Infinity Smashed Death Machine
Nov. 14th, 2010 04:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lb_leeA/N: You can blame this one on a book my friend gave me called The Machine of Death. It originated in a Dinosaur Comics webcomic strip about a machine that told you how you would die. Read that strip, and you will get the premise, and what The Machine of Death was about.
Since the Infinity Smashed crew are my general-purpose narrative guinea pigs, I found myself wondering: how would they react to knowing how they would die?
I. Specialist Grey
Specialist Grey squinted at the scrap of paper. He held at arm’s length away from him, then held it close to his face. He read it a second time. A third.
Then he put it down, frowning.
He wasn’t upset. There were few things that upset Specialist Grey, and death wasn’t one of them. After all, he had been prepared for the event of his own death since around the age of nineteen. Updated his will every three months, in fact. When you worked a job involving regular attacks by irate, panicked, or oblivious extraterrestrials, you had to accept the high likelihood of dying. Otherwise, you cracked.
Specialist Grey did not crack. And so for decades, he’d been full aware that he would die. Probably sooner, rather than later. He’d even been certain how he would die.
Until now.
Until now, he had tacitly assumed that his COD would be, quite simply, work. The exact phrasing on the card might have been different—‘shot’ or ‘set on fire’ or ‘smothered by tentacles’—but really, it would’ve been the same thing. He was also willing to accept the less likely but still possible end in a form of everyday causes—car accidents, cancer, heart attack—but honestly, he always figured it’d be work.
It wasn’t.
In fact, the way he would die made no sense at all.
And that was why Grey was frowning. He wasn’t upset, merely perplexed. He stared at the paper, trying to understand. How could he die that way? It was so… impossible. And not in the, “no, how can this be” way, in the, “my life does not have the parameters to allow this death to happen,” way.
They’d said the machine was infallible. Grey never thought once that it wasn’t. But to reach the end described on that bit of paper, his life would have to be very different than it was now.
Something big was going to happen to him, then. That was the only explanation. Something was going to happen to him, something earth shattering. Something that would change his life so dramatically that a death like this was possible.
He was, very likely, going to lose his job.
That bothered him far more than dying.
II. Bob
If there was one weakness of Bob’s, it was information.
He had to know things. It was his job, but more importantly, it was his passion. He hacked people’s accounts to find things out—where their money was going, who they were screwing, or even just what they were talking about with random people. He had to know things. The more information he had, he felt, the more he knew, and the more he knew, the more he could control that runaway freight train people called life.
So when that machine had come in, that damned death machine that everything Bob knew about physics, computers, and probability claimed couldn’t exist, he had to learn more. He claimed he was acting in skepticism; the damn thing couldn’t possibly work, he said. It was a hoax; it had to be. Damn it, he might deal with illegal aliens of an intergalactic variety, but the world just didn’t work that way!
But another part of him was morbidly curious. He’d been terrified of dying for as long as he could remember. Knowing how he’d go… well now. That was an important piece of information that could be used in many interesting ways.
So he signed up. He stuck his finger in a big metal thing that looked like a computer circa 1978, let it stab his finger, watched it shake, rattle, and hum, then spit out a slip of paper with a cheerful ding! He took it and moved on, shaking his head at the silliness of it all.
It had taken maybe half a second after taking the paper for it to sink in that now that he had this information, (if it was actually true, which it couldn’t be) maybe he didn’t want it.
What if it was some horrible, slow, painful way to die? His grandfather had died after a five-year cold war with lung cancer, his own organs rotting from the inside out. Twelve at the time, Bob had sworn that he’d kill himself before he let that happen to him. But would be able to, really?
After all, terrifying as cancer was, at least he knew how it worked. At least there was information about it. After death, there was no information. There was nothing.
He really would prefer not to die at all.
So now, here he was, sitting at his kitchen table at home, his top three shirt buttons undone, a day’s worth of stubble on his face, eyes bleary from lack of sleep. A big bottle of Kahlua sat at his left, a glass at his right, and the slip of paper, facedown, smack in front of him.
Bob had been staring at it for a while now.
He was going to look at it. He knew he would. To burn it made all his information-seeking instincts scream. This was the Holy Grail of information. He had to know.
Come on, he told himself. It was just a hoax. It couldn’t really be accurate. No one could predict that. They couldn’t even predict the goddamn weather reliably, so how could they predict his death?
