This story was submitted to the Machine of Death 2 submission call, and wasn’t accepted, for reasons not least of which are because it is just over 10,000 words long. However, I really like the story, even reading it again more than half a year after I wrote it. I wanted to explore some of the surreal concepts behind the Machine of Death idea, and needed a bit more space for this world to inhabit. There is something so bizarrely unsettling about the idea of a mortality contained within a short phrase.
Without further ado, here it is. In the standard form, the title of the story is the words on the card that comes from the Machine of Death. It’s called “Moose Moose”.
And in case you are unfamiliar with the Machine of Death concept, you should read this first.
It was a steel and glass spiral extending upwards and forwards, before pulling back in rollercoaster-loop as it rose, twisting out of the view of any person standing in front of it within the enclave of high steel fence. The architecture left the individual isolated in the bright sun while the building and its inhabitants swooped backward in what might be a loop of impossible height, or, perhaps simply ending after twenty or so floors, once the whorl of the architect’s magnanimous project was out of view.
And so Maddie stood there for a moment, as the space seemed to intend that she ought to, absorbing on her face the glare from the glass above, twitching the edge of the cloth of her formal cotton jacket between her fingers, balancing expertly in her tall heels. Then forward, into the air-conditioned lobby.
The click of her heels on the marble were metronomic over the brush-cymbal HVAC tones. A sound system played the corporate theme at barely a decibel over a whisper, more suggestion of ambient electric tones than the familiar melody. Maddie approached the desk, where the stunningly beautiful security guard/receptionist raised herself on her platform behind her unused writing surface, and leaned forward in her formal cotton jacket to set the tone, and imply the answer to certain unspoken questions. The corporate logo helix in black-on-yellow shone on a button on her lapel.
“May I help you, miss?”
“Yes, I’m looking for the Complaints department?”
The formal jacket standing above her moved slightly.
“Do you have a complaint?”
“No. I mean, perhaps–I’m not quite sure. This was the only address on the website, you see.”
“So you do not have a complaint.”
“I have a question. PR said that Complaints takes all questions that relate to algorithm related inquiries.”
“You have read the FAQ?”
“On the website?”
“There is no other FAQ.”
“Yes.”
“And you still have a complaint?”
“A question. Which they said that Complaints would answer.”
“Complaints is quite a busy department, that being the nature of the department. Are you sure your question hasn’t already been answered elsewhere?”
“I… yes?”
“So you would like to Complain.”
“Well, no… I–”
“Complaints Department is through those double doors there. Please take this ticket and this form.”
“Okay.”
“Those doors, there.”
“Thank you.”
The woman sat and looked elsewhere. Maddie took the items from the surface of the desk and held them under her arm, while she quickly clicked across the floor towards the doors. They swung open at her proximity, and she walked onto the carpet beyond.
The edge of a moving walkway beckoned her, and she stepped on with a touch at the rubberized railing to maintain her balance under the acceleration. The belt pulled her near silently through the wide hallway: windowless, carpeted wall and ceiling, softly diminishing ranks of flat-screens. The many varieties of corporate commercial spots replayed themselves for her.
“Wish you knew more from your canonical reading? Wish that there was more in the cards?”
“…a Patented Algorithm, giving full-spectrum analysis in verb-form and tense…”
“…More Information; Your Information. You’ve heard the bottom line, now get it defined!”
“Take Another Chance, Dad! Take Another Chance Card, and know… more.”
“…my Doctor told me what I had to know, but then I had to know more. I Took Another Chance.”
“Patented Algorithm, with new contextual information derived direct from your canonical. Take Another Chance. Try Chance Networks, and start to know more!”
She looked down at the form, thinking to fill it out, but was stopped by a large bold-lettered message at the top of the form, reading “DO NOT FILL OUT THIS FORM!” And so she didn’t. The volume of the screens increased as she approached the end of the walkway.
She stepped off quickly, picking up her heels to avoid catching them in the grilled edge where the moving floor dropped away under the stationary carpet. Doors swung open quickly to reveal a room filled with chairs filled with people, talking loudly, holding up different colored pieces of paper in the air, changing the color and the height of their hands as directed by a static-tinged PA horn on the wall between three screens, all of them playing Chance Network ads. A line of people snaked the walls of the room, leading from a glass-booth-enclosed man in a formal jacket next to a door, all the way around to where Maddie stood. And so she stood for a moment, trying to determine where it was she ought to otherwise be standing. Behind her, on the closing door, was an advertisement poster image of a woman having an epiphany as she read a card. The card text clearly read the words, “purple shoe”.
Maddie didn’t like the thought of joining a queue without knowing if it was the right one to be waiting in, but the idea of simply finding a chair couldn’t be the correct decision. She looked at the materials she held. The form was blank, entries coded with combinations of number and letters, stern warnings of “FOR INTERNAL USE ONLY”. The tag had a punch-off tab, marked with a serial number, mated on the other half of the tag with a different serial number, a bar code, a proprietary data square, and in large red letters, “F1037”. She looked around the room for any sign, any indication of anything in the room matching these clues, finding nothing. Sighing, she felt her choice in footwear and formal jacket for the occasion, if nothing else, demanded quick action to match her visual impression. And so, Maddie purposefully made her way around the edge of the crowded room, trying not to catch her heels on protruding feet, snaring bag handles, and oscillating children. The heat of the room increased, as the HVAC system struggled with the heat of the living.
Maddie fanned the edges of her cotton jacket discreetly to cool the small of her back as she sidled up the the person at what seemed to be the rear of the line. A man in his fifties held his hat in his hand, moving air with it.
“Excuse me, is this a particular line?”
His voice blended with the monitors overhead, but his irritation broke through. “‘Patience’, it said! ‘Patience’! That isn’t information, that’s an insult!” He waved the Chance Card in her face.
“Personalized elaboration to clarify your life!” promised the monitor overhead.
“I understand the irony. We can all take a bit of irony. But this is abuse! This is sardonic, manipulative, exploitative, expulsionary, extra-propriary…”
Maddie decided to ask the next person.
“A Chance is more than information, it’s a technological step forward, a Chance to be proactive with your mortal future,” suggested the monitor overhead.
She tapped a woman standing hand in hand with her husband, holding an infant, two children leaning sleepy-eyed against the wall.
“Excuse me, is this a particular line?”
The family looked at her, saying nothing. She didn’t know if it was her question, or her, or something more dire to blame for creating this look of tortured ignorance on their faces. The woman looked confused, and apologized in another language, perhaps Italian, maybe Portugese? Maddie moved on.
“Integrity. Decision point. Neutron beam. Processed cheese food. Predatory insect. Information like this, contextual clues, to help you understand!” the screen suggested.
The next in line was a woman wearing the exact same brand of formal cotton jacket as Maddie, but without the heels and the skirt, with slacks and boots instead. She tried not the look at the jacket as she asked, “Is this a particular line?”
“A particular line? This is C particular line.”
“I’m sorry?”
“Look at your ticket, honey. See, here on mine. ‘C7491.’ C particular complaint, C particular line.”
“All of this line?”
“As far as they’ve told us. Here, let me see your ticket..” the woman plucked it from underneath the elbow of Maddie’s jacket. “No, no, no. You are F general. You can tell by the number. F, 10, and then number. You want a different line.”
“A different line?”
“F general. Sorry, honey. Don’t know where.”
The woman looked upwards as if to continue watching the monitor above, which intoned, “Each of us in an individual, and for each of us there is an individual death. And yet the canonical cards read all the same! Why not pick a card, algorithmically derrived, specifically for you? Take Another Chance!”
Maddie stood confused for a moment, and then slowly drifted towards the glass-enclosed booth, hoping that perhaps there was a sign, or maybe a chance to ask where it was that she should be. She wondered if perhaps she should have just kept waiting on the phone at home.
The people closer to the head of the line watched her suspiciously, as if they expected her to try and duck into line in front of them at any moment. Within ten feet of the booth, she was able to see a list printed on a sign riveted to the front of the booth, but there was a gaggle of strollers blocking her view. She bent down to peer through the people, and was almost knocked down as a pair of doors on the nearby wall flew open, and collided with her hip. Three maintenance men pushed in a new glass-enclosed booth, complete with formal-jacket-enclosed man enclosed-within. Theypositioned it next to the door in front of her. A Klaxon sounded, and everyone in the room jumped.
“F general! F general line! F general please step to the booth!”
