to. Silo 1 could simply open nothing. I would take that seriously if the founders had not got there first.

That is precisely what the shifts, the freezers and the memory work are for. No generation of operators is ever awake, informed and conscientious enough to change the policy decided from the beginning. "They built the plan to survive their own descendants' mercy." Say what you want about these people, they were thorough.

Juliette's fight and why the woman bargaining with the algorithm should back the rebellion

So what is Juliette actually doing? Something I doubt even she has named yet. Getting into Judicial and capping that outlet is brilliant, though risky. But even if the pipe is capped, Silo 18 is still scored, ranked and watched. That is why the algorithm burned its cleverest move of the season on stopping her from finding the outlet.

Solo's mother set the precedent, though she gave her life. She did not argue, debate or bargain. She found the place where the plan touched her children and put metal over it, and for a while the end of the world did not happen. Silo 17 fell anyway, but for other reasons, and that is not nothing.

The silos exist because the safeguard needs something to eventually be used on. In the show they dug 51 holes, and only one surviving silo is meant to come out alive. Every good citizen who followed the pact was standing in line waiting for a turn that was always coming. Obedience only prolongs their wiping out. The best that woman can do now, if not openly then secretly, is help the rebellion her husband has joined succeed, because that is the only way to save everyone. Bernard has come to realise that, and the earlier she does, the better for her, the son she loves and all 10,000 people whose fate rests on her.

Do you think the woman bargaining with the algorithm will turn against it and help the rebellion in time?