Machine of Death

by Ryan North, Matthew Bennardo, David Malki ! (Editors)

  “I knew it! I knew you’d love it!” Jack rubbed his meaty hands together. “And here’s a little incentive for you. Let me take you behind the scenes.” He shuffled through the stack of printouts and produced what looked like an invoice, written entirely in Chinese. “Take a look at this!”

  “I have no idea what that says.”

  “Say hello to the proud new owner of two hundred thousand ProntoTesters,” Jack said smugly.

  Kelly suddenly felt her vision swim. She tried to talk, but her mouth was dry. Reflexively she sipped her tea, nearly scalding her tongue. Through a haze of steam she choked, “You bought out the factory?”

  “Every English one they made!” Jack beamed. “Did I tell you before? How those idiots tried to screw me on the Fat-It-Out? Cheap bastards quoted me three-eighteen American per unit, something like that—then, all of a sudden, when I have to fill ten thousand orders in a week, the price mysteriously jumps to five-oh-one! Trying to screw me over!”

  “That’s a big difference,” she acknowledged.

  “They blamed it on the exchange rate,” Jack said, tossing the invoice onto the counter atop the other printouts. “The dollar sucks, but not that bad that fast. In the end I paid the bill, I mean, I had to, or else that’s it for our sales—and we were charging thirty-nine-ninety-five-plus-S&H. But still.” Kelly cringed as he popped his knuckles, one after the other. “ProntoTester is gonna do great. I know it will. This”—he tapped the Chinese invoice—“this is me believing in you, Kel. Two hundred thousand now, two million tomorrow, twenty million next week! Who knows? This could real easily be our careers.”

  Kelly felt a knot settle in her stomach. The possibility of spending an entire career with Jack made her queasy. She took a cautious sip of the tea, and thought she felt the steam cloud up inside her skull.

  “Oh, and one other thing, no big deal,” he said. Kelly noted a sudden change in his tone—forced casual, now. “In case you get a call from some lawyer. There’s some B.S. class-action out there building against Fat-It-Out. It’s nothing—gold-diggers, trying to get a piece. It’s always the way when you make it big.” He waved his hand dismissively, as if he were all too familiar with the trappings of success. Kelly watched a bead of sweat roll down the back of his neck. “They’re going after the non-stick coating. Toxic something-or-other. It’s totally baseless, but in case you hear from someone—which you shouldn’t, because I’ve been keeping your name away from this—I want to make sure we all know the story.” He began to tick off points on his fingers. Kelly suddenly had the odd feeling that he’d had to recite this particular list before. “JBE has no role in manufacturing our products, we are simply marketers and distributors. JBE makes no warranty claims as to the condition or durability of its products. JBE relies on its customers to make determinations of quality prior to purchase. Many thousands of customers have reported no complaints with JBE products in the past.”

  He jerked up to look her in the eye, his red-rimmed gaze belying a deep, sudden intensity that gave Kelly a chill. “You got all that?”

  “Okay, show me this amazing idea of yours,” she told Julio, slumping into the uncomfortable chair behind his editing workstation. Four weeks now, and she was maddeningly no closer to a finished product than before—even though Julio always seemed to be working on something. He told her it was just how he filled his days, scrolling through the hours of useless footage they’d shot, looking for funny outtakes and re-cutting words and phrases into bizarre non sequiturs. He did this a lot, during downtime. He said it was how he kept his perspective.

  She’d even seen glimpses of other projects on his monitor, stuff they’d shot for Fat-It-Out or even older material predating her tenure—raw footage from campaigns like HairGlo-5, the hair-sculpting wax made with “real bee proteins,” or the TradeCenter, a kids’ bank that had unfortunately hit the market in September 2001.

  And she had to admit that Julio had his fake-busy work down to a science. Jack could burst in the door at any given time, and Julio would look every bit as productive as his timecard claimed he was.

  “Tell me what you think,” Julio said, tapping his spacebar to start the video playing.

  Sappy music swelled. On the monitor, handsome parents played with beautiful children. (Kelly recognized shots from the “Contemporary Family” stock-footage collection.) Julio’s voice, lively and bright, rang from the speakers: “Do you suffer from anxiety about the future? Concerned about what tomorrow may bring? Are you afraid of dying?”

