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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.

It could be that the machine does more than tell you where you’re going to die. It let’s you choose to change it. If you ask it again, it’ll try again. People always think that dying by overeating ice cream is going to be a good death. Obesity, however, is never a good death. And then there’s the person who gets the dream card: the one that tells him he’s not going to die. Or at least he thinks it’s saying that he’s not going to die. What happens to that guy? He dies, of course. Everybody dies. He dies in the most unexpected way, of course. More unexpected than the card says.

Getting hit by a sign that says: “live forever” as an advertisement for face cream. Something silly like that. Then there’s the doctor angle. What are the doctors trying to hide? Why won’t they let people get two cards? So many mysteries to fill in. Who should narrate it? A wanna-be doctor? It should be somebody knew to the business, somebody who doesn’t understand the business he is in. Who controls the machines? It’s not the doctors. Never the doctors. It’s the funeral home directors. They’re the ones with the machines. Damn funeral directors. It’s family run, and it’s a package deal: you want the card, you have to sign up for the full burial package. The works. If you don’t hit the minimal threshold, you don’t get the machine. But the machines are stored and used it places other than funeral homes. They found that getting people into funeral homes to use the machine was impossible. Putting it in the local mall, however. That was possible and could be done.

That’s a sick angle. We’ll see where I go with it.