Short Story #3 - Good Luck

10 Short Stories Challenge from a friend: She picks the topic/genre, I write it in one day.

--- A system(s) designed to make life easier becomes a burden ---

Mr. Finkleman had been quite candid in the interview. He’d looked at Joe rather seriously for a moment before admitting, “We really have no idea how it works.” His somber disposition broke into a winning smile that could easily clinch any sales pitch and certainly sold Joe. He added, “But it sure as hell does.”

The GenMar implant, so named after Victor Gennie and Randolph Phillip Marshenko, the two scientists who discovered it, was in it’s initial testing phase when Joe had his installed all those years ago. In fact he was touted as “Lucky Number 7” in the papers when the story had first broken since he was literally the seventh person in the world to acquire one. Everything had been hush hush and cloaked in CIA like secrecy before Lucky Number 9 had drunkenly spilled it all to a prostitute in Vegas one fateful evening. The press went wild. All records had been made public and the exact order of the surgical procedures had become legend.

But that was way later.

When Joe had come too on the gurney at the makeshift medical facility in a seedy area of downtown Los Angeles he had no idea there would be such a fuss over all this. His thoughts were consumed by the one hundred and forty dollars that would be paid out to him in cash as well as the fifty dollars a week for the next five years he would receive while under surveillance by Sherwood Drisco, the pharmaceutical company in charge of the project. Sure he would have to make himself available to them for regular visits for this extended period of time, but for a guy as down on his luck financially as Joe it was a sacrifice worth making even for the pittance offered. Joe had done work as a guinea pig before. He figured for such a long commitment the salary would be much higher. However, due to the particular nature of the experiment Sherwood Drisco felt paying it’s lab rats would be somewhat redundant. It was all explained when he signed the paperwork. Joe would certainly agree… Eventually. When he awoke on the gurney he didn’t. Then he was bitching and moaning despite being fortunate enough to land the gig in the first place. Things had been bad. They’d been bad for a long time. It had come down to taking the two hundred a month or moving back to Boise. And moving to Boise wasn’t an option.

There were banks of computers in the observation room where the patients were funneled after surgery to regain their strength and collect the one forty which was promised. Joe had found out later that there had been twelve in that first group; making fourteen with Gennie and Marshenko. Oh yes, they’d experimented on themselves first. No one knows what happened to them. They disappeared years ago when it was discovered that the surgery was nonreversible.

Still, he’d only seen three others in the observation room; two who’d been released prior and one more that had entered before he’d exited the premises. The monitors showed computer games and the fat guy who introduced himself as Frankie to anyone within earshot and the bald guy were both playing poker. Joe was not interested. He laughed to himself. Come on, he thought, how could he trust that they weren’t rigged? No, he just wanted his cash and then it was pound the pavement to try to land the steady employment that had been eluding him for nearly two years. They can’t rig that. Or could they? For a while Joe was sure Sherwood Drisco had a hand in everything he was doing. He did fill out their little questionnaire, didn’t he? They knew a heck of a lot about his life.

A stack of three quarters on the sidewalk near the medical facility. As if someone left them there on purpose barely three steps from the beat up jalopy that got Joe around the city. Three quarters. Anything less and he might not have even bothered picking them up, but three, well that would pay for a load of laundry at Washer-World. Coincidence? Had the girl in the white lab coat who’d collected his clipboard placed it here while he’d been under the knife? Maybe.

He had five years to figure it out. Could they keep it up for five years? Joe doubted it.

On the way home he stopped at the diner near his shack of an apartment in the slums. He hadn’t eaten anything he hadn’t prepared for himself or that didn’t come in a wrapper since last Christmas. It was stupid to spend some of the money he’d just been handed on food when there was stuff to eat at home, but Joe couldn’t seem to help himself. The scents in the greasy spoon were intoxicating and soon the biggest burger on the menu was being carried across the dining room toward him. It never made it. His waiter tripped and what was in one moment a scrumptious experience waiting to happen was in the next a mess all over his shirt and pants. Good luck? Ha!

And then the manager who had been tending the register nearby exploded.

“Goddammit, Reggie! That’s it! You’re fired!”

“But, Chuck…” The waiter stopped helping Joe clean up and faced his boss. His ex-boss. “It was an accident. I’m sorry.”

“Sorry doesn’t cut it anymore. Reggie Cutler, you are the worst waiter I’ve ever seen. I should have fired you a month ago. You’re costing me more money then you’re worth.”

“Chuck, I REALLY need this job”, Reggie was practically in tears.

“No! You’re fired. Get your stuff and leave or I’ll call the police and have you removed.”

Reggie could see that Chuck meant business and so, crestfallen, he stripped off his apron and disappeared behind the kitchen doors. A moment later with his personals in tow he left the diner for good.

“I’m so sorry mister”, said Chuck, “Let me have your order again. I’ll have it remade and it’s on the house.”

