Machine Learning

by Hugh Howey

  The other founders trickled in one at a time. Many had red eyes and chapped cheeks. There was none of the chatting, debating, and arguing that had marked their prior meetings in that room. Just the same funereal silence they’d held by the crypt doors.

  A second pot was brewed. One of the engineers got the screens running, and they watched the TV feeds in silence. There was speculation among the talking heads that the presidential nomination was not quite the lock everyone had presumed. The excitement in the newsrooms was palpable and eerie. Tracy watched dead men discuss a future that did not exist.

  Two minutes.

  The talking heads fell silent, and the feeds switched from newsrooms to a stage outside Atlanta. The distant downtown towers gleamed in the background. On the stage, a young girl in a black dress held a microphone and took a deep breath, a little nervous as she began to sing.

  The national anthem brought tears to Tracy’s eyes. She reminded herself to breathe. And not for the first time, she had an awful premonition that she was wrong, that the book was just a book, that John had believed in something that would not come to pass, and that she would soon be embarrassed in that room with all the people she’d convinced to join her. She would be another in a long line of failed messiahs. Her sister would look at her like she was crazy for the rest of her life. National headlines would mock the kooks in a mountain who had thought the world was going to end. And somehow all of this felt worse than twelve billion dead.

  It was a guilty thought, the panic that she might be wrong.

  Large red numbers on the clock counted down. No part of her wanted to be right. Either way, her world was ending. When the clock struck all zeroes, Tracy would either be an outcast or a shut-in.

  On the array of televisions, the same scene was shown from half a dozen angles, all the various news stations and networks tuned to that young girl in her black dress. One of the screens cut to the obligatory jets screaming in formation overhead. Another screen showed a group of senators and representatives, hands on their goddamn patriotic chests. Tracy searched for John, thought she might see him there near the stage with his suit jacket that showed off his handsome shoulders but also that bulge by his ribs. There were five seconds on the clock. One of the founders started counting, whispering the numbers as they fell.

  Three.

  Two.

  One.

  A line of zeroes.

  And nothing happened.

  “They’re still breathing,” someone said.

  Igor cursed and fumbled for that damned watch of his.

  An eternity squeezed itself into a span of three seconds. No one moved.

  “Holy shit,” someone said.

  CNN’s feed spun sickeningly to the side, the cameraman whirling, and Tracy realized it was one of the reporters who had cursed. Another screen showed a bright flash, a brief glimpse of a mushroom cloud, and then that monitor went black.

  The young girl was no longer singing. She had been replaced with station identifiers and shots of stunned newscasters who stared at their feeds in disbelief. More bright flashes erupted on the last monitor running, which showed a wide vista from some great distance. Three classic and terrifying mushroom clouds rose toward the heavens, shouldering the other clouds aside. And then that last screen succumbed as well, promising impotently to “Be right back.”

  “Shut it off!” a reporter screamed. He waved at someone off-camera. “Shut it off—”

  And then someone did. A switch flipped somewhere, in all those veins, and all the talking heads on all the screens bowed forward or tilted to the side. Blood flowed from the nose of the man who had just been waving. His jaw fell slack; his eyes focused on nothing—a quiet death.

  The founders in the command room—no longer breathing—watched in silence. Hands clasped over mouths. Those who had harbored any doubts now believed. All was still. The only things that moved on the screens were the thin red rivulets trickling from noses and ears. There was no one left alive to cut away to, to change the view. And only those ten people huddled around the wire-webbed monitors were left to see.

  “Kill it,” someone finally said, a terrible slip of the tongue.

  Tracy watched as Dmitry fumbled with the controls for the panels. He accidentally changed channels on one of the sets, away from news and into the realm of reruns. There was a sitcom playing: a family around a dinner table, a joke just missed. A bark of canned laughter spilled from the speaker, the illusion that life was still transpiring out there as it always had. But it wasn’t just the laughter that was canned now. They all were. All of humanity. What little was left.

  “Hey. Wake up.”

  Dreams. Nothing more than dreams. A black ghost clawing away at her mother, a wicked witch burying her father and her sister. Tracy sat up in bed, sweating. She felt a hand settle on her shoulder.

  “We have a problem,” someone said.

  A heavy shadow, framed by the wan light spilling from the hallway.

  “Anatoly?”

  “Come,” he said. He lumbered out of her small room deep in the mountain. Tracy slid across that double bunk, a bed requisitioned for two, and tugged on the same pants and shirt she’d worn the day before.

  The fog of horrible dreams mixed with the even worse images from their first day in the complex. Both swirled in her sleepy brain. Slicing through these was the fear in Anatoly’s voice. The normally unflappable Russian seemed petrified. Was it really only to last a single day, all their schemes to survive the end of the world? Was it a riot already? Orientation the day before had not gone well. Fights had broken out. A crowd had gathered at those four-foot-thick doors, which had been designed just as much to keep people in as to keep other dangers out.

