Wool (Watching outdoors on screens)

Brief description

The walls of the top level of the underground silo are covered with large screens showing the outside world. The images are captured by cameras above ground, and the camera lenses get grimy with dirt that is only cleaned off when an expelled resident of the silo cleans the lenses with a pad of wool before walking off to their death.

While in the holding cell before leaving the silo, Holston notices dead pixels on the screen, and imagines a future where most of the pixels will be dead. These screens are the residents' only images of the outside world, apart from drawings and photos in old children's books from long ago, and so he imagines that the few remaining true pixels in the future might be taken for the ones that are broken.

Holston has recently found the documents that caused his wife to believe that the world outside is in fact not toxic, and that the images on the screens are fake. This scene not only expresses his own distrust in the technologically mediated view of the outside world, it also explores how human interpretation of technology can also be flawed - hundreds of years later, when nobody remembered how the technology was supposed to work, how would people know what was a true pixel and what was a broken one? 

Pull Quotes

The view of the dead world filled up the entire wall of his cell, just like all the walls on the silo’s upper level, each one full of a different slice of the blurry and ever-blurrier wasteland beyond. Holston’s little piece of that view reached from the corner by his cot, up to the ceiling, to the other wall, and down to the toilet. And despite the soft blur—like oil rubbed on a lens—it looked like a scene one could stroll out into, like a gaping and inviting hole oddly positioned across from forbidding prison bars. The illusion, however, convinced only from a distance. Leaning closer, Holston could see a handful of dead pixels on the massive display. They stood stark white against all the brown and gray hues. Shining with ferocious intensity, each pixel (Allison had called them “stuck” pixels) was like a square window to some brighter place, a hole the width of a human hair that seemed to beckon toward some better reality. There were dozens of them, now that he looked closer. Holston wondered if anyone in the silo knew how to fix them, or if they had the tools required for such a delicate job. Were they dead forever, like Allison? Would all of the pixels be dead eventually? Holston imagined a day when half of the pixels were stark white, and then generations later when only a few gray and brown ones remained, then a mere dozen, the world having flipped to a new state, the people of the silo thinking the outside world was on fire, the only true pixels now mistaken for malfunctioning ones.

Howey, Hugh. Wool Omnibus Edition (Wool 1 - 5) (Silo series) (pp. 7-8). Broad Reach Publishing. Kindle Edition. 

Work that the situation appears in

Title Publication Type Year Creator
Wool Narrative, Novel Hugh Howey
Who does what?
This character
Aesthetic characteristics
Colours
Machine P.O.V
Not machine P.O.V.
Notes
It is not completely clear whether the cameras are showing the true outside, but Holston believes that they are deceiving him, so I have used that verb.

Authored by

UUID
77fd5ae3-338b-4133-9aca-6bd4accbd97e