Machine of Death

by Ryan North, Matthew Bennardo, David Malki ! (Editors)

  “But seriously,” Jack said, suddenly swinging his feet back down to the floor and assuming a Serious Tone, “you did a really great job on the Fat-It-Out campaign. I know I gave you a bit of a hard time along the way, your first big DRTV campaign and all. But in the end, I bit my tongue and trusted you, and you broke out of the box with some great new ideas. You deserve every bit of this success.”

  “Th-thank you,” Kelly said, feeling momentarily bad for cursing his name every waking moment for the last six weeks straight.

  “With that settled,” he said, breaking into a huge, sweaty grin—“now we put that patented Kelly Craig brain to work on the next big JBE blockbuster!”

  From beneath his desk he produced a cardboard box plastered with customs forms and shipping labels. Flicking Styrofoam dust from his fingers, he handed Kelly a red plastic device about the size of a shoe box, covered with smudgy fingerprints and basking in a distinctive Tupperware smell. “I got this on a hot tip from one of my sources overseas,” he said. “He’s thinking big, talking about a pan-Asia launch next month, and he was gonna pass up North America completely, got no distributors out here. Then he heard about Fat-It-Out, and I get an email asking if we could match that day-and-date domestically. I said ‘of course,’ had him send me a demo unit right away.” He shrugged. “It’s a tall order—but it’s a big opportunity. We’re going to the next level. And I know you can knock it dead.”

  The red device had no name, no branding, no cheap, colorful decal. An unplugged cord trailed out of the rear; a power switch was the only button. She turned it over in her hands. On the front, a darkened LED was inset next to a hole about the size and apparent depth of a lipstick. Beneath them both was a thin slit edged with tiny plastic teeth.

  She frowned. “What is it?”

  “I’ll admit, the details are sketchy,” Jack said. “English is not my guy’s main language, maybe not even in his top five. But here’s what I’ve got so far.” He gestured for her to come around to his side of the desk. He could have turned his computer monitor around, but she knew that he wanted her near him, hovering at his side, maybe brushing his shoulder. She held her collar closed as she leaned over.

  From his email he opened a photo of a big metal machine—wheeled base, dials, and gauges galore. It looked like a drill press, or something from a metalworking shop. “This is basically that,” Jack said, pointing to the red device in Kelly’s hands. “Some brainiacs made this big monster for the medical market, tried to sell it at trade shows for a hundred grand a unit. It’s some kinda blood analysis thing, checks your sugar, your cholesterol, all these diseases, all this battery of tests. It’s got a computer chip, it gives you instant results for everything. No more waiting for lab results.” He shrugged, flicking a sideways glance to Kelly’s shirt, then up to her face. “They built the prototype, but couldn’t find the cash to go to market.”

  Kelly walked back around the desk. “No kidding, it’s huge. That would take a ton of capital.”

  “Then the guy died,” Jack said. “Lead guy, scientist guy up and died—plane crash, boom. So our client, this investor friend of mine, bought out one of the patents.”

  “This plastic piece of junk can’t be the same as that whole big thing,” Kelly said. “Nobody’ll believe that, no matter how fancy your graphics.”

  “No, no, let me finish. Now as I understand it, the big thing is mostly one-stop-shopping for tests already available separately—you can get a blood sugar thing at the drugstore, you can get cholesterol at the, whatever, at the doctor’s office I guess. But the patent my guy bought was specifically for something called a ‘C-18 algorithm,’ some little circuit board in the middle—some new discovery. So he says, anyway. Who knows. My guy puts that piece in a red box, and voila.” He pronounced it voyla. “He thinks it’s gonna go big—he’s got half a million units on the assembly line already. Chinese versions, English versions, Japanese, Spanish, all of ’em.”

  Kelly put the red device back on Jack’s desk. “So what’s the pitch? What does it do? Sing, dance, change the baby?” She fished in her computer bag for her notebook, and jotted down proprietary C-18 algorithm.

  Jack shrugged. “That’s just the thing, I’m not totally sure—like I said, my guy’s got trouble with the language. As far as I can figure out, it’s a drug tester, prints out a little slip of paper says ‘pot’ or whatever. It really is a good business-to-business angle, there’s a lot you can do with it.”

