Machine Of Death Part 31

"We can wait," she said. "We'll just sit here. We don't have to turn it over at all. n.o.body will ever know."

We sat in silence for a long time. I told her later that I wanted to stay there forever, our futures vibrating in the midpoint between knowing and not knowing, the moment stretched to fill a lifetime. Would that have been a state of order? Knowing either way is a switch flipped to either side. But what if you refuse to touch it? Is that order or chaos?

History has turning points, moments around which pivot the events that follow. I sometimes imagine it to be a railroad switch that shunts a train from one path to another. Sometimes it's just a big pop, a whack of a stick and the pinata shatters and the candy pours out.

I don't know when this moment happened. It might be when Maggie and I looked at our certificates together and she started crying and I put my arm around her. That's when my life changed, because instead of warmth of closeness, I wanted to crawl away, the click of a cog, the next step. It sank into me, a realization made suddenly clear, a contrast from the moments that filled up our lives before. We weren't kids anymore, and we weren't going to be together forever. A teenager's mind isn't ready for that.

I pulled HEAT DEATH OF THE UNIVERSE. I already knew what that was, but I had to explain it to Maggie. I started to explain it to her to distract her from what she had pulled, because it was also pretty unique. My valiant efforts didn't work. Three days later and we were sitting on her bed with her parents downstairs worrying and worrying, filling the house with the sickly smell of anxiety. After all these years of having the blood readings, people were still slaves to it. Stephen Hawking would say that we're slaves to order, but it seemed pretty chaotic at Maggie's house.

Maggie was worried and weepy. I couldn't blame her. CANCER or PLANE CRASH or HEART ATTACK were what you expected to pull, and those are things you can deal with. They seem distant and unreal, like life was before we had the machine and its holograms and red-dyed paper and you knew that because your grandparents both died of heart attacks that you were p.r.o.ne to that, too. The machine gave us more order, but it didn't really take away the chaos.

"It means I'm going to live for a really long time," I said. "I don't think anybody else has pulled that. At least n.o.body I know of. I guess it's kind of a big deal."

"I've never heard of it," she said.

I shrugged. "It's when all the heat in the universe dies, right? Atoms stop spinning. It'll be really cold. It's all kind of theoretical, though. Well, it was."

"How long will you live?"

I was embarra.s.sed-she was envious of me. I expected a lot of people would be. I didn't see what the big deal was, though. The woman I loved had pulled NUCLEAR BOMB.

"It's about ten centillion years away," I said. "I looked it up."

"Is that a real number?"

"Yeah. It's ten with a hundred zeroes behind it."

"How could somebody live that long?"

I shook my head and stared at my feet. "I can't even imagine."

Her hands were trembling. She ran her fingers through her hair and clutched her stomach. She was crying again.

"Other people will pull NUCLEAR BOMB," she said. "They have to. A nuclear bomb doesn't kill just one person."

"You have to stop obsessing about it," I said, quietly. "It's not helping anything."

"How can I not think about it?" she said. I couldn't believe she still had enough water in her to cry again, but she did. She cupped her hands over her face. I hated seeing her so sad.

"You can't do this, Maggie," I said. "You just can't."

"We have to tell somebody about it," she said. "This is something everybody needs to know."

"I don't think that's a good idea," I said.

"But what if-"

"You can't think about what-ifs. You have to think about school and graduating, okay? If it's a problem, somebody else will pull it. You know that's true. If there's going to be a nuclear bomb, then other people will get it. Just like September 11."

"That happened because people didn't talk about what they got!"

"Do you think that would have helped? If they had told people what they got, then how do you know it wouldn't have happened anyway? It had to happen, Maggie. That's what they pulled."

"Don't you think it's weird that n.o.body told anybody else what they got?"She was starting to raise her voice. I didn't want that to be our first argument.

I put my hand on her knee.

"Don't tell me you believe that stuff," I said. "Just because some guys on YouTube say it's a conspiracy doesn't mean it is."

"Have you watched it?"

