Just My Luck

Norman Wakefield was not having a good day. But then, as far as Norman was concerned, very few days were good days. The world was rarely well disposed towards him, which was odd, because he wasn't the sort of person who would go out of his way to make trouble. The perfect life, it seemed to him, was to find a nice quiet job somewhere where nobody bothered you, try to keep your head down, wait forty or fifty years or so, and then pass away from some fairly painless disease, preferably one which caused as little mess and inconvenience as possible.

The world, however, had other plans.

It started when his car failed to, well, start. Closer examination revealed a peeping nest full of baby sparrows wedged behind the alternator. The bus was an hour and a half late, and then three arrived at once. Work was a cubicle tucked away in a IT support centre, where he fielded desperate calls from people whose cupholders had snapped off, people terrified that the illegal operation their PC had just performed would attract the attention of the police, and irate customers who demanded to know why, if they were paying for Internet service, they were expected to have to fork out for a modem as well.

Lunch was cut short by the canteen being closed due to a suspected outbreak of Foot and Mouth in the kitchens, leaving Norman to forage around the vending machines filled with excitingly wrapped chocolate. They seemed reluctant to leave their little wire springs, no matter how much money he fed them, and by the sixth attempt, he was out of change, and patience.

The afternoon callers seemed worse, if anything, and Norman began to wonder if they were doing it on purpose for some reason.

"It says 'press any key to continue'," said one particular specimen, earning himself pride of place in Norman's personal daydream of hell. "Which key is the any key?"

The bus home, surprisingly, was on time, and Norman then recalled where all his loose change had gone to. From the moment the overly pleased driver closed the doors and left, it started to rain. It stopped eventually, after a few miles walk, at about the point he was in sight of his front door.

Norman had had worse days, but he'd be hard pressed to think of one that was much better.

Finally, when he'd gotten home, there were two strangers in his living room.

The man was tall, fair haired, sparely built, and impeccably neat in a rather dated way. Given a set of waxed mustachios, he would have looked poised to be tying hapless heroines to railroad tracks. The bored looking girl lounging on the sofa on the other hand looked like she'd ran through a charity shop covered in glue. A ragtag assortment of clothes bundled together and wrapped around in a tweedy greatcoat which had clearly seen better days, and possibly a few worse ones.

Whilst his mouth was trying to get its act together and ask who the hell they were, the man smiled, as if recognising an old friend. "Mr. Wakefield. So very glad to meet you. We've been hearing an awful lot about you."

There was a pause, long enough to feel slightly awkward, as if they were waiting for Norman to say something. When he was not forthcoming in this regard, the man eventually continued. "Oh, but where are my manners? My name is Marcus Delphine, and this is my apprentice-"

"Partner," interrupted the girl from the sofa.

"Pupil," suggested the man.

"Colleague," snapped the girl.

"Protégé," the man said, a little testily. "Keep it up, and you can start being a 'sidekick'. This is my protégé, Eudora Blake. And we were hoping we could have a little chat, Mr Wakefield."

Norman's vocal cords finally got their act together. "About what?"

"Oh, various things. You, us... the end of the world." Delphine removed his glasses absently and buffed them against his lapel. "I'm afraid you're causing quite a lot of problems at the moment. We'd have come sooner, but you've proven rather difficult to track down."

"Problems? What problems?" He hesitated for a moment. "Are you the police?" It looked unlikely, especially the girl, but Norman was feeling that same sense of unspecified guilt one gets when walking past a policeman, whether you've done anything or not.

"Not at such," said the man, thoughtfully, "Though you could say we generally deal with lawbreakers."

"Threats to public safety," added Eudora, idly thumbing through a magazine. She looked up. "You believe in luck, Norman?"

"Luck?" said Norman, warily. The conversation was proving a little too tangential for his liking. "Not really, no. Er, why?"

She shrugged. "It exists. Good luck, bad luck, odd luck. Karma, Synchronicity, Fate. Probability is a proven universal force, like gravity or electromagnetism. Doesn't get a lot of coverage by physicists mind, probably because you can't make it go whoosh in a particle accelerator. Mathematicians are all over it, though."

Delphine nodded. "And it seems to be all over you, Mr. Wakefield."

"What?"

"You do seem to have the most extraordinary run of bad luck recently-"

"-the last thirty years or so-" injected Eudora.

"and I'm afraid it's starting to cause a bit of bother."

"That's ridiculous!" Norman paused for a moment once the gut reaction had forced its way out. "Isn't it?"

"Well, there's not many people who can claim on their insurance because a Caribou came crashing through their windscreen."

