Story Up My Sleeve #4: “The Killion,” by Ian Frazier

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At a little after noon on Friday, August 6th, Marcie Chang, anchorwoman on TV 8’s “Newsbusters” evening news show, picked up her envelope at the pay window on the studio’s fifth floor, bought a ham-salad sandwich and a cup of coffee from the lunch wagon in the hall, and took the elevator back to her office on the tenth floor. Sitting down at her desk, she tore open the envelope, which contained the first payment of the lucrative new contract that the station had offered her in the spring. She took one look at the check and collapsed. She was dead before her face hit the desk top. A few minutes later, TV reporter Kerri Corcoran, a colleague and friend, came into Marcie’s office, saw her, looked at the check she still held in her hand, and crumpled, lifeless, to the floor. The same fate met the receptionist who came to Marcie’s office to find out why she wasn’t answering her phone, and the building security guard, who was summoned by the cleaning woman after she had noticed the pile of bodies.

Nor was that the end. In quick succession, three police officers, a fireman, a newspaper reporter, and a pathologist from Mount Sinai were added to the death list. Alarmed public-health officials called on the Institute for Catastrophe Control in Princton. With grim predicatability, two of the institute’s top scientists soon showed the seriousness of the challenge when they, too, were felled. Within forty-eight hours, scientists from the institute who had taken over the case were fairly certain that the fatal agent was the check that Marcie had picked up that Wednesday afternoon. They examined it through heavily tinted safety glasses, in sections, with no one scientist viewing the entire check. Within another forty-eight hours, Dr. Leo Wiedenthal, director of the institute, knew what he had on his hands. In a statement released to the press, he said that there was no evidence of a supertoxin or highly contagious disease on the fatal paycheck. Rather, he said, “Marcie Chang and the eleven other victims almost certainly died as a result of what they saw on the check. Through a computer error, Marcie’s check was made out to an extremely high number. Apparently, the computer made Marcie’s check out to the sum of one killion dollars. The killion, as every mathematician knows, is a number so big that it kills you.”