But Cath did take it, years later, and it was the beginning of the end. For us, for everything.
We had a few good years before that. I’d thought the heat would die down once everyone realised the machine truly worked, but I couldn’t have been more wrong. Once it became clear just how reliable the predictions were, a huge number of people decided the machine itself was causing the deaths. And after we went into hiding that night, we never came out.
We knew fairly early on, I think, that we wanted nothing more to do with the device. We’d only started this company to get rich, and there seemed little doubt we’d achieved that. We thrashed out a deal that would net us a huge lump sum then continue to pay out in royalties no matter what people did with our technology, and sold the rights that first week. We became the elusive guys who just made this inexplicable thing and disappeared, which of course only added to the romance and public fascination with our little box. It wasn’t until much later that Pete’s scientific curiosity took hold again, and for those intervening years he was as happy as we were to let the world scratch its head at what we’d done, even as it wrote out our cheques.
We each changed hair colour at least once, we went by fake names (I was Chris, Pete was Jason, Cath was Carol and Jen insisted on being Cath, confusing and irritating us all), we only did interviews by email and IM, and we took turns picking the next country to spend a month in. The genius of it was that we’d essentially made our millions by creating something utterly useless. It didn’t help to know how you would die, precisely because the machine was so accurate—you couldn’t avoid it even when you knew it was coming.
Well, not entirely useless. You couldn’t avoid the death it predicted, but it was very possible that you’d avoided other deaths simply by consulting the machine. The way Pete explained it to interviewers was this:
Say you’re a clumsy skydiver. One day you’re going to screw your parachute up and fall to your death. But the machine won’t tell you that, because then you’d stop skydiving and it wouldn’t come true. Instead, the machine tells you you’ll die of a heart attack. You decide to take it easy on the high-stress sports, preferring that your inevitable demise be later rather than sooner, and you live twenty years longer than you would have if you’d never taken the test.
For an electrical engineer, Pete was suspiciously good at marketing. I maintain that it would have been cheaper to produce an empty box with “Don’t skydive” written on the side—and usually say so at that point in the interview—but the world seems to prefer his device.
It gets a little more complicated if you’re not a clumsy skydiver, of course, but on the whole the machine extends peoples’ lives by giving them the chance to stave off their fate for as long as possible—and in the process, miraculously avoiding the many others that ought to have claimed them along the way. None of the deaths it predicts are avoidable, but almost all of them are postponable. Almost.
That’s why we never felt particularly bad about what we’d done, no matter how much pain and misery it seemed to cause, no matter how many times the police intercepted anthrax and explosives addressed to the old manor. I found those more offensive than anything. It’s a matter of public record that Pete and I are not scheduled to die from an explosion or a disease, so the authors of these assassination attempts must have known their efforts would only ever hurt innocent people. Not that we were even guilty of anything in particular.
In between the people whose lives we saved and the people whose lives we ruined, we got a pretty bizarre set of responses to our mysterious black box—co-licensed and manufactured by over three hundred companies worldwide, to date. A lot of people found the suggestion of inevitability incredibly offensive, and tried to do everything they could to defy it.
In some cases, avoiding death became secondary to disproving the machine: one man gashed his wrists to disprove a slip that told him he’d die of AIDS. He survived, of course—he’d just received his prediction from a machine in a GP’s office, so there was help on hand. But he’d used an unsterilised scalpel from a nearby dolly, and with a grim inevitability familiar to anyone who follows special prediction cases, he contracted HIV from that.
Others took the fatality of it all as an excuse for hedonism, either because the manner of their death wasn’t related to their passions, or precisely because it was. If it’s going to kill you anyway you’d be mad to abstain, went the logic. Both types tended to die quickly. That caused some public concern, but I hardly thought the machine could be blamed for the live fast/die young correlation. Obviously those that overindulged in the vices that were to kill them died from them quickly—even they must have seen that coming.
It was the former group that suffered a stranger fate: their heart attacks, tumors and cancer struck quickly, as if eager to get their kill in before the toll of that lifestyle snatched it from them and proved the machine wrong. It looked, in other words, like the machine was killing to prove itself right. Mind you, all statistical anomalies look suspicious if you take them in isolation. That was a tiny group—reckless men with bad habits didn’t get slips saying NATURAL CAUSES often.
For the most part, it was just like each of us had a new medical condition, and all of us were hypochondriac about it. Even me. I, like the millions of HEART-ATTACKs out there, never touched red meat again, drank only in moderation, took light, regular exercise and simply left the room if anyone started arguing or stressful decisions needed to be made.
I’d even heard that some particularly ghoulish socialites held parties at which guests were obliged to wear their slips like name-tags, using the nature of their demise as a conversation starter. I never went to one, but a part of me felt like they had the right idea: you can’t take this cruel cosmic joke seriously, this blackest of humour, this mockery of fate. The only reasonable response to it is to go up to a stranger and say “Oh, hey, megaloblastic anemia? I hear that one’s a bitch.”
