Machine Learning

by Hugh Howey

  Coal-black eyes studied her between the low branches.

  Elise drew back the arrow but kept it pointed at the ground. Deer somehow know when they’re being threatened. She has watched them scatter while she took careful aim, until she was letting fly an errant shot at the bouncing white tail that mocked hunters of rabbit and venison alike.

  The bow in her hand was Juliette’s, once. Elise remembered back when it was made that she couldn’t even draw the bow, that her arms had been too weak, too short, too young. But that was forever ago. Elise was nearly as strong as Juliette now. Strong and lean and forest swift. No one in the village had ever caught a rabbit with their bare hands before Elise, and none had done it since.

  She and the deer studied one another. Wary. The deer were learning to be scared of people again. It used to be easy, bringing home a feast. Too easy. But both sides were learning. Remembering how to find that balance. To live like the people in Elise’s great books had once lived, with prey growing wary and hunters growing wise.

  With one motion, Elise steered the bow up and loosed the arrow with more instinct than aim, with more thought than measure, with six years of practice and habit. The buck reared its head, shook its horns, took a staggering leap to one side, and then collapsed. The heart. They only went down like that with an arrow to the heart. To the spine was faster, and anywhere else might mean half a day of tracking. Elise was too competent with a bow to gloat, wouldn’t need to tell anyone how the deer went down. When you ate an animal not from a can but from the flesh, everyone who partook could read the hunt right there on the spit, could tell what had happened.

  “Careful,” she could hear her brother saying whenever she brought home a deer and provided for her people. “Keep this up, and you’ll be mayor one day.”

  Elise drew out her knife—the one Solo had given to her—and marched through the woods toward her kill. Her quietude was no longer a concern. The hunt was over. But this was a mistake that she too often forgot, that a soft pace was always prudent. Juliette had taught her this. “The hunt is never over,” Juliette had said once, while tracking a doe with Elise. “Drop your guard, and what changes in an instant is who is doing the hunting.”

  Elise was reminded of the truth of this by another loud noise to her side. Again, she dropped to a crouch. And again, something was watching her. But this time, it was the most dangerous animal of them all.

  April was ready for anything to come through that door. It could be her sister, a mountain bear, a stranger intent on doing them harm. Open to all possibilities, she still wasn’t prepared for what appeared.

  The battle with the latch was finally won—the door flew open—and some creature entered on all fours. Some half-man, half-beast wildling. The creature sniffed the air, then spotted April and Remy perched inside the steel pod, huddled there beside the large plastic tub.

  “Shoot it,” April begged.

  “What is that?” Remy asked.

  “Shoot it,” she told him again, holding on to her husband’s arm.

  The beast roared. “FEEF-DEEN!” it growled, with a voice almost like a man’s. “Feef-deen!”

  And then it was in the air, jumping at them, yellow teeth and white eyes flashing, hands outstretched, hair billowing out wildly, coming to take them.

  Remy aimed the gun, but the beast crashed into them before he could pull the trigger. Hair and claws and teeth and snarling. Remy punched the animal, and April tried to shove it away when yellow teeth clamped down on Remy’s hand. There was a loud crunch—and her husband screamed and pulled his hand away, blood spurting where two of his fingers had been.

  From his other hand came a flash and a roar. Remy flew back into April, who knocked her head against the open lid, nearly blacking out. The animal slumped against the edge of the pod, a clawed hand splayed open, before collapsing to the floor.

  “What the fuck!” Remy shouted. He scrambled after the pistol, which had flown from his grip. His other hand was tucked under his armpit, rivulets of blood tracking down his bare ribs.

  “Your hand,” April said. She pulled one of the clean, folded shirts from the bin and made her husband hold out his hand. She wrapped the shirt as tight as she could and knotted the ends. Blood pooled and turned the fabric red. “Is it dead?” she asked. She braved a glance over the lip of the pod. The beast wasn’t moving. And now that she could study it, she saw that it wasn’t half-beast at all. It was mostly man. But naked, covered in hair, a scraggly beard, sinewy and lean.

