It only had to be wrong once.
But not today.
Story by David Michael Wharton
Illustration by Brian McLachlan
ALMOND
Administration and Maintenance Log, Cleveland Office
Feb 25 - No user requests. Tested samples 1-4. No problems.
Mar 4 - No user requests. Tested samples 1-4. No problems.
Mar 11 - No user requests. Tested samples 1-4. No problems.
Mar 18 - No user requests. Tested samples 1-4. No problems.
Mar 25 - No user requests. Tested samples 1-4. No problems.
Apr 1 - No user requests. Tested samples 1-4. Lab destroyed.
Apr 8 - No user requests. Tested samples 1-4. No problems.
Apr 15 - No user requests. Tested samples 1-97. No problems.
Apr 22 - No user requests. Tested samples 1-4. All predicted death by Mr. Potato Head.
Apr 29 - No user requests. No samples tested. No one is reading this log anyway.
May 6 - No user requests. I am beginning to suspect there’s a fundamental problem with a machine that tells people how they’re going to die, i.e. no one wants to know. However, we can all sleep soundly tonight knowing that, once again, Sample A dies by CRASH, Sample B dies by HEART, Sample C dies by SUICIDE, and Sample D dies by ALMOND, whatever the hell that means.
May 13 - No requests. How much, exactly, did we pay for this, and why was that money not put toward raises for the lab techs?
May 20 - No requests. Almonds continue to be deadly.
May 27 - Machine continues to predict the deaths of the four test samples. I continue to write entries in a book no one else will ever read. In fact, I asked Paul why he thought we weren’t getting any requests, and he said he didn’t even realize we had a machine yet. Way to spend the grant money, guys. Does anyone other than me even know we’ve had this thing since February? The samples were all printed on these neat, white business cards, like the kind you write your phone number on in a bar. “Why don’t we get together, baby? Just call me SUICIDE. Please don’t say no.” You couldn’t make me try this thing on myself for a million dollars. I’m certain the result would be MACHINE MALFUNCTION.
Jun 3 - I’m starting to wish I would have taken the job in Tulsa. The sample results on this machine are A) kind of creepy, B) a waste of time, and C) annoyingly vague. These samples are all from people who died already, right? If the guy choked on an almond, shouldn’t it say CHOKING? Or was he allergic? The other three are pretty straightforward, although now I think about it, CRASH could be a plane crash or a car crash. Or even a bike crash, I guess. They should send something that says how they died.
Jun 10 - 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.
Jul 1 - One request. (!) Results were kept confidential. Tested samples 1-4. No problems.
Jul 8 - No requests. I’m a little intrigued by the idea that someone in town knows how he is going to die. The rest of us are going on with our lives, worrying about paying bills or finding a good school system for the kids, but this one guy is nervously eyeing the mixed nuts aisle in the grocery store, or whatever. He’s got that little insight that no one in town (except me) knows about. I’m Alfred to his Batman, except I don’t know what’s on his card. Just that he knows what’s on his card. Unfortunately, I can’t think of anyone in comics who knows that someone has a secret identity, but doesn’t know what it is.
Jul 15 - Four requests. Apparently word is getting around. Three of them, all men, came and left, and I can only wonder what the machine says fate has in store for them. But the woman wanted to show the result to me. It was printed out on the same business card as the test samples, only hers said CANCER. She was really shaken up about it. I felt really bad for her, but then after she left, I thought what the hell, lady, what do you expect? It’s going to tell you how you die, right? You should probably be expecting cancer. In fact, it wouldn’t be a bad idea for the machine to have a label on it that says “Warning: Expect Cancer.” It’s not like it says you’ll get cancer tomorrow or anything. Seriously, we’ve had this thing for half a year now, and I see the first real result, and I think the whole machine is a bad idea. Plus, I haven’t seen any evidence that it’s even right! I’m the resident expert on this destiny-meter by dint of being the only person who’s read through the manual, but I don’t like it, and I don’t know if it works. And I refuse to use it on myself. Tell me that’s not screwed up. I wonder if the lab in Tulsa has one of these stupid things.
