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."

Fortune Botany

As I passed the craps table, the tumble of the dice caught my eyes. Something about the movement, but I couldn't place it. Then I saw the outcome of the roll, and immediately looked to see how the others were reacting. Nothing unusual, just the highs and lows of gambling on their faces as a few grumbled about "damn sevens always being there for someone else".

One dice showed seven dots, and the other had a blank side on top.

Baffled, I took the next opening to join in the game, making safe bets with the few chips I still had. I was shocked once again when I looked back to the dice, which were now a six and a one as the stickman slid them back to the three unused dice. The shooter of that roll was passable for a casino regular, but I caught a few details that subtly marked her as not entirely used to her wealth. A few stray hairs extending away from what would other was have been a uniform waterfall of black, the slight wrinkling in a pantsuit that should have gone to the dry cleaners yesterday, fingernails that were a day or two overdue for a manicure. Overall she rocked a sharp look, assuming you didn't look too closely.

She seemed to notice my interest in her, and quickly shot me a knowing smirk. When the dice came back around to her, she picked a pair without looking and tossed them with the lax attitude of someone who didn't give in to small rituals of good luck. The same strange movement reoccurred, but I couldn't quite put it into words. The first die came to a stop with eight dots on its upward side, and the second die . . .

There was something in the center, where the dot would go on the one face. But the actual one face was on the side facing towards me, and the emptiness in the center of the top face seemed to refuse my direct gaze. I stopped fighting with whatever reflex kept my eyes from looking at that, and noticed the other gamblers. There was a twitch or two in their eyes, but nothing they seemed to notice. They went on as if the total was a seven, and as soon as those dice moved they seemed to lose those impossible sides. This mistress of impossible odds must have noticed that I saw what nobody else would acknowledge, and beckoned me to the bar when the round ended.

We sat towards the further end, so the bartender wouldn't hear as easily while he mixed our orders. "How did you do that?" I said in a whisper, with a touch of urgency and fear I didn't intend. Despite not knowing what was in the center of a die face that apparently represented negative one, that void in a plane of white was fixed in my mind's eye.

She smiled, apparently amused by my reaction. Not at all afraid that she could get thrown out, or worse, if what I saw reached the casino management. "Do what? Roll sevens for those two rounds? Luck, obviously." She replied with a playful voice. The look in her eye told me she knew exactly what I was talking about.

"You know, rolling . . . other sides that aren't supposed to be there, and people still did the math without acting as if anything was wrong with that." I had to suppress my nervousness as the bartender brought our drinks. Mine was my go-to drink, a traditional whiskey sour, but this stranger's drink was something a cloudy black with a garnish of a grapefruit slice and a lavender sprig. I still regret not catching the name of that cocktail.

She delayed the answer, taking a sip while she seemed to savor my building intrigue as much as the drink. "Just luck." She said with an innocent shrug.

"Bullshit, luck doesn't do that for other people."

"Other people don't share my specialization in botany." She smiled as she reached into a pocket of her suit jacket, producing a vial containing a clover with seven leaves. "It's fairly simple once you know how to grow them."

I stared, confused. Four-leaf clovers were considered lucky by tradition, but that didn't mean anything, and it wouldn't be unreasonable for a mutation of the plant to produce seven leaves. That shouldn't be enough to alter her luck, let alone twist dice rolls into impossible pairings. "What?"

Then she produced another vial. Inside was a clover stem with no leaves to count. But then I caught the flicker. Something transparent that was shaped like a clover leaf was attached to the stem, but like with the negative pip on the die I couldn't force my eyes to focus on it. "The other part is understanding how to redistribute luck. Concentrate it into one clover, and another has to hold the debt of luck that generates. The results are pretty normal with five or six leaves, but the interesting results happen when the burden clover has to grow a negative leaf. I'm guessing reality wasn't quite built to handle that much of a difference in fortune."

"Most people can't see the physical manifestation of excessive luck debt, and their brains won't let them acknowledge the result. You're the first natural I've encountered. It took me a week to train myself to look directly at the distortion." She leaned in unnervingly close. "I keep the work secret, of course. The pair intensify their effect when separated by more than a couple of feet, and that could lead to dangerous results in places that can't soak up that shift of luck. Here, I slip the burden clover into someone's pocket and the worst that happens is that they strike out for the night, and I can continue to fund my research entirely with my own winnings."

I took a moment to process the ethical implications of this, since the rest was well beyond my understanding. "But . . . why are you telling me this?"

She leaned back, shrugged and smiled playfully. "I think you're cute. And I make sure the research is well-protected enough that any investigation will prove it to be as nonsensical as most think it is." Popping the lid off of the 'burden' clover's vial, she flicked it in a way so it landed in a passing man's pocket without him noticing, presumably a result of her luck, though now I was much more vulnerable to doubting everything. She removed the seven-leaf clover from the other vial and placed it in my breast pocket. "Consider your fortune for the rest of this night to be my treat." With a wink, she downed the rest of her drink and walked away, leaving me stunned and gaping.

I'd like to meet her again, but after seeing my results for the rest of my gambling for that evening I can only assume it will only happen if she's the one that considers it lucky to do so.