By Pentadact

“Fuck!”
It came from the den. Later I’d learn that it had followed a much quieter, “Oh fuck. Oh-”

My first thought was that it had broken. I was going to spend a lot of time, over the next five years, wishing that I’d been right about that.

He burst into the room, crunching the door hinges and smacking the handle deep into the plaster. He nearly fell over trying to stop. I didn’t say anything, just stared.
“391! He was on the train this morning! He was one of the victims!” He stared too. We just stared. “Look it up!”
I didn’t have to. I didn’t have all our test cases memorised yet, but 391 I did know: EXPLODED. He was one of the reasons I didn’t believe it was working, EXPLODED was a joke. He saw I wasn’t looking it up, saw me looking at him, and knew I knew, but said it all the same:
“It fucking works.”

-

We were eating.
“Okay, well, it’s on now.” I munched a chip.
“Yeah.”
“I mean, it’s on.” I pointed a chip at him for emphasis.
“Yeah.”
“I’m just-”
“I get that it is on.”
“Okay.” I put my chips down.
I fixed myself a drink.

-

He came into my office again, calmly this time, through the fucked door. My office, his house. We left all the doors open that afternoon, and just walked around doing small, unimportant things, occasionally meeting in the corridors of his big, dusty old house and swapping new thoughts.

“What’s the latest count? How many others died?”
“They’re saying two-hundred now.” I told him, underplaying it a little. “Some places are saying three.” They were all saying three.
“Christ. From one bomb?”
“Well, it was on the subway, so…”
“Yeah. Christ.” He slouched against the wall and looked up at the cracked ceiling. “This isn’t quite how I imagined it working.”
“You know we still have to publish, right? I mean, that was the point of no return, right there.”
“Yeah, yeah, I know. It’s just-” He looked at me. “It’s going to look like we’re profiting off of this.”
I laughed, then met his eyes. “It’s going to look like we’re profiting from it? Pete, it’s going to look like we did it. You don’t seem to realise how sceptical people are going to be about something like this. You’re the only person in the world who has any idea how this box works, and to the rest of us it looks a hell of a lot like a hoax. And when some small-minded prick with a pound of C4 decided commuters were responsible for all the world’s problems this morning, it became the most vicious hoax in history. We’re going to have protesters on your lawn around the clock, we’re going to get ripped to shreds in the press, we’re going to be hounded by cameras. We’re going to get mail bombs, Pete.” I sat down, and lowered my voice. “They’re gonna try and kill us. Nobody knows yet, but I promise you that at some point in the next eighteen hours, someone, somewhere, is going to check our predictions list against the victims list and our lives as they stand will be over.” I was realising most of this as I said it. I felt sick. We were fucked.
“We’re fucked, aren’t we?”
“We’re not fucked.” I thought about it. We were definitely fucked. “No, we’re not fucked.”
He shook his head. “We’re so fucked.”
I sighed. We were so, so fucked.

-

“I don’t, you know,” he said suddenly, as we boxed up the prototype. I frowned.
“What?”
“Have any idea how it works. I’m the same as anyone else, except I know it does.”
“You made it, Pete. I just did your accounts.”
“I didn’t really. I discovered it. If it had done what I built it to do, if it had been the thing we were trying to make, if it had been the Death Clock-”
“I told you we couldn’t call it that.”
“-then I would have made it. But you can’t make something like this, it’s out there waiting to be found.”
“Well, I certainly hope you can make it. Because we’re going to need a job fucking lot of them.”

-

“You know, this is the best possible way it could have happened.”
“What the hell?”
“No, I mean, to prove it. You couldn’t ask for a more conclusive test.” He put up a hand to silence me, “I know, I know loads of people are going to think we blew up a train to sell a box, but this is still going to convince more people than we ever dreamed we would. Your investor friends aren’t going to think we blew up San Francisco, they’re going to think it works.”
“They’re not going to like the publicity.”
“They don’t have to, yet. No-one has to know they’re investing, and they all know that by the time they come to sell them, the whole world will realise they work.” I was the business brain of the operation, but Pete wasn’t an idiot. I knew it from the moment he said ‘391′: this would make us.
“Yeah.”

