Machine Learning: New and Collected Stories

by Hugh Howey

  There is a path leading down to the boathouse. The small fishing boat hangs serenely in its water-stained sling. There are clumps of flowers along the path with wire fencing to protect them from the deer. John remembers waking up in the morning all those years ago to find several doe grazing. The venison and fish will never run out. They will soon teem, he supposes. John thinks of the market they passed in the last small town. There won’t be anyone else to rummage through the canned goods. It will be a strange and quiet life, and he doesn’t like to think of what Emily will do once he and Barbara are gone. There will be time enough to think on that.

  The screen door slams as Emily goes back to help unload the Lexus. John wonders for a moment how many others chickened out, decided to stay put in their homes, are now making plans for quiet days. He looks out over the lake as a breeze shatters that mirror finish, and he wishes, briefly, that he’d invited a few others from the program to join him here.

  He takes a deep breath and turns to go help unload the car, when a faint rumble overhead grows into a growl. He looks up and searches the sky—but he can’t find the source. It sounds like thunder, but there isn’t a cloud to be seen. The noise grows and grows until the silver underbelly of a passenger liner flashes above the treetops and rumbles out over the lake. Can’t be more than a thousand feet up. The jet is eerily quiet. It disappears into the trees beyond the far bank.

  There comes the crack of splitting wood and the bass thud of impact. John waits for the ball of fire and plume of smoke, but of course: the plane is bone dry. Probably overshot Kansas on its way north from Dallas. Thousands of planes would be gliding to earth, autopilots trying in vain to keep them level, engines having sputtered to a stop. The deck creaks as Barbara rushes to his side.

  “Was that—?”

  He takes her hand in his and watches the distant tree line where birds are stirring. It is strange to think that no one will investigate the crash, that the bodies will never be identified, never seen. Unless he wanders up there out of curiosity one day, or forgets as he tracks deer or a rabbit and then comes across pieces of fuselage. A long life flashes before him, one full of strange quietude and unspoken horrors. A better life than being buried with the rest, he tells himself. Better than crawling into a bunker outside of Atlanta with that blue book. Better than running to Tracy in Colorado and having to explain to Barbara, eventually, what took place in Milan.

  The porch shudders from tiny stomping feet. The screen door whacks shut. There is the sound of luggage thudding to the floor, and the porch falls still. John is watching the birds stir in the blue and cloudless sky. His nose itches, and he reaches to wipe it. Barbara sags against him, and John holds her up. They have this moment together, alive and unburied, a spot of blood on John’s knuckle.

  In the Mountain

  “Carry on,” one founder would say to another. To Tracy, it had become a mantra of sorts. Igor had started it, would wave his disfigured hand and dismiss the other founders back to their work. What began as mockery of him became a talisman of strength. Carry on. Do the job. One foot forward. A reminder to forge ahead even when the task was gruesome, even when it seemed pointless, even when billions were about to die.

  But Tracy knew some things can only be carried so far before they must be set down. Set down or dropped. Dropped and broken.

  The world was one of these things. The ten founders carried what they could to Colorado. An existing hole in the mountain there was burrowed even deeper. And when they could do no more, the founders stopped. And they counted the moments as the world plummeted toward the shattering.

  The rock and debris pulled from the mountain formed a sequence of hills, a ridge now dusted with snow. The heavy lifters and buses and dump trucks had been abandoned by the mounds of rubble. There was a graveyard hush across the woods, a deep quiet of despair, of a work finished. The fresh snow made no sound as it fell from heavy gray clouds.

  Tracy stood with the rest of the founders just inside the gaping steel doors of the crypt they’d built. She watched the snow gather in yesterday’s muddy ruts. The crisscross patterns from the busloads of the invited would be invisible by nightfall. Humanity was not yet gone, the world not yet ruined, and already the universe was conspiring to remove all traces.

