Blizzard Ball Read online

  “Never heard of it.” “No matter,” Basarov said. “You are an expert in hypergeometric distribution probability, yes?”

  “School’s out,” Sergei said. His attention wandered to a group of women at a nearby table.

  “Listen, please!” said Basarov, reining Sergei in. “We both know it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to create truly random event. Flaws emerge even in the most sophisticated random number generators. The lotto process is riddled with non-randomness creep. Mechanical drawing machines, numbered balls, human intervention, and hundred other elements all contribute to a string of non-random patterns.”

  “I suggest you consult fortune teller.”

  “Look at this,” Basarov said, and reached into his briefcase. He extracted a stack of accordion-folded computer paper and plopped it on the table.

  “Let me guess—lotto data file.” “Yes, just sample. I have over seven years of data—from the BlizzardBall Lottery, to be specific.” Basarov produced a memory

  flash drive and held it up between his fingers like a gold nugget. “When you chart the historical numbers based on frequency and their hit intervals, plus the sum of the balls drawn in a six-number game, and you track this data by specific ball machines and specific ball sets, some very interesting recurring, predictable patterns emerge.”

  “Next you are going to tell me you have tethered an infinite number of monkeys to typewriters in anticipation that one of the primates will eventually type the Old Testament,” Sergei said. “Hope you have lots of bananas.”

  “I am serious, comrade.” Basarov signaled the waiter for two more beers.

  “What you are telling me is that you have proprietary data. So who did you bribe?”

  “I have client with a unique interest in the practical application of probabilities.”

  “Well, I wish you and your client prosperous life together,” Sergei said. “Because, my poor over-the-edge friend, it will take light-years to calculate useable probability distribution model from this data.” Sergie rapped his knuckles on the file. “We are talking billions of computations.”

  Basarov took a deep breath and smiled. “That is where the PEL comes in.”

  The Probability Event Laboratory. Sergie knew all about the PEL. It was a scientifically sensitive collaboration between St. Petersburg University and the Russian government. Its purpose was to explore event predictability. The project’s probability models were based on the premise that all events after the Big Bang are predetermined. Known as the thesis of Causal Determinism, it predicated on the supposition that all events have a cause and effect, and the precise combination of events at a particular time engenders a particular outcome. If it were possible for an entity to know all the facts about the past and the present, and know all natural laws that govern the universe, then an entity might be able to use this knowledge to foresee the future. Causal determinism was commonly employed in predicting physical events such as weather and natural disasters. The actual computing power employed was unknown outside of PEL, but it was speculated that its processing speed was twenty-five quadrillion floating operations per second. In eight hours it could complete calculations that would take a typical laptop twenty thousand years.

  “You are asking me to play games on the PEL? Het!” Sergei’s eruption drew the stares of nearby patrons. “No way will I risk my career, maybe my life, for this what? Blizzard Ball?” he said, his voice still loud.

  “All you have to do is come up with narrow range of probable picks. We both know that even with the results from the data crunch it is still gamble. We are just improving the odds.” Basarov pulled an envelope from his pocket and pushed it across the table. “Here is something for your efforts.”

  Sergei squeezed the envelope as if testing the firmness of a tomato.

  Basarov leaned in. “It is ten thousand US plus we will fund the cost of the lottery tickets. If we hit on the jackpot, your cut is twenty-five percent. I know I do not have to do the math for you, Professor. It is enough to attract some pretty high class fringe benefits, yes?” Basarov sat back and let the proposition sink in for a moment. “If we hit on this one, my client has assured me we will have more opportunities at these run-up jackpots. Think oligarchy, comrade.”

  Sergei fondled his short trimmed beard. “Where do you purchase these BlizzardBall Lottery tickets?”

  “Through the back door,” Basarov said. “Canada.”

  Lotto2Win

  A BlizzardBall $750 Million Jackpot banner hung from an overhead pipe in a converted warehouse in Vancouver, Canada. Underneath, one hundred and fifty Lotto2Win telemarketers sat in four-foot-high partitioned cubicles aligned in rows on a bare concrete floor. Cables dangled like life-support lines and dispatched calls from an IBM AS400-driven predictive dialer. The cacophony of thirty-five different languages modulated into white noise.