Jul 21 - From this spot on my chair you can see exactly 64 bricks. Sixty-four is divisible by two, four, eight, sixteen, and thirty-two. That’s four to the third power, or two to the sixth power. There are 64 squares on a chess board, of which 32, or one half, are taken up by pieces in the beginning of the game. Every time there’s a pawn exchange, one-sixteenth (or 6.25%) of the pieces are removed from the board, thus freeing up one thirty-secondth (or 3.125%) of the board. Just thought I’d share. 64. 64. 64. Oh yeah, and, apparently I wasn’t the only one that lady talked to last week. Paul told me today that she currently has cancer. She was told by her doctor that it went into remission. I guess I can see why she was so upset. Well, all the more reason not to use the machine. There were another five requests this week, and I got to see a couple. The first was another CANCER (plus, the guy was totally a smoker), but I don’t think I was supposed to see it. I just happened to see the card when he looked at it. And then, get this, the other guy got JOY. If you’re gonna go, that’s the way to do it, I guess. I totally want to hear about this guy getting smothered in an orgy somewhere. Well, I mean, not immediately.
July 21 - All right. Being honest here, I guess I was thinking sooner rather than later. Pretty bad, huh? Does spending a long boring day with a death machine make you cavalier about death? Well, the guy will be happy at least.
Jul 22 - I just thought of “Almond Joy”. Seriously, this machine is probably sponsored by Hershey’s. On the other hand, between ALMOND and JOY, it’s predicted cancer and heart attacks. Maybe it’s sponsored by a competitor. Nestlé or something. Their new slogan is probably “sometimes you feel like death by a nut, sometimes you feel like some other kind of death.” If someone tells me that his cause of death is MOUNDS, I’m swearing off candy bars for good.
Jul 28 - Two people came in for predictions this week, and apparently they didn’t want to share their information. Wusses. In the meantime, things here are ridiculously boring. I’ve spent the last three hours staring at a machine that wants to tell me how I die. Alternatively, I could look out the window, and stare at 64 bricks in a big brick wall. Why put in a window at all? Are there people on the other side of the wall, wondering what’s in here? No, because that wall doesn’t have any windows. So with the lack of things to do, my mind has gone to dangerous places. I have been sitting here thinking that Dr. Womack had a bloody nose this morning. It would be easy (if a little gross) to fish a tissue out of his garbage can and find out how he dies. I would know, and he wouldn’t. And what if it were CHLAMYDIA or something? That’s the kind of information I could use to get a corner office. Then I’d have something to look at, and I wouldn’t have to sit and think about ways to blackmail my damn coworkers.
Aug 4 - The woman with cancer came back in today. Her name’s Beth. Her doctor said that her cancer poses no threat and now she wanted a second opinion from the machine. I told her that part of the machine’s maintenance is rechecking the same four test samples and they’ve never changed. (I did not mention that I’ve been neglecting my samples testing for a while.
) Beth wanted to try again anyway. CANCER, again. So many people are so fiercely private about their cards. It’s really awkward that Beth shows hers off to anyone she meets, and then talks about it. It seems so personal. It’s like finding your neighbors’ secret sex tapes. You’re curious as hell to see them, but as soon as you hit play, you know you shouldn’t have. And then you give them back to your neighbor, but they see you leave it in their mailbox and they’re like, “what did you think about the part with the trampoline,” and you wish you’d never heard of videotapes or neighbors or sex in the first place. Probably. Anyway, the conversation with Beth was uncomfortable. She said if she could start over again, she wouldn’t have taken the test. She’d prefer not to know. I told her that I’d never seen any indication that this particular machine is accurate. If it were spewing out lies all this time, I’d have no way of knowing. They’re just consistent lies, that’s all. All I was going on to vouch for its accuracy was the pamphlet that came with the machine. I don’t think my argument was as persuasive as her getting the same results twice, though. She wasn’t very happy when she left. It’s too bad. She seems really nice.
Aug 11 - Things are picking up again. Eight people. And now that Beth is gone, I find that my qualms about knowing other people’s deaths have completely disappeared again. I’m just a peeping Tom. Bring on the trampoline!
