The cold from the street felt different now. It was no longer an oppressive force that affected him so deeply. Now, it was just an environmental variable that his old coat could easily mitigate. Gael walked with purpose. He carried a bag of premium coffee under his arm. His mind was working fast, like an overheating processor.
The ATM incident had been a major software glitch. The heist at the convenience store could seem like a "biomechanical miracle" or just a string of criminal blunders. But his analytical instinct screamed at him that there was a pattern. A direct correlation between his sudden invulnerability and the misfortune of others.
But in science, a hypothesis is nothing without a controlled experiment. Gael needed a lab test. Something that relied solely on probability, free from machine failures or inept thieves. He needed a statistical miracle, packaged and barcoded.
He stopped in front of a small newsstand on the corner of the main avenue. Behind the glass counter hung rows of instant lottery tickets. They dangled from metal clips, promising wealth to the desperate.
"Give me one of those," Gael said, pointing to a shiny gold ticket with red lettering. "The 'Mega-Multiplier'."
The old man at the stand glared at him in annoyance. The ticket cost ten dollars. Gael pulled out one of the hundred-dollar bills the ATM had vomited onto him hours earlier and slapped it on the counter.
"I don't have change for this, kid."
"Keep it all," Gael replied, snatching the lottery ticket.
The old man blinked, stunned, but Gael had already walked away. He stood at the edge of the curb, beneath the awning of a closed bakery. Before scratching, he did what any good scientist would do: he established a baseline for his environment. He evaluated the variables around him to gauge the potential impact.
To his left, a stray dog slept next to a lamppost. To his right, traffic flowed normally. Straight ahead, across the two-lane street, a burly man in stained overalls was whistling. He was rolling paint onto the second-story wall of a building. He stood on a steel scaffold, secured by a harness that looked like it had seen better days.
Everything was in order. The system was in equilibrium.
Gael fished a quarter out of his pocket. His pulse was surprisingly steady. He pressed the ticket against the brick wall and scratched the first box.
Horseshoe symbol.
He scratched the second box.
Horseshoe symbol.
His breathing grew slightly shallower. The odds of winning the jackpot in that specific print run were one in three million. He scratched the third box, the one revealing the amount. The silver dust fell to the ground. It revealed a bold figure.
$200,000.
Gael stared at the numbers. Two hundred thousand dollars. Suddenly, his mind grasped the concept: he had won a serious amount by defying the odds.
In that exact microsecond, reality collected its tax.
A sharp, violent, metallic snap cut through the noise of the traffic. Gael looked up from the gold card. Just then, he saw the safety pin on the scaffolding across the street snap in two as if it were plastic.
The structure collapsed on one side. The painter let out a muffled scream as the plank flooring vanished beneath his feet. His safety harness, the last line of defense, snapped taut... and the steel buckle disintegrated from the friction.
The man fell from a height of fifteen feet. He slammed hard onto the hood of a parked van, then rolled and hit the ground. The sickening crunch of his right femur snapping could be heard even over the distant city sirens.
Pedestrians started screaming. The old man from the newsstand ran out to see what was happening. A small circle of chaos formed around the painter, who lay writhing in agony on the asphalt.
Gael didn't cross the street. He didn't yell. He didn't even blink.
He looked down at the winning ticket in his left hand, and then up at the coin in his right. The epiphany hit him with the force of a freight train, but instead of terror, what he felt was absolute clarity.
It wasn't that the universe suddenly loved him. Luck wasn't created out of thin air; luck was stolen.
It was the Law of Equivalent Exchange, applied to statistics. For every miracle that benefited him, a similar misfortune had to strike his surroundings. This was necessary to maintain the balance. The ATM gave him a thousand dollars; a cyclist lost a couple of teeth. A heist nearly cost him his life. Three robbers almost killed each other, and the hostages suffered bruises. Now, for two hundred thousand dollars, a hardworking man had just had his leg splintered into three pieces.
Gael tucked the winning ticket into the inner pocket of his coat. He looked at the accident scene one last time. The painter was being tended to by a passing medical student. He would survive. They all survived, unless he, Gael, pushed the machine too far.
A slow, icy smile, utterly devoid of empathy, formed on his face. For twenty-seven years, the world had charged him the tax for the happiness of others. He had paid with humiliations, debts, and broken bones.
If this was the universe's new algorithm, he was going to exploit it to the absolute limit.
Gael turned around and walked away from the chaos, moving with the straight posture of a king who had just inherited his crown. He had his seed capital. He understood the rules. It was time to take his experiment to a high-risk environment.
The local casino was waiting for him.