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The Machine Of Literal Death, Possibly, Maybe
For Entertainment Purposes Only, the sign's fine print read, and Tyrone's eyes kept straying back to that final line. After he signed the waiver: For Entertainment Purposes Only. While he waited for the ancient credit-card machine to churn through the chip-and-PIN math: For Entertainment Purposes Only. As the operator pressed the hypo up to his arm, and collected a few drops of blood with a hiss and a nip: For Entertainment Purposes Only.
"I've read a lot about the machine," he finally said while the operator ejected the used needle from the hypo and dropped it into the sharps bin. "Nobody's ever been found who got an incorrect prediction. Why the disclaimer?"
"Liability," she said immediately, not even looking back at him as she inserted the vial from the hypo into a device that looked vaguely like, but was almost certainly not, a tabletop centrifuge. It whirred to life, and there was an unearthly grinding noise from inside the device that sent an ache through Tyrone's molars and made his throat go dry.
He swallowed, glancing uncomfortably between the device and the silent refrigerator-sized black monolith at its side that he'd come here to consult. "I thought that's what the waivers were for."
"'For entertainment purposes only' is what the waivers are," she said. "It has nothing to do with how accurate the prediction is—standing behind the machine's assertions puts us at an incredible amount of legal risk. Think about it. If it tells you your cause of death will be 'Fatty foods' or 'High blood pressure,' we've just given you medical advice. If it says 'President Duke', we're making predictions you can use as investment advice. If it says 'Bankruptcy' and you're about to start a big lawsuit, we've just given you legal advice. That last one got us sued, by the way, and it was most likely the waivers which swung the jury."
The tabletop device rattled to a halt with an ear-splitting grinding noise that sent Tyrone's vision floaty for a moment. He staggered sideways, shooting out an arm to steady himself on the wall. The operator, seemingly unaffected, thumbed a button that spat the vial of blood back out into a metal catch, and picked the vial up, pausing as she was about to insert it into the black machine. "And if you want my advice, Mr. Clay, you should treat it as entertainment. Let's say it says 'Cancer'—about one in four do. It might mean you've got a tumor right now, or it might mean you'll die decades after retirement, and spending your life jumping at shadows is just going to make you miserable, and won't change when the end comes." She glanced back, then paused, tilting her head. "You alright?"
Tyrone glanced back at the crenellated rim of the tabletop device, and felt a fleeting image of its teeth sinking into his soul, chewing and ripping and digesting him and spitting him out in tablet form for the monolith to digest and contemplate. He took a deep breath and stood up a little straighter, waiting for the vertigo to bleed away. "I…I think so."
The operator assessed him for a moment, then nodded, an unexpected moment of sympathy flitting past her features. "Are you sure you want to do this? It's…" She trailed off, then placed a hand on his arm, and suddenly there was another person standing there beside him against the cold blank face of death. "A lot of people have second thoughts. Knowing how you'll die is a pretty mixed blessing. I can't process a refund after the slip prints, but if you want more time to think about it…"
He looked down at her hand, then back into her face. "What did yours say?"
"Suicide," she said softly and without hesitation.
He winced.
"Don't be sorry," she said. "I can choose when I die. And yes, it keeps me up nights wondering what in my life could become so scary that I feel I have to make that choice. But. You know." She shrugged and gave him a hopeful smile.
Tyrone didn't know how to respond to that. "Let's do this," he said instead.
The rest of this, he knew from the documentaries, was anticlimactic. The processed blood would be inserted into the small round slot near the top of the monolith. It would spin to life, shuddering slightly, with the whine of gears and gyros, and sit in silent thought for about ten seconds. Then its innards would start chattering, and a paper tongue would start protruding within the little mouth at knee level, and then some gear-stop clunks as the white tongue protruded to lick the top lip, and the machine would shudder and hiss as the printout was cut from the printer spool to fall into the dispenser.
Except the part with the chattering was curiously silent and prolonged. Tunk, he heard, and the machine shuddered. Tunk. Tunk. Tunk. And with a chillingly final lurch, something inside the monolith seized, and it screamed and went silent.
The operator stared, one hand over her silent O of a mouth, manicured nails trembling.
"What happened?" Tyrone said.
"It's never done that," she said, and crouched to examine the slot. "It's…oh, God, it's broken."
"Jesus. What does that mean?" Tyrone's heart started hammering. "Am I immortal? Am I already dead?"
"It started printing. I can see—" The operator grunted as she crouched lower, sticking her arm in up to the elbow. "I think I can get—" She yanked, and there was the sound of tearing paper, and she stood back up with half a printout.
Tyrone snatched it from her with trembling hands.
THIS, it said in the machine's simple typewriter-serif capitals, part of the S ripped away.
While the operator was placing a panicked call to her manager, Tyrone fled the building, jamming the paper in his pocket. When he got home, he sat and stared at the half-printout for a long time. He walked to the kitchen and rooted through his junk drawer for one of his ex-wife's lighters. He lifted the printout in one hand and the lighter in the other, but paused.
Maybe you'll burn your house down trying to get rid of "THIS" piece of paper, a little voice in the back of his head helpfully supplied.
He jammed the lighter back in his junk drawer, stiffly walked over to the sofa chair, and sat back down. Five minutes later, he stood back up, grabbed the lighter from the junk drawer, and threw it in the trash. Moments later, he rooted through the trash for it, and walked outside to throw the lighter in the empty trash bin, wheeling it outside onto his non-flammable driveway.
Tyrone stared at the slip for a while longer, carefully inserted it as a bookmark into a random page of his family Bible, and then went over to his computer and read through everything he could find about the so-called "Machine of Death". The write-ups he'd bookmarked while first researching it and re-read endlessly while he was on the waiting list for an appointment. Every news article which mentioned it or its famously reclusive inventor. Media interviews with its more famous clients. Online reviews from former customers. Discussions in the various forums that had sprung to life around it. None of them ever mentioned the machine jamming.
He spent several hours curled up in the corner breathing shallowly after realizing that, if the machine had exploded and riddled his body with shrapnel, the slip would have been proven instantly correct.
He ran a search on an online dictionary. "Thistles?" he said aloud at the scandalously short list of results, and fell asleep reading about the genus Asteraceae. When he woke up, he did the same thing on a genealogy site, searching through the T names and drawing a complete blank.
He was interrupted by a knock on his door, and discovered that his porch contained three men in suits flanked by two police officers. "Mister Clay," Middle Suit said. "I understand that you visited a 'Machine of Death' storefront yesterday, and returned home with a prediction slip?"
Tyrone stepped forward into the doorway, holding the door half-closed behind him. "Okay, yeah."
"Are you currently in possession of that slip?" Left Suit said.
"Maybe. What's this about?" Tyrone said, suspicion further growing.
Right Suit thrust forward a thick sheaf of notarized papers. "As the legal representatives of Passage Predictions, LLC, we would like to speak with you about taking possession of that slip for safe disposal."
"We wish to scrap the machine and destroy the prediction slip in a manner authorized by both yourself and the authorities, at a minimum distance of 1000 miles from your current location, to minimize any possibility of injury or other harm," Left Suit said.
"Just as a precaution, you understand," Right Suit added.
"You would, of course, be fully refunded for your transaction," Middle Suit said.
Tyrone accepted the papers and flipped through them without looking. Surprise and suspicion warred; relief flailed for territory, and was pushed off the map again by a rootless and insubstantial fear. It couldn't possibly be that easy. Could it? Then Tyrone thought of the operator's prediction.
"You know, I think I'd prefer to keep it, actually," he said.
The suits glanced at each other, then at the officers. The officers stood relaxed, staring at nothing in particular, one with her arms crossed and the other with thumbs hooked in the pockets of his crisply peaked slacks. MCCOURTNEY, K and ISSA, T, according to their cracking and faded badges.
"Mister Clay," Middle Suit said, "we strongly recommend against that course of action."
"Any particular reason why?" Tyrone said, resolve suddenly firming. "Cause. You know. For entertainment purposes only."
Middle Suit went nervously silent.
"Is it the legal position of Passage Predictions, LLC, that you expect your company to be the cause of my death?" Tyrone said—glancing over at Officer Issa, whose boredom had vanished into a growing smirk.
"Passage Predictions, ah, is investigating the machine's apparent malfunction," Middle Suit said, "and, um, desires a resolution that minimizes the possibility of injury or other harm. Accidental injury. Unintentional."
"Any Acts of God, you might say," Right Suit edged in, "that might occur in accordance with a hypothetically correct analysis."
"Acts of God, yes."
"Surely then," Tyrone said with a sweet smile, "there's nothing legally to worry about?"
It was, he reflected, quite possibly worth the risk of some improbable and untimely demise just to watch the lawyers squirm.
