The machine was large and dominated the center of the doctor’s office. I didn’t think it would be so big. It’s funny how they don’t have any photos of the machine, not anywhere. The thought was that the doctors were always trying to protect them, afraid that if the machine got into the wrong hands, bad things would happen. There was the one-time limitation, of course. Everybody knew that. You could ask the machine the question only once. Nobody knew what happened if you asked it a second time. It just wasn’t done. Maybe it always printed the same answer, and people didn’t want to tax its circuits. Or maybe the answers were so incredibly different, that we wouldn’t want to use the machine anymore.

Every person had the right to know one of the things about their deaths. There were three questions you could ask: when you were going to die, how you were going to die. There was only one question. It was an inalienable right to know how you were to die. The doctors controlled the answers for our own good. There were times when the answers weren’t shared.

You didn’t get to ask the question until you turned twenty-six years old. It was too late for some people, of course. A surprising large percentage of people die before their twenty-sixth birthday. Only the person could ask the question. The machine didn’t work by proxy. You needed to stand in front of the machine for the paper to slip out. And the strange thing about the paper was that nobody else could read it. There was nothing printed on it that people could see. Only the person who the paper was about could read what was written. I guess it’s not so strange when you live your life knowing these things. But of course you didn’t. That’s why you asked, isn’t it.

The machine beeped and burped and acrid smoke poured out of different doors and windows. It was a chaotic scene. And then, just like that, it stopped. And a small white business-card-sized card popped out.