Machine Learning

by Hugh Howey

  This is the final lie. This is the reason he never can tell her, won’t tell her even now, will lie and say they’re going camping instead, that she needs to pack something more comfortable. It is always here in his rehearsal that he chokes up and tells her what can never be true: “We’ll be okay in the end.”

  And this is when he imagines Barbara nodding and wiping her eyes and pretending to believe him, because she always was the brave one.

  John can see two figures in the van, their bodies slumped outward against the doors, looking like they’d fallen asleep. The van veers toward the Explorer. Emily is already scrambling between the seats to get in his lap as John fumbles with his seat belt. Barbara has her door open. The van fills the frame. His wife is out and rolling as John kicks open his door. Mere seconds pass from the time the van leaves the interstate to him and Emily diving into the grass. Scrambling and crawling, a bang like lightning cracking down around them, the van and the Explorer tumbling like two wrestling bears.

  John holds Emily and looks for Barbara. There. Hands clasped on the back of her head, looking up at the Explorer, camping gear tumbling out through busted glass and scattering. There’s a screech and the sound of another wreck up on the highway before the world falls eerily silent. John listens for more danger heading their way. All he can hear is Emily panting. He can feel his daughter’s breath against his neck.

  “Those people,” Barbara says, getting up. John hurries to his feet and helps her. Barbara has grass stains on both knees, is looking toward the van and the wreckage of the tractor trailer, obviously wants to assist them. A form slumps out of the van’s passenger window. Barbara fumbles her phone from her pocket and starts dialing a number, probably 911.

  “No one will answer,” John says.

  His wife looks at him blankly.

  “They’re gone,” he says, avoiding the word dead for Emily’s sake. Above him, a contrail lengthens merrily.

  “There was a wreck—” His wife points her phone up the embankment toward the hidden blacktop and the now-silent traffic. John steadies her, but he can feel her tugging him up the slope, eager to help those in need.

  “They’re all gone,” he says. “Everyone. Everyone we knew. Everyone is gone.”

  Barbara looks at him. Emily stares up at him. Wide eyes everywhere. “You knew . . .” his wife whispers, piecing together the sudden stop on the shoulder of the road and what happened after. “How did you know—?”

  John is thinking about the Explorer. Their car is totaled. He’ll have to get another. There’s a vast selection nearby. “Wait here,” he says. He hopes everything he packed can be salvaged. As he heads up the embankment, Barbara moves to come with him.

  “Keep Emily down here,” he tells her, and Barbara gradually understands. Emily doesn’t need to see what lies up there on the interstate. As John trudges up the slick grass, he wonders how he expects his daughter to avoid seeing it, avoid seeing the world he helped make.

  One Year Before

  Smoke curls from Tracy’s cigarette as she paces the hotel room in Milan. John lies naked on top of the twisted sheets. The rush of hormones and the buzz of alcohol have passed, leaving him flushed with guilt and acutely aware of what he has done.

  “You should move to Italy,” Tracy says. She touches the holstered gun on the dresser but does not pick it up. Inhaling, she allows the smoke to drift off her tongue.

  “You know I can’t,” John says. “Even if it weren’t for my family . . . I have—”

  “Work,” Tracy interrupts. She waves her hand as if work were an inconsequential thing harped on by some inferior race. Even when the two of them had worked down the hall from each other in the Pentagon, neither had known what the other did. The confusion had only thickened since, but along with it the professional courtesy not to ask. John feels they both want to know, but tearing clothes off bodies is simpler than exposing hidden lives.

  “I do sometimes think about running away from it all,” John admits. He considers the project taking most of his time of late, a plan he can only glimpse from the edges, piecing together the odd tasks required of him, similar to how he susses out political intrigue by whom he is hired to remove and who is left alone.

  “So why don’t you?” Tracy asks.

  John nearly blurts out the truth: Because there won’t be anywhere left to run. Instead, he tells a different truth: “I guess I’m scared.”

