Chapter 13 — The Other Winner
Rufus muses on the different potential outcomes of a system, given different starting points.
Followed by Chapter 13 —— The Other Winner, in which Mica meets an unpleasant fellow.
Listen to full episode :
Hello Friends,
Today’s chapter explores how a small change in the initial conditions of a system can yield a completely different story. It’s one of the clichéd tropes of the time travel genre, and, at the same time, an idea that is sort of a cousin to the ideas I explored around re-writing in my musings ahead of chapter 9. This time, though, rather than focus on what comes of turning left instead of right at the crossroads, I’m going to talk a little about what happens if we start life in Sydney instead of Warsaw.
If we consider the production of a pearl within an oyster——another version of the sphere uncovered by repeatedly lopping corners off a cube, only in this instance generated by smoothing over said corners, rather than lopping them off——in such an instance, the course of events that I’m talking about today is more akin to picking a different grain of sand, or irritant more generally, to kick the process off. Re-writing, by contrast, was more consistent with using a different oyster to nurture the pearl. And changing the conditions of the water probably sits somewhere in between.
Of course, not all such evolutions end up shaping pearls. Sometimes, apparently similar initial conditions can reveal markedly different outcomes. This is one of the enchanting and beguiling tropes of the branch of mathematics popularly known as chaos theory, but more technically referenced as dynamical systems. I like the moniker dynamical systems, even if it wasn’t the branch of mathematics I studied way back when, because it sounds so lively.
In any case, today’s chapter is a look at a slightly different purchaser of Saskia’s winning lottery ticket. It makes me wonder how different we all are at our cores. Whether it could be that our differences have more to do with expressions of the contrasting paths we’ve all taken to arrive in the here and now, than the raw putty we started from? Notwithstanding what you’re about to read, re-reading it myself makes me feel empathy for other’s whose paths have been less fortunate than mine.
Until next week, be kind to someone and keep an eye out for the ripples of joy you’ve seeded.
Cheerio
Rufus
PS. If you think of someone who might enjoy joining us on this experiment, please forward them this email. And if you are one of those someone’s and you’d like to read more
And now, without further ado, here’s chapter thirteen in which we meet the other lottery winner.
— 13 —
The Other Winner
Still irked by the two Saskia’s she’d seen at dinner the other night, Mica decided to bag Saskia’a story altogether. There was, after all, a simple alternative and she was standing in his entryway. Gotta love apartments. She scanned the buzzers and found him: Hugo Smith.
She gave him her spiel. Though he was not as welcoming as Saskia had been. Still, after some cajoling, he had let her in. Unfortunately, Hugo was dull. And dull in the worst possible way. His mind was small, and in spite of having just won a truckload of money, he wasn’t a story her editor would be interested in. So, Mica decided to throw the proverbial cat among the pigeons. Test what she’d witnessed against a disinterested neutral party.
“Here’s something even more improbable than the fact that you won the lottery,” Mica baited the hook, and cast: “your prize is being split with a time traveller.”
“What do you mean?”
“The woman you’re sharing your prize with claims she went back in time after the draw and bought her ticket then.”
“She admitted that to you?”
“Yes, but that wasn’t what convinced me. She took me to the Santa Anita racetrack and picked the winner there too.”
“What do you mean?”
“We watched the race and then she went back in time and bought a winning ticket.”
“You watched her?”
“Well, I didn’t go back in time with her. I can’t do that. But when she returned she had a winning ticket. She did it to convince me time travel is possible.”
Hugo stared at her for a long moment. “You are a serious putz!”
Mica squinted and cocked her head sideways. Hugo’s disparaging tone had hurt, but she really didn’t see what he meant.
“That’s the oldest con in the books.” Hugo shook his head and let out a scornful snort. “She bought every ticket before the race.”
“But——she had the double win too.”
“So? She bought the doubles too. All of them. She just won a massive lottery payout. She can afford it.” He thumbed his nose and wiped it on his jeans. “Either that, or I’m sharing my prize with a cheat!”
Mica was gobsmacked. Nothing said sour grapes more than a lottery winner who felt his winnings were half his entitled good fortune because he’d been robbed by a time traveller.
She considered bringing up the two Saskia’s she had seen at Cleo’s, the froofy restaurant that Saskia had taken her to, but decided it would only have elicited more derisive scorn from Hugo. No doubt he would have cited the everyday existence of identical twins.
Later, though, Mica had Jeff, her AI assistant, check the birth records. Saskia was telling the truth on that front. She didn’t have any siblings, far less an identical twin. And it would have been hard for the hospital where she was born to have missed that.
