Machine Learning

by Hugh Howey

  When the strangeness happens, I think it’ll be a glitch. We might not even understand what caused it or be able to reproduce it at first. Kevin Kelly thinks we won’t even know it happened for the longest time.

  “What’s the first thing AI will do when it becomes self-aware?” he asked me.

  “What?” I wanted to know.

  “Hide,” Kevin said. “The first thing it’ll do is hide.”

  Silo Stories

  In the Air

  Gears whir; an escapement lets loose; wound springs explode a fraction of an inch, and a second hand lurches forward and slams to a stop. All these small violences erupt on John’s wrist as the world counts down its final moments, one second at a time.

  Less than five minutes. Just a few minutes more, and they would’ve made it to the exit. They would’ve been on back roads all the way to the cabin. John stares at the dwindling time and silently curses the fender-bender in Nebraska that set them back. He curses himself for not leaving yesterday or in the middle of the night. But so much to do. The world was about to end, and there was so much to do.

  His wife, Barbara, whispers a question, but she has become background noise—much like the unseen interstate traffic whooshing by up the embankment. Huddled on the armrest between them, their nine-year-old daughter, Emily, wants to know why they’re pulled off the road, says she doesn’t need to pee. A tractor trailer zooms past, air brakes rattling like a machine gun, a warning for everyone to keep their heads down.

  John turns in the driver’s seat to survey the embankment. He has pulled off Interstate 80 and down the shoulder, but it doesn’t feel far enough. There aren’t any trees to hide behind. He tries to imagine what’s coming but can’t. He can’t allow himself to believe it. And yet here he is, cranking up the Explorer, ignoring the pleas from the fucking auto-drive to take over and manually steering down the grass toward the concrete piling of a large billboard. The sign high above promises cheap gas and cigarettes. Five minutes. Five minutes, and they’d have made it to the exit. So close.

  “Honey, what’s going on?”

  A glance at his wife. Emily clutches his shoulder as he hits a bump. He waited too long to tell them. It’s one of those lies that dragged out and became heavier and heavier the farther he carried it. A tractor-pull lie. And now his wheels are spinning and spitting dirt, and the seconds are ticking down.

  He pulls the Explorer around the billboard and backs up until the bumper meets the concrete piling. Killing the ignition silences the annoying beeps from the auto-drive, the seat belt sensors, the GPS warning that they’re off the road. The world settles into a brief silence. All the violence is invisible, on a molecular level, the slamming of tiny gears and second hands in whirring watches and little machines swimming in bloodstreams.

  “Something very bad is about to happen,” John finally says. He turns to his wife, but it is the sight of his daughter that blurs his vision. Emily will be immune, he tells himself. The three of them will be immune. He has to believe this if he allows himself to believe the rest, if he allows himself to believe that it’s coming. There is no time left for believing otherwise. A year of doubt, and here he is, that skeptic in the trenches who discovers his faith right as the mortars whistle down.

  “You’re scaring me,” Barbara says.

  “Is this where we’re camping?” Emily asks, peering through the windshield and biting her lip in disappointment. The back of the Explorer is stuffed with enough gear to camp out for a month. As if that would be long enough.

  John glances at his watch. Not long. Not long. He turns again and checks the interstate. It’s hot and stuffy in the Explorer. Opening the sunroof, he looks for the words stuck deep in his throat. “I need you to get in the back,” he tells Emily. “You need to put your seat belt on, okay? And hold Mr. Bunny tight to your chest. Can you do that for me?”

  His voice is shaky. John has seen war and murder. He has participated in plenty of both. But nothing can steel a mind for this. He releases the sunroof button and wipes his eyes. Overhead, the contrail of a passenger jet cuts the square of open blue in half. John shudders to think of what will become of that. There must be tens of thousands of people in the air. Millions of other people driving. Not that it matters. An indiscriminate end is rapidly approaching. All those invisible machines in bloodstreams, counting down the seconds.