Second thoughts intruded the next day, and Tyrone worked his way through the phone tree of the New York number on the notarized paperwork: The Law Offices of Hirtzmann, Hiscoe & Rothbach.
"I want to buy the broken machine," Tyrone said.
There was brief silence. Then: "Tyrone—can I call you Tyrone?—I'd like to set aside my professional obligations for a moment and speak to you, simply as one man to another. And that thing I'd like to say as a fellow human being is: You're crazy."
"Yeah, yeah. Hear me out, Mister…?"
"Ted, please."
"Ted. Isn't the whole point of learning your cause of death to assert some control over the process? Let's just pretend, for purposes of this discussion, that the machine is somehow out to personally murder me. If it's melted down to slag, maybe the metal gets recycled into a knife that some random mugger uses to stab me, or maybe if it's sunk to the bottom of the ocean, a sliver of metal gets eaten by a crab, and one day I eat it for dinner and choke on the shard. The point is, you're proposing something that introduces weird cosmic unpredictability into the process, and then I'm back to square one. If I own the machine, I can lock it in a warehouse across the country and never go near it until I'm ready to die."
"Where it could be stolen," Ted said immediately. "You could go broke and the storage unit could be foreclosed on. Or maybe the money you spend on the machine causes you to go broke, and that leads to your death. Same problem, except we're thinking of all those crab-knife-recycling problems. Did you look at the preliminary plan? We've sent it out to engineers and academics for peer review. You're basically saying you think you can cheat fate more effectively than a lot of smart people all coming together to work on your behalf."
"Yes, well," Tyrone said, "it would be my problem then, as a consenting adult. No liability anywhere, if I own the thing. Stop trying to save me from myself and do the simple thing for your clients."
Ted sighed. "Look, just because I'm a lawyer doesn't mean I'm a walking joke, okay? When I go home from the office at night I have to go to sleep with all the decisions I make, and I don't want a death on my conscience."
"You made partner with that attitude?" Tyrone jabbed.
"Ha, ha. This isn't a lawyer thing, okay? Did you happen to notice in the paperwork that I'm also a board member of Passage? We brought the Machine to the world because it helps people, Tyrone. It lets them plan, and live smart, and wring more out of the time they have left. If a Machine malfunction cuts one person's life short, that's too many. I don't want you to take that chance."
And the bad press would ruin you, Tyrone didn't say. This isn't altruism talking.
"What was your prediction?" he said instead.
"Cancer," Ted said. "So now I'm getting screenings every six months and eating a little healthier. Maybe pushing myself a little harder with my hobbies. It's pretty liberating on the ski slopes knowing you're not going to die by slamming into a tree."
"When the diagnosis comes," Tyrone said, "you gonna get chemo?"
Ted paused. "It depends. The first cancer isn't necessarily going to be the one that kills me, but let's be honest, chemotherapy is hell. If the odds of it working are too low, it's better to save myself the agony."
"So what you're saying is," Tyrone said, "it's more important to you to have control of your death than to delay it as long as possible?"
Ted was silent.
"Look," he finally said, "I'll run it by the rest of the board if you want, but…please, Tyrone. Think about our offer."
Tyrone woke up in the middle of the night with a crazy thought on his mind and ice in his veins. He stumbled out of bed down to the living-room desk, flipped on the light over the family Bible, and leafed through the paperwork that the lawyers on his porch had handed him.
Ted. Who was a board member of Passage Predictions, LLC, whose business his crazy ideas were threatening. Ted, starts with T.
"Hirtzmann, Hiscoe & Rothbach."
The panic receded only slightly when he saw "Ted Rothbach" on a signature line. He turned on his computer and checked the firm's Web site, and finally his heart unclenched. Eric Hiscoe.
He pointed at the Bible's bookmark and smirked. "Gotcha," he said aloud, and very nearly did a little victory dance before wondering if maybe he would trip and fall and the book would land on his head.
The next morning, Tyrone called over his friend Andre to wrap the prediction slip in a plastic sleeve, the sleeve in a notebook, the notebook in a cardboard box, and the box in his basement.
That, he thought, should take care of things until I hear back from Rothbach.
"Hello…yes…I'm sorry for intruding, sergeant, but I've got a really important question about one of your officers…"
Andre pressed the frame to the wall over the sofa, which had been pulled forward by about three feet. "You sure about this?"
"Absolutely. Plexiglass cover, lightweight rounded frame, and we'll screw it to the wall so it can't fall off."
"Into the drywall, or a stud?"
Tyrone paused.
"What are the chances," he asked, "of a weakened stud collapsing the house?"
"Yes, I'm just calling for the result of the blood-borne infectious diseases panel, last name Clay…"
"It's a reasonable precaution," Tyrone said defensively.
"No it isn't," Andre said, setting down the security camera and stepping down from the stepladder. "Look, if you're so worried about someone stealing it, set it on fire and be done with it."
"No. Then we're back to the it-could-come-from-anywhere problem."
"It still could! You don't even know it's the paper that'll do it!"
"What's more likely?" Tyrone said. "That I keep the paper around and it gets me one day, or that the universe winds up an even more outlandish Rube Goldberg machine despite having a legitimate murder weapon twenty feet away?"
"What's more likely is that the machine fucked up!" Andre shouted, then closed his eyes and took a breath through his nose. "Go get retested."
Tyrone snorted. "They blacklisted me. Don't want to risk another machine offering me the same message more explosively. So I'm doing the smart thing, which is to craft a death I can control, and make it simultaneously extremely unlikely and likelier than the alternative." He reached out for the security camera—but paused halfway through, backed away, and nodded toward it. "That's what lets me live without fear.…As long as I steer clear of that Passage warehouse in Ketchikan, I mean."
"Without fear," Andre said, and picked up the camera with a sigh. "Right."
"I think I can live without a vacation to Alaska," Tyrone said, but Andre merely returned to installing the camera.
"Hello, this is going to sound like a strange and simple request, but you advertise 'no questions asked', and I'll pay what your time is worth. There's a member of the Police Department…"
Tyrone trailed off, eyes lingering on the THIS behind the plexiglass. No hint of punctuation. Maybe this was over the line.
Without fear, Andre's voice echoed in his head, and he steadied himself. As ridiculous as the idea was, he couldn't let it keep owning him. It would be so simple to finally put it to rest.
"…An officer named Timothy Issa," he continued, "and I just need to know his middle name…"
The news programs at first identified George Tanner's death as a suicide, until they found a detailed note next to his prediction slip on the table in his apartment. "Just in case something happens I need everyone to know that I am NOT done with life," it read. "I fully intend to walk back in this door after jumping off the Lincoln Bridge. I am proving to the universe that I am invincible until I choose to end it."
His family sued, claiming breach of duty of care based on Tanner's history of mental illness. It eventually came out in court that Tanner had confided to a friend he wanted to take down Passage for his prediction of suicide, and that he "was going to set them up good," but that didn't sway the jury on the mental-health claims. Two years later, Tyrone bought the THIS machine at the bankruptcy auction.
Its shell, anyway. The guts had long since been ripped out, and when Andre and Cody wrestled it into the back corner of the living room, it sat there like the hollow exoskeleton of a sun-baked cricket.
"Dude," Cody said. "This is creepy." Andre, for his part, just rolled his eyes.
"It's asserting my control over fate," Tyrone said. "With the possible exception of thistle soup, or people with exceptionally improbable names, or whatever happened to the machine's innards, I now know for a fact that what's going to kill me is right here in this room."
"So you can spend the rest of your life freaking out at it in person," Andre said.
"I am not freaking out," Tyrone said. "I am not afraid."
"Uh-huh," Andre said.
"I—I'm not—Goddammit, look!" Tyrone yelled, then stomped across the room and flung himself to the ground at the machine's base, sprawling on his back.
Andre's eyes flew wide. "Ty—"
"I could die at any moment and I'm perfectly okay with that!" Tyrone shouted, heart hammering, feeling sweat beading on his brow. His eyes flicked up to the silent black shell, which was resting quietly on sturdy legs, showing no signs whatsoever of being overbalanced or ready to break apart or armed with terrorist explosives. "Look at me! If the universe wanted to kill me right now, it could, uhh…I dunno, cause an earthquake and tip the thing over onto me! DO YOU HEAR ME, UNIVERSE? IF YOU WANT TO KILL ME, NOW'S YOUR CHANCE!"
Nothing happened.
"Jesus, Tyrone, this is creepy," Cody said. "Get up. Please."
Tightness clenched Tyrone's chest, and he suddenly remembered to breathe. The machine loomed over him like a tombstone made of night. A wall clock ticked off seconds in the kitchen. The carpet tickled his arms. The stippling on the ceiling hung like a million tiny spikes.
