It is in the beginning of these times that the next story takes place, it is all facts, and is heavily documented, unfortunately the documents are all classified information, and are in the property of the institution that created de machine. And old diary article is all that’s left of this story.
Mexico: Richard N., the infamous leader, founder and last member of the equally infamous MADM (Movement Against Death Machines), was found dead this morning in a beach town, down in Mexico, his cause of death remains undetermined, so deathlab technicians who incidentally happened to be there will be taking samples of his blood “to determine his cause of death” local authorities said.
Richard was a bit crazy since he was young, they all thought he would grow up to be a thug o a homeless, so when he said he wanted to be a scientist everyone laughed at him, telling him he didn’t even had the abilities to be a lab mouse, fortunately for him, he was no easy quitter, so he decided to look at something to explain scientifically. After a while of reading and making research, he ended up being a really knowledgeable person, nevertheless, he did not found anything he could explain with that knowledge; so he went out to the city, trying to understand everything, he was doing pretty fine until that moment; He saw a very long line, it went all along at least 5 blocks. Full of curiosity, he followed the line, and when he got to the place where it began he was shocked to see that everyone that was going into the place had this anxious look in their face, but when they came out there was nothing left of that expression, people had a vague look in their eyes and seemed disillusioned, worried and paranoid.
Richard then decided to ask anybody nearby what was going on, so they told him that it was a machine that could predict the cause of death for anyone, and that it worked, this was the first machine in the city, but soon there would be lots more, since they were relatively cheap. Richard thought this was all nonsense and got out of there, but soon he knew that the machine predictions were becoming real all over the world. People just gave the machine a sample of their blood, and then received a silver paper with an inscription on it; the inscription was the cause of death for the blood donor.
“There is no way a machine can predict the future, if it did, we could predict other things that are easier, such as the global economy for the next years, or climate.” Thought Richard, then, he had the craziest idea he had ever had; What if the machine killed people, being the prediction just a warning from the machine, telling the user how would it kill him.
Immediately Richard sent letters to the company, informing them of his worries, but they were not interested in hearing him (business was good, no need to sacrifice profits) and didn’t pay the least attention to him. Richard was still worried and did carry his own experiments, but did them on rats, and different kinds of lab animals. The results were astounding, when any animal received a prediction it would die of whatever the machine had said, even if special measures were taken. One of the most impressive cases was a rat that got “electrocution” as its cause of death; it was placed far from any cable or light, but two weeks after the prediction; when rain season started, water filtrated to the room, and humidity conducted enough electricity to kill the rat when it tried to drink. It seemed that it was unavoidable to die the way the machine said.
Again Richard made efforts to contact the company that manufactured said machines, deathlab, but they didn’t answer his calls nor returned them as they promised. Frustrated by the lack of interest of the company, and given that it was impossible to pay a visit to them (They never gave out an address) he went to different TV stations and Newspapers, he even started a Web blog in order to inform the public about his conclusions about the death machines. He was taken as crazy, but some papers accepted to publish him and he got a respectable amount of followers, who refused to use the machines and committed to convince more people of not using the machines.
It all seemed to go smoothly for Richard, as he gained popularity and followers. He was recognized everywhere he went and he got as much cheers as death threats, so he was pretty much famous. One especially rainy day, as he walked through the deserted streets of his neighborhood he started hearing strange noises in the roofs, but thought nothing about it, since there were a lot of stray cats around; Richard kept walking, but the noises were too loud to be those of a cat, he looked up, but saw nothing since the moonlight was blocked by the clouds. Then, out of nowhere a huge metal barrel fell just in front of him, hadn’t he stopped he would have been crushed… Someone was after him.
The next months were all downhill for him, more and more followers kept getting out of the movement, and every day there were less supporters of his movement against death machines. It all hit rock bottom when the government made it mandatory for the citizens to use the death machines, or face the consequences (The news were worded like that, the consequences were never specified). It was the time for Richard to start an attack against the machines, and it was the official beginning of the MADM, the equal of French resistance, but this time it was a no-truce battle against death machines.