  Tracy laughs as if it’s a joke. She taps her cigarette and spills ash onto the carpet, opens one of the dresser drawers and runs her fingers across John’s clothes. Before he can say something, she has opened the next drawer to discover the book.

  “A Bible,” she says, sounding surprised.

  John doesn’t correct her. He slides from the bed and approaches her from behind in order to get the book. Tracy glances at him in the mirror and blocks him, presses back against him, her bare skin cool against his. John can feel his hormones surge and his resistance flag. He forgets the book, even as Tracy begins flipping through it. She was always curious. It was trouble for them both.

  “Looks more interesting than a Bible,” she mutters, the cigarette bouncing between her lips. John holds her hips and presses himself against her. She complies by pressing back. “What is this?” she asks.

  “It’s a book about the end of the world,” John says, kissing her neck. This is the same thing he told Barbara. John has come to think of the book as one of those paintings that blurs the closer you get to it. It is safe by being unbelievable. The hidden key to understanding it—knowing who wrote it—was all that needed keeping safe.

  Pages are flipped, which fans smoke above their heads.

  “A different Bible, then,” Tracy says.

  “A different Bible,” John agrees.

  After a few more pages, the cigarette is crushed out. Tracy pulls him back to the bed. Afterward, John sleeps and dreams a strange dream. He is laying Barbara into a crypt deep beneath the soil. There is a smaller coffin there. Emily is already buried, and it is a lie that they’ll ever be unearthed. It is a lie that they’ll be brought back to life. That’s just to get him to go along. John will live on for hundreds of years, every day a torment of being without them, knowing that they are just as dead as the others.

  John wakes from this dream once and is only dimly aware that the bedside light is on, smoke curling up toward the ceiling, fanned by the gentle turning of prophetic pages.

  The cars are, for the most part, orderly. They sit quietly, most of them electric, only one or two idling and leaking exhaust. They are lined up behind one another as if at any moment the trouble ahead might clear and the traffic will surge forward. Brake lights shine red. Hazards blink. The cars seem alive. Their occupants are not.

  John considers the sheer weight of the dead—not just around him on the highway, but an entire world of the dead. An entire world slaughtered by men in elected posts who think they know best. How many of those in these cars voted for this? More than half, John thinks grimly.

  He tries to remind himself that this is what someone else would’ve done, some mad dictator or mountain hermit. Eventually. The technology would’ve trickled out—these machines invisible to the naked eye that are just as capable of killing as they are of healing. When fanatics in basements begin to tinker, the end is near enough in the minds of many. No exotic or radioactive materials to process. Instead, machines that are becoming rapidly affordable, machines that can lay down parts one atom at a time, machines that can build other machines, which build more machines. All it will take is one madman to program a batch that sniffs out people by their DNA before snuffing them out.

  John remembers his sophomore year of high school when he printed his first gun, how the plastic parts came out warm and slotted neatly together, how the printed metal spring locked into place, how the bullets chambered a little stiff with the first round and then better and better over time.

  That was something he could understand, printing a weapon. This . . . this was
the next generation’s music. These were the kids on his lawn. He was one of their parents pulling the stereo plug before anyone made too much trouble.

  John picks out a black SUV in the eastbound lane. A gasser, a Lexus 500. He has always wanted to drive one of these.

  Lifeless eyes watch him from either side as he approaches, heads slumped against the glass, blood trickling from noses and ears, just these rivulets of pain. John wipes his own nose and looks at his knuckle. Nothing. He is a ghost, a wandering spirit, an angel of vengeance.

  There is a wreck farther ahead, a car on manual that had taken out a few others, the cars around it scattered as their auto-drives had deftly avoided collision. He passes a van with a sticker on the back that shows a family holding hands. He does not look inside. A dog barks from a station wagon. John hesitates, veers from his path toward the SUV and goes over to open the door. The dog does not get out—just looks at him with its head cocked—but at least now it is free. It saddens John to think of how many pets just lost their owners. Like the people stranded up in the sky, there is so much he didn’t consider. He heads to the SUV, feeling like he might be sick.

