Machine Of Death (51 page)

HE
HAD
NOT
READ
HIS
SLIP
OF
PAPER
. It was folded in an envelope in his left pocket. In his right pocket were several books of matches, and he was wearing a backpack. He pushed his way through the scrubby pine trees on the west border of the barrens.

“This isn’t how it works, you know. The machine is playing word games.”

He hopped across a clear stream, feet sinking into the sandy bank on the other side, wetness seeping over the soles of his sneakers. Water was bad. He needed dry brush.

“The universe doesn’t work by word games. You have to think with words to play word games.”

He kicked at a snake, daring it to bite, but it disappeared into the undergrowth.

“You can’t just say what’s going to happen ahead of time. That’s not how physical law works. That’s narrative. And when reality is twisted to fit narrative, that’s not natural. That’s someone making stories happen.”

A few strands of spiderweb brushed his cheek and eyelash, and he swatted at the air around his face. He was climbing higher. He spotted a cluster of dry-looking bushes in the fading light, and took one of the kerosene bottles from his backpack.

“We have tales about this. The Oracle makes a prediction, and it comes true in an ironic way. Every legend has them. But that’s how you tell the legends apart from reality. In reality, the magic doesn’t work.”

He unscrewed the cap on the kerosene bottle and started splashing the liquid over the dead leaves. He continued until the bottle was empty and the brush was thoroughly soaked.

“There are paradoxes, too. Playing word games only frees you from them for so long. You’re messing with things, somehow, keeping people dying the right way no matter what we do. If we watch long enough we’ll see your hand move. I’m not stupid. You can’t just change things like this.”

The breeze was strong and westerly, and there was plenty of brush downwind. He struck a match, stared for a moment, and then dropped it among the fuel-soaked leaves.

“Physics works by saying that if you set things up like so, this is what will happen. Curses say that no matter how you set things up, this is what will happen. And curses don’t work. They never have. That’s not how our universe goes. They’re in all of our stories, but that’s ’cause we’re people, and we can figure out a way to make them adapt to each new situation. It takes a mind to do that.”

The grove was ablaze. He turned from the heat and walked away.

“It takes a mind,” he repeated as he went, “and yet those people are all dead, just as their papers predicted. So where does that leave us?”

There was no answer. He reached the car. It was a Chevy Nova with no glass in the back window. He had bought it for $300, cash.

“I never expected an answer. I never thought the priest or the rabbi or the monk knew any more than I did. I was at peace with an uncaring universe. So what the hell is this all about? For the first time, a chance at some answers, and you’re playing games?”

He pulled out onto the freeway, and settled the speedometer at seventy. Any faster and he might get pulled over. In any event, the car wouldn’t go any faster.

“Are you even paying attention? Am I just talking to myself? Maybe you’re on autopilot. Maybe you haven’t noticed me yet.”

He drove silently for an hour, then got off at a random exit.

“You can’t just announce that it’s all been a game and then expect me to keep playing. I spend my life waiting for some fucking answers and then you wave this in front of me. I’m not going to sit around and passively watch how it all plays out and laugh at your cleverness. I want to talk to you. I want to know who the hell you are.”

He passed an all-night Wal-Mart parking lot, drove on for half a mile, and turned right onto a dirt road. He followed it for a bit, then turned off the road and maneuvered the car between the trees down into a small ravine, where the wheels stuck in the mud. He turned off the car, took his backpack, and walked toward the Wal-Mart.

“So who are you, anyway? Are you what waits on the other side, with the papers guiding us to you? Or are you a petty, stupid animal like us, a level above but just as lost, playing games? Do you know your own destiny, your own end? Does the same reaper who collects our souls wait, somewhere, for you? What does it say on
YOUR
piece of paper?”

He reached the parking lot, and walked down the rows of cars. He found an old Reliant K with a cold hood—good, its owners probably wouldn’t return for a while—took a crowbar from his backpack, broke the window, opened the door, and climbed inside. He fumbled around with the wires under the steering wheel, hoping that there would be an obvious pair of wires labeled “
CONNECT
THESE
TO
HOTWIRE
CAR” but in the end he had to pry the ignition apart and turn the rotator switch to start the car. He pulled out onto the street and headed back toward the freeway, wind buffeting his face through the shattered window. Maybe someone had seen him at the barrens, but they’d be looking for a Chevy Nova. Keep changing cars. Can’t get caught by a roadblock once they notice the pattern. Have to do this right.

“I’m not afraid anymore. But I’m angry. This isn’t right. This isn’t natural. We’re being pushed around, and I want to know who you are. Who the hell are you? What am I doing out here? I have a mother, and a father, and brothers, and I’m on a highway in a stolen car hundreds of miles from home, and I could die anywhere, and it’s all to play games with you so you’d better fucking come out and talk to me!” He felt a tightness in his chest and a sudden lump in his throat. He blinked away tears. “I’m not crazy. There are hundreds of bodies buried with their little pieces of paper, and it’s not natural, and I want to know
WHO
THE
FUCK
YOU
ARE
.” The words hurt his own ears.

He drove for another hour, a Google Maps printout in his lap, the location of the next fire marked with a red teardrop-shaped icon.

“In elementary school,” he said, after a time, “kids would come up to you and ask the question, ‘Are you P.T.?’ It was a trick question, of course. If you said yes, they called you a pregnant teenager. If you said no, they’d say you weren’t potty-trained. All you could do was reject the question. You could even,” he added conversationally, “punch the kid in the mouth when he asked.”

They’d probably see the pattern by morning. The local police would be alerted, waiting near the locations of the last few fires. He’d have to be careful.