  It was illegal to sell U.S. lottery tickets outside the country, but regulators were stretched too thin to chase down the offshore, cross-border violators. Sales of BlizzardBall Lottery tickets were booming.

  The owner of Lotto2Win, Roddy Pitsan, had just consumed a quart of custom-made tonic prepared by a Chinese herbalist. The coarse green liquid, concocted to cleanse his system and repulse the introduction of drugs, smelled like grass clippings mixed with tobacco. An addiction to cocaine had stripped his already lanky thin frame of twenty pounds and fragmented his thinking. He had to get focused, get straight. There was too much money on the line for him to be fucked up. The tonic did not go down easy, and he dropped to the Persian carpet in his office, clutched a waste basket, and vomited.

  Gisele Marsalis had been watching Roddy’s curious behavior from her telemarketing cubicle. Gisele was mid-thirties, tall, and athletically firm. “You okay?” Gisele asked. She had a self-confidence about her that men found attractive, especially guys like Roddy—big idea types. They had dated once. It went nowhere. She was getting better at recognizing losers.

  “Food poisoning,” Roddy said and brushed back his long greasy hair, revealing a wavy nose and cheeks hollowed by drug use. “I’ll be fine, eh.” He grabbed the basket again and held it.

  Roddy had been raised in the glacier-scraped flatlands of Saskatchewan where an “eh” stretched conversation and bridged the emptiness of the frozen winter. People on the tundra took their time sorting words and more often than not actually drew a deep measure of themselves when presented with a polite, “How are you, eh?”

  Always the entrepreneur, Roddy forfeited a high school diploma for a juvenile rap sheet that included petty theft and fencing stolen goods. He caught on as a busboy at an all-night truck stop outside of Saskatoon. An older waitress who carried around a dog-eared copy of Tropic of Capricorn took him under her wing. Over the long empty hours, she shared with Roddy, Henry Miller’s observations of people going through life like dead men, day in and day out, from generation to generation. The account mirrored the lives of the broken farmers and exhausted miners on the hardscrabble tundra. Miller’s antidote to drudgery—a concoction of Eastern mysticism, sexual exploits, and the chaos of capital-ism—struck a chord with Roddy. The impressionable youth adopted it as his talisman. The path was made straight for his exodus from the Canadian Great Plains.

  He landed in Vancouver and got a job as a cruise line shuttle bus driver. He observed non-U.S. citizens pooling their money and dipping into the border town of Bellingham or going down the coast to Seattle to buy lottery tickets. From his kitchen table, he hatched a business that would make it easy for people beyond the U.S. borders to purchase Mega Millions, Powerball, and state-operated lottery tickets.

  Roddy viewed himself as enlightened on the human condition of want. His business venture simply leveraged people’s irrational hope for riches, their inherent insecurities, and the search for life’s shortcuts, with the lottery being the perfect fix.

  Over the past ten years, he’d been threatened with closure from government regulators, ripped off by employees, roughed up by compet
itors, and been near bankruptcy, but he had always managed to keep going. The $750 million BlizzardBall Lottery had put his business in overdrive. Worldwide demand for tickets was off the charts.

  Gisele was his best telemarketer. She earned a high percentage commission and the privilege of opting out of the autodialers and canned scripts. She dialed her own calls and was given the best leads. Her elite status was the goal of the other fledgling telemarketers, whose scripts were displayed on monitors with prompts to guide the sale of lottery ticket packages and overcome objections. Call production was paced, monitored, and measured. Contacts-to-close ratios were like batting averages. Fall below the line and you’re fired. Telemarketers had been known to pee in a cup rather than take a bathroom break and jeopardize their call performance. Gisele’s book of business contained the names and numbers of hot leads and clients she’d cultivated. It was locked in a safe after every shift. Client predation practices were rampant among telemarketers.

  Gisele scanned her contact list and tapped the name of her next call, a recent lead: Professor Sergei Petrov. The professor had made a couple of small lottery ticket buys over the past several weeks. “Professor, Gisele here from Lotto2Win,” she said. Gisele presented a smooth, deep, matter-of-fact voice to her customers. She made sure she looked into a small mirror at the beginning of every call, aware that her smile transmitted through her voice. Comfortable in her own skin, her makeup amounted to a swipe of mascara over her deep-green eyes and a touch of blush. She also liked to play with the color of her hair.