"Right," Tyrone said, shimmying away from the machine, then crab-walking, then scrambling backward before he finally got to his feet halfway across the room. The tightness in his chest didn't loosen, and he suddenly knew it was a heart attack and the damn machine had scared him to death, and he staggered wordlessly back to the far wall, vertigo surging and choking, staccato breathing leaving his throat with little rattling wheezes—darkness creeping in from the edges of his vision and then exploding throughout his consciousness—
—and he woke up, numb but whole, with Andre and Cody crouched over him, the machine still standing in silent accusation across the room.
"You alright, dude?" Cody said, lifting Tyrone's wrist and pressing two fingers to it. "You fainted."
"Not too late to melt that thing into slag," Andre muttered.
Tyrone stared at the machine for ten minutes the next morning before slowly shuffling toward it.
He glanced behind it, alongside it. It had no plug to insert into the nearby power outlet. No wild animals lurked in its shadow. It was no less well balanced than it had been the previous day.
Finally, slowly, he reached out. Stretched his arm forward. Hesitated.
Typed "static electricity" into his computer's search engine. Read several articles. Got a safety pin from the kitchen, and unbent it so he could touch the machine with the tip. Tapped it. Waited. Pressed his hand further forward and brushed his fingers to the cool black surface.
Held his hand there. It tingled a bit against his skin. The machine did nothing.
"You know, maybe you're not completely terrifying," he finally said.
It didn't reply.
Later that week, he lay down in front of the machine again, feeling his heart start to thud in his chest.
"Listen, you," he said, feeling a little self-conscious even though he lived alone. "You're going to kill me someday. I get that. But I. I."
His voice cracked. He swallowed, and pushed words out, hoping that saying them would make them true.
"…I don't think it's going to be today."
His pulse hammered like drumsticks against the insides of his ribs. He forced himself to take a deep breath. This wasn't a heart attack. It was just fear.
The clock in the kitchen ticked onward.
And suddenly, the machine was what it had always been. A cold black husk. An impersonal, insubstantial piece of a much larger game. A tiny but crucial piece of the universe—a universe which was someday going to kill him, just like it was going to kill every man, woman, child, and animal that had ever lived, some sooner than others.
"And if it is today," Tyrone said slowly, "it was always meant to happen that way. Right?"
He forced himself to lie there until he felt his heart start to slow.
He reached up and brushed his fingers to the machine. The tip of an afternoon sunbeam was licking the metal near the floor, and the black surface was warm to the touch.
No static electricity zapped him. No earthquakes toppled the machine down on him.
Tyrone didn't die.
Cody stopped dead as he entered the living room, staring at the far wall. "Dude," he said. "You moved it?"
Tyrone shrugged. "It looked weird in the corner."
Cody looked at him, eyes wide in some combination of fear and awe. "You moved it. That's…when did you go all bodhisattva on us? How?"
"I don't know," Tyrone said. "Wednesday? It just…" He made a vague gesture with a hand. "It was scary. Until it wasn't."
"Dude." Cody shook his head, opened his mouth several times to speak, then marched up and clamped his arms around Tyrone in a hug. "Dude."
Tyrone laughed, made a fist, and knocked it to the side of the machine. A little thrill tingled up his spine. "I could have died just then," he said. "But I didn't."
Cody laughed back. "I strongly suggest that you keep not dying."
"That's the secret, I think," Tyrone said. "Can I get you a beer?"
Tyrone kept not dying through six jobs, two moves, and a marriage. They had first gotten together because Jada read about THIS in an old forum post of Tyrone's and thought it was really cool. Her own slip had said CAR ACCIDENT. She drove to their wedding.
They were exiting the plane back from their third vacation to Europe when Tyrone's phone chirped. His primary care physician needed to talk to him about some test results. Right away. In person.
"Metastatic pancreatic cancer," the doctor said, eyes soft, face weary. "You've got maybe two months. A year at the outside if it responds to chemo."
"What?!" Tyrone's eyes flew open. He'd been coping with increasing back pain for the last year or two, and in hindsight had been explaining away some incredibly severe fatigue, but…"That's…that's impossible. It's literally impossible. It…I…" He started to sob, clinging to Jada, feeling the world spin away.
"That's impossible," he said again that night, after he'd drained his reservoir of tears. "It can't kill me." He began to laugh bitterly, body shaking in empty sobs. "For entertainment purposes only."
She hugged him from behind, stroking his chin with the backs of her thinning fingers. "Look at it this way," she whispered. "You'll be the world's first person to foil the machine's prediction."
"That doesn't count," he said. "The machine broke.…Or maybe it worked just fine. Maybe the medical term for pancreatic cancer starts with THIS. Maybe I blew off testing because I believed in THIS too much. Maybe the machine was silently irradiating me my whole life."
"The medical term for pancreatic cancer is pancreatic cancer," Jada said. "This was a routine screening, and you heard what he said, almost half of all pancreatic cancers aren't caught until this stage anyway. And…mmm. You think so? It's just a metal shell, but maybe if something in its innards went hot back when it seized up…"
They overnighted a Geiger counter from an online seller. When they fired it up, it emitted only the feeble clicks of background radiation. Tyrone slumped down in the sofa across from the machine, staring at it accusingly.
Jada sighed and kissed him on the forehead. "Let's have some lunch, Ty. We can talk about what to do with the rest of our time." She stroked his shoulder, but he merely rocked back and forth, staring at the machine. "It's just like it used to be, isn't it? You know what's going to kill you. Except now you know how long you've got, too."
Tyrone stared sullenly at the machine.
"Love you," she said, and grabbed the car keys.
"Love you," he muttered, and returned to his staring.
"Betrayer!" he shouted, after the sound of the car had faded into the distance. "Liar! How dare you." He choked back a sob, and a hidden inner reservoir of tears burst forth, and he forced himself exhaustedly to his feet and shuffled over against the monolith. "I thought I was supposed to be done with this Goddamned fear. Isn't that what you taught me? To be at peace with being on the edge of death? To celebrate life?"
The machine was silent.
"WHY DIDN'T YOU KILL ME?" Tyrone screamed, and slumped against the machine, sinking slowly to the floor. "Why didn't you kill me."
Jada didn't come home.
Andre escorted Tyrone home the day after the funeral. "You going to be okay?" he asked, tremors rattling his arm as he held Tyrone's shoulder.
"No," Tyrone said, voice flat, tears finally cried out. "But thanks for asking."
The two of them stood there in silence for several minutes, looking in the direction of the machine without looking at it, Andre steadying himself on the back of the sofa chair.
"I never got a prediction," Andre finally said. "I envied you, you know. After you finally bought that thing. After it all, you knew what to be afraid of."
"Doesn't matter," Tyrone said. "What's there to fear any more?"
"Matters it was good, maybe."
Tyrone's expression finally stirred to life, curling into a scowl. "Every good thing this damn box brought me, it took back away again. My certainty. My fearlessness. My Jada."
Andre thought, then said simply, "More than some folks get."
Tyrone closed his eyes and lowered his head. Andre clapped him clumsily on the shoulder, and Tyrone heard him shuffling off.
"See you," Andre said. "If I can keep not dying."
Three weeks later, Tyrone—shuffling a few painful steps at a time—slumped to the floor at the base of the machine, and sprawled onto his back, wincing a bit.
"Listen, you," he said, and the machine was, as usual, silent.
Tyrone drew in a rattling breath and steadied himself. "I don't owe you anything, you know." He brushed his fingers to the cold black metal. "That makes two of us. You never owed me a Goddamn thing. Except maybe ending my life someday. And maybe not. Maybe you're just broken." A laugh wracked his body. "That makes two of us, too."
The machine sat impassively. Tyrone gathered his energy and forced himself to sit up, sagging back against it.
"You got nothin', eh?" Tyrone said, reaching inside his bathrobe, and pulling out an old, familiar slip of paper with trembling fingers. THIS, it read. He reached back inside, and pulled out a tiny eyedropper-capped bottle full of clear liquid.
"Arsenic," he said out loud. "I don't know about the cancer, but I can tell you pretty sure that this isn't THIS. So if you want me, this is your last chance."
The machine was silent.
Tyrone laughed bitterly, unscrewed the eyedropper, and examined the tip. "Figures, after all this time, I'd have to do everything for you."
He squeezed a drop on the end of the S, tore the paper off, crumpled it up, and forced it down his throat. Then he closed his eyes, curling himself around the black and silent tombstone.
"I've read a lot about the machine," he finally said while the operator ejected the used needle from the hypo and dropped it into the sharps bin. "Nobody's ever been found who got an incorrect prediction. Why the disclaimer?"
"Liability," she said immediately, not even looking back at him as she inserted the vial from the hypo into a device that looked vaguely like, but was almost certainly not, a tabletop centrifuge. It whirred to life, and there was an unearthly grinding noise from inside the device that sent an ache through Tyrone's molars and made his throat go dry.