  “There’s something I haven’t told you,” he tells his wife. He turns to her, sees the worry in her furrowed brow, and realizes that she is ready for any betrayal. She is ready to hear him say that he is married to another woman. That he is gay. That he murdered a prostitute and her body is curled up where the spare tire used to be. That he has been betting on sports, and the reason for the camping gear is that the bank has taken away their home. Barbara is ready for anything. John wishes any of these trivialities were true.

  “I didn’t tell you before now because . . . because I didn’t believe it.” He is stammering. He can debrief the president of the United States without missing a beat, but not this. In the backseat, Emily whispers something to Mr. Bunny. John swallows and continues: “I’ve been a part of something—” He shakes his head. “Something worse than usual. And now . . . that something is about to—” He glances at his watch. It’s too late. She’ll never get to hear it from him, not when it mattered, not before it was too late. She will have to watch.

  He reaches over his shoulder and grabs his seat belt. Buckles up. Glancing up at the passing jet, John says a prayer for those people up in the air. He is thankful that they’ll be dead before they strike the earth. On the dashboard, there is a book with The Order embossed on the cover. In the reflection of the windshield, it looks vaguely like the word redo. If only.

  “What have you done?” Barbara asks, and there’s a deadness in her voice, a hollow. As if she knows the scope of the horrible things he could do.

  John focuses on his watch. The second hand twitches, and the anointed hour strikes. He and his family should be outside Atlanta with the others, not on the side of the road in Iowa. They should be crowding underground with everyone else, the selected few, the survivors. But here they are, on the side of the road, cowering behind a billboard blinking with cheap gas prices, bracing for the end of the world.

  For a long while, nothing happens.

  Traffic whizzes by unseen; the contrail overhead grows longer; his wife waits for an answer.

  The world is on autopilot, governed by the momentum of life, by humanity’s great machinations, by all those gears in motion, spinning and spinning.

  Emily asks if they can go now. She says she needs to pee.

  John laughs. Deep in his chest and with a flood of relief. He feels that cool wave of euphoria like a nearby zing telling him that a bullet has passed, that it missed. He was wrong. They were wrong. The book, Tracy, all the others. The national convention in Atlanta is nothing more than a convention, one party’s picking of a president, just what it was purported to be. There won’t be generations of survivors living underground. His government didn’t seed all of humanity with microscopic time bombs that will shut down their hosts at the appointed hour. John will now have to go camping with his family. And for weeks and weeks, Barbara will hound him over what this great secret was that made him pull off the interstate and act so strange—

  A scream erupts from the backseat, shattering this eyeblink of relief, this last laugh. Ahead, a pickup truck has left the interstate at a sharp angle. A front tire bites the dirt and sends the truck flipping into the air. It goes into the frantic spins of a figure skater, doors flying open like graceful arms, bodies tumbling out lifeless, arms and legs spread, little black asterisks in the open air.

  The truck hits in a shower of soil before lurching up again, dented and slower this time. There is motion in the rearview. A tractor trailer tumbles off the blacktop at ninety miles an hour. It is happening. It is really fucking happening. The end of the world.

  John’s heart stops for a moment. His lungs constrict as
if he has stepped naked into a cold shower. But this is only the shock of awareness. The invisible machines striking down the rest of humanity are not alive in him. He isn’t going to die, not in that precise moment, not at that anointed hour. His heart and lungs and body are inoculated.

  Twelve billion others aren’t so lucky.

  Two Days Before

  The ringtone is both melody and alarm. An old song, danced to in Milan, the composer unknown. It brings back the fragrance of her perfume and the guilt of a one-night stand.

  John’s palms are sweaty as he swipes the phone and accepts the call. He needs to change that fucking ringtone. Tracy is nothing more than a colleague. Nothing more. But it could’ve been Pavlov or Skinner who composed that tune, the way it drives him crazy in reflex.

  “Hello?” He smiles at Barbara, who is washing dishes, hands covered in suds. It’s Wednesday evening. Nothing unusual. Just a colleague calling after hours. Barbara turns and works the lipstick off the rim of a wineglass.

