Poked, Prodded and Probed, but Not in a Fun Way
A Mostly Secret Government Department, Edinburgh.
Cooper was in a short, beige corridor with the only way out to his left and a frosted-glass and wood office door opposite. The big brass nameplate read: “Dr Emily J. Braxton psychiatrist” followed by enough letters to make a decent Scrabble score.
He was wearing a white hospital gown and sat at the end of a row of four aluminium and wood seats connected by a steel rod and bolted to the floor.
On the wall to his right was a crest of a lion and unicorn rampant either side of a shield topped by a crown, beneath it, in large, black lettering it said, “The Department for the Quantification and Utilisation of Luck” with the motto “Potius quam ut felix sit bonum” beneath it, which he didn't have a good enough grasp of Latin to translate.
For the last two days they’d subjected him to a battery of tests, both mental and physical, including having tubes inserted into orifices that he very firmly believed to be exit only.
Even though they kept him behind locked doors and guarded him twenty-four-hours a day, he’d still managed to garner a great deal of information about both his surroundings and the soldiers watching him, including the fact that he was being kept on the second floor of a three-storey building with external, enclosed fire-escape stairs.
Moments later the office door opened, and a middle-aged woman in a grey trousers suit walked out, "Mr Cooper?" she said, looking around quizzically, despite him being the only one there.
He was going to make a sarcastic comment about it being his invisible friend that she was looking for, and that he was only there to keep him company, but he knew that psychiatrists aren't famed for taking off-the-cuff comments at face value.
Inside, the office was luxuriously decorated, well, by government standards anyway, the bookshelves behind her were filled with leather-bound volumes by the kind of people who never let a single though got unexamined.
As he sat on the couch opposite her, he noticed that halfway between them was a coffee table with a thick, hardback book on it, the title: “The Quantification and Actualisation of Serendipity and its Effects on Informational and Normative Social Influences” filled most of the cover.
He picked it up, which took both hands, and turned it over. On the back of the dust jacket was a photograph of a slightly younger version of the doctor sitting faux-casually in front of the same bookcase, her black hair pulled back into a bun so tight that it gave her a permanently surprised expression.
“If you’d called it ‘How to get lucky’ you’d have sold more copies,” he said putting it back, “and your hair looks much better down like that,” she almost touched it but caught herself at the last minute.
“How are you, Mr Cooper?”
“Fine, yourself?”
“It’s been a long day,” she said, rubbing her eyes.
“Want to swap places and tell me all about it?” he said, holding out a hand for the notebook and pen she’d just picked up from the round table beside her which also held a big ring-bound report.
“From what I’m told, you do that a lot, don’t you?” She said, making a note.
“Do what?”
“Say something that subverts expectations and look for a reaction that tells you something about the person, hopefully revealing a weakness you can prey on later.”
“Or I just enjoy making bad jokes,” he smiled, looking like canonisation was imminent, “now can we get to the part where you accuse me of wanting to kill my father and sleep with my mother?”
“I’m a Jungian, not a Freudian, we don’t subscribe to Oedipal theories, but speaking of sex, you were married for thirteen years before your divorce, what happened there?” she said, reading from a red file with his name and photo on the front.
“It was a mixed marriage,” Cooper said.
“Oh, how so?” she said, looking at the picture of the pretty redhead in his file.
“Her side were honest.”
“After the divorce you joined the army, rising to the rank of lieutenant in Military Intelligence before being dishonourably discharged,”
“Bzzz! Wrong,” he said, making an irritating game show buzzer sound.
“Oh?” She said, looking surprised.
“There has to be a court-martial for a dishonourable discharge, which couldn’t happen as they had no proof, so a bad conduct discharge, for stupid, made-up reasons, was the best that they could do,” he said lying down on the couch and putting his hands behind his head, crossing his legs to trap the hem of the gown. To keep it from riding up.
“You were in the army for…,” she paused to check his file, “four years and eight months, do you miss it?”
“Of course I do, any bureaucracy is a conman’s playground.”
“You say that, but they caught you, didn’t they?”
“I ran a flawless operation for months before I made one, fatal mistake.”
“What was that?”
He sat up and looked her straight in the face, “I trusted somebody.”
“But why do it in the first place? Judging by your 2.5 million pound classic car collection, your impressive investment portfolio and the six million pounds in the four bank accounts we tracked down, not to mention the offshore accounts you probably have the funds stolen from the army stashed in, you didn’t need the money.”
“Do you know how many laws there are, Doc?” he said, noting how she tried to hide her irritation at the shortening of her title, showing that she wanted people to look up to her, not treat her as an equal.
“There must be thousands, in the UK alone.”
“Bzzz! Wrong answer, Doc.”
“Then why don’t you give me the correct number,” she said appearing perfectly calm, although he could see the annoyance building under the surface. He had a talent for finding what irritated people and using it to his advantage.
“In the entire world there’s only one law: don’t be poor, even on the rare occasions that the rich get convicted they end up in the type of open prison that has squash courts and a golf club. I plan to retire this year, or maybe next, and live for another forty or fifty years and during that entire time I don’t intend to be poor for even one-second.”
“Cynical, to say the least, but moving on,” she said, looking exasperated, “let’s talk about your luck.”
“Not that I can complain,” he said, “but it turns out it’s not as good as I thought.”
“You really believe that?” she said, sounding surprised.
“Why shouldn’t I? Your people said that I only guessed the answers their little quizzes about fifty percent of the time.”
“Actually, you got every test exactly half right,” she said holding up the summary page of a book-length report that sat on the table beside her.
“Can’t fault me for consistency, then,” he said with a smile.
“You don’t seem to understand. For example,” she said, reading from the summary, “you guessed 26 out of 52 playing cards correctly and the chances of that happening is…” she paused to consult the sheet again, “one in 7.2 trillion! And the odds of doing exactly that for all the twenty-seven tests that you took ten times each is so remote that it’s as near to impossible as makes no difference.”
“I don’t know what you expect me to say to that,” he said, holding his hands out palms up as he shrugged his shoulders.
“You’ve never noticed a pattern like this before?”
“Well, I was blown out of a plane six thousand feet up, which we can put in the unlucky column, but I didn’t die, which was definitely lucky. I also had the good fortune to survive two tours of the Middle East but still ended up here talking to you, so maybe you’re right, but, even if you are, I don’t know what you expect me to do about it.”
“Do you know what ‘Potius quam ut felix sit bonum’ means in English?” She said.
“The Latin on the wall outside? Not a clue.”
“It means better to be lucky than good and you seem to be a bit of both.”
“I like you too, give me a big hug,” he said standing up and holding his arms out.
“With that level of reliability,” she said, irritatedly without moving, “you could be of great service to your country, pay your debt to society.”
“I’m such an idiot,” he said, after puzzling over that for a few seconds before realisation dawned on his face. He sat back down with a thud, “That’s what this place is for, isn’t it? You’re trying to find a way to weaponise luck.”
“You could put it like that,” she said as he started to chuckle, “what’s so funny?” she snapped.
“All of this,” he said, waving a hand around, as his shoulders shook with laughter,” this is what’s so funny. A big building filled with hundreds of people spending thousands of hours with a budget of millions of pounds just to look for the next generation of super-soldier, and all you found was me!”