Machine Of Death (39 page)

When she didn’t come back to
JBE
the next day, or the day after that, or the day after that, Jack eventually stopped calling. She tried accessing Jack’s email again, but the password didn’t work anymore. Her heart seized in her chest at the thought that he had discovered her intrusion.

She called Rockefeller+King three times, but each time hung up before the receptionist answered. 

The weekend passed in fitful bursts of anxiety, and she heard nothing from any quarter. She presumed that Julio had either improbably grown a pair and shipped the spot as-is to the affiliates, burning the place down, as it were; or that Jack and Julio had spent a frantic, sleepless 72 hours preparing an all-new, twenty-eight-minute infomercial.

Either way, she felt guilty.

She went to Wal-Mart to buy yogurt and saw Fat-It-Out still on the shelf, toxic coating and all, and it renewed her fervent hope that Jack would burn in hell. 

Her phone woke her up, and she answered it groggily without looking at the caller ID.

“Kel, can you please come in today, please,” Jack said. There was something different about his voice—he wasn’t demanding, pleading, or shouting; he was just
asking politely.
It threw her off guard.

She thought about asking how things were, but didn’t. She tried to think of an excuse, but couldn’t. Then the call was over and her conscience had said “okay” before the rest of her had even woken up yet.

“Moron! You are a moron!” she shouted at herself in the shower.

“‘Can you
please
come in today,
please
,’ oh, you son of a bitch,” she chanted mockingly to her shoes.

“Damn it damn it damn it,” she told her mirror as she pulled out of her driveway.

She turned on the radio, and the voice that greeted her almost made her wipe out her mailbox. For a moment she thought she was still asleep, and dreaming.

“Get the
ultimate
peace of mind—from one
tiny
machine that fits
anywhere
,” a jaunty voice told her. It was Mark, the announcer they used for every infomercial. He could sound excited about
anything.
“Order now and
we’ll
pay the first payment of $29.97.
You
only pay shipping!”

Then, a studio full of laughter. “We’re going to get one for the studio right away,” the morning-zoo deejay said. His dimwit partner chimed in with an old-man voice. “Maaake sure to get the ruuuush delivery,” he squeaked. “I don’t know how loooong I haaaave.” 

When she got to
JBE
, the parking lot was full. Inside the office, college kids chattered into headsets.

She tried to walk to Jack’s office, but her feet led her the other way, towards Julio’s edit bay. Towards a friendly face.

Julio wasn’t in yet, but something weird was definitely going on. After a second of nervous fidgeting in the hall, she ducked into Julio’s room, closed the door, and woke up his computer.

Blogs were buzzing. Clips from Julio’s joke spot were Featured Videos on YouTube and littered the Reddit front page. The AP had cribbed from her press release, which meant that major outlets and networks would pick up the story in the coming week. Everyone had an opinion—was the Machine of Death just a hilariously bad commercial, or a subversive viral marketing gimmick?

Or maybe—just maybe—something more?

“A spot-on satire of infomercial idiocy, made better by the fact that there apparently
is
an actual product you can buy,” wrote a columnist at AdWeek magazine.

“rofl i’d totally buy one,” a YouTube commenter added.

And then this, from an article on Slashdot: 

bq.

According to patent records, this
JBE
product (from the folks who brought you Gyno-Paste!) is actually a repackaging of a genuine medical device developed by a
UCLA
team who never found an investor. It’s one of those “who knows what
REALLY
happened” scenarios—the head of the project died in a plane crash (allegedly after a meeting with the Defense Department), just before he was set to unveil the device at MD&M East, the big medical-equipment trade show in NY. It doesn’t sound too far-fetched to think that this is a case of sabotage that nobody cares enough to investigate (or is being prevented from investigating), because according to the
NTSB
report the cause of the plane crash was “water contamination of the fuel system”—something every pilot is trained to check for during preflight. 