"Especially in central London," added Eudora.

"Or who can lose three sets of housekeys in one morning," said Delphine.

"Without leaving the house." said Eudora. "Or have a cat which spends six hours being coaxed down from a tree by the fire brigade, only to touch the floor for about eight seconds before bolting straight up a neighbouring tree because of all the excitement."

"Though that's possibly caused as much by feline humour than anything," mused Delphine. "Nevertheless, it's just one thing after another with you, isn't it?"

"This is crazy!" said Norman. "I mean, yes, I do have a fair few bad days, but doesn't everyone?"

"Not every day. Besides, name the last bit of good luck you had."

"Well..."

"Anything. As far back as you like. Or a day where everything went to plan, at least."

Norman sank into a nearby armchair, nauseated. The enormity of it all hit home. "What does it mean?" he asked weakly.

Delphine beckoned to Eudora. "Attend. We have a man who has bad fortune. Consistently, persistently, and constantly. Your thoughts?"

Eudora sighed theatrically. "He's the end of the probability curve, an individual to whom the worst happens, or at least the worst happens without actually killing or maiming him."

"And the results of such a man existing?"

"Extreme stress on the time/space/likelihood axes," recited Eudora in a bored voice, "causing distortion of the local reality, eventually leading to entropic collapse of congruent phase space."

"Excellent. You see, Norman," Delphine explained, "reality is a very temperamental thing," It may look rather solidly built, but trust me, it's remarkably fragile in some respects."

"Shoddy construction, I say," said Eudora. "Not the sort of thing you ought to cobble together in a few days. No craftsmanship."

"Quite. And clusters of improbable happenings like, well, like yourself, Norman, tend to spread. You're the statistical equivalent of a cannonball fired at a trampoline. Your very life is pressing down on the fabric of reality, each successive unfortunate happenstance making the distortion worse and worse. If it keeps happening for long enough, well... think what happens if you have a small hole in a dam."

"A little dampness at first," said Eudora, "Followed shortly thereafter by the whole village below being swept away. In other words, we leave you to your own devices, and it'll be goodbye, world."

"But this is ridiculous! Odd things happen to people all the time. Why should I be the cause of all this? I mean, the chances of winning the lottery are millions to one, but someone manages it most weeks!"

"Yes, but that tends to be more distributed, evenly spread," said Delphine. Randomly spread, so to speak. But if the same person won the lottery every week... well, they still wouldn't be racking up the kind of odds you're overcoming on a daily basis."

"Talking of lotteries," chimed in Eudora, "remember the time you threw away a ticket, thinking it was an old one, and then realised it was for the next draw. And guess what the numbers were that week?"

"Yes, yes," said Norman, now thoroughly irritated,

"And then you spent the whole weekend digging through the local landfill, looking for it."

"I'd rather not think about it, to be honest."

"Unlucky, certainly," she continued, not listening,"but when the same numbers came up the week after, but you'd been too busy looking for the first ticket to buy another-"

"Thank you, you've made the point," he interrupted. "We've already established my life is full of weirdness. Not least of which is a pair of strangers haranguing me about it in my living room," he muttered under his breath. He'd never expected to have his life so thoroughly graded by anyone, as if it were some kind of test he was expected to pass. "So now what?"

"Now," said Delphine, "we fix the problem. It's what we do. We're the people who keep the universes shored up. Reality Engineers."

"Cosmic plumbers." added Eudora. "Celestial odd-job men."

"How?" asked Norman, throat dry.

"I'm afraid we have to remove all trace of you from here. You'll never have existed." Delphine paused, and pulled a small book from his pocket. "Celestial Odd-job men. That's very good," he beamed, scribbling.

Norman stared at him for a moment, then nodded slowly. After the day he'd had, indeed, after the life he'd had, it didn't sound as bad as it should. "Will it hurt?" he asked?

"You won't feel a thing," said Delphine.

"Norman?" Eudora reached towards him, a sad smile on her face. "Take my hand."

Norman held it tightly. It was after all, he thought, just my luck.

There was a long silence as the two stood momentarily lost in thought. Around them, the wallpaper in the room started to fade into another pattern, as history began to realign itself. Eventually the furnishings and occupants would follow, as the universe seeped in to fill the Norman-shaped gap.

"Shame, really," said Delphine, shrugging. "Seemed a nice chap."

Eudora grunted noncommittally. "Anything else we need to look at while we're here?"

Delphine pulled his notebook from an inside pocket, and riffled through its pages. "Some man who keeps walking into a bar, apparently."

"Sounds painful." They left, leaving the softly rippling room to its own devices.