William was facing the wall, but he was still able to hear the men talking behind him. He was on his knees in front of a brick wall. They were only about ten feet away, discussing his fate. What they were saying was extremely clear. As he listened, he stared up at the ravaged, brick wall in front of him. Though he couldn’t see the men’s actual faces, he started to associate each voice he heard with a different section of the wall.

There was a deep voice that he put with the rough mortar between the bricks. There was a high, smooth voice that he placed with a brick that was smooth instead of ridged like the others. There was a gravelly sounding voice that he associated with a part of the wall that was below him to his right. It was pock-marked with bullet holes, and some of the mortar was falling out completely. There was some graffiti on the wall above him, but he listened in vain for a voice to go with it. Someone had gone to the trouble of painting a rebel logo on the wall. Maybe it was before the shooting had started. It seemed a bit pointless, but it also seemed to demonstrate the belief that support for a thing was actually valuable. That belief seemed to have demonstrated itself false, but it was a belief that William kept wishing were actually true. He kept trying to match it to a voice, but none of them seemed quite right.

Those were the main voices, but there were others as well.  There were eight men and most of them didn’t speak. And even when one of the other men piped up, he generally had very little to say. Even though it seemed like it was a fairly big decision for the men to make, there wasn’t really much to talk about. They were on the march deep behind the lines and couldn’t take prisoners, so they had to make other arrangements. They weren’t sure whether to execute him, injure him so he couldn’t keep fighting or just let him go free and depend on him to leave. This was obviously what William wanted, and he was, actually, intending to just leave if they let him go. He really didn’t care who won, and certainly not enough to keep fighting about it. Naturally, he was curious about what was going to happen to him, but at the same time, he found it disconcerting having to listen.

The gravelly voice was really pushing for execution. He was arguing that they definitely wanted William out of the fight, and the only way to get that done was either to take him prisoner or kill him. Since they couldn’t take him prisoner, they’d have to kill him. William found himself sympathizing with this argument until he remembered who they were talking about. Then he hoped that the best argument wouldn’t win.

For a moment they talked about injuring him instead. The idea was brought forward by someone that William hadn’t heard before. The voice seemed unsure of itself, and even though it had brought the idea of an injury up, it didn’t seem to think it was actually a very good idea.

It was an unremarkable voice, and he couldn’t decide which part of the wall it would even go with. It definitely didn’t fit with the graffiti. William had to smile despite himself about how snobby he had gotten about that graffiti. There was no way that a hesitant, mediocre voice was going to get that spot.

The deep voice immediately objected, saying that injury was nothing but a cruel and cowardly method of execution. It pointed out that any injury they inflicted would almost certainly be fatal. William would just lie on the ground and bleed to death without any help. So even if the intent was simply to ensure William’s removal from the conflict, it would likely result in prolonged suffering and death. The deep voice said that, though he would have preferred imprisonment, a straight execution would be a better option than just leaving him to bleed out.

After this admission, the two voices argued for a while, but the gravelly voice was clearly winning. The other voices agreed with him, and the deep voice was the only holdout left. William could hear a bit of desperation seeping into the voice, and he kind of knew that he’d lost. Both of them had lost.

The gravelly voice pointed out that William’s side wouldn’t hesitate to kill one of them. The deep voice responded by saying that that was an even better reason not to do it. They were fighting an actual war so as not to be like the other side, and so if the other side would have had no problem with an execution, it was an even better reason not to do it themselves.

However, the first voice had already convinced the others. Different voices expressed varying degrees of sympathy for the deep voice and for William, but the discussion was now just focussed on how they would kill William, not on whether they actually should. They were feeling bad about it, but it didn’t change anything. They still had to deal with him, and they had limited options for how they were going to do that.

The idea of a firing squad was briefly considered, but the deep voice proclaimed that he wanted no part of it. William heard the swishing sounds of someone walking away—presumably the deep voice leaving. After he had left, nobody else seemed to be that interested either, and even the gravelly voice was hesitant. There was no longer any discussion, just the sound of uncomfortable silence. Eventually the gravelly voice spoke up again, saying that, if no one else was willing to help him, he would take care of it himself.

William heard a mechanical click behind him and then felt the muzzle of a rifle under his left ear. William had often been accused of thinking too much, and that came back to him as the muzzle rested under his ear. He should have been angry or desperate or something, but he mostly just felt sad. It was depressing that his own death seemed so reasonable.

After a while, William started to get a little impatient. The execution was happening, and it seemed like it’d be better to just get it done with. He wondered what the gravelly voice was waiting for, and then the muzzle of the gun jerked, and he stopped wondering. He’d never figured out which voice the graffiti should go with.

