Machine Learning

by Hugh Howey

  There are briefcases and business shoes scattered across the deck. Up on the flybridge, I put the boat into gear. I lay on the horn a few times, yell my friend’s name, look for him in the crowds. But Scott is gone. The motor yacht Prelude pivots neatly in the tiny marina and points its bow across the Hudson toward New Jersey. We pass through the narrow breakwater, and I look back over my shoulder to see a dark object plummeting from a burning building, a man in a flapping business suit, who disappears out of sight. The flag on the back of the boat goes to half-mast as we motor away. The wind picks up on our faces, but all else is silence.

  The marina across the Hudson won’t take us. We tie up on the fuel dock, everyone trying their cell phones to let loved ones know they’re okay, but the networks are jammed. Men put on their business shoes and gather their briefcases and disappear. Crowds gather on the docks and along the shore to gaze at this burning neighbor across the way. I can’t stay on the fuel dock, they tell me. I have to pull away.

  I need to go back and look for Scott. I have mobility, while so many others are trapped. And out here on the Hudson, I can see the sky; I can get out of the way. I am heading back to Manhattan when the screeching starts, when the top of the South Tower tips, when a building leans its head sadly to one side and then sinks into the earth.

  A building collapsing sounds a lot like a jet throttling up on a runway. A high-pitched scream builds and builds. You brace for a boom, a roar, a masculine anguish—but it is a shrill cry. It gets you not in the chest, but in the bones.

  I watch from the deck of a boat named Prelude. The flag on the aft of the boat is already at half-mast. A man in a business suit with a briefcase lowered it as we left the marina, other men in similar suits taking flight from office windows, escaping the heat.

  A plume of crushed steel billows out over Lower Manhattan. My best friend is in there somewhere. I turn the boat around, away from the onrush of dust and debris, away from the home where I used to live.

  7

  September 11. Cell phones do not work, and part of me is glad. As soon as I get a signal, I’ll be able to call my mom and tell her I’m alive. But I’ll also have to call Shannon, Scott’s girlfriend, and let her know that Scott is dead, that a building has fallen down around him, that he went off to investigate a fire and now is gone.

  I consider this aboard Prelude. I cannot stay on the fuel dock, and there’s no available slip, so I creep toward Manhattan, where fellow boats from North Cove Marina are pulling people from the seawall. People are desperate to leave. They jump to Prelude’s swim platform, each with a different story. The wake and chop make for treacherous maneuvering so close to a concrete wall. On the New Jersey side, we let people off by docking up to a restaurant. There are construction workers there with hard hats and muddy boots and lunch pails. They’re looking for someone, anyone, to take them across the Hudson, opposite this tide of humanity. They say they want to help. I tell them I’m going back anyway, and they can ride.

  As they scamper onboard, I forget to tell them about their boots, about minding the deck. We cast off and watch from the Hudson as the second building falls. I ask them if they’re sure. They are. As I creep into the marina, my home is unrecognizable. Debris is everywhere. The glass dome of the Winter Garden is wounded, and a lower chunk of one of the lesser towers is missing. The world seems a precarious place. Buildings mean to topple on men. Buildings have. I pivot in the tight marina and back into my old slip, like I’ve done a thousand times, and white paper flutters down like a flock of exhausted birds. The paper catches on the deck and in the scuppers. There’s the smell of something acidic, something foreign, something I have never tasted but I know to be toxic. All but one of the men jump to the dock. The lone dissenter has seen enough. I don’t blame him.

  “That building looks to topple,” I tell the men with the hard hats, pointing to the smaller World Trade 7. Two hours ago, I didn’t know buildings could do this. Suddenly, I’m an expert.

  I scan the wasteland around me and see no sign of Scott, no sign of anyone. “Be careful,” the guy who stayed behind calls out to his friends, and I am convinced that I have delivered these men to their deaths. I pull out of the slip once again. We pick up more passengers from the seawall south of the marina before heading back across the Hudson. There is much to do, pulling people away, right up until the Coast Guard comes and orders us to stop.

