This Is How You Die

by Matthew Bennardo

  At first Dr. Jeth’s security teams tried capturing them, but it was bizarre: to a man, they’d escape. However secure the cell, however well guarded, each one cut a path of dead staff and destroyed equipment out of the facility. The doctor wasn’t trying to contradict their death prediction; he was just keeping them there until the reactor was complete, fully intending to let them go. But the universe bent double to give them early release, at a horrific cost to the project and its staff.

  Jeth wasn’t a vindictive guy, but everything came second to the reactor. So he hired Ex to start finishing off everyone they captured. You can guess what his name’s short for.

  As soon as I got to my office and read the e-mail from Di, I called her. Then, as the phone was ringing, I realized that this was going to make it obvious that I hadn’t read the results properly when she showed them to me, and she was going to wonder why. I almost hung up before remembering she had caller ID—I think she even had a ringtone for my extension—and prank calling her would be even worse.

  Shit shit shit shit shit shit—

  “Hey!”

  “Hey. VICTORIA FALLS?”

  “Yep!”

  “The guy in cell six dies of VICTORIA FALLS?”

  “I know!” She said brightly. She loved the specifics.

  “I don’t think we have a Victoria Falls here. I don’t think we have a Victoria Falls anywhere outside of Zimbabwe.”

  “And Zambia, I think.”

  “Really?”

  “It’s the same one; it’s on the border.”

  “Oh.” I felt dumb for not knowing something I had no reason to know.

  “So what do you think, field trip?”

  Ah, now, this was tricky. Did I want to fly to Harare with her on a private jet and see the largest waterfall in the world, then kill a guy on it? I absolutely did. But did I want to be the creative director of mortality who wasted a huge amount of time and money by taking a prediction at face value? No. I wasn’t sure I wanted to do this job much longer, but I felt I should keep doing it properly until I officially quit.

  “I’d love to, but there’s probably an easier way.” Genius! Pretend she was offering, and then turn her down! Wait wait wait wait wait wait—

  “Oh, okay. Talk to you later.”

  Shit.

  Di wasn’t Di’s real name either; she just worked in Diagnostics. Among many other things, she was the one who tested any hostiles Security captured to find out how they’d die.

  At first, they were all GUNSHOT WOUNDs and BLUNT FORCE TRAUMAs. Simple jobs for Ex. But then the U.S. military started sending unkillables, and that’s when things got tricky.

  It’s rare, very rare, but every now and then someone with a slip that says TOOLSHED is willing to sign up for wet work. That means they’ve got an agent in the field who cannot possibly die in the field, and that’s a scary thing to deal with.

  Ex would try his best, but without fully comprehending the implications of directionally agnostic causality, it ended with a lot of burned-down toolsheds and escaped agents.

  That’s why Dr. Jeth hired me: I’d written a paper in the 2060s called “Tweaking Inevitability: How to Change Your Fate in a Way the Universe Is Mostly Okay With.” My job was to take a result like VICTORIA FALLS, and instead of thinking “We have to take him to Zimbabwe and/or Zambia,” figure out an easier death we could do right there without proving the machine wrong.

  Before I ever let Ex strike a blow, I had to be sure that if the subject died the way we were trying to kill him or her, it’d make sense for the machine to have said what it said. If you try to contradict a prediction, things go wrong. And they go wrong in painfully unpredictable ways.

  After an awful few minutes in which I tried not to think of anyone on staff called Victoria, I realized the name didn’t have to belong to a human. All we needed was a living thing large enough to kill when dropped from a great height, and it could be anything it made sense to name.

  There isn’t a lot of info on this island online, so I looked up the nearest big one and flicked to fauna. Tapirs. We probably had tapirs. A meter high, two meters long, and anything up to three hundred kilos—easily enough biomass to crush a human being. I would catch a tapir, name it Victoria, and have Ex drop it from the south mast onto inmate six. The world would continue to make perfect sense.

