Machine Of Death (19 page)

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.

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.

Lisa, we called her. Oh, yeah, she was fine—we knew she would be. We took a blood sample in the second trimester and had it tested: She’s going to die of emphysema, so unless she’d been bumming smokes off the placenta in there, we were in the clear. She and I.

She’s going to be an interesting case, actually—it’s not something that happens quickly, emphysema, so I’ll be intrigued to see how I fail
this
woman so utterly that I end up repeatedly exposing her to a toxic gas over the course of enough years that it ultimately destroys her lungs and kills her. Am I just going to forget to tell her, for her entire life, “Oh, and don’t smoke”? You have to wonder.

I was already overcompensating—I actually hit a guy last week for pulling out a cigarette at a housewarming party I was hosting at Pete’s old place, my old office, the place where it started. He’d left it to Jen, but she’d given it to me when she left the country. She didn’t ask for any money and I didn’t offer any; Jen and I had a double-share each now, so it made no difference to either of us. We hardly talked, anyway. Tragedy doesn’t bring people together, who started that bullshit? It’s like nitro-fucking-glycerin.

“Does anyone have a light?” he said.

“No, but I have a…lights out…sandwich?” I almost said, before realising how amazingly lame it was. I’d already hit him by then, too, so I think the point had been made. It was almost a reflex.

I’ve been steadily losing it for a year now. I should come up with a more peaceful solution, like “Actually I’d rather you smoked outside.
In Kazahkstan.”
But I don’t think it’s going to come up again, not now.

I was working in my old office when it happened, the crib within arm’s reach. He burst into the room, crunching the door hinges and smacking the handle deep into the plaster, and nearly fell over trying to stop. For that split second, when it was just a blur, on my
life
I thought it would be Pete.

It wasn’t Pete. He was huge. A big, broken, sad face. I didn’t say anything, just stared. He must have been six foot six. He stared too, wild. We stared. He said two low, fragile words, “My son,” then trailed off and just pointed it at me.

The words sounded dumb even as I spluttered them: “Please, I have a—”

He dropped the gun, apparently surprised by what he’d done, though from my perspective it was hard to see how it might have been an accident. I couldn’t see what was in his other hand, but I had a good guess. He presented it to me timidly, like a receipt for our transaction, and I could see then that this had not been his plan. He must have imagined shoving it in my face, or making me eat it as I died. The whole thing seemed to be surprising him a lot more than it was me. I always figured I had something like this coming.

I was paralysed, I could feel that immediately. My body felt like soft lead, heavy and heatless, as I slumped against the oak-panelled wall, heart pounding, my head bent awkwardly down into my chest as the last twinges of control and sensation faded from my clammy hands. I gurgled like a baby. Blood, I saw, sticky brilliant blood dribbling down my chin. Messy business.