Hugh Howey - Machine Learning

Ziba was there, a face behind a mask, an angel with no oxygen, laboring down that nameless ridge having summited after me.

And Cardhil, whose ankle had seized, whose gears whirred, whose mind was said to be that of the great climber of the same name, but it was not something I ever believed. Until that moment. And I would never doubt again. It was Cardhil who carried me. And the perfect grace that had seemed inhuman at base camp felt like a real man to me on that summit. Cardhil staggered and limped along. He cradled me in his mighty and trembling arms.

At camp 7, Hanson tended to me, though he was in no shape to do so. He said my hands were gone. My feet as well. I believed him.

At 6, we notified base camp. We informed Humphries and Shubert’s team that they had perished nobly. The controversy was not in my mind at camp 6. I was weeping frozen tears. I was still dead on that peak, blabbering to alien stars. I had not yet been carried anywhere.

There was no memory of camp 5. I’m not even certain we stopped there. At camp 4, a doctor removed my lips and my nose. It required no instruments. My Sherpas were there to congratulate me. The horror of what I’d done was far worse than the horror of what I’d become. I could look at myself in the mirror with no revulsion. To think on myself, though, was to invite black thoughts.

Ziba and Cardhil made it down the mountain ahead of me. I asked Hanson to work the radio, and I tried to form the words with my new face. But it wasn’t my lips that caused problems. It wasn’t my tongue.

At base camp, at this approximation of civilization, I was provided a glimpse of what awaited me across the worlds. And it did not matter who I told or how often. I wrote in every forum, had letters crafted by those who could form them, who could understand my muted, lipless words, but Ziba, I was told, was already off to explore new worlds. And my exhortations that she be remembered fell on deaf ears. Ridgelines had already been named. And when my wife kissed my new face weeks later, the tears I wept were not for seeing her again but for the misery, the pain, of not having been left there where I deserved to lie, where I could be forgotten, frozen in the vastness of time, spinning lazily with broken wings beneath that great orange and alien star. Beneath that star who alone would ever know the awful truth of my most hollow glory.

I doubt I’ll ever write a story as effortlessly as I wrote this one. “The Walk up Nameless Ridge” spilled out of me in a single writing session. It was a story I needed to write for myself, and I immediately thought of it as one of my finest. Which is a bit ironic, because the story is about how unworthy I am as a writer. It was a rejection of what little fame my novel Wool was bringing me. An attempt to step back and hide from the world.

At the time, Wool seemed to be everywhere. It was on the New York Times Best Sellers list, and the five individual parts were clogging up the top of Amazon’s science fiction Best Sellers lists. It was a bizarre feeling, a mix of exhilaration and embarrassment. I was sure I didn’t deserve any of this. The feeling was crippling at times.

Around the same time, I read Kevin Kelly’s excellent book What Technology Wants . Kevin helps dispel the illusion of singular creators, discoverers, and inventors. What is true of the sciences I believe is also true of art. Success in art lies as much in the changing tastes of the crowd as in the offerings. There is a varied froth of material being generated at all times, much of it along narrow themes, and when the need from the audience becomes great enough, one stream of that art is rewarded.

I’ve seen many parallels to Wool in other forms of popular culture. There were a lot of artists thinking about the same issues, wrestling with the same ideas, because artists are part of the general population, and we were all wrestling with the same forces all around us. It’s not coincidence; it’s shared experience.

With “The Walk up Nameless Ridge,” I wanted to write about the possibility that our true explorers will never be known. Maybe we should give less credit to those we think broke new ground. And maybe we should look harder and appreciate more those who came before us.

Iwonder, sometimes, if this is not me. Holding a tentacle up in front of the mirror, turning my eyestalk and studying these webbed ears, these bright green eyes with their space-black slits, I become convinced they belong to some other. It is a morning contemplation that, much like the gas from breakfast, eventually passes by mid-afternoon. But when I rise, I feel it is in another’s body. My brain is discombobulated from sleep, and I sense some deep gap between my soul and my form. I think on this while on the toilet, until my bunkmate, Kur, slaps the bathroom door with his tentacle.

“Always in a rush to shit,” I shout through the door, “but never in a hurry to be first from bed.”

Kur pauses in his protestations, possibly to consider this contradiction. “It is your smelly ass that wakes me,” he finally explains.

I flush and pop the door. Somewhere, our spaceship home will turn my waste into a meal. I like to pretend it will all go to Kur. Outside, we jostle in the tight confines of our bunkroom as he takes my place in the crapper.

“What day is it?” he asks, farting. Most of our conversations are through this door. Once our shifts begin, we don’t see each other. Kur works in Gunnery, and I moved up to Intelligence ages ago, after the conquest of the Dupliene Empire. The new job came with a superiority complex, but, alas, not a larger bunk.

“It’s Second Monday,” I tell him. We are practicing our Native. Kur and I are both assigned to Sector 2 landfall. He will be shooting at the very crowds I have studied, and on this planet they have seven days to a cycle instead of twelve. Such confusions are likely why I awake feeling like some other. You settle in the skin of an alien race, and by the time you feel at home there, they are no more.

Kur flushes. “Not day of the week. What day till planetfall?”

I hear the sink run as he washes his tentacle. Kur’s personal hygiene makes up for much else.

“It’s eight days to planetfall,” I tell him. “Near enough that you should know.”

He cracks the door. His bottoms are still undone. “I dreamed today was the day,” he says. “Very confusing. I was mowing down the pink cunts when your foul emanations stirred me.” He screws his eyestalks together, suppressing a laugh or a bout of gas. “Explains the cannon fire in my dreams,” he says.

He laughs and farts and laughs some more.

I am reminded of my own nightmares. They usually come right after a conquest. In these dreams, it is suddenly the day of the next planetfall, and I don’t know my assignments. I don’t know the language or my targets or the geography. I haven’t had these dreams in a long time, though. I feel prepared. I know this planet Earth twice as well as I have any other. I am as ready for this invasion as I have ever been.

While Kur finishes dressing himself, I tap the grimy terminal on the wall. A light in the top corner is flashing, twice long and one short: a message for me.

TO: Second Rank Intelligence Liaison Hyk

FROM: Sector 2 Supervisor Ter

Bad news, Hyk. Mil from Telecoms Sector 1 has killed herself again. As this is the second offense in a span of twelve sleeps, Mil has been reassigned to Gunner Crew 2, Squad 8. Due to some shuffling in landing parties, we need you to clean out your desk and report to Sector 1. We apologize for any inconvenience. See Supervisor Bix when you arrive.