Aug 18 - Our office has death fever. It’s actually less morbid than it sounds. I just mean that a bunch of the folks here suddenly got really interested in finding out how they’re going to kick the bucket. All right, maybe it’s exactly as morbid as it sounds. I wonder if they all went out for lunch last week and talked about it over drinks or something. I never got invited. I spend my lunches with my good friends Bricky and the Fatal Fortune-Teller. A bunch of people came in as a group to get their death cards, so I got to watch them share. I’ve got some interesting coworkers: Paul is going to die by FALL, Tammy from HR got LIGHTNING, and Mitch got OVERDOSE. He seemed to think it was pretty funny, but Tammy got a strange look on her face. Mitch had never struck me as the kind of guy who would take drugs irresponsibly, but, you know, there are an awful lot of drugs around here in the office that he has access to. And he took a trip with his girlfriend to Amsterdam last Christmas. Hmmmm… Mike from accounting got the weirdest one: GOVERNMENT. How do you die by government? Will he commit treason? Get drafted? Maybe he’ll happen upon who really killed JFK. Paul tried to get me to do it, but I refused. First of all, I still don’t want to know. Second, I don’t want other people to know. Third, I don’t have any proof that this thing works. I don’t know if they think this machine is like a party game, or if they all just really want to know how they die, but I stare at this thing every day, and I’m maybe a little scared of it.
Aug 25 - Apparently, getting your death foretold by a machine isn’t covered by insurance. Paul was fuming yesterday, but I think he’s crazy. Do you really want your insurance company to know how you are going to die? I’d think your auto premiums would skyrocket if your insurance company knew your death card said CRASH. They probably wouldn’t cover you at all. In related news, inventory showed that one lab was missing over a thousand dollars’ worth of stimulants. That’s serious business. Everyone thinks it’s Mitch. He looks miserable, but the question is: Is he miserable because he’s been caught, or because he’s stopped taking stimulants? Or is it possible that he’s innocent, and he’s miserable because everyone thinks he’s stealing from the company?
Sep 1 - Mitch is gone. Whether he stole anything is still uncertain, but he apparently missed a conference when he was in Amsterdam with his girlfriend, and that’s the official reason he’s canned. Sounds a little trumped-up to me. No one made a big deal out of the conference then. I tried to talk to Paul about it, but he didn’t seem concerned. Did he not make the connection between Mitch getting laid off and drawing the card that says OVERDOSE? Or is he just preoccupied by when and where he’s going to fall to death? There’s been a steady stream of people coming in asking for the test. I guess there was a bit on the news about it last night. Someone in New York took the test, and when she found out it said SUICIDE, she killed herself. Does that justify that the Morbid Medium Machine works? I think it means that people with suicidal tendencies shouldn’t use the stupid machine. I was thinking it would be nice if the machine would print the number for a suicide helpline every time someone got SUICIDE, but I guess it would be pretty futile. I mean it doesn’t say they’ll attempt suicide. It says they’ll die by suicide. Someone else got GOVERNMENT yesterday. I wanted to refer him to Mike, but there are confidentiality rules that I would be breaking. I’m like a priest. I store all these confessions, and I’m forbidden to say anything. A priest tells the confessions to God, and I tell the predictions to the maintenance log. Plus, I’m not getting laid, so that’s another thing I have in common with priests. I wonder if Batman has a priest. Anyway, maybe Mike already knows this guy from their top secret anti-government cabal.
Sep 8 - Wow. A family came in today, with two kids, and only the father spoke English. He made them all take the blood test. They looked terrified. And every single one of them came up with the same result: FIRE. I told the dad, and he got this weird faraway look in his eyes, and then he got really mad at me. He threw the cards back at me and called me a crook, told me to stay the hell away from him. Then he gathered up the whole family, all of them staring at me, and stormed off. I’ve been shaking for the last hour. I don’t think he’s going to tell his family. Well fine, I guess I’d rather not know, so maybe they’re better off not knowing. But…how will not knowing help them prevent a fire? Or, if the machine really is accurate, is it too late to prevent it now?