  Anatoly fidgeted by her side. The heavyset physicist exhaled, and a cloud of frost billowed before his beard. On her other side, Igor reached into his heavy coat and withdrew a flash of silver. Tracy stole a glance. The gleaming watch was made more perfect in his mangled hand. Igor claimed he was a descendant and product of Chernobyl. Anatoly had told her it was a chemical burn.

  Between Igor’s red and fused fingers, the hours ticked down.

  “Ten minutes,” Igor said to the gathered. His voice was a grumble of distant thunder. Tracy watched as he formed an ugly fist and choked the life out of that watch. His pink knuckles turned the color of the snow.

  Tracy shifted her attention to the woods and strained one last time to hear the sound of an engine’s whine—the growl of a rental car laboring up that mountain road. She waited for the crunch-crunch of hurrying boots. She scanned for the man who would appear between those gray aspens with their peeled-skin bark. But the movies had lied to her, had conditioned her to expect last-minute heroics: a man running, a weary and happy smile, snow flying in a welcome embrace, warm lips pressed to cold ones, both trembling.

  “He’s not coming,” Tracy whispered to herself. Here was a small leak of honesty from some deep and forgotten place.

  Igor heard her and checked his watch again. “Five minutes,” he said quietly.

  And only then, with five minutes left before they needed to get inside, before they needed to shut the doors for good, did it become absolutely certain that he wasn’t coming. John had gone to Atlanta with the others, had followed orders like a good soldier, and all that she’d worked to create in Colorado—the fantasy of surviving with him by her side—had been a great delusion. Those great crypt doors would close on her and trap her in solitude. And Tracy felt in that moment that she shouldn’t have built this place, that she wouldn’t have wasted her time if only she’d known.

  “We should get inside,” Igor said. He closed the lid on that small watch of his—a click like a cocked gun—and then it disappeared into his heavy coat.

  There was a sob among them. A sniff. Patrice suddenly broke from the rest of the founders and ran through the great doors, her boots clomping on concrete, and Tracy thought for a moment that Patrice would keep on running, that she’d disappear into the aspens, but she stopped just beyond the concrete deck, stooped and gathered a handful of fresh snow, and ran back inside, eating some of it from her palms.

  Tracy thought of grabbing something as well. A twig. A piece of that bark. A single falling snowflake on her tongue. She scanned the woods for some sight of John as Anatoly guided her inside, deep enough that the founders by the doors could shove the behemoths closed. Four feet thick, solid steel, streaked with rust where the weather had wetted them, they made a hideous screech as they were moved. A cry like a mother wolf out in the gray woods calling for her pups.

  The white world slimmed as the doors came together. The view became a column, and then a gap, and then a sliver. There was a heavy and mortal thump as the doors met, steel pressing on steel, and then a darkness bloomed that had to be blinked against to get eyes working again.

  Though the doors were now closed, Tracy thought she could still hear the sound of the wolf crying—and realized it was one of the founders making that mournful noise. Tears welled up in her eyes, brought there by a partner’s lament. And Tracy remembered being young once and sobbing like that. She remembered the first time a man had broken her heart. It had felt like the end of the entire fucking world.

  This day was something like that.

  The mountain was full of the confused. Nearly five thousand people asking questions. Their bags were not yet unpacked; their backs were still sore from the rutted, bumpy ride in the buses. And now th
e myriad excuses for bringing them there—the retreats, reunions, vacations, emergencies—evaporated as conflicting accounts collided.

  With the doors closed, the founders set out to explain. First to family. Later, to all of the invited. Tracy had been given an equal allotment of invitations, and she had used most of them on practical people. Soldiers. Tools of retribution. When the world was clean, all she wanted was to see a bullet in the people who had done this.

  Of friends, she had none. Most of her adult life had been spent in Washington or overseas. There was a doorman in Geneva who had always been kind to her. There was the guy who did her taxes. Which was to admit that there was no one. Just her meager family: her father, her sister, and her sister’s husband. Three people in all the world. Maybe that was why John’s decision hurt so much. He was almost all she had. All she’d thought she had.

