Machine of Death

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

  Grale knew what was going to happen. He always did. He turned away from the sniper, Simmons curled on his shoulders, and started running back to cover. If the bastard was going to shoot Grale, he’d have to do it from behind.

  A puff of dirt flashed up between Grale’s legs, as if to say, “I don’t mind that.”

  But Grale was almost there.

  Gearhead and the others were still firing, trying to keep the sniper down. But the man behind the rifle had a pair made of brass. Another round zipped past Grale’s ear.

  Ten yards to go. Not even that.

  But Grale could feel it. The muzzle of the rifle may as well have been pressed against his back. The sniper, he knew, wouldn’t miss a third time.

  A rocket streaked through the heavens. Half of the sniper’s building caved in. As Grale turned the corner and set Simmons down, he heard Gearhead yelling into the radio.

  “Kill confirmed. Repeat, kill confirmed. You got the bastard!”

  Simmons looked up at Grale, his eyes beaming with gratitude and admiration.

  “But, sir, your paper said—”

  “Some other sniper, son. Some other war.”

  Story by Bartholomew von Klick

  Illustration by John Keogh

  HEAT DEATH OF THE UNIVERSE

  I MET MAGGIE AT A KEG PARTY IN THE BACK YARD OF THE HEAD CHEERLEADER’S HOUSE. The cheerleader didn’t know I was there, and probably would have objected to my presence. I was a nerd. I didn’t earn acceptance from my peers until we were too old and too jaded about high school cliques to care.

  Maggie and I had been at the same school since junior high, but we had never really met each other before. She was a name on a roster, another face in the background noise. She was tall for her age, and had knobby knees and a flat chest, and a nose that was a little too big, but I thought she was beautiful. Seeing her at the party again, in different and unusual circumstances, was like waking up and everything seeming smaller than it was before. I had seen Maggie every day for years, but suddenly she was the most wonderful girl I had ever seen. Before that moment, before I saw her laughing over the rim of a red plastic cup, I don’t think I even noticed girls.

  We got off to a good start. We talked awhile, and shared a drink or two in the freshly-cut grass, giggling. Later, I held her hair back while she puked in the kitchen sink. Maggie had too much Jagermeister, drawn by its sweet smell and licorice taste. She had always liked licorice. Between bouts of gut-twisting heaves, Maggie cursed the liquor companies for making the stuff taste exactly like her favorite candy. Childhood to adulthood, things don’t change as much as they used to. Maggie blames commercialism and the corporations. I think I agree with Stephen Hawking.

  I read his book during my sophomore year. The other kids would have made fun of me if they hadn’t gotten that out of their collective system in junior high. They were too busy getting laid and trying to get laid, and trying to get into good colleges. I had already been accepted with a big scholarship because I’d discovered a new kind of algae in the stream near my grandparents’ house. It was just a science project to me, but to college admissions departments, it was as if I had rushed for a million yards last football season.

  I had scholarship offers, and ended up going to the school that Maggie was going to. I told my parents that I had picked the state university because I had read that graduate programs matter much more than undergraduate programs, and that I should go to a big state school for undergrad because I needed the social acculturation that happens at those kinds of places. They agreed with me, or at least let me have my way, because that new kind of algae made them think I was smarter than they were.

  I’m not as smart as everybody thinks I am. When I tell people that I’m not as smart as they think I am, they think I’m being modest. I keep expecting to wake up one day and know that I’m that smart and be comfortable with it, and be able to think my way through any problem and come to the right conclusion every time, like there’s a door locked in my mind and if I could unlock it, everything would be fine, and I would be a modern-day Mozart. I’ll never be Mozart, though. I played the baritone tuba in junior high band, and faked my way through it. I never even learned how to key or read the music. I just pretended. I wonder if Stephen Hawking tells people that he’s not as smart as people think he is.