He swallowed, glancing uncomfortably between the device and the silent refrigerator-sized black monolith at its side that he'd come here to consult. "I thought that's what the waivers were for."
"'For entertainment purposes only' is what the waivers are," she said. "It has nothing to do with how accurate the prediction is—standing behind the machine's assertions puts us at an incredible amount of legal risk. Think about it. If it tells you your cause of death will be 'Fatty foods' or 'High blood pressure,' we've just given you medical advice. If it says 'President Duke', we're making predictions you can use as investment advice. If it says 'Bankruptcy' and you're about to start a big lawsuit, we've just given you legal advice. That last one got us sued, by the way, and it was most likely the waivers which swung the jury."
The tabletop device rattled to a halt with an ear-splitting grinding noise that sent Tyrone's vision floaty for a moment. He staggered sideways, shooting out an arm to steady himself on the wall. The operator, seemingly unaffected, thumbed a button that spat the vial of blood back out into a metal catch, and picked the vial up, pausing as she was about to insert it into the black machine. "And if you want my advice, Mr. Clay, you should treat it as entertainment. Let's say it says 'Cancer'—about one in four do. It might mean you've got a tumor right now, or it might mean you'll die decades after retirement, and spending your life jumping at shadows is just going to make you miserable, and won't change when the end comes." She glanced back, then paused, tilting her head. "You alright?"
Tyrone glanced back at the crenellated rim of the tabletop device, and felt a fleeting image of its teeth sinking into his soul, chewing and ripping and digesting him and spitting him out in tablet form for the monolith to digest and contemplate. He took a deep breath and stood up a little straighter, waiting for the vertigo to bleed away. "I…I think so."
The operator assessed him for a moment, then nodded, an unexpected moment of sympathy flitting past her features. "Are you sure you want to do this? It's…" She trailed off, then placed a hand on his arm, and suddenly there was another person standing there beside him against the cold blank face of death. "A lot of people have second thoughts. Knowing how you'll die is a pretty mixed blessing. I can't process a refund after the slip prints, but if you want more time to think about it…"
He looked down at her hand, then back into her face. "What did yours say?"
"Suicide," she said softly and without hesitation.
He winced.
"Don't be sorry," she said. "I can choose when I die. And yes, it keeps me up nights wondering what in my life could become so scary that I feel I have to make that choice. But. You know." She shrugged and gave him a hopeful smile.
Tyrone didn't know how to respond to that. "Let's do this," he said instead.
The rest of this, he knew from the documentaries, was anticlimactic. The processed blood would be inserted into the small round slot near the top of the monolith. It would spin to life, shuddering slightly, with the whine of gears and gyros, and sit in silent thought for about ten seconds. Then its innards would start chattering, and a paper tongue would start protruding within the little mouth at knee level, and then some gear-stop clunks as the white tongue protruded to lick the top lip, and the machine would shudder and hiss as the printout was cut from the printer spool to fall into the dispenser.
Except the part with the chattering was curiously silent and prolonged. Tunk, he heard, and the machine shuddered. Tunk. Tunk. Tunk. And with a chillingly final lurch, something inside the monolith seized, and it screamed and went silent.
The operator stared, one hand over her silent O of a mouth, manicured nails trembling.
"What happened?" Tyrone said.
"It's never done that," she said, and crouched to examine the slot. "It's…oh, God, it's broken."
"Jesus. What does that mean?" Tyrone's heart started hammering. "Am I immortal? Am I already dead?"
"It started printing. I can see—" The operator grunted as she crouched lower, sticking her arm in up to the elbow. "I think I can get—" She yanked, and there was the sound of tearing paper, and she stood back up with half a printout.
Tyrone snatched it from her with trembling hands.
THIS, it said in the machine's simple typewriter-serif capitals, part of the S ripped away.
While the operator was placing a panicked call to her manager, Tyrone fled the building, jamming the paper in his pocket. When he got home, he sat and stared at the half-printout for a long time. He walked to the kitchen and rooted through his junk drawer for one of his ex-wife's lighters. He lifted the printout in one hand and the lighter in the other, but paused.
Maybe you'll burn your house down trying to get rid of "THIS" piece of paper, a little voice in the back of his head helpfully supplied.
He jammed the lighter back in his junk drawer, stiffly walked over to the sofa chair, and sat back down. Five minutes later, he stood back up, grabbed the lighter from the junk drawer, and threw it in the trash. Moments later, he rooted through the trash for it, and walked outside to throw the lighter in the empty trash bin, wheeling it outside onto his non-flammable driveway.
Tyrone stared at the slip for a while longer, carefully inserted it as a bookmark into a random page of his family Bible, and then went over to his computer and read through everything he could find about the so-called "Machine of Death". The write-ups he'd bookmarked while first researching it and re-read endlessly while he was on the waiting list for an appointment. Every news article which mentioned it or its famously reclusive inventor. Media interviews with its more famous clients. Online reviews from former customers. Discussions in the various forums that had sprung to life around it. None of them ever mentioned the machine jamming.
He spent several hours curled up in the corner breathing shallowly after realizing that, if the machine had exploded and riddled his body with shrapnel, the slip would have been proven instantly correct.
He ran a search on an online dictionary. "Thistles?" he said aloud at the scandalously short list of results, and fell asleep reading about the genus Asteraceae. When he woke up, he did the same thing on a genealogy site, searching through the T names and drawing a complete blank.
He was interrupted by a knock on his door, and discovered that his porch contained three men in suits flanked by two police officers. "Mister Clay," Middle Suit said. "I understand that you visited a 'Machine of Death' storefront yesterday, and returned home with a prediction slip?"
Tyrone stepped forward into the doorway, holding the door half-closed behind him. "Okay, yeah."
"Are you currently in possession of that slip?" Left Suit said.
"Maybe. What's this about?" Tyrone said, suspicion further growing.
Right Suit thrust forward a thick sheaf of notarized papers. "As the legal representatives of Passage Predictions, LLC, we would like to speak with you about taking possession of that slip for safe disposal."
"We wish to scrap the machine and destroy the prediction slip in a manner authorized by both yourself and the authorities, at a minimum distance of 1000 miles from your current location, to minimize any possibility of injury or other harm," Left Suit said.
"Just as a precaution, you understand," Right Suit added.
"You would, of course, be fully refunded for your transaction," Middle Suit said.
Tyrone accepted the papers and flipped through them without looking. Surprise and suspicion warred; relief flailed for territory, and was pushed off the map again by a rootless and insubstantial fear. It couldn't possibly be that easy. Could it? Then Tyrone thought of the operator's prediction.
"You know, I think I'd prefer to keep it, actually," he said.
The suits glanced at each other, then at the officers. The officers stood relaxed, staring at nothing in particular, one with her arms crossed and the other with thumbs hooked in the pockets of his crisply peaked slacks. MCCOURTNEY, K and ISSA, T, according to their cracking and faded badges.
"Mister Clay," Middle Suit said, "we strongly recommend against that course of action."
"Any particular reason why?" Tyrone said, resolve suddenly firming. "Cause. You know. For entertainment purposes only."
Middle Suit went nervously silent.
"Is it the legal position of Passage Predictions, LLC, that you expect your company to be the cause of my death?" Tyrone said—glancing over at Officer Issa, whose boredom had vanished into a growing smirk.
"Passage Predictions, ah, is investigating the machine's apparent malfunction," Middle Suit said, "and, um, desires a resolution that minimizes the possibility of injury or other harm. Accidental injury. Unintentional."
"Any Acts of God, you might say," Right Suit edged in, "that might occur in accordance with a hypothetically correct analysis."
"Acts of God, yes."
"Surely then," Tyrone said with a sweet smile, "there's nothing legally to worry about?"
It was, he reflected, quite possibly worth the risk of some improbable and untimely demise just to watch the lawyers squirm.
Second thoughts intruded the next day, and Tyrone worked his way through the phone tree of the New York number on the notarized paperwork: The Law Offices of Hirtzmann, Hiscoe & Rothbach.
"I want to buy the broken machine," Tyrone said.
There was brief silence. Then: "Tyrone—can I call you Tyrone?—I'd like to set aside my professional obligations for a moment and speak to you, simply as one man to another. And that thing I'd like to say as a fellow human being is: You're crazy."
"Yeah, yeah. Hear me out, Mister…?"
"Ted, please."
"Ted. Isn't the whole point of learning your cause of death to assert some control over the process? Let's just pretend, for purposes of this discussion, that the machine is somehow out to personally murder me. If it's melted down to slag, maybe the metal gets recycled into a knife that some random mugger uses to stab me, or maybe if it's sunk to the bottom of the ocean, a sliver of metal gets eaten by a crab, and one day I eat it for dinner and choke on the shard. The point is, you're proposing something that introduces weird cosmic unpredictability into the process, and then I'm back to square one. If I own the machine, I can lock it in a warehouse across the country and never go near it until I'm ready to die."
