The Grand Wheel

The mythical system once sought by cranks and eccentrics became, therefore, a scientific fact. To meet this challenge the fermat, a new class of machine able to operate beyond the billion bracket, arose. Early versions had been comparatively crude affairs, following, perhaps, the path of a single molecule in a heated gas or counting out exploding atoms. As the randomatic equations, refined and extended, pushed back the billion bracket still further these, too, became obsolete. These days all fermats worked on the subatomic level, by manipulating the weak nuclear interaction, intercepting neutrinos, processing exotic artificial particles, or even tapping the source of true randomness below the quantum level. The innards of some of them were Wheel secrets.

Making for the exit, Scarne paused in the foyer, where there stood a row of a small type of fermat called the mugger. Muggers held a special fascination for Scarne, perhaps because of their ubiquity. Wherever one turned there was a mugger. They existed in their billions, all treated by Wheel mathematicians as a single stochastic organism with terminals spread over a hundred star systems. Not bad, Scarne thought, for something that had evolved from the ancient fruit machines and one-armed bandits.

He fumbled in his pocket for a coin and pressed it into the mugger. He touched the go-bar: a cloud of coloured dots twinkled silently on the gridded screen. It was like watching a structureless proto-galaxy, speeded up. Number, he thought. Number was what it was all about. What everything was all about. Number, plucked out of some unfathomable sub-universal source.

The sparks settled. Scarne scanned the grid slots.

Gold. Gold. Gold. And gold all along the line.

Stupefied, he stared at the golden points. As he did so, a soft conspiratorial voice issued from the base of the mugger.

‘Jackpot. You have won the jackpot.’

Scarne glanced around him. The Legitimacy government had long outlawed Wheel jackpots, though rumours persisted that they were still operated illegally – rumours which, given the nature of the odds, were hard to confirm. Some said the jackpot was an enormous sum of money. Others that it granted a secret wish.

The soft voice spoke again, directing him. ‘Take hold of the silver handles below the pay-off groove. The jackpot will then be delivered.’

Scarne broke out in a sweat as he looked for the handles, which to the uninitiated were merely part of the mugger’s florid decoration. Nervously he closed his fingers round them, his head reeling to think of the odds against this happening. One jackpot, perhaps, per billions, trillions of throws? It seemed impossible. Impossible? No, he reminded himself, nothing was impossible in a world of random numbers. Only improbable.

And then the jackpot hit him and it was nothing he could have guessed at or expected. The Wheel house dwindled from his consciousness. He was standing on the edge of a precipice. Below him was a raucous, roaring, boiling sea. Then the ground vanished from under his feet. He was falling. Down, down, down.

He was sinking, drifting, swimming through a vast shifting foam-like sea out of which abstract entities formed and dissolved without rhyme or order. He came to understand that he had dropped out of the realm of solid reality. He was in the awful other reality, the one he had been contemplating, dimly and theoretically, instants earlier. The gulf of pure randomness that underlay all of existence. The Great Profundity: a sea of non-causation, on which the universe of cause-and-effect, of structure, order, space and materiality, floated like scum on turbulent water.

Number.

The universe was made of number. The ancient Greeks had been the first to guess at that fact. Modern science, aided and abetted by randomatics, had confirmed it. And here it was: the source from which number flowed in an endless, utterly irrational stream. Before there was the atom, before there was the elementary particle, before there was h, the quantum of action, there was number.

Scarne understood the randomatic equations now in a way he never had before. But even those equations were dissolving, breaking up. Everything dissolved in this foam sea. It was a universal solvent beyond the wildest alchemical dreams, breaking down substance, idea, being itself. Even Scarne’s own consciousness was dissolving, in ecstasy and terror, into the endless flux …

Then it all vanished and substance returned. The silver handles were cool in Scarne’s sweating hands. The fermats glittered and flashed, ranked silver and red.

Vastness.