I came home Friday after my last final and waited for my parents to get home from work. I waited until Mom was getting dinner on the stove before I made them sit down at the dining room table with me. I didn’t really lie to them, not much, unless you consider not telling them something a lie. I knew it was splitting hairs to try and differentiate between a lie and an omission, but I didn’t feel nearly as guilty about not saying something as I did with an outright fabrication.
I told them that school had been extra stressful, and that I was a little stressed about Kassandra. I didn’t lie when I told them I was in love with her. When Mom asked me if Kassi was in love with me, or at least did I think she was in love with me, and I didn’t say anything for a few seconds before shrugging, she looked at my father before reaching out and taking my hand. I didn’t lie about that either, as I had no idea how Kassi felt about me. She liked me, that was pretty clear, but after barely two months, could she really be in love with me?
I told my parents to not worry about me, that I’d keep my love to myself until more time had passed so I wouldn’t scare her away. They seemed to accept that this as the thing that had made me bottom out for a couple of weeks, with my dad commenting that my life might go easier if I timed my woman troubles to not coincide with the end of the semester. I smiled and agreed, then asked if I could borrow his car to take her out to dinner. When he said yes, I smiled again and asked if I could borrow twenty bucks. It was the first genuine smile I’d seen on either of their faces since they’d tried to get me to tell them what the hell was wrong with me.
When I got back in my room, I sat in my chair. I thought about going to the closet to get the computer, but decided I had better start my planning without its weird influence being in my view all the time. I knew I’d start touching icons and browsing the “future web,” as I’d begun thinking of it, and never do any actual planning, only plotting and scheming. I didn’t know if there was a true difference between planning and plotting/scheming, but it felt like there was. Planning was trying to make heady decisions. Plotting sounded like I was going to try and become an evil supervillain. Scheming sounded like I was going to shoot for being a dangerously wealthy evil supervillain.
I pulled out my spiral notebook and flipped through it until I found a few consecutive blank pages. I put the point of my pen to the paper, but paused. What, exactly, was I going to do? Get rich, for sure, but how? And why? I needed a motivation beyond just getting rich and buying anything I wanted. I began to write a list, pros and cons of every idea that came into my head that sounded semi-feasible. I tried to stick to realistic things. Dreaming about buying my own private Caribbean island wasn’t helpful. How would I tell my parents? Kass? My friends? The government?
*****
January 10, 2015
I laid awake in the hotel bed, listening to Kass breathing slow and steady from her deep sleep. I’d tried to sleep, but even after two rounds of the best sex I’d ever experienced, I was unable to relax enough to do anything other than turn tomorrow over and over in my head. I had the winning ticket for a one hundred and fifty million dollar jackpot sitting on the coffee table at home, along with a funny little stick-it note for my parents about how the ticket was an attempt to pay them back for room and board for twenty-one years. I
hoped
it was the winning ticket. The thing that kept me awake tonight, and for the previous two nights, had to do with whether or not the future was a set thing.
I’d chosen a jackpot that was modest in size and had no winner. At least according to the news reports on Qwerry. I’d begun to worry that since the jackpot had no winner on January 11, the numbers that had been drawn on that date, the same numbers I’d chosen three days ago, would somehow not be winning numbers. It made my brain hurt to think about it. Nothing I’d seen yet from the Qwerry searches had been wrong, which meant, as far as I could tell, that the future was already set, and couldn’t be changed.
This had huge implications if it was true. I’d just be some asshole with a quantum computer that could rule the online gaming world and predict the future, but it would definitely drive me into a mental hospital if I couldn’t use the information to my advantage. It was great to to be able to hang at the sports bar and do party tricks like guess each play that a football team would run, but that wasn’t helpful for me.
I’d also begun to worry that I was getting obsessed again, but this time with money. Every step of my little plan involved money in some way or another, and once I’d set up a solid base plan to work from, I’d been forced to admit that the fable about the granting of wishes leading to more wishes was true. I wanted to do a lot of things, a lot of good things, but I’d have to keep generating more and more money. It was easy to keep picking winning lottery numbers, but I’d already ruled that out.
That meant the stock market, and I’d had to sit down and take a hard look at that strategy. I might not get a second glance if I took some lottery winnings and invested it, and scored big here and there, but I was sure that the SEC or someone else would open an investigation if I kept up a string of resounding successes. Not even the biggest players in the market were right one hundred percent of the time. From what I could tell, the best were around eighty percent correct in their guesses. Most seemed to be fifty to seventy percent successful. Since the successes more than made up for the losses, the losses were acceptable. Especially to brokers, who were really only playing with everyone else’s money.
I’d come to the conclusion that I had to play the game for the long haul. Win a lottery jackpot now, invest some money in the market and spend a few years making a killing, balancing it with enough losses to look like any other investor, while at the same time finding profitable businesses to invest in, either as a partner, or by purchasing outright. It was a nice thought to have a trillion dollars in the bank to then turn around and try to stamp out world hunger, give everyone fresh, clean water, and educate the masses. It was a more realistic thought that the trillion dollar bank account would raise so many red flags that me and my creepy little computer would be on lab tables in a deep, dark government bunker somewhere, being dissected in one way or another.
Kassi snorted and rolled over. She buried her face in my bare chest, wrapping a leg and an arm around me. I still hadn’t told her I loved her, but ever since the winter break began, we’d been thick as thieves. I still hadn’t told her about the computer yet either. It was just another thing to keep me awake at night. I’d solved the lottery problem, but I hadn’t solved the Kassi problem. She wasn’t a problem in a negative way, but the problem was that if we stayed together, I’d eventually have to let her in on the secret.
