Get chance and luck*...

* This phrase was driving me crazy: thanks to Lisa ("Honey-chan") Nelson for identifying it as being from the refrain of "Get Wild", the opening theme for City Hunter, by TM Network

I got the idea for writing this note after reading an item by Rory McLean in the U.K., in which he speculates as to why the Lovely Angels can have a 100% success rate in solving their case load and still manage to devastate the general environs...

It got me to thinking about some of the old science fiction stories I'd read over the years (a lotta years for me) that dealt with people who had bizarre luck or who controlled or were controlled by the laws of probability. (All of these stories are pretty generally available even today.) So I thought it would be interesting to spin some theories about how the DP's luck works.

First, I thought of a couple stories in which the protagonists are directly involved with the operation of chance events. Alfred Bester's "Pi Man" is a person whose life is "controlled" by probability. He finds himself constantly compelled to act, often in bizarre and unpredictable ways in order to balance events so as to preserve statistical averages in the world. As one example, he is forced to empty his pockets and toss a certain amount of loose change out of his apartment window because the net amount of money accidentally found by other people is growing too large. Things that are stranger still develop in the course of the story.

But the Angels are more "proactive" than that: they are not simply manipulated by random chance. Stephen Barr's "I Am a Nucleus" suggests another possibility. A New Yorker is walking by a Manhattan construction site when a meteor crashes down into it; a tiny fragment strikes him in the head. As he is recovering, he discovers that very strange, improbable events seems to be occurring wherever he goes: two pedestrians can't get by each other on the sidewalk because they keep stepping to the same side, window curtains blowing in a breeze tie themselves into knots, and so on. As days pass, his own life and that of the city get progressively more disrupted as more things that "can't happen" do. It turns out that the minute cosmic object stuck under his skin organizes events so that the probability of extremely rare occurences is boosted enormously. This would lead to a variation of Mr. McLean's "luck-sucking" ability: perhaps our heroines have an unconscious or involuntary way of altering the probability of circumstances to work in their favor.

Another idea has nothing to do with chance, but with the ability to "be in the right place at the right time." In Theodore Sturgeon's "The [Widget], the [Wadget], and Boff", two aliens come to Earth to investigate a very unusual capability possessed by few species in the Galaxy. It gives those who have it the ability to make the right choice or take the correct action in life-threatening situations before they have time to think of it. This ability is carried in their brains as "Synapse beta-sub-16"; they're here to determine whether humans have it. The aliens pass for adult humans by putting on a man- and a woman-"suit" (the 'widget' and 'wadget'). They soon gain the confidence of a small boy, Boff, and get him to show them around so they can study people. In the climax, Boff manages an improbable feat that rescues family members from their burning house, demonstrating that he has "beta-sub-16": the aliens' quest is successful. The Angels may not be "lucky": they just know where to be standing when things come down...

Then again, some people are just "born lucky." In Larry Niven's Ringworld, Teela Brown is a young woman of the 29th (?) Century who manages to survive or avoid some pretty stupendous calamities (in a manner that seemed to me awfully like two other fictional characters I know). Niven's idea is that she carries a "lucky" gene, which gives her a "survival skill" or "unconscious ability" (or whatever you want to call it) to do whatever small thing she needs to do or to end up wherever she needs to be in order to stay alive.

Something which sounds science-fictional but has actually been entertained as a scientific idea is the so-called "many-worlds" interpretation of quantum mechanics. Briefly summarized, it proposes that at a juncture where an event can have more than one outcome, the universe fragments into universes in which each of these consequences has taken place; there are then countless universes among which all possibilities have been realized. (It is not particularly fashionable now, as this hypothesis has no particular predictive power or ability to be tested as a scientific theory.) This has been the jumping-off point, though, for quite a few science fiction stories, including a couple short ones by Niven ("For a Foggy Night" and "All the Myriad Ways"). The theory of your Death in such a universe is that you survive as long as your consciousness, at each juncture, keeps picking a universe in which you still live. When you finally pick wrong, it's "Game Over." So maybe the Pair has a gift for choosing the right cosmic branch to leap onto while all around them fail...

The improbable, out-of-control events are one of the things that I was immediately taken with in their stories, so I thought it would be fun to consider how other writers have handled Chance. I'd also like to hear what you think. I do have one question for now: does the "Lovely Angel" use Douglas Adams' Improbability Drive?

Nozmo (4/99)