  Remy straightened his arms and pointed the gun at the door, his bandaged hand steadying his good one. April saw that there was another beast there. Another person on all fours. Less hairy. A woman.

  The woman sniffed the air, studied them, and then peered at the dead man-creature. “Feef-deen,” she said. She snarled, showing her teeth, and her shoulders dipped as she tensed her muscles and readied for a leap. Remy, bless him, didn’t allow her to make the jump. The gun went off again, deafening loud. The woman collapsed. April and Remy watched the door, frozen, and after an agonizing dozen throbs of her pulse, April saw the next one.

  “How many bullets do you have?” she asked Remy, wondering where he learned to shoot like that, if it was as easy as he made it seem.

  He didn’t answer. He was too busy lining up his shot. But this next creature, another woman, studied the room, the two dead creatures and the two living ones, and made the same noise but without the rage. Without the snarling.

  “Feef-deen,” she said, before turning and wandering off. Almost as if satisfied. Almost as if all were right with the world.

  “Who goes there?” Elise asked. She watched the shapes beyond the foliage—it appeared to be two men. Pressing an arrow into the dirt, she left the shaft where she could grab it in a hurry, and then withdrew another from her quiver and notched it on to the bowstring. She drew the string taut but kept the arrow aimed to the side. “Rickson? Is that you?”

  “Hello,” a voice called. A woman’s voice. “We’re coming out. Don’t shoot.”

  A couple stepped around a tree. Elise saw that they were holding hands. They kept their free palms up to show that they were empty. Both wore backpacks. Both looked like they’d been living in the bush for ages, like the people who’d made it out of Silo 37 a few years ago. A thrill ran through Elise with the chance that these were new topsiders.

  “Where are you from?” she asked. The couple had stopped twenty paces away. They looked rough. And there were only two of them. Elise recalled how back when she lived in Silo 17, every stranger was to be feared. But the people who dared to free themselves from their silos ended up being good people. It was a truth of the world. The bad people stayed right where they were.

  “We’ve been . . . underground for a long time,” the man said.

  He didn’t give a number. Sometimes they didn’t know their number. Sometimes they had to be told by finding their silo on a map; there were fifty of them, the silos, buried underground. Elise fought the temptation to flood this couple with too much all at once. When she was younger, that had been her way. But she was learning to be more than quiet just in the hunt, to be as soft of tongue as she was of foot.

  “Are you alone?” she asked, scanning the woods.

  “We met another group northwest of here,” the man said. He must’ve run into Debra’s scouting party, which had been gone for a week. “They told us the people in charge lived by the coast. We’ve been looking for them for a long time. A very long time. Can you take us to your city?”

  Elise put her notched arrow away and then retrieved the one she’d left in the dirt. “It’s a village,” she said. “Just a village.” The memory of where she used to live, in one of those fifty silos, all cut off from each other, seemed forever ago. That life had grown hazy. Time formed some gulfs that not even recollection could span.

  “Do you need help with the deer?” the man asked. “That’s a lot of food.”

  Elise saw that he had a knife on his hip and that both of the
m bore the shrunken frames of the famished. She wondered what he could possibly know about deer. She’d had to consult her books to learn about deer, how to hunt them, how to clean them, how best to cook them. Maybe he too had pages from his silo’s Legacy, that great set of books about the old world. Or maybe his silo had a herd of them.

  “I’d love the help,” she said, putting away the other arrow, comfortable that these people meant no harm and also that she could take the both of them with her bow or knife if she had to. “My name’s Elise.”

  “I’m Remy,” the man said, “and this is my wife, April.”

  Elise closed the distance between them. She shook their hands one at a time, the woman’s first. As she shook the man’s, she noticed something strange about his hand. He was missing two of his fingers.

