This Is How You Die: Stories of the Inscrutable, Infallible, Inescapable Machine of Death

by Неизвестный

  The first light of a fishing boat flickered on in the distance.

  “Just want it over with?” I whispered.

  “They say you can change the when, don’t they? If only I didn’t know… if it didn’t feel cowardly, like she might think it was because… because I can’t stand the constant fear…”

  I stood up slowly, balancing on the angled concrete.

  “But I do love her.” The fading light silhouetted him against silver-gold clouds. Perfect broad shoulders. He shook his head. “Maybe time is an illusion, but goddamn it, it’s the one we were meant to live in, isn’t it?” His fingers gripped the camera too tight. “Maybe Saki had the right idea. This isn’t life; this is—”

  “No.” I reached for his hand, slipped on the seaweed that had caught on the rough surface. The world spun for just a moment. I steadied myself, his hand on my arm, and I laughed.

  “That was scary.”

  “You okay?”

  “I’m fine.” On the wooden path that runs along the rocky beach, a group of elementary school children ran by chattering and laughing in their matching yellow backpacks.

  “This is life,” I said after a minute. “What are we supposed to do other than keep living it?”

  He nodded slowly. Such an empty phrase. Someday they’ll figure out how to take other readings, to find the imprints left by other parts of our existence and translate them. Someday we’ll unravel this illusion of time and read off a whole life before it happens, watch our own lives like a movie we’ve already read the summary of. Someday. Not yet.

  “Maybe,” he said quietly. “Someday, we… It’s not that I don’t want it. I just don’t…”

  I reached for the camera and he let me take it, carefully, hanging the strap around my neck. I leaned down to find the right angle. We all pretend this one thing doesn’t change anything important; just another little detail in the overflow of knowledge we live with now. But we’re meant to live with mysteries. Maybe that’s what Saki understood. “Maybe,” I repeated. “But not yet. It’s okay.”

  The shutter clicked, freezing the crashing wave against the long row of tetrapods. I straightened up and watched the last rays of sun slip behind the mountains.

  “I don’t have to know.”

  * * *

  Story by Rebecca Black

  Illustration by Carly Monardo

  MACHINE OF DEATH

  You’re invited!

  Come party with the

  MACHINE OF DEATH

  BLACK LETTERS ON A WHITE CARD, a corporate logo, and on the back, handwritten details about where and when the party would be held. Pavel was looking very pleased with himself as he waved it around.

  “What do you think?” he asked Marka. “Much more interesting than dinner and a movie again.”

  Marka pursed her lips. She had never been to a Machine of Death party. Everybody knew about the Machine of Death, of course, just like everybody knew that nobody knew how it worked. The machine had been introduced only a few months ago, but its popularity spike was envied by fad-mongers the world over. The machine had been packaged and peddled at malls, movie theaters, doctors’ offices, and even as a party game. You could find a machine anywhere someone might be hanging around with some time to kill—pun totally intended.

  “I don’t know,” Marka said. “It seems so morbid. I mean, at first I was mildly curious—not curious enough to stand in line for the privilege, mind you—but now…”

  Pavel rolled his eyes. “I know, I know. Now it’s too popular. It’s just like those vampire books last year. If everybody’s doing it, you don’t want to. You want to be unique. You don’t jump on bandwagons; you calmly walk in the opposite direction.”

  “I took the road less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.”

  “Yeah, yeah. But come on, Marka. Who’re you trying to impress? It’s not like we’re in high school anymore. And none of your snooty literature professors will ever know that you went to this party, let alone care.”

  Marka sighed. Pavel was right. Just now, Pavel, with his brooding good looks and hot chiseled body, was indeed the person she most wanted to impress. True, her literature professors wouldn’t have approved of him or his recreation management major, but they wouldn’t have approved of the books she’d gotten descriptions like “hot chiseled body” and “brooding good looks” from either.

  The Delta Kappa sorority house was already teeming with people when they arrived. Marka was glad. She hated being the first one at a party—as if she were so starved for company that she couldn’t wait another second. Not unpredictably, the machine was the center of attention. For all the hype, the machine itself was pretty unimpressive: a smallish rectangular black box with a keyboard on top and a few cords running out the back. A crowd of maybe thirty people watched curiously as the operator hooked its video output cables to an enormous TV screen.

  “All right, folks!” the operator said with a grin. “My name is Gene, and I’ll be your MC for tonight. Let’s start out with a little demo. I need a volunteer.”

  A forest of hands shot up, and Gene picked a volunteer from the front row. Marka thought she recognized him from somewhere but couldn’t quite place where. “What’s your name?” the operator asked. “Vasili? Great! Now, Vasili, I have here a stack of prediction cards and pens. I want you to take one and pass the rest to your girlfriend there, and then she’ll start them around the rest of the room. Got one? Great! Now, I want you to write a word on the card. Just one. The first thing that pops into your head.”

  Vasili wrote and then handed the card back to Gene, who turned to the machine and typed the word on its little keyboard. Everybody watched as the letters appeared one by one on the giant screen.

