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If you haven’t already read Machine of Death, quit making your life even more worthless than it already is! Machine of Death is an anthology of stories set in a world where there exist machines that tell you how you’ll die. The machine is always accurate, but usually vague.

Here is my own amazing story for a future version of the book:

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John furrowed his brow as he stared at the slip in his hand. LIED TO BY MACHINE. This was how he was going to die…maybe. He stood in front of the machine in silence for almost a minute until the impatience of the people behind him in line became palpable. John made a beeline for the exit, still trying to wrap his head around the seemingly paradoxical prediction in his hand. Which machine would lie to him? Was it the machine that had printed his slip, meaning he would die in some other fashion? Can one die of a paradox?

As he left the mall and began the long walk home, John tried to comfort himself by imagining that this meant he would live to see an age of sentient robots, and that one of those machines would lie to him. Perhaps he would be killed by a jealous robot husband after John engaged in hours of passionate robo-human sex with his robot wife, who had listed herself on iHarmony as DRM-free. The cross-walk sign gave the okay, and John walked into the intersection, lost in his thoughts about the intriguing details of robo-human sex.

It didn’t hurt at first. The world was suddenly upside down and eerily silent. People rushed out of their cars to try and help, or to yell at the people who were blocking traffic by trying to help. John felt a strange kind of pain building up in his head, and knew it was a bad sign that he felt almost nothing anywhere else. The crosswalk sign, he thought. That had to be it; the machine that had lied to him. Even as his head tilted back and the world began to go out of focus, the irony was not lost on John. Had he not been so preoccupied with the slip, he surely would have seen the car coming.

The car. John’s eyes rolled back to see the car that hit him driving away. It looked like any other vehicle, like those forming the backdrop of the crowd of people gathering around him, except for the colorful print on the back. It said:

Google Driverless Car

Do you super-duper swear that you're a human being?

Yes, I am a human being. Seriously.