Dying Has Never Been This Exciting (Free Download "Machine of Death" Ebook and Podcast)

What’s the only fate shared by the entire humanity? Yup, it’s death. And since we’re all going to die, it won’t be a far-too-incorrect premise that life is the process of dying itself, right? You see, most people do know that to live means to be dying, but since they couldn’t see the other end of that process—the mysterious death—life has become something of a day-to-day, all-too-ordinary journey (physically, mentally, spiritually, economically, etc). How about that fate of death? Not to worry. We’ll cross that bridge when we get to it.

But what if we have the chance to present that bridge in front of us right now? What if we are given the chance to have a glimpse on our death? Would you want or dare to take that chance? Well, that’s what Machine of Death is all about. The only problem is you can’t get every details about your death, not the when, not the where, and (absolutely) not the why; it’s simply the how.

So, what’s the point? We’re still dying and—biblically speaking—death will still become a thief that would sneak in, right? Well, it’s still makes a lot of different nonetheless. I mean, at least we would know what we’re dying of; at least we know who the thief is. And believe me, knowing that “how” can shed a whole new light upon one’s life. It can be a motivation, it can be a source of paranoia, it can set new social classes, or it can cause revolution in major fields (like law or medicine), and Machine of Death presents those possibilities in every shape and color.

What makes the book more interesting is that it doesn’t wrap the issue with the all-too-serious-fatal-doom tone, such as in Final Destination movie series. Machine of Death is a compilation of 35 short stories by 35 different authors (or collaborations). Each author makes his/her own twist of the issue in his/her style of writing, with various moral, psychological, or philosophical approaches. It can be sad, reflective, funny, hilarious, or simply silly. All in all, we can view our dying process as a very different matter. An interesting one. An exciting one.

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For a brief preview, here I show you the T-Rex comic that presents the basic premise of the book, which is made by one of the book’s masterminds and editors. The comic has attracted hundreds of readers to contribute their own stories, which some of them are then picked and compiled in the book. Below, I also give you the Introduction I quoted from the book, in case you wanna know. For the complete e-book download and other info visit their official Machine of Death site here.

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Introduction

The machine had been invented a few years ago: a machine that could tell, from just a sample of your blood, how you were going to die. It didn’t give you the date and it didn’t give you specifics. It just spat out a sliver of paper upon which were printed, in careful block letters, the words “DROWNED” or “CANCER” or “OLD AGE” or “CHOKED ON A HANDFUL OF POPCORN.” It let people know how they were going to die.

The problem with the machine is that nobody really knew how it worked, which wouldn’t actually have been that much of a problem if the machine worked as well as we wished it would. But the machine was frustratingly vague in its predictions: dark, and seemingly delighting in the ambiguities of language. “OLD AGE,” it had already turned out, could mean either dying of natural causes, or being shot by a bedridden man in a botched home invasion. The machine captured that old-world sense of irony in death: you can know how it’s going to happen, but you’ll still be surprised when it does.

The realization that we could now know how we were going to die had changed the world: people became at once less fearful and more afraid. There’s no reason not to go skydiving if you know your sliver of paper says “BURIED ALIVE.” But the realization that these predictions seemed to revel in turnabout and surprise put a damper on things. It made the predictions more sinister: yes, skydiving should be safe if you were going to be buried alive, but what if you landed in a gravel pit? What if you were buried alive not in dirt but in something else? And would being caught in a collapsing building count as being buried alive? For every possibility the machine closed, it seemed to open several more, with varying degrees of plausibility.

By that time, of course, the machine had been reverse-engineered and duplicated, its internal workings being rather simple to construct. And yes, we found out that its predictions weren’t as straightforward as they seemed upon initial discovery at about the same time as everyone else did. We tested it before announcing it to the world, but testing took time—too much, since we had to wait for people to die. After four years had gone by and three people died as the machine predicted, we shipped it out the door. There were now machines in every doctor’s office and in booths at the mall. You could pay someone or you could probably get it done for free, but the result was the same no matter what machine you went to. They were, at least, consistent.

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