“When the question doesn’t make sense, you can reject it. But this is much worse. Here, there’s only one way out. And you’re standing there next to it, grinning. Well, fine. You win. I can’t quit. I’m in your stupid game.” He shifted in the seat and heard the envelope crinkle in his pocket. He stared up at the stars through the glass. “But I’m not reading your paper until you give me some answers.”

Morning drew near. Spot fires burned across the Ohio valley, forming a curious pattern. Perhaps someone out there would glance at the Earth, would see the great question mark he had burned into its skin. Perhaps the mind behind the Machine was deaf to his ramblings, but it had to notice the hundred-mile-tall message drawn in fire. It was the Machine’s move now.

He sat on a flat stone in a Kentucky field, far from any roads. The police wouldn’t find him here, not for a long time. He’d starve to death first.

“I don’t know what you know, but I know I’m done searching halfheartedly for answers. I have your attention, across whatever space and time separates us. Whatever is going to happen to me can happen here. I’m not moving to eat or drink. If that’s the way you’ve decided it will happen, then I guess that’s the way it will happen. But it’s your decision, not mine. You can’t pretend you’re ignoring this.”

He lay back on the rock.

“So maybe I’ll die here. Maybe this is how it ends, with my questions unanswered.”

The setting moon hung over the horizon. People claimed it bore a face, but he had never been able to see it.

“But if you have even a bit of honesty in you, the paper in my pocket doesn’t say ‘
SUICIDE
.’ It says ‘
MURDER
.’”

There was no reply.

Story by Randall Munroe

Illustration by Kazu Kibuishi

IT
WAS
LIKE
THAT
MOVIE
,
BACK
IN
THE
DAY
,
WHERE
THE
MACHINE
ASKS
THE
KID
, “
HOW
ABOUT
A
NICE
GAME
OF CHESS?” 

“No,” he types back. “Let’s play Global Thermonuclear War.” 

That’s what the slip of paper in my hand read. “Global Thermonuclear War.” 

I was sixteen years old. A girl, just about a woman.

You may have heard about the Delvice, which is what the marketing droids decided to call it back in the day when they thought it was going to change the world. The “Delphi Device.” Clever, huh? Stick your finger in, feel a little prick, find out how you’re going to die. There were jokes about some unfortunate early ad copy: “I’m just sorry for the guy who has everybody feeling his little prick.” But it was really that simple, if anyone could figure out what it all meant. 

Where did the words come from? The internals were simple: A few cells of your blood were vaporized by a laser, and the optical spectrum was fed into your basic quad-core PC running a huge neural net. 

It had some limitations. The result was always in English. And while the machines never made an error when they were calibrated properly, like any other device, they could go wrong. Then they just produced plausible nonsense. People got predictions like “Colorless Green Ideas,” which was meaningful enough to kill Chomsky’s theory of language, but not much else. 

The rest of the time the words had meaning, but not always the obvious meaning. Words are ambiguous. It has something to do with being a tool for thought. 

Whatever the machine said, you usually lacked the context to interpret it properly. “Hit by car” might as easily refer to an amusement park ride as a highway mishap. “Crushed by a pig” might mean a block of iron or an angry sow. “Gunshot” covered the bases from artillery to BBs. 

So despite the early predictions that it was going to change everything, it really didn’t. I mean, what use is a prediction that seems tuned up to mislead? And who really wants to know? People had been ignoring doctors’ advice for years. It was that much easier to ignore the output of a machine that you couldn’t even ask for a second opinion. 

It became a novelty for a generation: a “you-tell-me-yours-and-I’ll-tell-you-mine” topic of conversation on a first date, and then faded into obscurity like any of a dozen other inventions whose time never quite came.  

Did you know there was once a guy who built flying cars? Really. They worked, too. They just didn’t work well enough to be popular enough to change anything. It’s easy to build a novelty. It’s hard to make the world reorganize itself so that what used to be a novelty becomes a necessity. Bill Gates managed it with personal computers. Henry Ford with automobiles. Edison with electricity. Bell with telephony, and
RCA
with radio and television, even if they had to “borrow” the latter from Farnsworth. But not many others. 

The Delvice never became a necessity, and novelties don’t last. Some folks had fun with it, though. When I was doing research after getting my own prediction I found out about one guy who, for a while, ran a successful Web site that would generate a list of possible interpretations for any cause of death. The lists usually ran into the tens, sometimes the hundreds. 

But it soon became obvious that a few short words just weren’t enough to encode the kind of information people care about.  Most of the time. 

I never told anyone about the prediction I got. It hardly seemed to mean anything, especially once I’d read a few accounts of radical ambiguity. Words on paper from some ancient toy in a back-country mall that hadn’t been maintained for decades. Maybe mine was a nonsense phrase that happened to look meaningful. Might as well ask the once-popular Magic 8-Ball something. It got “Outlook not so good” right. I don’t know if anyone ever asked it about Internet Explorer. 

The next few years of my life were full of the usual girly things: boys, toys, sports, and school. Despite dire predictions in the early years of the new millennium, things were shaping up not too badly, and by mid-century anyone with a brain could get along pretty well. 

I completed a double-major in business and math, and found myself working in New York as a second assistant actuary. The Chief Actuary was a wizened old man with a gentle smile and an old-fashioned manner that hid a timid and conventional mind. There’s something about being in the business of predicting death that attracts the mediocre. But a job is a job, and with student loans to pay off it was good money and a convenient place to start what at that time I liked to think of as the long climb over the bodies of my enemies, all the way to the top.