  “ALMONDS?” he said as he typed. “Really? What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “You tell me,” Vasili said. Marka finally realized where she had met him. He was that smart-alecky jerk her friend Olna had dated for a while. “That’s what your machine does, isn’t it?”

  The operator shrugged. “The game is more fun if you make a guess. It’s interesting to see if your idea matches the reality shown by the machine. Anybody want to take a stab at it?”

  “He chokes?” one guest offered, not very creatively, in Marka’s opinion.

  “Allergic reaction?” Slightly better, but still pretty pedestrian.

  “No, I’ve got it! A clown named Almonds goes on a rampage and the guy gets run over again and again by a tiny but very heavy car.” This one got a laugh.

  Gene hit the submit button, and the screen with the letters on it faded to black. “We have to wait a moment for the machine to find a matching death. We think it uses tachyon pulses to peek into the future and find just the right set of circumstances for our input,” he said. Marka shared a smirk with Pavel over the vaguely scientific explanation the operator offered. She knew that in reality, nobody had a clue how it found the images that no camera could have taken.

  When the picture came back up, it showed a middle-aged forklift operator casually shifting pallets from one stack to another. In a fatal mistake, he shoved a lever a little too far, and his machine sped backward into a precariously stacked tower of crates with “ALMONDS” stenciled on them in big red capital letters. Marka watched in horror as the boxes teetered and began to fall, then sighed in relief as the screen went black again.

  Her sigh was echoed by many around the room, but there was also a small chorus of boos from somewhere in the back. Gene waved them down. “As you can see, at the request of our hostess”—here he gestured toward a perky girl in a Delta Kappa sweater—“I have the machine set to show us the answer to the riddle but shut down before anything gets too gory.”

  “So that’s how it works!” the sorority girl said, beaming. Marka was willing to bet that she’d been a cheerleader at some point in her life. “You’ve all got your prediction slips, and extras are in a bowl by the door. We’ve also got flyers that explain how each of the games works. Food is o
n the table, and drinks are in the cooler. Everybody have a great time, and go Wildcats!”

  The room answered with the customary yowl that was their team’s battle cry, and someone handed the operator another little white slip of paper. The party had officially started.

  Marka looked at the screen again as the letters appeared one by one. H-I-G-H H-E-E-L-S.

  Pavel, his voice low, said, “I’ve seen this one a couple of times before. Could be she gets her shoe caught in a train track. Or sometimes the heel breaks at the top of a flight of stairs. They say that somebody once saw a fashion model murder a photographer with an especially sharp pair of stilettos. I think it’s an urban legend, but people keep asking the machine, hoping to get lucky.”

  As it turned out, a poor woman just tripped as she was crossing in front of a bus.

  Marka turned away in disgust. “Let’s get some food.” She walked away from the crowd around the machine. Pavel caught up with her a moment later with one of the flyers in his hand.

  “Is something wrong?” he said.

  “I just think it’s a bit morbid standing around watching people die. Making woman after woman pay the ultimate price for fashion.” Marka found that her own feet were killing her. If they could talk, they’d be telling her what a bad idea they had always thought high heels were, especially this cute strappy pair that she would insist on wearing on dates with Pavel, even though she knew she’d be limping for days afterward. She sighed, slipped them off, and dropped them in the garbage can.

  “We’re not making them die,” Pavel said condescendingly, shaking his head at her latest grand gesture of nonconformity. “The machine just finds somebody who was going to die that way anyway and matches them to the prediction.”

  “Are you sure? Do you really know how the machine works?” She grabbed angrily at a little paper plate and plastic fork, wishing she had stuck to her principles, such as they were, and refused the invitation.

  “Aw, c’mon, don’t be like that. Of course I don’t know how it works. Nobody knows how it works, but the scientists have proven pretty conclusively what it does. They say it has something to do with quantum. Or magnets. Maybe both.”

  “I still think it’s morbid. They’re still people, and we’re laughing when they’re crushed to death.” Marka put a couple of tiny sandwiches on her plate and moved toward the cookies.

  “See, that’s another thing the scientists have proven. They’re not. Not real people anyway. They’re potential people. In some other dimension or something. A parallel universe.” Pavel poured her some punch and held it out as a peace offering. “Look, they’re starting a new game.” He peered at the flyer and read the description. “This one is called… telephone. After the first prediction, each prediction has to describe the previous death in some ironic or tangential way.”

  “What’s the point?” Marka nibbled petulantly on one of the sandwiches. They were stale.

  “Well, to see where it goes, of course. You know, like the old telephone game we played in elementary school, where you whisper and see how mixed up the phrase gets? It’s like that, only with death predictions.”

  Marka allowed herself to be led back to the crowd around the screen. She watched as the word GRAFFITI turned into a teenage boy accidentally shorting out an electric fence while attempting to spray-paint his name on a cow. BEEF became a woman enjoying her last hamburger while driving. INATTENTION faded to show a baby slipping under the water in a bathtub as his mother answered the telephone. Everybody agreed that reaching TELEPHONE in a game of telephone was a good cue to try another game. Marka felt sick. She set down her plate of appetizers.

  “Let’s get out of here,” she whispered to Pavel. “I know a good café where we could get a bite of something decent to eat and just talk, you know?”

