VARRICK
The Lyrikan hit the table so hard the chips jumped.
“Where's my payout?” His pale face flushed with rage, eyes shifting from silver to angry red. “Ninety-three to one. I saw it. Everyone saw it!”
The dealer, a young Merrith with shaking hands, gestured at the display floating above the table. Numbers cascaded across the holographic matrix, flickering between impossible values. 93:1. Then 12:1. Then null. Then 93:1 again.
“Sir, the system is recalculating.”
“The system showed me WINNING!”
From my vantage point across the casino floor, I tracked the security team's convergence on the scene. The Lyrikan's rage made sense. The odds matrix had promised one payout, delivered a fraction of it, then crashed entirely. Three other players at the same table were already shouting, demanding their credits back.
The cocktail of recycled air and industrial cleaning fluid hit my nose as I stepped fully into the station. Casino hubs all smelled the same. Desperation and bleach. But this one carried an extra note. Decay.
The probability matrix above the failing table finally stabilized on a number that satisfied no one. The Lyrikan grabbed his remaining chips and stormed off, still cursing. Security dispersed. The dealer slumped in her chair, exhausted.
I'd seen that exact failure pattern before. In beta testing. Seven years ago, when I'd first written the mathematics that governed every game in this place. Seven years without updates, without adaptation, and the code was finally collapsing under its own obsolescence.
The main casino floor sprawled before me, three stories of neon and noise. Hundreds of tables, thousands of players, all of them trusting in probabilities I'd designed. I moved deeper, cataloging what I saw.
At Gravity Well, the projected odds kept resetting mid-game. Players bet on red, the ball landed on red, but the payout calculated for black. Then it corrected. Then overcorrected.
A card game called Collapse paid out triple on a guaranteed loss. The Nerath player collecting the credits looked confused by his luck. The house looked murderous.
Star Fall, the dice game in the corner, couldn't maintain consistent probability matrices for more than six rolls. The display above it showed odds that jumped between mathematically sound and complete chaos.
My code. My mathematics. All of it dying.
My jaw ached. I forced myself to unclench it.
I didn’t have the time to care. I was here for something else.
The high-stakes mezzanine hung above the main floor, suspended on pillars of black glass and criminal wealth. Real gold fixtures caught the light. A current of genuine risk flowed between the tables. This was where the serious players came. The ones with credits to burn and everything to lose.
I climbed the stairs.
The dealers up here moved differently. More polish, less fear. Still indentured, still trapped, but they'd learned to survive through skill rather than just endurance. You could see it in how they held themselves. Spines straight, eyes carefully neutral, trained to be invisible.
Then I saw her.
A human female, standing at the premier table, dealing Flux to a collection of wealthy degenerates who'd never notice what she was doing. But I did.
Her hands moved in perfect rhythm, sorting and dealing without conscious thought. Muscle memory so deep it freed her mind for other work.
She tracked everything.
The Mondian in seat three touched his throat before every bluff. She'd already cataloged it, adjusted her shuffle to compensate. The Orlian in seat five had a betting pattern that revealed her internal count. The dealer had restructured the deck flow to neutralize it.
Behavioral analysis. Real-time probability adjustment. Pattern recognition that would have taken any algorithms fifty hands to achieve, and she was doing it in five.
Without augments. Without camera. Just her mind and those dark eyes that missed nothing.
She glanced up, scanning the mezzanine for new players. Her gaze swept over me, cataloging and assessing the same way it moved over everyone else.
For barely a second, our eyes met.
My pulse jumped. Heat spread through my chest, my blood singing in a way that had nothing to do with mathematics and everything to do with recognition. Not destiny. Not fate. Just genuine, physical interest in someone whose mind clearly matched mine in ways I hadn't calculated for.
