“The little DEATH?” Chiaiass seemed mocking as he spelled it out, mispronouncing a few of the made-up symbol names. “In what contexts?”
Skeeiao spoke up. “In contexts that suggest that it’s one of many terms the Vesk-chh used for the concept of… orgasm.”
“Orgasm.” Chiaiass tilted his large tapered head, staring at the machine as if his vision were so enhanced that he could see inside it and steal its secrets. “So, if a DEATH, little or otherwise, is an orgasm, then we can assume this machine is meant to predict how one’s orgasm will happen. A virility idol of some sort? Or a computer to teach people of the Vesk-chh how they could find their greatest sexual satisfaction?”
“We still need to examine it further,” Skeeiao said, “but—”
Chiaiass reached over to the machine again, and Skeeiao looked murderous. Mrrkli tensed. People nowadays might not be as fragile as the ancient people the two of them had studied, but anyone could still be killed, if there was a great enough destructive force to tear apart the body, and a skilled enough hacker to erase the personality backups. Skeeiao looked ready to do both to Chiaiass, but she held back, even as he touched her machine again, violated it, stuck his forefinger right into its little mysterious hole.
And winced, and pulled away, his finger dripping with the blood-and-nanite mixture that was supposed to stay inside his veins. “It cut me!” he cried, then stilled, as the rollers behind the slot began to move, pushing out one of the sheets of fabric. A word was printed on it in black pigment.
It read, ROCK.
“What does that mean?” Chiaiass said, shaking his finger as if that would speed up the nanite repair.
“When mentioned on the Disk,” Mrrkli answered, “that word is always used in some construct like ‘hard as a ROCK.’ Usually referring to male arousal. But the Vesk-chh seem to have had a tendency toward exaggeration, so ROCK is probably not something of the exact same hardness as any part of their bodies. More likely, it’s just the hardest thing they could think of.”
“Vai-tilki?” offered Chiaiass.
Mrrkli lowered his eyes. Chiaiass was an idiot; the substance called vai-tilki had been invented within his own lifetime. Yet one must be polite to the chief financial adviser.
“Possibly,” said Mrrkli, his eyes still downcast, “although I’m not sure if they were aware of vai-tilki.”
Chiaiass stared at his hand, at the machine, at the word ROCK. “I’ve seen enough for today,” he said.
After he left, Skeeiao and Mrrkli had a panic/rage attack together. Skeeiao ran around the room, alternately shouting curses about Chiaiass and shuddering in fear that the cut from the machine, or its printed word, had offended him, that she wouldn’t be getting any more funding after all. Mrrkli was just shaky and uneasy, sitting in a corner too weak from anxiousness to move, although he couldn’t figure out exactly why.
They didn’t expect Chiaiass back again for a long time, but in fact he returned the next day. “A most extraordinary thing has happened,” he said. His irises and pupils were fully expanded and his skin was flushed with emotion, and for once it did not seem to be a bad emotion.
“I went home yesterday, wondering how the machine had come to the conclusion that I could be brought to orgasm by—by vai-tilki, or some similarly hard substance. I thought of the machine’s original makers, with their fully organic bodies and their primitive culture, and yet I realized that they are, after all, our ancestors; that somewhere inside you and me, traces of their instincts, their drives, their sexuality, must remain.”
Skeeiao looked at him out of the corners of her eyes, giving most of her attention to her computer console. Mrrkli’s eyes were cast down in respect, but he said nothing.
“And on a whim,” Chiaiass went on, “simply on a whim, I synthesized a thin rod of vai-tilki, and asked my mate to touch me with it. She tapped it gently against my backside. And—it was the strangest thing—the sensation of being tapped by a substance so hard and strong—it aroused me. I asked her to slap me harder with it, and—well, I must say, I have more confidence in this machine’s accuracy now than I had expected to have.”
Skeeiao just stared at him. “So you want to stick your finger in the machine again?”