  At least it meant a small audience as she dispensed the horrid truth, the nightmare she’d held inside for more than a year. Tracy hesitated outside the door to her sister’s small room. She raised her fist and prepared to knock. Truth waited for her on the other side, and she wasn’t sure she was ready.

  Her father sat on the bed and wrung his hands while Tracy spoke. Her sister, April, sat next to him, a look of slack confusion on her face. Remy, April’s husband, had refused to sit. He stood by his wife, a hand on her shoulder, something between anger and horror in his eyes.

  They were all dressed for the camping trip they’d been promised—a week of backpacking, of living in the woods. The gear by the foot of the bed would never be used. The bags and the garb were reminders of Tracy’s lies. She listened as the words spilled from her mouth. She listened to herself say what she had rehearsed a hundred times: how the tiny machines used in hospitals to attack cancer—those invisible healers, the same ones that would’ve saved Mom if they’d been available in time—how those same machines were as capable of killing as they were of healing.

  She told her family how those machines were in everyone’s blood, in every human being’s on Earth. And curing everyone might be possible, but it would only be temporary. Once people knew that it could be done, it was only a matter of time. A switch had been invented that could wipe out every man and woman alive. Any hacker in his basement could flip that switch—which meant someone would.

  Tracy got through that part without the wailing or hysterics she’d expected, without the questions and confusion from her dad, without anyone pushing past her and banging on the door, screaming to be let out. No one asked her if she belonged to a cult or if she was on drugs or suggested she needed to take a break from whatever work she did in Washington, that she needed to see a professional.

  “It was only a matter of time before someone did it,” Tracy said again. “And so our government acted before someone else could. So they could control the aftermath.”

  Remy started to say something, but Tracy continued before he could: “We aren’t a part of the group who did this,” she said. She looked to her father. “We didn’t do this. But we found out about it, and we realized we couldn’t stop it. We realized . . . that maybe they were right. That it needed to be done. And so we did the next best thing. We created this place. We invited ourselves along. And those that we could. We’ll be okay here. You all were inoculated on the way. You probably felt your ears popping on the bus ride up. Now we’ll spend six months here, maybe a year—”

  “Six months,” Remy said.

  “This can’t be real.” Her sister shook her head.

  “It’s real,” Tracy told April. “I’m sorry. I never wanted to keep this from any of—”

  “I don’t believe it,” Remy said. He glanced around the room as if seeing it for the first time. April’s husband was an accountant, was used to columns of numbers in black and white. He was also a survivalist, was used to sorting out the truth on his own. He didn’t learn simply by being told. Igor had warned that it would take some people weeks before they believed.

  “We are positive,” Tracy said. This was a lie; she had her own doubts. She wouldn’t be completely sure until the countdown clock hit zero. But there was no use infecting others with her slender hopes. “I realize this is hard to hear. It’s hard even for me to grasp. But the war we were bracing for isn’t going to come with clouds of fire and armies marching. It’s going to be swifter and far worse than that.”

  “Did you do this?” her father asked, voice shaking with age. Even with his encroaching, occasional senility, he knew that Tracy worked for bad agencies full of bad people. There were classified things she had confided to him years ago that he had been willing to shoulder for her. They would likely be the very last things his dementia claimed, little islands of disappointment left in a dark and stormy sea.

  “No, Dad, I didn’t do this. But I am the reason we have this place, a nice place to be together and wait it out.”

  She flashed back to that night in Milan, to the first time she’d laid eyes on the book with the word Order embossed on its cover. It was the same night she made John forget about his wife for a brief moment, the night when all those years of flirtations came to fruition: the bottle of wine, the dancing, that dress—the one she’d gotten in trouble for expensing to her company card. And in his room, after they made love, and hungering for more danger, she had gone to the dresser where she knew his gun would be tucked away, and she’d found that book instead.