 

Northrup was going through his old files when he came across the folder that his mom had put together many years before. It was full of newspaper clippings about him and the machine that he’d invented. Most of them were from the weekly local paper of the small town that she’d been living in, but there were also a few from larger daily newspapers as well. Looking through the articles, he realized that, at least for some of them, she must have had to go searching to get them, since they weren’t from papers that she’d have even subscribed to.

Twenty years earlier Northrup had invented a kind of “life alarm.” The machine had been very popular for a few years. How it worked was that you entered your goals, and then you entered your actions as you went about daily life. If the machine saw that you were getting off track and doing things that wouldn’t help you get to your destination, it let you know. Unlike a standard alarm clock, it didn’t beep at you, but instead, the voice of a gentle British woman reminded you of where you were actually trying to get.

In spite of its initial popularity, it wasn’t long before the machine started to cause some controversy. The troubles culminated in Northrup being sued over one young man’s goals. An aunt took him to court because her nephew had entered that he wanted to get as high as possible. Whenever he wasn’t stoned, the alarm would gently chide him, and encourage him to smoke something or take a pill. They had to forcibly separate him from the machine before they could get him into rehab. The young man got himself straightened out eventually, but he became very critical of the machine, blaming it, in part, for his problems with substance abuse.

In the end, the judge found that Northrup couldn’t be held responsible for the goals that people punched into his alarm. However, even though he won the court case, the machine quickly lost popularity. It wasn’t long before no store would sell it, and Northrup faced bankruptcy. Soon no more alarms were being made.

Northrup had continued working on it, regardless. He hoped that he could fix some of the flaws that led to the court case. However, he found the problems insurmountable, and wanted to just put the whole thing behind him. He’d grown sick of the alarm, and he soon stopped even trying to fix it. The machine became nothing more than an idea when Northrup scrapped the last prototype. He was hoping that he’d never hear any more about it.

However, the alarm had been popular for long enough to spur quite a few articles. His mother had carefully clipped and stored as many as she could find. Northrup himself hadn’t bothered to keep more than a few of them and at the same time as he’d junked the prototype, he’d also burned the articles he’d kept, wishing that he’d never even imagined the machine in the first place. As a result, other than the articles that his mother had kept, there was no evidence left of the success that Northrup and his invention had enjoyed.

His mother had died several years before. It should have been old age that got her, but it was a car accident instead. Her car had been hit while she was pulling out of her driveway onto a busy street. A younger person in a newer car would have been all right, but she was in her eighties and the car was too old to have effective air bags. So, she held on for a little while, but after a few days, she died of her injuries.

Northrup was devastated, but he wasn’t sure that he was devastated enough. Even in his relationship with his mother, the alarm had taken its toll. Right up until the end, she had continued to insist on his brilliance, and that had made Northrup angry. One utterly failed invention, and she would not let go of the belief that he was a genius. At the time, he’d been working in a shoe store. He kind of liked it and wondered why he’d ever even tried for anything else.

His mother wasn’t satisfied with it, however. She kept forwarding him job offers to teach in Engineering departments. He’d told her many times that universities didn’t hire failed inventors with a bachelor’s degree to teach courses, but she wouldn’t listen.

After her death he had found the articles while he was going through her stuff. He was still working at the shoe store, but at least he had become the manager. Most of his staff were too young to know about his past, and those that were old enough to remember were also too smart to bring it up. Since he no longer had to serve the public very much, it was only very rarely that he had to deal with any random customer knowing who he was. Or at least, even if they figured it out, it was very rare that anyone said anything.

Looking through the articles, most of them described him as a visionary of some sort. His mother hadn’t kept the later articles that described him as deluded or arrogant or other unpleasant things. She didn’t like to think of him that way, so she had just willfully ignored what people actually thought of him by that time.

He found himself angered by the articles. If there had been at least some of the negative articles as well as the glowing ones, he might have found the experience less irritating. Though maybe he wouldn’t have. It wouldn’t have been great reading that he was delusional any more than it was reading about his genius. When he found them, he thought about taking them out to the backyard and burning them like he’d burnt the others.

However, he soon calmed down. Besides the articles, his mother had kept a box of his report cards and his awards. The report cards portrayed Northrup as a budding genius, like the articles had. He had always gotten good marks, and his teachers gushed about his natural abilities and talent.

So instead of burning them, he placed the folder full of articles into the same box with the report cards. He put it to one side, determined that when he started packing everything back up, it would go on the bottom. He’d be able to forget about it without actually having to get rid of it.

The folder was hers and even though it was about him, he didn’t feel right about destroying it. She had been deluded about him right until the end, and no matter how much he might want to, he couldn’t change her mind anymore. The delusion was hers, and he didn’t feel he had the right to wreck it even after she had died.