  Perhaps it was a leak. Air from the outside getting in. Tracy hurried down the hall barefoot, searching her lungs for some burn or itch, touching her upper lip and looking for a bleed. Her last thought as she caught up to Anatoly and they reached the command room together was that the cameras outside the crypt doors would be on, would reveal a lone man, inoculated to the sudden death but slowly dying anyway, banging feebly and begging to be let in—

  “Everyone here?” Dmitry asked. The thin programmer scanned the room over his spectacles. There was no real leader among the founders. Tracy held some special status as the originator of the group, she who had found The Order. Anatoly was the man who had coordinated the lease and planning of the facility. But Dmitry was the brightest among them, the tinkerer, the one who had deactivated the machines in their blood. Of them all, he seemed to most enjoy the thought of being in charge. No one begrudged him that.

  “What is this?” Patrice asked. She knotted her robe across her waist and crossed her arms against the chill in the room.

  “The program,” Dmitry said. “It . . . has changed.”

  Someone groaned. Tracy rubbed the sand from her eyes. The gathered braced for Dmitry’s usual technobabble, which was bad enough when wide awake.

  “Five hundred years,” he said. He pushed his glasses up his nose and looked from face to face. “Not six months. Five hundred years.”

  “Until what?” Sandra asked.

  “Until we can go out,” Dmitry said. He pointed toward the door. “Until we can go out.”

  “But you said—”

  “I know what I said. And it’s all in the book. It says six months. But the program unspooled yesterday. It’s dynamic code, a self-assembler, and now there’s a clock set to run for five hundred years.”

  The room was quiet. The recycled air flowing through the overhead vent was the only sound.

  “How are you reading this new program?” Igor asked. “Do you have those buggers in here?” He nodded toward the silver pod with all its tubes and wires.

  “Of course not. The antennas we put up, I can access the mesh network the machines use to communicate. Are any of you listening to me? The program is set to run for five hundred years. This book”—he pointed to the tome sitting on the large round table—“this
isn’t a guide for the entire program. It’s just for one small part of it, just one shift. I think the cryo-pods are maybe so they can—”

  “So how do we change it?” Anatoly asked. “You can tap into the network. How do we turn it all off? So we can leave right now? Or set it back to six months?”

  Dmitry let out his breath and shook his head. He had that exasperated air about him that he got when any of the founders asked questions that belied fundamental flaws in their understanding of what, to him, were basic concepts. “What you’re asking is impossible. Otherwise I would have done it already. I can program the test machines in my lab, but overcoming the entire network?” He shook his head.

  “What does that mean for us?” Tracy asked.

  “It means we have a year’s worth of food,” Dmitry said. “Eighteen months, maybe two years if we ration. And then we all slowly die in here. Or . . .”

  “Or what?”

  “Or we die quickly out there.”

  Sharon slapped the table and glared at Dmitry. “We’ve got fourteen men in the infirmary and another eight in restraints from telling everyone we’ll be here for six months and that everyone they know is now dead. Now you’re saying we have to tell them that we lied? That we brought them here to starve to death?”

  Tracy sank into one of the chairs. She looked up at Dmitry. “Are you sure about this? You were wrong about the clock the last time. You were a few seconds off. Maybe—”

  “It was tape delay,” Dmitry said, rubbing his eyes beneath his glasses. “All broadcasters use a time delay. I wasn’t wrong. I’m not wrong now. I can show you the code.”

  One of the founders groaned.

  “What were you saying about the pod?”

  “I think this is a manual for a single shift,” Dmitry said. “And the pod is for—”

  “You mean the icebox?” Patrice asked.

  “Yes. The cryo-unit is to allow them to stagger the shifts. To last the full five hundred years. I looked over one of the requisitions reports we intercepted, and it all makes sense—”

  “Does our pod work?” Anatoly asked.

  Dmitry shrugged. “Nobody wanted me to test it, remember? Listen, we have a decision to make—”

  “What decision? You’re telling us we’re all dead.”

  “Not all of us,” Tracy said. She rested her head in her palms, could see that witch from her dreams, shoveling soil on thousands of writhing bodies, hands clawing to get out.

  “What do you mean?” Patrice asked.

  “I mean we’re the same as them.” She looked up and pointed to the dead monitors, which had once looked out on the world, on the people with their anthems who had doomed them all. “We have the same decision to make. Our little world, our little mountain, isn’t big enough for all of us. So we have a decision to make. The same decision they made. We’re no better than them.”

  “Yes,” Dmitry said. “I figure we have eighteen months’ worth of food for five thousand mouths. That gives us enough for fifteen people for five hundred years.”

  “Fifteen people? To do what?”

  “To survive,” Dmitry said. But the tone of his voice said something more somber and sinister. Tracy tried to imagine all that he was implying. Someone else said it for her.

  “And kill everyone else? Our families?”

  “No way,” someone said. Tracy watched her partners, these founders, fidget. It was the orientation all over again. A fight would break out.

  “We can’t live that long anyway,” Tracy said, attempting to defuse the argument by showing how pointless it all was.

  “Generations,” Anatoly blurted out. He scratched his beard, seemed to be pondering a way to make some insane plan work. “Have to make sure there’s only one birth for every death.”