  She made rapid notes. “It’s literally a blood test? Or do you pee in that little hole—’cause I don’t have to tell you, unless it comes with a funnel, to half the audience that’s a real tough sell.”

  A second later she regretted putting the image in his mind. He seemed to take a full five seconds to collect himself, before heaving a deep breath, blinking a few times, and picking up the device. “You stick your finger in here, there’s a little needle inside takes a blood sample, and it prints in like ten seconds.” His hands were quaking, and the device rattled. “With the previous version, the big clunky one, they tried to go the whole health-care route—I’ll forward this email to you. They had some Chicago ad agency involved, whole direct-to-trade promo campaign with a bunch of cheeseball doctors in lab coats yapping away about this and that, blah blah blah. Soft-sell crapola.” Jack was fond of pointing out the differences between traditional, more restrained methods of marketing and intensive half-hour blocks of full-volume paid programming. His method sold more products over the phone, for one.

  “Doctors see right through a staged testimonial,” Kelly said. “Point of pride when they do.”

  Jack nodded. “Screw ’em. Our folks are the working folks, just givin’ ’em a break from all that Hollywood, Madison Avenue B.S. No one with a medical degree is buying Fat-It-Out, you know? You know?” He laughed. “Oh, speaking of Fat-It-Out, I got some choice letters from doctors. It’s starting already. Here, let me read you this—”

  “That’s okay,” she said quickly. If people were complaining about Fat-It-Out, she didn’t want to hear about it. It would make killing herself for months on that campaign even harder to justify.

  “You sure? It’s hilarious! They take it so seriously! But hey...” He knocked on the drug-tester’s red plastic shell. “At least this is pretty straightforward: finger in, paper out. Idiot-proof! You can use that if you want. What do you think—is ‘idiot’ too harsh? They got those Dummies books.”

  “I’ll come up with a few concepts,” she said. “I’ll have scripts for you this week.”

  He waved the offer away with a thick hand. “Run with it,” he said. “I trust you. You can take this, yeah? ’Cause I got skillets to ship.”

  Kelly shrugged. “Whatever you need.”

  “You’re the star of the show now, babe.”

  She named it the ProntoTester, and within a few days she’d filled an outline with glowing ad-copy hyperbole. The infomercial would have to be pretty elaborate if they wanted to hit Jack’s sales expectations. In addition to the usual staged presentation, they’d have to shoot some testimonials—meaning they’d have to get some people to actually use the product. That meant orchestrating trial events, recruiting participants, working through the whole process of weeding out non-photogenic faces and people who couldn’t string a sentence together on camera. They’d have to get trial units shipped in from China, plus because of the needles they’d have to get a whole health-and-safety inspection—Kelly felt her fingertips begin to shake. This was going to be a big job. And Jack wanted it to air when? Within a month?

  “C’mon, superstar,” she muttered to herself. “That’s non-superstar thinking. Get to work!”

  She tapped at her laptop, writing snippets of dialogue for the presenters and then erasing them, letting her fingers bounce on the keys, whittling key selling words out of phrases and concepts. “Patented detection-control mechanism.” “The proprietary C-18 algorithm delivers instant results.” “One poke finds one toke.” She deleted the last one immed
iately. It wasn’t all gold.

  The next thing to do, she decided, was to test it out. She called in Julio, the company’s A/V guy—editor, cameraman, and all-around technical whiz. They probably wouldn’t use any footage of the initial test in the infomercial, but she’d learned to shoot everything, just in case. Besides, she’d spent hours upon hours in the editing bay with Julio working on Fat-It-Out, and enjoyed his companionship—he was the anti-Jack, low-key and calm, and didn’t take the job too seriously. After all, it wasn’t his money on the line.

  She had the college kids take short breaks from manning the phones to sign waivers and get their fingers pricked on JBE’s standing set. She was expecting the test to unearth a few potheads, maybe one kid on something harder—she’d had to repeatedly promise that the test results wouldn’t affect their jobs. Besides, they’d reshoot everything later, with auditioned participants and makeup and applause and everything—for now she just wanted to make sure the thing worked.

