Machine Learning: New and Collected Stories

by Hugh Howey

  “Tul heard from High Command that the warships are to be kept in low atmo,” Urj says quietly. He is squad commander and to report out of chain is a great sin. Somehow, the hush deepens. The game is forgotten, even the thirty-five that I’m in the hole.

  “Reboot and reload?” Gha, a gunner, asks.

  Urj nods.

  “What’s that mean?” Bek asks, and I am thankful. I grow tiresome of admitting my ignorance on these things.

  “It means there are more of us in the vats, and those bodies may be needed as well.”

  “Fast as they can grow us,” Gha says, “they’ll send us down.”

  Everyone looks at me like I’m responsible for this mess. But what do I know? It’s been ages since I took a life or gave one up. There have been occasional worlds that we passed by because they were deemed too dangerous to take on. There have been worlds we conquered with a single warship. Then there are worlds like these that worry the stalks of those much higher in rank than I’ll ever be. So many types of worlds, and I’ve studied them all.

  Instead of spending my free time greasing the outdated gear I’ve been assigned or going over the tactics in my squad manual, I sit in my bunk in the days before planetfall reading about Mil, my absent bunkmate. This is what I call her: my absent bunkmate. We share our bunks, hers and mine, just not at the same time. She is sexed where I used to sleep, while I suffer the dreadful slobbering snores of her old roommate, Lum. I wonder at times, woken at night by the awful noise of Lum sleeping, if the mystery of Mil’s suicides is not right there, one bunk below me.

  Mil’s files are full of a vague strangeness, but nothing I can put my sucker on, either for myself or for Kur. Lots of messages are gone—the original ordering is intact, but some numbers are skipped. Reminds me of the “missing buck” play my squad inanely ascribes to.

  Quite a few messages are to and from a secretary at High Command, saying that Mil’s reports are being passed along. The actual reports are not among her files, however. There is one partial report quoted, describing a missing signal of some sort. I wonder if one of our advanced scout ships has been taken out. It is from these ships that all my intel came. Does Earth have warning of our arrival? Wouldn’t be the first time. And it would explain the All-Tentacles and the consternation among the higher-ups.

  I think of the long-range scans of Earth I used to study. It was evident that fighting had taken place recently and might still be going on. Not unusual on planets we raid, and this planet’s inhabitants are an especially warlike people. If they stopped that fighting and trained their guns toward us, that would be very much not good. The problem with hitting an aggressive race isn’t just their honed skills, but their state of readiness.

  Maybe I’m reading too much into Mil’s records, but with so many bodies being thrown into Gunnery, it is time to consider that we are being lowered like a skink into boiling water. Maybe Mil was suggesting we bypass this planet entirely, and High Command is having none of such talk from a terminal tech. Perhaps they deleted her suggestions in case she turns out to be right.

  But why the suicides? It’s not just that suicides are expensive—it’s that the chances of offing oneself twice in a single cycle are low. Whatever is ailing someone is not likely to be present when they are brought back.

  When my new bunkmate, Lum, returns from her station duties, I set the terminal aside and broach the touchy subject.

  “Hey, Lum,” I say.

  My bunkmate is eating a gurd. With her mouth full, she raises her stalks questioningly.

  “Did you . . . notice anything strange about Mil before she . . . well, before either of her suicides?”

  “Mmm,” Lum says. She swallows and starts taking off her work clothes. I haven’t been able to tell if she is coming on to me, but I knot my tentacles that she isn’t.

  “Yeah,” she says. “She was very different the days before. Both times.”

  “How so?” I ask.

  Lum throws her clothes into the chute and steps into the crapper to run the shower. “She got real calm,” she says. Steam starts rising in the crapper. I’ve scalded myself twice showering after Lum’s lava blasts.

  “You mean, she wasn’t usually calm?”

  “Her normal state was to raise hell,” Lum says. She sticks her head out of the crapper, but I notice a tentacle wrapping around the edge of the door. She is dying to shut the conversation off and get in the shower. “The reason Mil offed herself was because of her demotions. She was in High Command a few raids ago. Got bumped down, and she’s been getting bumped down ever since. Causes too much trouble.” Lum screws up her eyestalks. “Speaks her mind,” she says, as if this is a great sin.

