Hugh Howey: Machine Learning

“Tul heard from High Command that the warships are to be kept in low atmo,” Urj says quietly. He is squad commander and to report out of chain is a great sin. Somehow, the hush deepens. The game is forgotten, even the thirty-five that I’m in the hole.

“Reboot and reload?” Gha, a gunner, asks.

Urj nods.

“What’s that mean?” Bek asks, and I am thankful. I grow tiresome of admitting my ignorance on these things.

“It means there are more of us in the vats, and those bodies may be needed as well.”

“Fast as they can grow us,” Gha says, “they’ll send us down.”

Everyone looks at me like I’m responsible for this mess. But what do I know? It’s been ages since I took a life or gave one up. There have been occasional worlds that we passed by because they were deemed too dangerous to take on. There have been worlds we conquered with a single warship. Then there are worlds like these that worry the stalks of those much higher in rank than I’ll ever be. So many types of worlds, and I’ve studied them all.

Instead of spending my free time greasing the outdated gear I’ve been assigned or going over the tactics in my squad manual, I sit in my bunk in the days before planetfall reading about Mil, my absent bunkmate. This is what I call her: my absent bunkmate. We share our bunks, hers and mine, just not at the same time. She is sexed where I used to sleep, while I suffer the dreadful slobbering snores of her old roommate, Lum. I wonder at times, woken at night by the awful noise of Lum sleeping, if the mystery of Mil’s suicides is not right there, one bunk below me.

Mil’s files are full of a vague strangeness, but nothing I can put my sucker on, either for myself or for Kur. Lots of messages are gone—the original ordering is intact, but some numbers are skipped. Reminds me of the “missing buck” play my squad inanely ascribes to.

Quite a few messages are to and from a secretary at High Command, saying that Mil’s reports are being passed along. The actual reports are not among her files, however. There is one partial report quoted, describing a missing signal of some sort. I wonder if one of our advanced scout ships has been taken out. It is from these ships that all my intel came. Does Earth have warning of our arrival? Wouldn’t be the first time. And it would explain the All-Tentacles and the consternation among the higher-ups.

I think of the long-range scans of Earth I used to study. It was evident that fighting had taken place recently and might still be going on. Not unusual on planets we raid, and this planet’s inhabitants are an especially warlike people. If they stopped that fighting and trained their guns toward us, that would be very much not good. The problem with hitting an aggressive race isn’t just their honed skills, but their state of readiness.

Maybe I’m reading too much into Mil’s records, but with so many bodies being thrown into Gunnery, it is time to consider that we are being lowered like a skink into boiling water. Maybe Mil was suggesting we bypass this planet entirely, and High Command is having none of such talk from a terminal tech. Perhaps they deleted her suggestions in case she turns out to be right.

But why the suicides? It’s not just that suicides are expensive—it’s that the chances of offing oneself twice in a single cycle are low. Whatever is ailing someone is not likely to be present when they are brought back.

When my new bunkmate, Lum, returns from her station duties, I set the terminal aside and broach the touchy subject.

“Hey, Lum,” I say.

My bunkmate is eating a gurd. With her mouth full, she raises her stalks questioningly.

“Did you… notice anything strange about Mil before she… well, before either of her suicides?”

“Mmm,” Lum says. She swallows and starts taking off her work clothes. I haven’t been able to tell if she is coming on to me, but I knot my tentacles that she isn’t.

“Yeah,” she says. “She was very different the days before. Both times.”

“How so?” I ask.

Lum throws her clothes into the chute and steps into the crapper to run the shower. “She got real calm,” she says. Steam starts rising in the crapper. I’ve scalded myself twice showering after Lum’s lava blasts.

“You mean, she wasn’t usually calm?”

“Her normal state was to raise hell,” Lum says. She sticks her head out of the crapper, but I notice a tentacle wrapping around the edge of the door. She is dying to shut the conversation off and get in the shower. “The reason Mil offed herself was because of her demotions. She was in High Command a few raids ago. Got bumped down, and she’s been getting bumped down ever since. Causes too much trouble.” Lum screws up her eyestalks. “Speaks her mind,” she says, as if this is a great sin.

“Seems weird,” I say. “Two suicides in a cycle. Taking on that much debt.”

Lum eyes the shower. The steam is, blessedly, cloaking her lower half.

“You ever done it?” I ask. “Ever… you know.”

“No,” she says, smiling. She looks down at herself. “I’m all original. And I’m wasting water. You wanna come in? I can tell you about my crazy ex-bunkmate, and you can scrub the barnacles off my back.”

“I’m good,” I say. “Just curious is all.”

Lum seems, if anything, relieved. I can’t get a bead on her. “Suit yourself.” She starts to pull the door shut, then sticks her head out one last time. Considers something. I’m waiting.

“You were in Intelligence,” she says.

“Still am,” I say. “Gunner is just this one time.”

“And other races, they do it too? Off themselves?”

“A lot,” I say.

“But it’s final death for them,” Lum says.

“Yeah. That’s the point,” I say. “They do it when they get depressed.” Here, I’m drawing more from my own experiences than any of my studies. I remember feeling like I wanted to sleep for a long time. Forever, if I could.

The steam is filling our bunkroom. I feel sweat gathering on my back. Lum studies me for a painfully long while.

“I don’t think Mil was depressed,” she finally says. “I think she was… satisfied. Content, maybe. Or resigned. Or maybe…”

“Maybe what?”

“Or maybe she was scared out of her senses, and she couldn’t get anyone to pay attention. So she finally gave up.”

The next morning, I find what may be a clue. It is discovered by my sensitive back: a lump in my mattress or a spring bent out of shape. This is two mornings in a row with an ache in my spines (my mother would, again, call me soft of tentacle). I tear the sheets off my mattress in search of the answer.

All the springs are in fine shape, but running a tentacle across the mattress, I feel a lump. A very hard lump with sharp corners. It turns out to be a small data drive sewn into the fabric of the mattress. This is most curious. I wouldn’t think my beloved Mil would be into sexing vids, which is all I have ever used these for. The drive is locked. I try to access it with the wall terminal, but it refuses my tentacle. Coded to Mil’s secretions, unless it belongs to someone else.

One mystery is solved, and that’s the second suicide. Even with Mil’s memories restored to some prior, stable state, she would have found the drive and accessed some reminder. She had left a note to herself before the first deed, and upon discovering it, gave a repeat performance. Maybe her superiors knew she had left some memory behind, and so they sent her to another ship. To my bunk. Where she is being sexed by Kur.

The only problem with my brilliant theory is that Kur says she’s still trying to hang herself. But that could be explained by the sexing! I chuckle to myself. I will have to tell Kur that one. I bring up my messages on the terminal to pass this joke along and to tell him about the data drive, when I see a message waiting in my inbox from him, saying that he has thwarted another attempt on her life.