He just stared at the slip of paper, facedown. He didn’t move.
Christ. He was scared shitless of a piece of paper.
Bob reached for the Kahlua and the glass. He would look at the paper eventually. But not yet.
III. Raige
Raige took his slip of paper with only one thought in his mind: will I go the way my mom did?
Everything took a backseat to that. Because sure, death was scary, and Raige hoped to have a good few years before he had to worry about it. But everyone died eventually; in some ways, it was the universal human experience. He could handle it, if he thought of it like that.
But he couldn’t bear the thought of his dad going through losing an immediate family member twice. The guy was still shattered from the first one.
He had been afraid, at first. Oddly, M.D. had helped him with that, despite being self-identified as the Least Comforting Person in the World.
“Come on, Raige,” she said. “Your mom was… what, forty? It’s highly unlikely to hit you too. That’s astronomical odds.”
Raige just looked at her. “You’re living in a tree, kid. You work for dragons. That is astronomical odds.”
“Well, yeah,” she conceded. “But still, that means that you can’t die that way. It’s too mundane. Besides, I already know how you’re going to die.”
He knew this was going to be bad, but he asked anyway: “How?”
She grinned at him. “Eaten by bears.”
He shoved her and groaned, but he laughed anyway. And after that, for some reason, he hadn’t felt so afraid. Maybe because after being attacked by bears, he really was ready for anything.
Still, he had put the paper away for a while, until he felt ready to deal with what it said. Just placed it under his mattress until he decided he wanted to know.
One night, without much thought or preamble, he took it out and read it by moonlight.
He slumped against the wall with a sigh and tilted his head back, eyes closed. He covered his face with one hand and smiled.
“Oh, thank god,” he whispered.
Then he started to cry, because he had never been so relieved in his life.
IV. M.D.
M.D. had known that however she was going to die, it was going to be improbably. She would stand for nothing less. After all, she had survived her home planet. She’d dislocated both shoulders, broken her ankle and her wrist, been stricken blind, been tranqed at least five times, crossed a desert no less than three times, and been sunk in a hypoglycemic coma, and she wasn’t even an adult yet. In the course of her short but highly eventful life, she’d been starved, beaten, exploded, electrocuted, shot, stabbed, tossed into volcanoes, hurled out of the sky, and attacked by bears, yellow lights, and man-eating trees. She had fought Number One and won--barely.
So yeah, no, no mundane death for her. Nuh uh, no way, no sir. Her death was going to be highly improbable, and likely flashy as well. A death her surviving friends would talk about for years to come, prefaced with something like, “Can you believe they fit a grand piano in there?”
So she was excited to find out. Not afraid—she felt she’d been living on borrowed time since the very start—but excited, and curious. Maybe her life was so odd already that her ‘improbable’ death would end up being ‘congestive heart failure.’ She’d be okay with that. At the rate she was going, she suspected that the most improbable death of all for her would be ‘old age.’
She’d stuck her finger in the machine, tried not to faint while it took the blood, and then staggered off with the paper, feeling lightheaded and vaguely nauseous. Once she was sitting down and no longer concerned about verticality, she read it. It was one word:
‘Coincidence.’
She blinked. She snorted.
Then she burst into snorts of delighted laughter.
“I knew it!”
V. Biff
Biff wasn’t even entirely sure why he’d gone to that stupid fucking machine. Like it mattered how he’d die. Like he cared. But well, it was there, and it was free, and it seemed like something to do that night.
So he went and got his paper. Then he’d stuffed it in his pocket and promptly forgot about it. Reading, even a tiny slip of paper that couldn’t have held more than a sentence, wasn’t something he just did. He preferred to do it in his own time, on his own, where no one could mock his reading speed.
At dusk, when he finally remembered it again, he sat at the cheap folding table under the one remaining working light bulb in his crappy apartment. He grabbed a beer, fished the paper slip out of his pocket, and smoothed it out onto the tabletop. He took a deep gulp from the bottle, and looked down.
It was shorter than he’d thought, only one word. Seven letters. Even with his dyslexia, it didn’t take him long to read it.
‘Suicide.’
Biff made a mirthless sound. He looked up at the ceiling.
“Yeah, no shit,” he told it. “I been dying of that for years.”