  “This is hilarious,” Kelly grinned.

  The ProntoTester appeared on the screen with a flash. “Now, the solution to all of life’s uncertainty! The Machine of Death.” One of the phone-response kids stuck his finger into the device, then held it up with a cheesy smile. A close-up revealed that his test result was SKYDIVING ACCIDENT. Julio’s voice continued: “It tells you exactly how you’ll leave this earth!”

  Kelly burst out laughing. “You sound so serious!”

  “We’re gonna run this on air, right?” Julio deadpanned, stopping the playback with a keystroke.

  “Totally. You just made my job a lot easier,” Kelly said. “Oh, man. Early lunch for everyone!”

  Julio spun in his chair. “Awesome! But I’m still billing the hours.”

  “Go for it. It’s not my money.” Kelly motioned to the computer. “Keep playing! How long is it?”

  “So far I’ve got, like, thirty-two minutes.” Julio laughed at Kelly’s gaping expression. “Been a slow couple of weeks!”

  He moved his mouse and cued footage on the video monitor. “See, here we’ve got outtakes from Fat-It-Out—these guys are dying from CHOLESTEROL. And check this out.” He pressed the spacebar, and they watched a woman in Spandex do a series of awkward crunches inside a spring-like contraption. A big red graphic slammed onto the footage: SHODDY EXERCISER.

  Kelly doubled over with laughter. The Ab-Mazing had certainly been the shoddiest exerciser she’d ever seen, though it hadn’t stopped JBE from peddling them in no less than three successive infomercials as Jack tried desperately to sell his back stock. “Jack’s brain would go nuclear if he saw this. You have no idea how much money he lost on that piece of crap.”

  “Oh, I have an idea.” Julio half-twisted to glance back at Kelly. He seemed to consider adding something else—but a sharp rap on the door silenced him. He whirled back to the computer and cued footage of the ProntoTester onto the monitor.

  Jack burst into the room officiously. “Kel, quick question—you haven’t heard from that lawyer I talked about, have you? About Fat-It-Out?”

  Kelly shook her head. “No. Should I have?”

  “No! No, it’s fine. But if you do get a call, don’t say anything, okay? Let me know right away.” He glanced at the monitor and beamed. “Looks great! Coming right along! When do I get to see a cut?”

  Kelly swallowed. Luckily, Julio’s complicated timeline on the computer screen gave the impression of progress. “Soon,” she said. “Still tweaking.”

  “That’s why you’re gonna go far,” Jack said, leaning his bulk on the creaking desk. “Never satisfied!” He thumped the desk twice for emphasis, clapped Kelly heavily on the shoulder, and slammed the door viciously behind him.

  Kelly and Julio sat shell-shocked as the echoes of his presence faded. Julio was the first to speak: “I am so glad that guy is dumber than I am.”

  Kelly drummed her fingers on the desk nervously. Suddenly she felt stupid, wasteful. “How soon do you think we could have a real cut?”

  Julio’s new laugh was bitter. “You’re not serious. Give me a script! Shoot us some footage!” He looked at his watch. “When is this thing supposed to air? If I cared about that sort of thing, I would be freaking out right about now.”

  Kelly nodded slowly. “Yeah. Unfortunately, I do care about that sort of thing. The airtime’s been bought for weeks.” She stood and paced in a tight circle, trying desperately to make all the problems go away by waving her hands arou
nd—after all, nothing else was working. “I just can’t wrap my head around this stupid thing! All Jack can say is, he thinks it’s a drug test. Well, guess what! It’s clearly not. I can’t sell it as a drug test because he’s going to get us sued and we’ll all be out of a job! Why the hell does he think it’s a drug test?” She blew loose hair from her face and slumped back into the chair. The whole thing was asinine. She’d even begged him to hire a translation firm and get the schematics translated from Chinese, but he was paranoid about information leaking to competitors. So she banged her head aginst the wall for four weeks, and the result was that they were nowhere.

  But she was the superstar. This was the type of problem superstars were supposed to solve.