  Scott is dead. My cell phone is dead. My mother must think me dead. So it goes.

  I pick up the papers that have drifted down on the boat and have become plastered there, these relics from great buildings that no longer stand. The first one I grab is an insurance document. Listen: What I tell you here is true. The first line on the first page I pick up, it begins:

  In the event of damage to the building . . .

  So it goes.

  A red sun slides across the geodesic dome, and the crisp angles between the glass panels divide that alien sky into triangles of magenta and gold. Another day in those prison walls. Billy is asleep on the sofa bed, mewling like a cat, his hands twitching in some dream, some time-travel delusion. Montana escapes from the fold-out bed as quietly as noisy springs will allow. She grabs her robe and covers herself. The zoo is quiet, the doors not yet open to the hordes of skinny aliens with their hand-like heads. This is the only time when she can see the critters across the way, those balls of fur that roll around and bump into one another, their long periscope antennas unfolding to peer out at the world, at the woman peering back at them.

  Montana watches the furry aliens scurry and bump about. She thinks of what Stained told her of the universe ending, how a pilot presses a button and all that ever was or ever is goes kaput. It’s hard to believe such an end might be possible. Even harder to summon some fear of this, some longing or regret. She presses her palm to the thick glass, cool to the touch, and she remembers this, something both distant and familiar: Her hand on peeling wallpaper. A domestic prison. A feeling of being trapped. Broken knuckles and blood in the sink, and barely a dent in the sheetrock.

  It is September 11, 2013. Twelve years have gone by. I’m on a flight from San Francisco to Fort Lauderdale, a cross-country flight loaded down with fuel. Looking out the window, I think of a woman I have invented, the woman in 13D. I’ve been thinking about her for twelve years. I’ve been on fifty flights this year, and I think about her every time.

  I don’t know this woman in 13D. Maybe she’s a man. Maybe that seat is empty. But I’ve been thinking about her—imagining her—ever since that ball of orange and black erupted overhead. I wonder if she knew, in those last moments of her life, that she was about to die. The engines outside her window must’ve been screaming, making that noise like a great steel building collapsing to the ground. The wings must’ve been creaking, the wind howling across the trembling skin of that aircraft, New York City so near below. Too near. Buildings rushing past, knuckles white on the armrests, a stranger clutching the wrist of another stranger in fear, that sense that this wasn’t right, that those men who have taken over the plane—who won’t let anyone go to the restroom up front—aren’t going to land and simply trade hostages.

  I’m on the wharf, looking up. There’s a plane howling across the clear blue sky, banking hard, coming in too fast. One building is burning, and another can’t get out of the way. A pattern is forming, but in my head I only have a silent scream to a pilot who is already dead. Pull up. Pull up, I silently shout. What’re you doing? I scream this to the pilot as I watch, trying to talk to him as a Tralfamadorian might. This can’t be happening. This can’t be happening. This can’t be happening.

  The woman in 13D is screaming and thinking the same thing.

  And then it happens.

  8

  The Coast Guard won’t let me move. The Hudson and the East River have been shut down. New York City is smoking, and I am not aware of this last fact, but the entire world is watching. Some with happy fists.

  Another boat has tied up to the restaurant do
ck. Hours march by. The construction workers return for the lunch pails they left on the dock, and they say there was little to do in the way of help, that they had to catch the same rescue boats as everyone else. But they saw things. They tell me awful stories, things I do not want to hear. They leave boot prints of mud and ash on the docks, trailing away.

  I hear my name. Turning, there is Scott on the dock across the water. A dead man, standing. My best friend, waving at me. I nearly dive in and swim across. My heart is bursting out of my chest, and for all the death I’ve seen, now is when the tears come, this sight of someone I love, very much alive.