Sep 15 - Well, the machine works, I guess. It’s just got a sick sense of humor. The guy whose card said JOY died over the weekend. No orgy, no heart attack from winning the lottery. He was run over walking home from the library. By a woman named Joy. That’s really messed up. I’m sort of freaking out over this. How does a machine know the name of the person who runs you over? And why wouldn’t it say RUN OVER? The sample card said CRASH, not the driver’s name. It’s like it was toying with him. Is that what it was? A joke? A machine joking about death? It sounds stupid but why not? I mean, a machine isn’t going to die, right? That’s the big advantage to being a machine. Finally, after doing every little thing we’ve told them to do, a machine is lording something over us. Seriously, no wonder it says ALMOND. It delights in being ironically vague. I hate this thing. I’m sleeping with the lights on tonight.
Sep 23 - I had someone come in for a second visit today because—get this—he lost his card and forgot what it said. He forgot. Did I just meet the stupidest person in America? Is this person the reason that my instruction manuals are 60% warnings and all the good TV shows are canceled in favor of pap? I told him he should write it down next time. Speaking of how death makes people stupid, there was a new announcement from Tammy in Human Resources. All new employees will be subject to getting a readout from the death machine. I am required to pass on the results to her. Current employees are strongly encouraged to share their results with Human Resources, but it’s not required. I don’t like the sound of that. Also, I’ve gotten a ton of people coming in, with a lot of vague results. The JOY thing has me second-guessing all of them. One man got RAM. He was thinking goat. I’m thinking Dodge. So he’ll probably get smashed in a battering ram, just to prove us both wrong. Another one was BLOCKAGE. Will his arteries be blocked? Will his way to the hospital be blocked? Poor Beth is probably going to be killed by someone born in July. And what about Fallin’ Paul? I keep wondering if there’s a way autumn could kill him. Tammy already knows his card, and Mike’s, and a bunch of others. I’ve been trying to keep an ear to the wall to hear if anyone else who has taken the test will lose their jobs. I’ve heard that Dr. Caine drew SHIV. If that doesn’t spell bad news for your future, I don’t know what does.
Sep 30 - Someone managed to stump the machine, from the looks of things.
His card said $¢NIKCLE. What does that mean? Death by aliens? I asked if he had any ideas. He said he was in a really bad car accident, and keeps having dreams about car accidents every night, and wanted to know if that’s what would kill him. No, lucky you, you’ll be killed by a $¢NIKCLE, which for all I know could be a new kind of car invented ten years from now. I called our distributor at EndVisions, and they’re going to send someone out to see if there’s a problem with the machine. I have taken the liberty of hiding this log in my desk, and getting a new one that makes it look like I’ve been running the same four tests every week and that we’ve had all kinds of users who always keep their results confidential (except for Mr. $¢NIKCLE). I’m a little worried that I screwed it up somehow. I guess if he gets mad, I’ll blame it on the fact that I’m stuck in a room with no view and a death machine, and understandably, it made me temporarily insane.
Oct 7 - Well, I can take comfort in knowing that the EndVisions tech isn’t any more knowledgeable than I am. Actually, I take no comfort in this at all. Neil, the rep who came in, had no idea why the machine would say JOY when it meant RUN OVER. Or what it means when the sample says ALMOND. I’m disappointed. I kind of trusted the distributor to know these things. Neil’s pretty sure that Mr. $¢NIKCLE won’t die from a car accident. He guessed the cause of death was a dollar, a penny, and a nickel, like he’d make a deal with a loan shark but end up being a day late and $1.06 short. So, like I said, Neil’s no expert. Maybe this will be a mystery for the ages. He was impressed with my (fake) record-keeping, but even more impressed with the way the office has embraced the machine. He said that most offices don’t usually use it on their own employees, much less factor the results into their hiring practices. He was even talking about using our lab as an example of EndVisionary Thinking in the next newsletter. Apparently Neil helps edit it. He asked what my card said, and I lied and told him ELECTROCUTION. His card said STROKE. He seemed proud of that fact. He plans to go skydiving next summer, since he knows it won’t kill him. I immediately thought that he’d land in a lake, try to do a breaststroke, get a cramp, and die. I did not mention this to him.
Machine of Death Page 6
