Machine Learning: New and Collected Stories

by Hugh Howey

  It’s difficult to remember that every conflict has two sides. The other side feels just as secure in their position as we do in ours. There’s something to be gained by taking the opposing side as our own, really trying to empathize, imagine the bad guys are the good guys. With their motivations in mind, it becomes more difficult to dehumanize them and easier to understand them. It’s not something that comes easily—but I’m trying.

  Nothing Goes to Waste

  “Nothing goes to waste.”

  I could hear my father’s voice echoing in my mind, always pestering me to do this, not do that, to do it all differently.

  Pleasing him may forever prove impossible, but I couldn’t help myself from trying.

  He wanted a boy. It was a fact, not something I guessed about or suppressed in my psyche. No, he told me all the time. Usually right after correcting me or pointing out some flaw.

  Born small, I stayed that way. Doctor said it was a problem with one of my glands. My dad thought it was gender-related. My theory? Self-preservation. My body had figured out early on that it was a target and best to make itself hard to hit. Stupid theory, I know, but it helps to think it.

  You get picked on for being small long enough, you eventually figure there’s no benefit to be had. Tall kids play galaxy ball, some of them going off to make millions. Fat kids push each other across gravity mats, winning accolades from their countries. When I was growing up, small kids had their money taken away from them. And they got plenty of shouts, but not the good kind.

  I was fourteen before I discovered the one thing small people were good for. Riding Theryls. The fastest quadrupeds on twelve planets. Of course, Theryl racing wasn’t that lucrative for the jockey, even as the owner made piles of credits and the studs sold for piles more. And outside the secretive gambling rings where a year’s wage might be put on the line for a single race, nobody could name a single Theryl jockey.

  But it paid a wage. And it was something I could be good at. As good as the boys. Maybe good enough for my dad.

  I quit school and got a job in the stables, working my way up. A trainer named Juinco took me under his wing, let me cool a few Theryls down after their workout, get comfortable in the saddle. I did a few amateur circuits first, then some smaller shows, finding more ladders to work my way up. Only now, the rungs weren’t a stretch because of my height, but thanks to my gender.

  Still, I worked hard, my father’s voice always in my ear, urging me along. Eventually, owners saw that I didn’t drink or do the drugs other jockeys got into. I didn’t gamble away my meager pay. I finally got my shot.

  “You sure you wanna go pro?” Juinco asked me. “It ain’t easy going back.”

  Juinco knew—he was a retired jockey, like most trainers. He’d made the sacrifices you have to in order to compete. Every ounce mattered. I could do the calculations in my head, each tenth of an ounce meant three-fourths of a second. That might be the difference between first and fifth.

  I’d grown used to the hunger, starving myself for days before a race. The trick was to have enough energy to not pass out, but no more. If the blackness pushed in around your vision while you jounced down the track, you’d hit it perfect. I could do that. My dad had taught me to be perfect.

  My new pro sponsor paid for the legal procedures, like the removal of most of my thigh muscles. You didn’t need them on a Theryl—it was almost all in the hamstrings and ass. My arms I already had down to mere sticks, using them as little as possible, starving myself enough to have my body absorb its own bone marrow. Every ounce meant almost three and a half seconds. There were so many parts of me I could let go of.

  You can tell a lot about a Theryl jockey just by shaking their hand. If you feel a full set of fingers wrap around the side of your hand, you’re dealing with an amateur. Someone on one of the smaller circuits. A lightweight, but not light enough.

  Unfortunately, even though the facts were well-known, the procedure couldn’t be performed “officially.” I suspected the race committee wasn’t solely to blame; the jockeys treated it like a rite of passage. Something each rider needed to do themselves.

  Thumb and forefinger, that was all I needed to stay in the saddle. Even if I fell off once or twice a year, I would win twice that many extra races by shaving the superfluous weight. I hardly needed to do the math.