  I go to crank Prelude to drive the comical distance across this leap of water. It would take an hour to walk around. A crew member from the sailboat says to use their tender, so I do. Scott and I embrace. He tells me what happened, the choking cloud, how he had to breathe through his shirt, how he followed the stampeding others, dangled over the Hudson from a rail, dropped into a boat, saw someone else land and their leg go sickeningly sideways, didn’t know where I was, marched down the Hudson shoreline and stopped at every marina, and now here.

  We look at each other for a long time. We talk on top of each other. I have to touch his arm several times to make sure he’s real.

  On the dock, someone suggests we find food. And has anyone seen a TV? There are rumors about Chicago and LA. Are they right? Are more coming? The Sears Tower? The White House?

  We head through the parking lot toward town, but there is a man blocking our way. Sitting astride a tractor with a big scooping bucket on the front, he yells at us for being on his property. We explain the boats, and he says we can’t tie up there, that this is his restaurant. We say there’s no room anywhere, that the Coast Guard won’t let us leave, that they’ll shoot at us if we do.

  He tells us we better go fucking home and get our guns. He tells us we’re at war.

  We watch as a car pulls up, a friend of his, and the man lifts the bucket of that great tractor so that this one car can come through, and then the bucket rattles back to the concrete. No one else may pass.

  “Better get your fucking guns,” he yells at us, as we run off in search of food. We run, and our feet make the sound of Tralfamadorians clapping, of happy people making fists.

  Stained is washing the same triangle of glass that he washed the night before. He peers in at Montana and seems to be watching her knit. Montana has snapped the antennas off the TV, much to the chagrin of Billy Pilgrim, who says this Western is his favorite show. He settles when he sees the reception does not waver. Montana finds she has to rough up the smooth metal a bit before it will hold the thread. She is taking the carpet apart and making a dress for her child. Her arms rest on her swollen belly. The thread pulls neatly from the carpet, one line at a time, back and forth, as the opposite happens in her lap. There is destruction and creation taking place all at once, connected by a single thread. The glass squeaks as Stained washes the same spot, over and over.

  “Because,” he says, apropos of something, the organ overhead playing his tune-like voice.

  Montana smiles. She’s not sure what question this is aimed at—not that it matters. She is content to have someone who listens. Billy doesn’t always. He just stares in the vicinity of her locket.

  “I wish you wouldn’t destroy the universe,” Montana says, not for the first time. She starts a new row, really likes the way she can extend or retract these needles to make them shorter or longer, thinks TV antennas are just fine for knitting, and then looks up at Stained. “Those of us who only see in three dimensions, we would most appreciate having the universe around.”

  Stained blinks and watches her. Montana peers down at the dome of her belly, this dome within a dome, this prisoner two domes deep, naked and ignorant and soon for this world. “It would be nice to have a universe for my baby,” she tells Stained. Not that this would move him, just her thinking aloud. Just talking over Billy, who is murmuring in his sleep.

  “I’m not angry at you,” she tells Stained. And the squeaking and cleaning stop. “You took everything from me, but I’m not angry at you.” Another row of stitches. Montana adjusts herself in the lounger, because being pregnant requires a constant quest for some elusive comfort. She loves her baby; this is what she knows. And she never wanted one. Never would have had one back at home. Not in that life. It made hating this place difficult at times. Stained seems to be reading her mind, the way he stares at her.

  “I was angry, you know,” she tells him. “For weeks and weeks, all I wanted was for all of you to die for what you did. Maybe you heard me screaming it in my head, those long speeches saying I’d get even with you, that my world would come for me, would blast you to smithereens.”

  Stained watches her.

  “But this is where we’re different. You see the future and refuse to change it. Where I come from, we can see the past, but we keep repeating it. That’s where we’re different. The same but different.” She nods vigorously. “I’ve never been free before, you see. Not once in my whole life. I used to make fists and hit walls, but it hurt me more than it hurt them. The people who did bad things to me, they didn’t care how angry I got. It didn’t fix a thing. So you go right on cleaning and peering in, and I’m going to—”

  “He loves you, too,” Stained says.

