Hugh Howey - Machine Learning

Adam soaked it in. He wanted it to be real as well.

“Hey!”

He turned. Belatrix stood behind him, her green work apron hanging around her neck, two creases running down it vertically from having been meticulously folded the night before. Curls of brown hair hung like springs behind her ears. Her bright eyes smiled at him, crinkles radiating away from their corners. “I didn’t see you come in,” she said. At least, that’s how it was translated for Adam.

Belatrix showed him the small stack of books she was shelving, as if to apologize for not hugging him. Adam smiled what he knew to be a perfectly symmetrical smile full of brilliant teeth.

“I kinda snuck past to the bathroom.” He waved a little wave to forgive the lack of a hug. Adam glanced at the books in her hands. “You getting off soon?”

“I am.”

She was. Adam knew she was. He had chosen the time carefully when he logged in. Belatrix smiled at him then slid a book into place. Adam tried not to think of the other him, the fleshy him, and the real world waiting and spinning around him. He gave himself up completely to the sim.

“How was work?” Belatrix asked as she pushed open her apartment door and shrugged off her coat. It had drizzled on their walk over from the bookstore. Adam wiped his feet on her mat, then kicked off his shoes. Details like the mud, the shiny drops of water on the tile—he still marveled at the completeness of the illusion, the scope and scale of the digitally constructed world. It was easy to lose oneself in it, to become bewildered by it all.

“That interesting, huh?”

Adam broke out of his trance and helped Belatrix hang her jacket on the hook by the door. “Work was fine,” he said. “Closed a pretty big deal this week.”

He was sure it was true. When he wasn’t present to fill and steer his avatar, the computers moved it about as autonomously as anyone else on planet Hammond. Belatrix, in fact, had probably spent more time in his avatar’s place of work than he had.

“Some tea?”

“Sure,” he said, even though he hated the stuff. It wasn’t tea, but that was the closest translation for the language parser. Horseshit would have been more apt, but the translator stuck to categories such as “warm beverages.” The only thing it left untouched were proper nouns, which left Adam’s avatar with the moniker of Phurxy, a dreadfully common name on Hammond’s Southwest continent.

“Bitter apple?” Belatrix held up a grainy lump of spice. Again, the translation was a mere approximation.

“Please,” Adam said. It made the hot horseshit taste more like wet dirt, a distinct improvement. Adam often considered fast flowing the time through these bits, but the domestic foreplay was a crucial part of the fantasy. This was the life he wanted to live, here with Belatrix in her tidy apartment. He took the steaming bowl and glanced in the mirror at his clean and neatly groomed self. His avatar had taken the time to do that in the morning, brushing his teeth and his hair. It felt like room service for the body and soul. He luxuriated in his sense of self.

“ Seamonsters and Mist is opening up at the cinema this weekend.” Bel-atrix took a loud sip and looked at him over the rim of her bowl. “You wanna go see it?”

“Love to,” he said. It felt amazing to make plans for his avatar’s time, knowing he wouldn’t have to go—but that he would. He drank as much wet dirt as he could take, set the bowl aside, then plopped down on one of the floor cushions. “I’m feeling kinda horny,” he said with a grin.

Belatrix smiled and set aside her bowl.

Adam could get away with saying such forward things—he could rush the moment with her—because he didn’t do it often.

He did it every time.

Adam arrived late to his eight o’clock class. His students were already there, sitting like powered-down robots, gazing ahead, awaiting commands from him. He closed the door—too loudly—and felt annoyed by the quiet. He would’ve preferred the film cliché: balled paper flying; kids sitting on desks swinging their feet; boys with bravado and girls with batting lashes twisting in their seats. In all his years of teaching, he’d never seen such a scene, not once. It was always the blank stares, the lethargy, the sense among them that the first who moved or uttered a word would be eaten by the others—or, worse, be made unpopular.

Adam dumped a stack of papers on his desk and made a show of arranging them, anything to disturb the thick silence of the room. He resented his eight o’clock class. He knew they felt the same way, but what were they missing? More sleep? Escape from their hangovers? He was missing an entire other life he preferred to live, a life that was daily truncated by a day job he wished he didn’t need. He thought this as he scanned their faces, all a weird mix of wide eyes and boredom. If it weren’t for the access to the university server farms and their sims, he wouldn’t put up with the kids at all. Well, the sims and the health care. The health care was nice.

He shuffled papers around and tried to glean from graded assignments which class this was. He had nothing planned for the day. He rarely did of late.

The hypocrisy of Adam’s new existence, the layers and layers of hypocrisy, was always right at the surface, staring back at him. He had become a master of procrastination. Like the students he had long mocked, he had honed the art of putting things off until they were simply never done. He lived under a heavy blanket of shirked responsibilities; they weighed on him every moment, this great pile of many things that needed to be done. He no longer knew where to start. It was all about getting through each moment, getting through the day to enjoy the nights, faking his real life so he could live his fake one.

More hypocrisy: Adam used to mock his kids for their addiction to video games—now he lived in one of his own. He remembered his disgust at virtual marriages between players who had never met, stories about trolls and paladins exchanging digital vows. Now he had one girlfriend he had never met, and he discussed marriage and kids with another person who didn’t really exist.

Then there was the plagiarism—his greatest hypocrisy of them all.

“Does somebody want to pass these out?” Adam gathered up the graded assignments and waved them with one hand. He hadn’t actually taken the time to read them, just verified that they existed. A student he particularly loathed, seated to Adam’s left, was the first to volunteer. The boy took the papers eagerly. Adam rubbed his palms over his eyes and his fingers through his unwashed hair. The plagiarism was his greatest hypocrisy by far. If any of his students plagiarized, they would be flunked. They knew that from the start. It was the greatest sin as a student, as a thinker, and it was a temptation they struggled to avoid. Adam, meanwhile, did it for a living. His second job, the one that paid most of his bills, was to steal the words of others. But lately he hadn’t even been able to summon the motivation to do that. While the papers, marked with their red checks and little else, fluttered their way through the room, an old conversation with his mother came back to Adam. He remembered the first time he had tried to explain his new vocation, and how unimpressed she had been.

“I’m just so proud of you, honey!”

“Thanks, Mom.” Adam held the phone under his chin, the speaker angled away from his face. The extra distance dampened the earsplitting scream of his mother’s voice, who seemed to think her words needed extra force to cross the two time zones between them.