Machine Learning: New and Collected Stories

by Hugh Howey

Going to sleep at night is a more useful and less costly way to not exist for some short while.

Between these temples, aching and burning and sore my universe lies

“Well, if you slept more, you’d dream more, and you’d see how good your brain is at making something out of nothing.”

He said roughly thirty percent of everything we see is hallucination. It’s our brain smoothing things over so the world’s not so pixelated.”

every curse begins with a blessing.

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.

“I’ve never been free before, you see. Not once in my whole life. I used to make fists and hit walls, but it hurt me more than it hurt them. The people who did bad things to me, they didn’t care how angry I got. It didn’t fix a thing.

Montana wants to scream, but the thing she is angry at is in the past. The past can’t hear her. This is the thing, her great discovery. She smiles at the future. Happiness is a choice.