  It didn’t.

  It pricked fingers, and spat out pieces of paper, but none of it made any sense. Most of the test results weren’t drug-related at all, and the few that were—ALCOHOL and MORPHINE—were lacking the level of detail she expected a drug-tester to provide. In the rest of the cases, the thing spat out arbitrary dictionary words like IMPALE and XYLOPHONE and LAOS and HEMATOMA, and she knew for a fact that the XYLOPHONE kid had been high as a kite the whole time. Was it a translation issue? Bugs in the software? Some function she didn’t understand? Or was this unit just broken?

  The ProntoTester’s failure wasn’t a huge deterrent to Kelly—after all, Fat-It-Out didn’t work that well either—but it was an inconvenience. It meant they would have to fabricate test results for the sake of the infomercial, thus walking that fine line between “dramatization” and “false advertising.” Kelly knew that walking the line was part of their business, but she still couldn’t totally silence the voice that told her she spent every day suckering innocent idiots out of their hard-earned disability money. Most days, though, her work ethic drowned out that voice with shouts of “DO YOUR JOB.”

  Julio had no such moral qualms. He’d clocked a lot of overtime hours by simply doing his own job well, disconnecting his higher brain and working the editing computer like a maestro at a piano. “Sure, I have questions about my job,” he’d once told Kelly. “Like what should I spend my paycheck on this week? New TV or new stereo?”

  If the thing even worked poorly, she’d have had no problem. An instant drug-tester would be an immediate and huge seller—every business in the country would want one, if it really were cheap, easy, and even half as accurate as her infomercial might suggest it was. But the ProntoTester didn’t seem to work at all.

  She’d even, with some reluctance, administered the test to herself and to Julio—but the results, STROKE and OVERTIME respectively, only confirmed her belief that the stupid thing was nothing but a random-word generator.

  “But that can’t be it,” she complained to Julio. So they racked up four hours of time-and-a-half, getting tipsy and giggling on Jack’s dime, coming up with increasingly-silly explanations for what the device actually did. She started with “psychic label-maker,” to which Julio suggested “masochistic Scrabble dictionary,” which didn’t make a ton of sense but by then it was eleven o’clock and they were buzzed. Kelly came back with “circumstances of one’s conception,” and Julio countered with the equally-ridiculous “circumstances of one’s demise,” with a rueful glance at both the clock and his eerie result slip.

  Kelly laughed (slowly, given the hour), closed her laptop, gathered her coat, and went home. Even by the awful standards of the late-night-consumer-products industry, the very same folks that had gleefully sold the public on Hair-B-Gone and Gyno-Paste and the MuffinMagic X-Treme, she had to admit that the ProntoTester was a big red plastic stinky turd of a product.

  As a function of the type of neighborhood that Jack Bogg Enterprises was located in, there was a Wal-Mart right across the street. Kelly felt guilty in principle for shopping at Wal-Mart, for some vague liberal reason—but there was literally nothing else but office parks for miles, and it just so happened that the megastore stocked a brand of yogurt she’d been unable to find anywhere else. So when the college kids’ sales chatter down the hall became too much to ignore, she closed her laptop, grabbed her sunglasses, and headed across the street.

  She tried not to look around the store as she marched toward the dairy case, conveniently located on the back wall past just about everything else imaginable. She averted her eyes from $4.99 DVDs and 3-for-$8 T-shirts. She was mostly successful at avoiding glances into the overflowing carts of people with poor impulse control, and felt guilty for the smug sense of superiority that crept in to reward the effort.

  Halfway between Home Electronics and Furniture, she rounded a corner and was blindsided by Housewares. Brightly-colored boxes of the Fat-It-Out Advanced Nutritional System crowded an entire endcap. She’d only just pushed that ridiculous-looking skillet-with-a-spit-valve image out of her mind but here it was again, the packaging blasting Healthful Advantages™ at her in 100-point yellow type. She whirled away and hid by the food-storage bins to catch her breath. She felt chased by a monster.

