Hugh Howey - Machine Learning

Everything happens twice in your life. Often, it’s quite more than that. This is a thing Tralfamadorians know and humans ignore. It’s rarely enough to suffer a thing once, the Tralfamadorians like to say. Not when you can suffer it again and again.

I ran away to Charleston, South Carolina, more than once. The first time was to elope. I was nineteen. A girl I loved was leaving to take a job on a boat, and getting married would make sure that we stayed together even while we were apart. On Tralfamadore, they would laugh, knowing what happens next.

Less than a year later, I quit my career as a computer technician, packed what I could into a car, and fled to Charleston, an emotional wreck. A chessboard there saves my life. Fleeing to Charleston saves my life. I am twenty years old and will soon divorce. So it goes.

There is a café on King Street where chess players sit on coffee-bean sacks and move around six-inch wooden soldiers, soldiers we slam down with happy violence. My hurts disappear when I move those soldiers. A stranger is sitting across from me, as strangers do in that place. Names are exchanged. “Scott,” a man says, not looking up from the board. He must be a decade older than me. The woman beside him glances up from her magazine to smile piteously at her boyfriend’s next victim. But Scott is about to save my life. As most things go, he will do this more than once.

Best friends form like fires spread. Gab turns to conversation. Familiar faces are smiled at. People have to eat, so why not grab a bite together? Like Montana Wildhack, Scott dances for a living. But it’s called ballet and wardrobe is involved, so somehow it’s more respectable. In Charleston, South Carolina, you can have a ballet studio within four blocks of a church if you want. But probably not right next door. There are limits.

When I decide I should buy a sailboat to live on, Scott goes with me to Baltimore to sail it down the coast. Neither of us knows what we’re doing as we head for Charleston around Cape Hatteras in January. Boats have disappeared to the bottom of the sea here once or twice. We soon discover this is so. And it is not the last time Scott and I will see trouble from the deck of a boat. Nor is it the last time that I am certain I will die.

At the base of the Twin Towers, there is a glass dome called the Winter Garden. Palm trees stand there in the dead of winter, like the sea snakes of Zyx, trapped in a strange world. I wake up one day to find myself living in that dome. One moment, I’m attending college classes in Charleston. The next minute, I’m in an alien land, surrounded by strangers, trapped in a glass dome, wanting to scream and scream.

The line to get a bagel in this place is infuriatingly slow.

Montana bought a house in Palm Springs with her own money. Movie money. Her realtor showed her houses in the hills with nice views, but seeing out meant others could see in. She settled on a small place with a roof that needed repair, but she liked the hedge. And it had a pool, where she could lie out and feel the sun warm her flesh, touching her without touching her. Until she woke up smelling like baby oil and coconuts, a nightmare of creatures gazing in through geodesic glass, a naked stranger beside her, a horror she knew all too well.

Montana had forgotten what it meant to own her body. She had lived a life on display, first because it felt nice, later to survive, and then to profit. She wasn’t oblivious to this trade-off. There were days when the exchange made her feel powerful, when checks came in the mail from her agent and she thought of the number of men aroused by her on-screen performances. It reminded her of that party and dancing for those college boys, going home with more money than she’d ever held.

But then there were days in the middle of a shoot, brief moments of nakedness when the director yelled “cut” or the cameraman needed to change rolls, and the magic of the scene vanished and the characters around her faded back into actors. Here was when an assistant took a dozen paces to bring her a robe, and Montana Wildhack felt a chill. Here was the off-camera hell when the actor from the previous scene continued to touch her as if she were his. This was when they would ask her out. Tell her how great she was. The best ever.

On Tralfamadore, she was back on display in a geodesic dome of glass that held thousands of alien viewers at bay. This was her movie set, with its lime-green kitchen appliances, yellow lounger, sofa bed, end tables, lamps. The alien zookeepers had installed a phonograph that worked and a television set that didn’t. The latter had an image painted on the curved glass screen, an image of two cowboys dueling with pistols. Montana thought she recognized the film. She’d had sex with one of the actors a few years ago when his feature career had hit the skids and hers had not yet begun. He had played a doctor, she a nurse.

Montana remembered the trepidation she’d felt on every new shoot. Arriving at some rented house, the smell of morning coffee, a man she would perform with smiling too widely as the director introduced her. They would pump her hand, these actors, and stare at her breasts where a locket lay with its little prayer, Montana silently pining for the wisdom to know what things she might change.

Billy Pilgrim stirred on the sofa bed, and the Tralfamadorians outside the dome went wild from the sudden movement. Montana Wildhack shivered from the cold of being trapped with yet another actor. They had been on display for several months, she and Billy Pilgrim, and she was fairly certain of two things: The first was that she would never see her home again. The second, that she was pregnant.

We are on the dock, gazing up at the smoking building. My boss Kevin is there. And so is Andrew, the engineer. The first sign that something is wrong is Andrew’s wife running to us, shaking and crying. This is not the Leslie I know, the forever smiling, the warm and friendly. This is a wife collapsing into the arms of her husband, unable to talk, barely able to breathe.

She was in the gym on the top floor of the hotel. There was a crash. Ceiling panels rained down, lights exploding. They had run from the building, had run through the courtyard, and there were bodies—

There were bodies everywhere.

Andrew held his wife. My best friend, Scott, ran off to investigate. The rest of us looked up at those marching flames and that drifting smoke. Here was a thing to gawk at.

If Montana Wildhack had a type, she was quite sure that Billy Pilgrim was not it. Billy possessed a weak countenance, was thin and made up of more joints than bones. He also did not seem entirely sane.

He would drift off to sleep at all hours and claim upon waking to have traveled through time, to be both there on Tralfamadore and also back on Earth, to be simultaneously younger and older, and to know how he would one day die. He said he knew every mistake he would make, that he could see them all at once, and complained that he was doomed to repeat them again and again. “There’s no stopping,” he would say. And then he would drift back, unstuck from time, the Tralfamadorians listening in on his dreams with their telepathic minds as Billy squirmed and murmured and slept.

It wasn’t until Montana watched him cry in his sleep, whimpering his whispers of war, that she began to care for him. Billy woke her one night while the zoo was quiet and told her about the bombing of Dresden. Every horrible detail. The stars overhead twinkled serenely, and Montana had a revelation. Billy Pilgrim wasn’t weak, she decided, as he drifted back to sleep—he was broken. The whole system was broken. Sending young men to war, expecting them to come back whole, their bullets to make things right. Expecting a girl from the Big Sky State to step off a bus in LA and have a career that wouldn’t kill her. The machinery of it all was set up unfair from the start. Living in three dimensions meant you learned what you needed to know too late in life.