Three years earlier, Holston and Allison work side by side in their apartment: Holston sorts sheriff’s case files while Allison studies fragments recovered from old deleted server data. Allison excitedly tells Holston that she has found evidence suggesting there was more than one uprising in the silo’s history. Instead of a single known rebellion, the records seem to show major revolts happening regularly, roughly every generation.

As Allison explains her findings, Holston first treats them as another historical curiosity. He suggests repeated unrest might have been tied to practical problems such as the need for cleaning or population pressure. Allison rejects that explanation and carefully raises a more dangerous idea: perhaps the rebels did not destroy the silo’s historical records at all. Instead, she thinks the authorities or their ancestors may have deliberately wiped the servers.

Allison supports her theory with the pattern she has found in the recovered reports. Because revolts had occurred repeatedly for a long time, but stopped after the great uprising that also erased so much data, she reasons that the deletion itself may have been meant to break the cycle. She speculates that forbidden knowledge on the hard drives—about the outside world, the silo’s origins, or why people came to live there—may have driven people toward rebellion or a desire to leave.

Holston is alarmed both by Allison’s conclusions and by how openly close they come to questioning official history. He warns Allison not to keep digging, fearing that her search for truth could be seen as dangerous and could trigger the very social pressure he deals with as sheriff. Allison argues that truth is inherently good and that, since she has already shared her recovery methods with IT, the information will eventually surface anyway. The chapter ends with Holston recognizing how tense the silo already is and fearing that Allison’s investigation is pushing toward something deadly.