  “Have you made up your mind?” Tracy asks. She sounds like a waitress who has returned to his table to find him staring dumbly at the menu, as if this should be simple, as if he should just have the daily special like she suggested half an hour ago.

  “I’m sorry, you’re breaking up,” John lies. He steps out onto the porch and lets the screen door slam shut behind him. Strolling toward the garden, he startles the birds from the low feeder. The neighbor’s cat glares at him for ruining dinner before slinking away. “That’s better,” he says, glancing back toward the house.

  “Have you made up your mind?” Tracy asks again. She is asking the impossible. Upstairs on John’s dresser, there is a book with instructions on what to do when the world comes to an end. John has spent the past year reading that book from cover to cover. Several times, in fact. The book is full of impossible things. Unbelievable things. No one who reads these things would believe them, not unless they’d seen the impossible before.

  Ah, but Tracy has. She believes. And like a chance encounter in Milan—skin touching skin and sparking a great mistake—her brush with this leather book has spun John’s life out of control. Whether the book proves false or not, it has already gotten him deeper than he would have liked.

  “Our plane leaves tomorrow,” he says. “For Atlanta.” Technically, this is true. That plane will leave. John has learned from the best how to lie without lying.

  A deep pull of air on the other end of the line. John can picture Tracy’s lips, can see her elegant neck, can imagine her perfectly, can almost taste the salt on her skin. He needs to change that goddamn ringtone.

  “We can guarantee your safety,” Tracy says.

  John laughs.

  “Listen to me. I’m serious. We know what they put in you. Come to Colorado—”

  “You mean New Moscow?”

  “That’s not funny.”

  “How well do you know these people?” John fights to keep his voice under control. He has looked into the group Tracy is working with. Some of them hold distinguished positions on agency watch lists, including a doctor who poses an actionable threat. John tells himself it won’t matter, that they are too late to stop anything. And he believes this.

  “I’ve known Professor Karpov for years,” Tracy insists. “He believes me. He believes you. We’re going to survive this thanks to you. And so I would damn well appreciate you being here.”

  “And my family?”

  Tracy hesitates. “Of course. Them too. Tell me you’ll be here, John. Hell, forget the tickets I sent and go to the airport right now. Buy new tickets. Don’t wait until tomorrow.”

  John thinks of the two sets of tickets in the book upstairs. He lowers his voice to a whisper. “And tell Barbara what?”

  There’s a deep breath, a heavy sigh on the other end of the line.

  “Lie to her. You’re good at that.”

  The tractor trailer fills the rearview mirror. A bright silver grille looms large, tufts of grass spitting up from the great tires, furrows of soil loosened by yesterday’s rain. Time seems to slow. The grille turns as if suddenly uninterested in the Explorer, and the long trailer behind the cab slews to the side, jackknifing. John yells for his family to hold on; he braces for impact. Ahead of him, several other cars are tumbling off the road.

  The eighteen-wheeler growls as it passes by. Its trailer misses the concrete pillar and catches the bumper of the Explorer. The world jerks violently. John’s head bounces off his headrest as the Explorer is slammed aside like a geek shouldered by a jock in a hallway.

  Mr. Bunny hits the dash. There’s a yelp from Barbara and a screech from Emily. Ahead of them, the trailer flips and begins a catastrophic roll, the thin metal shell of the trailer tearing like tissue, countless brown packages catapulting into the air and spilling across the embankment.

  Time speeds back up, and John can hear tires squealing, cars braking hard on the interstate, a noise like a flock of birds. It sounds like things are alive out there—still responding to the world—but John knows it’s just automated safety features in action. It’s the newer cars protecting themselves from the older cars. It’s the world slamming to a stop like the second hand inside a watch.

  Tracy had told him once that he would last five minutes out here on his own. Turning to check on his wife, John sees a van barreling through the grass toward her side of the car. He yells at Barbara and Emily to move, to get out, get out. Fighting for his seat belt, he wonders if Tracy was wrong, if she had overestimated him.