  It was Juinco’s final lesson before I moved on to the pro ranks. He told me a hot plate was better than a welding iron, the flat surface cauterizing the wound quicker and cleaner. I bit down on a strap of leather, just like he’d said, and aligned the clippers around the base of my pinkie. One of the long handles went across my shoulder; the other was gripped in my other hand, one of its last acts as a fully formed appendage.

  I made sure the cooking plate was all the way up before closing my eyes and pulling the handles together. It made a loud pop as it went through the bone, and the pain was more of a dull throb than the bite of a sharp cut. My brain wanted to pass out, but I had mastered the art of taming that sensation. I pushed my bleeding nub against the hot plate, filling the room with a sizzle and the smell of cooked meat.

  It reminded me of the step I’d forgotten. Juinco’s insistence returning to me at the odor of my burning flesh.

  “Eat something before you start,” he’d said. I didn’t think it was important, but all of a sudden understood why. I salivated uncontrollably and glanced at the missing piece of me sitting on the table.

  When was the last time I’d eaten? I couldn’t remember.

  I could hear my dad’s voice, clear as the popping of hot juice on the hot plate.

  “Nothing goes to waste.”

  Afterword

  This may be the most gruesome story I’ve ever written. The idea that a jockey would so value their diminished weight that they would discard what they see as extraneous digits and limbs. But this is where science fiction and satire help reveal absurdities in real life. We harm ourselves all the time in pursuit of strange ideals.

  I’ve wrestled with an eating disorder my whole life. There must be some genetic component, because my father has it as well. I don’t have it as bad as many do, but I’ve always felt overweight, even when I can see my ribs. I skip meals and control my portions in order to feel skinny enough. I have studied enough about the human brain to know that this is a problem, and to fight against it and try to maintain a healthy weight, but the issue is still there.

  When I was in college, my best friend was in the local ballet company. Most of my friends were dancers, and I saw the horrific pressures placed on the female dancers to maintain a certain weight and size. There was also the abuse of their feet. The injuries in the name of grace and balance were absurd. The audience wept for all the wrong reasons.

  I think “Nothing Goes to Waste” was written thinking of my friends Scott, Shannon, and Sarah. The irony is in the title. Plenty goes to waste. All for sport and art and shame.

  Deep Blood Kettle

  They say the sky will fill with dust in a bad way if we don’t do something soon. My teacher Mrs. Sandy says that if the meteor hits, it’ll put up enough dirt to block the sun, and everything will turn cold for a long, long while. When I came home and told Pa about this, he got angry. He called Mrs. Sandy a bad word, said she was teaching us nonsense. I told him the dinosaurs died because of dust in the sky. Pa said there weren’t no such thing as dinosaurs.

  “You boys watch,” he told me and my brother. “That rock’ll burn up. It’ll be no more than a flash of light. I’ve seen a million shooting stars if I’ve seen a dozen.” Pa stopped rubbing his rifle and traced a big arc in the air with his oil-stained rag. “She’ll hit the sky and light up like fireworks, and the worst she’ll do is leave a crater like that one down in Arizona. Then we’ll show them suckers how we watch over our land.”

  Only Pa don’t use the word “suckers.” Pa uses worse words for the invaders than he ever did for Mrs. Sandy. He never calls them aliens. Sometimes he says it’s the Russians or the Chinese or
the Koreans. He believes in aliens about as much as dinosaurs.

  Pa spat in the dirt and asked if I was taking a break or something. I told him, “No sir,” and went back to oiling my gun. He and my brother did the same.

  Pa says our land is fertile because of the killin’ we soak it in. That’s why things grow as tall as they do. The little critters are killed dead and give their life to the soil.

  I seen it every year when we plow it under for the new crops. When I was a boy, before Pa let me drive the John Deere, I’d play in the loose soil his plowing left behind. Acres and acres for a sandbox. The dust he kicked up would blot the sky and dry my mouth, but I’d kick through the furrows and dig for arrowheads until my fingernails were chipped or packed full of dirt.