  Elise and Remy carved the choice cuts of meat and wrapped them in the deer’s stripped hide. Elise secured the bundle with bark twine from her pack, and hung the bundle from a thick branch. The couple insisted on carrying the meat, resting it on their shoulders. Elise walked ahead, showing the way back to camp.

  She resisted the urge to badger the couple with questions about their silo, how many were left there, what jobs they held, what level they lived on. When she was younger, she would have talked their ears off. But Juliette had a way about topsiders. There were unspoken rules. The people of the buried silos joined the rest when they were ready. They spoke when they were ready. “We all have our demons,” Juliette liked to say. “We have to choose when to share them. When to let others in on the wrestling.”

  Elise often suspected that Juliette was holding out the longest. She had been their mayor for years and years. No one hardly voted for anyone else. But there was something in the woman’s frown, a hardness in her eyes, a furrow in her brow, that never relaxed. Juliette was the reason any of them escaped from the silos, and the reason there was something to escape to for the rest. But Elise saw a woman still trapped by something. Held down by demons. Secrets she would never share.

  The night fires were times for sharing. Elise told the couple this as they approached camp. She told them about the welcome they would receive, and that they could say as much or as little as they like. “We’ll take turns telling you our stories,” Elise said. “I’m from Silo 17. There are only a few of us. There are a lot more from Silo 18. Like Juliette.”

  She glanced back at the couple to see if they were listening. “Like I said, you don’t have to say anything if you don’t want. Don’t have to say what you did or how you got here. Not until you’re ready. Don’t have to say how many of you are left—”

  “Fifteen,” the woman said. She’d barely said a word while the deer was being cleaned and packed. But she said this. “There were fifteen of us for the longest time. Now there are only two.”

  This sobered Elise. She herself had come from a silo that only offered five survivors. She couldn’t imagine a world with just two people.

  “How many are you?” Remy asked.

  Elise turned her head to answer. “We don’t count. It’s not really a rule, but it’s basically a rule. Counting was a touchy subject for a lot of our people. Not for me, though. Well, not the same. I came from a silo with very few people. You didn’t count so much as glance around the room and see that your family is still there. We have enough people now that there’s talk of setting up another village north of here. We’re scouting for locations. Some want to see a place that used to be called the Carolinas—”

  “Carolinas,” Remy said, but he said it differently, with the i long like “eye” instead of “eee.” Like he was testing the word.

  “It’s Carolinas,” Elise said, correcting him.

  Remy didn’t try again. His wife said something to him, but Elise couldn’t make it out.

  “Anyway, that’s the sort of thing we vote on now. We all vote. As long as you can read and write. I’m all for the second village, but I don’t want to live up there. I know these woods here like the back of my hand.”

  They reached the first clearing, and Elise steered them toward the larder, where they dropped off the meat. Haney, the butcher’s boy, grew excited at the sight of the feast and then at the strangers. He started to pester them with questions, but Elise shooed him away. “I’m taking them to see Juliette,” she said. “Leave them alone.”

  “Juliette’s the person in charge here?” the woman asked.

  “Yeah,” Elise said. “She’s our mayor. She has a place near the beach.”

  She led them there, skirting the square and the market to keep from being waylaid by gawkers. She took the back paths the prowling dogs and mischievous children used. Remy and April followed. Glancing back, Elise saw that April had removed the bag from her back and was clutching it against her chest, the way some parents cradled their children. There was a look of fear and determination on her face. Elise knew that look. It was the hardened visage of someone who has come so far and is near to salvation.

  “That’s her place,” Elise said, pointing up into the last two rows of trees by the beach. There was a small shelter affixed to the trunks with spikes and ropes. It stood two dozen paces off the ground. Juliette had lived inside the earth and upon the ground, but now lived up in the air. “I’m trying to get to heaven,” she had told Elise once, joking around. “Just not in a hurry.”

  Elise thought that explained why Juliette spent so much time out on the beach alone at night, gazing up at the stars.