  If John had stayed in bed, she wouldn’t have thought anything more of it. The book was full of the dry text that only lawyers who had become politicians could craft. Emergency procedures. An ops manual of some sort. But the way John had lurched out of bed, it was as if Tracy had let his wife into the room. She remembered the way his hands trembled against her as he asked her to put it away, to come back to bed, like she’d grabbed something far more dangerous than a gun, something cocked and loaded with something much worse than bullets.

  After he’d gone to sleep, Tracy had sat on the edge of the bathtub, the book open on the toilet lid, and had turned every page with her phone set to record. Even as she scanned, she saw enough to be afraid.

  Enough to know.

  “I’m sorry,” she told her father, unable to stomach the disappointment on his face.

  “When—?” April asked.

  Tracy turned to her sister, the schoolteacher, who knew only that Tracy worked for the government, who had no idea about all the classified blood on her hands. April was four years older, would always be older than Tracy in all the ways that didn’t matter and in none of the ways that did.

  “In a few hours,” Tracy said. “It’ll all be over in a few hours.”

  “And will we feel anything?” April rubbed her forearm. “What about everyone out there? Everyone we know. They’ll just—?”

  Remy sat beside his wife and wrapped his arms around her. The air around Tracy grew cold. Even more empty.

  “We were supposed to be out there when it happened, too,” Tracy said. “The four of us. Remember that. We’ll talk more later. I have to get to a meeting—”

  “A meeting?” April asked. “A meeting? To do what? Decide the rest of our lives? Decide who lives and who dies? What kind of meeting?”

  And now Remy was no longer embracing his wife. He was restraining her.

  “How dare you!” April screamed at Tracy. Their father shivered on the bed, tried to say something, to reach out to his daughters and tell them not to fight. Tracy retreated toward the door. She was wrong about the hysteria, about it not coming. There was just some delay. And as she slipped into the hall and shut the small room on her sister’s screaming, she heard that she’d been wrong about her beating on the door as well.

  Saving a person seemed simple. But saving them against their will was not. Tracy realized this as she navigated the corridors toward the command room, her sister’s screams still with her. She could hear muffled sobs and distant shouting from other rooms as she passed—more people learning the truth. Tracy had thought that preserving a life would absolv
e all other sins, but the sin of not consulting with that life first was perhaps the only exception. She recalled an ancient argument she’d had with her mother when she was a teenager, remembered yelling at her mom and saying she wished she’d never been born. And she’d meant it. What right did someone else have to make that decision for her? Her mom had always expected her to be grateful simply for having been brought into the world.

  Now Tracy had made the same mistake.

  She left the apartment wing, those two thousand rooms dug laterally and tacked on to a complex built long ago, and she entered the wide corridors at the heart of the original bunker. The facility had been designed to house fifteen hundred people for five years. The founders had invited more than three times that number, but they wouldn’t need to stay as long. The biggest job had been cleaning out and refilling the water and diesel tanks.

  The entire place was a buried relic from a different time, a time capsule for a different threat, built for a different end-of-the-world scenario. The facility had been abandoned years ago. It had become a tourist attraction. And then it had fallen into disrepair. The founders chose the location after considering several options. Igor and Anatoly used their research credentials and leased the space under the auspices of searching for neutrinos, some kind of impossible-to-find subatomic particles. But it was a much different and invisible threat they actually set out to find: the machines that polluted the air and swam through every vein.

  Tracy used her key to unlock the cluttered command room. A round table dominated the center of the space. A doughnut of monitors ringed the ceiling above, tangles of wires drooping from them and running off to equipment the engineers had set up. In one corner, a gleaming steel pod stood like some part of an alien ship. It had been built according to stolen plans, was thought at first to be necessary for clearing the small machines from their bloodstreams, but it ended up being some sort of cryo-device, a side project the Atlanta team had undertaken. The only machine Tracy knew how to operate in that room was the coffeemaker. She started a pot and watched the countdown clock overhead tick toward Armageddon.