VI. Thomas
“Hey, come on, I’m not lying, there really is this machine that’ll tell you how you’re going to die!”
“Yeah, sure, babe.”
When M.D. told him, Thomas didn’t believe it. It sounded flagrantly like a line of M.D. BS, and he knew better. When Raige told him, he still didn’t believe it, because he knew Raige didn’t know better. But when Bobcat told him, Thomas finally decided that yes, there was in fact a machine that could tell you exactly how you’d kick the bucket.
Considering his life circumstances, it wasn’t much of a stretch.
“See?” M.D. said. “I told you it was real. Now come on.”
She didn’t grab him, but she made motions as though trying to usher him towards the machine.
“Why?” Thomas asked.
“Don’t you want to know?” She asked.
“Not really.”
That stopped her flat. She blinked at him. “Really?”
Thomas thought it over for a moment, but only a moment. “Yup. Really.”
“But… why not?”
Thomas shrugged. “I don’t want to know. I mean, what good would it do me?”
M.D. frowned, chewing her thumbnail. It was obvious she hadn’t really considered the question. “Don’t you like to know what’s coming?”
Thomas snorted. “Babe, that’s not knowing what’s coming. That’s like being in chapter two of the book called Your Life, reading just the last sentence, and saying you know what happens. It won’t make any sense just on its own like that.”
“How do you know? Just because mine doesn’t make sense…”
“M.D.,” Thomas said, drawing out each word, “I don’t want to know. Okay?”
He only called M.D. by her name on special occasions, and she knew it. She stopped. She held still for a while, thinking it over. Then she nodded and her expression softened.
“Okay,” she said. “You don’t need to know.”
Thomas nodded back at her. “You got it.” Then he grinned at her. “Besides, why ruin the fun? I’m a lot more interested in how I’m going to live.”
VII: Specialist MacIntire
Specialist MacIntire went to the machine to get his piece of paper, more out of bored curiosity than anything. He wasn’t sure what he expected, or if he believed it. But hey, why not? It was like reading a horoscope or reading a fortune cookie, likely bullshit but not likely to hurt you. So he went to the machine, stuck his finger in it, and waited for his COD.
The moment it came out, he took it and read it. Then he frowned.
“‘Authorly edict?’” He read incredulously. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
Since the Infinity Smashed crew are my general-purpose narrative guinea pigs, I found myself wondering: how would they react to knowing how they would die?
I. Specialist Grey
Specialist Grey squinted at the scrap of paper. He held at arm’s length away from him, then held it close to his face. He read it a second time. A third.
Then he put it down, frowning.
He wasn’t upset. There were few things that upset Specialist Grey, and death wasn’t one of them. After all, he had been prepared for the event of his own death since around the age of nineteen. Updated his will every three months, in fact. When you worked a job involving regular attacks by irate, panicked, or oblivious extraterrestrials, you had to accept the high likelihood of dying. Otherwise, you cracked.
Specialist Grey did not crack. And so for decades, he’d been full aware that he would die. Probably sooner, rather than later. He’d even been certain how he would die.
Until now.
Until now, he had tacitly assumed that his COD would be, quite simply, work. The exact phrasing on the card might have been different—‘shot’ or ‘set on fire’ or ‘smothered by tentacles’—but really, it would’ve been the same thing. He was also willing to accept the less likely but still possible end in a form of everyday causes—car accidents, cancer, heart attack—but honestly, he always figured it’d be work.
It wasn’t.
In fact, the way he would die made no sense at all.
And that was why Grey was frowning. He wasn’t upset, merely perplexed. He stared at the paper, trying to understand. How could he die that way? It was so… impossible. And not in the, “no, how can this be” way, in the, “my life does not have the parameters to allow this death to happen,” way.
They’d said the machine was infallible. Grey never thought once that it wasn’t. But to reach the end described on that bit of paper, his life would have to be very different than it was now.
Something big was going to happen to him, then. That was the only explanation. Something was going to happen to him, something earth shattering. Something that would change his life so dramatically that a death like this was possible.
He was, very likely, going to lose his job.
That bothered him far more than dying.
II. Bob
If there was one weakness of Bob’s, it was information.