  “There she is,” Elise said, pointing down by the surf. “You can leave your bags here if you like.”

  They elected to carry them. Elise saw them fixate on Juliette, who was standing alone by the surf, watching the tall fishing rods arranged in a line down the beach, monofilament stretching out past the breakers. Farther down the beach, Solo could be seen rigging bait on another line. Charlotte was there as well, casting a heavy sinker into the distance.

  Elise had to hurry to catch up with Remy and April. The couple seemed drawn toward Juliette. On a mission. But the woman had that pull on plenty of people. Sensing their presence, the mayor turned and shielded her eyes against the sun, watching the small party approach. Elise thought she saw Juliette stiffen with the sudden awareness that these were strangers, new to the topsides.

  “I got a buck,” Elise told Juliette. She nodded toward the couple. “And then I met them in the woods. This is April and Remy. And this is our mayor, Juliette. You can call her Jules.”

  Juliette took the couple in. She brushed the sand from her palms and shook each of theirs in turn, then squeezed Elise’s shoulder. A strong wave crashed on the beach and slid up nearly to the line of rods. The tide was coming in. The couple seemed not to be awed by the sight of the ocean, which Elise thought was strange. She still couldn’t get used to it. As for them—they could only stare at Juliette.

  “Are you in charge of all this?” April asked.

  Juliette glanced down the beach toward Solo and Charlotte for a moment. “If you came from a place with a lot of rules and great concern over who is in charge, you’ll find we’re not so strict here.” Juliette rested her hands on her hips. “You both look hungry and tired. Elise, why don’t you get them fed and freshened up. They can look around camp when they’re ready. And you don’t have to tell us your story until you want—”

  “I think we’ll say our piece now,” April said. Elise saw that she was the talkative one now. Remy was holding his tongue. And there was anger in their guises, not relief. Elise had seen this before, the need to vent. She shuffled back a step but wasn’t sure why. Maybe it was because Juliette had done the same.

  “Very well—” Juliette started to say.

  “We aren’t here to be saved,” April said. She continued to clutch her bag to her chest, like it was a raft keeping her afloat. “We aren’t here to live with you. We died a long time ago, when everything was taken from us. We’ve been dead and walking for years to get here and to tell you this. You didn’t get away with it.”

  “I’m not sur
e I—” Juliette began.

  April dropped her bag to the sand. In her hand was a silver gun. Elise knew straightaway what it was. There were three of them in camp that the men used to hunt; Elise hated the way they spooked the wildlife.

  This one was different . . . and trained on Juliette. Elise moved to stand in front of the mayor, but Juliette pushed her away.

  “Wait a second,” Juliette said.

  “No,” April said. “We’ve waited long enough.”

  “You don’t understa—”

  But a roar cut off whatever Juliette was about to say. A flash and an explosion of sound. She fell to the beach, a wild wave rushing up nearly to touch her, all so sudden and yet in slow motion. Elise felt her own body startle, like a deer that knows it’s in mortal danger. She sensed the whole world around her. Saw Solo and Charlotte stir down the beach and start running. Felt the heat of the sun on her neck, the tickle of sweat on her scalp. Could feel the sand beneath her feet and hear the crying birds. There was an arrow in her hand, her bow coming off her shoulder, a gun swinging around, a man yelling for someone to stop, Elise wasn’t sure who.

  She only got half a draw before the arrow slipped from her fingers. She loosed it before the trigger could be pulled again. And the shaft lodged in the woman’s throat.

  More screaming. Gurgling. Blood in the sand. Remy moved to catch his wife. Elise notched another arrow, swift as a hare. By her feet, Juliette did not stir. The man reached for the gun, and Elise put an arrow in his side, hoping not to kill him. He roared and clutched the wound while Elise notched another and knelt by her wounded friend. The man regrouped and went for the gun again, murder in his eyes. For the second time that day, Elise put an arrow through an animal’s heart.