Nullfortunate

The temporary command center was abuzz with the expected noise of professional scientists and military personnel scrambling at a seemingly chaotic tangle of tasks, but uniquely accentuated by the continuous rumble of rolling dice. Marisha stopped briefly to glance at one of the booths where a young man in military uniform rolled a d20, examined the result then repeated the process with mechanical efficiency. The task seemed entirely mundane, and somewhat nonsensical given the seriousness with which he was performing it. She continued further into the tent towards where one woman in a general's uniform was somehow managing to orchestrate the traffic of reports and pending orders that passed onto her desk. She looked at least two decades older than Marisha, though the stress of leadership may have put excessive lines of age into her caramel skin. Still sharp though, as she noticed and made eye contact with Marisha despite the dozen or so people between them, curtly beckoning her over all while listening to a scientist's report.

"-should minimize subjectivity's interference in how we detect its intensity." The scientist was saying by the time she got into earshot. The general took barely a second to make a decision and respond.

"Do it. But safely!" She turned, providing a firm handshake to Marisha when she approached. "Doctor Estelle, I'm glad you've arrived unharmed. I'm General Calder. Did you have time to fully read the briefing materials during your flight here?"

Marisha released the handshake and nodded. "I did. Any new developments since that draft was sent?"

Calder grimaced in a manner of frustration. "The others have agreed on a working theory on why the examination team dropped dead. Given Marshall's medical history, it's assumed that ten meters was close enough to automatically cause an existing embolus to arrive in his brain. The rest made it to three meters before they died with no obvious symptoms we could observe from a safe distance, so the current theory is that Brownian motion completely fails at that range now. We have equipment coming in that we'll use to try to detect living bacteria within the crater to see if they're affected as well."

The briefing folder slipped from Marisha's hands and almost hit the ground before Calder caught it. "That . . . that's not how Brownian motion works." Marisha's throat became dry as she considered the implication.

"Normally you'd be correct, but statistical aberration seems to be the Object's specialty. We've already established a system for detecting where the field it generates reaches the five percent threshold." Calder gestured to the group of uniformed people rolling dice. "We were able to round up the tabletop gamers and have them roll d20s. Given their inherent regard for a roll of one to be unfortunate, they're the best thing we have to a reliable measurement system at the moment. We'll relocate this command center as soon as they start to only yield 'critical failures' with every roll."

"So the effect is definitely subjective?" Marisha asked, intent on grasping the situation. "Have other common biases from games of luck been tested?"

Calder looked a bit more dismayed and shrugged. "I'd have more people flipping coins, but the variance in whether they prefer heads or tails interferes with the results and has made it difficult to pin down the fifty percent threshold. Cards and other forms of dice are used in too many games with different rulesets to force a consistent poor outcome within the Object's field. We haven't been able to pin down if subjectivity matters outside of games of chance."

"Ok, so run me through the basic confirmed behavior of the Object. Maybe we're missing something." Marisha replied, a touch of urgency entering her voice as she began to grasp the daunting task she was taking part in.

Calder sighed and opened a folder on her desk and spreading out photos and documents. "The Object, as we're calling it for now, alters random events to always be their most unfortunate outcome. The further the event is from the Object, the higher its chance of failure has to be in order for the alteration to take place. We think the field of this effect did not manifest, or at least begin to expand, until it landed two days ago. With the eyewitness accounts we have from the people who got there first, it's likely the field wasn't able to affect anything significant until roughly five hours in, when older vehicles within fifty meters of the Object began break down. Three civilians died from tripping and breaking their necks while within one meter of the Object during that first day, and there were thirty more within one hundred meters that died from sudden complications to preexisting medical conditions over the next two days."

Cataloguing the details as she listened, Marisha had to suspend some previous notions from her field of work. "Any idea of the composition of the Object? Did an observatory manage to detect its approach?"

"Current theory is that it's some kind of naturally-occurring alloy, since it definitely seems metallic but doesn't look like any metal we know of." Calder grimaced, moving another document to the front. "We're still analyzing visual footage and spectroscopy from the three days before the impact, but no results yet. I don't give it much weight, but a couple scientists think it didn't lose any mass upon atmospheric entry." She paused. "If they are correct, though, then that lends credence to the presumption that the Object is artificial. This would then make it more likely that its arrival was intentional."

Marisha took a moment of concentration to suppress some of her nausea at the thought of what that meant. "So what will my role be in this? I imagine I was called in specifically to identify a more precise set of mechanics for this phenomenon."

"No, Doctor. Your role here is to lie." Calder held her gaze, a living monument of composure and resolve. "All attempts to damage the Object with conventional weaponry and tools have failed, due to the intensity of the effect surrounding it. The only option we have to stop it is detonating a nuclear bomb in close enough range to vaporize it. If we wait too long, electronic or mechanical failure will make every bomb we send turn into a dud at best."

"So you'll take this fantastical anomaly of probability and embellish in ways that will make the men in charge shit themselves on the spot. We might have weeks until humanity is wiped out by this threat, but we need them to think we have a day or two left to live so they don't mire this solution in bureaucracy."

It took Marisha by surprise. The General was speaking of a course of action that could get everyone there disgraced, court marshalled and worse. But the thirty or so people in earshot didn't bat an eye at it. "But . . . surely there's a chance they'll listen if we're honest. We don't have to put so much on the line."

The tent suddenly fell silent, everyone in sight turning to look at Marisha with grim, resigned expressions. "You haven't personally witnessed the early days of this, Marisha." Calder said, her voice heavy with determination beyond what she showed earlier. "Leaving this up to chance will kill everyone."