So maybe he was lucky after all, thought Joe. Lunch would only cost him a trip to the Laundromat and since he’d found enough change to pay for the wash it would really only cost the price of the drier. Maybe, continued Joe in this vein, he could try pushing his luck and see what might happen.

“Gee, thanks. Say, I suppose this is sort of awkward, but are you looking to hire a waiter?”

“What’s that?” Chuck was cleaning the remnants of the mess off the table and into a bus pan.

“I’m looking for a job”, Joe stated simply, “And if you need a waiter…”

“Got experience waiting tables?”

“Ten years”, Joe lied.

“Well, then I’ve got five shifts for you to cover this week. If I like what I see you’ll go on the schedule permanently. If not…” Chuck let it linger. It was more then fine by Joe. “Ok then. Be here tomorrow at noon.”

Could Sherwood Drisco have set up this entire event? It was conceivable, but didn’t seem likely to Joe. Yet that thought kept racing through his head. However, what didn’t run through Joe’s head, nor through the heads of his case workers at Sherwood Drisco when he made his monthly reports on his progress with the GenMar implant was Reggie Cutler. What everyone failed to recognize as events unfolded was just how important the Reggie Cutlers of the world were to the equation.



The GenMar implant, quite literally harnessed good luck. As Mr. Finkleman previously stated, no one was quite sure how it worked, not even the scientists who created it. What they did uncover through research was that the tiny fabricated disc worked best when implanted in between vertebra in the spine. Once there it somehow manipulated the telluric waves around it’s occupant shielding him or her from unfortunate consequences of all manner while drawing toward it only beneficial ones.

What no one took into account was that for every sudden job opening for Lucky Number 7 there was a Reggie Cutler getting fired.

It seems there is only so much luck out there and the old adage that every action has an equal and opposite reaction is especially true in the world of chance.

When only fourteen people are sucking on the straw of happenstance it makes almost imperceptible wrinkles on the telluric currents. When, in the fourth year of testing Lucky Number 9 let the cat out of the bag after cleaning up on roulette the consequences changed mightily.

With tremendous pressure from multiple avenues laid upon them the FDA rushed the GenMar implant through it’s final year of testing in under two months. By the end of the first year on the market over six million had been installed in American citizens alone. It didn’t take long for the stats to pile up. For example, the year before the GenMar explosion the Crude World Mortality Rate according to the CIA World Factbook was 8.3752 per thousand people. That first year it didn’t change too much as it’s listed at 8.3753 per thousand people. However, of those eight and a half per thousand people who died only .039 had the GenMar implant. Numbers were skewed like this across the board.

For a mere $10,000 one could infinitely decrease one’s chances of dying. Sure it’s a lot of money, but would you rather put a down payment on that new car or assure yourself a longer life. A longer life, mind you, that would be luckier in all sorts of ways. Most likely you’d luck into a new car for free along the way anyway, so the choice sure became easier.

By the third year of availability the discs were being implanted in newborns at birth. By the fifth year there were more people with them then without and it was at that exact moment when that single person who represented 50.0000000001 percent of the population had his GenMar installed that critical mass was achieved.

Suddenly there was just as much good luck in the world as bad and things got flaky. Life became a huge pinball machine. People with GenMars became kickers or those little bumpers that flicker the pinball away at tremendous speed and crazy angles. Those without the device were more like slingshots or those tunnels the pinball enters. As the scoreboard lights up the force behind the ball becomes greater until it’s shot back on the field with enormous magnitude.

When people with GenMars came in contact with one another luck would begin bouncing off them faster and faster until… Well, until someone’s luck eventually ran out; usually with dire consequences, often times leading to death. Whereas if an unfortunate without an implant was in close proximity with a GenMar he or she became a slingshot, hoarding the bad luck being thrown at him from the device. Often times if two or more GenMars ganged up on someone without it wasn’t unusual for the poor fellow to spontaneously combust.

The mortality rate on Earth skyrocketed beyond anything ever imagined. War. Plague. Disease. Nuclear holocaust. These were nothing beside the GenMar Epidemic.

It didn’t take long for people to want their implants removed. It was immediately discovered that within hours of installation the discs fused permanently to the spine.

That was when Gennie and Marshenko disappeared.



Joe decided early on to hide out. If he stayed far enough away from people he discovered he could control his luck somewhat. He’d made a considerable amount of money in the years when he was one of the few lucky people in the world and with this he purchased an island in the Aleutian chain off the coast of the Alaskan mainland. He lived simply enough with loneliness being his greatest enemy. Still he dared not allow anyone to join him in his seclusion. He kept his own livestock and tended his own farm which would keep him sustained indefinitely. Every once in a while he would discover that he was missing some necessity of life. Luckily, he still had his GenMar. At one point a plane crashed near his property. The occupants died and the aircraft was destroyed, but it just so happened that certain things Joe needed were onboard and undamaged. Things like this happened from time to time.

Joe guessed he could live comfortably like this until the population of those with GenMar implants dwindled to a more manageable number… If he was lucky… And if it’s one thing he was… It was lucky…


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