  According to Hawking, all this certainty is going to be bad for us. We spent the first few billion years of our collective existence scrabbling through a random universe full of uncertainty, pain, suffering, and unpredictability. Hawking thought that if you put a little bit of order in the chaotic soup of human existence, then the order will crystallize and spread itself throughout the whole human experience. Life will either get very boring or very interesting, in the Chinese sense. There’s some debate about what this would look like, because nothing like it has ever happened. Some people think Hawking is wrong and that a little bit of order in a whole lot of chaos is no more effective than an ice cube dropped in a lava flow. Others believe that it’s going to be the social equivalent of metal fatigue, simultaneous across the whole planet. Civilization will shatter like an icicle. Too much order is worse than too much chaos. We evolved in chaos. We survived chaos. Life thrives in chaos.

  I thought about that a lot during our senior year. The chaos of high school and all the politics of it and the cliques sort of dissolved and became more permeable. Nobody cared about that stuff anymore. They cared about college, and their new lives: High School 2.0. It was a kind of order of its own, though I thought it was kind of temporary. Maggie and I visited a few colleges together and it seemed pretty chaotic to me.

  Maggie and I had sex for the first time right before our birthdays, on December 31st. No liquor for us, no wine, no champagne. We hung out in the treehouse in her back yard, which had overgrown with spidery ivy and creeping, snaking tree branches. Her father was a contractor, so while it was in a tree, it was pretty well insulated, and two bodies in it warmed the place up pretty well, especially if those bodies were humping. I had heard that sex for the first time was always messy and weird and gross, but it wasn’t for us. I had researched it a lot on the Internet, but Maggie wasn’t interested in the technicalities. She just wanted to be close to me.

  “I’m scared,” she said, after we did it, and we were spooning on the floor of the treehouse, wrapped in the blanket I had brought from my house. It was blue and white, in a pattern like a summer sky with clouds on it. It was wool, and scratchy and soft at the same time.

  “I don’t want to get my blood read.”

  “We don’t have to,” I said.

  “Yes we do,” she said. “My mom won’t stop talking about it.”

  “Moms suck sometimes,” I said.

  “Especially mine,” she said. “It’s worse than when I had my period for the first time. She kept telling me it was going to happen soon. She bought me six kinds of maxi pads. I was afraid she was going to demonstrate how to use a tampon.”

  “Ew.”

  “Yeah. Boys are lucky.” She sighed and grabbed my hand and squeezed. “I hope we get the same reading.”

  “Me too,” I said. “But it’s okay if we don’t.”

  “I guess so,” she said. “But what if I get CAR ACCIDENT and you get DROWNING? Or what if I get CANCER and you get OLD AGE?”

  “Nobody gets OLD AGE,” I said.

  “Sometimes they do,” she said.

  “It’s an urban legend,” I said. “Because nobody actually dies of OLD AGE. They die of cancer or something.”

  “That’s not what my uncle says,” she said. “His friend in college pulled OLD AGE. And he was killed by an old guy driving a car.”

  “I don’t think that’s true,” I said. “It’s too weird.”

  “Just because it’s weird doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen,” she said. “Things like that happen all the time. Like those people who pull STABBED, and they fall on some broken glass, or that lady who pulled HANGED, and got wrapped up in telephone wires when s
he jumped off her roof. That stuff happens.”

  “Yeah, I guess it does,” I said. “But it’s rare. If that were always true then nobody would get their blood read at all. People wouldn’t be so secretive about their certs. There wouldn’t be laws against having your blood read before you’re eighteen. It would just be a joke, you know? Like a horoscope.”

  She didn’t have an answer for that. I was the smart kid. People always thought my logic was perfect, even if they knew it wasn’t, because I was smarter.

  “I don’t want to know how I’m going to die,” she said, finally. “It doesn’t seem fair.”

  “Everybody does it. They still live their lives.”

  “Some of them,” she said, a reference to her uncle, the black sheep of her family. He had pulled GUNSHOT, and got scared and moved to the wilderness out west somewhere. He didn’t live his life. He started living someone else’s.