We could laugh about it, and we could forget it, and we did—lots of both. But it encroached on all our quiet moments: we felt infected. The prediction made it as if our death had already taken root in our bodies, and it was impossible not to visualise it. Memories of health-infomercial graphics haunted me, phong-shaded fat congealing in my arteries and constricting my bloodflow. I could put it to the back of my mind, always, but never entirely out.
The traveling was my idea. I never really knew what to do with the money, after working so long in the pursuit of it. Buying anything extravagant—helicopters, hotels, heroin—seemed to involve an awful lot of effort, and I can’t honestly say that the only thing stopping me from buying these things before had been a lack of funds. I didn’t want them. I didn’t want anything, much, just a little safety.
I thought about giving it all to charity—there was even a dedicated one to helping people escape their machine-determined fate, the futility of which made me gape—but I knew I’d regret it. I hadn’t done many generous things in my life, and they’d all made me feel terrible. In the end I did give a chunk of it to BrainHelp, a charity devoted to helping the survivors of aneurysms, because it was close enough to home to mean something to me, and useless enough to Pete not to be personally motivated.
But travel was my way of escaping that contentment, fleeing the realisation that we had nowhere else to go in life. We would, instead, go to the places we hadn’t yet been. It was one of my better ideas, except for the part where it nearly kills my girlfriend.
I begged her not to do it. Well, pleaded. Well, openly disapproved. A Thai taxi had smashed into our flimsy tuk-tuk on the reeking streets of Bangkok. I, she argued, had been smugly safe in the knowledge that it wasn’t going to kill me as we tumbled out onto the sidewalk, while she had been freaking out. I tried to tell her that it wasn’t like that, that when something actually happens all rational thought about predictions flies from your head, but either she didn’t believe me or she didn’t care. She was wild, she just had to know.
I should have been a real man about
it and stopped her. Or a good man, and supported her. But instead I was an actual man about it, which meant that I whined, chided, and made her feel bad about herself without actually helping in any way. She’d come to expect nothing more.
We used the original prototype for it, still under a tarp in that first hangar, and everything we did echoed. Pete and Jen came along for moral support. She replaced the needle with its fresh tube of claret attached, and we waited for the smooth hum of the printout.
She stood up, took it, looked at it, and looked away, almost in one motion. I didn’t notice her hand tremble as she passed it to me, but the tip of the slip of paper quavered delicately, giving her away. I looked up at her.
I took it. I read it. It was one word.
I started to sob.
The machine doesn’t tell you when you’re going to die, I’d corrected a hundred interviewers about that. But in this case it had. In this one case, it had done exactly what we originally designed it to do: give an ETD.
We both knew, at the moment each of us saw it, even over the simple horror of that awful word, that it meant nine months at the most. We both knew that it would rend us apart, that we’d never be that close again. Closer in other ways, sure, but not like this, not now that we knew I was going to kill her. We’d already set the wheels in motion. We had nine months, maybe less.
LABOUR. It stared back at us innocently until Cath made me throw the slip away, like it had just wandered out of a perfectly harmless sentence about union disputes. I wanted so badly to be involved in a union dispute right then, for that to be my biggest problem, for that to be what LABOUR meant to me.
I wanted to recall all the machines and tell Pete to redesign them to print in lower case, or Latin, or pictograms, or anything but that giant glaring word burning its way through the bin and my eyelids. And more than anything I wanted to hold her, and I just, just couldn’t. I couldn’t.
I did it anyway. Standing up was like controlling a crane, and she felt cold, tiny, bony against my chest. I’m a weak, mean, small man, and so is Pete—he told me so. But the one thing he and I can do, and I think it’s the reason we became friends, the reason we started this company, is the impossible. If there’s a good enough reason to do it, we just do it. In my case that was standing up and putting out my arms, and it was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do, but goddamn it I had her now and I wasn’t letting her go—for minutes, at any rate.
I looked at the machine over her shoulder as my wet face pressed against her warm cheek, and wondered what Pete’s reason had been.
It killed him, in the end. I could never understand it, but those seven months—we didn’t get the full nine, and I was almost glad of it by the end—hit Pete every bit as hard as they hit us. It was the first time that what we’d done really got to him. He loathed the machines, smashed that original prototype—valued at six and a half million dollars on our insurance paperwork—with a crowbar while drunk one night. Have you ever tried hitting anything with a crowbar? They’re fucking heavy. Pete’s a geek, but that machine was dust when I found it. I was angry then, actually, but I hadn’t realised how bad he’d gotten.
That was when he went back to work. He was obsessed with the idea of “fixing it”, as he put it. We’d set out to tell people how long they had to live, and by virtue of the now-famous TILT chip—intended to take into account probabilistic factors relating to your lifestyle that might increase the chances of accidental death—we’d ended up spitting out a horrible piece of information that haunted the user for the rest of his and his family’s life. At the time we’d thought its popularity meant it was a success, but Pete was right: we’d failed utterly, we’d created a horrible, horrible thing. He’d created it. I only got into the habit of taking some of the credit after he made it clear how ashamed he was.
The TILT chip was the problem. It didn’t stand for anything, by the way—Pete just named it in all caps because he was really pleased with it at the time. He was like a little kid once you got him hard-coding. It was all I could do to persuade him to leave off the exclamation mark he insisted it deserved. We both loved telling interviewers that story.
