Machine of Death

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

  The next few years of my life were full of the usual girly things: boys, toys, sports, and school. Despite dire predictions in the early years of the new millennium, things were shaping up not too badly, and by mid-century anyone with a brain could get along pretty well.

  I completed a double-major in business and math, and found myself working in New York as a second assistant actuary. The Chief Actuary was a wizened old man with a gentle smile and an old-fashioned manner that hid a timid and conventional mind. There’s something about being in the business of predicting death that attracts the mediocre. But a job is a job, and with student loans to pay off it was good money and a convenient place to start what at that time I liked to think of as the long climb over the bodies of my enemies, all the way to the top.

  The Chief, as we called him, made a point of taking new associates out to lunch in the few weeks after their arrival at the firm, and I took that opportunity to ask him about the Delvice. Having moved to the big city, I was thinking again about that strange prediction from years ago, wondering what it really meant, and imagining the tall smoky men nodding their broad-brimmed hats over the skyscrapers while pedestrians screamed through the streets like badly-inked extras in an old comic book.

  I didn’t feel comfortable approaching the issue directly, but got him talking about the old days, before gene-mapping and other death-prediction technologies were routine. He had some good stories to tell, mostly about the changes in courtship and marriage that resulted from routine paternity testing, but when I asked, “What about the Delvice? Isn’t it a little surprising that it never caught on?” he looked like he’d swallowed a frog.

  “Hardly surprising at all,” he snapped. “It’s a toy.”

  “Gene mapping was a toy once, too.”

  “Gene mapping was a tool, even when it was too cumbersome to use. It was clear from the beginning that we could create meaningful probability distribution functions based on people’s genetic proclivities, even before routine measurement became possible. With gene mapping we could associate a given haplotype with a dozen possible causes of natural death, and sub-divide the population into risk categories accordingly. If someone had DFN-8 they were going to go deaf and have poor balance, and we knew what the odds were of them dying because of it.

  “The Delphi Device was too well named. It never produced anything susceptible to statistical analysis. Two people might die of cancer at the age of seventy-five and one of them would be told ‘Cancer’ and the other ‘Old Age’. Two people might die in the same car crash and one would be told ‘Drunk Driver’ and the other ‘Blunt Force Trauma.’ And the odds are that the one who had been drinking would get the drunk driver prediction.

  “Actuarial art is not just about numbers, it’s about categories, and we carefully choose categories of causes that matter to us. Diseases we can cure, accidents we can prevent, chronic conditions we can treat. Those are what matter. The Delvice used some other kind of categorization scheme, and it was too capricious to offer any statistical guidance, much less individual assurance.”

  I nodded and tried to look intelligently interested, although so far he hadn’t said anything I didn’t know. And nothing that explained his apparent hostility toward the machine.

  “Then there was the time element. Suppose you knew you were going to die of heart failure. At what age? Without that little bit of information you really don’t know anything that you didn’t know before, even in the old days when we just had things like family history and lifestyle to go on.

  “Finally, and most famously, there was the interpretation issue. I recall one case where a man was predicted to die from a falling meteorite. Astrophysicists spent a fortune following him around, waiting to get the rock still hot from its descent through the atmosphere. And of course he wound up dying in a museum during the making of a documentary about his predicament when one of the exhibits fell on him. So even in cases where there seemed to be no room for ambiguity there were too many possibilities.”

  “And no one ever tried to get past those issues?”

  “Oh, we tried. I myself once headed up a division of the company that was tasked with finding a way to aggregate sufficient data to make statistically valid inferences from Delvice forecasts. It was very nearly the demise of my career.” He grimaced at the painful memory. “At first it looked straightforward. There are techniques for dealing with imperfect data, but as someone once said, ‘data’ is not the plural of ‘anecdote.’ To perform any sort of statistical inference we must have some sort of homogeneity. And there wasn’t any way of imposing that on the Delvitic results. In the end, my team was able to prove mathematically that there was a kind of maximum entropy principle behind the predictive mechanism: prediction was only possible if the sum total of knowledge in the world remained constant. Anything else would have violated the second law of thermodynamics, which even a poor statistician like me knows isn’t going to happen. So in a sense the feeling of knowledge that the Delvice predictions created was just that: a feeling. The simple fact of knowing how you were going to die necessarily changed the world in such a way that the knowledge couldn’t do you any good. It didn’t create any new information—it just collected little bits of information from a million places and concentrated them in one place.

  “We called it the Ignorance Theorem. It was quite a significant result from a purely theoretical perspective, and in fact the mathematician responsible later went on to win the Fields Medal for his work on extended probability measures over non-Borel subsets. He was obsessed with finding a loophole in his original result, possibly because his own Delvitic prediction involved something that appeared both equally unlikely and unpleasant. To do with sex and horses, as I recall.”

  I opened my eyes wide with slightly salacious girly curiosity at this, and his pale skin took on a genteel flush, but he didn’t fill me in on either the details of the prediction or the actual fate of the mathematician in question. (My later research showed it was every bit as unlikely, and far more unpleasant, than even those fleeting scenes that had spattered my imagination initially.)