Lots of misfits joined the movement, but they were easy targets since they didn’t even tried to hide that they were part of MADM, the most important part of the movement were the intellectuals that refused to use the machines, who kept doing studies with them, and trying to get to a conclusion. It seemed like the battle was almost lost, and the movement was about to disappear when a philosopher published a theory about the death machines. To date, only an excerpt of that work has been found.
“…Basically, death machines perform the task that a murderer would, he sees and analyses his victim before choosing how to kill him, the moment before he decides, the person can die of an almost infinite number of causes, but when the murderer decides which way it’s going to kill his victim, this is definite and impossible to change. As in our not-so-perfect justice system, a convicted criminal sentenced to the death row would die even if he wasn’t sentenced to death, for us, death is unavoidable, but by giving blood to the machines, we are allowing them to decide our death. What it does is select a possibility of an almost infinite number of deaths and assign it to the subject. The main reason the scientists have been unable to understand the working process of death machines, is because there still isn’t a reliable quantum theory, so we are using a system that we don’t understand, therefore…”
The complete paper was sent to different governments, but was mostly ignored, since approximately 95% of the population had already used the machine, and they didn’t wanted to create panic. The work was banned and the author of it was incarcerated, accused of being an agitator and of trying to overthrow the actual system; he was never heard of again.
In the meantime, Richard had been on the run for almost five years, and was getting tired of it, on repeated occasions he was quoted as being “this close to send to hell the whole thing”. But that were just some sporadic crisis, when he felt better he kept recruiting people to destroy death machines and vandalize death labs property.
It was impossible to keep up the pace, and the movement started to loose followers, it was on the brink of disappearing when death labs started an offensive against Richard, he was being expected everywhere he arrived to, and escaped from death on repeated occasions, it appeared that he had a mole. As ambushes became more and more frequent, Richard grew more and more paranoid to the point of not trusting anyone, and traveling alone. It’s said that because of that he knew nothing of MADM most prominent members being arrested and disappearing, and smaller regional groups being dismantled; soon, the only survivor was Richard.
One day, Richard was in the coast of the pacific, looking for an old MADM hideout were he hoped to find some old members of the group to recruit more people in the area. As he entered the place, he noticed something was wrong; something was VERY wrong.
Deathlab people were al over the place, Richard barely had time to hide behind a box when a group of heavily armed mercenaries with deathlab’s logo passed him by, he saw them enough time to notice that among them were some former MADM members, dressed as the mercenaries… There was more than one mole, there was an army of them. The mercenaries were carrying MADM members, who were tied and blindfolded, and made them stand in a row; They were going to be executed.
Richard tried to flee the place, he stood up and started walking away, then, when he thought he was almost safe he heard someone yelling at him: “Stop roght were you are! NOW! ” There were two options; He could run and try to escape, or return to be recognized and shot. The choice wasn’t a tough one, and in an instant he was running as fast as his tired and under nourished legs allowed him to. There was a gunshot, it got him in the arm, but he kept running, leaving a trail of blood behind him.
“It’s his blood” said the man who had shot him, “Yes, I did recognize him. It was Richard whatever, the founder of MADM.” The lab people arrived soon, collected his blood and took it to the lab, by now he would probably be death, or in the brink of it. It was safe to declare him death, so deathlab’s problems would finally be over… This is when the news of his death were published, and the reason that his cause of death never was is still matter of discussion, but recently I found a letter from a scientist involved in the analysis of the blood to deathlab executives, its transcription below is the (almost) integer original letter.
Sir…
As you should be aware by now, that MADM sneaky little bastard was finally gunned down by our troops, and we took blood samples to confirm his cause of death, as of now, the results are arriving to my office, and they are not at all what we would have expected, we suppose that, unless the machine doesn’t work with blood of people who are already dead, Mr. Richard N’s blood is immune to our analysis, meaning that, at the moment we cannot make an announcement regarding his death…
You may also need to know that the wildest theories are circulating among the people around here, there has been people that say that he is immortal and that he won’t ever die, or that he won’t die until he sees all of deathlab employees death, of course, all of these theories are unfounded and are not considered seriously.
Sincerely yours,
XXX.
P.D. The test results came as “Impossible to determine.”
So, there is no body, no test results, no nothing… If they lied about that, what else are they hiding?
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