Hugh Howey - Machine Learning

When the vision came, it was a thunderclap. A sudden roar, though I realized the words had been there before. They were the buzzing in my brain, nonsense words, but I knew what they meant. I saw them like shapes and things, like swirling dreams. There was shouting, someone on the road with me, a man with my own voice. Crying and crying, fingers pinned my eyes open, and I never wanted to look away from the sun again. I loved it in that instant. I wanted it to fall out of the sky and enter me through my eyeballs; I wanted to let it blow me across the prairie and set everything on fire, to burn that land ahead of its coming, to make room. I saw men and women and children fall before me. I saw an infant thrown into the flames, blood in everyone’s eyes. And the voices, these words foreign and understood that came like pictures directly into my head, this voice on the road that spoke as I spun and spun between the barbed wire and my skittish horse, they sounded like the tongue of a Red Man.

I woke up and men were dead. My men. Something told me there had been a killing. My head throbbed like my heart was trapped in my skull, had swollen up, and needed out. It took a moment to realize my eyes were open but I wasn’t seeing anything. I could barely make out a shape in front of my face when I waved my hand before it. Groping about, I felt a bunk beneath me, a wall of steel bars behind. I was in the pen. I could feel the firing squad lined up, instruments of death aimed at my chest, could see the men I’d killed.

“Sir, he’s done stirred.”

Voices and shuffling feet. I had Arapaho on my tongue, the taste of silver and fire, words like pictures drawn in the dirt, telling me what to do. Something alien had communicated with me. A part of it lived deep inside.

“Drink some water, son.”

There was a hand on my wrist, a hand reaching through the bars. A tin of water was pressed into my palm, sloshing cool on my forearm. My lips stung as I drank. I pulled the cup away and touched my mouth, found my lips swollen and cracked. My throat burned. But the horrible throbbing in my eyes and my brain drowned out these lesser hurts.

“What the hell happened to you?”

“Major?” My voice was a pale shadow of its old self. I drank more, ignoring the sting of my fouled lips. “What did I do?” I asked.

“They found you face-up in the dirt, babbling like you had a few too many. Your horse came back to the fort without you.”

“I can’t see.”

“That’s what you’ve been sayin’. Doc said to put you in here where it was dark, that it should come back. You rest up, okay? Can’t afford to lose any more of my men.”

“How many?”

I could hear the boards creak as the major shifted his weight. “How many of what, son?”

“Did I… How many dead?” Memories and visions were mixed up in my head. Words I knew and words I didn’t. There were flashes of green and swimming lights in my eyes like an angry campfire. Something was telling me to kill or that I already had, hard to tell which.

“Get some rest. I’ll send some food over.”

I nursed my water and decided I hadn’t done the things I thought I had. But I could feel the urge. Some silent screaming beneath my skin, something directing my bones. I was reminded of a visit to Richmond when I was a boy. A friend of my mother’s was a pastor there, took us to his great big church. There was a belfry terribly high off the ground, a circuit of rickety stairs, and at one corner you could peer down at the street like a bird. And something in me felt this urge to jump out and go plummeting down, something so strong that I had to back away and clutch my father, even though I was too old to be holding his hand. And now this demon was in my blood again, but this time to hurt others.

Long after the tin cup was dry, I continued to pass it back and forth between my hands. It was Collins who brought me my supper.

“You gone and blinded yourself, ” Collins said, a voice in the darkness. Hinges pealed as he let himself into the pen, and I realized the door had never been locked. I hadn’t killed no man. Not that day, anyhow.

The plate was warm as he rested it on my knee. A fork was pressed into my palm. “You manage all right?” he asked. “See anything yet?”

I shook my head. I saw things, but not like he meant.

“I blame myself, ” Collins said. “But what was you thinking?”

“I weren’t,” I admitted. “Just started and couldn’t stop.”

Collins laughed. “Most take a glance and know it’s a bad idea.”

I groped around the plate with my fork, found some resistance, some weight. Took a sniff of potatoes and blew on ’em in case they was hot. How anyone lived with such blindness, I couldn’t fathom.

“I heard voices,” I told Collins. I wasn’t sure I’d ever tell anyone, but it just came out. “Voices and… I had a vision.” I swallowed the potatoes and shook my head. Patches of murk swam in the darkness, a vague discernment of shapes. I’d welcome just seeing my own hands.

“You heard voices. You mean when they scooped you off the road?”

“Before.” I peered at where I thought Collins stood, where I heard him. “They were telling me to do awful things. I think Randall was poisoned by the sun.”

“Randall was poisoned by the Arapaho. He was babblin’ that nonsense right up until we shot him. You just need some sleep is all.”

I nodded and ate, and Collins gave me silent and invisible company. By nightfall, it felt as though some of my eyesight was returning, but not much. I fell asleep on that cot for drunkards, madmen, and murderers—and wondered which of them I was.

When I awoke, it was not yet dawn. My internal clock had unwound from the late shifts and lack of sleep. But I could see my hands, and my lips only partway stuck together. Groping about, I let myself out of the pen and sought my own bunk.

Along the way, with my fingers brushing cedar clapboards to keep from spinning in circles, I noticed the pinpricks of tiny lights in my vision. It was pitch-black across the fort, and it was like somehow the brightest of stars were able to penetrate my blindness. But no: it was my eyesight returning.

I stopped and marveled at the tiny spots of light in that infinite darkness. The voices were out there, straining to be heard. There was a madness in my soul, an invader.

It hadn’t taken a full hold of me, but its claws had left marks. It was the same madness I’d seen in the war cries of the natives we fought with. It was the madness Randall had seized upon. A cry from some distant throat telling me that this land was someone else’s and that a reckoning was coming. That was the sight I’d seen: a land wiped clean and taken by those who didn’t belong, a land of dead and missing cattle to starve us the way we’d done with the buffalo, a time of great sickness and men dying beyond counting, with infection rained down from the heavens like some poisoned blanket.

This was the calling. I heard it clearer that night than I ever would again. I stood there for what felt like hours, searching for those pinprick stars and marveling at how our own sun was said to be one like them. Our sun, where native tribes stood sentinel in the morning so we couldn’t see them coming, where they would watch and watch and plan their deadly raids. Many a time, they had brought hell on us from the east with the rising of the sun, the Arapaho and the Sioux and the Apache, but I reckoned we’d done the same and that others might do it to us one day. Generations back, a man with my name had crossed a wide sea and brought his own hell from the east. Others would come. It were folly to think we’d be the last.

That was my vision, what I saw clearly that night in my blindness and with an earful of strange voices. I saw the night and its lights like never before. There was a far and dark sea out there, hanging over me. A dark sea that ships sailed on, scouts arriving at dawn to watch over us, vast fleets to rain down by dusk. But it was not yet dusk. It was early yet. And those stars were like campfires impossibly distant where strange men spoke in strange tongues and conjured war. They spoke with words that I could not fathom but could see like scratches in the dirt, could see like a calling to do bad things on their behalf.