Machine Of Death (18 page)

“We’re fucked, aren’t we?”

“We’re not fucked.” I thought about it. We were definitely fucked. “No, we’re not fucked.”

He shook his head. “We’re so fucked.”

I sighed. We were so, so fucked.

“I don’t, you know,” he said suddenly, as we boxed up the prototype.

I frowned. “What?”

“Have any idea how it works. I’m the same as anyone else, except I know it does.”

“You
made
it, Pete. I just did your accounts.”

“I didn’t really. I discovered it. If it had done what I built it to do, if it had been the thing we were trying to make, if it had been the Death Clock—”

“I told you we couldn’t call it that.”

“—Then I would have made it. But you can’t make something like this, it’s out there waiting to be found.”

“Well, I certainly hope you
can
make it. Because we’re going to need a job fucking lot of them.”

“You know, this is the best possible way it could have happened.”

“What the hell?” I was actually shocked.

“No, I mean, to prove it. You couldn’t ask for a more conclusive test.” He put up a hand to silence me, “I know, I know loads of people are going to think we blew up a train to sell a box, but this is still going to convince more people than we ever dreamed we would. Your investor friends aren’t going to think we blew up San Francisco, they’re going to think it works.”

“They’re not going to like the publicity.”

“They don’t have to, yet. No one has to know they’re investing, and they all know that by the time they come to sell them, the whole world will realise they work.” I was the business brain of the operation, but Pete wasn’t an idiot. I knew it from the moment he said “391”: this would
make
us.

“Did you tell Jen yet?”

“What? Yeah, of course! You didn’t tell Cath?”

“Not yet.” Honestly, it had only just occured to me.

“Well why the hell not? You’ve got to tell her, dude.” I hate it when he calls me
dude.

“I just—how do you say it? How did
you
say it?”

“I said ‘Jen, it works,’ same as I said to you.”

“Actually you said
‘It fucking works!’”
I mocked, in my best nasal geek voice. “But you told her how we know?”

“Yeah.”

“Was she freaked out?”

“Of course. Aren’t you?”

“I’m—I’ve been—” I came clean. “I feel sick. I’ve been feeling sick for three hours now.”

He looked straight at me; I don’t talk like that often. “You’ve got to tell her. Jen’ll tell her, and she’ll tell her when I told her. You know what they’re like, women just find a way to get times into conversations.”

“I can’t say I’d noticed.”

“Well, they do.”

I walked into the den. Pete was tinkering again, already. I set his coffee down and took a sip of mine.

“Thanks.”

I ignored him. “Here’s what we do. You spend the rest of the night packing all this away, everything you need. I hire a van. You hire a hangar. I hire an agent. You draw me up a list of the components that went into the latest prototype—not the ones you
think
you’ll need for the new improved version, I know you. The components for
this
one. I’ll give the investors the heads-up before the news breaks, and tell them we need the first payment by noon tomorrow. You call every engineer friend you trust and get them on board. Write out a step-by-step assembly guide an idiot could follow in the van on the way, then make sure we don’t hire any idiots to follow it. I order us a new pair of phones, we throw these away, and we give the new numbers to
no one
but Cath and Jen unless I say. We disappear. I can sort out accommodation once we’re out of here, and a few months down the line we can buy a new place, but right now we have to get as many of these things built and making predictions as possible. The more predictions they make, the more get proved right, the fewer mail bombs we get.” I sipped. “What’s that?” He was writing something.

“It’s a step-by-step assembly guide an idiot could follow.” He put it on a thin pile.

“What are those?”

“Well,” he leafed through them, “this one’s a component list for the prototype, this one’s a map to the hangar we’ve hired, these are the resumés of the three most expensive agents I could find, this one’s a printout of a receipt for two iPhones, this one’s a fax from the Hyatt confirming our reservation, and these are the keys to our new van.” He tossed them to me. I looked around the room, I guess for the first time. It was full of neatly packed boxes.

“What do I do at this company again?”

“It’s never really been clear to me.” He took a sip of his coffee and went back to writing. “Call the investors!” he shouted after me as I left, forgetting my mug.

“We’re not going to get killed by a mail bomb, you know,” he said in the van on the way up. It was dark, I was driving, which meant the radio stayed off. “We know that much. Whatever happens with this, it won’t kill us. I’m an aneurysm and you’re a heart attack, those were the first two tests we ever ran.”

“Yeah.” I’d been thinking about that a lot since we discovered the box really worked. I wondered what it would feel like. “Christ, what about Cath and Jen?” I’d refused to let either of them be tested.

“We’ll have them take it, we have to now.” They were coming up tomorrow. The thought of it made me queasy.

“No,”
I said suddenly. “No. I don’t want it hanging over them.” Then, feeling the familiar emotional crunch of stepping on Pete’s toes when it came to Jen, “Not Cath, anyway.”

“We have to.”

“You think about it, don’t you? What it’s going to feel like? Come on, we don’t want that for them.” He stared at the wing-mirror. “If I looked through your browser cache, I’d find a bunch of sites about aneurysms, right?” ”

“No.” He looked back at the road. We sat in silence for a few minutes, the blank road purring beneath us as a half-tunnel of arched black trees flashed by either side. “I cleared it.”

I looked away from the road for the briefest moment. He was smiling.

So that was that day. I persuaded Cath not to take the test, and Jen didn’t need persuading: she said over her dead body, and I said we probably wouldn’t bother if she was already dead, and she said good, and updated her position to “Not
even
over my dead body.” In all of our discussions that night, I don’t think Pete or I considered that they’d have a say in it themselves.

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.