[ever the lesser]

A breakdown of the Machine of Death premise:

There’s a book out there called Machine of Death (you can get it in .pdf form for free from machineofdeath.net). The premise: there’s a machine that tests your blood and tells you how you will die. It can be vague or very specific or whatnot, but whatever the death is, it has to be the title of the story. People sent in short stories to this tune. The first book was so successful that they’re doing a second.

I’ll add that a person doesn’t have to die in the story. It can be them struggling against their death, or the machine itself (deus ex machina-style), etc. etc. 

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LONELINESS

Ruth knew her fate when she met the only man she would ever love.

The first time they met, she was walking alone in the park. He, not watching where he was going, ran into her and knocked her to the ground. He helped her up, blurting apologies, self-admonishments, and finally, after looking into her eyes and the words suddenly drying up and blowing away in the soft fall wind, his name. But Ruth let the wind carry his name too, and left him bewildered.

The second time, she was on duty when he came to the emergency room after an accident. He was bloody and barely conscious. He was her patient, and she was his savior. A few weeks later, when he had somewhat recovered, he came back to the ER to thank her and ask her out, bandages still on his face and hands, his heart written across his face. She said yes, but she could not bring herself to smile.

For the first date, Ruth could not look him in the eye, wondering when he was going to betray her and discard her. When one date turned into two, two into ten, ten into living together - when he chased her shyness away first with soft kisses that ran chills up her spine, then touches that lifted her from her body - Ruth began to believe for the first time that the Machine of Death had been wrong. Perhaps when she had taken the test years before, when being young meant living forever anyway, it had misread her fate, and she wasn’t to die without this man in her life.

Ruth had once endeavored to be a part of the world rather than apart from it. When she heard of the Machine of Death, she laughed at the silliness of it, and, in her hubris and skepticism, had agreed to be tested with her med school friends. But when Ruth had retrieved her fate from the Machine of Death, the piece of paper cracked the bedrock of her soul. Ruth struggled not to believe it, but when one of her classmates and closest friends with the fate “carelessness” died in a car crash with a drunk driver, the truth seeped into her bones and changed her.

She became withdrawn and sensitive to the pettiness of everyday life, her emotions becoming a magnifying glass, turning the rifts and cracks between people into unbridgeable gaps. One by one, Ruth’s relationships fell apart, and, afraid of being lonely and not just alone, she could not bring herself to make new ones. She had finished med school, but without help and without passion. She had chosen to work in the emergency room because it had appealed to her, in her post-Machine world, to work in a place where the criticalness of the present blocked out thoughts of the future. Often she wondered if this was really her fate all along, or if she had become her own executioner.

But when she was with him, the noose loosened. It was always there, but so was he, and in his presence almost all things could disappear. He loved her, and it warmed her, somehow.

After moving in together, they had their first fight - a petty thing over something small, one of the natural outcomes of two individuals sharing the same space for the first time. He had snapped at her out of frustration, though he quickly saw his error and apologized. Ruth could see the sincerity in his eyes, but the seeds had been sewn, and an ominous grey fog of panic clouded her mind. She had learned to love him, but even as he wrapped his arms around her, whispered in her ear, and led her to the bedroom, she knew, in the creeping darkness in her heart, that he was going to leave her. For the first time, his touch failed to pierce the veil between them, and she was alone again.

Yet she had still learned to love someone deeply, powerfully, through the inevitability of her fate. Ruth began to feel an obsessive need to keep him, but, as he told her he loved her, she also felt a painful mistrust take root, and the desperation of the contradiction closed around her throat and suffocated her. 

The mistrust transformed into a twisted, wicked thing, consuming Ruth’s thoughts. Every time she looked into his eyes, she could see only his eventual betrayal. To him, however, she was still loving, kind, and, ultimately, hidden – which she knew had been why, despite her shyness that was really a part of her damage, he had fallen for her. He had told her that he had never and would never be tested by the Machine. She had said the same, even though she saw the word whenever she closed her eyes. She wondered what would happen if he knew the truth, but it didn’t matter. The result would always be the same.

When he brought up the possibility of having children, she fought against him with a handful of weak reasons, hiding the real reason for her panic. Failing to see what she was hiding, his temper flared and he left for the night to stay with a friend. Ruth was unable to move, crushed beyond emotional reaction. Her mind disconnected from her body, and she could only stare at the door he had walked through, trying not to understand what had happened. When he came back less than an hour later to apologize to her for being rash and unfair, the damage had been done. While her misery churned and the desperation sank in, she forgave him with a kiss.

Ruth wandered through life for the next few months. He mentioned that he saw a slight change in her, but she did not refuse his love, and he did not press her. Yet this kindness came across awkwardly as withdrawal and disinterest, and she had to contain miserable screams every time he walked out the door. Her work became a function of body without mind, and she was mechanical and efficient. It was after a long night of crises and scares, long after the unfeeling had become routine, that she came home with the sedative and syringe in her pocket.

She found it as she undressed in their bedroom, her fingers wrapping around the smoothness of the bottle and the syringe when she checked her pockets. She stared at it, failing in her exhaustion to remember how it had come home with her. While she was holding it, he turned over, breathing deeply and softly in his sleep. She looked up at him; the clock’s gentle ticking the only sound disturbing the silence. The moonlight streaming through the window lit his face, and Ruth was struck by what she had gained and how much she could lose.

Her mind reconnected with her body suddenly, pent-up emotions rushing through her so quickly that she could not process them all at once. Without thinking of the true cost, without allowing any part of her to dissent, she unwrapped the syringe, plunged the needle through the seal, and drew out all of the sedative. She then approached him, walking in front of the window and blocking the light that fell across his face. She leaned over him, slid the needle into his arm slowly, and injected enough to keep him still for a while. As she withdrew the needle, he rustled a little and barely opened his eyes. He saw her and smiled, and she took his hand and kissed his forehead as he slipped into nothingness.

She observed him for a while to make sure he was well and breathing before heading back to the hospital and taking what she needed. Drugs to make him sleep. Drugs to wake him. Drugs to take away his pain. She took one nutrition bag and then, thinking twice, took two more. When she returned home, she watched him again, taking him in, looking for any sign something had gone wrong. Once she was sure, she slipped into bed beside him, wrapping her arms around his belly and finding comfort in his warmth. Never once did she ask herself what she had done. 

In the weeks afterward, he began to atrophy and wither, a fraction of the man he once was. When Ruth was feeling lonely, she would give him the waking drug. When he woke, she would be there, waiting. She would tell him lies about where he was and what was happening, and he would look at her, attentive but unmoving. Once he was able speak, he would always tell her he loved her. She would smile and always say it back. They never talked, but she would hold his hand and kiss his face. Then, when she had to leave or he started to move, she would inject more drugs into his system and watch him sink back into oblivion.

And whenever she lay beside him, his stillness pacified her. As she would drift to sleep holding the man she would love and never lose, she would listen to the soft ticking of the clock, her only company.