Jackpot Lottery Win!
An unscratched lottery ticket was worthless.
Even the mountain of tickets piled up here was nothing more than scraps of paper until someone scratched them.
Grace held a five-cent coin and started scratching with single-minded determination.
But scratching more than 400,000 tickets wasn’t something that could be done in a single day.
As Grace dropped a losing ticket into the loser box, she said, “This is a showdown. Wrist versus brain. Which one gives out first?”
“In situations like this, you use your head.”
I headed for the tool rack in the corner of the warehouse.
If your head was bad, your body suffered; if your body was bad, your head suffered. That was the rule of life.
I pulled two lightweight electric drills from the toolbox.
At the tip of each drill, I had attached a piece of green scrubbing pad.
Whiiiiiiir—
When I switched the drills on, the scrubber at the end spun and stripped the silver coating off the lottery tickets in an instant.
Grace applauded with complete sincerity. “You really are a genius.”
At this rate, each ticket would take half a second.
We each grabbed a drill and plunged into the mountain of tickets.
Whiiiiiiiiir!
Every time the drill shaved across the foil on a ticket, gray flakes sprayed into the air.
“Loser.”
Grace scratched at incredible speed, sorting each ticket into a different box according to its ranking.
“Loser. Sixth prize, ten dollars. Loser. Loser. Loser. Loser. Sixth prize, ten dollars. Loser. Loser. Loser. Loser. Loser. Loser. Sixth prize, ten dollars. Loser. Loser. Loser.”
Her hands moved with the accuracy and speed of an automated factory sorter.
“Nice hands. You could get hired as a casino dealer.”
“If I don’t hit the lottery, I may have to seriously consider it.”
Grace replied from behind her mask.
In the strange trance of repetitive labor, we moved like machines without speaking.
Mostly losers, occasionally sixth prize, and even more rarely fifth prize.
The gray residue stripped from the tickets settled over our hair and shoulders in a thin layer.
...How much time had passed?
The overheated drills began to give off the smell of burning.
By then it was already 2 a.m.
The silver dust piled on the floor had risen to our ankles.
The mountain of 400,000 tickets was now down to bare ground.
The empty twenty-kilogram boxes were packed full of winning tickets, so heavy they felt like lumps of iron.
The box containing the sixth-prize ten-dollar tickets was the heaviest.
With roughly one in ten tickets turning up sixth prize, there had to be around 40,000 of them in that box alone.
Converted into money, that came to just under $400,000.
At a glance it looked impressive, but when you considered the purchase cost of the tickets, the break-even point still seemed impossibly far away.
There were far fewer fifth-prize $100 tickets than that.
They occupied only one corner of a thick bundle of paper.
The fourth-prize $1,000 tickets could be counted on one hand, and the third-prize $10,000 tickets numbered barely ten or so.
But the real big catch we were after still hadn’t appeared.
Then Grace cried out in an excited voice.
“...Oh! Second prize! It’s a second-prize ticket!”
At last, the prized $100,000 ticket had appeared.
I hurriedly turned my head to check.
[★] [★] [$100,000].
It was clearly a second-prize winner.
“Good. We’ve got one, at least.”
“...But $100,000 isn’t nearly enough. We need first prize.”
She was right.
We hadn’t started all this just to settle for one measly second prize.
There were now only a little over a hundred tickets left.
Grace’s expression grew steadily stiffer.
“What if... there isn’t one? What if somebody already claimed the prize and the system’s just not showing it because of an error...”
“Then we’d sue the lottery company. That wouldn’t be the worst ending.”
America was, after all, a nation of lawsuits.
I patted Grace’s shoulder to comfort and encourage her.
...But failure was definitely still a possibility.
In the memories I carried from before my regression, Grace’s lottery project had ended in failure.
It had been good enough that I’d intervened and helped gather up the remaining tickets, but there was no guarantee the outcome itself would change completely.
We started the drills again and scratched through the remaining tickets.
The fewer tickets were left, the heavier the air inside the warehouse became.
Another second prize turned up, but... still no first prize.
Before long, there was only one ticket left.