"Where it could be stolen," Ted said immediately. "You could go broke and the storage unit could be foreclosed on. Or maybe the money you spend on the machine causes you to go broke, and that leads to your death. Same problem, except we're thinking of all those crab-knife-recycling problems. Did you look at the preliminary plan? We've sent it out to engineers and academics for peer review. You're basically saying you think you can cheat fate more effectively than a lot of smart people all coming together to work on your behalf."
"Yes, well," Tyrone said, "it would be my problem then, as a consenting adult. No liability anywhere, if I own the thing. Stop trying to save me from myself and do the simple thing for your clients."
Ted sighed. "Look, just because I'm a lawyer doesn't mean I'm a walking joke, okay? When I go home from the office at night I have to go to sleep with all the decisions I make, and I don't want a death on my conscience."
"You made partner with that attitude?" Tyrone jabbed.
"Ha, ha. This isn't a lawyer thing, okay? Did you happen to notice in the paperwork that I'm also a board member of Passage? We brought the Machine to the world because it helps people, Tyrone. It lets them plan, and live smart, and wring more out of the time they have left. If a Machine malfunction cuts one person's life short, that's too many. I don't want you to take that chance."
And the bad press would ruin you, Tyrone didn't say. This isn't altruism talking.
"What was your prediction?" he said instead.
"Cancer," Ted said. "So now I'm getting screenings every six months and eating a little healthier. Maybe pushing myself a little harder with my hobbies. It's pretty liberating on the ski slopes knowing you're not going to die by slamming into a tree."
"When the diagnosis comes," Tyrone said, "you gonna get chemo?"
Ted paused. "It depends. The first cancer isn't necessarily going to be the one that kills me, but let's be honest, chemotherapy is hell. If the odds of it working are too low, it's better to save myself the agony."
"So what you're saying is," Tyrone said, "it's more important to you to have control of your death than to delay it as long as possible?"
Ted was silent.
"Look," he finally said, "I'll run it by the rest of the board if you want, but…please, Tyrone. Think about our offer."
Tyrone woke up in the middle of the night with a crazy thought on his mind and ice in his veins. He stumbled out of bed down to the living-room desk, flipped on the light over the family Bible, and leafed through the paperwork that the lawyers on his porch had handed him.
Ted. Who was a board member of Passage Predictions, LLC, whose business his crazy ideas were threatening. Ted, starts with T.
"Hirtzmann, Hiscoe & Rothbach."
The panic receded only slightly when he saw "Ted Rothbach" on a signature line. He turned on his computer and checked the firm's Web site, and finally his heart unclenched. Eric Hiscoe.
He pointed at the Bible's bookmark and smirked. "Gotcha," he said aloud, and very nearly did a little victory dance before wondering if maybe he would trip and fall and the book would land on his head.
The next morning, Tyrone called over his friend Andre to wrap the prediction slip in a plastic sleeve, the sleeve in a notebook, the notebook in a cardboard box, and the box in his basement.
That, he thought, should take care of things until I hear back from Rothbach.
"Hello…yes…I'm sorry for intruding, sergeant, but I've got a really important question about one of your officers…"
Andre pressed the frame to the wall over the sofa, which had been pulled forward by about three feet. "You sure about this?"
"Absolutely. Plexiglass cover, lightweight rounded frame, and we'll screw it to the wall so it can't fall off."
"Into the drywall, or a stud?"
Tyrone paused.
"What are the chances," he asked, "of a weakened stud collapsing the house?"
"Yes, I'm just calling for the result of the blood-borne infectious diseases panel, last name Clay…"
"It's a reasonable precaution," Tyrone said defensively.
"No it isn't," Andre said, setting down the security camera and stepping down from the stepladder. "Look, if you're so worried about someone stealing it, set it on fire and be done with it."
"No. Then we're back to the it-could-come-from-anywhere problem."
"It still could! You don't even know it's the paper that'll do it!"
"What's more likely?" Tyrone said. "That I keep the paper around and it gets me one day, or that the universe winds up an even more outlandish Rube Goldberg machine despite having a legitimate murder weapon twenty feet away?"
"What's more likely is that the machine fucked up!" Andre shouted, then closed his eyes and took a breath through his nose. "Go get retested."
Tyrone snorted. "They blacklisted me. Don't want to risk another machine offering me the same message more explosively. So I'm doing the smart thing, which is to craft a death I can control, and make it simultaneously extremely unlikely and likelier than the alternative." He reached out for the security camera—but paused halfway through, backed away, and nodded toward it. "That's what lets me live without fear.…As long as I steer clear of that Passage warehouse in Ketchikan, I mean."
"Without fear," Andre said, and picked up the camera with a sigh. "Right."
"I think I can live without a vacation to Alaska," Tyrone said, but Andre merely returned to installing the camera.
"Hello, this is going to sound like a strange and simple request, but you advertise 'no questions asked', and I'll pay what your time is worth. There's a member of the Police Department…"
Tyrone trailed off, eyes lingering on the THIS behind the plexiglass. No hint of punctuation. Maybe this was over the line.
Without fear, Andre's voice echoed in his head, and he steadied himself. As ridiculous as the idea was, he couldn't let it keep owning him. It would be so simple to finally put it to rest.
"…An officer named Timothy Issa," he continued, "and I just need to know his middle name…"
The news programs at first identified George Tanner's death as a suicide, until they found a detailed note next to his prediction slip on the table in his apartment. "Just in case something happens I need everyone to know that I am NOT done with life," it read. "I fully intend to walk back in this door after jumping off the Lincoln Bridge. I am proving to the universe that I am invincible until I choose to end it."
His family sued, claiming breach of duty of care based on Tanner's history of mental illness. It eventually came out in court that Tanner had confided to a friend he wanted to take down Passage for his prediction of suicide, and that he "was going to set them up good," but that didn't sway the jury on the mental-health claims. Two years later, Tyrone bought the THIS machine at the bankruptcy auction.
Its shell, anyway. The guts had long since been ripped out, and when Andre and Cody wrestled it into the back corner of the living room, it sat there like the hollow exoskeleton of a sun-baked cricket.
"Dude," Cody said. "This is creepy." Andre, for his part, just rolled his eyes.
"It's asserting my control over fate," Tyrone said. "With the possible exception of thistle soup, or people with exceptionally improbable names, or whatever happened to the machine's innards, I now know for a fact that what's going to kill me is right here in this room."
"So you can spend the rest of your life freaking out at it in person," Andre said.
"I am not freaking out," Tyrone said. "I am not afraid."
"Uh-huh," Andre said.
"I—I'm not—Goddammit, look!" Tyrone yelled, then stomped across the room and flung himself to the ground at the machine's base, sprawling on his back.
Andre's eyes flew wide. "Ty—"
"I could die at any moment and I'm perfectly okay with that!" Tyrone shouted, heart hammering, feeling sweat beading on his brow. His eyes flicked up to the silent black shell, which was resting quietly on sturdy legs, showing no signs whatsoever of being overbalanced or ready to break apart or armed with terrorist explosives. "Look at me! If the universe wanted to kill me right now, it could, uhh…I dunno, cause an earthquake and tip the thing over onto me! DO YOU HEAR ME, UNIVERSE? IF YOU WANT TO KILL ME, NOW'S YOUR CHANCE!"
Nothing happened.
"Jesus, Tyrone, this is creepy," Cody said. "Get up. Please."
Tightness clenched Tyrone's chest, and he suddenly remembered to breathe. The machine loomed over him like a tombstone made of night. A wall clock ticked off seconds in the kitchen. The carpet tickled his arms. The stippling on the ceiling hung like a million tiny spikes.
"Right," Tyrone said, shimmying away from the machine, then crab-walking, then scrambling backward before he finally got to his feet halfway across the room. The tightness in his chest didn't loosen, and he suddenly knew it was a heart attack and the damn machine had scared him to death, and he staggered wordlessly back to the far wall, vertigo surging and choking, staccato breathing leaving his throat with little rattling wheezes—darkness creeping in from the edges of his vision and then exploding throughout his consciousness—
—and he woke up, numb but whole, with Andre and Cody crouched over him, the machine still standing in silent accusation across the room.
"You alright, dude?" Cody said, lifting Tyrone's wrist and pressing two fingers to it. "You fainted."
"Not too late to melt that thing into slag," Andre muttered.
Tyrone stared at the machine for ten minutes the next morning before slowly shuffling toward it.
He glanced behind it, alongside it. It had no plug to insert into the nearby power outlet. No wild animals lurked in its shadow. It was no less well balanced than it had been the previous day.
