Machine Of Death

When I looked up from my plate, three young men were sitting on the other side of the rough table, staring at me intensely. None of them were very tall, but they had the tough look of mountain people. Their faces were purple from burst blood vessels -- or maybe it was makeup, I'm not going to pass myself off as some expert here. They wore heavy canvas clothes and long, filthy woolen scarves. When I finished my meal the one on the left spoke to me. "Do you know where we can get a Machine of Death?"

Zachary Bernstein, of The Bicycats, performs his original song "When We Found Out On Our Own" at the Machine of Death Talent Show, April 26, 2011, in Hollywood, CA.

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."

Johnny straggled behind Dalton as they came out of the jungle into the clearing. Streaks of fuel burned in the grass, the flames pale and languid in the bright midday sun. But they were still hot and smoky as hell. The smashed chopper was only about twenty yards away, a crumpled aluminum can surrounded by four smoldering lumps of black. The rest of the men. Dalton brought the nose of his rifle up and put his finger on the trigger. They hadn't seen any enemy fire when they had gone down, but it was hard to be sure. And even if the bad guys hadn't been around before, there was nothing like a crippled chopper to bring them out of cover. "Keep your eyes open," said Dalton. Johnny just grunted, and drew his knife. It was the only weapon he had anymore.

In the months afterward, in suburban dining rooms, the bohemian bourgeoisie debated the ethics of the machine. The first had been installed unobtrusively in leading doctors' surgeries, and as they spread across the country, schoolteachers and bank managers and creative consultants and publishers met for cocktail parties, suppers, restaurant lunches, and the conversation turned to the machine, the machine, again and again, the machine. "I saw one," said Kate Boothroyd, sucking on a cigarette, "on Kensington High Street. There was a line a bloody mile long--madness." A temporary silence settled over the Broads' dining table, broken by the hostess. "And would you?"

The door opened when she was still a few yards from the house. An old man made his way out, standing on the three steps leading down to the yard, straightening his back. He looked exactly the same as last time -- five years ago, or maybe seven? She couldn't quite remember -- thin, tall, with a wisp of nearly white hair that blew whichever way the wind fancied. She smiled at him. "Hi, Grandpa."

I'm so freaking excited I can hardly stand it. Tomorrow is my birthday, THE birthday. The birthday everybody waits and waits for and until you get there you just hate that all your old friends already got theirs and you're the only one without it yet, and sometimes you think holy-freaking-eff, I'm never going to turn sixteen, but then you do. Tomorrow, I'm going to find out how I die.

Well, I thought, that sucks.

The second time the stick turned blue, it was intentional -- they had good jobs, a car, a house, and a strong desire to take the next step. They'd surprised their parents with it on Mother's Day, and were immediately enveloped in a whirlwind of blue and pink, both grandmothers good-naturedly attempting to outdo each other with baby preparation. Ryan's father, the paragon of stoicism, had cried and hugged him, tears leaking out from behind Coke-bottle glasses. Annie glowed.

I remember everything about that day. It was right there at the mall, between the ice cream stand and Hot Topic, a big hunk of metal with a hole and a slit. There we were, my girlfriend the voyeur and I. We went for ice cream, she wiped a spot of vanilla from my forehead with one of those little napkins they give you, and then I did it.

The cart was draped with a white bed sheet, keeping the cart's burden hidden. The guests all turned to watch as the little mystery wheeled into the room, squeaking slightly, leaving a visible groove in the carpet. Norma stopped and stood; she made no move to uncover her secret, only smiled at the seven faces around her. Every guest had a fresh drink in hand and a hot hors d'oeuvre on a toothpick.

When some small-minded prick with a bag of pipe bombs decided commuters were responsible for all the world's problems this morning, it became the most vicious hoax in history. Nobody knows yet, but I promise you that at some point in the next eighteen hours, someone Googling the victim names is going to find our prediction list and our lives as they stand will be over.

This is the procedure now: A vehicle comes into the bay, paramedics pull a body out on an unfolding trolley, and a nurse meets them and asks them for the card. Sometimes she smiles, and you know that this one might well walk out of the hospital. Sometimes she gets a stony look on her face and you know that her eyes have flicked across to the patient to see who's going to die. Sometimes -- rarely, but sometimes -- she frowns.

Very expensive nanny. Very expensive tutor. Montessori nursery school priced competitively with Yale. Phonics, piano lessons from age four, one edifying vacation in a major European city per year, a diet of both organic and local produce cooked to order from a menu drawn up by a personal nutrition coach, and a white-noise machine. A portfolio of coloring-book samples. What was missing? Oh, yes...

The clerk set the gun on the counter. "There's a seven-day waiting period." Tommy peeled off an extra couple hundreds and slid them across the counter. The clerk hesitated, then pocketed the bills and loaded the weapon into a brown paper bag. "Some weeks are shorter than others." He added a box of bullets to the bag, then rang up the total. "You need any extra ammo?" "No," replied Tommy. "One box will be plenty."

I'm tired of looking at the machine, but there's nothing else to look at. Maybe it's supposed to wear down my defenses and get me to take the test, but I've made my decision. So I sit and stare at it. My planner is black with the blood of my tormented doodles. There is a brick wall outside my window. What's on the other side? My guess is that it's a locker room, and there are dozens of hot naked chicks inside, all with a thing for underpaid lab technicians who could, at the drop of a hat, tell them how they're going to die.

"The job of Prime Minister is no job for a weakling," said Derek Fortham MP, eyes shining in the TV spotlight. "Centuries of British politics have shown us that. It's a job that calls upon all of a man's strength. It's a job for men who know their limitations. Men with perspective. With drive." The audience was utterly silent, staring with goggle-eyed hero-worship as Fortham reached into his inside pocket and produced a white slip of paper, which he held between his first and second fingers and waved in time with his speech. "I always keep my death prediction close to my heart. At the age of fifty-seven I will be knocked down by a car; that's what it says. I don't fear it. I'll never run from it. When I see that car coming, I will stand with feet firm. That's the kind of strong leadership this country needs."

To any of the countless shoppers passing by, the kiss wouldn't have seemed like much. Longer than a peck, sure, but nothing overlong or excessive. It didn't appear to be anything special. But for Rick it was something else entirely. Any time he touched Shannon he managed to get lost in the moment, swept up like the hapless lead in some cheeseball Hallmark special.

Everyone knows that on the fourth day of ninth grade is when you get your results. I mean, that's the way it happens in our town; other towns do it differently. Amy, who moved here from Atlanta, said that in the big cities they do it when you're born, since they have to take blood from babies, anyhow, to test for HIV and that disease that means you can't drink Diet Coke. (She says she's going to be shot in a botched robbery, but I think she's lying. She also said her aunt is on Days of Our Lives, and I don't believe that either.)

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.