Kelly’s eyes froze on the word
water
. She felt the blood drain from her face. She could still see that research paper hidden away in Jack’s email, the one that contained the lead scientist’s C-18 result.

WATER
.

This was nuts. The ProntoTester—the Machine of Death—was a stupid cheap device that didn’t work, just like Hair-B-Gon didn’t
actually
remove hair, just like Gyno-Paste didn’t
actually
rejuvenate genital skin, just like Fat-It-Out didn’t
actually
replace eating healthy and exercising, no matter what Mark assured the consumer in calm, earnest tones. 

They couldn’t actually
believe
the spot. They must think the spoof infomercial was a joke, postmodern geek-humor. The radio deejays and the kids on YouTube wanted ProntoTesters to go with their Ninja Turtle toys and Super Mario-emblazoned hoodies.

But if Julio had somehow been
right
—if those little paper slips could say
WATER
and
somehow
mean water contamination in an airplane’s fuel tank—then someday, maybe soon, those blogs would go into overtime, and Jack’s Chinese warehouse would sell out in a day and a half, and the box would be reverse-engineered by everybody, everywhere, and there would be lawsuits and government inquiries and everything would go to hell and nobody would be laughing.

A machine to predict death. The most ludicrous idea in the world.

But people had bought Fat-It-Out.

She stood up and closed her eyes and could picture bright red boxes lined up at Wal-Mart, crammed into a million shopping carts. “Machine of Death,” the boxes would say, “now with potassium.” And everyone would buy ten of them.

She opened her eyes, and turned around, and Jack was standing in the doorway.

“Are you hot?” he asked. “You’re sweating. Here, let me hit the A/C.” He walked into the room and brushed past her on his way to the thermostat. She felt her skin prickle.

He turned back to her, standing closer than normal conversation required, searching her face for any indication—of what?

After a long moment of silence, he spoke in a dramatic whisper. “I was right to trust you,” he said. “You’ve made me a lot of money. You’ve made
us
a lot of money.”

She burst into tears, and of course, he swept her into his arms.

She hated it—she hated him touching her, making her flush, making her tense—but at the moment she really did need a hug.

Story by David Malki !

Illustration by Jess Fink

I’VE
GOT
THREE
MONTHS
LEFT
TO
LIVE
,
AND
I’M
IN AN
APARTMENT
BUILDING
ON
FIGUEROA
,
KICKING
DOWN
SOMEONE’S
DOOR
.

“Paramedics,” I shout. “We’re coming in.”

No response. Sweat rolls down my back, and the hallway stinks like the inside of a fish. I’m a scheduled man, the living dead, but here I am: tagging and bagging in the slums of Angel City like it’s any other Tuesday.

Titus, my partner, leans against the wall behind me and scrubs his fingernails through his goatee. “Hundred credits says it’s a scag overdose.”

I give the door another kick and plaster dust trickles down from the ceiling. All we know are the facts that came in with the ping: black female, early twenties, unconscious and unresponsive. No name or class registered, no datafeed on her at all.

“Come on, a hundred credits,” Titus says. “Class J-8, overdose. I bet you.” He puts out his hand for me to shake, but I’m in no mood for this shit. My head’s full of sand and my eyes won’t focus. I slap his hand away from me.

“What crawled up your ass today?” Titus asks.

I haven’t told him I’m scheduled. I think about how it feels to be wrapped in my body, the speck of my soul floating in all this meat. Everything I know will end in eighty-six days.

I give the door another kick and the whole thing splinters off its hinges.

We head into the apartment, back toward the bedroom. The floor plan’s typical thirties construction, slapped together in the years after the Separation, when the upper classes all evacuated to the Garden. On the kitchen table, empty beer bottles huddle together with cigarette butts in their bellies: the wreckage of others’ lives.

Last night, Helene and I had cried into each other’s cheeks, then made love with our teeth knocking together in the dark. This morning she’d hung on my shoulders as I stood at the door in my uniform. Her round stomach, our unborn baby, pressed against my belt.