Finally, slowly, he reached out. Stretched his arm forward. Hesitated.
Typed "static electricity" into his computer's search engine. Read several articles. Got a safety pin from the kitchen, and unbent it so he could touch the machine with the tip. Tapped it. Waited. Pressed his hand further forward and brushed his fingers to the cool black surface.
Held his hand there. It tingled a bit against his skin. The machine did nothing.
"You know, maybe you're not completely terrifying," he finally said.
It didn't reply.
Later that week, he lay down in front of the machine again, feeling his heart start to thud in his chest.
"Listen, you," he said, feeling a little self-conscious even though he lived alone. "You're going to kill me someday. I get that. But I. I."
His voice cracked. He swallowed, and pushed words out, hoping that saying them would make them true.
"…I don't think it's going to be today."
His pulse hammered like drumsticks against the insides of his ribs. He forced himself to take a deep breath. This wasn't a heart attack. It was just fear.
The clock in the kitchen ticked onward.
And suddenly, the machine was what it had always been. A cold black husk. An impersonal, insubstantial piece of a much larger game. A tiny but crucial piece of the universe—a universe which was someday going to kill him, just like it was going to kill every man, woman, child, and animal that had ever lived, some sooner than others.
"And if it is today," Tyrone said slowly, "it was always meant to happen that way. Right?"
He forced himself to lie there until he felt his heart start to slow.
He reached up and brushed his fingers to the machine. The tip of an afternoon sunbeam was licking the metal near the floor, and the black surface was warm to the touch.
No static electricity zapped him. No earthquakes toppled the machine down on him.
Tyrone didn't die.
Cody stopped dead as he entered the living room, staring at the far wall. "Dude," he said. "You moved it?"
Tyrone shrugged. "It looked weird in the corner."
Cody looked at him, eyes wide in some combination of fear and awe. "You moved it. That's…when did you go all bodhisattva on us? How?"
"I don't know," Tyrone said. "Wednesday? It just…" He made a vague gesture with a hand. "It was scary. Until it wasn't."
"Dude." Cody shook his head, opened his mouth several times to speak, then marched up and clamped his arms around Tyrone in a hug. "Dude."
Tyrone laughed, made a fist, and knocked it to the side of the machine. A little thrill tingled up his spine. "I could have died just then," he said. "But I didn't."
Cody laughed back. "I strongly suggest that you keep not dying."
"That's the secret, I think," Tyrone said. "Can I get you a beer?"
Tyrone kept not dying through six jobs, two moves, and a marriage. They had first gotten together because Jada read about THIS in an old forum post of Tyrone's and thought it was really cool. Her own slip had said CAR ACCIDENT. She drove to their wedding.
They were exiting the plane back from their third vacation to Europe when Tyrone's phone chirped. His primary care physician needed to talk to him about some test results. Right away. In person.
"Metastatic pancreatic cancer," the doctor said, eyes soft, face weary. "You've got maybe two months. A year at the outside if it responds to chemo."
"What?!" Tyrone's eyes flew open. He'd been coping with increasing back pain for the last year or two, and in hindsight had been explaining away some incredibly severe fatigue, but…"That's…that's impossible. It's literally impossible. It…I…" He started to sob, clinging to Jada, feeling the world spin away.
"That's impossible," he said again that night, after he'd drained his reservoir of tears. "It can't kill me." He began to laugh bitterly, body shaking in empty sobs. "For entertainment purposes only."
She hugged him from behind, stroking his chin with the backs of her thinning fingers. "Look at it this way," she whispered. "You'll be the world's first person to foil the machine's prediction."
"That doesn't count," he said. "The machine broke.…Or maybe it worked just fine. Maybe the medical term for pancreatic cancer starts with THIS. Maybe I blew off testing because I believed in THIS too much. Maybe the machine was silently irradiating me my whole life."
"The medical term for pancreatic cancer is pancreatic cancer," Jada said. "This was a routine screening, and you heard what he said, almost half of all pancreatic cancers aren't caught until this stage anyway. And…mmm. You think so? It's just a metal shell, but maybe if something in its innards went hot back when it seized up…"
They overnighted a Geiger counter from an online seller. When they fired it up, it emitted only the feeble clicks of background radiation. Tyrone slumped down in the sofa across from the machine, staring at it accusingly.
Jada sighed and kissed him on the forehead. "Let's have some lunch, Ty. We can talk about what to do with the rest of our time." She stroked his shoulder, but he merely rocked back and forth, staring at the machine. "It's just like it used to be, isn't it? You know what's going to kill you. Except now you know how long you've got, too."
Tyrone stared sullenly at the machine.
"Love you," she said, and grabbed the car keys.
"Love you," he muttered, and returned to his staring.
"Betrayer!" he shouted, after the sound of the car had faded into the distance. "Liar! How dare you." He choked back a sob, and a hidden inner reservoir of tears burst forth, and he forced himself exhaustedly to his feet and shuffled over against the monolith. "I thought I was supposed to be done with this Goddamned fear. Isn't that what you taught me? To be at peace with being on the edge of death? To celebrate life?"
The machine was silent.
"WHY DIDN'T YOU KILL ME?" Tyrone screamed, and slumped against the machine, sinking slowly to the floor. "Why didn't you kill me."
Jada didn't come home.
Andre escorted Tyrone home the day after the funeral. "You going to be okay?" he asked, tremors rattling his arm as he held Tyrone's shoulder.
"No," Tyrone said, voice flat, tears finally cried out. "But thanks for asking."
The two of them stood there in silence for several minutes, looking in the direction of the machine without looking at it, Andre steadying himself on the back of the sofa chair.
"I never got a prediction," Andre finally said. "I envied you, you know. After you finally bought that thing. After it all, you knew what to be afraid of."
"Doesn't matter," Tyrone said. "What's there to fear any more?"
"Matters it was good, maybe."
Tyrone's expression finally stirred to life, curling into a scowl. "Every good thing this damn box brought me, it took back away again. My certainty. My fearlessness. My Jada."
Andre thought, then said simply, "More than some folks get."
Tyrone closed his eyes and lowered his head. Andre clapped him clumsily on the shoulder, and Tyrone heard him shuffling off.
"See you," Andre said. "If I can keep not dying."
Three weeks later, Tyrone—shuffling a few painful steps at a time—slumped to the floor at the base of the machine, and sprawled onto his back, wincing a bit.
"Listen, you," he said, and the machine was, as usual, silent.
Tyrone drew in a rattling breath and steadied himself. "I don't owe you anything, you know." He brushed his fingers to the cold black metal. "That makes two of us. You never owed me a Goddamn thing. Except maybe ending my life someday. And maybe not. Maybe you're just broken." A laugh wracked his body. "That makes two of us, too."
The machine sat impassively. Tyrone gathered his energy and forced himself to sit up, sagging back against it.
"You got nothin', eh?" Tyrone said, reaching inside his bathrobe, and pulling out an old, familiar slip of paper with trembling fingers. THIS, it read. He reached back inside, and pulled out a tiny eyedropper-capped bottle full of clear liquid.
"Arsenic," he said out loud. "I don't know about the cancer, but I can tell you pretty sure that this isn't THIS. So if you want me, this is your last chance."
The machine was silent.
Tyrone laughed bitterly, unscrewed the eyedropper, and examined the tip. "Figures, after all this time, I'd have to do everything for you."
He squeezed a drop on the end of the S, tore the paper off, crumpled it up, and forced it down his throat. Then he closed his eyes, curling himself around the black and silent tombstone.
I have conflicting emotions about this story primarily because it is at the top of my slate and I can't help but be off-put by the mundane and predictable conclusion. Given the how the writing is oriented towards a more humanistic story of how people react to a proclamation of certain death and how they attempt to come to terms and understand it, I find it strange that the author felt it necessary to literally shove the note down the reader's as throat as literal cause of death rather than something more nuanced and what I had hoped the author was going for, like a gradual self-inflicted ruination in attempt to escape fate due to paranoia. In fact, that sort of nuanced conclusion is what I felt the story was building to, but then suddenly shifted gears to quickly wrap things up towards the very end, perhaps because of time constraints. I can't say. Nonetheless, it leaves me with an unsatisfying conclusion, which is shame, because much of the work towards the beginning that sets up the story's groundwork is clever, the protagonist is like-able, and mystery of what "THIS" could mean and how and why it caused the machine to fail carried my interest throughout the entire story, and I never felt that I was trudging along (at least until the last 15%), which is a high compliment.