There was a rush, and shouting, as people from all over the room attempted to join the line, stepped out of the old line allowing people to move up, stepped out of line before realizing they were already in the correct line and attempting to reclaim their spots, went after better seats vacated by people who joined lines or tried to improve their positions, either farther or closer to air conditioning vents, doors, other people, and the screens. Children took the opportunity to increase the level of chaos at hip-level and below.
By the time Maddie had securely reattained her posture on her heels, the line had formed behind her and snaked either through the center of the chairs, or along the wall, though this was disputed by proponents who stood to gain or lose by either eventuality.
“STEP UP please!”
It was the man in the booth. Maddie took a half-step forward and pointed her voice towards the slanted metal grill in the shape of the helix logo placed in the glass.
“Tag please.”
She slid it into the document slot.
“Form.”
That followed.
“Complaint?” His pen hovered over the form.
“I have a question.”
“Have you read the FAQ?”
“Yes, I–”
“And you would still like to complain?”
“I’d like to ask–”
“No questions here, miss. Through the doors, and head into the light.”
“The light?”
“The lights. Follow the lights.”
The doors buzzed, indicating they were unlocked. She took her form and tag, and stepped to the door, pressing on it gingerly. She just missed the unlock, and the doors didn’t move.
“Smartly, please! Press smartly!” The voice from the booth reminded her.
The buzz again, and she was through. It was a white hallway, with moisture damaged acoustical tiles that appeared to date back further in time than the building might have existed, extending above her in what appeared to be equal directions to the left and to the right. She stood still, looking for any sign to indicate direction. Then, from recessed LEDs in the wall, a red arrow illuminated and pointed towards the left. She followed, and as she clicked down the linoleum of the hall more arrows lit. She must be heading in the right direction, but should she slow down and let the arrows precede her? It wasn’t clear. Suddenly the arrows stopped, a buzzer sounded, and a door popped open. Maddie stopped, turned quickly, and stepped into the doorway as it closed behind her.
In front of her was a man in a formal jacket, bent low over a desk, thinning hair presented to her inquisitively, as if it were shrouded face peeking through the dark. There was a chair in front of the desk, but she decided to remain standing. A dusty terminal on the desk, dark, but fan humming. The tag on the desk read: “Milten”. Behind the desk, was a typical advertisement poster for the company, featuring one of their yellow cards with the watermarked helixed logo, marked with a Chance, reading “linguine”.
The man looked up from his writing, and was taken aback by the sight of her in that way that only a middle-aged man can, upon suddenly realizing that he was alone in a room with a younger woman. Maddie wasn’t sure if that meant that he thought she was attractive or only that he was awkward.
“Please be seated… Ms…?”
“Roubacheau. Madeline Roubacheau.”
“Oh–I’m sorry. Form please.”
She presented it.
“And name again.”
She repeated it. He transcribed it to a particular box on the form.
“A general complaint, is it?”
“A question.”
His pen paused in its scratching path. “I’m sorry, you must have followed the wrong lights.”
“No, I was told that my question could only be answered in the Complaints department.”
“You were.”
“Yes.”
“And you’ve read the FAQ?”
“Yes.”
“And you still have a complaint?”
“A question, but yes.”
“Well Ms. Roubacheau, let’s call up your history and see what we can do about your complaint.”
She thought about it, but decided at this point to just let it go. He looked up and smiled politely, as if waiting for her.
“I’m sorry?”
“Your cards, miss? I assume you have brought them?”
“Oh yes, I’m sorry.”
From inside her jacket, she retrieved her case for her personal set, that she had received free on the occasion of getting her fifth. The slim glass-plastic clamshell would fit up to twenty cards, and had position locks to fit into a case storage shelf for her home catalog of excess cards sorted into separate twenty-cases, the shelf which she would receive as a free gift on the occasion of her two-hundredth. She wasn’t sure at what point she received a free laser name-engraving on her twenty-case, but her clamshell was still fresh, its unmarrable surface shining in the dull office florescents. She clicked it open, tapped out the cards, all five of them. She laid them in a stack on the desk. Politely averting his eyes from the printed words, the un-introduced Mr. Milten selected the top card in his small fingertips, and deftly slid it into the slot in the surface of the desk, pulled it out, and replaced it sideways on the small stack. Pen still over the form, he squinted at the terminal’s monitor, and began to write quickly in efficient strokes.
“Five cards then. Not so many…”
“Yes.”
“Have you had your canonical? We have no record of you receiving it through Chance Networks.”
“Oh, yes. I… I don’t carry it with me, though.”
“I see.” He wrote in small letters to fit a great deal of words in a particular box.
“Your file notes your canonical death prediction regardless of whether it has been given to you, of course. The algorithm cannot write new Chance cards without it.”
“I understand.”
He held the pen aloft, and wasted time enough to give her another small glance and smile.
“So what seems to be your complaint?”
“I have a question about the algorithm.”
“Our proprietary Chance algorithm is the key to the derivation of your specific Chance cards, yes.”
“Yes, but why are they so… obscure?”
“Obscure, miss?”
“Oblique.”
“Oblique?”
“Obtuse?”
“I’m not sure I understand, Ms. Roubacheau.”
“Well, look.”
She spread the top three cards out along the desk, turning them so they would face Mr. Milten. He did not look at the cards, but instead looked at his screen.
“I see nothing out of the ordinary.”
“This one says ‘anticipatory’.”
“Yes.”
“And this one is ‘coniferous’.”
“Yes.”
“And this one: ‘yellow’. What is that supposed to mean?”
“You have read the FAQ?”
“Yes.”
“Then you understand that Chance cards are often like this. They all refer to the contextual circumstances of your canonical death prediction. Interpreted through our proprietary algorithm, the Chance cards spread out in subject and circumstance from the singular cause of death.”
“No, I understand what they are. It’s just that–”
“It’s like a meadow of grass, Ms. Roubacheau.”
“I’m sorry?”
Mr. Milten leaned back in his chair, smiling to someone, but not to Maddie. “A meadow is made from many different blades of grass. Each is singular, a leaf unto itself. But without all of them, together, there would be no meadow. A leaf of grass on its own is nothing. A clipping. A dead thing. But together…” he gazed off above her head.
She said nothing. She imagined she would hear his spiel one way or another. And so allowed, he continued.
“Many people are unhappy with their canonical death predictions. They are so sparse, and so often ironic. The incontrovertible truth of them is no consolation for the additional mystery they create. What the technology of Chance Networks achieves, using our patented algorithm, is to calculate contextual synonyms, related terms, other useful adjectives to help describe the circumstances of the death prediction. Your fate is derived through the algorithm, one Chance at a time, sketched all the way from the canonical event, back through the fabric of time, to now. We don’t change the death, we add to it. Each new card generated from the algorithm is another Chance to understand. We help paint the entire picture. A picture–of a meadow. You see Ms. Roubacheau?”
“But these cards don’t make anything clearer.”
“Well, you do have only five. The algorithm is a fickle thing, Ms. Roubacheau. As advanced as it is, it can only do what it is capable of doing. Each is a Chance, but only a single Chance, if you catch my meaning.”
Mr. Milten withdrew a small box from a shelf underneath his surface, with an air of repressing a small amount of excitement.
“Ms. Roubacheau, because of your concern, I am able to offer you a complimentary Chance card. If you would be so kind as to insert your finger, we can let the algorithm continue its work…”
“No.” Maddie crossed her arms on her chest.
“You don’t want another Chance?”
“Someone must be able to tell me how I’m supposed to interpret these cards.”
Mr. Milten placed the box on the desk, and looked concerned.
“Now, we at Chance Networks are aware of the so-called cottage industries of ‘Chance Interpreters’ out there, doing a secondary business in… ahem… ‘reading’ our cards. But we take a firm stance that there is no way to conclusively add to the picture of what the algorithm reads from the canonical prediction, other than through the algorithm itself. We do not recommend or condone using these services, and there are several lawsuits pending regarding claims certain of these outside service entities make regarding our… intellectual property.”
“But certainly someone within the company could tell me what I’m supposed to do with these?”
Milten laughed. “I’m sorry miss, but I’m but a customer service operative. What those folks in engineering do, is–ahem–quite outside of my expertise. I could perhaps allow you to review one of our instructional videos…” he began opening drawers.
“No thank you. Perhaps there is someone in engineering I could speak to?”
“I wouldn’t know about that, Ms. Roubacheau. In the meantime, let’s just mark that you have accepted the Chances surrounding your death…” he reached for his pen.
“I don’t accept these.”
He blinked. “I’m sorry?”
“I can’t accept these. How could I?”