Chiaiass made a mild negative gesture, his hands pointing downward and his irises contracted. “Perhaps later, but now I have an offer that you both should find attractive. I would like to make this machine open to the public. Sex sells. I am sure it always has, even a million years ago; that was undoubtedly why the Vesk-chh put so much effort into building, and then protecting, this machine. It is a fount of money. People will come from all over the world to pay for its predictions. It will enrich you, and me, and the whole nation of Pnn-kiai.”
“But we don’t know what else it might print,” Mrrkli objected. “Not all words in the Vesk-chh language have known meanings.”
“It would be enough,” insisted Chiaiass. “To touch a sexual relic of prehistory, to know that someone a million years ago had an idea of what your own blood might say of your sexual preferences—oh yes. Even if they could not understand what it told them, people would pay.”
“It’s a priceless artifact!” Skeeiao shouted. “Daily use would wear it out again.”
“If your nanites could restore it after a million years, then they can continue restoring it,” Chiaiass said. “And both of you will become richer than you could imagine.”
It was viral. It was spreading through the population like a joke or a new game or a video: the ancient machine that could tell you how best to enliven your sex life. The line of people waiting to use it went on as far as Mrrkli and Skeeiao could see.
“Well, at least,” said Mrrkli, as they worked late into the night, “at least we have money now.”
“But we didn’t agree to this,” Skeeiao said, slumped onto folded arms. “He never gave us a choice.”
Mrrkli looked down. “But we have a choice now. Others will look after the machine. We can go, leave this place, do whatever we want.”
“All I ever wanted was to learn and study,” Skeeiao said.
“Then do that. Do as much of it as you like. You have enough money to fund yourself.” Mrrkli sat close. Skeeiao looked vulnerable, wearing a scarf around her head and sashes around her breasts and groin beneath her open robe, as if clothing would protect her.
“Except I don’t want to anymore,” she said. “When anything I discover can be bought and sold and made into a sex toy for the masses, what’s the point?”
They stayed in Pnn-kiai taking care of the machine because they didn’t know what else to do.
The machine’s fame spread all through the nation. People claimed to have found their true sexual orientations through it, or their soul mates, or simply the greatest pleasure they had ever experienced. Memoirs and songs were written about it. It had fan clubs everywhere. Chiaiass had been right: sex might be a natural bodily function, as ordinary as eating and sleeping, but it held people’s attention much, much more strongly. Lovers were seen everywhere, incorporating stranger and stranger objects into their lovemaking: fruits and vegetables, cleaning supplies, computers. Most of them even seemed to be enjoying themselves.
Mrrkli worked overtime translating the results for eager customers, or, sometimes, telling them he couldn’t translate their results, that the words weren’t mentioned on the Disk. It didn’t matter. When a mysterious word was printed, it only added to the fascination. There were people offering all sorts of made-up possible meanings, and even people inventing new sex toys and naming them after the words the machine printed.
Even when meanings were clear, the machine was often wrong. A man whose slip said HEART complained when he was unable to become sexually excited through cardiovascular training, cardiopulmonary resuscitation, or even eating the hearts of animals. But for many, it was a self-fulfilling prophecy: just thinking that something could arouse you was enough to become aroused. It was the premise on which aphrodisiacs had worked throughout h
istory, Skeeiao said, looking through notes from other archaeological studies. It was nonsense and it was useless, but it worked.
One day, the woman of the couple who had been trying to conceive in the quad came in to be tested. Mrrkli watched from the window in his office as she inched to the front of the line, shifting her weight from foot to foot as others received their slips ahead of her.
Her mate was at her side but seemed uninterested in having his own sexual fortune told. He stood by tolerantly as she put her finger in the machine’s hole and squeaked at the sharpness when it drew blood.
The machine dispensed her slip, and after looking it over several times, she ran to Mrrkli’s window, dragging her mate by his hand. He slid the window open. She shoved the paper in his face.
It read PREGNANCY.