Ironically, even though this is one of the longest stories in the write-off, it doesn't seem quite long enough, and it needs more space to fully flesh out the ramifications of its ideas, such as the cancer diagnosis, the heartbreak of the car crash (which is mostly glossed over), Jada as a character, etc. Perhaps the greatest problem of this story is that it leaves too much unsaid and doesn't tap into its true potential. It has a great sense of internal narrative, especially with the scenes with the suits and the explanation of how the company avoids liability. It doesn't bog itself down with the technicalities of how such a device works and it is infallible, rather it attempts to illustrate what sort of impact that would have on the world, which is infinitely more interesting.
Nonetheless, this is not to suggest that there is no fat to be trimmed in this story, only that its interesting segments are underutilized and downplayed. One thing I would hope upon a revision is that the author would take less pains to beat the reader over the head with the physical danger of the machine itself and establishing that it will not end up being the cause of his death. This whole debate, which I knew was going nowhere by the end of the first scene, takes around 1000 words, roughly a fifth of the entire story itself that could have been dedicated to doing other more interesting things. I understand in universe that it would befit the character to exhibit a high level of caution, but this can be accomplished in two scenes tops, and also, ignores other possible interpretations of what "THIS" means that no doubt would have occurred to the protagonist. It just frustrates me that some much time was spent securing this particular facet when there are a plethora of potential possibilities to use.
The personification of the box seems out of place within the context of the previous scenes, given that even under duress, the protagonist never addressed the box before, and I don't think that element particularly adds to the story. It just seems odd, and the emotions he's going through aren't exactly strongly identifiable or understandable. Jada even points this out. To be frank, I'm not sure exactly what the cancer diagnosis really adds to the story as a whole other than to progress the story to its inevitable conclusion. It's a bit too ham-fisted for me and detracts from what should be an important character death later in the story, which happens right around the same time, and the two events kind of mesh together where neither event seems to have a particular emotional impact.
Somewhat related, the George Tanner paragraphs are written in such a way that it makes it seem as if they audience should be familiar with George Tanner beforehand, which is was a cause for a confusion, especially because the explanation of how that story is relevant is tacked on in a single sentence at the end of the story. Perhaps establish the setting before delving into that story, or even better, use the suicide bit as a callback to the proctor that had the suicide prediction when Tyrone was being evaluated, keep the backstory the same, but save the audience the trouble of introducing a new character.
Still, despite my bitching, top marks for you. Good job. Do better.
Things to Consider:
- Expanding emotional core of the story and exploring more possibilities of the premise
- Developing later scenes further
- Tossing out and rewriting the conclusion to better suit the overall tone and logic of the piece
- Reducing the length of extraneous scenes
- Changing up the presentation order / content on the George Tanner scene
Ironically, even though this is one of the longest stories in the write-off, it doesn't seem quite long enough, and it needs more space to fully flesh out the ramifications of its ideas, such as the cancer diagnosis, the heartbreak of the car crash (which is mostly glossed over), Jada as a character, etc. Perhaps the greatest problem of this story is that it leaves too much unsaid and doesn't tap into its true potential. It has a great sense of internal narrative, especially with the scenes with the suits and the explanation of how the company avoids liability. It doesn't bog itself down with the technicalities of how such a device works and it is infallible, rather it attempts to illustrate what sort of impact that would have on the world, which is infinitely more interesting.
Nonetheless, this is not to suggest that there is no fat to be trimmed in this story, only that its interesting segments are underutilized and downplayed. One thing I would hope upon a revision is that the author would take less pains to beat the reader over the head with the physical danger of the machine itself and establishing that it will not end up being the cause of his death. This whole debate, which I knew was going nowhere by the end of the first scene, takes around 1000 words, roughly a fifth of the entire story itself that could have been dedicated to doing other more interesting things. I understand in universe that it would befit the character to exhibit a high level of caution, but this can be accomplished in two scenes tops, and also, ignores other possible interpretations of what "THIS" means that no doubt would have occurred to the protagonist. It just frustrates me that some much time was spent securing this particular facet when there are a plethora of potential possibilities to use.
The personification of the box seems out of place within the context of the previous scenes, given that even under duress, the protagonist never addressed the box before, and I don't think that element particularly adds to the story. It just seems odd, and the emotions he's going through aren't exactly strongly identifiable or understandable. Jada even points this out. To be frank, I'm not sure exactly what the cancer diagnosis really adds to the story as a whole other than to progress the story to its inevitable conclusion. It's a bit too ham-fisted for me and detracts from what should be an important character death later in the story, which happens right around the same time, and the two events kind of mesh together where neither event seems to have a particular emotional impact.
Somewhat related, the George Tanner paragraphs are written in such a way that it makes it seem as if they audience should be familiar with George Tanner beforehand, which is was a cause for a confusion, especially because the explanation of how that story is relevant is tacked on in a single sentence at the end of the story. Perhaps establish the setting before delving into that story, or even better, use the suicide bit as a callback to the proctor that had the suicide prediction when Tyrone was being evaluated, keep the backstory the same, but save the audience the trouble of introducing a new character.
Still, despite my bitching, top marks for you. Good job. Do better.
Things to Consider:
- Expanding emotional core of the story and exploring more possibilities of the premise
- Developing later scenes further
- Tossing out and rewriting the conclusion to better suit the overall tone and logic of the piece
- Reducing the length of extraneous scenes
- Changing up the presentation order / content on the George Tanner scene
The Machine Of Literal Death, Possibly, Maybe
A solid intro that gets the conceit across through dialogue without being too heavy-handed.
The reuse of “grinding noise” stands out to me as a bit clumsy, though that's admittedly a nitpick. And immediately after, there's “shooting out an arm”, which is far too exciting a phrasing for a guy putting a hand on the wall.
Halfway through, and while I don't have any major faults, it's getting a ittle one-note. Tyrone heads off this way of dying, and this way, and this way. His characterisation amount to obsessive, and that's about it. The cast of characters who surround him are just shadows.
Then we leap forward in time, and I get a realisation:
She hugged him from behind, stroking his chin with the backs of her thinning fingers. "Look at it this way," she whispered. "You'll be the world's first person to foil the machine's prediction." Haha!
This isn't an idea-story. It's a black comedy. I don't know whether it's intentional (the title seems to imply that), but that's how it's turned out.
And with the that, the ending makes sense: The obvious irony of IT KILLED HIM AFTER ALL is undercut by the uncertainty, by the fact that he would've died anyway. Tyrone is ridiculous. His conflict is farcical. All the attempts he makes to control his destiny, fight it, or accept it, come to likewise trivial ends.
Does that excuse the creeping repetitiveness of the first section? Not entirely – I still think that could be be trimmed down. I still think a bit more characterisation would underscore the pathos of Tyrone's situation.
Mainly, though, I think you should accentuate the comedy aspect a bit more. Not too much – that would ruin it – but a couple more signifiers that that's the direction the story's taking would help.
A solid intro that gets the conceit across through dialogue without being too heavy-handed.
The reuse of “grinding noise” stands out to me as a bit clumsy, though that's admittedly a nitpick. And immediately after, there's “shooting out an arm”, which is far too exciting a phrasing for a guy putting a hand on the wall.
Halfway through, and while I don't have any major faults, it's getting a ittle one-note. Tyrone heads off this way of dying, and this way, and this way. His characterisation amount to obsessive, and that's about it. The cast of characters who surround him are just shadows.
Then we leap forward in time, and I get a realisation:
She hugged him from behind, stroking his chin with the backs of her thinning fingers. "Look at it this way," she whispered. "You'll be the world's first person to foil the machine's prediction." Haha!
This isn't an idea-story. It's a black comedy. I don't know whether it's intentional (the title seems to imply that), but that's how it's turned out.
And with the that, the ending makes sense: The obvious irony of IT KILLED HIM AFTER ALL is undercut by the uncertainty, by the fact that he would've died anyway. Tyrone is ridiculous. His conflict is farcical. All the attempts he makes to control his destiny, fight it, or accept it, come to likewise trivial ends.
Does that excuse the creeping repetitiveness of the first section? Not entirely – I still think that could be be trimmed down. I still think a bit more characterisation would underscore the pathos of Tyrone's situation.
Mainly, though, I think you should accentuate the comedy aspect a bit more. Not too much – that would ruin it – but a couple more signifiers that that's the direction the story's taking would help.
Well... hmmm.
I liked the concept going in here, despite feeling like I've seen it before. I was hoping for a twist of some sort, but I don't really know where/how that would come in? Your opening is good, the descriptions are good, the pacing is pretty good, but I'm just left kinda cold at the end. I'm honestly not sure what I actually wanted from this one, but I'm not sure I got it. This definitely had some up and downs and what.
Perhaps I couldn't help comparing it to Skywriter's "Torn Apart and Devoured by Lions" subconsciously. I'll score it fairly well, I think, for everything it does right. I just can't help but feel it's a bit too straightforwards to really make me feel like it's something special?