  Today she’d nail all her calls in a short spiky blonde bob, swept behind her ears. The edges of a unicorn tattoo peeked out from her shirt just below the neckline. “Heard it’s practically balmy in St. Petersburg. Must be the global warming? No snow in Vancouver either. Just maddening rain.” She recorded each conversation and spent her off-hours listening to the tapes to gain an intimate understanding of her customer’s emotional drivers: the fear, greed, or loneliness that would lead them to buy. The professor was a flirt, an easy mark. Gisele was setting him up for a big buy.

  “How’s university life?” she asked. “I’d love to go back to school. I speak six languages, maybe try and wrap a useful degree around that. Learned a couple of them from my ex-husbands. Married twice but neither could communicate worth a damn.”

  Gisele got a laugh of recognition out of the professor.

  “On my own now,” she continued. “So far so good. Sometimes a girl has to take charge.” Gisele’s eyes fell on the photograph on her desk of her six-year-old daughter. “I shouldn’t be so chatty today. I got a lot of friends to call. Don’t want to leave anyone out of this one. I am going crazy trying to fill the orders for the BlizzardBall. The jackpot’s $750 million. Can you believe it? A middle-of-nowhere state like Minnesota offering up the prize we could only dream about. If there was ever one to load up on, this is it.”

  Gisele could hardly contain herself when the professor informed her of the number of tickets he wished to purchase. “I got a good feeling about your picks, Professor. You’re not going to forget this working girl when you hit, are you, sweetheart? Wow! That’s very generous of you. I’m going to pass you along to Claude. He’ll get your exact numbers, verify the order and payment information. Hang on and good luck.”

  She punched a button on her keyboard and said, “Claude, I have a live one on the line.”

  “Vous remercie, ma chère,” the French Canadian lottery ticket sales manager replied. At sixty-one, he was considered the company curmudgeon. Gisele was a frequent target of his Francophile rants and fatherly advice. But with this call he was strictly business. Claude recorded the professor’s curious number picks and calculated the inflated purchase price on 53,103 tickets.

  Drawing

  Earl Swanson debated whether the long wait in line at the Short Stop would be worth the static he’d receive for getting home late for Christmas dinner. From outside the convenience store, he ran a quick mental inventory of his most critical possessions: the dated bungalow fast becoming the neighborhood eyesore, the sixty-five-horsepower Johnson motor with a broken prop shaft hanging from the transom of a dented eighteen-foot Lund fishing boat, the rusted Arctic Cat snowmobile missing the right front ski. There were other places in town to purchase a lottery ticket, but that would be tempting fate. The Short Stop in Hibbing, Minnesota, had been the source of over $30 million in lottery prize money and was considered a honey-hole of mystical proportions. One of the winners, a geologist from a nearby taconite mine, claimed the Short Stop sat on top a point of intense magnetism. He professed that this was the same energy ancient diviners believed brought well-being and prosperity and had marked with standing stones, à la Stonehenge.

  Earl hated waiting. He considered it an obstacle. As a certified mining blaster, removing obstacles was his trade. But there was no budging this line. He squeezed into the Short Stop and had begun filling in his BlizzardBall picks when a bump from behind skittered his pencil across the form. “Jesus Christ.”

  “Sorry, pal,” said a familiar voice.

  Nelson was a former coworker. They had been laid off from the taconite mine at the same time.

  “A little jumpy?” Nelson said.

  “Doing nothing is getting to me,” Earl said. “Any word on a callback?”

  “Ain’t heard squat and I’m not counting on it.” Nelson doffed his dusty billed cap and pointed to the hat’s crown with the name of his new ceramic tile business stenciled on it.

  “Suppose I should move on too, but I’d like to get another crack at it,” Earl said, pulling a fresh BlizzardBall Lottery form out of the rack. “Just so I’d have a chance to put a blasting cap up management’s ass.” He quickly ticked off the numbers on the form.

  “That’s a loser, pal,” Nelson said, looking over Earl’s shoulder

  “What, you picking the balls now?”