Mrrkli translated it into the Pnn-kiai language for her. “The meaning is very clear,” he added. “In the stories on the Disk, the characters mentioned it often. Usually as something to avoid, but it happened to a few of them anyway.”
The woman looked at her mate, the inner rings of her irises expanding in amusement. “Silly machine,” she said, and they ran off.
Mrrkli saw them making love in the quad again and again, several times in the next few days, reeking of fertility, apparently sure that making a baby would bring her the greatest orgasm of her life. Mrrkli didn’t think it would, and he still didn’t think she was licensed to have a baby, but he didn’t care. Nothing mattered to him and Skeeiao anymore. The dark feeling that they had sold themselves for money hung over their heads, making it impossible to enjoy anything that their money bought.
And then it happened. The young woman succeeded in getting pregnant. And the black-market fertility device she’d been using malfunctioned, destroyed her womb, destroyed her body faster than her nanites could repair it. She crumbled to dust in days. And—poor careless kid, careless enough to conceive illegally in public, careless enough to buy such a risky device in the first place—she hadn’t even backed up her personality in years. The person she had been at that moment was lost forever, killed.
Then the other stories started coming out. A man whose prediction said ADULTERY had started cheating on his monogamous partner and found it so exciting that he decided the machine was right. He kept on doing it until the jealous mate of his illicit lover poisoned his nanites and erased his backups. A woman who had gotten EXPLOSION actually decided to set one off in her bedroom, of all things. She meant it to be small, yes, but she used too much of the explosive and blew up herself and her home with all her backup drives.
Finally, for the first time, the government seemed to regret funding the machine. The leading council of Pnn-kiai ruled that the machine was dangerous, that it was using the irresistible promise of sex to lure people into putting their lives in jeopardy.
Even Chiaiass, the first person to use the machine, came out against it. Fans of the machine called him a traitor, and one day he was found crushed by a boulder on the route of his daily walk, with all his backups mysteriously missing.
The leading council struck back, arresting a large number of suspects, and that was the beginning of the end. Pnn-kiai fell into civil war. Freedom fighters, striving for the freedom to use the machine, and using that grievance as a platform for all their other grievances, fought bitter battles against the government and its allies.
The military built great hot ovens, ovens of execution, and threw rebels into them along with their backup drives, melting their bodies and minds into nothing. It was the surest way to kill people who were as strong as people were these days… and the more it was done, the less strong people seemed.
Mrrkli and Skeeiao were hunted, simply because they had discovered and restored the machine in the first place. They went into hiding in a deep vault built by their admirers. The machine sat inside with them, the one condition of their protection. Skeeiao had wanted to destroy it, but their fans had refused to build the vault and protect them unless they could protect the machine as well.
The two of them sat alone together for months, eating dry rations and staring at the machine. Skeeiao wore long cloaks with laced-up robes underneath them, boots on her feet, heavy caps on her head.
“Did you ever want to use the machine?” Mrrkli asked her one night. “Were you ever curious, what it might say about you?”
“No,” Skeeiao said. “I think that was the only thing I’ve ever not been curious about.”
“But I have, sometimes,” Mrrkli admitted. “I never thought it was worth the trouble of waiting in the line, but I was a little bit curious.”
“Well, you can use it now, if you want,” Skeeiao said, huddling in her cloak. “It has one strip left in it, and enough pigment to print once.”
Mrrkli stood up and went to the machine. What else was there to do? It was the only entertainment left to them, this relic of a million-year-old civilization, a civilization that he imagined teeming with machines and pornography—it would fit with the fact that one sample of each was all that remained of their language. Were the Vesk-chh really so different from his own people?
He put his finger in the hole, felt its bite. The last strip of fabric printed. It said FURNACE.
“What is that?” murmured Skeeiao, too listless to consult her mental database.
“The Disk mentioned it once,” said Mrrkli. “It said, ‘Her warmth was like a FURNACE, engulfing his whole body.’ ”
“So maybe it was a piece of clothing,” Skeeiao suggested. “Something they put around their bodies to keep warm.” The inner rings of her irises fluctuated weakly: she had made a tonal pun with the words “keep warm,” but it wasn’t a very clever one.