  “We’ll live ours,” I said. “Together.” I squeezed her tight, for emphasis.

  “Yeah,” she said. “Together.”

  If order really were crystallizing across the whole quantum stratum of human existence, then Maggie would have turned out to be my sister or something.

  But that didn’t happen. We had blood drawn at the doctor’s office. Our families let us go by ourselves. I drove us in my mom’s Taurus. The salt-stained tires ploughed twin canals through the chunky, gray slush. The snow unspooled from the roof in loose, white ribbons.

  Maggie and I had the same doctor. He had a machine in his office that did the readings. He drew a little bit of blood and put it into a little receptacle on the machine. It looked like a big laser printer, smooth white plastic and blinking, green lights. In a few minutes, the machine hummed and something inside it spun and the humming grew louder and shook the floor a little. He smiled at us, arms folded. The machine printed out the certificates on special paper, the same pinkish color as those new five-dollar bills. He put them face-down on a tray and handed them to us. Maggie and I sat down on the examination table, butcher paper crinkling and creasing under us, bunching between us as Maggie scooted closer. The doctor left us alone.

  Maggie asked me if I was feeling nervous. I told her no, even though that was a lie and she could see it in my face.

  “I can tell when you’re nervous,” she said. “You look like you’re reading small print when you’re nervous.”

  “I am now,” I said. “Thanks.”

  “Oh, it’s all right,” she said, and put her hand on my leg. She was always misreading my sarcasm. If there were a chance I was nervous, she took it seriously. I was joking this time. I told her so. She nodded and held my hand.

  “We can wait,” she said. “We’ll just sit here. We don’t have to turn it over at all. Nobody will ever know.”

  We sat in silence for a long time. I told her later that I wanted to stay there forever, our futures vibrating in the midpoint between knowing and not knowing, the moment stretched to fill a lifetime. Would that have been a state of order? Knowing either way is a switch flipped to either side. But what if you refuse to touch it? Is that order or chaos?

  History has turning points, moments around which pivot the events that follow. I sometimes imagine it to be a railroad switch that shunts a train from one path to another. Sometimes it’s just a big pop, a whack of a stick and the piñata shatters and the candy pours out.

  I don’t know when this moment happened. It might be when Maggie and I looked at our certificates together and she started crying and I put my arm around her. That’s when my life changed, because instead of warmth of closeness, I wanted to crawl away, the click of a cog, the next step. It sank into me, a realization made suddenly clear, a contrast from the moments that filled up our lives before. We weren’t kids anymore, and we weren’t going to be together forever. A teenager’s mind isn’t ready for that.

  I pulled HEAT DEATH OF THE UNIVERSE. I already knew what that was, but I had to explain it to Maggie. I started to explain it to her to distract her from what she had pulled, because it was also pretty unique. My valiant efforts didn’t work. Three days later and we were sitting on her bed with her parents downstairs worrying and worrying, filling the house with the sickly smell of anxiety. After all these years of having the blood readings, people were still slaves to it. Stephen Hawking would say that we’re slaves to order, but it seemed pretty chaotic at Maggie’s house.

  Maggie was worried and weepy. I couldn’t blame her. CANCER or PLANE CRASH or HEART ATTACK were what you expected to pull, and those are things you can deal with. They seem distant and unreal, like life was before we had the machine and its holograms and red-dyed paper and you knew that because your grandparents both died of heart attacks that you were prone to that, too. The machine gave us more order, but it didn’t really take away the chaos.

  “It means I’m going to live for a really long time,” I said. “I don’t think anybody else has pulled that. At least nobody I know of. I guess it’s kind of a big deal.”

  “I’ve never heard of it,” she said.

  I shrugged. “It’s when all the heat in the universe dies, right? Atoms stop spinning. It’ll be really cold. It’s all kind of theoretical, though. Well, it was.”

  “How long will you live?”