  I don’t know what I was expecting, but the result that afternoon was not pretty. It worked, of course, but as Victoria the tapir fell uncomplainingly to her death, I felt a stomach-twisting worry that there might have been a better way. The sound made me flinch.

  Once you get used to the machine, the deaths it predicts don’t factor into your ethical judgment calls—the death is already out there, waiting to happen. But the collateral damage stands out more, and that afternoon it stood out all over the place.

  With classic bad timing, Di joined us on the roof.

  “There you are!” Then she saw it. “Oh, wow, what happened here?”

  I looked meaningfully out to sea, hoping to impart some gravity to the moment. “Victoria fell.”

  She glanced up to Ex, harnessed to the mast thirty meters above. He waved. She waved.

  “I had a question about that one, actually. I realize it’s a bit late now, and I know you know a lot more about this stuff than me, but Dr. Jeth legally owns the island, and…” She seemed to have second thoughts. She’s always had this bizarre impression that I’m some kind of intellectual heavyweight, just because I’ve written a white paper.

  “What?” I tried to ask it encouragingly, even as that knot reappeared.

  “Couldn’t you have renamed a waterfall?”

  Fuck.

  When you work with predictions long enough, you start to think a little too laterally. I weaseled out of it with Di using a few long words, but she was right—that would have been perfect. I hadn’t been on my game for months, and now that the reactor was getting close to completion, it was starting to worry me. I think my head had already moved on, but my body was sticking around to see the project through.

  If it wasn’t for Di, I might not have stuck it out. But something about her presence here seemed to validate the whole thing, to hide the supervillainous overtones and illuminate the possibilities.

  Jeth had an unnatural talent for nuclear physics. Should that be a crime? He didn’t like governments. Who did? How smart do you have to be before cynicism counts as villainy? And oh, God forbid you become independently wealthy enough to buy an island. Suddenly it’s the Island of Dr. X, and the press can’t refer to you without using the word “lair.”

  VICTORIA FALLS wasn’t a hard one—I used to resolve slips like HEARTBREAK in an afternoon without killing so much as a puppy. I’d bungled VICTORIA, but I’d make up for it—the rest of the list Di had given me was going to be easy. Whoever selected these guys for the mission was an amateur, or they were saving their less killable unkillables for later.

  In general, the more adventurous and exciting their death, the easier they are to kill. If you’re on an assault squad with a guy who’s going to be EXPLODED, that’s your first man down. HEART ATTACK is going to be a tougher cookie, but he could still go at pretty much any time.

  The real badass of the team is going to have something like ALZHEIMER’S. That son of a bitch can eat bullets and drink jet fuel; the universe is not letting him die until he forgets his granddaughter’s name and how to put his dentures in.

  So Dr. Jeth handpicked most of his key staff partly on the basis of their predictions: none of us die in an exciting way, so we’re all tough to kill. Every time we’re attacked by someone with a sexier death, luck comes down uncannily on our side.

  It was activation day, the event that would both realize Dr. Jethmalani’s dream of solving the world energy crisis and simultaneously kill him. So we’d all decided it would be a good day to tease him with the stupidest, most trivial questions we could come up with.

  I hit the button and the door purred open.

  “
Mort. I have ninety seconds. What is this regarding?” Jeth’s English was good, but he didn’t like to use contractions.

  “Do we have any doomsday devices?” He stopped typing and looked at me seriously.

  “You are asking me if we have any doomsday devices?” I sensed this was a mistake.

  “Yeah, I have a prediction here that just says DOOMSDAY DEVICE. I guess the Israelis thought you’d have one, and this guy would destroy it and die in the blast.”

  “Do you know what a Lazarus Reactor is, Mort?”

  “Not in any real sense, no, but I realize it’s not a doomsday device.”

  “So what you are asking me is if, in addition to developing sustainably free power for the planet via nuclear transmutation, I am also simultaneously preparing to destroy the same planet with a separate invention?”

  “Well, I just thought if we had one, I could get Ex to hit the guy really hard with it, and that’d probably count.”

  Jeth took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes, suddenly looking very old.