  She’d tried hard, really hard, to do a good job producing her first big campaign for JBE. And Fat-It-Out had repaid her by taking over every waking hour of her life.

  Six months ago, when she was burning out working for Jack as an associate producer, she’d tried taking her portfolio to Rockefeller+King, the big ad agency—the one with the athletic shoe account and the soda account and the three competing insurance accounts. But they’d laughed her out of the office, and told her to take her weight-loss cream and her hair-removal spray and her leather-repair paste with her. (Well, they hadn’t said that exactly, but she’d gotten a distinct vibe of contempt from their trendy glasses and carefully tousled haircuts—and they hadn’t called back, so what did it matter what they’d actually said?)

  And then Fat-It-Out had come along, and Jack had handed her the reins, and she’d buckled down and tried her best to do a good job—the only thing she knew how to do—and she’d knocked the ball out of the park.

  So this was it, now. She was an infomercial producer.

  She gathered herself. She straightened, and took a breath. She tried to picture the ProntoTester on the shelf here in six months, but stalled trying to imagine what the box copy could legally say: “Inaccurate drug test!” maybe, or perhaps “Random word generator!”

  “Ooh, Dolores, have you seen this one?” The voice filtered from around the corner, back by the Fat-It-Out boxes— Kelly heard the squeak of shopping-cart wheels, the wheeze of labored breath, the rustle of hands on a cardboard box; the clank of pans shifting inside.

  Then, another woman’s voice: “Look, it’s got a valve for draining the oil out! Isn’t that clever? I’ll bet Lacey would love this for her new apartment. She needs to start eating healthier.”

  “What a great idea!” came the chirping response.

  Kelly wanted to round the corner and scream, No! It’s just cheap pans that one Chinese company couldn’t sell on their own married with cheap valves that another Chinese company couldn’t sell on their own. As the unseen women read each other the hyperbolic statements from the back of the box—statements that Kelly herself had written and revised and erased and re-written and ultimately approved for the packaging—Kelly felt her cheeks begin to burn. She wanted to shout: I wasn’t being serious when I implied it would change your life; it’s just something you say in marketing!

  But instead, she said nothing.

  “How’s it coming?” Jack asked, grabbing Kelly’s shoulders and squeezing.

  Kelly jumped in her plastic chair, startled—then shrugged his hands away. “Slow,” she said, standing and crossing the breakroom to retrieve a mug of hot water from the microwave, opening the door with ten seconds left to go. “But it’s coming along.” She didn’t mention that in
the last two weeks, the only progress she’d made at all had been in her level of anxiety.

  She’d stalled creatively. Without consistent results, she had no sales angle; without a sales angle, she had no campaign. The Pronto-Tester seemed to mock her; its LED, finger divot, and serrated mouth formed a leering face that watched her pace a furrow into the carpet. Periodically it stuck its tongue out to mock her—in the form of another cryptic slip of paper that raised more questions than it answered. As the slips began to accumulate into a terrible mountain of frustration, each new theory dashed by the next result, its blank expression seemed to her absurdly, maddeningly calm.

  And other pressing matters had come up for her—health insurance paperwork, renewing magazine subscriptions, getting a new cell phone and transferring her whole phonebook. Days had rolled by unmarked, save by her nightly resolution that tomorrow would be more productive.

  Still, she knew she’d get it done eventually. After all, she was the genius behind Fat-It-Out.

  “I bet it’s gonna be great,” Jack grinned. He turned to retrieve a stack of papers from the printer, paging through them, throwing a few away. “I could get used to this whole hands-off kinda deal. I mean, don’t get me wrong, shipping out skillets takes up most the day. But I’m working on courting some new clients, drumming up some business. I even got a new slogan, check it out—‘J-B-E is going up, up, up!’” He spread his hands like a presenter on one of his infomercials, his showman instincts kicking in. “Came to me in the shower! I’m thinking of having new cards printed. Orange is hot, right? You want an orange business card?”

  “Absolutely,” Kelly said, fumbling with a tea bag, splashing it into the mug, spilling hot water on the counter. How long were you supposed to steep it? Did it get bitter if you left it in too long? She was bad at tea.