  I was embarrassed—she was envious of me. I expected a lot of people would be. I didn’t see what the big deal was, though. The woman I loved had pulled NUCLEAR BOMB.

  “It’s about ten centillion years away,” I said. “I looked it up.”

  “Is that a real number?”

  “Yeah. It’s ten with a hundred zeroes behind it.”

  “How could somebody live that long?”

  I shook my head and stared at my feet. “I can’t even imagine.”

  Her hands were trembling. She ran her fingers through her hair and clutched her stomach. She was crying again.

  “Other people will pull NUCLEAR BOMB,” she said. “They have to. A nuclear bomb doesn’t kill just one person.”

  “You have to stop obsessing about it,” I said, quietly. “It’s not helping anything.”

  “How can I not think about it?” she said. I couldn’t believe she still had enough water in her to cry again, but she did. She cupped her hands over her face. I hated seeing her so sad.

  “You can’t do this, Maggie,” I said. “You just can’t.”

  “We have to tell somebody about it,” she said. “This is something everybody needs to know.”

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea,” I said.

  “But what if—”

  “You can’t think about what-ifs. You have to think about school and graduating, okay? If it’s a problem, somebody else will pull it. You know that’s true. If there’s going to be a nuclear bomb, then other people will get it. Just like September 11.”

  “That happened because people didn’t talk about what they got!”

  “Do you think that would have helped? If they had told people what they got, then how do you know it wouldn’t have happened anyway? It had to happen, Maggie. That’s what they pulled.”

  “Don’t you think it’s weird that nobody told anybody else what they got?” She was starting to raise her voice. I didn’t want that to be our first argument.

  I put my hand on her knee.

  “Don’t tell me you believe that stuff,” I said. “Just because some guys on YouTube say it’s a conspiracy doesn’t mean it is.”

  “Have you watched it?”

  “No,” I said. “But I read about it. Look, Maggie, that’s silly. There were thousands of people there. How would the government get them all to work at the same building? Or to fly on the same plane?”

  “The people in the Pentagon pulled MISSILE,” she said. “It’s true.”

  “That’s just a rumor. It’s an urban legend. Stop it, Maggie.”

  “I’m scared,” she said, her anger melting into convulsing sobs.

  I put my arm over her shoulder and hugged her close to me.

  After Sept
ember 11, Stephen Hawking didn’t comment on the conspiracy, because nobody had really thought about it. In a letter to the New York Times, he said that order was winning, even though it seemed like it wasn’t. War and terrorism are agents of chaos, he said, but the Western world was the bastion of order, and that we would win. Bringing peace and democracy was just another way of bringing order. We were more powerful. We would win, and the Middle East would be quiet and peaceful, eventually. The American military was the ice cube. I thought about that a lot.

  It was all over the news within a few days. Other people had pulled NUCLEAR BOMB and went public with it, but not Maggie. Her parents were pretty down on the government, and went to war protests and things, and they were worried about what they would do with the information. They didn’t want their daughter to be put through the wringer of the Patriot Act, which is what a lot of people were expecting.

  Since it was illegal to get your blood read before you were 18, and nobody older than that had pulled the nuke, everybody just assumed it was going to happen much later, decades down the road, when all fifteen people who had pulled the nuke just happened to be in the same place at the same time where a nuclear bomb would go off.

  I didn’t talk much about what I had pulled because it was so strange. It seemed so weird that somebody would live so long. It was crazy to even consider, but I was thinking about that a lot at the time, and thinking about how if you pull something it’s pretty likely to happen.

  Within a few weeks, the FBI was all over our town. They were all over other towns, too, like spiders, building webs between the Nuclear Kids, as the NUCLEAR BOMB pullers were being called by the press. The FBI interviewed me, and asked me politely to see my cert, which I did, because I didn’t want to cause trouble. There were two agents, a man and a woman. They seemed young, too young to be carrying guns around. The man saw my cert and scrunched his nose up and showed the woman, and she shook her head.