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Prose
"The
machine had been invented a few years ago: a machine that could tell, from
just a sample of your blood, how you were going to die. It didn’t give you
the date and it didn’t give you specifics. It just spat out a sliver of paper
upon which were printed, in careful block letters, the words DROWNED or
CANCER or OLD AGE or CHOKED ON A HANDFUL OF POPCORN. It let people know how
they were going to die. "The
problem with the machine is that nobody really knew how it worked, which
wouldn’t actually have been that much of a problem if the machine worked as
well as we wished it would. But the machine was frustratingly vague in its
predictions: dark, and seemingly delighting in the ambiguities of language.
OLD AGE, it had already turned out, could mean either dying of natural
causes, or shot by a bedridden man in a botched home invasion. The machine
captured that old-world sense of irony in death — you can know how it’s going
to happen, but you’ll still be surprised when it does. "The
realization that we could now know how we were going to die had changed the
world: people became at once less fearful and more afraid. There’s no reason
not to go skydiving if you know your sliver of paper says BURIED ALIVE. The
realization that these predictions seemed to revel in turnabout and surprise
put a damper on things. It made the predictions more sinister –yes, if you
were going to be buried alive you weren’t going to be electrocuted in the
bathtub, but what if in skydiving you landed in a gravel pit? What if you
were buried alive not in dirt but in something else? And would being caught
in a collapsing building count as being buried alive? For every possibility
the machine closed, it seemed to open several more, with varying degrees of
plausibility. "By
that time, of course, the machine had been reverse-engineered and duplicated,
its internal workings being rather simple to construct, given our example.
And yes, we found out that its predictions weren’t as straightforward as they
seemed upon initial discovery at about the same time as everyone else did. We
tested it before announcing it to the world, but testing took time — too
much, since we had to wait for people to die. After four years had gone by
and three people died as the machine predicted, we shipped it out the door.
There were now machines in every doctor’s office and in booths at the mall.
You could pay someone or you could probably get it done for free, but the
result was the same no matter what machine you went to. They were, at least,
consistent." |