-

“Did you tell Jen yet?”
“What? Yeah, of course! You didn’t tell Cath?”
“Not yet.” Honestly, it had only just occured to me.
“Well why the hell not? You’ve got to tell her, dude.” I hate it when he calls me dude.
“I just- how do you say it? How did you say it?”
“I said ‘Jen, it works,’ same as I said to you.”
“Actually you said ‘It fucking works!’,” I mocked, in my best nasal geek voice, “to me. But you told her how we know?”
“Yeah.”
“Was she freaked out?”
“Of course. Aren’t you?”
“I’m- I’ve been-” I came clean. “I feel sick. I’ve been feeling sick for three hours now.”
He looked straight at me; I don’t talk like that often. “You’ve got to tell her. Jen’ll tell her, and she’ll tell her when I told her. You know what they’re like, women just find a way to get times into conversations.”
“I can’t say I’d noticed.”
“Well, they do.”

-

I walked into the Den. Pete was tinkering again, already. I set his coffee down and took a sip of mine.
“Thanks.”
I ignored him. “Here’s what we do. You spend the rest of the night packing all this away, everything you need. I hire a van. You hire a hangar. I hire an agent. You draw me up a list of the components that went into the latest prototype – not the ones you think you’ll need for the new improved version, I know you. The components for this one. I’ll give the investors the heads up before the news breaks, and tell them we need the first payment by noon tomorrow. You call every enginer friend you trust and get them on board. Write out a step-by-step assembly guide an idiot could follow in the van on the way, then make sure we don’t hire any idiots to follow it. I order us a new pair of phones, we throw these ones away, and we give the new numbers to no-one but Cath and Jen unless I say. We disappear. I can sort out accommodation once we’re out of here, and a few months down the line we can buy a new place, but right now we have to get as many of these things built and making predictions as possible. The more predictions they make, the more get proved right, the fewer mail bombs we get.” I sipped. “What’s that?” He was writing something.
“It’s a step-by-step assembly guide an idiot could follow.” He put it on a thin pile.
“What are those?”
“Well,” he leafed through them, “this one’s a component list for the prototype, this one’s a map to the hangar we’ve hired, these are the resumés of the three most expensive agents I could find, this one’s a printout of a receipt for two 8GB iPhones, this one’s a fax from the Hyatt confirming our reservation, and these are the keys to our new van.” He tossed them to me. I looked around the room, I guess for the first time. It was full of neatly packed boxes.
“What do I do at this company again?”
“It’s never really been clear to me.” He took a sip of his coffee and went back to writing. “Call the investors!” he shouted after me as I left, forgetting my mug.

-

“We’re not going to get killed by a mail bomb, you know,” he said in the van on the way up. It was dark, I was driving, which meant the radio stayed off. “We know that much. Whatever happens with this, it won’t kill us. I’m an aneurysm and you’re a heart-attack, those were the first two tests we ever ran.”
“Yeah.” I’d been thinking about that a lot since we discovered the box really worked. I wondered what it would feel like. “Christ, what about Cath and Jen?” I’d refused to let either of them be tested.
“We’ll have them take it, we have to now.” They were coming up tomorrow. The thought of it made me queasy.
“No,” I said suddenly. “No. I don’t want it hanging over them,” then, feeling the familiar emotional crunch of stepping on Pete’s toes when it came to Jen, “Not Cath, anyway.”
“We have to.”
“You think about it, don’t you? What it’s going to feel like? Come on, we don’t want that for them.” He stared at the wing-mirror. “If I looked through your browser cache, I’d find the Wikipedia entry on aneurysms in there somewhere, right?”
“No.” He looked back at the road. We sat in silence for a few minutes, the blank road purring beneath us as a half-tunnel of arched black trees flashed by either side. “I cleared it.”
I looked at him for the briefest moment. He was smiling.

This is the first micro-chapter of my short story for the Machine of Death challenge, which was great fun to write. I gave it a go because I thought it would be a good test of whether I can enjoy writing to someone else’s spec, and it turns out I much prefer it to writing my own ideas. There was something breezy about this whole process – it’s a short piece to begin with, but also not having the burden of responsibility for the concept makes it even easier to jump in.