I’d already spent a few nights trying to justify never telling her, or anyone I’d end up with, if not Kass. I couldn’t do it. Every scenario ended with Kass or some faceless long-term love interest stumbling across the computer’s real capabilities some day. I could hide it for ten, maybe even twenty years, assuming the computer never failed, but someone would eventually get suspicious as to why I had never thrown the thing out.
I hugged her tight, my love for her creating a warmth within me that I’d begun to notice lately. I was sure I had fallen in love with a couple of other girls that I’d bedded, but I knew now that it wasn’t what I considered
true love
. I’d been younger then, inexperienced, and I went for any girl that gave me the time of day. Every relationship that ended had hurt, but I knew all of them combined wouldn’t hurt as much as if Kass and I split up.
I felt stupid that I had such strong feelings for her this soon, even my talking to my father about it a week ago in an offhand way. He told me when he met my mom, he felt the same way. He just knew. He told me that within three weeks, he knew she was who he would spend the rest of his life with, and from there, he spent seven months doing everything he could to not screw up so he could tell her how he truly felt. When I asked him why he waited so long, he just looked at me funny. When I asked him how he knew it was the right time, after seven months, he told me that he didn’t know. He just couldn’t live with it jammed inside of him anymore, and had to take the chance that she wouldn’t run away screaming.
Even though I was about to be rich enough to have an entourage of high quality groupies, I only wanted Kassandra. I wanted her to be Kassandra Gallagher. I didn’t know if I wanted children, which was okay, as Kass had never really said anything that hinted she was looking forward to motherhood. Bringing children into the world was chancy at best, and no one could know what the future held.
Well, one of us could. But I’d made a hard rule about not looking up myself, Kass, my parents, or anyone else I knew. I couldn’t live knowing their expiration date, and I was too terrified to look because I didn’t want to read about something more awful than “died of natural causes.” What if someone murdered my parents? What if Kass was on her way home from work on our anniversary and some dickhead with a .55 blood alcohol level t-boned her into the afterlife? I didn’t want to read about one of my best friends from high school slowly succumbing to a long, terrible fight with cancer.
We’d rented the hotel room for the weekend as a celebration of sorts. School was over for the time being, though it would be back to the grind in two weeks. Living in the dorms over break was like being the last man on Earth. Most of the time, Sawtooth cleared everyone out for maintenance. A few of the students were granted exceptions, Kassandra being one of them. We were caught in a tight spot when it came to having enough privacy to get naked. I felt uncomfortable bringing her home, as my parents were anything but stupid. They knew I was safe, and I’d let them know she was on the pill, but still… it was my parents’ house. And Kass wasn’t exactly quiet when I solved the equation and produced the right answer.
The dorm wasn’t any better. Because a few other students were also present, and because of regular maintenance, everyone had been moved to the first floor near the Resident Assistant’s room until the semester started again. We could get it on in her dorm, as she didn’t have to share it with anyone, but having comfortably loud sex with ears on all sides (not to mention the disapproving glare of the RA whenever I showed up and went into Kassi’s room) just wasn’t happening. I knew that within a week or two, money would never be a problem again, and so I ganked what I could from my bank account and splurged on a room that was a steep two hundred and fifty dollars per night. Between two nights in the hotel and two nights on the town doing whatever felt good, I’d blown almost a grand of my savings. I didn’t tell my parents that I only had eight dollars and some change left in my account.
I looked over at the clock. It was just after four, and I was still wide awake. I felt the pull of the computer, even though I’d stuffed it back in the closet after planning everything out. I didn’t want to get bogged down by getting lost within all of the future crap that was about to happen. I knew I could spend years just reading in fascination everything that had yet to happen. I also knew that I’d spend all of those years feeling a pit in my stomach each time the computer predicted accurately. My stomach was an acidic mess, knowing that my parents were going to be filthy rich in less than twenty-four hours. I assumed, anyway, that whatever amount they ended up with would put them in the “filthy rich” category.
I’d nearly had an anxiety attack multiple times, stressing about whether or not I’d made the right decision. I could claim the winning ticket myself, but I didn’t want that responsibility. I knew my parents would give me anything I wanted, especially knowing that I was the one who bought the ticket for them. It was just one more slice of paranoia that haunted me, that they would be suspicious of me having a winning lotto ticket. I’d never bought a ticket in my life, and as far as I know, the only time my parents had was whenever the Powerball hit five hundred million or more.
What if the money changed them in bad ways? Both worked in the public sector, and while we were just inside the middle class, it was that lifetime of hard work that had made them, and in effect me, who we were. I had been taught the value of a dollar at an early age. Not because we were so poor that my parents lived paycheck to paycheck, but because we wanted to have a good life, and that meant not spending foolishly on things we maybe wanted but didn’t really need.
Not that we lived so frugal as to be economically Amish. I had Xboxes and Playstations and guitars and bikes and even a used car, all courtesy of my parents or my parents contributing to my own savings to make it happen. We just weren’t the type of family that needed a vacation cabin up in McCall or Sun Valley, family ski passes to Bogus Basin, snowmobiles and motorcycles and hot tubs, things that required credit cards or bank loans to buy beyond the house and their modest cars.
What if they went crazy? We’d all watched the show on television about the past lottery winners who had pissed it all away. Some turned into dope addicts. Others spent their money on dumb shit like gold-plated toilets and diamond-encrusted belt buckles, useless but expensive
bling
type shit, while still others let themselves be swindled and stolen from until there was nothing left. My dad always seemed to get the most upset, sometimes even yelling at the
fucking idiots
on the TV as they told their sob stories. What if
I
went crazy? What if Kassandra used me for my money? I imagined myself dropping a heavy stone on my own head for thinking such a thing… but it had happened to plenty of others, hadn’t it?