  “Well, you know why he’s on about the drug-testing,” Julio said, working his chair’s pneumatic lift in spurts, becoming shorter inch by hissing inch. “The thing does work, as far as that goes. It’s just—only for him, is the problem.” He twirled in a circle. “Well, and for me too.”

  Kelly looked up slowly. He’d lost her completely. “Back up like ten steps.”

  Julio spoke seriously, confessingly. “I…I’m addicted to overtime, Kelly.” He buried his head in his hands. “I got my eyes on some new rims. They’re shiny—so shiny.”

  “No, what did you mean, ‘it worked for Jack’?”

  “Oh, man, you know he tested positive, right?” Julio spun back towards his computer, clacking keys like a machine gun. An overflowing email inbox appeared on his screen. “Tested himself the first day. COCAINE AND PAINKILLERS.”

  “Oh my God,” Kelly said, leaning towards the screen. “That makes so much sense. That explains so much.” And then she realized what it was that she was looking at. “You hacked Jack’s email?”

  Julio turned to her with a shrug. “Not so much ‘hacked’ as ‘guessed a ridiculously obvious password,’” he said. “I mean, jackisgreat? Seriously, it was my first try.”

  That night, she spent six hours drinking beer and reading through Jack’s email.

  She discovered all kinds of stuff in that ill-sorted inbox. He was “involved” with half-a-dozen airheaded bimbos from a handful of sleazy dating sites, but that was par for the course. He was continually buying Vicodin from Mexican pharmacies, which was like a puzzle piece fitting firmly into place. And he seemed to have written to everyone he could think of who might shed light on his “hypothetical” ProntoTester result: several people from China, plus a bunch of people at various university email addresses.

  Running a search on the addresses popped up a series of file attachments sent from the Chinese client. She couldn’t make much of the actual messages because they largely seemed to refer to phone conversations he’d had with Jack (and were written with a command of English best described as “good try”), but the attachments were English-language research papers, apparently from the American team that had originally developed the C-18 algorithm.

  She clicked the first one open, eager for any clue as to what the device was actually meant to do. Unfortunately, the papers weren’t much easier to read than the manufacturer’s fractured English; all the scientific charts and technical jargon left her lost. She did, however, read with interest the list of initial results the C-18 had generated for the research scientists themselves: WATER, STROKE (like her own result), ASLEEP—and, disturbingly, HOMICIDE.

  For an alcohol-addled second, she forgot that Julio’s “Machine of Death” infomercial had been a joke. She sat very still in the darkness of her living room, letting the implications settle around her like ash from a distant volcano. STROKE sounded like it could be a way to die. HOMICIDE was definitely a way to die.

  But then she remembered Jack saying that the lead scientist (who’d drawn WATER) had gone on to die in a plane crash, and with that realization came the reassuring reminder that the ProntoTester’s slips were simply, maddeningly, just random words. Nothing in the research seemed to indicate anything different—although she had to admit that she didn’t understand much of what it did say.

  Even still, Jack had clearly gotten really agitated about COCAINE AND PAINKILLERS.

  And Julio did put in a lot of OVERTIME.

  And she had been on the crew team in college.

  Creepy coincidence, right? It had to be. Just…just logically.

  To set her third-beer, one-A.M. mind at ease, she scrolled through file after file of lab notes until she found a mention of the plane crash. It was a brief note on the very last page, describing how the Cessna returning the scientist from a meeting in New Mexico had suffered engine failure over the desert.

  Following that, she read some sketchy notes about a sudden loss of investment capital, and the subsequent termination of the research. Nothing at all about WATER.

  She closed the files and paced around the room awhile, telling her hands to stop shaking. She popped open another beer before returning to Jack’s inbox, and was just starting to feel better when she read about the lawsuit.

  Forget “building”—the class-action suit was built, over a hundred people claiming that the non-stick coating on the Fat-It-Out pans had flaked apart above 150°F. Which wouldn’t have been so bad by itself, except that the coating was also, apparently, highly toxic.