He had to know things. It was his job, but more importantly, it was his passion. He hacked people’s accounts to find things out—where their money was going, who they were screwing, or even just what they were talking about with random people. He had to know things. The more information he had, he felt, the more he knew, and the more he knew, the more he could control that runaway freight train people called life.
So when that machine had come in, that damned death machine that everything Bob knew about physics, computers, and probability claimed couldn’t exist, he had to learn more. He claimed he was acting in skepticism; the damn thing couldn’t possibly work, he said. It was a hoax; it had to be. Damn it, he might deal with illegal aliens of an intergalactic variety, but the world just didn’t work that way!
But another part of him was morbidly curious. He’d been terrified of dying for as long as he could remember. Knowing how he’d go… well now. That was an important piece of information that could be used in many interesting ways.
So he signed up. He stuck his finger in a big metal thing that looked like a computer circa 1978, let it stab his finger, watched it shake, rattle, and hum, then spit out a slip of paper with a cheerful ding! He took it and moved on, shaking his head at the silliness of it all.
It had taken maybe half a second after taking the paper for it to sink in that now that he had this information, (if it was actually true, which it couldn’t be) maybe he didn’t want it.
What if it was some horrible, slow, painful way to die? His grandfather had died after a five-year cold war with lung cancer, his own organs rotting from the inside out. Twelve at the time, Bob had sworn that he’d kill himself before he let that happen to him. But would be able to, really?
After all, terrifying as cancer was, at least he knew how it worked. At least there was information about it. After death, there was no information. There was nothing.
He really would prefer not to die at all.
So now, here he was, sitting at his kitchen table at home, his top three shirt buttons undone, a day’s worth of stubble on his face, eyes bleary from lack of sleep. A big bottle of Kahlua sat at his left, a glass at his right, and the slip of paper, facedown, smack in front of him.
Bob had been staring at it for a while now.
He was going to look at it. He knew he would. To burn it made all his information-seeking instincts scream. This was the Holy Grail of information. He had to know.
Come on, he told himself. It was just a hoax. It couldn’t really be accurate. No one could predict that. They couldn’t even predict the goddamn weather reliably, so how could they predict his death?
He just stared at the slip of paper, facedown. He didn’t move.
Christ. He was scared shitless of a piece of paper.
Bob reached for the Kahlua and the glass. He would look at the paper eventually. But not yet.
III. Raige
Raige took his slip of paper with only one thought in his mind: will I go the way my mom did?
Everything took a backseat to that. Because sure, death was scary, and Raige hoped to have a good few years before he had to worry about it. But everyone died eventually; in some ways, it was the universal human experience. He could handle it, if he thought of it like that.
But he couldn’t bear the thought of his dad going through losing an immediate family member twice. The guy was still shattered from the first one.
He had been afraid, at first. Oddly, M.D. had helped him with that, despite being self-identified as the Least Comforting Person in the World.
“Come on, Raige,” she said. “Your mom was… what, forty? It’s highly unlikely to hit you too. That’s astronomical odds.”
Raige just looked at her. “You’re living in a tree, kid. You work for dragons. That is astronomical odds.”
“Well, yeah,” she conceded. “But still, that means that you can’t die that way. It’s too mundane. Besides, I already know how you’re going to die.”
He knew this was going to be bad, but he asked anyway: “How?”
She grinned at him. “Eaten by bears.”
He shoved her and groaned, but he laughed anyway. And after that, for some reason, he hadn’t felt so afraid. Maybe because after being attacked by bears, he really was ready for anything.
Still, he had put the paper away for a while, until he felt ready to deal with what it said. Just placed it under his mattress until he decided he wanted to know.
One night, without much thought or preamble, he took it out and read it by moonlight.
He slumped against the wall with a sigh and tilted his head back, eyes closed. He covered his face with one hand and smiled.
“Oh, thank god,” he whispered.
Then he started to cry, because he had never been so relieved in his life.
IV. M.D.
M.D. had known that however she was going to die, it was going to be improbably. She would stand for nothing less. After all, she had survived her home planet. She’d dislocated both shoulders, broken her ankle and her wrist, been stricken blind, been tranqed at least five times, crossed a desert no less than three times, and been sunk in a hypoglycemic coma, and she wasn’t even an adult yet. In the course of her short but highly eventful life, she’d been starved, beaten, exploded, electrocuted, shot, stabbed, tossed into volcanoes, hurled out of the sky, and attacked by bears, yellow lights, and man-eating trees. She had fought Number One and won--barely.