  He tries the driver’s door on the Lexus and finds it unlocked. A man with a loosened tie sits behind the wheel, blood dripping from his chin. The blood has missed his tie to stain the shirt. A glance in the back shows no baby seat to contend with. John feels a surge of relief. He unbuckles the man and slides him out and to the pavement.

  He hasn’t seen anything like this since Syria. It’s like a chemical attack, these unwounded dead.

  Memories from the field surge back, memories of politicians back when they were soldiers. He gets in and cranks the Lexus, and the whine of the starter reminds him that it’s already running. The car has taken itself out of gear. John adjusts the rearview and begins to inch forward and back, working the wheel, until he’s sideways in traffic. Once again, he pulls off the interstate and down the embankment.

  He heads straight for the wreckage of the Explorer and the van and gets out. Before Barbara and Emily can get to him, he has already pushed the passenger of the van back through the window and has covered him with the sport coat folded up on the passenger seat of the Lexus. John opens the back of the SUV, and Barbara whispers something to Emily. The three of them begin rounding up their gear and luggage and placing it into the car. It is a scavenger hunt for Emily. A box of canned goods has spilled down the embankment, and as she picks up each can and places it into the basket made by clutching the hem of her dress, John feels how wrong all of this is. There is too much normal left in the air. Being alive feels unnatural, a violation. He watches a buzzard swing overhead and land with a final flap of its wings on the top of the billboard. The great black bird seems confused by the stillness. Unsure. Disbelieving its luck.

  “Is this ours?” Emily asks. She holds up the small single sideband radio, the antenna unspooled into a tangle.

  “Yes,” John says. He tries to remember what he was thinking to pack the SSB, what sort of foolish hope had seized him. Barbara says nothing, just works to get everything into the new car. She brushes leaves of grass off her carry-on and nestles it into the Lexus. Her silence is louder than shouted questions. She used to do this when John came home with stitched-up wounds, saying nothing until John feels his skin burn and he has to tell her.

  “I wasn’t positive—” he begins. He stops as Emily runs over to dump the contents of her dress into the car. He waits until she has moved beyond earshot again. “Part of me hoped nothing would happen, that I’d never have to tell you.”

  “What happened on the highway?” his wife asks. She shows him her phone. “I can’t get anyone . . . Dad won’t—”

  “Everyone is gone,” John says. He repeats this mantra, the one he keeps rolling over and over in his head. “Everyone.”

  Barbara searches his face. John can feel twelve billion souls staring at him, daring him to make her understand. Even he doesn’t understand. Beyond the next exit, maybe the world is continuing along. But he knows this isn’t true. Barbara looks at her phone. Her hand is shaking.

  “There was no stopping it,” John says. “Believe me.”

  “Who is left? Who can we call?”

  “It’s just us.”

  Barbara is silent. Emily returns and stacks cans between the luggage.

  “This is because of what you do, isn’t it?” Barbara asks. Emily has gone back for more.

  John nods. Tears stream down Barbara’s cheeks, and she begins to shake. John has seen widows like this, widows the moment they find out that’s what they are. It is shock fading to acceptance. He wraps his arms around his wife, can’t remember the last time he held her like this.

  “Did you do this?” she asks. Her voice is shaking and muffled as he holds her tight.

  “No. Not . . . not exactly. Not directly.” He watches Emily delight in another find, far down the slope of grass.

  “It’s something you . . .” Barbara swallows and hunts for the words. “. . . that you went along with.”

  John can feel himself sag. He can’t tell who is propping up whom. Yes, it was something he went along with. That’s what he does. He goes along with. In Milan, succumbing to another, never leading. Never leading.