“The algorithm is infallible, Ms. Roubacheau. Derived from the canonical Machine of Death design, the truth is unquestionable.”
“But if I don’t understand them, how can they mean anything to me?”
“Well, let me show you a few of mine.” He reached in his jacket pocket, and pulled out a custom metal case, inscribed with his name, just as on the sign on the desk. “See here?” He held the yellow card he extracted delicately by the edges. “ ‘Rotini’, reads this one. Pasta-related, not unlike the poster behind me, which is why I chose it to decorate my workspace,” he gestured behind him and grinned.
“I used to think that meant pasta salad, as if I would die of my canonical while on a picnic or at a barbecue. But then I got this one, which says ‘bi-plane’. Perhaps an airshow or county fair then? But then! This one: ‘labyrinthine’. Which relates, I believe, to a particular school trip I took in my college days. Making the pasta-related Chance readable in an entirely new light!”
Maddie did not share his enthusiasm. “Are pasta-related Chances supposed to mean something in particular that I don’t understand?”
Mr. Milten sighed, and rolled his eyes back, appearing to be thinking about a problem, but what sort of problem, it was difficult to say.
“Have you read any Zen philosophy, Ms. Roubacheau?”
“I have, and I find it abhorrent.”
“I see.”
Maddie placed her hands on her knee, and leaned forward in her formal jacket.
Milten twitched his pen back and forth on the desk. “Are you sure I cannot simply mark down that you accept these Chances–just in the effort to… push things along?”
“I do not accept them.”
“Well.” He glanced at his watch, and pushed what might have been a bead of sweat back into his hairline. “Well–perhaps there is someone I could refer you do on the engineering floor.”
Maddie smiled. “I would appreciate that very much.”
He hastily made a series of marks on her form, writing with much less precision.
“Please take this, and proceed down the hall to your right. Up the steps, around the corner, and to the elevator. You want the sixth floor, room 77, a Mrs. Dantez.”
She gathered her cards, replaced the case in her pocket. As she turned to leave, Milten stopped her.
“Oh, before you go–can you give me three adjectives to describe ‘panther’?”
“Panther? Like the predatory cat?”
“Yes, but not those adjectives. Like what you think of when you think of a panther.”
“Oh. Um, ‘feline’, ‘sharp’, ‘black’… ‘hungry’–”
“Three will do, thank you!” He jotted on a pad on the side of his desk. “Have a good day!”
In the elevator, the buttons were marked with letters, rather than with numbers. Maddie didn’t feel like going back to inquire, so she took a chance, and pressed the button with “F” on it. The corporate music was louder in the elevator, but the volume from the screens was lower.
She clicked down an oppressively warm hallway, holding her paperwork lightly in one hand to try and keep the moisture from her fingers from marking them. She knocked twice on the door marked 77, all alone on a particular stretch of hallway, and opened the door.
A rush of overly-cooled air met her. Opposite the door was a counter, where a bored-looking receptionist read a magazine, while he twisted back and forth in a low office chair. Behind him was a mirror, and two passages leading in either direction. On wall with the doorway were a line of three chairs to the left, one of which was occupied by a large man with a white cowboy hat, who sat next to a small table just large enough for the potted plant on top of it. The room was also a hallway, extending in either direction. She approached the desk.
Without looking up, the man said, “have a seat, she’ll call when she’s ready for you.”
Maddie took chair closest to the door.
“Good day, miss.” It was the man wearing the hat.
“Hello.” She began to play with the edges of her jacket, as if she was picking off lint.
“Could I… ask you a favor?”
Maddie looked at him for a moment, but he was looking at the receptionist, as if making sure the man was focused on his magazine.
“It’s a bit of a proposition.”
She froze, and prepared to stand if necessary.
“Nothing untoward, or out of the ordinary, I assure you. I simply offer that I might… buy your cards.”
“You want to buy my cards?”
He gestured with his hand, in a downward motion.
“Quietly now, quietly.” He laughed nervously. “But yes. Twice what a new Chance card reading costs at retail. Cash.”
Maddie was startled and confused. “But I don’t have that many, only…” she stopped herself from saying how many she had, though she wasn’t sure why.
“You can buy two new for what I’ll give you for one. Nothing wrong with having more cards, right? Take Another Chance, as they say in the literature.”
“I’m not sure it’s a good–”
“Oh, for research only, miss. I don’t want your canonical, nothing like that. I’m just a curious man, see. I’ve been studying their algorithm for years. Out of curiosity, nothing more than that. Every card is a new data point. No good to anyone but the people who bought ‘em. And to me. Data, you see. If you care to help, I’d make it worth your while.”
“Well, I need them for my complaint–I mean my question.”
“Of course you do. Well, after that, if you want to write down your words and sell me the cards, I’d still be interested. Here is my card. Business card, that is.” He palmed it in his hand, and held it over to her. She took it. It read “Chance Cards”, and then there was a number.
“I’d… you might want to put that away for now, miss. These folks, they don’t exactly take kindly to my research. Think I’m trying to hone in on their algorithm. Not possible though. I’m more curious in what it generates.”
Maddie tucked it away. She looked over at the desk, and caught the receptionist looking at her suspiciously, but then he quickly went back to his magazine. The man next to her was inauspiciously studying the wall, and began humming a tune that Maddie didn’t know. She pulled her jacket close against the cold of the air conditioning, and had a sudden desire to inspect her cards. Once more. For the hundredth. Thousandth. But she didn’t want the man with the hat to see them.
Then the voice came over an intercom, full of static, far too loud. “Madeline Roubacheau, I will see you now.”
Maddie stood, and looked towards the receptionist for direction, but he didn’t look up.
“To the left, down the hall.”
She moved past the man in the hat, clicking on the floor.
The intercom burst with static. “No, not that way. My left. MY left.”
Maddie stopped, confused as to which way that was, but it must be the other way. She passed the man in the hat again, who smiled, and tipped the brim, as if that was the only reason he wore such a hat. Down the hall, she reached for the door on the left side.
“Not that door. The third one,” the intercom corrected.
She kept going.
“No, the… from the… that door. THAT door. Yes. Come in.” Static, and then nothing.
The room was warm, but not to an uncomfortable extent. It was large enough to refer to as an office, with a large wooden desk, and several chairs. There was a blotter on the desk, and a phone, and behind it, an imposing looking woman who looked as if she was into-her-sixties-but-looking-in-her-fifties, wearing a full formal jacket and skirt, a long string of pearls, and a neatly assembled silk scarf with pin, bearing, of course, the corporate logo, black helix on yellow. Behind her were three framed posters. One, advertising a “Chance for Life” charity event. The other flanking poster a photo of a family with full decks of cards, and the slogan, “We Understand!” written in large, slanted, san-serif letters. The middle poster showed a hand of indeterminate race holding a yellow card, palm up. “Imagination”, it read.
“Please have a seat, Ms. Roubacheau. I am Mrs. Dantez. How can I help you?”
“I have a question.”
“Yes, I gather that, and that is why you are here. You have read the FAQ?”
“I have.”
“And you have no complaints?”
“Aside from my question, no.”
“And your question is?”
“How is it that these cards mean anything?”
Mrs. Dantez sighed, and crossed her fingers on one hand over the others on the blotter.
“Form please.”
Form on the desk.
“Tag as well, for formality’s sake.”
Tag.
“And your license to test, if you would.”
Maddie pulled her license out, and laid it on the desk. Mrs. Dantez picked it up with one hand, and put on a pair of reading glasses with the other. She studied it in the overhead light, and then produced a pen.
“One of your cards, as well.”
Maddie opened the case, and gave one up. The stoic woman in front her began marking items on the form while speaking aloud.
“Age to test: passed. Mental competency to test: approved. Medical consult: met. Drug test: no indicators… though that date was some time ago,” she looked over her glasses at Maddie, who was glad she’d worn the formal jacket. “Though it is within the mandated cycle. Preparedness for Mortality Training Course: attended, and standardized.”
She paused, and the pen hovered. “Religion is blank.” She looked at Maddie. “Is that Atheist, then?”
Maddie felt the familiar blush. “I haven’t really considered it. And I was told it isn’t mandatory to have it declared in any direction.”
“Oh, it’s not mandatory. But it is an anomaly.”
“Is that a problem?”
“No, oh no. No problem. But it is irregular.”
“Would that affect my Chance card generation?”
“No, not assuredly. But it is something that we’ll take into consideration.”
She marked the form. Then she placed the pen on the edge of the blotter, and took up the card, and inserted it quickly in the slot in the desk. Then she pulled out a screen from the side of her desk, tilted downward so only she could see it. Shading the glare from the overhead lights, Mrs. Dantez read whatever was summoned to the screen.