  “The board of directors, as you might imagine, wasn’t much interested in theoretical results, regardless of how interesting they might have been to academics. They didn’t even allow us to publish what we had, hoping rival firms would continue to invest in something we knew to be a dead end. It took me several years to make up for that failure, and I was fortunate to salvage my career at all. No matter what anyone tells you, they always shoot the messenger. If he’s very lucky, as I was, it’s only a flesh wound.”

  “So even if someone had an unambiguous prediction, they wouldn’t be able to do anything about it?”

  “That is correct. It’s a bit like these oddball quantum phenomena we used to hear so much about, that some people thought were going to allow faster-than-light communication. A fellow I knew in college got stuck with that one as his first job out of school. Apparently everyone who understood anything about the problem knew it could never be used to send signals, but someone in senior management at his employer decided it ‘just made sense,’ to use the catch-phrase of the arrogant and ignorant.” He shook his head sadly in memoriam to a career cut short. “Poor man. He was an absolute genius, a true prodigy in quantum information theory. I hired him as a consultant on the Delvice project, and his own contribution to the work was critical.

  “It was taking quite a risk on my part, what with corporate chairs being the only secure university employment these days, and him having been blacklisted. The motto of the modern corporation is: ‘If at first you don’t succeed, hide any evidence you ever tried.’ If that means ruining a few careers here and there it’s just too bad. That was the last intellectual work he was able to secure, although I understand he has continued his own theoretical research, despite turning his hand to plumbing for a living. Which I suppose has its remuneration—financially, if in no other way.

  “In any case, his experience was a cautionary tale for me, a
nd with his advice I was able to present the final result to the board without quite falling on my own sword.”

  I almost smiled at the sudden image of him dressed in ramshackle armor like a knight, but had the sense to restrict myself to a weak smile. He was clearly touchy on the subject of careers ruined by the ignorant asking for the impossible. But I could hardly help asking, “But how does that work? If someone had a clear prediction, say, ‘Death by hurricane,’ wouldn’t they be able to know that a hurricane was going to hit?”

  “Yes, but when? And where? And will they be in more than one hurricane? We had great hopes for such people, but unfortunately the general principle meant that only a few unambiguous predictions could exist, and even when we could find people who had them, it gave us nothing useful. A dozen people in Los Angeles were found with ‘Earthquake’ predictions, but that’s hardly new information. All it told us was that there would be people killed in California by earthquakes. ‘Film at eleven,’ as we used to say.”

  I let the obscure reference go. Film?

  “So even in the case where someone knew they were going to die in a singular global catastrophe—a war or famine or plague—they couldn’t do a thing to prevent it?”

  “Not unless they can also violate the second law of thermodynamics. It would be the equivalent of building a perpetual motion machine. Strictly impossible. Even if they published their prediction, no one would believe them, or the act of publishing it would cause the event to occur. Like a central banker warning of a panic and causing a run on the banks.

  “As I said, the marketing people did a better job than they could possibly have dreamed when they named the Delphi Device. The Greeks understood the vagaries of prediction. They knew that knowledge can’t be created out of nothing, and in this case the price of knowing one thing is the inability to do anything about it. I would have thought that someone with your name would appreciate that, Cassandra, but I suppose hope really does spring eternal among the young.”

  I’ve spent many years since then pondering what he told me, and learning far more math and physics than I ever dreamed existed in those days as a lowly actuarial assistant. I even broke into the company’s archives and verified that the theoretical work the Chief’s group did decades ago is sound. I’ve worked through the proofs myself, and I can’t see any way around it.

  By concentrating the knowledge of how one is going to die into a a few simple words, the same information is lost from a million other places that might prevent that occurrence from actually coming to pass. The Ignorance Theorem might be summed up as: “To know what is going to happen to an individual, there must be a loss of information about the group.” And by removing information from that dynamic context, we remove the possibility of change.

  I hooked up with the Chief’s quantum-mechanic friend a few years ago and found he had indeed continued to work on the Ignorance Theorem. He had been able to prove that it is the act of measurement that actually fixes the individual’s fate. Free will is a collective phenomenon—individuals only have it when they are an ignorant atom within a larger group. It is in the dynamics, the ebb and flow of information passing freely between individuals in a billion small ways, that makes the process of choice possible. The group can be in a mixture of a million “information eigenstates” at once, each representing a possible future, all evolving as an uncertain whole.

  The Delvice picks out one possible future from that mix and collapses the collective wavefunction into a single state relative to the fate of that individual. Which suggests there is one desperate way to reverse the process.

  I am not taking this course lightly. I went back to that old back-country mall where I got my prediction so many years ago and bought their machine, certainly one of the last in existence. It was cheap. I’ve been testing people ever since—my job, now in the upper echelons of the insurance business, has given me access to a lot of blood samples. It isn’t exactly ethical, but I have never been at risk of being caught.