“Let’s stay home,” she had said. “Otherwise I’ll think myself crazy.”

“Titus needs me. The grid’s lit up with calls.”

“I’ll scream if you go.”

I put my hand over her mouth and she bit my palm.

Sometimes at night when I touch my forehead to Helene’s, I can feel her thoughts turning inside her. They brush my skin like whispers and I imagine the two of us melting together.

But now, in the scummy one-bedroom on Figueroa, I’m frozen in my own blood and the apartment’s armchairs slump in the corners, nightmares on casters.

Titus and I find the victim sprawled on the bedroom floor with her skirt knotted around her thighs and her feet bare and one arm stretched out across the stained carpet. The window’s open behind her. Whoever called this one in must have climbed out and run off. I kneel down over the woman and I feel her strong steady breath on my cheek.

“Can’t smell scag on her,” I say. “You lost the bet.”

“Not like we shook on it,” Titus says. I turn the victim’s head and brush her hair back to expose the barcode tattooed behind her left ear. Titus leans in and scans her.

“Miss Pepper Dawson,” he says, then flicks the
LCD
on his tagger. “No class listed, though. It’s drawing a blank.”

“Fake tags?” I ask.

“Looks like. Encryption’s misaligned.”

I can’t find a thing wrong with her: no bleeding, no bruises, no breaks, and she’s not liquored up or sludged-out on drugs. Looks peaceful, like she’s sleeping. I touch the line of Pepper’s jawbone and I think about Helene. I think about our baby. I think about freefall from thirty thousand feet, the cold gray ocean rushing up to meet us. My stomach flips.

Pepper coughs and her eyes snap open. Then she yelps and recoils from me, my white uniform and blue gloves, my belt blinking with electronics.

“No, I’m fine,” she says. “Just fainted, is all.” She scrambles backward across the floor.

Everyone tries to do this, soon as they recognize who we are and what we’re there for. It never does any good. We already have our hands around Pepper’s arms and I’m trying to shush her, keep her calm while Titus does the blood sample. He presses the tagger’s piston to the inside of her left elbow.

“Don’t,” she says. “I can explain.”

“Heard that one before,” Titus says. His cheeks are pale gray, his face a chisel. He pulls the trigger and the piston snaps and the tagger’s lights go blue as it uploads the blood sample. Pepper thrashes, pounds her heels on the floor. I fight to hold onto her.

It goes like this: We check the victim’s tags and run their blood; if their fate matches their symptoms, we cart them off to St. Michael’s Hospice so the priests can euthanize them. But if their symptoms don’t match, we don’t do a whole lot—just slap some bandages on, give them some pills, that sort of thing. Patch and release. We can’t afford to waste too many Hospice supplies on the non-dying.

We shouldn’t even call ourselves paramedics. We’re bus-boys. We ship bodies and clean up messes, that’s all.

“What’d you bet her blood’s fake, too?” Titus asks me. He wipes sweat from his forehead.

Black-market blood isn’t unheard of, especially in this part of Angel City. In the fate-scrubbing shops, they’ll alter your tags, mod your fingerprints, scramble your retinas, and swap out your slumlander blood for some nice, clean Garden-class blood. None of it actually changes your fate, as far as anyone can tell. But slumlanders are desperate bastards.

“Please,” Pepper says. Her voice has become small, like a child’s, and I can feel her pulse jumping in her arm. I want to tell her that I know what it’s like. I know how it feels to look at death, to have its teeth on your neck.

Two weeks ago, Helene and I had argued with our death counselor about our Notice of Scheduling.

We’re too young, we had said. This whole thing had to be a mistake, a clerical fuck-up somewhere. The counselor had folded his arms. He looked like a typical Ministry fob: bad haircut, high collar, face pocked like sandstone. He took off his skullcap and tucked it under one arm and crossed himself. I wanted to spit in his face.