  Montana turns and peers at Billy Pilgrim, who has rolled over and has uncovered himself. She knits two and purls one. Knits two and purls one. “I know,” she says. She doesn’t say that she doesn’t really love Billy. Pities him, more like. After a long while, she remembers where the conversation had been going.

  “You know what I’ve realized? Just a week ago, sitting here, miserable for my kid who will be born in this zoo of yours. I realized that I have never owned myself. Not really. I’ve thought what others wanted me to think. I’ve felt the way I was supposed to feel. I used to get angry and want to hit things, thought that would make it better, make things right.” Montana laughs. She balls up her hand. “I used to make fists like you do, that’s what I did.”

  The glass before Montana has never been so clean.

  “And then I realized what a blessing it is that I don’t know the future. That I don’t see like you do. Because what would I do? I’d be as numb and callous as you are. A prisoner. I’d already know how this dress comes out, and that wouldn’t make me wanna go through with it. You know?”

  “It’s a boy,” Stained says.

  Montana looks from her knitting to the Tralfamadorian with the red splotch on his palm. If Montana had lived a different life, she would have called this Tralf Macbeth. But that wasn’t the life given to her.

  “What did you say?” she asks.

  Stained blinks. Montana rubs her belly.

  “Can you read his mind? It’s gonna be a boy?”

  Tears blur her vision like the rainy Tralfamadorian nights streak the dome.

  “If you can talk to him, tell him I love him. Tell him everything’s gonna be okay.”

  Stained has gone back to cleaning. Montana wants to scream, but the thing she is angry at is in the past. The past can’t hear her. This is the thing, her great discovery. She smiles at the future. Happiness is a choice. She knits another row and loves every man who ever wronged her. More important, she loves those who will wrong her yet.

  “Because,” Stained says, curling a finger, and peering in at her.

  “Yes,” Montana agrees.

  “Because.” She laughs, and almost feels free.

  9

  A plane disappears into an office building, and bombs erupt everywhere at once. In London and Baghdad, in Spain and Afghanistan, every bomb that ever was and ever will be detonates in unison. All the same bomb.

  The Tralfamadorians see time stretched out in all directions. They see a people who can do nothing but make joyous fists. Something is wrong with those who don’t. Something is terribly wrong with those who don’t. And where are the more like them?

  It is July 6, 2001, and I am on the dec
k of the motor yacht Symphony. There is a stranger beside me, a beautiful girl; I do not know her name. She is a dancer, one of the high-kicking Rockettes, and we have exchanged smiles more than once over the course of the night. I join her on the bow. It is a warm evening on the Hudson. I have yet to meet my wife, Amber, in whom I will find peace. Symphony turns away from the Statue of Liberty and aims for Manhattan, steams through those lapping waters toward a skyline alight, toward those tall pillars of gleaming glass that blot out the blackest sky.

  At that moment, a stranger leans in and kisses a boy, and the universe has never been so right. If time could be lived in a single dimension, there is where I would be. A boy and a city whole. But it is a man who writes this, every word of it true. And in that bright blue and empty sky where shade used to shelter my toil, I take solace in the wisdom of Montana Wildhack—who knows that nothing in the past can keep her from being free.

  Afterword

  This is by far the most difficult thing I’ve ever written. It’s the only time I grossly missed a self-imposed deadline, and what is little more than a novelette took longer to compose than most of my full-length novels. The final 10,500 words required that I first write about 100,000, composing and recomposing passages over and over again, crafting and deleting, until I ended up with the piece I submitted.

  In 2014, Amazon launched a new program called Kindle Worlds, which allows fans to write stories based on their favorite characters and worlds. My Silo series was included in the program, and Amazon was also interested in me writing for one of the other “Worlds.” When I saw that Kurt Vonnegut’s works were included in the program, I expressed interest. I think I knew from the start what I wanted to write; it just took me a while to admit it to myself.