  I can’t tell anything from the data. I wondered if there would be an increase in “Fire” predictions for younger people who were more likely to live until the bombs fell. But the Ignorance Theorem holds. There is nothing in the data that unambiguously pointed to a sudden increase in violent death. There can’t be.

  It was only a matter of time before the final thought occurred to me. I am the only person who knows of my prediction. Perhaps I am the only one who got it. The “meteorite man” was certainly unique in his fate. Maybe I am, too.

  Suicide won’t work. People tried that back in the day—terminally depressed souls who were told by the Delvice they were going to die of cancer and tried to shoot themselves or poison themselves or drown themselves. It never worked. They either failed entirely—the gun misfired, or the “poison” turned out to be candy—or they floated back to the surface and lived out their days as institutionalized vegetables until they died, as predicted, of cancer.

  What I need to do is not destroy my life, but rather disperse the knowledge of how it is going to end. If I do that, then perhaps it won’t happen. It is the only thing I can think of in my increasingly desperate quest. But I must not reveal to anyone what my prediction is, or they would have to share my fate.

  Fate. There’s another fine Greek concept.

  I’ve lived well these past years, knowing that tomorrow we all might die. I’ve never married, never had children. I regret that, if I regret anything. But I’ve been able to enjoy myself in ways that others, trapped in more conventional lives, might not. Known pleasures and adventures that were made all the more intense by the growing certainty that in the end I must forget them all.

  I’ve destroyed my machine. I really hope it is the last one in existence. I’ve not been able to find any others. I’ve done a bit of other destruction, too. Archives, records. It would be hard, though not impossible, for anyone to build a new one. And if they do, I’ve arranged things so that they will eventually be sent all the information I have on the Ignorance Theorem and the collective nature of free will.

  Penultimately, I have murdered my quantum collaborator. His body won’t be found. His prediction read simply, “Cassandra.” Death by me. When he first heard my name he gave a small start, and then a slow smile spread across his features and he nodded. He was a very old man, even for these long-lived times. His first words were, “I’m happy to say I’ve been waiting for you for a very, very long time. And I think I am indeed ready to meet you at last.” He was a good friend, and helped me to understand the nature of the problem and the only possible solution. But he knew too much. If he didn’t know the exact nature of my prediction he guessed the general sense of it. He had to die. And the machine said I had to kill him.

  As for me, administering electro-shock therapy to yourself isn’t easy, but I’m pretty sure my set-up will work. It’s amazing what you can find on iBay. Complete with manuals, even. This old Russian gear is supposed to be the best.

  I have it wired so there is a program of shocks that will be administered until I am unable to speak the pass-phrase, which is, as you might expect, “Global Thermonuclear War.” As soon as I say it I’ll be shocked again. Once an hour has passed with no shocks an automated email will alert the building super. Just one line: “Emergency. Send paramedics to Unit 10-C.” If that doesn’t work, my rent is due tomorrow, which will certainly bring him to the door soon enough.

  I don’t know why I’m writing this, even. Before I shock myself the first time I’ll scrub the drive and burn this machine.

  But I guess I wanted to review in my own mind what brought this to pass. Decades of knowing, or at least suspecting that I knew, how the world was going to end. With tensions rising again in Micronesia over thermo-electric rights to the Western Pacific Basin it is time to act. If I can disperse the knowledge in my mind, turn it back into a million random acts of a million anonymous human beings, put the world back into a superposition of possible futures, it might just be enough to prevent the end.
/>   The paramedics who are called to my side will be changed, however slightly, by responding to that call instead of some other. The doctors and nurses will have the course of their lives deflected. Perhaps I’ll even make the news, changing in some small way the minds of many thousands of people who will see a story about me instead of something else. In these things I still have a choice. If not in the manner of my passing, then at least in the manner of my living.

  There is no certainty I will succeed. Perhaps I am committing mental suicide for nothing. But I have to try.

  I have read a great deal on the effects of electro-shock, and there is a good chance I’ll be rehabilitated. I’ve given much thought to what I might do with the rest of my life, and concluded that the only way to avoid future disasters of this kind is for humanity to expand beyond just one world. We have been to Mars and back. It is time to go there and stay.

  The note beside my bed read simply: “Only one Earth is not enough.” I’m afraid to say anything more, afraid I will give in to some subconscious temptation that would eventually lead me right back to this point.

  I have done what I can. If it works, I will have saved humanity. And no one, not even I, will ever know.

  Goodbye.

  Story by T. J. Radcliffe

  Illustration by Matt Haley

  Contributors

  Camille Alexa lives with fossils, dried branches, pressed flowers, and other dead things in ¼ of an Edwardian house in the Pacific Northwest. She's fond of big dogs, warm bread, post-apocalyptic love stories, and the serial comma. Her short fiction collection, Push of the Sky, earned a starred review from Publishers Weekly and has been nominated for the Endeavour Award. More at camillealexa.com.

  John Allison lives near Manchester, UK and intends to keep positive despite all the evidence suggesting that he do otherwise. See his comics and his upbeat attitude at scarygoround.com.