  “No, but a tile guy can spot a pattern a mile away.” Nelson pointed out the diagonal line formed by Earl’s number picks. “Every stargazing moron out there uses a pattern to plot their lottery numbers: diagonals, corners, columns, rows, zigzags, blocks, and circles.”

  Earl crumpled the form and started again, feeling uncomfortable under Nelson’s watchful eye.

  “Stop!” Nelson leaned his chin over Earl’s shoulder. “Progressions are a statistical long shot.”

  “Progressions?”

  “You know, like multiples: 5, 10, 15; or last digits, like 3, 13, 23; or consecutive numbers. And miracle of miracles, if a common number combination or pattern play hits, the pot would be sliced and diced to the point where you’d be lucky to come out of it with enough money to buy a cheeseburger.”

  “What makes you a lottery genius?”

  “Hey, don’t get testy. Just trying to help out. And, as a matter of fact, I have hit on a few small payouts here and there.”

  “Screw it. I’m just going to grab a Quick Pick and hit the road.” Earl tossed the form into a receptacle and made a move toward the checkout counter.

  “Whoa, partner,” Nelson said. “We’re talking $750 million here. Quick Picks are a lazy man’s approach.” He steered Earl to the form rack.

  “You’re wearing me out,” Earl said, but Nelson had slipped off down the beer aisle.

  Christmas dinner had always been Earl’s time to regale his family with stories of the fall hunt. He rested his thick forearms on the snowman-themed tablecloth. His family and in-laws squeezed tightly around him. The savory dinner—venison steaks, grouse, and pheasant—gave off a hint of musky forest that practically begged for Earl’s fall hunt chronicles. He waited for the right opening in the chatter as wild rice harvested from the Red Lake Indian Reservation and cranberries from nearby Wisconsin were passed from person to person. But when the conversation turned to the lottery, he realized he’d been trumped. His brother and sister in-law lived for gambling as well as harassing each other.

  “Florence, did you get a senior citizen discount when you played your birthda
y numbers in the BlizzardBall?” Floyd snorted out a laugh.

  “For your information,” Florence said, touching her orange manicured nails lightly to her salon-colored persimmon hair. “I’m playing a palindrome.”

  Earl straightened the antler candleholder centerpiece in an attempt to steer the conversation back towards the hunt, but after several attempts he let it go.

  “What’s a palindrome, Auntie Florence?” asked Jessica, Earl’s eleven-year-old daughter.

  “Here, I’ll show you.” Florence took a piece of paper and a pen from her purse and jotted down numbers. “Oprah just had a numerologist on her show. He was amazing,” she said. “Predicted last year’s Super Bowl score and showed all these tricks with numbers, like this.” Florence tapped the pen on the paper to draw attention to the numbers 2, 4, 9, 19, 42. “You see how the individual numbers read the same forward and backward? That’s what you call a palindrome. Now, if you add the numbers 2, 4, 9, 1, 9, 4, and 2 together they equal 31, which is my BlizzardBall number. Pretty neat, huh?”

  “Auntie Florence, what would you do with the money if you won?” Jessica asked.

  “Why, I’d get me a pool boy, maybe even a pool,” Florence said with a “Ha!” directed toward her husband.

  “How about you, Uncle Floyd?” Jessica tugged on the sleeve of his plaid flannel shirt. “What would you do if you won?”

  “Well, besides shoving the job, I’d buy a deluxe Gulf Stream Coach RV and take us all on a trip to Baja where we’d fish for yellowtail and drink Dos Equis cerveza.”

  “Don’t forget to put hair on your list,” Florence cackled, and Floyd’s bald head turned red.

  Earl had to admit, patting the lottery ticket in his breast pocket, he rather enjoyed the wishful conversation. It reminded him of his early boyhood when he had spent hours paging through the Sears catalog, immersed in the magical wonder of Christmas dreams.

  But a glance over at his wife short-circuited Earl’s nostalgia trip. Maureen hadn’t said a word since dinner began and sat stiffly, clutching her fork tines up. The Swanson family’s Christmas traditionally started with dinner, followed by dessert, and concluded with Christmas mass. He knew what Maureen was thinking: the damn lottery was going to screw things up.