  “Seems weird,” I say. “Two suicides in a cycle. Taking on that much debt.”

  Lum eyes the shower. The steam is, blessedly, cloaking her lower half.

  “You ever done it?” I ask. “Ever . . . you know.”

  “No,” she says, smiling. She looks down at herself. “I’m all original. And I’m wasting water. You wanna come in? I can tell you about my crazy ex-bunkmate, and you can scrub the barnacles off my back.”

  “I’m good,” I say. “Just curious is all.”

  Lum seems, if anything, relieved. I can’t get a bead on her. “Suit yourself.” She starts to pull the door shut, then sticks her head out one last time. Considers something. I’m waiting.

  “You were in Intelligence,” she says.

  “Still am,” I say. “Gunner is just this one time.”

  “And other races, they do it too? Off themselves?”

  “A lot,” I say.

  “But it’s final death for them,” Lum says.

  “Yeah. That’s the point,” I say. “They do it when they get depressed.” Here, I’m drawing more from my own experiences than any of my studies. I remember feeling like I wanted to sleep for a long time. Forever, if I could.

  The steam is filling our bunkroom. I feel sweat gathering on my back. Lum studies me for a painfully long while.

  “I don’t think Mil was depressed,” she finally says. “I think she was . . . satisfied. Content, maybe. Or resigned. Or maybe . . .”

  “Maybe what?”

  “Or maybe she was scared out of her senses, and she couldn’t get anyone to pay attention. So she finally gave up.”

  The next morning, I find what may be a clue. It is discovered by my sensitive back: a lump in my mattress or a spring bent out of shape. This is two mornings in a row with an ache in my spines (my mother would, again, call me soft of tentacle). I tear the sheets off my mattress in search of the answer.

  All the springs are in fine shape, but running a tentacle across the mattress, I feel a lump. A very hard lump with sharp corners. It turns out to be a small data drive sewn into the fabric of the mattress. This is most curious. I wouldn’t think my beloved Mil would be into sexing vids, which is all I have ever used these for. The drive is locked. I try to access it with the wall terminal, but it refuses my tentacle. Coded to Mil’s secretions, unless it belongs to someone else.

  One mystery is solved, and that’s the second suicide. Even with Mil’s memories restored to some prior, stable state, she would have found the drive and accessed some reminder. She had left a note to herself before the first deed, and upon discovering it, gave a repeat performance. Maybe her superiors knew she had left some memory behind, and so they sent her to another ship. To my bunk. Where she is being sexed by Kur.

  The only problem with my brilliant theory is that Kur says she’s still trying to hang herself. But that could be explained by the sexing! I chuckle to myself. I will have to tell Kur that one. I bring up my messages on the terminal to pass this joke along and to tell him about the data drive, when I see a message waiting in my inbox from him, saying that he has thwarted another attempt on her life.

  Why does my heart go out to her? Why am I not disturbed? And what if she kills herself yet again and they are out of bodies for her in the vats here? They might bring her back as a man,
and now it is too late and I already love her.

  Listen to me. A cycle ago, I was dreaming of saving enough for a plot of land and a settlement pass, of making a permanent home on some ball of mud. Now I am worried over a woman with a career of demotions and a pile of debt.

  I study the locked drive, this lone token of hers. It was sewn into the top of the mattress, almost as if designed to gouge a spine and annoy the resting. Like it was meant to be found. Maybe it wasn’t planted for her at all—but for me.

  Two days to planetfall, and a terminal tech’s madness consumes me. I should be worried about my own skin. A bad death means more debt I can ill afford. But it’s difficult to stop being a liaison officer. I am trained to dig and to study and to know a soul before we destroy them. Now I find myself curious about a soul intent on destroying herself.

  It is download day, one day before planetfall. After mess, we file by rank down to the vats and hold our tentacles very still in the tight confines of the scanner. Annual copies were taken in my old line of work, but they were treated casually—few people fall over dead at their research terminals. This time, I don’t move a muscle. I try not to think any stray thoughts. I have a very good feeling that this copy will be needed.