  “I am about to switch on an experimental traveling wave reactor that will provide enough energy to run several small countries for two hundred years, while broadcasting both the startup process and my full schematics to every nation in the world by live streaming video, shortly after which the initial uranium 235 reaction will end my life.” He put his glasses back on and the tiredness vanished. “Ask Jen in Side Projects and General Villainy.”

  “Oh. Good idea.”

  He was a hard man to rile.

  I was most of the way back to my office when the Klaxons went off. I ran the rest.

  My office seals securely—Di and I get to watch any attack play out on the security cameras once we’re both safe, which is scary but actually kind of nice. At least, that’s what happens if the route back to my office doesn’t lead me straight to eight armed commandos.

  I burst into the nearest door—the ladies’, it turned out—and listened for their voices.

  A low, serious one: “Pancreatic: head down to the labs, check for doomsday devices and deathbots. Rectal: get to the satellite dish on the roof; we need to stop this guy’s live feed before we take him out. Thyroid, you’re with me.”

  Holy shit. A whole squad of cancers. A cancer squad. This was hard-core—one cancer is like a superhero in that line of work. I’d never heard of a whole team of them before. They must have been holding them back for one last attack on activation day.

  A different voice: “Laz, what’s our ROE?”

  “Shoot to kill; no one’s going to find these guys.”

  I waited until their footsteps had completely died away. Then, pulse heavy in my throat, I slowly pushed open the door.

  I found a two-meter-tall special forces agent in bulky black Kevlar pointing a silenced carbine at me. I ducked.

  A burst of shots went off, howling angrily off something behind me, but I didn’t feel any hits. I grabbed stupidly at the guy’s armored shins, but in trying to both step back and kick me in the ribs at the same time, he staggered. I felt his body slam heavily to the ground, heard his gun clang against the steel floor, and took it as a cue to throw myself on top of him.

  “What the fuck?” He spat through an armored face mask as he thrashed under my knees and I fumbled frantically at his sidearm holster. I got the weapon out and pressed it into his chest with both hands, but not before he got an arm out and brought his carbine up into my neck. The silencer was a centimeter from my skin, and it felt like someone was holding a candle to my throat.

  His eyes, the only part of him not covered up, regarded me seriously for the first time. I think he sensed that luck had done some very deliberate leveling of the playing field here and was trying to determine which of us was more screwed.

  At last, he spoke quietly:

  “Thyroid. You?”

  “I’m thyroid too. Presented yet?”

  “No. You?” In a weird moment, he sounded genuinely concerned about me.

  “Me neither.” My heart started racing. How close was this going to be?

  “Okay, what type?” I was afraid he’d ask this. Mine’s good, but there are better thyroid cancers out there if you know where to look.

  “Follicular,” I said with an unsteady attempt at pride. “Five-year survival rate of a hundred percent at stage one.”

  “Papillary, same.”

  My pulse quickened. “Stage two?”

  “A hundred percent.”

  “A hundred percent.”

  I was still summoning the courage to ask when he beat me to it:

  “Stage three?” This was it, final round. I held my breath.

  “Seventy-one?” I squeaked, one eye shut.

  “Ha!” He threw me into the wall and launched into a trained crouch, carbine still pointed expertly in my face. “Ninety-three percent, motherfucker!” He fired.

  His weapon jammed. I don’t know if this had occurred to him, but the five-year survival rate for a bullet wound to the head is pretty close to zero—it wasn’t going to trump follicular thyroid.

  I might not have any weapons training, but I do know something about death—enough not to try killing someone who’s not going to die that way. So I shot him, deafeningly, in both shins.

  When Ex found me, I was staggering vaguely in the opposite direction from my office, ears ringing from the shots and the screams, hot spots of wet on my arms and face. He’d been running, couldn’t stand still. I handed him the carbine and the sidearm and told him about the cancer squad. He already knew.

  “Oh shit, you took out Thyroid? I saw the squad on the cams. I was dreading taking on that motherfucker. My nerd!” He patted me roughly on the back.

