When Holston climbs out of the silo in his survival suit, he is stunned to see that everything looks green and lush, completely unlike the brown and gray wasteland he has seen on screens his whole life. The sky is blue and birds fly overhead. Even the skyscrapers in the distance, that looked broken on the screens in the silo's upper level, are whole. He believes that the IT department has fooled the silo's residents into believing that the outside world is toxic. He cleans the lenses of the cameras that capture the images of the outside world out of pity for the people still left inside the silo.Â
But after a few minutes, he feels sick. Thinking there is too little air in the survival suit, he manages to smash it with a rock and remove the helmet. But when he takes off the helmet and looks at the world with his own unaided eyes, he sees that the world is in fact brown and gray, the skyscrapers are broken, and the body of his wife, who left three years earlier, is lying on the hillside next to him.Â
In this series, technology or the lack of technology is consistently used to keep the people subdued and to avoid an uprising. The screens in the silo never show the outside world quite as it is, because of dirt on the lenses and dead pixels on the screens. Holston then comes to distrust the images shown as he finds documents showing that the world outside is not really toxic. This appears to be confirmed when he steps outside, but then when he removes the helmet he discovers that the green lushness was a deception too.Â
These situations are the most obviously relevant to machine vision, but technology more broadly is also heavily manipulated, for instance so that silos cannot communicate with other silos (or even know that other silos exist).Â