A small book that tackles one of life's great mysteries: where does fate end and coincidence begin? Fifty-five million years ago, a sudden burst of lightning frightened a herd of small prehistoric horses. In the ensuing panic, one of the horses, a five-year-old mare no bigger than a fox terrier, fell into a lake and drowned. On June 23, 1975, in Austin, Texas, a drop of oil combusted in a car engine. This tiny explosion happened just as the Ford Pinto, driven by a one-armed hitchhiker named Jimmy, pulled into the parking lot of the Timber Creek Apartments, home to the young woman in the passenger's seat, a twenty-two-year-old biology student named Clarissa Sanders.The lyrical and fantastical story of how these two seemingly unrelated events are actually connected, Machine is a daring mix of fact and fiction, of science and art.