Mrrkli sat down, nursing his bleeding finger. The machine was worthless. Clothing did not arouse him.
But—maybe it wasn’t so wrong. Clothing, in and of itself, directly, could never arouse him. But the only place he ever saw clothing was on Skeeiao, the one who had called him when she trusted no one else, the one who had always been beside him.
And now they were alone together in the world, with nothing but each other. He could see the need in her, the need for closeness in the face of despair, even though her body was wrapped up in layers and layers of fabric. At the center, inside the clothing, was the person he now realized could probably give him his most powerful orgasm, his greatest sexual satisfaction—for what else could be as sexually satisfying as love?
The machine might be right, after all.
He leaned close to her, and she leaned back, and together they began taking off her clothing.
* * *
Story by Erika Hammerschmidt
Illustration by Trudy Cooper
EDITORS’ NOTE
THE IDEA OF THE MACHINE OF DEATH first appeared in an episode of Dinosaur Comics, written and published by Ryan North (who is also one of the editors of this book). Death predictions, of course, are an ancient storytelling trope. But this particular comic strip from December 5, 2005, is the first time that this particular method of predicting deaths was described—the machine, the blood test, the print-out predictions.
In October 2010, the first book based on this idea was published. It was an illustrated anthology of thirty-four stories called, simply, Machine of Death: A Collection of Stories About People Who Know How They Will Die. That book went on to be a #1 bestseller on Amazon, to sell more than 27,000 English-language copies in its first two years of publication, and to be translated into eight more languages.
Fast-forward to now, and you’re holding in your hands the second book in the series, This Is How You Die: Stories of the Inscrutable, Infallible, Inescapable Machine of Death. Far from being a retread of the first book, this is an expansion in every way. There are more words, more art, more diversity among the stories. We challenged the writers for the second book to take us places that the Machine of Death had never gone before, and they delivered.
Thinking back to the very first appearance of that Dinosaur Comics strip, and the first conve
rsation that the three of us had about an anthology (with help and encouragement from many other fans of the comic), through soliciting stories from eager writers worldwide (twice!) and all the way up to now—it’s incredible how far we’ve come. We couldn’t have predicted any of this, but we hope the future holds many more surprises in store for us.
Thanks for being a part of this amazing journey!
* * *
LEARN MORE AT: ALSO, WE HAVE A GAME:
HACHETTEBOOKGROUP.COM Machine of Death: The Game of Creative Assassination
MACHINEOFDEATH.NET MACHINE OF DEATH.NET/GCA
CONTRIBUTORS
Editors
MATTHEW BENNARDO is the writer of more than thirty-five published short stories. His work has appeared in markets such as Asimov’s Science Fiction, Lightspeed magazine, Strange Horizons, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and others. This anthology is the second he has edited. He lives in Cleveland, Ohio, but people anywhere can find him online at MBENNARDO.COM or on Twitter at @MBENNARDO.
DAVID MALKI ! is the author of the comic strip Wondermark, a gag strip created entirely from nineteenth-century woodcuts and engravings, AKA a collaboration with the dead. In 2009, the Wondermark collection Beards of Our Forefathers was nominated for the Eisner Award—the highest honor in comics—for “Best Humor Publication.” It’s possible that this was a clerical error. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, Nikki, a special-effects makeup artist. Read his comics at WONDERMARK.COM, or use the Internet website “Twitter” to find him at @MALKI.
RYAN NORTH is the author of Dinosaur Comics, which you can read at DINOSAURCOMICS.COM. He writes the bestselling Adventure Time comics published by BOOM! Studios, and his choose-your-own-path version of Hamlet, called To Be or Not to Be, recently became the most funded publishing project ever on Kickstarter. You can check that out at HAMLETBOOK.COM! He lives in Toronto with his rad wife and sweet dog.
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