Hugh Howey - Machine Learning

“I didn’t tell you before now because… because I didn’t believe it.” He is stammering. He can debrief the president of the United States without missing a beat, but not this. In the backseat, Emily whispers something to Mr. Bunny. John swallows and continues: “I’ve been a part of something—” He shakes his head. “Something worse than usual. And now… that something is about to—” He glances at his watch. It’s too late. She’ll never get to hear it from him, not when it mattered, not before it was too late. She will have to watch.

He reaches over his shoulder and grabs his seat belt. Buckles up. Glancing up at the passing jet, John says a prayer for those people up in the air. He is thankful that they’ll be dead before they strike the earth. On the dashboard, there is a book with The Order embossed on the cover. In the reflection of the windshield, it looks vaguely like the word redo. If only.

“What have you done?” Barbara asks, and there’s a deadness in her voice, a hollow. As if she knows the scope of the horrible things he could do.

John focuses on his watch. The second hand twitches, and the anointed hour strikes. He and his family should be outside Atlanta with the others, not on the side of the road in Iowa. They should be crowding underground with everyone else, the selected few, the survivors. But here they are, on the side of the road, cowering behind a billboard blinking with cheap gas prices, bracing for the end of the world.

For a long while, nothing happens.

Traffic whizzes by unseen; the contrail overhead grows longer; his wife waits for an answer.

The world is on autopilot, governed by the momentum of life, by humanity’s great machinations, by all those gears in motion, spinning and spinning.

Emily asks if they can go now. She says she needs to pee.

John laughs. Deep in his chest and with a flood of relief. He feels that cool wave of euphoria like a nearby zing telling him that a bullet has passed, that it missed. He was wrong. They were wrong. The book, Tracy, all the others. The national convention in Atlanta is nothing more than a convention, one party’s picking of a president, just what it was purported to be. There won’t be generations of survivors living underground. His government didn’t seed all of humanity with microscopic time bombs that will shut down their hosts at the appointed hour. John will now have to go camping with his family. And for weeks and weeks, Barbara will hound him over what this great secret was that made him pull off the interstate and act so strange—

A scream erupts from the backseat, shattering this eyeblink of relief, this last laugh. Ahead, a pickup truck has left the interstate at a sharp angle. A front tire bites the dirt and sends the truck flipping into the air. It goes into the frantic spins of a figure skater, doors flying open like graceful arms, bodies tumbling out lifeless, arms and legs spread, little black asterisks in the open air.

The truck hits in a shower of soil before lurching up again, dented and slower this time. There is motion in the rearview. A tractor trailer tumbles off the blacktop at ninety miles an hour. It is happening. It is really fucking happening. The end of the world.

John’s heart stops for a moment. His lungs constrict as if he has stepped naked into a cold shower. But this is only the shock of awareness. The invisible machines striking down the rest of humanity are not alive in him. He isn’t going to die, not in that precise moment, not at that anointed hour. His heart and lungs and body are inoculated.

Twelve billion others aren’t so lucky.

The ringtone is both melody and alarm. An old song, danced to in Milan, the composer unknown. It brings back the fragrance of her perfume and the guilt of a one-night stand.

John’s palms are sweaty as he swipes the phone and accepts the call. He needs to change that fucking ringtone. Tracy is nothing more than a colleague. Nothing more. But it could’ve been Pavlov or Skinner who composed that tune, the way it drives him crazy in reflex.

“Hello?” He smiles at Barbara, who is washing dishes, hands covered in suds. It’s Wednesday evening. Nothing unusual. Just a colleague calling after hours. Barbara turns and works the lipstick off the rim of a wineglass.

“Have you made up your mind?” Tracy asks. She sounds like a waitress who has returned to his table to find him staring dumbly at the menu, as if this should be simple, as if he should just have the daily special like she suggested half an hour ago.

“I’m sorry, you’re breaking up,” John lies. He steps out onto the porch and lets the screen door slam shut behind him. Strolling toward the garden, he startles the birds from the low feeder. The neighbor’s cat glares at him for ruining dinner before slinking away. “That’s better,” he says, glancing back toward the house.

“Have you made up your mind?” Tracy asks again. She is asking the impossible. Upstairs on John’s dresser, there is a book with instructions on what to do when the world comes to an end. John has spent the past year reading that book from cover to cover. Several times, in fact. The book is full of impossible things. Unbelievable things. No one who reads these things would believe them, not unless they’d seen the impossible before.

Ah, but Tracy has. She believes. And like a chance encounter in Milan—skin touching skin and sparking a great mistake—her brush with this leather book has spun John’s life out of control. Whether the book proves false or not, it has already gotten him deeper than he would have liked.

“Our plane leaves tomorrow,” he says. “For Atlanta.” Technically, this is true. That plane will leave. John has learned from the best how to lie without lying.

A deep pull of air on the other end of the line. John can picture Tracy’s lips, can see her elegant neck, can imagine her perfectly, can almost taste the salt on her skin. He needs to change that goddamn ringtone.

“We can guarantee your safety,” Tracy says.

John laughs.

“Listen to me. I’m serious. We know what they put in you. Come to Colorado—”

“You mean New Moscow?”

“That’s not funny.”

“How well do you know these people?” John fights to keep his voice under control. He has looked into the group Tracy is working with. Some of them hold distinguished positions on agency watch lists, including a doctor who poses an actionable threat. John tells himself it won’t matter, that they are too late to stop anything. And he believes this.

“I’ve known Professor Karpov for years,” Tracy insists. “He believes me. He believes you. We’re going to survive this thanks to you. And so I would damn well appreciate you being here.”

“And my family?”

Tracy hesitates. “Of course. Them too. Tell me you’ll be here, John. Hell, forget the tickets I sent and go to the airport right now. Buy new tickets. Don’t wait until tomorrow.”

John thinks of the two sets of tickets in the book upstairs. He lowers his voice to a whisper. “And tell Barbara what?”

There’s a deep breath, a heavy sigh on the other end of the line.

“Lie to her. You’re good at that.”

The tractor trailer fills the rearview mirror. A bright silver grille looms large, tufts of grass spitting up from the great tires, furrows of soil loosened by yesterday’s rain. Time seems to slow. The grille turns as if suddenly uninterested in the Explorer, and the long trailer behind the cab slews to the side, jackknifing. John yells for his family to hold on; he braces for impact. Ahead of him, several other cars are tumbling off the road.

The eighteen-wheeler growls as it passes by. Its trailer misses the concrete pillar and catches the bumper of the Explorer. The world jerks violently. John’s head bounces off his headrest as the Explorer is slammed aside like a geek shouldered by a jock in a hallway.