Part 1 of "Wool," by Hugh Howey, is as sad and bleak and full of hope as the world in which it is set.

 When is the lie the truth?  Truth, a lie?  When do we start telling the intentional lies?  Do we lie to our children – scare them into believing the world is more dangerous than it really is, if only to protect them a little better?  Do we lie to our elders as they are coming close to death – tell them they are going off to a better place where there will be no more pain or suffering?  Do we cling to our lies, or to our truths?

Houston isn’t sure which is the lie and which is the truth anymore.  All he knows is that his wife believed they were being smothered by lies, and was willing to die to prove it, if only to herself.  It’s been three years since she willingly walked out of the silo that had sheltered the last of human kind for hundreds of years.  She needed to know what was really beyond the grainy, clouded, pixelated screens that offered their only view of the land around them.  She had uncovered a program that had the ability to re-write the image the cameras captured and display a modified image on screen.  She believed, wholeheartedly, that the images being shown to them on the screens was fake, that someone had decided, long ago, to keep people cloistered inside the silo, even as the world outside shed the toxins that had forced their ancestors underground so long ago.

The memory of watching his wife cleaning the cameras from the outside of the silo, doing her best to show the real world to the people still trapped inside, has haunted Houston for three years, and he can’t take it anymore.  He has to know what it was that she saw out there.  He has to know if she had been right all along.  Even though he knows it’s most likely that she was mistaken and the world is the same dead, bleak world they’ve been staring at on those monitors their entire lives, the mere chance that she could have been right – that it could all be a lie – emboldens him to take action.

Houston steps outside the airlock, in a carefully designed hazmat suite, and wonders if the suite is all part of the lie as well.  Surely the clear blue sky and green grass that he sees through the hazmat hood can’t possibly be toxic.  Surely his wife had been right all along.  He would find her, he is certain of it.  He will find everyone who has walked outside and lived.  For they all must have.  A world so bright and full of life couldn’t possibly be the deathtrap he had been raised to believe.

But, it is.

Houston discovers, in his last seconds of life, that the only lie he had ever been told, was by the visor in the helmet of his hazmat suite.  There, the program his wife had uncovered all those years ago, worked his horrible magic, turning the dead landscape that was truly his world, into a virtual Eden, to be enjoyed at the moments of death, before the toxins that destroyed the planet so long ago, ripped through the lying suite and tore him apart from the inside.

Is it more cruel to lie to someone at the moment of their death – giving them hope of a future and freedom?  Of course, lying about one’s true freedom over the course of their entire lives is certainly cruel.  If Alison had been right and the giant screens at the top of the silo were displaying a fake world in order to control those who lived inside, that would be horrendous, no doubt about it.  But it’s still not excusable to lie to those who’ve been sent outside – allowing them a few minutes of belief that they will survive out there – that those who’ve walked outside before them had survived as well.  It doesn’t matter when the lie happens – it’s still cruel.

Yes, the truth is bleak – a dead world with no hope and no future – but it’s still the truth, and people have a right to know what it is that kills them.  In the case of Alison, it was idealism and misguided hope.  In Houston’s case, it was blind love.  We can only hope that those remaining inside the silo are not so fool-hardy.