Hugh Howey: Machine Learning

—Ter

Do not reply to this message. All commands are my own and do not reflect the commands of my Supervisors. Planetfall in eight sleeps and counting. Have a happy invasion!

“Fuck me,” I say.

“Seriously?” Kur asks. He flashes his fangs and points to his bottoms. “I just got the last button done.”

“I’ve been reassigned.”

Kur’s joke hits my brainstump a moment later, too late for a retort. He shoulders me aside to study the terminal for himself.

“A new bunkmate,” he says. “A girl. Maybe this one will sex me.”

“I will miss you, too,” I say. It is a half-truth. But my feelings are raw that Kur seems not sad at all. Part of me expects him to grieve.

“I wonder if she’s cute,” Kur says. He is making his bunk before breakfast, a feat I have never witnessed. He says her name aloud: “Mil.” Almost as if he is tasting the sound of it. Tasting her.

“I think she must be deranged is what,” I say. “Two suicides in a cycle. How much do suicides cost these days?”

“Two thousand credits,” Kur says. “Squad mate of mine had to pay recently. Cut his neck shaving with a butcher’s knife. Swears up and down it was an accident.” He turns and shrugs his tentacle as if to say: No damn way it was an accident.

“Well, glad I’m not getting this roommate,” I say. “She’ll probably kill herself in the crapper while you sleep.”

Kur laughs. “You’re jealous. And I’m not the one with eight days to learn a sector.”

This only now occurs to me. Sector 1. That’s the continent known as Asia in Native. A large landmass, heavily populated. I pray the languages there are mere dialects of Sector 2’s. Hate to waste my vocab.

I also mull the four thousand credits this Mil from Telecoms now owes for the two suicides. That’s a lot of cred. All of that in a lump sum would be nice. It takes five thousand credits to buy a settlement slot these days. I could own a small plot of land on one of these worlds we conquer. Watch the fleet sail on without me.

Such are my thoughts as I pile my belongings onto my bed and knot the corners of the sheets. Everything I own can be lifted with two tentacles. Kur describes in lurid detail a girl he has yet to meet while I double-check that my locker is empty and I have everything. I find myself imagining this Mil dangling by her own tentacle from the overhead vent—and then I see Kur sexing her like this, and I need out of that room. Maybe he is right about me being jealous.

Opening the door and setting my sack in the hall, I turn to my mate of the last three invasions. Who knows when I’ll see him again?

Kur has a tentacle out. He is looking at me awkwardly and plaintively, as if this goodbye has come just as suddenly for him. I am overwhelmed by this unexpected display of affection, this need to touch before I leave the ship, this first and final embrace.

“Hey,” he says, his eyestalks moist. “About that fifty you owe me…”

The transfer shuttle is waiting for me. The pilot seems impatient and undocks before I get to my seat. As he pulls away from my home of a dozen lifetimes, I peer through the porthole and gaze longingly at the great hull of the ship, searching for familiar black streaks and pockmarks from our shared journey through space. This far from our target star, the hull is nearly as dark as the cosmos, her battle wounds impossible to find. My face is to the glass, and it is as though an old friend refuses to look back. Suddenly, it is not the shuttle peeling away from my ship. It is my ship withdrawing from me.

I remember when she was built. It was in orbit above Odeon, thousands of years ago during a resupply lull. It was the last time I was transferred. Those thousands of years now feel like hundreds. I try to remember a time before this ship, but those days are dulled by the vast expanse of time. It often seems as though we were born together—like the ship is my womb but the two of us share the same mother.

I brush the glass with a tentacle as I gaze at her, and I hunt for the marks of wear upon my own flesh. I search for reminders from my years as a gunner—but those scars must be on another tentacle. It was so long ago. Or maybe I am remembering old scars that are gone now, washed clean when last I died. It is a shame to lose them. With them go my memories of how they occurred. Those reminders should be a part of me, just as I was part of that ship. But now its steel plates fall away and lose detail, until my old home is just a wedge of pale gray among hundreds of such wedges.

I turn in my seat. Past the pilot I can see my new home, a similar craft, practically identical. And beyond that, a disk of illumination brighter than the neighboring stars—the planet that all the fleet has its pointy bits aimed at.

The pilot docks, lazily and with loud, jarring clangs. I thank him as I enter the airlock. Onboard the new ship—with some struggle and crappy directions—I find my bunk. My mate is not there. On shift, no doubt. I leave my things on the stained and bare mattress of the upper bunk, wondering idly if this is where the girl of the second suicide slept, or if perhaps my new bunkmate has been waiting for this day to claim the lower. The suicide girl probably passed me in another shuttle, is at this very moment surveying my empty bed. Or lying in it. Or she is dangling by a tentacle from my old air vent.

I can’t stop thinking on the suicides. As I wend my way down foreign corridors, placing a tentacle here and there on the unfamiliar pipes and plates that squeeze in around me, I wonder what madness in some strange woman brought me here. Not that I haven’t killed myself, but that was a very long while ago, after my second or third invasion. I remember waking up in the same body the next morning—same but newer and still smelling of the vats—and realizing the futility of it all. My supervisor at the time—Yim, I believe—sat me down and explained that bodies weren’t cheap and to cut that shit out. I soon realized that taking a blaster to my own head was no different than falling in battle, just more expensive. It took centuries to work off that debt, what with the interest. It only takes once to know the headache is not worth it, that the numbness is not worth it. Going to sleep at night is a more useful and less costly way to not exist for some short while.

Unless… maybe this girl in my old bunk is so far in debt that more of it is hardly felt. Maybe she enjoys the waking. Maybe she loves learning to use her tentacles again. I remember that, the deadness in my suckers after reviving. Like I’d slept on them wrong. That is not a feeling I crave enough to kill myself for. But there are those much crazier than I.

Eight days to planetfall, and here I am lost on another’s ship and thinking on nonsense. This will be one of those invasions where I am useless, standing on the sidelines and watching, no time to adequately prepare. I’m comfortable with that. No one can blame me. The late transfer is not my fault.

I pass a woman in the corridor and notice the way her stalks follow mine. Hey, maybe a new ship will be good for me. Maybe my bunkmate is lousy at gambling. I can get used to this life, as I have so many others. This is what I tell myself, that I can be happy in this skin of mine. For what other choice is there?

I find Supervisor Bix in the Sector 1 command hall, near the front of the ship. A terminal tech points him out through the glass. There are three men and two women bent over a table that glows with a land map. Stretching my stalk, I can see Sector 1 and part of Sector 2. I watch these supervisors argue, can hear their muffled annoyance through the glass, and I see that things operate similarly here as everywhere else—with very little grease and a lot of grind.