  “Not yet,” he said. “They’re just about to play poetry. You’ll like this one.”

  “Poetry?”

  “Yeah. Everybody gives the machine a line from a poem and we see what it comes up with.” He turned to the crowd around the screen and pitched his voice to be heard over the buzz of conversation. “Hey, Marka’s majoring in literature or something like that. She should go first.”

  There was a murmur of agreement, and everybody looked at her expectantly. Lines ran through her head: “Beowulf donned his armor for battle / Heeded not danger; the hand-braided byrny…” “Because I could not stop for Death…” “In Flanders fields the poppies blow…” “To him who in the love of Nature holds communion…” With every line, an image appeared in her head—a tank with inadequate protection from a roadside bomb, a car running a red light, a heroin needle dropping from a lifeless hand, a bloody bootlace in the mouth of a bear.

  Marka snapped. “You guys are all sick! You spend night after night inventing games to play with this machine. You laugh and you drink, and meanwhile these are people’s lives we’re dealing with here! Did you see that baby? How is his poor mother ever going to live with herself now? Do we just type SUICIDE into the machine and say the problem is solved? How can you live with yourselves, knowing that you’ve tainted the one great joy of my life? Every line of every poem I ever read from now on will be a metaphor for death!”

  She pushed Pavel away as he tried to calm her. “I hate that I let you talk me into this. Just leave me alone.”

  Marka was sitting on the back porch steps, crying softly, wondering how she’d ever be able to show her face in public again, when she felt a hand on her shoulder. She brushed it off, her fury suddenly reignited, and turned to give Pavel another piece of her mind. “I don’t care how hot you are. I never want to—”

  It wasn’t Pavel. It was the machine’s operator. He handed her a tissue.

  Marka tried ineffectively to wipe the tears and snot off her face without smearing her makeup. “Sorry for ruining your party,” she said meekly.

  “Don’t worry about it. It’s not the first time, and it won’t be the last. I got my rental fee up front, so I’m happy. When this sort of thing happens, and you’d be pleasantly surprised at how often it does, I generally shut down the machine for a while. It gives everybody a chance to calm down, and I get to take an extra break. And who better to spend it with than a smart, pretty girl like you?”

  Marka blushed at the compliment despite herself and looked at Gene for the first time as a person rather than as an appendage of the machine. He was older than Marka and Pavel, certainly an upperclassman, maybe even a graduate student. He wasn’t as handsome as Pavel (after all, who was?), but he was good-looking in an average sort of way. His curly brown hair was a bit shaggy, and his clothes looked like they came from the better sort of thrift store. Marka pegged him as a computer science major.

  “But once the ruckus dies down and the easily shamed contingent goes home,” Gene continued, “there will be another group who stays late, typing in predictions till the wee hours of the morning. They’ll tell themselves they just want to spite you and show how they’ve got nothing to hide from you or anybody else, but they’re really just jerks who like to watch people die. If they weren’t here, they’d be at home watching Bloodsport or Last Man Standing, or whatever this season’s new life-or-death reality show is.”

  Marka nodded. She didn’t like the life-or-death shows, but plenty of people must watch them, or they wouldn’t keep making them. “I know the type,” she grumbled. “I bet Pavel will be one of them.”

  “There you go, then.” The operator smiled at her encouragingly. “The party’s not ruined, and I’ll easily meet my week’s prediction quota in a single night.”

  Marka frowned again. “What do you mean, your quota? Why should anybody care how many times the machine gets used?”

  “That’s one of the great secrets of the industry.” Gene leaned in a bit closer, his voice hushed. “Most operators just figure the quota is there to keep the popularity up, but me, I have a different theory. I’ve seen a lot of these predictions, and in many of them you can see a little slip of white paper, a lot
like the ones people were writing on tonight. Once or twice in a mall, or doctor’s office, I’ve even seen a machine. The logo is just like ours, but it has no screen. Instead it’s just got a little hole in the front.” He made a circle with his fingers to show the size of the hole.

  “A hole? What for?” Marka asked, wishing she wasn’t so fascinated.

  “Exactly! I get curious, you know, so one night at home with my machine, I type in MACHINE OF DEATH, and you know what I see?” His voice wasn’t hushed anymore. “A guy goes to a kiosk, pays his money, and sticks his finger in the hole to give a blood sample. The machine spits out a little card, and on it is just what I’ve typed. The guy takes one look at it, has a heart attack, and that’s the end of him.” Gene spread his hands and nodded knowingly as if this explained everything.

  “I don’t understand,” said Marka. “Why should it kill him to know he’s using a Machine of Death? I mean, he knew that before he started, right?”

  “Over there, in that parallel world, the machine is different. They don’t type in predictions; they ask the machine to give them one. The machine tells each person how they’re going to die.” His eyes were wide, and the expression on his face reminded Marka of somebody telling a ghost story by a campfire. All he needed was a flashlight under his chin to complete the effect. “That must be what the quotas are about,” he went on. “There are a lot of people over there, and there are more all the time—even if there are fewer all the time too, if you get my drift—and somebody’s gotta write all those predictions.”