Hugh Howey - Machine Learning

There are books written in the Tralfamadorian way. You can read them in any order, front to back or sideways and inside out. It doesn’t matter, because it all happened. You have to see it all at once to know the book. To tell anyone what you are reading is pointless. You have to wait. You can only comment on your sense of the thing when studied from some distance. I studied a book like this in college, just a few years ago (a Tralfamadorian would say that I am still studying it). I hated the book when I read it the first time. A lot of people died. Truly awful things happened to a man who became an author, but he wrote of these things and utter nonsense in the same breath, and this made me dismiss the book. Until I finished it. You have to see all things at once, as on Tralfamadore. I read it again. I caught a glimpse of some other dimension. I began to back away, and I saw all of it at once, and that’s when I wept and saw that it was good.

The thing I hated while reading this book, it turns out, was me. Bad things happen, and shoulders are shrugged. The most serious of events are blended with the strange. The author pulled me inside his mind, and what I found there was a dead stillness, the somber and poignant wisdom of someone with little hope and scars across his eyes. There was humor there, too. But not the bright kind. The man who wrote that book is dead. So it goes.

Montana Wildhack was abducted while sunning beside her pool. She was twenty years old, which is middle-aged in her profession. In her first two years, she made over seventy films. It didn’t take long to film movies such as these, try as men might to prolong each scene. And Montana was in high demand, for in addition to being lovely, she could act. Had she known this skill had other outlets, she would have skipped her early career altogether and made a different sort of film, the kind with plot and wardrobe. But that would come after, and the least of the little a young person knows is what they’re capable of. It takes a Tralfamadorian to see all of time and know that life won’t always be so dim. Nor so good. Seen all at once, the way a Tralfamadorian sees time, life makes perfect sense. Which would be an odd way to live one.

Waking up naked inside a glass dome does strange things to Montana’s brain. There was a blue California sky and a burning sun overhead one moment, and now the sound of her own screaming voice. She can still smell the baby oil on her skin. A man is there, also naked. Tall and skinny and unattractive, with a leer that makes him look like a Hollywood director. And beyond the glass, hundreds of fleshy beings that look like plungers with hands for heads and eyes where the palms should be clap by making fists. This is how Tralfamadorians show that they are happy. This is how they know the world is right by them. They make fists.

If I try hard enough—which is to say by not trying at all—I can see in the fourth dimension the way a Tralfamadorian does. There I am, sitting in a college classroom. It is the summer of 2011, and I’m studying a book that jumps around and makes me feel angry and hollow inside. It’s also summertime ten years earlier in New York, and I’m working on a windlass in the stern of a fancy yacht. It is the summer of 2013, and I’m lying in a bed in Florida, typing. My dog is having a dream. On Tralfamadore, time is seen all at once, which makes it difficult at times to see how things are tied together. I’m reading a book about bombs being dropped on Dresden. Twenty-five thousand people are dying. There’s a plane banking over Manhattan right now. I can read the jumble of numbers and letters on the tail of that plane. I am screaming in my head for the pilot to pull up. On Tralfamadore, they communicate telepathically. They do not do this on Earth. No one will ever hear me. There is orange and black against a bright blue sky, and I think I can feel the heat of a movie effect against my face, but maybe it’s just fear and my imagination. My friend Kelly yells down at me from the neighboring yacht: “Did you see that?” Kelly’s brain is doing odd things. Montana Wildhack is screaming. All of us are. Twelve years later, I’m lying beside my dog in an otherwise empty house. She dreams and I cry. Thousands are dying all over again. So it goes.

Montana Wildhack learned at a young age that she would only be loved for her flesh. Her uncle taught her this, and no one ever thought to teach her otherwise. The Serenity Prayer is engraved on the locket around her neck. Listen:

She has read it enough to be able to read it upside down, just as it lies. The trickiest part is the last line. This is where mortals who live in three dimensions have too much expected of them. All of human misery lies here. Hubris and cowardice, too. If only it were as simple as a prayer that can fit on a locket. If only wisdom were so cheap. But men wrestle with the things they cannot change, and they ignore those that might bend to some economy of effort. Winning at wrestling is about picking your partner. Most people prefer the unconquerable brute they already know. Or maybe, if you look around, we’re addicted to a challenge. And so things go unchanged and unaccepted, and our arms and hearts grow weary.

On Tralfamadore, the applause of fists dies down, and Montana is alone and terrified in a room with a naked man. She has been here before. She knows what to do, and it is a sad thing that she does not know any better. Billy Pilgrim thinks he is a lucky man, that he is saving her. Montana feels dead inside, but this is the only feeling she has ever known. She is on the planet Tralfamadore, billions of light years from Earth, but she feels right at home in this stranger’s arms. The way a mosquito feels at peace in amber.

September 10, 2001. A storm is brewing in New York City. A clash is about to begin. Tempers will soon rise as historical conquests and slights are remembered and renewed on the eve of this fight between ancient and embittered foes.

Yes, the Boston Red Sox are playing the New York Yankees.

Roger Clemens is slated to pitch, looking for his twentieth win. It’s the last meeting of the year between the two teams. I’m there to watch. My best friend, Scott, is there, visiting from South Carolina. Kevin—my boss and the captain of a neighboring yacht—is there as well. He is also joined by his best friend. It is a coincidence, our best friends from out of town staying with us that week. It’s a Monday, and the weather is dismal. A storm comes, and then the rain, and we stand in it, naively hopeful, as fifty thousand fans slowly leak from Yankee Stadium. We splash in the rivers at the bottoms of the bleachers, while candy wrappers and empty cups drift toward distant drains. Men down on the field cover the diamond of dirt so that it won’t turn to mud, and it’s dark when they announce there won’t be any baseball. It feels less like America after that. We head home sad and soaked, but it is only rain.

Our friends had come a long way to see something distinctly New York and vastly American, and so as we pass through those glass towers toward the marina we call home, Kevin and I take our best friends up to Windows on the World, the restaurant at the top of the World Trade Center’s North Tower. After a long elevator ride, we wet our insides to go with our outsides. The city sparkles from those heights. There isn’t a soiled patch of street to be seen, just wet newness, black asphalt shiny like rivers of oil. I stand with my forehead pressed to the glass, shoulder to shoulder with Andrew, a mechanic from another boat, as we both peer into that unblemished, that happy and serene America, far, far below.