Grace set the drill down and, somewhat perversely, picked up the five-cent coin again to scratch it.
The result was... .
“Sixth prize.”
Grace said it with a hollow laugh.
“...No first prize.”
The final tally was two second-prize tickets.
Converted into winnings, that came to $200,000.
Even adding up every prize from third place and below, we’d barely recouped about twenty percent of our investment.
At last, Grace brushed the gray dust off the legs of her jeans.
Her voice was calm.
“...Well, probability is like that.”
But there was no hiding the disappointment in her face.
Grace forced herself to sound cheerful. “Just because the expected value was positive doesn’t mean you’re guaranteed a win. If the sample size is big enough, it converges, but in a single trial, after all...”
“Yeah, that’s right. The experiment itself was still meaningful. We proved the lottery commission’s issuance system had a flaw, and we also confirmed the practical viability of an information-asymmetry arbitrage model. Next time, we’ll design it more precisely.”
“You’re right. Thanks for trying to cheer me up.”
Grace nodded at my words.
But even with her head lowered, the weight of her disappointment was still unmistakable.
“Let’s rest for a bit. I’m going to get some water.”
Grace slowly turned around.
And in that instant—
“...!”
Something caught my eye.
It was a Power Jackpot scratch ticket stuck to the back pocket of Grace’s jeans.
The last ticket remaining in this vast warehouse—ticket number thirty-six.
A rectangular slip of paper, clinging to the curve of Grace’s ass just below her back pocket.
I reached for it.
“Hold on, Grace. Don’t move.”
“Huh?”
Grace turned toward me and jolted in shock.
“What are you doing...”
When she saw my hand heading for her backside, she shrieked.
“Are you insane!? What are you doing in the middle of this!”
“Just stay still.”
“How am I supposed to stay still? You’re moving way too fast! And what is with the timing? Come to think of it, you really are way too wild...”
I ignored her protest and kept reaching.
Then I peeled the last lottery ticket off Grace’s ass.
Only then did Grace realize what had been in my hand.
“...Huh?”
“Looks like it stuck there from static.”
I held it out to her.
“Let’s scratch it. It’s the last one.”
“M-me? You want me to scratch it?”
“This was your idea from the very beginning. You should finish it.”
I waved the final ticket in front of her eyes.
After a long hesitation, she nodded.
“Fine. I’ll see it through.”
“Here.”
I took out a five-cent coin instead of the drill and handed it to her.
For some reason, it felt like the end should be done with human hands, not machinery.
Grace took the coin, and once again a heavy silence settled over the warehouse.
She placed the coin on the ticket.
Scriiitch... scriiitch... scriiitch...
With each pass of the silver coin, the foil coating peeled away slowly.
The first symbol was [★].
Then the second symbol emerged as well.
The second was the same shape and color: [★].
Two black star marks stood side by side.
It meant a winning ticket.
The only question was what rank it had won.
Grace, who had been pretending to stay calm all this time, was now breathing a little faster.
Her hand slowly peeled back the coating on the right side.
The foil over the prize rank was gradually stripped away.
And then—
«[1] EIGHT MILLION ($8,000,000)»
First prize, eight million dollars.
Numbers as miraculous as a divine revelation were carved into my retina alongside Grace’s.
“F-found it.”
Grace’s voice shook violently.
“...It’s eight million dollars.”
Her knees seemed to go weak, and she swayed where she stood, so I caught her from behind.
Leaning back against me, Grace stared blankly at the ticket.
No matter how you looked at it, it was unquestionably the winning ticket.
She kept staring at it for a long time, and then suddenly shouted so loudly it was unbelievable.
“We did it! We did it, Sanha! We did it! We actually did it! Eeeek!”
Before I could even say a word, Grace threw her arms around me, and all at once pressed her lips to my cheek.
“...”
The sudden kiss on the cheek was surprising, but the situation itself was extremely positive.
Grace had spent about $3.3 million on acquiring the tickets, and I had spent about $500,000 on the remaining purchases.
The result was a first-prize payout of $8 million, and if you added the lower-tier winnings, the total came to roughly $8.6 million.
It was, quite literally, a Power Jackpot.