"No," I said. "But I read about it. Look, Maggie, that's silly. There were thousands of people there. How would the government get them all to work at the same building? Or to fly on the same plane?"

"The people in the Pentagon pulled MISSILE," she said. "It's true."

"That's just a rumor. It's an urban legend. Stop it, Maggie."

"I'm scared," she said, her anger melting into convulsing sobs.

I put my arm over her shoulder and hugged her close to me.

After September 11, Stephen Hawking didn't comment on the conspiracy, because n.o.body had really thought about it. In a letter to the New York Times, he said that order was winning, even though it seemed like it wasn't. War and terrorism are agents of chaos, he said, but the Western world was the bastion of order, and that we would win. Bringing peace and democracy was just another way of bringing order. We were more powerful. We would win, and the Middle East would be quiet and peaceful, eventually. The American military was the ice cube. I thought about that a lot.

It was all over the news within a few days. Other people had pulled NUCLEAR BOMB and went public with it, but not Maggie. Her parents were pretty down on the government, and went to war protests and things, and they were worried about what they would do with the information. They didn't want their daughter to be put through the wringer of the Patriot Act, which is what a lot of people were expecting.

Since it was illegal to get your blood read before you were 18, and n.o.body older than that had pulled the nuke, everybody just a.s.sumed it was going to happen much later, decades down the road, when all fifteen people who had pulled the nuke just happened to be in the same place at the same time where a nuclear bomb would go off.

I didn't talk much about what I had pulled because it was so strange. It seemed so weird that somebody would live so long. It was crazy to even consider, but I was thinking about that a lot at the time, and thinking about how if you pull something it's pretty likely to happen.

Within a few weeks, the FBI was all over our town. They were all over other towns, too, like spiders, building webs between the Nuclear Kids, as the NUCLEAR BOMB pullers were being called by the press. The FBI interviewed me, and asked me politely to see my cert, which I did, because I didn't want to cause trouble. There were two agents, a man and a woman. They seemed young, too young to be carrying guns around. The man saw my cert and scrunched his nose up and showed the woman, and she shook her head.

"What does that mean?" she said, to me. I shrugged.

"I'm not sure," I said. It was kind of a lie.

"Have you told anybody else?"

"Just my girlfriend. My parents don't know."

"Why didn't you tell your parents?"

"I didn't want them to worry."

"Then you do do know what this means," she said, pointing to the cert in her hand. know what this means," she said, pointing to the cert in her hand.

"I sort of do," I said. "It's when all the heat in the universe dies. It's sort of the end of the universe, I guess."

"That can't be real," she said, to me, as if I were lying to her.

"That's what it says," I said. "It's never wrong, is it?"

"No," she said, shaking her head. "No, it isn't."

"Hey, this kid's a genius," said the man, who was looking at the trophy on my shelf. The trophy wasn't for Being a Genius, it was for a Whiz Kids compet.i.tion a few years earlier.

The woman looked over his shoulder at the trophy. "A lot of kids win those."

"No, he invented something. Right?"

"Sort of," I said.

"An immortality machine," said the woman.

"I discovered a new kind of algae," I said.

"That's it," said the man. "With holistic properties."

"No," I said. "It's just algae."

"I thought I read that somewhere," he said. "It kills cancer or something."

"I haven't heard that," I said.

"Oh. I must have made it up. Sorry to bother you."

"It's OK," I said, relieved that they would be going.

"Hey, one more thing," he said. His partner put my cert back on the desk. She hovered over it for a few moments, shaking her head, as if she still couldn't believe what it said. "What did your girlfriend pull?"

"She wouldn't tell me," I lied. "She says it's private."

"But you told her yours," he said.

"Yeah," I said.

"You don't think it's private?"

"It can be, I guess."

"But not to the kid who's going to live to the end of the universe, right?"

"Yeah," I said. "I guess so. I really didn't think about it much."

"Hey, if you find a cure for cancer, let me know, okay?" he said, smirking.

"Yeah, sure," I said. "Does it matter, though?If you pulled CANCER, right?"