  She felt her gut constrict as she read a message from Jack to his attorney, idly suggesting that she, as producer on the campaign, should have conducted “scientific trials or something” on the pans to determine their safety. The logic being, if it were Kelly’s fault that JBE sold shoddy pans, then—conveniently—it couldn’t have been Jack’s fault.

  Luckily for Kelly, the attorney seemed to think that the excuse would stick about as well as the coating on the pans. Jack was pissed.

  She sat frozen for several minutes, unable to stop her mind from reeling. He was even more of an ass than she’d thought. Who knew what else she’d still find, lurking in that digital Pandora’s box of malice and despair? More plots to undermine her that she should know about?

  She kept digging, and found a message from two weeks ago in which marty@rockefeller-king.com had written: “Dear Mr. Bogg, I would love to speak to you about the creative team involved in the Fat-It-Out campaign, which I understand has been very successful for your company.”

  Jack had responded, in his typical idiom, “thanks! home-grown here at JBE. that’s why they pay me the big bux!! just kidding.”

  Rockefeller+King had come looking for her. Jack hadn’t told her, and true to his word, hadn’t even mentioned her name to them.

  She ran out of beer.

  When she woke up, her first thought was about her pounding headache. The second was about Rockefeller+King, a potential lifeline out of JBE. And she had to get word to them before the news broke about the Fat-It-Out lawsuit.

  She tried to remember if Marty was one of the tousle-haired hipsters who’d scoffed at her in her interview—but that was so long ago she couldn’t remember any of their names.

  She called R+K. A receptionist answered. Marty was out. Would she like to leave a message? Yes, that would be great. Her heartbeat drowned out the ringing.

  A youthful recorded voice informed her that he was on vacation for the next two weeks.

  Damn. Damn. The beep caught her off guard. She licked her lips and launched in. When she hung up she walked in a circle and repeated everything she’d said. Then she revised it. Mentally backspaced over it and made it better. For herself.

  She almost called back, but what would she say? Who would she talk to? She couldn’t think. Too much to consider. Too much to manage. The ProntoTester. Damn it!

  She drove to JBE with so many things rattling in her mind that by the time she arrived, she’d already forgotten the trip itself. She parked by the planter without noticing that the lot was mostly empty. The college kids had been laid off, one by one, as Fat-It-Out sales had slowed.

  No blast of cold air greeted her at the front door. A far-off buzz betrayed a fan oscillating in Jack’s office. The folding tables where the coll
ege kids had worked were empty; the rows of computers were dark.

  She found a cardboard box in the breakroom, and methodically emptied her cubicle. It took her awhile. She was surprised to find that it was difficult to do.

  She gently pulled a thumbtack from the carpeted wall and took down her calendar. This Thursday had been circled in red for weeks now. “Ship to network affiliates,” it said.

  Her conscience screamed at itself to get to work, then screamed back to burn this place to the ground. She closed her eyes, and tipped the scales with a mental slide-show of Jack’s constant awfulness, trying to recall every leering touch, every shady business deal, every pointless hour of weekend overtime selling junk to idiots. The lawsuit. Trying to sell her out. Her hatred frothed and roiled. Every muscle in her body wanted to strike something.

  “Hey!” Julio’s voice almost threw her into the cubicle wall. She snapped her head up and nearly knocked over a standing lamp. Julio ducked back around the corner, lifting his hands in mock surrender. “Sorry! Didn’t mean to scare you.”

  “It’s…it’s all right.” Kelly plucked a soft black rubber band from her desk, the last refugee of her belongings. She pulled her hair back, tugging it tight, unable to do it any other way.

  “Moving to a new office?” Julio asked slowly, looking around, reluctant to voice the other, more awful possibility.

  “Something like that,” she said. She struggled for something to say but couldn’t think of anything appropriate, so she turned to the desk behind her, weighing the advantages of taking the stapler home with her.

  He shrugged. “Look, I’ve been reading his email for years,” he said. “I know it hits you hard at first. Getting the rock-hard truth of how crappy this business really is.” He glanced down the hall, not meeting her eyes. “Then I look at my time card, you know?”

  “I’m happy for you,” she choked, and rushed past him, down the hall and into the office’s one small bathroom, hearing his half-apology echo out behind her before she closed the door and lost it.