  Will I wake up with my current sense of dread intact? Will my first thought be, upon my rebirth, Please don’t let me die tomorrow? What a strange life. It is only strange to me because I have studied so many races who only know final death. Their one life is all, and this causes some among them to guard it until it cannot breathe. Others flail and spend it recklessly. And what do we do? We grow bored of it.

  Before I joined the fleet, I remember thinking that we were conquerors of worlds. But we are conquerors of death. How many copies of ourselves have we left behind? How many will be enough? The scanner clicks and whirs around my head, recording these disjointed musings of mine, the hollow in the pit of my soul, and what is really eating at me becomes clear:

  I do not dread dying tomorrow as much as I loathe the thought of taking lives with my own tentacles. I have studied for too long, read too much poetry, perhaps. I am used to making planetfall with the last of the landing parties, the crafts full of advisors and record-keepers and relic-takers. I land once the bloated bodies of all a world’s poets have already been turned beneath the soil.

  So this I dread. And what else? The repetition. The waking up to do it all over again. Death becomes no more than sleep. And even if I put a bullet to this brain, and the next, and the next, swift enough to test the staying power of the vats, there will always be another of me in Second Fleet, and finally I will tire of this as well.

  The scanner records these worst of my thoughts. And then the whirring and grinding falls still. Ah, how I wish I could fall still as well. Into some meditative, or more permanent, silent state.

  And with this, the mystery of Mil’s second suicide is solved. It is so obvious, I feel like slapping myself with my own tentacles. I squirm from the scanner. As the next gunner takes my place, I badger the scanner technician to look something up for me on his terminal. He is annoyed, but I have all the charm of a liaison officer. All I need is a date. I need to know when Mil performed her last routine backup. I tell him it is a matter of life and death. Of life and debt. And he relents.

  The date is near enough that I know that I am right, but I rush back to my bunkroom and pull up Mil’s records to be sure. And yes, her backup was soon after the missing messages but just before her first attempt. Whatever she knows, it doesn’t look bad to a technician on her scans. It is not a black fog of depression, no bright colors of mental imbalance. Just a piece of knowledge, cleverly hidden away.

  I fish the locked data drive out of my pocket and study this mystery. If only I had another day or two, I would get to the bottom of this. As it is, the why of it all will have to wait until after Earth. I just hope when I die in the morning that I’ll be able to piece these more recent epiphanies together again.

  It is planetfall, and as our attack craft soars down through the atmosphere toward this green and blue and white target of ours, my thoughts drift to a heat tech I met once. I don’t remember his name, it was so long ago. He came to the bunkroom Kur and I shared when the thermostat was out. It was so cold in our room that our piss froze and crinkled before it hit the toilet. While he was working to fix the unit, the heat tech complained that he was always cold, which I had never thought of before. Strange to think of a person who fixes heaters never being warm. But of course. He only works where the heat is broken. He must be cold all the time.

  I am thinking this on the day of planetfall, because lately I have only seen our conquests in ruin. The planets are already smoking from the orbital bombardment and the armies of gunners by the time we liaisons ever get mud on our boots. The power grids are out; satellites blown to bolts; fires raging. Others stay behind and build an empire; they will see the place whole. But not me. I am like the heat tech, forever cold. I am the conqueror who never glimpses what he has won. I only see these worlds in their cultural writings from deep space, and then I see them battered and broken.

  These are my thoughts as the shuttle touches down and sways on its struts. The gunners around me loosen their harnesses as the rear hatch lowers. There is gunfire from a squad that got here first. There is the scream of something heavy plummeting through thick atmosphere. Sergeant Tul yells for us to “move, move,” and we do.

  I am third off the ship, and my tentacles are moist with fear. My GAW13 kicks as I fire. Tanks rumble and drones and fighter craft swirl overhead, a maelstrom of missiles exploding, fountains of dirt erupting, my first glimpse of real-life humans taking shelter, taking aim.