  Where he hadn’t yet plowed, you could see the dead stalks from the last harvest. The soil there was packed tight from the rains and the dry spells. Pa used to laugh at the newfangled ways of planting that kept the ground like that by driving the seeds straight through. It weren’t the way the Samuels tended their land, he told us. We Samuels dragged great steel plows across the hard pack and the old stalks, and we killed everything in the ground. That was what made the land ready again.

  When I was younger, I found half a worm floppin’ on top of the ground after a plow. It moved like the tail on a happy dog, but it was already dead. Took a while for it to realize, was all. I pinched it between my fingers and watched it wind down like the grandfather clock in the great room. When it was still, the worm went into a furrow, and I kicked some dirt over it. That was the whole point. The little things would feed the corn, and the corn would feed us, and we would all get taller because of it. Pa, meanwhile, drove that tractor in great circles that took him nearly out of sight; the dust he kicked up could blot out the whole Montana sky, and my boots would fill up with gravel as I kicked through the loose furrows he left behind.

  Pa only believes in things he can see. He didn’t believe in the meteor until it became brighter than any star in the sky. Before long, you could see it in the daytime if you knew where to look and squinted just right. The people on the TV talked to scientists who said it was coming straight for us. They had a date and time and everything. One of them said you could know where it would land, but that nobody wanted a panic. It just meant people panicked everywhere. And then it leaked that the rock would hit somewhere between Russia and China, and Pa reckoned those people were panicking a little worse.

  He called it a rock, not a meteor. Like a bunch of people, Pa don’t think it’ll amount to much. Folks been predicting doom since his grandpa was a boy, and the world outside still looked pretty much the same.

  This was before we got “First Contact.” That’s what they called it even though the rock hadn’t set down yet. It was nothing but a phone call from what I could tell. On the TV they said it was coming from the other side of the rock. That’s when even the scientists and all the smart people started acting a little crazy.

  First Contact happened back when Mrs. Sandy was still our teacher. We listened to the news at school, and I talked to her, and I didn’t tell Pa any of what I learned. It made him angry hearing about the demands, but Mrs. Sandy said it was the best thing that ever happened to our planet, them deciding to come here. She told me a lot before she left and the substitute took her place. She was going to be one of them that welcomed the invaders, even sold her house and bought a pickup with a camper back. I eventually reckoned Pa was right to call her some of those bad things.

  But I did sort out a bunch between the TV and what Mrs. Sandy said. The rock weren’t no accident like the scientists used to suppose. It was aimed. Like the stones I chucked after a plowing, trying to hit one rock with another. The invaders, they was right behind the big rock.

  Mrs. Sandy liked to say that our governments would make the right choice. And all of a sudden, the same channels on TV that I watched for news showed new people. They wore headphones and spoke funny and argued over what to do. My brother wouldn’t stop asking about the little flags in front of each of them, and I had to tell him to shut up so I could hear.

  The invaders were giving us a choice, it sounded like. All they wanted was half our land and for us to get rid of all of our weapons, and they would leave most of us alone. They gave a date. It was the same one the scientists had already figured. The rock could be moved, they said. It didn’t have to hit. It could go into orbit, and then we could have it for our own.

  On a different channel, men with suits and ties argued real loud over how much the rock was worth. They used words I’d never heard of before, something more than “trillion.” I knew what gold and some of the other valuable things were, but some were called rare and sounded like they were from Earth. I couldn’t sort out how something that could kill us one day could be worth so much the next, but the invaders said the rock only needed a nudge.

  When I turned thirteen, Pa said I was finally old enough to drive. He taught me in the old pickup with the missing tailgate and the tires that were always starving for air. It was a shifter, which seemed a hard way to start driving, but Pa believed in learning the worst to begin with. I had to yank up on the steering wheel to push the old clutch all the way in. Damn thing made it so my arms would be as sore at night as my legs. Pa cursed every time the gears growled, and it was hot in the truck even with the windows down. But I got to where he would send me to fetch the mail. And once I’d mastered the old pickup, he taught me on the John Deere, and I learned to plow. Pa was right that it made driving the tractor easier. But it was still scary as hell.