  “Well, I had help.” It’s a staff rule not to tell each other our predictions, so I left it at that.

  “Seriously, that’s a mild fucking cancer. You’ve gotta try to die of that.” I let it slide. “Anything on the leader?”

  “Just a name—Laz, Raz, something.”

  “All right, take these back and get to your office. I’m gonna clean this up.”

  I reluctantly took the guns back and stumbled off. Strong hands grabbed my shoulders and turned me around.

  “It’s this way, man.”

  In my office, I hit the button absentmindedly and jumped when the door slammed behind me. I propped the carbine up against the wastepaper bin, put the gun on my desk with a clunk, and shook both arms—I actually had a cramp from carrying them for three minutes.

  I called Di—no answer. I logged in on my workstation, logged on to our extranet, logged through to our intranet, then unthinkingly logged in to my e-mail, remembered I wasn’t checking my e-mail, logged out of my e-mail, then back into the intranet because it had overzealously logged me out, and finally found the option for GPS tracking.

  Di’s phone was about four meters outside her office, which was weird. It was moving, which was weird. And she still wasn’t answering, which was weird.

  I suddenly felt like everyone was watching: like whatever happened next, it’d be something I’d probably have to justify later, and I was terrified of what they’d think of me when I did. I picked up the gun.

  It was a three-minute walk or a two-minute run, and I was jogging, so it took me four minutes. And yes, my arms ached, but it was a good ache now.

  When I got there, Di was already gone.

  I held the gun up in both hands and very slowly peered into her office, but the door was open and it was empty. There was only really one way she could have gone, so I ran—properly this time.

  I found her kneeling over an agent twisted into the most explosively awkward pose, a sheathed carbon-fiber knife between her teeth. I fell in love with her on the spot.

  “Eeeth fee heerf fath.” She opened her mouth to drop the knife, unloaded the clip from his pistol, and shoved both into the back pockets of her jeans. “Sorry, I had a knife in my mouth.” This was about the only piece of information I already had.

  “What the hell happened?�
��

  “I Tased him. But, Mort, we’ve got a problem.”

  “Well, the two geekiest people in the building have taken out more of the intruders than our twenty-man security team so far, so I can believe that.”

  “Ha! You got one too?” She stood up. “I’m glad you’re okay, by the way.” She touched my shoulder, giving me instant cardiac arrhythmia. “No, there’s another problem: Ex hit their leader, and I tested the blood. Look.” She showed me the readout on her phone.

  “Fuck. Fuck! We need to go!”

  “I know!”

  “Where’s Ex now?” There was a stomach-twisting crack of bone and a scream from the stairs down to the lab. I looked at Di. “I have a theory about where Ex is now.”

  “Shit, Mort, that’s him.” Ex had the leader on his front, twisting his arm into shapes that shouldn’t work. I pointed my gun uselessly at both of them, and Di wisely moved out of my line of fire.

  “Ex, don’t!” she shouted. “You can’t stop him!”

  The moment Ex looked up, a fist smacked him in the jaw with astonishing force. The leader got to his feet, his snapped arm hanging limp, and shot Ex in the stomach with an ear-stinging crack.

  I flinched. Di gasped. The leader ran for her, his gun perfectly level. I didn’t think; I just fired.

  I swear, there must have been a time when not thinking before you fired was a perfectly sensible way to shave valuable milliseconds off your reaction time. Post-Machine, though, it turns out to be a really terrible idea.

  Di screamed and fell. My ears rang, my palms stung, my eyes and nostrils burned. The leader holstered his gun without breaking his stride and leapt over her body. It took me a full second to replay the moment in my head and realize that only I had fired—my shot must have ricocheted. I ran to her.

  “Fuck fuck fuck I am so sorry I am so so sorry!” Why did the walls have to be steel? What is this rule that supervillain lairs can’t be made of normal building materials, ones that know how to take a bullet?

  She was wide-eyed and white, her cheeks wet, and her left thigh was soaked with blood. As carefully as I possibly could, I held her under the arms and pulled her over to where Ex lay.