  I have studied them so long that they feel intimate and familiar. I know them. I launch a volley into a small squad, and one of the humans is ripped in two. Our shuttle is taking fire and screams as it pulls away, lifting up to gather more bodies as they spill from orbiting vats. The resistance is stiffer than we were promised. A grenade takes out Urj, and one of his dismembered tentacles tangles around my ankle. Sergeant Tul is yelling at us to take cover. There is a mound of metal nearby, some kind of bunker half-covered with dirt that a few gunners huddle behind. Bullets pepper its side. I fire into the humans until my gun overheats and then dive into the bunker. The last thing I see overhead is the flash of a new sun, a blinding ball of light, as one of our warships and all of its vats wink out of existence.

  There is much yelling. Radios bark back and forth. I check my gun and my tentacles, make sure all is in place, and then I see what I am hiding inside of, this makeshift bunker. It is familiar. It is the ruin of one of our ships, a troop shuttle, but something is not right—

  Bullets ping off the hull, and I can hear the natives of Sector 1 yelling and coordinating. A gunner from another squad has taken shelter with us. Her radio barks, and she yells at Tul, “War Two is down!”

  I think of Kur. Our home. Our bunkroom. Now that ship is a hailstorm of bolts plummeting through the high clouds and scattering across this ball of mud.

  Inside the busted troop shuttle where we’ve taken shelter, tall grasses are swaying, waving at me, trying to signal some warning. Rov stands by the gaping hole in the shuttle’s skin, scanning the sky, her armored bulk blotting out my view of the carnage beyond. I am going to die a cowardly, expensive death, I realize.

  “War One has taken a hit!” Rov shouts.

  Flashes of light stab in around her, another brightening of the sky. A moment later, there is a deep grumble that I feel in my bones, a noise like the belly growl of a hungry god.

  Closer by, a bomb explodes, a sharp crack followed by the howls of my kin. I hear alien craft buzzing overhead, filling the sky with the piercing shrieks of their passing, and with the whistle of loosed munitions.

  All is background noise. I am watching the tall grasses wave and wave. Their feathery blades are growing up through the destroyed hull of one of our ships. There is rust here and there, cables chewed by local varmints, all the signs o
f that universal destroyer: Time. The scars he leaves are everywhere I look.

  I hold a tentacle in front of my visor and study it. Where are my scars? Where are the physical artifacts of wounds I remember suffering? Has it really been so long? I search for an old injury that I have been hunting for and have been unable to find for a cycle now. The last thing I remember is waking in my bunk, feeling like someone else. I remember a last glimpse of my ship, dimmed and showing no pockmark, no wear of war.

  Another bomb erupts in the distance. More of my people dying. And I think of the stress I witnessed among High Command on my warship. I think of the way things have been falling apart—so many people thrown to Gunnery. There is a girl who will not stop killing herself, a girl who knows something, a fragment of a report about a missing signal from another ship.

  There is a helmet by my feet, half-buried in the dirt of planet Earth. Tul is yelling for us to fight, and I am trying to remember a poem I once knew. The words are not with me. All around us are the signs of an invasion that did not succeed. And I know a sudden truth with all the fierceness of a hot blast—I know this as bullets zing by my helmet and bombs rage closer and closer:

  We are the second fleet.

  We are the reserve.

  All that’s left.

  And hell has come for us at last.

  Afterword

  “Second Suicide” came about while daydreaming about the alien invasion trope from the point of view of the aliens. This story has been told so many times. What’s interesting to me is that humans are always the underdogs. Makes sense—if aliens could arrive here in force, they’d be leagues ahead of us in all sorts of warfare-making gizmos. But what if we are more indomitable than we realize? What if we’re not so fragile after all? There are colonies of ants that most humans are wise enough to steer around.

  The tension in most good stories comes from the underdog perspective, the hero’s journey. Perhaps alien invasion stories put us at a disadvantage for narrative purposes as much as some primal fear. With “Second Suicide,” I wanted to flip that around. The opening scene hopefully makes the reader care for who is normally the bad guy. And then I tell a story of humans kicking ass, and somehow it becomes a sad tale. The people we normally root for are winning, and even while writing the story, I didn’t know how to feel about this.