Machine Of Death

[Terisse]

For those of you who don't know, The book, Machine of DeathMachine of Death: A Collection of Stories About People Who Know How They Will Die, Is finally out in print, e-book and, best of all, FREE pdf. Edited by Ryan North (Qwantz), Matthew Bennardo, and David Malki ! (Wondermark). So far, I've read a fair share of the first few stories in the collection, and I haven't been disappointed at all by the quality or quantity involved here. The illustrations are amazing in their own right, though not always professionally done, and the contributors are everywhere from unknown hopefuls to current webcomic writers and professionals, including Randall Monroe, our three esteemed editors, and a few more I recognize after extensive looking.

Yeah. So far, it's been a good mixture of funny, terrifying, weird as hell and totally thought-provoking. But that's just me. What about you guys?

The Introduction.

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 being
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.” But the realization that these
predictions seemed to revel in turnabout and surprise put a damper on
things. It made the predictions more sinister: yes, skydiving should
be safe if you were going to be buried alive, but what if 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.
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.

Edit: I forgot to include this. Free pdf links, for two-page and single-page formats.