  The first time you drive something so big, you wonder if one man ought to be able. There was a red lever that went from rabbit to turtle, and Pa would stand in the cabin with me and yell for me to nudge it up. But we were already bouncing around something fierce. The noise was terrible. And looking back, I couldn’t see the house through the haze I was stirring. It weren’t even like we were moving so much as the great big tires of the tractor were spinning the earth beneath their knobby treads. Pa would bend over the seat and knock the red lever up, and the bucking would grow worse. The steering wheel jittered side to side, and I had to clutch it just to stay in my seat.

  But like the truck, my fear of the tractor didn’t keep. Before long, Pa hitched the great plow to the back, twenty-four feet wide, and I learned how to kill the soil to make it ready for planting. The seat would bounce me along like I was in a saddle, and the radio would blare in the little cabin that smelled like my dad when he was sweaty. I did circles like I was mowing grass but twenty-four feet at a time. The mesa behind our house would disappear behind the dust, and it got so I couldn’t see the cliffs along the back of the homestead. But I could see the soil in front packed hard and tight, and I could see out the side where I’d already been. Plowing was a lot like mowing—I just had to overlap where I’d been before.

  “Not too much overlap,” Pa would tell me. The price of gas had gone way up since First Contact, and too much overlap meant an extra run for no good reason. And so I bounced along and put death in the soil. I cut the worms in half and made things ready for planting. Now and then, a deer would startle across the loose furrows, legs having a hard time of it, and white rabbits would dash from the thrush. The rabbits were the dumbest little things. They would dart back and forth in front of the tractor—they could see me coming, but they couldn’t make up their minds. I would yell and yell at them, but they would just jitter back and forth until the tractor went over them and then the plow. Turning in my seat, I always expected a tuft of white to spit out somewhere, but the soil that kicked up would just turn a little red.

  “That’s where the corn would grow the tallest,” Pa would say when I told him how dumb the rabbits were. The blood in the soil was a good thing. That’s when you knew it was ready.

  The cliffs behind our house were a source of constant play, and they had a funny name. Too Close for Comfort they were called. I reckoned kids made up that name, but it was a real thing. Scientists called
it that. Men who were supposedly smart had come up with it.

  When I was a boy too young to drive—before I turned thirteen—they came from the university and dug in the dirt at the base of the cliffs that rise up behind our land. They found so many bones beneath the dirt that they couldn’t take them all. Steve Harkin and I plotted to sneak in one night and nab a skull or two, but the men in the shiny city trucks with no 4×4 put a stop to that by giving us a skull each. It weren’t as fun without the danger and flashlights, but we got our skulls.

  I remember cradling that great hunk of bone as heavy as stone and asking one of the university men why they were digging there.

  “This here was a buffalo jump,” the man told me. He reminded me of Mrs. Sandy, and he had this clipboard with all kinds of little squares full of numbers and was the smartest man I ever spoke to ’cept for my pa.

  “The buffalo used to come over this cliff and smash into the rocks down here,” he told me and Steve Harkin. “That’s where these bones came from.”

  Steve thought that was pretty cool. We gazed up at the cliffs that I had known all my life, the ones that delayed the sunrise in the morning, and I saw them different for the first time. I asked this man from the university why buffalo were so dumb.

  “Oh, buffalo aren’t dumb,” he claimed. I was about to argue with him, but then he explained. “Indians used to chase the buffalo to the edge of the cliff in great herds,” he said. “They tumbled off hundreds at a time and smashed their legs so they couldn’t walk. While they squealed and snorted and tried to pick themselves up on busted bones, the Indians would run in with spears and jab ’em in the neck.”