  Emily arrives with something blue in her hands. “Is this ours?” she asks.

  John pulls away from his wife. He looks down. It’s the book. The Order. “No,” he says. “That’s nobody’s. You can leave that here.”

  The Day Before

  There are two envelopes nestled inside the blue book, two sets of plane tickets. John pulls them both out and studies them, angles them back and forth to watch the printed holograms catch the light. It is raining outside, the wind blowing fat drops against the bedroom window, a sound like fingers tapping to be let in.

  He sets the tickets aside and flips through the large book at random. Tracy thought it was the Bible when she first saw it—by dint of it being in a hotel room drawer, no doubt. He thinks about the New Testament and how long people have been writing about the end of the world. Every generation thinks it will be the last. There is some sickness in man, some paranoid delusion, some grandiose morbidity that runs right through to distant ancestors. Or maybe it is the fear in lonely hearts that they might die without company.

  John finds the section in the book on security. His future job detail. If he doesn’t show, will they promote some other? Or will it mean extra shifts for someone else? John tries to imagine a group of people skipping through time to wait out the cleansing of the Earth. He tries to imagine kissing his wife goodbye as he lays her in a silver coffin. Kissing Emily and telling her it’ll all be okay. One last lie to them both before he seals them up.

  Because there’s no mistaking their ultimate fate. John can feel it in his bones whenever he reads the book. He knows when a person has been doomed by politicians. He knows when they say, “Everything will be all right,” that they mean the opposite. The book doesn’t say, but it doesn’t have to. Not everyone who goes into that bunker will come out alive. If he flies to Atlanta and does his job, he’ll never spend another day with his wife and daughter. Tomorrow will be the last, no matter what, and it’ll probably be spent in airports and in economy class.

  He weighs the other tickets, the ones to Colorado Springs. Here is folly and madness, a group who thinks they can cheat the system, can survive on their own. Here is a woman who last year asked him to leave his life behind, his wife behind, and start anew someplace else. And now he is being asked again.

  John holds the envelopes, one in each hand. It is usually another’s life he weighs like this. Not his own. Not his family’s. He doesn’t want to believe a choice is necessary. Can’t stand to think that Emily will never grow up and fall in love, never have kids of her own. Whatever life she has left, a day or years, wouldn’t really be living.

  He suddenly knows what he has to do. John slams the book shut and takes the tickets with him to the garage. Rummaging around, he finds the old C
oleman stove. There’s the lantern. The tent. He sniffs the old musky plastic and thinks of the last time they went on a vacation together. Years ago. What he wouldn’t give for just one more day like that. One more day, even if it is their last.

  He finds a canister and screws it onto the stove, adjusts the knob, presses the igniter. There’s a loud click and the pop of gas catching. John watches the blue flames for a moment, remembers the horrible flapjacks he made on that stove years ago: burnt on the outside and raw in the middle. Emily loved them and has asked for her flapjacks like that ever since. He tries. But it’s not easy to do things the wrong way on purpose.

  John sets both envelopes on the grill, right above the flames, before he can reconsider. It isn’t a choice—it’s a refusal to choose. He has seen too many folders with assignments in them, too many plane tickets with death on the other end. This is an assignment he can’t take. Cheat death or run to the woman he cheated with. He can do neither.

  The paper crackles, plastic melts, smoke fills the air and burns his lungs. John takes a deep breath and holds it. He can feel the little buggers inside him, waiting on tomorrow. He can feel the world winding down. Orange flames lick higher as John rummages through the camping gear, gathering a few things, practicing the lies he’ll tell to Barbara.

  He has only been to the cabin once before, eight years ago. Or has it been nine already? A friend of his from the service had bought the place for an escape, a place to get away when he wasn’t deployed. The last time John spoke to Carlos, his friend had complained that the lakeshore was getting crowded with new construction. But standing on the back deck, John sees the same slice of paradise he remembers from a decade prior.