“You have had your canonical, I assume?”
“Yes.”
“But you’ve only had five cards.”
“I’m sorry. I know it isn’t very many, but I simply can’t have any more until I know what they are supposed to mean.”
“What they are is described in the FAQ, Ms. Roubacheau.”
“I know what they are, of course. Anyone knows that. But I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with them. How to read them. How I’m supposed to understand any of this.”
Mrs. Dantez leaned over the desk, severely. “You haven’t been to an interpreter, have you Ms. Roubacheau?”
“No, of course not. I know that’s a scam. That’s why I came here, to the corporation.”
The older woman sighed, and began to look slightly closer to her actual age, but only for a moment. She opened a drawer and pulled out a disc.
“I have this video that I could show you…”
“I’ve seen the videos.”
“You haven’t seen this video. It’s not a promotional video. It’s an internal training video.”
She slipped it from its case, and inserted it somewhere on her side of the desk. The lights dimmed automatically, and from a spot in the corner light shone, projecting an image on top of the middle poster behind the desk. A screen descended from the ceiling and caught the film image. Mrs. Dantez didn’t turn to watch the film, appearing to only close her eyes. Maddie looked over her head as carefully as she could.
A man walked into the shot, wearing a formal jacket, complete with logo pin. “Good morning!” he said to the camera, though the time of day was no more visible in the scene than it was in the windowless office in which Maddie sat. “My name is Sam Augustine, and I’ll be your guide through the training procedure.”
The scene changed. Sam was in front of a bustling Change Networks franchise, walking past the line extending out the door, walking inside the lobby, walking behind the banks of machines and teller windows, and into the raised area that was unique to every franchise.
“Before we get into the step by step procedure by which you’ll tune the central algorithm hub, let’s take a minute to discuss the importance of this seemingly minor daily maintenance task.” Sam popped the lid of the central unit, audibly humming through the recording, and let the cover rise to his eye level. “It only take a minute, but it is importance cannot be overstressed. Sloppy tuning can result in misaligned results transmitted from the algorithm mainframe, and inappropriately delivered to the customer. The checksum safeguards make receiving incorrect results an impossibility. But result errors are possible, or franchise-wide Failure-to-Chance. Either can mean costly downtime for the entire franchise, and dissatisfied customers, who haven’t received the quick and accurate Chances they have come to expect. Without balancing the hub to the characteristic load of customers on a twice-a-day basis, Chance failures can increase by as much as twenty percent.”
The film stopped, the lights came back on, and the screen retreated into the ceiling. Mrs. Dantez opened her eyes.
“Are you saying that there might have been an error in my Chances?” Maddie was open-mouthed.
“No dear. I’m saying precisely the opposite.” She held up one of Maddie’s cards. The one marked ‘coniferous’. “You see this code strip here? This contains your unique user ID, linked to your stored canonical reading, verified in our central algorithm servers. Your canonical reading is what it is: the way that you’ll die. The algorithm develops your Chance here on the server from the canonical, and then transmits it to the Chance franchise, and prints it on the card. The server generates a checksum to make sure only algorithmically correct results are printed on your card. We don’t need a new blood test every time we Chance. The blood test is only to verify, for security, that only you will receive your Chances.”
She looked down at her screen. “The Chances are yours, no less than your canonical. Each of your five Chances are 100% checksum accurate. The checksum is recorded in each Chance code strip, for paper trail verification.”
Mrs. Dantez smiled across the desk.
“You see, dear, that is what Chances are. They are you. From your canonical cause of death, we derive the nano-fate Chances that surround how that death will occur. There is no possibility of them being wrong, or being for anyone else. Your Chances are you–and while I don’t mean it in a belittling way, if they don’t seem to make sense to you… well, there’s no one that can do anything about that but yourself.”
“But the canonical is a cause of death. These are just words. They don’t make any sense.”
“They will. Given enough Chances, given enough time, and enough personal reflection, the meaning comes clear. The meaning comes from you.”
Maddie shook her head.
“This just isn’t good enough. These are words with no meaning! Look at this.”
She held up a card from the bottom of the stack, so the woman across from her would have to read it. The immaculate composition of her face faded as she saw the word.
“I… I do apologize for that. Normally the words aren’t so… anatomical…”
“It’s not just a part of my body! It’s my… it called it a… I never have used that word in my life!”
“I understand why you’re upset. I don’t care for that word at all myself. But I must reiterate, Ms. Roubacheau, that the Chance Networks does not create these words themselves. Chance Networks and its algorithm do not attempt to… well as I said, these words come from you. They are your Chances, and nobody else’s.”
Maddie sat back in her chair, her emotion spent for a moment.
“I must ask you, dear: have you ever… considered using suicide as a means to hasten the resolution of your canonical results?”
“No, I have not. My canonical isn’t ‘suicide’.”
“Few are. But an educated woman like yourself knows that it doesn’t have to be.”
Mrs. Dantez removed her glasses.
“It’s okay if you have thought about it. Many people who seek Chances have considered it. In a mortal world as this, it is an option for all of us. Chances are another way out of the vicious, emotional cycle of having to deal with our mortality. If you have considered using suicide–”
“I have not.”
“I believe you. But even if you haven’t, seeking another Chance might give you some further insight into yourself. Taking a Chance might be the way out.” She pulled out a box, and set it on the desk. “I’d be happy to give you a complimentary Chance. It is often that when we’re at such an impasse in interpreting our Chances, just then a new Chance comes along to put everything in a different light.”
She pulled out a case from her jacket pocket, and clicked it open. It was inlaid with mother of pearl on the upper side, and black velvet on the bottom. There were only four cards in it, and she carefully lined then on the raised edge of the blotter, like a pathway of four yellow stones.
“When I was twenty-two, not too far from your own age, I received this Chance.”
‘Silence’.
“For a young woman, this is a fairly morose Chance. It troubled me, I don’t mind telling you. It wasn’t until I was thirty-seven that I got this additional Chance.”
‘Morning’, read the card.
Mrs. Dantez took a deep breath, as if she were actually recalling the emotion. “It changed everything for me! I had had visions of the worst things you can imagine: suffocation, becoming deaf later in life, being murdered as a witness to a crime, and so on. My canonical aside–for it to occur in the context of ‘silence’ seemed particularly gruesome. But, ‘morning’! A time of peaceful silence, of reflection, or meditation. I began to see that silence could be a beautiful Chance, and it was only my preconceptions and fears that I was seeing, reflecting in my Chances. My world was turned around completely! And then I received these other two: ‘apothecary’, and ‘wooden’. Well you see the first one was…” she looked at Maddie, who was looking off into space.
“Take another Chance, dear.”
“I don’t want one.”
“You don’t want one?”
“I don’t want another one, until I can figure out the ones I have.”
“But you must accept them, Ms. Roubacheau! They are your Chances.”
“I won’t accept them. Not until they mean something to me.”
“But if you accept them now, and wait, in time the meaning will become clear.”
“I refuse to accept them.”
Mrs. Dantez sighed, and sat back. Then she reached forward and gathered up her cards, putting them away in her case. She picked up her pen.
“There is one more thing we can do. We can examine you. There are certain physical signs–and I remind you, that they are very slight tells, nothing definite or assured–but they can act as diagnostic criteria for checking Chance causality.” She began to write. “If you want the exam, you must promise to take it to completion. For insurance purpose, once begun, the exam must be finished. It’s causal-liability, as the case law about the matter is not binding yet. I can give you an exam, and then with those results in mind, perhaps you will be willing to take another Chance.”
She wrote something on Maddie’s form.
“Okay?”
Maddie nodded her head.
Mrs. Dantez opened a drawer, and pulled out a file folder, which she spread on her desk, and began withdrawing forms. She assembled a packet as she checked off items, filled out passages, and inserted the complaint form Maddie had brought with her.
“Any history of heart conditions?”
“Any medical allergies?”
“Any fear of confined spaces?”
“Any history of epilepsy?”
“Any surgeries in the past five years?”
“Any metallic implants that are known to be reactive to magnetism?”
“Any recent skin reactions in the presence of radio waves?”
“Sensitivity to light?”
“Have you been in any environments with reactive chemicals over a safety level of 2?”
“Do you or do you not enjoy the taste of cilantro? Has your opinion on this changed in the past three years?”
“Okay, Ms. Roubacheau, sign here. Please go through this door, and speak to the nurse. His name is Virgil. He’ll take good care of you. And wear this badge for the rest of the time you’re here, please.”
