"It’s not like gravity, you know? You can’t just assume it’s in the background of the story, and if someone falls off a cliff, it’s a given that they’d fall ‘downward’ and go ‘splat’ unless there’s a robot to catch them or something. You have to say GRAVITY or A FRIGGING CLIFF or something, and it gets tedious. I don’t know.”
-The Narrator, in the short story POPULAR CULTURE
The Machine of Death is a machine that knows how you will die. It takes a blood sample and spits out a slip with your cause of death on it. This cause of death is always accurate; that is, you will definitely die how it says you'll die, though the language your Slip uses may be misleading, vague, or ironic.
That is what the header image of this blog is: a Machine of Death slip, one which predicts death "LIKE A DISNEY VILLAIN." Meaning, of course, death by falling. The quote above, about the Machine predicting death by falling, is from my M.o.D. short story POPULAR CULTURE, in which the narrator dies due to popular culture (funny how that works out, eh?), and which I submitted to Machine of Death Vol. 2. (No, my story did not get selected to be published, quite possibly because it was competing against 1,957 other stories to be in the same collection (link opens in new window). That's a word cloud of the titles of all the submissions, which is understandably a big file that may take a while to load; nevertheless, my story is right there near the upper right hand corner for the world to see.)
So that's how that works.
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