  Five minutes seems like an impossibly long time to live.

  The Day Before

  John likes to tell himself he’s a hero. No, it isn’t that he likes the telling—he just needs to hear it. He stands in front of the mirror as he has every morning of his adult life, and he whispers the words to himself:

  “I am a hero.”

  There is no conviction. Conviction must be doled out at birth in some limited supply, because it has drained away from him over the years. Or perhaps the conviction was in his fatigues, which he no longer wears. Perhaps it was the pats on the back he used to get in the airport from complete strangers, the applause as the gate attendant allowed him and a few others to board first. Maybe that’s where the conviction came from, because he hasn’t felt it in a long while.

  “I’m a hero,” he used to whisper to himself, the words fogging the Plexiglas mask of his clean-room suit, a letter laced with ricin tucked into an envelope and carefully sealed with a wet sponge. The address on the envelope is for an imam causing trouble in Istanbul—but maybe it kills an assistant instead of this imam. Maybe it kills his wife. Or a curious child. “I’m a hero,” he whispers, fumbling in that bulky suit, his empty mantra evaporating from his visor.

  “I’m a hero,” he used to think to himself as he spotted for his sniper. Calling out the klicks to target and the wind, making sure his shooter adjusts for humidity and altitude, he then watches what the bullet does. He tells himself this is necessary as a body sags to the earth. He pats a young man on the shoulder, pounding some of his conviction into another.

  In the field, the lies come easy. Lying in bed the next week, at home, listening to his wife breathe, it’s hard to imagine that he’s the same person. That he helped kill a man. A woman. A family in a black car among a line of black cars. Sometimes the wrong person, the wrong car. These are things he keeps from his wife, and so the details do not seem to live with them. They belong to another. They are a man in Milan with a beautiful woman swinging in the mesmerizing light. They are two people kissing against a door, a room key dropped, happy throats laughing.

  John peers at himself in the present, standing in the bathroom, full of wrinkles and regrets. He returns to the bedroom and finds Barbara packing her bags. One of her nice dresses lies flat on the bed, a necklace arranged on top—like a glamorous woman has just vanished. He steels himself to tell her, to tell her that she won’t need that dress. This will lead to questions. It will lead to a speech that he has rehearsed
ten thousand times, but never once out loud. For one more long minute, as he delays and says nothing, he can feel that they will go to Atlanta and he will do as he has been told. For one more minute, the cabin by the lake is no more than an ache, a dirty thought, a crazy dream. Tracy in Colorado has been forgotten. She may as well be in Milan. John thinks suddenly of other empty dresses. He comes close to confessing in that moment, comes close to telling his wife the truth.

  There are so many truths to tell.

  “Remember that time we had Emily treated for her lungs?” he wants to say. “Remember how the three of us sat in that medical chamber and held her hand and asked her to be brave? Because it was so tight in there, and Emily hates to be cooped up? Well, they were doing something to all three of us. Tiny machines were being let into our bloodstream to kill all the other machines in there. Good machines to kill the bad machines. That’s what they were doing.

  “We are all ticking time bombs,” he would tell her, was about to tell her. “Every human alive is a ticking time bomb. Because this is the future of war, and the first person to act wins the whole game. And that’s us. That’s me. Killing like a bastard from a distance. Doing what they tell me. A payload is a payload. Invisible bullets all heading toward their targets, and none will miss. Everyone is going to die.

  “But not us,” he will say, because by now Barbara is always crying. That’s how he pictures her, every time he rehearses this. She is cunning enough to understand at once that what he says is true. She is never shouting or slapping him, just crying out of sympathy for the soon-to-be dead. “Not us,” he promises. “We are all taken care of. I took care of us, just like I always take care of us. We will live underground for the rest of our lives. You and Emily will go to sleep for a long time. We’ll have to hold her hand, because it’ll be an even smaller chamber that they put her in, but it’ll all go by in a flash. Daddy will have to work with all the other daddies. But we’ll be okay in the end. We’ll all be okay in the end.”