Holston continues up the hill, determined to get out of sight of the cafeteria cameras before removing his suit. While he is still absorbed by the apparent beauty of the green grass and blue sky, he is struck by severe stomach cramps and nausea. He first assumes he has overexerted himself or neglected food and rest, so he tries to slow down and keep moving toward the crest.

The pain rapidly worsens into total physical collapse. Holston falls, crawls upward, and struggles through bursts of blinding light until his vision fails completely. Believing he may be suffocating inside the suit because the air supply was only meant to last through the cleaning, he panics at being trapped in the sealed gear and desperately searches for a way to get the helmet off.

Using a jagged rock he finds in the dirt, Holston smashes the helmet latches loose. When he finally removes the helmet and tries to breathe, the air hits him like a blow, and he realizes the outside atmosphere is toxic. At the same moment, the vivid landscape disappears: with his naked eyes he sees only brown grass, gray skies, and a dead world.

Examining the helmet, Holston understands that the visor itself created the false image. The outside of the visor is coated, and the inner side contains the dead display that had shown him the green world Allison once suspected was a manufactured illusion. Looking back down the hill, he sees reality as it always was and understands that the lie was carried with him out of the silo.

As the toxins kill him, Holston notices that the object he crawled into was not a boulder but Allison's body in its decaying suit, something the visor had omitted. He reaches out and holds what remains of his wife as he dies on the barren hillside, wondering what the people inside the silo will see on their screens as his body curls up in the wasteland.