V

TED

Ted’s residence on Level 4 was twice the size of the others, a perk of being one of the first to join David Pilcher’s inner circle. For fourteen years he’d lived in this tiny space, and it exuded the messy comfort of home, with everything (sort of) in its place.

Life in the superstructure shook out in a strange rhythm of work and leisure, and it generally took people years to find the balance. Regardless of department, work shifts were onerous. Ten-hour days, six days a week. And still, things just barely got done For Ted, as head of surveillance, there wasn’t a week in recent memory when he had worked fewer than seventy hours. The challenge had come with finding what to do, beyond sleeping, with the other seventy hours of free time in the week. He wasn’t an extrovert, and even though they existed for him only on surveillance monitors, Ted felt he spent every working second with the residents of Wayward Pines. So in his time off, he wanted nothing more than to be alone.

He’d tried painting.

Photography.

A bad spell of knitting.

Excessive exercise.

Until one day, eight years ago, he’d found an antique typewriter in the ark, an Underwood Touchmaster Five. He’d carried it back to his residence, along with several boxes of paper, and set up a little writer’s desk in the corner of his room.

All his life, he’d felt like he harbored within him the Great American Novel.

But now that there was no America, no anything really, what would he write?

Was there even a point to the creation of books and art when humanity lived on the precipice of extinction?

He didn’t know, but as he began to punch the old keys, worn so smooth the letters were barely visible, he knew he liked writing and that he loved the feel of the Underwood under his fingers.

There was no screen.

Just the lovely, tactile click-click-click of the keys, the faint smell of ink as the paper scrolled slowly out, and him alone with his thoughts.

At first, he’d toyed with a detective novel.

That had petered out.

Then his own life story, which he quickly tired of recounting.

A couple weeks in, it hit him. All day long, he stared at surveillance monitors broadcasting hundreds of private lives in all stages of desperation. He would make the residents of Wayward Pines his subjects. Chronicle their lives before, their integrations into the town, imagine their interior thoughts and fears.

He’d started writing, and he couldn’t stop.

The stories had poured out of him and the paper had accumulated beside his desk like snowfall until he had thousands upon thousands of pages detailing the lives (as he envisioned them) of the people of Wayward Pines.