In a recent episode of "Silo," the sci-fi series from Apple TV+, a character who does not have long to live puts on a virtual-reality headset. She's spent her entire life in a subterranean shelter, which descends more than a mile into the earth like an upside-down skyscraper. What she sees in the headset is totally alien: the cloud forests of Costa Rica, recorded in the bygone year of 2018. We never see the red-eyed tree frog and iridescent birds that appear on her screen; instead, we watch her reach out and close her fingers on empty space. "So beautiful," she says. Then she refers to us, the people of the twenty-first century: "How did they lose this world?"
A post-apocalyptic story is something like a murder mystery in which the victim is life as we know it-"not a whodunnit but a howdidithappen," as Jill Lepore wrote in this magazine, in 2017. Often, artifacts from our own time serve as clues about what has gone awry.
In the first season of "Silo," released in 2023, a string of ill-fated characters encounter "relics" that threaten to reveal dark truths about the origins of their underground refuge, and about what came before. They can't figure out what a prehistoric Pez dispenser is for, but they can use the Silo's ancient computers to read the files on a twentieth-century hard drive.
In "Silo," ten thousand people live on a hundred and forty-four subterranean levels, which are connected by an enormous spiral staircase. Working-class mechanics are consigned to the "down deep," where they maintain a massive generator that powers, among other things, grow lights for crops.
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