Sam Leith - The Coincidence Engine

Hands shook his head. ‘No luck. Just things, so to speak, taking place. Your brain is programmed to notice things that seem strange, to invent correlations and to make theories about them. Winning streaks.’

‘If I won the lottery, I’d be lucky,’ said Red Queen. ‘I’d be amazed.’ Red Queen was not lying about this. Red Queen didn’t play the lottery.

‘Yes, you’d think so. But are you amazed every week when someone wins the lottery?’ Hands answered his own question: ‘No. Because someone always wins the lottery. The thing is: that’s not surprising at all. That’s just something happening. One person in a million, or however many players you have, will always win. You’re only surprised when it’s you. From the point of view of the universe this is not at all unusual. A coincidence isn’t something strange that happens; it’s something that happens that you think is strange.’

Red Queen looked blank, frowned.

‘Let me try to explain again,’ said Hands, his slightly frayed but pleasurably superior sense of himself reasserting itself; his seminar tone sneaking back in. ‘So if this machine is, as you say, affecting probability, it is affecting something that doesn’t exist in the first place. It’s affecting an idea in someone’s head. An idea about expectation, or even desire . And then that idea is affecting things – substantial physical things – in the world. Its operation is as paradoxical, so to speak, as its very existence.’

‘I don’t really have the leisure to think about this philosophically, Professor, interesting though that may be,’ said Red Queen. ‘I need to know how to find it, and how to get it under control.’

‘There,’ said Hands, ‘I don’t know if I can help you. If it has to do with ideas – and if it is tending to behave in such a way as to be so to speak “improbable” – what it does will get more and more improbable. It will begin to feed back into itself.’

‘It will get weirder?’

‘In all likelihood, yes. I was talking earlier about cascade effects. You know, like when a truck starts to fishtail on the freeway, and then… it just goes and it spins out altogether. Something predictable, after a certain point, becomes very, very unpredictable. At the ends of these series, very close to zero or very close to infinity, the line doesn’t just curve slightly – it goes…’ Hands’s right arm wearily described a rocket taking off across some sort of imaginary graph. ‘What I mean is that something that we know to exist but that is highly, highly improbable – something at the point where the rules really seem to break down altogether – is called a singularity.’

‘Like a black hole?’

‘Yes, a black hole is a singularity, in physics. When it comes to the laws of physics, all bets are off, so to speak. But singularity means something slightly different across different disciplines… Are you paying attention to me?’

Red Queen was not – was, rather, thinking about the patterns they’d been plotting in gambling odds in the big centres. Porlock’s clever idea. They’d let the numbers Doppler off against each other – Atlantic City and Vegas and bootlegged data for Tijuana; all-night poker hands flowing through the big Internet servers; roulette on reservations; anything that might pick up a sort of after-echo of the effect, like background radiation. Porlock had looked as smug as all hell when he’d brought the results, plotted through the day. It had suggested, however approximately, a vector: a field of disturbance heading due west from Atlanta, emitting a steady, Geiger-counter-like crackle of the unpredictable.

In Red Queen’s head, a map of America. Porlock thought these gambling centres might be a way of plotting a course. But a line between Atlanta – the place where the boy had stopped and handed this package to his employers – and San Francisco – the place where the boy was apparently heading before he decided to go off-map… it went more or less through the Nevada Desert.

‘Vegas. What would happen?’

‘Sorry?’

‘I’m thinking aloud. Let’s say, sake of argument, this is a terrorist action…’ Red Queen got up from the desk again, paced down one side of the room, now ignoring Hands altogether. ‘You have a coincidence machine. You want to cause maximum damage. Where do you go?’

‘I don’t follow you.’

‘You go to Vegas. You go to – what would happen if… if… everything came up black all at once?’

‘Well, I’m no expert on this, but generally casinos lay off odds. On average the people who bet red will cancel out the people who bet black. Rather as I was saying -’ Hands was keen to get back to his lecture – ‘the behaviour of a roulette wheel or a deck of cards – a straight one, so to speak – is perfectly predictable over a long period. That’s why the casino always wins. The most freakish results all cancel each other out, and -’

‘But say , Hands -’ this was the first time Red Queen had not called him ‘Professor’, and there was a definite edge of impatience in it – ‘ say everyone happened to have bet on black. Or nobody bet on black. Then it came black. Or say -’ an image suddenly presented itself in Red Queen’s mind – rows and rows of women sitting like tortoises in velour leisure suits, in front of the slots in the waxy yellow light – ‘say every slot machine in Vegas paid out its top jackpot at once. What would happen?’

‘Theoretically -’

‘Theoretically hell. This would be – would be an act of war. It would wipe out companies, pension plans, stocks. It would cause chaos. This would be like dropping a coincidence bomb on America.’

‘I suppose, in -’

‘Professor, I need to make some phone calls, now. I would appreciate it if you were able to give us a little more of your time.’

‘Actually, as I was going to say,’ Hands returned, ‘I see that gambling or stock markets would present a problem, economically speaking. But I’m – when I said you had a problem I meant something rather more serious than that. A run of numbers in a gambling parlour is one thing, but a singularity is a problem of a quite different order of magnitude.’

‘I don’t see.’

‘There is something that baffles physicists about the beginning of the universe. We know a little about what gravity was like, in the very first moments of time. And the chances of the initial state of the universe having arisen by accident are one in ten to the power ten.’ Hands’s eyes rolled up and right and his tongue appeared in the corner of his mouth. He remembered: ‘To the power 123.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘That is fantastically improbable.’

‘I thought you just said that there was no such thing as probability.’

‘Not as a force, no. But let’s talk as if probability exists as you understand it. For the sake of argument. The state of gravity at the beginning of the universe was so improbable that the odds-to-one against it are so great that if you wrote a 0 on every single atom in the universe, you still wouldn’t be able to write it down. I’m saying this machine could do something much more damaging than bankrupting a couple of casinos or crashing the United States’s economy.’

‘There is nothing more damaging than crashing the United States’s economy,’ said Red Queen. ‘Trust me.’

‘No. I don’t think you understand me. This machine could, if it – strange to put it this way – took a shine to the notion, pull our universe inside out through its own asshole.’ Far from being dismayed by the prospect – in the way Red Queen was dismayed, deeply dismayed, by the prospect of explaining a threat to the economy to the boss – Hands seemed positively to perspire with excitement.