She gestured at a door Maddie had not seen before. She signed, and gathered up the forms, affixed the badge, and stepped towards the door.
“Oh, Ms. Rouhbacheau?”
“Yes?”
“Could you tell me the first five words that come into your mind when you think of the phrase, ‘boiled egg’.”
“I’m sorry?”
“‘Boiled egg’. Five words. Any words. Go.”
“I–uh… shell, pan, cooking, quickly, salt.”
“No adverbs please.”
“No–”
“No adverbs. One more. Hurry now.”
“Yolk?”
“Thank you.” She wrote what might have been those words down on a pad on her desk. “Go ahead–Virgil will be waiting for you.”
Maddie stepped onto the tile of a brightly lit hallway, lined with glass windows that must have opened onto exam rooms. Each window had a curtain drawn in front of it, and shadows moved on the curtain, two, maybe three people per room. She wasn’t sure which way to go to find Virgil, or even what exactly she was doing, or whether she ought to leave. Standing still for a moment, the edge of her jacket in her free hand, the other filled with paperwork. Listening to the dry, HVAC air, Maddie tried to hear which direction the most noise might be coming from. She heard what sounded like distant shouting. No, it was most certainly shouting, coming from the right. It was shouting, getting louder. It was someone coming this way.
Wondering what she ought to do was what she was doing when the shouting rounded the corner. The young woman in a white medical gown had a familiar look, but before Maddie could return the look of disoriented derailment, the figure pushed past her and ran, slapping barefoot, down the hall and away. Maddie was sent backward, trying to keep from tottering off of her heels, flat against one of the glass windows.
“There she is!” A number of large orderlies rounded the corner, dressed in a manner in which only women titled orderlies would be dressed. Two were on either side of Maddie, and a slim, older man stood beside them.
“I… I think the person you want–”
But they had her by the arms, and her stack of papers fell to the floor. The man, whose logo-emblazoned name tag read “Virgil”, bent to pick them up.
“But Mrs. Dantez said that I–”
“Yes, I’m aware of what Mrs. Dantez said. Put her in room 846.”
He took her papers down the hall in the opposite direction from the way she was taken, both arms of the orderlies on her formal cotton jacket’s arms, raised in the air in a way that she could only barely manage to stumble along on her heels with them, clicking along to keep from falling down. After what must have been some seventy yards, a door was pushed open, a light came on, and she was inside.
“Remove your clothes.”
“I–”
“You’ve agreed to a series of tests.”
“Yes, but–”
“Remove your clothes, please.”
The orderlies were imposing figures, and they held out a familiar looking gown. She had agreed, but to what? Maddie sighed, and slid her sleeves out of her formal jacket. The badge was missing from the label where she had clipped it. She stepped out of the heels, and onto the floor. Blouse, skirt, hose.
“Your underthings too.”
And those. She put on the gown. One of the two women gathered up the discarded clothing and her shoes, into a white cloth bag. Before she put in the jacket, she fished out Maddie’s case.
“You’ll want these. There’s a pocket.”
And indeed there was, on the chest of the oddly fitting gown, generally over the left side. She put the case in the cloth opening that was just big enough, and the case weighted down the cloth against her breast. The metal was cold through the light fabric. Then the orderlies were gone, and the door was closed.
There was a poster on the back of the door. A Chance box, as if in a franchise booth, was visible in a close-up shot. A card was emerging from the slot. The first letters were visible, spelling ‘Wit–’, and the caption said beneath it, “This Chance Could Be the One.”
A different orderly returned. She had a tray. First it was blood. Then a swab of the inside of Maddie’s cheek. Then a tissue sample, a scratch beneath her upper arm. Then urine. The orderly disappeared with the tray.
A new orderly, with a cart. Many different devices, all for the measurement of various things. Heart rate. Mini-EEG. Reflex arc. Standardized pain threshold. Electro-conductivity. Cognitive ray. Radio stethoscope. Magentoscope. Positronic band. Physical exam. Flashing lights, sanitized probes: under, behind, in, and back out. She checked it–the area referred to in profane language on her card. Maddie looked at the wall, while the orderly seemed to make an audible noise, not quite approvingly or disapprovingly. Then she was gone.
Maddie stood flat-footed against the wall. She stared at the poster, wondering what sort of person it was that had stuck their finger in the slot of the Chance box, causing it to print that card, of which she could only read the first three letters. Did they take an actual picture with a Chance box in order to make that poster? Or was it a computer-generated graphic? Was it a false box, perhaps–used for such photographs? Or did someone actually generate that card… was that someone’s Chance, and they were waiting for the camera to finish its work before they removed it and read what it said?
The orderly who had previously carried the tray came back into the room, seemingly in a much better mood than she had been when she was wielding the needle. This time she carried a clipboard.
“Don’t look so glum, deary! We’ll have you out of exams in no time at all. They don’t take but a minute, you see. Like the boxes themselves, those test machines are. In the hole, and there it goes. Oh, but your stool! No wonder you look so tired.”
She reached outside and pulled in a light plastic stool that had been outside the door, handing it to Maddie, who held it to her chest, touching lightly against the case in her gown pocket. The orderly pulled in a chair on wheels, and sat on it.
“Well, sit down then.”
Maddie did.
“Just a few questions. Now–you know your canonical, don’t you?”
Maddie sighed, and leaned forward to let her elbows fall to her knees.
“Yes.”
“Excellent, excellent. Have you ever considered suicide in order to hasten the results?”
“No.”
“Not ever?”
“No.”
“Well, okay. You know it would not be out of the ordinary if you had.”
“Okay.”
“But you haven’t.”
“No.”
“Okay. Three synonyms for ‘hungry’.”
“I’m sorry?”
“Synonyms please, three of them, for ‘hungry’. No adverbs.”
“Famished, starving, and… uh, malnourished?”
“Hmm… I’m not sure about that last one, but it will do. Would you be willing to take a Chance right now?”
“Now?”
“The box is in the hallway. I’ll go get it. Complimentary.”
“No.”
“No?”
“I won’t take one.”
“Okay, and… wait one moment. What is your name?”
“Madeline Roubacheau.”
“Roubacheau?”
“Yes.”
“My goodness, but I’ve got the wrong forms here! Where is your badge?”
“I… I don’t know.”
“It wasn’t on your formal jacket.”
“It must have been when…”
“But you have your cards, don’t you?”
“Yes, they’re right here–”
“Well thank goodness for that! Who only knows what might have happened… and then for you, my dear… how horrible to have lost one’s Chances!”
“No, I do have them…”
“Well thank goodness! Let me go get your forms, and get rid of these!” She shook them on the clipboard, as if they were wet, or had been particularly troublesome somehow. “Feel free to keep your stool.”
Maddie hadn’t made any motion to get up, or pull her arms from her knees.
“Would you like a Chance then?”
Maddie exhaled before speaking. “I…”
“Free of charge, of course. I only thought–these not being your forms–that perhaps you would indeed like one after all.”
“N–no, thank you.”
The orderly blinked her eyes, and tapped the clipboard against the side of her hip. “Well, okay…” she said, as if she blamed the form she held. “Pretty young lady like yourself, I never would have figured, but…”
She turned to leave the room, pushing the chair in front of her. Then she paused. “You know what my last Chance was?”
Maddie looked up.
“It was ‘Others’. What do you make of that?”
Maddie opened her mouth, but didn’t say anything. The orderly was already gone, and she heard the wheels retreating down the hall.
In less than three minutes, she heard flat footsteps running, approaching. It was Virgil, completely out of breath, his name tag askew.
“Ms. Roubacheau! Thank goodness I’ve found you!”
As he leaned against the door frame to catch his breath, Maddie felt as if she was required to say something in response.
“Yes?”
“There’s been a terrible mistake!”
She raised her eyebrows and began to speak, but he continued.
“Not with your test results, no! Those were all fine. Normal, I might say, though I’m hardly qualified to give you any sort of assessment. No, there was a mistake, and I’m so very sorry to have mixed it all up in this way. It is my responsibility, and I understand if you are upset, and I can only apologize to you in the most sincerest of terms!”
Still leaning against the door frame, bent over with exertion, it almost appeared as if he was attempting to bow in way of apology.
“But there is time yet!” he blurted out. “Please, follow me now, and I’ll get you going in the right direction.” And then he was out of the room. “Come along, come along! And I’m terribly sorry!”
She had to pad quickly on the cool floor with her bare feet to keep up with the man’s tall strides.