He looked at the woman, who shrugged and walked out of the room. He looked back at me.

"I didn't pull CANCER," he said. "But you never know."

"Yeah," I said. "I guess it wouldn't matter if you did."

He chuckled and put his hands in his pockets. "Cancer can cause a lot more than death. A cert is just how it ends, right? It's not the whole story."

Sometimes you can feel the changes coming. You can't sleep right the night before, and you're tired and not dealing with your feelings very well, and you're not prepared for it when it happens. Maybe it's order a.s.serting itself, freezing the top layers while the stew roils and boils underneath, like when my mom puts chicken soup in the fridge so the fat rises to the top and hardens and she can ladle it out.

I had a lot of nasty dreams about car accidents and jigsaw puzzles and big, long scars on Maggie's face and her teeth falling out.

The next day was the first day of school after the big New Year's break. There were police cars all over the parking lot, and some government cars. I walked to homeroom, and the man from the FBI was there. He nodded to me as I sat down at my desk. My homeroom teacher looked nervous, and told me to have a seat. I wondered how Maggie was.

"You've probably heard on the news," she said. I hadn't, and a few other kids hadn't, either, so she started to explain. She was having trouble finding the right words.

"There are a few other people who have pulled...something that might not be good for the rest of us. And Agent Williams here is-"

Agent Williams, the FBI guy who looked too young to carry a gun, put his hand on her shoulder and stepped forward.

"No need to get excited, kids," he said, because some of the others were starting to raise their hands. "This is just a routine investigation. We got permission from the school board to have you all tested, in some cases for the second time."He looked right at me and smirked a little. "It's all going to be very smooth and organized, so I don't want anybody freaking out, okay?"

n.o.body freaked out. They converted the gym to a big laboratory, with beds and curtains everywhere and the blood-reading machines set up in the corners. Some of the younger kids cried when they got their blood taken, but that was all. Doctors and nurses and other people in blue scrubs and lab coats were all over the place, carrying racks of samples to the machines.

They put us in our homerooms and told us not to wander off, but the force of that authority was fading. The teachers looked more worried than the kids, and weren't really paying attention. I didn't have the nerve to get up and find Maggie, but she would try to find me. I decided it was best to stay put.

I sat on the gym floor with a few of the other kids, nerds like me, except while I had found a place all by myself in the wide, deep strata of high school culture, they had stuck together and taken the chess club and the computer club stratum as their own, as the previous nerds and geeks had graduated after initiating them. Now they were on top, the smartest kids in school. Well, except for me.

"Hey, Brian," said one of the nerds, a kid whose name I couldn't remember. I think it was Jake, but I never really cared to learn it. He was a junior. "What did you pull?"

"That's a personal question," I said, not taking my eyes away from the book I was reading, Stephen Hawking's book, the one that had gotten me thinking so much. I had to read it again, and was reading it a lot. I was back at the part where he was describing the machine's inner workings. He thinks the machine hangs on a cosmic string, tied like a noose around our necks.

"You don't have to tell me," he said. "I was just curious."

"I didn't pull the nuke," I said.

"I hope I do," said the Junior, proudly. He had obviously been thinking about it.

"That's stupid," I said.

"No it isn't," he said, but not just to me. The other nerds were shaking their heads and rolling their eyes. This kid was probably the one with all the stupid theories. Every friend group has one. "Do you know how a nuke kills you?You're incinerated. You probably won't even know it's coming. That's a lot better than EMPHYSEMA or something. Do you know how EMPHYSEMA kills you?You drown in your own mucous."

"You're crazy," I said.

"Oh really?Why?What, did you pull EMPHYSEMA?Or AIDS?"

"Shut up," I said.

"I'm telling you, the nuke is the way to go."

"There are lots of ways a nuke can kill you," I said. "Not just in the first blast, either. Do you know how radiation poisoning kills you? Say you take about a thousand rads or so. For the first few days, you're fine. You don't even know anything's wrong. You might even feel great, like you just got laid, but that's a bad example because you don't know what that's like."