I liked the concept going in here, despite feeling like I've seen it before. I was hoping for a twist of some sort, but I don't really know where/how that would come in? Your opening is good, the descriptions are good, the pacing is pretty good, but I'm just left kinda cold at the end. I'm honestly not sure what I actually wanted from this one, but I'm not sure I got it. This definitely had some up and downs and what.
Perhaps I couldn't help comparing it to Skywriter's "Torn Apart and Devoured by Lions" subconsciously. I'll score it fairly well, I think, for everything it does right. I just can't help but feel it's a bit too straightforwards to really make me feel like it's something special?
The Machine Of Literal Death - A+ - Top of my slate, obviously. I got an Asimov vibe off it for some reason, possibly some old and dying brain cells of mine connecting it to one of his older works. There’s a few spots that need a little polishing to knock off odd turns of phrase, but the plot theme behind it is solid and draws the reader all the way through to the end where it is not-quite-but-just-enough revealed as not to leave the reader scratching their head at “Rosebud?” and enough to make the trip well worthwhile.
I had some problems in placing this story on my slate. On one hand it reads like something I already heard before and doesn't stray from the predictable at any point. On the other hand it's well written, flows without a hitch and being very original doesn't seem to be the point anyway.
Now to some more focused criticism. The main question I have is: what is the point? The struggle against a deterministic universe? The futility of trying to avoid things that are beyond our control? The silliness of the human condition and the problems we create for ourselves? I feel like it is a bit too unfocused, or that I'm not clever enough to catch the meaning.
The difference in size between the middle and the ending is another thing that maybe should be changed a bit. I think that the ending should either be shorter or longer, depending on the point you want to make. Currently it feels a bit jarring and leaves me a bit unsatisfied.
Now, this seems to be the harshest critique I dealt out this round, which isn't fair because despite everything I said this is a good story. As I said, I had a few doubts about how to place it, but at the end I decided for the upper half of my slate. The things the story does it does well, and the things it misses are probably things that have more to do with my personal preferences than with any even remotely objective criticism. So, good job there.
Now to some more focused criticism. The main question I have is: what is the point? The struggle against a deterministic universe? The futility of trying to avoid things that are beyond our control? The silliness of the human condition and the problems we create for ourselves? I feel like it is a bit too unfocused, or that I'm not clever enough to catch the meaning.
The difference in size between the middle and the ending is another thing that maybe should be changed a bit. I think that the ending should either be shorter or longer, depending on the point you want to make. Currently it feels a bit jarring and leaves me a bit unsatisfied.
Now, this seems to be the harshest critique I dealt out this round, which isn't fair because despite everything I said this is a good story. As I said, I had a few doubts about how to place it, but at the end I decided for the upper half of my slate. The things the story does it does well, and the things it misses are probably things that have more to do with my personal preferences than with any even remotely objective criticism. So, good job there.
This is another one that falls just short of my Companions watermark, and once again the biggest problem is the way in which it slams into an unsatisfying ending; others have covered the issues with the sudden introduction and muted passing of Jada (consider introducing her earlier in the story? Perhaps even much earlier, maybe when he's doing his internet research, even if they don't get together then), and the weirdly sudden and blatant use of the paper for his suicide. Though "biggest" is perhaps overselling it. I had a lot of small reservations here that added up, and while the ending was the most noticeable issue, it didn't bug me much more.
>>Not_A_Hat cites Skywriter's "Torn Apart And Devoured By Lions", which actually is a super apt comparison here, because this appears to be fanfiction of / written in the same universe as it; TA&DBL was written for an anthology called The Machine Of Death, from which you are presumably drawing your title. Each of those stories centered around a machine which told people the manner in which they were going to die, so the premise here isn't original, though in fairness it doesn't look like this is making any effort to disguise its roots, and the ideas of the premise here aren't the main things I enjoyed anyway. Those would be the methodical deconstruction of the various little elements that went into Tyrone's paranoia; I kept trying to think of other loopholes but couldn't find any you missed.
The other major thing to address here is the pacing -- which kinda ties into the ending gripes mentioned above, since the ending fees quite hurried, but the difference between the first section (getting the slip) and the middle section (dealing with it) is itself rather stark. While the beginning does serve up a lot of exposition introducing the whole MOD angle, it feels rather too long for its weight.
Still, what edged this out over Suburbanism for me was that the ending, while way too abrupt, actually did sorta work thematically, in a way that I really wanted to like (and just needed more space). As the story says, the arsenic isn't THIS, and he could easily have just swallowed some; there was a deliberate choice to involve the note and to fulfill the self-fulfilling prophecy, which makes some interesting statements about his changing relationship with the machine over the course of the story. (Though I can't help but feel that this could have ended with a lot more dark humor if, with a final cry of defiance, Tyrone drank the poison straight -- and then collapsed and expired, the bottle of arsenic rolling out of his hands to come to rest on the "THIS" slip.)
Tier: Strong
>>Not_A_Hat cites Skywriter's "Torn Apart And Devoured By Lions", which actually is a super apt comparison here, because this appears to be fanfiction of / written in the same universe as it; TA&DBL was written for an anthology called The Machine Of Death, from which you are presumably drawing your title. Each of those stories centered around a machine which told people the manner in which they were going to die, so the premise here isn't original, though in fairness it doesn't look like this is making any effort to disguise its roots, and the ideas of the premise here aren't the main things I enjoyed anyway. Those would be the methodical deconstruction of the various little elements that went into Tyrone's paranoia; I kept trying to think of other loopholes but couldn't find any you missed.
The other major thing to address here is the pacing -- which kinda ties into the ending gripes mentioned above, since the ending fees quite hurried, but the difference between the first section (getting the slip) and the middle section (dealing with it) is itself rather stark. While the beginning does serve up a lot of exposition introducing the whole MOD angle, it feels rather too long for its weight.
Still, what edged this out over Suburbanism for me was that the ending, while way too abrupt, actually did sorta work thematically, in a way that I really wanted to like (and just needed more space). As the story says, the arsenic isn't THIS, and he could easily have just swallowed some; there was a deliberate choice to involve the note and to fulfill the self-fulfilling prophecy, which makes some interesting statements about his changing relationship with the machine over the course of the story. (Though I can't help but feel that this could have ended with a lot more dark humor if, with a final cry of defiance, Tyrone drank the poison straight -- and then collapsed and expired, the bottle of arsenic rolling out of his hands to come to rest on the "THIS" slip.)
Tier: Strong
Doggone it, this one is tricky to rate and review. I'm gonna point at >>Cassius and >>Orbiting_kettle, who have already written much of what I could think to.
Adding a few brief thoughts: the writing here was excellent, barring some of the very brief asides peppered-in along the way, which I generally found more confusing than not. I also wanted to get more description of the main character's friends, as they came off a bit as indistinct talking heads. Unfortunately, I found the ending to be confusing and a bit of a dud, notwithstanding >>georg's suggestion that there's a "Rosebud"I should be looking for. I'll add that to my general desire to see elements of this world expanded more, such as what happened with the lawyers and the creepy company, which kind of seem to vanish.
But I get the sense that part of this is me missing things, rather than a serious fault in the work itself. I'm willing to let this into my top tier despite wishing for a clearer resolution, because at least the resolution is somewhere in the ball park of being thematically consistent.
Tier: Top Contender
Adding a few brief thoughts: the writing here was excellent, barring some of the very brief asides peppered-in along the way, which I generally found more confusing than not. I also wanted to get more description of the main character's friends, as they came off a bit as indistinct talking heads. Unfortunately, I found the ending to be confusing and a bit of a dud, notwithstanding >>georg's suggestion that there's a "Rosebud"I should be looking for. I'll add that to my general desire to see elements of this world expanded more, such as what happened with the lawyers and the creepy company, which kind of seem to vanish.
But I get the sense that part of this is me missing things, rather than a serious fault in the work itself. I'm willing to let this into my top tier despite wishing for a clearer resolution, because at least the resolution is somewhere in the ball park of being thematically consistent.
Tier: Top Contender
>>horizon
Lol, you posted your review while I was reading this and working on mine. I think your comparison to Companions is apt; I found this to be another brilliantly written story that kind of comes unraveled toward the end. This ended up coming in just above Companions for me though, and largely because the ending came closer to paying off the journey that the protagonist went through.
I also think your suggested ending would be perfect. Dear author, please consider. :-p
Lol, you posted your review while I was reading this and working on mine. I think your comparison to Companions is apt; I found this to be another brilliantly written story that kind of comes unraveled toward the end. This ended up coming in just above Companions for me though, and largely because the ending came closer to paying off the journey that the protagonist went through.
I also think your suggested ending would be perfect. Dear author, please consider. :-p
I'm not sure how to judge this one. It's well written, but this is an Original Fiction round and this is not an Original Fiction story.
I'm going to punt and abstain.
I'm going to punt and abstain.