“We’ll get everything straight, I assure you!”
Around three turns, down a straight away, and up a short flight of rubberized stairs. Virgil opened a door.
He whispered, holding his head close to the edge of the door, “Mr. Blake’s office! And once again, I’m sorry!” He closed the door behind her.
The office was immense, carpeted deeply from wall to wall. Maddie squinted against the natural light streaming in from the wide windows, showing nothing but a view of uninterrupted blue sky, the bright sun sending gleaming shadow lines down the large modern statuary that dotted the open expanses of carpet, and the couch, and the low tables, and the several chairs. It lit up a full, dark head of hair on a surprisingly young man behind the desk that presided over the space, as he looked down at a pad of paper, scribbling furiously. Maddie breathed in a bit suddenly, overwhelmed by the light after the low florescent lighting previously illuminating her.
“My goodness, Ms. Roubacheau!”
Her feet felt warm on the sun drenched carpet.
“Virgil didn’t give you your clothes back. What a silly man.” He pressed a button on his desk repeatedly. “It should only be a minute.”
The door behind her popped open, and Virgil’s arm stuck in holding the cloth bag. He waved it side to side, and, “I’m sorry!” came around the door. She took the bag, and the arm gratefully disappeared and the door closed again.
“I’ll just secure myself in the closet, and you can get dressed at your leisure. Not to worry, no one will come in that door unless I call for them.”
The man rose from his chair, and took several large, sporting leaps across the carpet, dodging around two statues, to what must have been the closet door on the wall. He flung it open, revealing, indeed, a number of hanging jackets, all dwarfing the small man. He plunged in between the garments, and with a flourish, pulled the door closed to a click.
“Please go ahead! Just let me know when you’re finished!” His voice was quite muffled by the door. It seemed thick and secure, from the sound of his elbows bumping against it as he no doubt fought for space among the coats. Seeing no other option, Maddie begun to dress. The sun was warm on her skin.
“My name is Mr. Blake, by the way!” He shouted from inside, to overcome the muffling. “And you must be Maddie Roubacheau! I’ve been dying to make your acquaintance for… well, it must have been almost forty-five minutes now!”
With her hose on, Maddie quickly pulled up her skirt, and tucked the blouse back into it.
“You see, I’m the boss around these parts! The Complaint Department, that is! Nothing much happens here without me finding out about it, at least within the hour! You might think that being in charge means I don’t have many responsibilities, other than overseeing things. But I assure you, that’s not the case! If someone isn’t satisfied, it’s my job to make sure that they are!”
She put on her formal cotton jacket, and held her heels in her hand, leaving the gown and bag on the floor. “Mr. Blake…” she raised her voice a bit to penetrate the closet.
It opened a crack. “All finished?” She assured him that she was. “Well then, I’ll come out of the closet, where it will be much easier to speak with Ms. Roubacheau–Maddie, that is–if the young lady doesn’t mind if I address her as such?”
“No, that’s okay.”
He leaped back across the carpet, and landed hard in his chair, swiveling around a complete turn. “Please sit down, please sit down! Pick any chair you like.”
There were no chairs near his desk, and so she picked the couch, which was a bit awkward because it faced the center of the room. But he sprang across the rug again, and chose a seat immediately next to the couch. “A wonderful choice, a wonderful choice! I say chair, and she picks the couch! Ms. Roubacheau–Maddie, that is–an excellent choice, if I may say so.”
The chair he sat in was low, and even his short legs came up quite high above his lap, pulling the cuffs of his casual suit up over his shoes, exposing the fact that he was not wearing socks. He was quite young, perhaps the same age as Maddie herself, or even younger. She did not put her heels back on, as she was seated, and they would have been nearly buried in the long carpet shag anyway. She set them next to her feet.
“But you’d like to get to the point of the matter, of course. Your tests were absolutely, positively normal. There was no reason to think that they would have been anything else. And there was a little mistake with the forms, but no harm done. You still have your Chance cards, correct?”
She nodded. They were back in her jacket pocket, as they always were.
“Only five cards, Maddie? Naturally, there is no reason to expect someone so young to have accumulated hundreds and hundreds. But still, only five?” He put his chin on his palm, and his elbow on his knee, and smiled at her.
“I won’t get any more.”
“So I hear. And though I think I know why, would you like to tell me?”
It seemed, at least to the disoriented and still slightly blinded Maddie, that he was almost earnestly excited to hear her tell him. “I’m not sure that I see the point, Mr. Blake.”
“Herman! Please call me Herman. And go on, please do.”
“I’ve read the FAQ…”
“Yes! The FAQ!”
“And I’ve seen the videos…”
“Some of the videos certainly are better than others.”
“I… yes. And I’ve thought about the Chances I’ve gotten over and over again.”
“Yes, assuredly! We must–I only imagine we all do.”
“But I don’t see to what end, Mr… Herman.”
“Say more.”
“The canonical. Its meaning is clear, though it may ‘delight in a certain irony’, as the saying goes.”
“Yes.”
“And the canonical is ever so brief, and always the same.”
“It is.”
“Whereas, the algorithmically decoded Chances are less ironic, and yet more obscure.”
“They are–though if I might interrupt you quickly to say that they are ‘derived’, not ‘decoded’. But, please continue.”
“And they are supposed to be more information. Not read in the same way as a canonical, but as a supplement to a canonical. Words to surround it, and augment it, slowly, with more and more Chances, giving you a better picture of what one’s end might be like.”
He smiled, and extended his hand, palm wide. “But…”
“But they are just words.”
He waited for her, hand still outstretched.
“They may be algorithmically verifiable, but they are just words. With no context, they might as well be chosen at random. Without some sort of story or order to assemble them in, they could relate to my canonical in any conceivable way. They’re simply no good.”
Herman closed his hand, and smiled. He leaned back in his chair, and stuck his legs out in front of him, crossing one bare ankle over the other. “But you’re here.”
“Yes, I am.”
“Even though the words are meaningless to you, you came here looking for someone to explain to you how you ought to find meaning in them. You wanted them to have meaning, and so you went looking for a way to find it.”
Maddie suddenly felt sad. But she could only smile, and let out a tiny laugh, that somewhere inside it, had the faintest thought of a cry.
“Yes.”
“You didn’t have a complaint. You had a question.”
“That’s what I told them.”
“You see? I know simply everything that happens in this place.”
She laughed. Herman stood up, and sat next to her on the couch. He put a hand on her shoulder. “I’d like to show you something, if I could.”
He was almost attractive, in a strange way. Cute, maybe. Like an overly sincere young man, trying to act a part, and almost pulling it off. Was he really in charge here, or was he just masquerading, pretending to be important, playing executive in someone’s office? “Sure,” she said, giving him her best camaraderie smile.
Out of his casual jacket pocket he pulled what appeared to be two matchboxes, taped end to end. She had never noticed before that a Chance card was precisely double the size of a standard matchbox.
“I made this. When I was little. It has… sentimental value. You know.” He slid out the end, and there were a stack of perhaps ten cards inside it. He pulled the one from the bottom out, leaving the rest in place. With the soft hush of cardboard moving against itself, he pushed the box closed, and replaced it in his pocket.
“I love this one best. I used to think it was a really important one. The pivotal Chance, as it were. Then others came, and it didn’t seem so crucial. After a while, it almost seemed superficial and redundant, almost as if it was blocking the continuity of the rest of the cards. But I kept it. Maybe it was because it was so important at one time, I kept it in my personal set out of habit. Or because of its uselessness now, perhaps there’s a certain significance in that. I don’t know. But I keep it in my set, and I imagine I always will. Though who can say for sure.”
He handed it to her. This time she did laugh. She laughed, and laughed, holding her free hand up to her mouth. She brushed her hair back out of her eyes, and tried to compose herself.
“I’m sorry. You probably want to know why I’m laughing.”
“I imagine that I know.”
“I have the same card.”
“I know you do, Maddie.”
She reached for her case, and opened it. She took out her card, and held it next to Herman’s, though keeping his in her right and hers in her left, so she wouldn’t be confused as to which was which.
‘Moose Moose’, said the cards in her hands.
She gave his back to him, and put hers away.
“You’re not convinced,” said Herman. “And that’s good. You don’t have to be, and maybe you never will be. But,” he said, with a smile. “I think you are ready to take another Chance.”
“What makes you think that?”
