Machine Learning: New and Collected Stories

Introduction

I’ve always wanted to be a truck driver. For years, this felt like what I should be doing with my time. I tried to convince a girlfriend once to quit school so we could be a long-haul team and crisscross the United States in a Peterbilt. The hours and hours of staring at the horizon appeals to me, the time to get lost in one’s thoughts, the self-contained world of sleeper cabs, some mechanical issue that always needs fixing, the roadside diners full of colorful characters.

It took me a while to realize what I really wanted was to be Han Solo, who long ago drove a big rig named the Millennium Falcon all over a galaxy far, far away. I saw Star Wars when I was very young, and I’ve wanted to be Han Solo ever since. A vagabond with a personality type that role-playing peeps would recognize as chaotic good (the sort of person who breaks rules, but in the name of serving a moral purpose). Sadly, my girlfriend was not enthused with the idea and decided to stay in school. (Pro tip: Don’t let someone you date think they’d make a wonderful Wookiee.)

The truck driver dream was put on hold, but it didn’t die. In college, I met a ballet dancer who lived on a small sailboat in Charleston Harbor. I had no idea people did such a thing. The small boat was like my beloved sleeper cabs, but afloat. I immediately started searching and found a boat I could afford several states away. I read a few books on ocean navigating and then nearly got my best friend and myself killed sailing around Cape Hatteras in a winter norther.

But I had my Falcon at last. And as the semesters dragged on, the horizon beckoned. I couldn’t just sit still; there was too much out there to see. So I dropped out of college after my junior year and made my way to the Bahamas. What I discovered there is a world completely alien from the life I left behind. A world of salty retirees, wannabe pirates, and clashing cultures. Here were all these little clumps of vagabonds bouncing off one another, swapping stories, borrowing tools, trading tips. I was young and broke and would scamper up masts or dive below keels to do jobs other boat owners didn’t enjoy. In exchange, I was given plates of food, which I scarfed down between grunts of gratitude. My hair grew long, I became scruffy, and I probably smelled like a nerf herder. I was becoming Chewbacca.

When the money ran out, I got work on other people’s boats. They started small, but someone would ask if I could drive a bigger boat, and I figured the general principles were the same. This was a very surreal transition in my life. I went from a half-starved kid on a twenty-seven-foot sailboat with no toilet and no shower to a clean-shaven guy in pressed uniforms who drove mega-yachts for the mega-wealthy. These boats had hot tubs on top and garages full of smaller boats in their bellies. The helms looked like spaceships, like the cockpit of a jetliner on steroids. I moved these large machines from one place to another and fixed anything that broke along the way. I had found my truck-driving job at last!

The next decade of my life was spent on yachts like this. Much of that time I sat at the helm and stared at the horizon, lost in my thoughts. Hours and hours of horizons and daydreams. Night shifts with stars so bright, you could read by them. Flat seas that reflected these pinpricks until I was surrounded by stars, floating in deep space. With these years of staring at the horizon, I realized that my fascination with the future and my inability to sit still come from the same insatiable curiosity: I want to know what’s around the corner. I strain for it, not content for it to come to me. The futurist and the vagabond are the same souls—one in body and the other in thought.

My love of science fiction comes from the same place. With science fiction, we dream about what’s around the corner. We use the genre as a warning, or as a way to explore time, space, and progress. The same people who crossed seas in bygone eras, or rode wagons out west, or put men on the moon are now dreaming about humanity on Mars and beyond. These are probably the same tinkerers who fashioned better spear points or learned to sew and make fire. What’s next? What’s out there? These questions haunt me.

The stories you’re about to read are my attempts to answer these questions. Many of them were written during a sedentary period of my life, while I was working in a bookstore and writing my first novels. There are recurring themes here that I was dimly aware of when I was writing them but have become stark now that they’ve been collected into one place. A couple of these stories are new. The rest have been published in so many scattered ways and places that I doubt anyone has seen them all before.

When I look at this body of work, and the more than a dozen novels I’ve written, I feel once again like that kid at the helm of a boat much too large for his qualifications. I honestly don’t understand how I’ve gotten here. One step at a time, I suppose. One sentence after the other. One daydream, one idea, an early morning writing before I have to go to work… and eventually you get to a place that might’ve humbled me if I’d thought about it all at once.

My sailing trip around the world has progressed much the same way. Besides wanting to be a truck driver (or Han Solo), I’ve had two impossible fantasies at the very top of my bucket list. One was to write a novel; the other was to sail around the world. As I write this in March 2017, I’m sitting on my boat off of Isabela Island in the Galápagos. I sailed here from South Africa, going as far north as Maine, spending a month in Cuba, and just recently crossing through the Panama Canal. I’m halfway through my voyage, and what seemed unlikely in the whole has been slowly achieved one horizon at a time.

And isn’t this true for humanity at large? We live in a world not of science fiction, but of science fact. I will upload this introduction to my publisher via the ether. I live on a solar-powered machine not much less remarkable than the Millennium Falcon. When I look at gleaming cityscapes of glass towers touching the clouds, it strikes me that a band of several hundred primates spread out and built all of this from what we dug out of the mud. Out of the mud.

Is it possible to doubt where we might go, seeing how far we’ve come? We do the impossible daily. We are creeping ever toward that unreachable horizon. I wonder what we’ll find when we get there.