He’d spent years, literally years, working on the algorithm that would use actuarial data and hugely sophisticated conditional probabilities to get a rough idea of how likely people’s stupid habits were to kill them, and when he’d finally done it, he discovered something odd. Actually, I discovered something odd. If he’s going to call it a discovery rather than an invention, then I really can take some of the credit. It was me who, through incompetence rather than the spirit of experimentation, first tried using the machine without entering any data. And instead of a ballpark life-expectancy figure, I got “48 45 41 52 54 2d 41 54 54 41 43 4b”. Which, Pete reliably informed me, an extraordinary expression on his face I’d never seen before or since, translated to “HEART ATTACK”.
The truth was, it didn’t even really need the blood sample—we just kept that part in so that people would take it seriously, and to drive up the manufacturing costs to something investors would believe. For the same reason we insisted that all connectors be made of solid 24-carat gold when any old crap from Radio Shack would have worked, and there was a whole circuit full of wildly expensive and important-looking components in there that wasn’t even hooked up to the live elements of the machine.
A few technical journals had picked up on that, but no one dared try remove them. You could see where the fanatics were coming from, really: that hard nugget of inescapable truth just came down a wire, almost in our language, and not even its creator knew why. You could also see why Pete was so pleased with himself, and you could even see, years later, after millions of morbid projections proved true, why he was so wretched.
The problem, he suddenly announced once he stopped drinking, was the accuracy. He’d made it far, far too good. You didn’t actually want a machine that was always right, the machine you really wanted was one that was always wrong. Wrong because you were able to avoid the death it predicted, the one you would otherwise have succumbed to, and live happily ever after.
A bad news machine that can’t be defied is an inherently unmarketable idea, he told me, trying to speak my language. I decided not to get out my black AmEx card to demonstrate just how marketable it had been. So he started work on a spec for the machine’s nemesis, the cure, the Final Solution to death itself, what he called Project Idiot.
I would have stopped him, should have, and God damn me for not doing it, but I was just grateful for the distraction. Something to think about other than the ways in which Cath’s ever-growing bulge might rip her apart, and how it would make me feel about our daughter, if she survived.
He couldn’t do it. He had a dozen brilliant ideas, but it just couldn’t be done. The TILT chip defied him with the same silent, sinister smugness it defied those who tried to prove it wrong. He couldn’t recreate it, he couldn’t modify it, and he couldn’t trick it. He discovered that it wasn’t even using his actuarial data to make the predictions, it had just incorrectly surmised our purpose in entering them, and pulled the result it imagined we were after from nowhere.
My explanation was that it was quantum, the perfect catch-all for the apparently impossible. But Pete said something over and over that to this day I don’t quite get: “It’s a function of the future,” he said, “not the past.” He said it didn’t matter what he did to it before it was built, because its predictions were somehow independent of anything that had already happened. I don’t know, but he kept saying it.
So it was the future he tinkered with, and he was sure one of his tricks would work. He became fixated on the moment when the patient actually reads his slip: if he takes the test but never reads it, it will say something different than if he’d taken it and read it as normal. The ink doesn’t change, it will always have said something different—it was the machine’s most uncanny and unsettling ability: knowing with total certainty what you will do in response to its prediction.
&nb
sp; He talked to a loose society of machine fanatics who kept their unread predictions curled up in tiny silver pendants around their necks, to be opened and read in emergencies to find out if they’re about to die. No help. Eventually he built a full prototype of a machine that would email the result to a server in Wyoming that was hooked up to a Geiger counter, and would send the result on to the patient’s email address if it registered a radioactive decay within a second of receiving it, or scrub the data from its hard drives if not.
He needed a way of getting the information to the patient without the machine knowing whether it would or not, but every time he tested it it produced the same result as the existing machines. Schrodinger’s Idiot, he called that one. He’d decided the physics students who owned the machine in Wyoming were going to get drunk one night and mail out everyone’s results, which he was sure they were recording despite his instructions, and he’d been planning to drive out there and do I don’t know what the next morning. The morning after I found him.
He was slumped over his desk. I always knew it would be me doing this. I set our coffees down and looked at the clock. Time of death, 22:25—or earlier. I’d pictured him with a soldering iron in hand when I’d played this out in my mind before, hundreds of times, but as I gently lifted his cold, curly-haired head off the bench I saw that it was papers he’d been working on. Printouts from his CAD software, scribbled on in green biro. I couldn’t make them out then, but I looked later, and I liked them so much I had them framed.
I never picked up much engineering savvy from Pete, but his margin notes made it plain enough. He’d designed The Idiot, and it would have worked. It had a lookup table of the most common causes of death and it simply discarded the blood sample and picked one at random, weighted toward the most common. It would be wrong, again and again, and even when it was right, it would be avoidable. The Idiot, had he made it, would have exceeded its spec as dramatically as the original machine. I could only think of one way to make it stupider, and I knew Pete always got a kick out of my terrible ideas, so before framing it I wrote “Don’t skydive” on the side.
Machine of Death Page 14