“Because you will be ready. Maybe not now, maybe not for years. But before that canonical takes effect, you will want to have another Chance. You will step into a Chance Networks franchise, you will insert your beautiful finger to have a drop of blood drawn from it, you will be verified on our central algorithm servers, and your Chance will be printed on one of our yellow cards. And, for the entire extent of the brief amount of time it will take for you to reach down and pull out the card so you can read it: that Chance will not come soon enough.”
She thought about it.
“I have a special offer for you now. Because we’ve just completed a number of physiological tests on you, I can offer you a special Chance. This sort of Chance is not yet available commercially, not to the public. It will be soon, and it is even more precise, less ironic, and better helps each and every individual to better understand their specific Chances as regards their canonical. We call it a Gold Chance. And I have one waiting for you.”
He stood, and walked over to the desk. From beneath it he pulled a small box, shining in bright gold. As he brought it over, the sunlight was tossed in a thousand directions from its surfaces, lighting up the statues, the walls, the ceiling with shards of golden light. Herman sat back in the chair, and balanced the machine on his knee.
“It’s already had your data transmitted to it. All you need to do, if you wish to accept your Chances, is press the button there, right on top. You press the button, and it will print the card. If not, I’ll open the cover and hit the reset, and it will forget your Chance that is right there inside it even now, waiting to be printed.”
He put his eyes into hers. “It’s up to you, Maddie.”
She felt the carpet around her toes. He smiled.
She pressed the button, and with a buzz, the card printed and ejected. Maddie instantly looked at the ceiling, and reached forward to palm the card.
“I… I’d like to read it later, if that’s okay.”
“Of course.”
“Thank you, Herman.”
“Your welcome. Is there anything else I can do for you today?”
“Oh–no, I don’t think so.”
“Well thank you for coming to see me, Maddie. I always appreciate visitors.”
“Oh, it was nothing.”
They sat silently for a full five seconds, and then Herman took the box back to his desk, and sat in his chair, replacing the box from wherever it had come from.
“I should go, then.”
“Alright, Maddie. Just out the door, and to the left is the elevator.” He stayed seated.
“Thanks.”
“Oh, and Maddie?”
“Yes?”
“Don’t forget your shoes.”
She held the card in her palm, as she bent down to get the shoes.
She kept the card there as she clicked to the elevator, and all the way down, and out through a windowed causeway that looked out over the grounds, underneath the backside of the twisting helix of the building. And then down a set of stairs, and out a back gate, where the security guard gave her a salute that she didn’t feel was necessary, but that she appreciated anyway. And then she was back in the street, hot, full of traffic, dust rising everywhere in the sun. Maddie figured out which direction it was that she needed to go, and then pulled out her case. Quickly, she glanced at the Chance card in her palm before sliding it into the case and clicking it shut. It didn’t make a bit of sense.
Posted: January 3rd, 2012
Categories:
Ballast
Tags:
death drive,
semiotics,
words
Comments:
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I self-published a new novel a couple months back called Light on Fire. I’ve been wanting to write a little bit about the book, other than a general shameless plead to have you buy it. I am trying something a little different: I am serializing the book on its own website for free. Because I wanted to have at least a good number of chapters available free before I dug into the meta so you would know what I was talking about, I held back in discussing it too deeply here on POSZU. But as of today, there are just over 20% of the chapters available, so I think I can finally let loose.
First, let me get any and all shill information and links out of the way.
The title of the book: Light on Fire
By me: Adam Rothstein
The book is being serialized online at a rate of a little over 3 chapters per week, normally released on Tuesday mornings. The location for that is here:
www.lightonfire.net
There is an RSS feed for the new chapters, as well as a Twitter feed.
The book is available for sale in eBook format, which I heartily encourage you to purchase, as it is only 99 cents! ($2.99 at Kindle store, because this is Amazon’s minimum, apparently. Sorry.) Here is a list of retailers and formats. Pick whichever one is convenient for you; though if you asked me, I’d suggest Smashwords, because not only do they offer the most formats all DRM-free, my experience using them as a means for publishing with other retailers has been very positive, and I’d suggest them as a first stop if you were ever to self-publish your own eBook.
Now that’s out of the way, let’s talk about the book. Writing, for me, is a very philosophical process. There’s a good deal of thought that goes on about the form of my writing, as well as the content, while I’m writing it. This is, in a way, the invisible plot of the book, considering most of my writing is philosophical at least a little bit. So I like to share my thought process, in addition to publishing the work. Who knows, this might even be more interesting than the book itself.
At any rate, it will be shorter. That is probably the first thing one might notice about Light on Fire: it’s about 200,000 words long. If you are hefting the eBook, of course, you won’t notice a thing. At least, until you read, and you read, and you read, and you wonder when the book is going to get anywhere rather than just rambling on and on about a group of perhaps teenagers, perhaps college students, perhaps adults, a character called the Angel of History who seems to have something important to say but can’t get around to it, and chapter after chapter of metaphorical description of mundane activities.
It is meant to be this long. Naturally, because I wrote it this long, and didn’t cut very much of it, even though it is the first thing any editor would tell me to do. No novel should look like Light on Fire. For a long time, I had mental trouble calling it a novel, because I knew that wasn’t what I was trying to write. I had something else in mind. Maybe a piece of generative, ambient music. Or perhaps a mini-series, that would have ordinarily been cancelled after a few episodes, but in a bizarre twist of alternate universes, was allowed to continue exactly as it was. It could be more like a road trip, which is a fun journey at first, but when you are tired, your muscles are cramping, and you are burning up money refilling the tank yet again, starts to seem like it is about a third longer than you wish it was.
Why would I want to make such a thing? Obviously I can do such a thing, because this is the age of self-publishing. I could also scream thousands of words of shitty poetry through a megaphone in the supermarket parking lot, or communicate with others only in the sound of my own urination and call it performance art, or record the sound of a bulldozer crushing one hundred violins and say it’s music. In addition to the age of self-publishing, this is the age of Dada as the status quo. Everything is always a certain level of crazy/sublime, at minimum. So the only reason to pay attention to any of it at this point, would seem to be for sheer spectacular entertainment sake. The semiotic rationale of throwing pieces of lead type at Tea Partiers is no better than any other rationale (just making up an example). And so, the greatest common denominator of art-for-art-sake is entertainment. In which case, I probably should have done one of these things I just listed, because those would all be much more entertaining than a very long, slightly-boring book.
But I wasn’t just doing “whatever”–you know, “semiotically novelizing”–for what artistic merit it might bring me. I had a very specific goal in mind. I was trying to make something in particular, and whatever value it might (or might not) have as art is completely secondary to that.
I wanted to write a novel of America. Not a Great American Novel, mind you. I wanted to capture what the novel of America looks like, not according to the artistic genre of the GAN, or the formal conventions of the novel. I wanted to end up with a novel that accurately reflected America: the present. This is something that, as far as I know, does not exist outside of this work I have completed.
Such a thing is rare, because there isn’t much that is common about it. Right away I realized that such a novel would hardly look like a novel at all. There are many, many reasons why not. To begin with, there is nothing actually in reality in America today that looks at all like a novel. Novels have characters whom we like, or at least like hearing about. Novels have beginnings, middles, and endings. Novels have events that mean something in context of each other, in the context of the author and the reader’s preconceptions, and should seek to inform some sort of altered postconception after the novel has been finished, even if only in the slightest of degrees. There is nothing like this, truthfully, in America reality today. There are plenty of lies going on in America that resemble novels. There are thousands and upon thousands of novels written in America, about America. But it isn’t even that these things are not true, whereas there is some sort of hidden Truth about America that isn’t being told. It is that the time of Truth is over for America. Today, presently, America just is. American Reality is a parking lot. It is a parking lot that abuts another parking lot, which abuts another parking lot, and the only thing that distinguishes the hoardes of steel and future e-waste Lifestyle Utility Vehicles, filled with dogs, babies, and the rest of us hyperventilating in the sweltering climate change reality, is a grid work of numbers and letters, unless you happen to be lucky enough to be parked at a place with enough intellectual property to name all these lots. American Reality is the difference between The Goofy parking zone and parking structure F2. American Reality is long, ever so long, and not very entertaining.
I think the previous form of the America’s Novel, the one that was entertaining and perhaps a least occasionally historically meaningful, ended with the election of Barack Obama. I don’t want to wax too political here. In some ways, 2008 was obviously a happy-ending for many people. For others, it was a looming cliff-hanger, a prelude of the eventual cash-in sequel of Palin, etc. But I make this epochalization of the novel based upon a number of factors, that are really unrelated to the election or the president himself. Of course the presidency is a major epoch foundation for American history. But there was also the state of the Internet, and what that means for language and history. There was the state of world history around that time, and America’s changing role on that stage. There was the economic thing, which seems to be almost entirely repressed in today’s memory (a good indicator of trauma). There was the whole post 9/11 environment, another source of trauma, that finally we are beginning to be far enough from that we can start analyzing. And then there was literature.
