Hugh Howey - Machine Learning

There are briefcases and business shoes scattered across the deck. Up on the flybridge, I put the boat into gear. I lay on the horn a few times, yell my friend’s name, look for him in the crowds. But Scott is gone. The motor yacht Prelude pivots neatly in the tiny marina and points its bow across the Hudson toward New Jersey. We pass through the narrow breakwater, and I look back over my shoulder to see a dark object plummeting from a burning building, a man in a flapping business suit, who disappears out of sight. The flag on the back of the boat goes to half-mast as we motor away. The wind picks up on our faces, but all else is silence.

The marina across the Hudson won’t take us. We tie up on the fuel dock, everyone trying their cell phones to let loved ones know they’re okay, but the networks are jammed. Men put on their business shoes and gather their briefcases and disappear. Crowds gather on the docks and along the shore to gaze at this burning neighbor across the way. I can’t stay on the fuel dock, they tell me. I have to pull away.

I need to go back and look for Scott. I have mobility, while so many others are trapped. And out here on the Hudson, I can see the sky; I can get out of the way. I am heading back to Manhattan when the screeching starts, when the top of the South Tower tips, when a building leans its head sadly to one side and then sinks into the earth.

A building collapsing sounds a lot like a jet throttling up on a runway. A high-pitched scream builds and builds. You brace for a boom, a roar, a masculine anguish—but it is a shrill cry. It gets you not in the chest, but in the bones.

I watch from the deck of a boat named Prelude. The flag on the aft of the boat is already at half-mast. A man in a business suit with a briefcase lowered it as we left the marina, other men in similar suits taking flight from office windows, escaping the heat.

A plume of crushed steel billows out over Lower Manhattan. My best friend is in there somewhere. I turn the boat around, away from the onrush of dust and debris, away from the home where I used to live.

September 11. Cell phones do not work, and part of me is glad. As soon as I get a signal, I’ll be able to call my mom and tell her I’m alive. But I’ll also have to call Shannon, Scott’s girlfriend, and let her know that Scott is dead, that a building has fallen down around him, that he went off to investigate a fire and now is gone.

I consider this aboard Prelude. I cannot stay on the fuel dock, and there’s no available slip, so I creep toward Manhattan, where fellow boats from North Cove Marina are pulling people from the seawall. People are desperate to leave. They jump to Prelude ’s swim platform, each with a different story. The wake and chop make for treacherous maneuvering so close to a concrete wall. On the New Jersey side, we let people off by docking up to a restaurant. There are construction workers there with hard hats and muddy boots and lunch pails. They’re looking for someone, anyone, to take them across the Hudson, opposite this tide of humanity. They say they want to help. I tell them I’m going back anyway, and they can ride.

As they scamper onboard, I forget to tell them about their boots, about minding the deck. We cast off and watch from the Hudson as the second building falls. I ask them if they’re sure. They are. As I creep into the marina, my home is unrecognizable. Debris is everywhere. The glass dome of the Winter Garden is wounded, and a lower chunk of one of the lesser towers is missing. The world seems a precarious place. Buildings mean to topple on men. Buildings have. I pivot in the tight marina and back into my old slip, like I’ve done a thousand times, and white paper flutters down like a flock of exhausted birds. The paper catches on the deck and in the scuppers. There’s the smell of something acidic, something foreign, something I have never tasted but I know to be toxic. All but one of the men jump to the dock. The lone dissenter has seen enough. I don’t blame him.

“That building looks to topple,” I tell the men with the hard hats, pointing to the smaller World Trade 7. Two hours ago, I didn’t know buildings could do this. Suddenly, I’m an expert.

I scan the wasteland around me and see no sign of Scott, no sign of anyone. “Be careful,” the guy who stayed behind calls out to his friends, and I am convinced that I have delivered these men to their deaths. I pull out of the slip once again. We pick up more passengers from the seawall south of the marina before heading back across the Hudson. There is much to do, pulling people away, right up until the Coast Guard comes and orders us to stop.

Scott is dead. My cell phone is dead. My mother must think me dead. So it goes.

I pick up the papers that have drifted down on the boat and have become plastered there, these relics from great buildings that no longer stand. The first one I grab is an insurance document. Listen: What I tell you here is true. The first line on the first page I pick up, it begins:

In the event of damage to the building…

So it goes.

A red sun slides across the geodesic dome, and the crisp angles between the glass panels divide that alien sky into triangles of magenta and gold. Another day in those prison walls. Billy is asleep on the sofa bed, mewling like a cat, his hands twitching in some dream, some time-travel delusion. Montana escapes from the fold-out bed as quietly as noisy springs will allow. She grabs her robe and covers herself. The zoo is quiet, the doors not yet open to the hordes of skinny aliens with their hand-like heads. This is the only time when she can see the critters across the way, those balls of fur that roll around and bump into one another, their long periscope antennas unfolding to peer out at the world, at the woman peering back at them.

Montana watches the furry aliens scurry and bump about. She thinks of what Stained told her of the universe ending, how a pilot presses a button and all that ever was or ever is goes kaput. It’s hard to believe such an end might be possible. Even harder to summon some fear of this, some longing or regret. She presses her palm to the thick glass, cool to the touch, and she remembers this, something both distant and familiar: Her hand on peeling wallpaper. A domestic prison. A feeling of being trapped. Broken knuckles and blood in the sink, and barely a dent in the sheetrock.

It is September 11, 2013. Twelve years have gone by. I’m on a flight from San Francisco to Fort Lauderdale, a cross-country flight loaded down with fuel. Looking out the window, I think of a woman I have invented, the woman in 13D. I’ve been thinking about her for twelve years. I’ve been on fifty flights this year, and I think about her every time.

I don’t know this woman in 13D. Maybe she’s a man. Maybe that seat is empty. But I’ve been thinking about her—imagining her—ever since that ball of orange and black erupted overhead. I wonder if she knew, in those last moments of her life, that she was about to die. The engines outside her window must’ve been screaming, making that noise like a great steel building collapsing to the ground. The wings must’ve been creaking, the wind howling across the trembling skin of that aircraft, New York City so near below. Too near. Buildings rushing past, knuckles white on the armrests, a stranger clutching the wrist of another stranger in fear, that sense that this wasn’t right, that those men who have taken over the plane—who won’t let anyone go to the restroom up front—aren’t going to land and simply trade hostages.

I’m on the wharf, looking up. There’s a plane howling across the clear blue sky, banking hard, coming in too fast. One building is burning, and another can’t get out of the way. A pattern is forming, but in my head I only have a silent scream to a pilot who is already dead. Pull up. Pull up, I silently shout. What’re you doing? I scream this to the pilot as I watch, trying to talk to him as a Tralfamadorian might. This can’t be happening. This can’t be happening. This can’t be happening.