  Tracy’s eyes returned to the book on the center of the conference table. Others were looking at it as well. She remembered a passage like that inside the book. Several passages now suddenly made more sense. The answer had been there, but none of them had been willing to see it. It’s how that book seemed to work.

  “I won’t be a part of this,” Natasha said. “I won’t. I’d rather have one year here, with my family, than even consider what you’re suggesting.”

  “Will you still think that a year from now, when the last ration is consumed and we’re left watching one another waste away? Either it happens now, or it happens then. Which way is cleaner?”

  “We sound just like them,” Tracy whispered, mostly to herself. She eyed those monitors again, saw her reflection in one of them.

  “The Donner Party,” Sherman said. When one of the Russians turned to stare at him, Sherman started to explain. “Settlers heading west two centuries ago. They got trapped in the mountains and had to resort to—”

  “I’m familiar with the story. It’s not an option.”

  “I didn’t mean it was an option.” Sherman turned to Natasha. “I mean, that’s what we’re going to start thinking a year from now. Or eighteen months. Whenever.”

  Natasha spun a lock of her hair. She dipped the end between her lips and remained silent.

  “It would be quick,” Dmitry said. “We still have canisters of the test nanos, the ones I built. Those, I can program. We would have to inoculate ourselves first—”

  “This is going too fast,” Tracy said. “We need to think about this.”

  “After thirty-six days, we’ll be down to fourteen people,” Dmitry said. “At the rate we’ll be feeding these people, each month we delay means one spot lost. How long do you want to think about it?” He took off his glasses and wiped the condensation from them. It had grown hot in the room. “We’re in a lifeboat,” he said. “We are drifting to shore, but not as fast as we had hoped. There are too many of us in the boat.” He returned the glasses to the bridge of his nose, looked coolly at the others.

  “Every one of us should have died yesterday,” Anatoly said. “Our families. Us. Every one. None of us should be here. Even this day is a bonus. A year would be a blessing.”

  “Is it so important that any of us make it to the other side?” Patrice asked. The others turned to her. “I mean, it won’t even be us. If we were to do this. It would be our descendants. And what kind of hell are they going to endure in here, living for dozens of generations in this hole, keeping their numbers at fifteen, brothers and sisters coupling? Is that even surviving? What’s the point? What’s the point if we’re just trying to get someone to the other side? No matter what, the assholes in Atlanta will be our legacy now.”

  “That’s why we have to do this,” Tracy said.

  Dmitry nodded. “Tracy’s right. That’s precisely why we have to do this. So they don’t get away with it. Isn’t that what we planned from the beginning? Isn’t that why we only have enough food for a year but enough guns to slaughter an army?”

  “Fifteen people is no army.”

  “But they’ll know,” Dmitry said. “They’ll carry legends with them. We’ll write it all down. We’ll make up most of the first fifteen. We’ll make sure no one ever forgets—”

  “You mean make a religion out of this.”

  “I mean make a cause.”

  “Or a cult.”

  “Do we want them to have the world to themselves, the fuckers who did this?”

  “We can’t decide anything now,” Tracy said. She rubbed her temples. “I need to sleep. I need to see my family—”

  “No one can know,” Anatoly told her.

  Tracy shot him a look. “I’m not telling anyone. But we need a day or two before we do anything.” She caught the look on Dmitry’s face. “Surely we have that much time.”

  He nodded.

  “And you won’t program anything without consulting with us first.”

  Again, a nod.

  Sherman laughed, but it was without humor. “Yes,” he said. “I need sleep as well.” He pointed to Dmitry. “And I want assurances that I’ll wake up in the morning.”

  The following day, Tracy grabbe
d breakfast from the mess hall and found three founders at a table in the corner. She joined them. No one spoke. Between bites of bread and canned ham, she watched the bustle of strangers weaving through the tables and chairs, introducing themselves to one another, glancing around at their surroundings, and trying to cope with their imprisonment. Their salvation.

  The buzz of voices and spoons clicking against porcelain was shattered for a brief moment by an awful release of laughter. Tracy searched for the offender, but it was gone as quickly as it had come. She watched Igor chew his bread, his eyes lifeless, focused beyond the mountain’s walls, and knew he was thinking the same thing: They were in a room crowded with ghosts. There was no stopping what they would have to do. And for the first time, Tracy understood all that John had endured those past years. She remembered the way he would glance around in a restaurant, his eyes haunted, the color draining suddenly from his face. Looking for an exit, she used to think. Looking for some way out if it all goes to shit.

  But no—he had been doing this, scanning the people, the bodies all around him. How could he search for an exit when there was none?

  Tracy saw her sister and Remy emerge from the serving line, trays in hand. She started to wave them over, then caught herself. When she saw her sister among all those walking dead, she realized what she had to do. She put down her bread and left her tray behind. She needed to find Dmitry. To see if it was possible.

  A new Order was required, a new book of instructions. Nine of the ten founders and the six they chose would have the rest of their lives to sort out the details, to leave precise instructions. Tracy had already decided she wouldn’t go with them. If John were there, maybe it could work, but she couldn’t pair off with one of the men in their group.