I’ve read some novels about America from the post 9/11 years, nowhere near most or even a good number of them. Among them, I notice a trend. There is something big that is unspoken. Not entirely a thing of repression, it is not the same void in all of them. Books are quite different. Some may cover certain bases, and others wholly over-represent other areas. But in each, there is a blind spot. A void. The 270-some degrees outside of a camera’s view when it closes in on the protagonist’s face in a thriller, so we cannot see the person creeping towards them until they put on a look of shock as they ought to, though the actor can clearly see what’s going on with stereoscopic human vision.
It’s not a lacuna brought on by a base view of the world, or some intricate Other perspective that everyone but me ought to have seen and now I’m going to call them on it. I think it is just that there is no complete picture of America any more. There is no multi-cultural melting pot, no flag that can carry all the stars and stripes, no common dream and aspiration. All of that is over, if it ever existed. It just isn’t feasible to even pretend. The only narrative of a coherent America in America today is that spouted by politicians, whom are considered the biggest liars out there, and a marginal, political un-party activism group that has some sort of name that everyone turns into an insult, and is commonly associated with the Know-Nothing Party of days past. Looking to either of these places for coherency… well, you’d be better off asking a conspiracy theorist. It’s something that I tried to get at with my Museum of Small American Museums series. There is plenty going on, but it is only viewable up close. The telescopes are broken, and we only have microscopes left. It is a fairure of perspective lines, so we are forced to use real lenses again, rather than just our simulations of their optical properties.
I could go on about this and cite a dozen other examples of the general failure of America’s Novel, but I want to move past this and talk more about my book. Because, this is why I wrote my book. I was tired of seeing the novelization of America fall short, nothing more than a genre of a time that is now closed to us. I was tired of that vertigo that comes from turning ones head so fast, trying to see everything going on, when there is no way to do so. I wanted to back up, sit down for a minute, and take it slow. Abandon the pace of news, music video, dance music, TV drama, the Internet, and all the rest that causes this vertigo. I wanted to find what is literary about America, even if that meant writing something that wasn’t necessarily entertaining as is. And so, that is what I did. Because America, as it is, is so beyond entertainment. At least at one point we were a TV society. We still might be. But if so, it is because America represents TV. Not the other way around.
Parts of America are still entertaining. But to hoist these up and make a complete TV program or a novel either requires a disgusting perversion of what is actually going on, like turning the lives of high school students into soft-core porn, or a terrible violence to the mundanity of life, like inventing a plot about a terrorist plot at every mall in America all at the same time. And yet, the lives of high school students are like hardcore porn, and there are terrorist plots not just in the malls, but in the bars, the alleys, the bathrooms, the bedrooms, and the playing fields of America as we plot against our enemies, our loved ones and ourselves constantly, somehow seeking to make a point with threats, violence, and fear. So how to we show these parts? How do we put the parts in the context of the whole?
It is this effort of trying to encompass, while not unifying or holifying, that is hard part of confronting America’s parts. While some of these parts are bad, there are other parts of America that are good. There are people making things, all the time, and some of them are not just good, but great. Most of the land here is still beautiful, despite what we’ve done to it. People live in relative safety and security, in health and in wealth, at least compared with history if not with their neighbors and the rest of the world. But what is this? Some sort of generic optimism, that can be tied around the shitty parts like a bow? A consolation prize? Does anyone really feel consoled by a consolation prize? Isn’t optimism the resolve we apply to the things we are trying to fix? Not a whimsical act of quitting, a meek smile, and a “it could be worse”?
There are just so many people in the world today. In America today. There is nothing that even begins to be a coherent narrative. It’s not as easy as a simple “death of grand narratives”. You cut off a head of that hydra, and five more grow in place. In fact, the hydra breaks apart in to thousands of small worms, some with one head, some with more, some with none, and they wriggle off to hide under rocks where you’ll never be able to get them all together again. Humpty Dumpty is the narrative our current Herculean narrative task. And in the American narrative, there are at least three Dumpty’s, all involved in a taser fight/DUI accident/revenge orgy, and it’s dark out, and someone just made off with the flashlight, and I think there’s a shard of one of them stuck in the bottom of my foot.
None of this is a reason to give up. This is why I couldn’t just give up, edit down, and make a real novel. I wanted to. I would have been done in half the time… okay, maybe two-thirds. I would have had something that I really liked, and that other people liked too, instead of an abstract epic poem to the atemporalization of history and the death of not just a nation, but probably my future and that many of my friends. An epic of anxiety, that made me as uncomfortable about the time I spent on it as I spend trying to imagine myself as the fellow citizen of the people I mean in the street. But I couldn’t stop writing it until it was done. The uncertainty is a reason to keep working. To pick at it until it bleeds. My American anxiety is an obsessive compulsion. It is a reason to buckle down, to get moving, to pick up one’s tools, and get cracking. Maybe to cry a little bit while doing so. That’s what I thought every time I sat down to work on Light on Fire. I’m not sure what I thought it might accomplish, if it would do anything. No artistic rationale here, really, I swear. I just wanted to do it. I wanted to give it a shot, and see what America looked like after passing through the literary filter, with all of this in mind. Will it be interesting? Maybe to some. Will it be a best seller? I seriously doubt it. It might not even be a “seller” at all. But it will be a complete thing. A project accomplished. As much as it can be complete.
There are blind spots, there are dead ends, there are red herrings, there are side plots bigger than the main plot. There are characters whom we aren’t sure of their description, though we could give them one. There are boring moments, and little flashes of excitement. A bit of humor, a bit of horror, a bit of deep thinking, and a bit of porn. All of these in are in Light on Fire, I mean. I’m not sure all of these are in America–that is, I’m sure they all are in America, but I’m not sure they are constituent in the same proportions as they are in my book. And yet, when you take the literary lens I did, and turning it around and around trying to focus, that is what those squiggly lines and blurry colored dots most closely resemble. One hundred and three stories that don’t really go together well, and yet are related. That’s the book. That’s what I made. And you know, I think it actually kind of works.
Perhaps conveniently, the first book I read after finishing Light on Fire was Don DeLillo’s White Noise, which I had never read before. I avoided it, because it sounded too much like something I wanted to write, and I was afraid of being too influenced. As it is, I’m very glad I read it immediately after finishing Light on Fire, because it is almost exactly the same. Very different, but very much the same. I don’t want to speculate too deeply on DeLillo’s motivations for the book, but as the reader, I earn a certain privilege to do so. The book is very much about a certain disenchantment of the 1980s in America, with its culture, with its science, with its goals and preoccupations. The plot of the book rises and falls in barometer-like excitement in a precipitatory way, condensing certain themes in parts where the pressure lowers the clouds, and then concentrating and whisking away the moisture in other areas. Where the plot falls away, we see the themes laid bare.
If there was a continuation of a similar literary system for this decade, I would perfunctorily place Light on Fire not far from that mark. We’ve gone beyond the disenchantment, the blank static views of TVs tuned to dead channels that are tuned back on us, the cultural unconscious of talk radio, the bedrooms that look more and more like kitchen appliances. Or rather, all of that is still here. But we, the children of that corn, have grown up, and we are now adults. And we are normal–or at least according to certain definitions our parents have had to settle for. Few of us have jobs, fewer of us own homes or cars in which the scenes of White Noise might take place. The fear and loathing has shifted. The terror we live with is more specific and human, and the technological amusements work much better, because they’ve been designed so that we’ve customized them to our liking. Unspecific generalities like Fear are something for people with mortgages. Fetish, not defined according to sub-culture or music genre, is something for people with a reputation to lose. The swirling storm clouds of plot are now more of a mist. There is a certain wetness to the pavement, but we can’t really say when it rained. And so, we are left to continuing living, not bad lives, but not exactly what was promised to us in elementary school either, living in basements, in group houses, in our broken down cars and on public buses. These lives, if that is what we call them, which we are waiting on, hoping that the plot will one day start. And while in the ‘80s the form of this waiting might have had a sort of stasis to it, a blank wall of prescription drug haze, and white noise anxiety, today it is something different. For young Americans today, the color of our dead channel is fire.
More on Light on Fire, when I come up with some thoughts that seem cogent. Until then, do enjoy the free serials of the novel. Every Tuesday, or thereabouts.