So yeah, no, no mundane death for her. Nuh uh, no way, no sir. Her death was going to be highly improbable, and likely flashy as well. A death her surviving friends would talk about for years to come, prefaced with something like, “Can you believe they fit a grand piano in there?”
So she was excited to find out. Not afraid—she felt she’d been living on borrowed time since the very start—but excited, and curious. Maybe her life was so odd already that her ‘improbable’ death would end up being ‘congestive heart failure.’ She’d be okay with that. At the rate she was going, she suspected that the most improbable death of all for her would be ‘old age.’
She’d stuck her finger in the machine, tried not to faint while it took the blood, and then staggered off with the paper, feeling lightheaded and vaguely nauseous. Once she was sitting down and no longer concerned about verticality, she read it. It was one word:
‘Coincidence.’
She blinked. She snorted.
Then she burst into snorts of delighted laughter.
“I knew it!”
V. Biff
Biff wasn’t even entirely sure why he’d gone to that stupid fucking machine. Like it mattered how he’d die. Like he cared. But well, it was there, and it was free, and it seemed like something to do that night.
So he went and got his paper. Then he’d stuffed it in his pocket and promptly forgot about it. Reading, even a tiny slip of paper that couldn’t have held more than a sentence, wasn’t something he just did. He preferred to do it in his own time, on his own, where no one could mock his reading speed.
At dusk, when he finally remembered it again, he sat at the cheap folding table under the one remaining working light bulb in his crappy apartment. He grabbed a beer, fished the paper slip out of his pocket, and smoothed it out onto the tabletop. He took a deep gulp from the bottle, and looked down.
It was shorter than he’d thought, only one word. Seven letters. Even with his dyslexia, it didn’t take him long to read it.
‘Suicide.’
Biff made a mirthless sound. He looked up at the ceiling.
“Yeah, no shit,” he told it. “I been dying of that for years.”
VI. Thomas
“Hey, come on, I’m not lying, there really is this machine that’ll tell you how you’re going to die!”
“Yeah, sure, babe.”
When M.D. told him, Thomas didn’t believe it. It sounded flagrantly like a line of M.D. BS, and he knew better. When Raige told him, he still didn’t believe it, because he knew Raige didn’t know better. But when Bobcat told him, Thomas finally decided that yes, there was in fact a machine that could tell you exactly how you’d kick the bucket.
Considering his life circumstances, it wasn’t much of a stretch.
“See?” M.D. said. “I told you it was real. Now come on.”
She didn’t grab him, but she made motions as though trying to usher him towards the machine.
“Why?” Thomas asked.
“Don’t you want to know?” She asked.
“Not really.”
That stopped her flat. She blinked at him. “Really?”
Thomas thought it over for a moment, but only a moment. “Yup. Really.”
“But… why not?”
Thomas shrugged. “I don’t want to know. I mean, what good would it do me?”
M.D. frowned, chewing her thumbnail. It was obvious she hadn’t really considered the question. “Don’t you like to know what’s coming?”
Thomas snorted. “Babe, that’s not knowing what’s coming. That’s like being in chapter two of the book called Your Life, reading just the last sentence, and saying you know what happens. It won’t make any sense just on its own like that.”
“How do you know? Just because mine doesn’t make sense…”
“M.D.,” Thomas said, drawing out each word, “I don’t want to know. Okay?”
He only called M.D. by her name on special occasions, and she knew it. She stopped. She held still for a while, thinking it over. Then she nodded and her expression softened.
“Okay,” she said. “You don’t need to know.”
Thomas nodded back at her. “You got it.” Then he grinned at her. “Besides, why ruin the fun? I’m a lot more interested in how I’m going to live.”
VII: Specialist MacIntire
Specialist MacIntire went to the machine to get his piece of paper, more out of bored curiosity than anything. He wasn’t sure what he expected, or if he believed it. But hey, why not? It was like reading a horoscope or reading a fortune cookie, likely bullshit but not likely to hurt you. So he went to the machine, stuck his finger in it, and waited for his COD.
The moment it came out, he took it and read it. Then he frowned.
“‘Authorly edict?’” He read incredulously. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
no subject
Date: 2010-11-15 10:27 pm (UTC)