The Grandfather Gamble

"The storm is worse than I expected," Mares said, shaking the rain from his coat as he joined the poker table. He was a tall, wiry man with a sharp nose and the keen eyes of a gambler. The room was dim, the low hum of conversation and clinking glasses providing a backdrop to the flickering lights above the table. The rain hammered against the windows, drowning out the distant sounds of the town.

Carlos Biltong, still dripping from his walk there, glanced at Mares, who was shuffling the deck with the practiced ease of someone who knew his way around a card game.

"Deal us in," Biltong said, pulling up a chair. He hadn’t planned on staying long, but something about Mares’s appearance intrigued him.

Mares dealt the cards, his movements precise, almost mechanical. As the game began, the usual banter was subdued. Biltong was talking crazy, right off the bat. What if I never heard my grandfather’s story?” he said and threw in a few chips, his gaze flicking between his cards and Mares. Biltong's grandfather, a brilliant yet enigmatic scientist, had been the one to introduce him to the concept of iterative learning—specifically, the principle of reiterating time sequences with slight variations until the desired outcome was achieved. It was a method rooted in both machine learning and the very nature of time itself, a way to perfect an outcome through endless repetition.

As a boy, Carlos Biltong had been captivated by his grandfather’s stories, which were always laced with the mystery of time and the possibility of change. His grandfather would often sit by the fire, a distant look in his eyes, and speak of how one could return to the same moment over and over, making tiny adjustments until everything fell into place.

Biltong had taken these lessons to heart, applying them in his work with the Canadian Spacetime Agency, where his research into retrocausality was built upon these very principles.

Perhaps, without his grandfather’s influence, Carlos Biltong would have been a different man—one who never played with the fabric of time.

"So, Mares," Biltong said, breaking the silence, "what do you think of the grandfather paradox? Anything new?"

Mares didn’t look up from his cards. "There’s always something new. But it's not about what’s new, it’s about what’s being missed."

Biltong raised an eyebrow. "Missed?"

"Yes," Mares said, his voice calm, almost detached. "The geoglyphs in Peru aren’t just marks in the earth. They’re messages. Warnings, maybe. And we’re not understanding those warnings."

Biltong chuckled, though it was a nervous sound. "You’re saying the Nazca geoglyphs are trying to tell us something?"

Mares placed his cards on the table, face down, and leaned back. "I’m saying they’re telling us more than we’re ready to hear."

The rain outside grew louder. Biltong exchanged a glance with Mares, both men trying to gauge whether the other was serious.

"What about it?" Biltong asked, his voice more serious now. "You said we could understand it."

The thick smell of cigars and the low hum of conversation filled the room, mingling with the faint scent of whiskey and the sharp tang of Biltong’s cologne. The two players sat around the dimly lit table, their eyes sharp, their hands steady. Chips clinked in neat stacks, and cards whispered as they slid across the felt. The small talk had been the usual banter of work, weather, and women, drifting on in time until Biltong sought to confess the workings of his mind.

“It’s called the Grandfather Paradox,” Biltong said, his deep voice carrying across the table. “You go back in time, kill your grandfather, and poof—no more you. But then, who killed him?”

Mares, seated to Biltong's right, chuckled as he thumbed his cards. “Time travel?. “It’s what that pyramid out in Nazca—what was it, five meters a side was about, they say.”

“Not nowhere,” Biltong corrected, drawing out his words for emphasis. “They found it exactly where it was meant to be, inside the Nazca Lines. Like someone from the future just dropped it there. A three-dimensional puzzle piece in a two-dimensional landscape. Some people think it’s a guardian object.”

"Guardian object?" Mares asked, leaning forward. His cards lay forgotten as curiosity got the better of him.

“A guardian object,” Biltong repeated, savoring the attention. “Supposedly, it’s meant to protect us from ourselves. Remove it, and—who knows? Maybe that’s what’s holding everything together.”

Mares snorted. “Right, and next you’ll tell me Eternals are real too.”

“Maybe they are,” Biltong said, a sly grin spreading across his face. “Maybe one’s sitting at this table right now, proving a point.”

The cards had come to a pause as the players exchanged glances, skepticism coloring their features. But Biltong leaned back, confident, holding his cards as though they were keys to the universe itself.

“Alright, enough talk,” Mares said, breaking the spell. His eyes flicked back to his hand, and the game was on again. “Let’s see those cards.”

It was down to Biltong and Mares. Biltong, by far the older man, born in 2017 whilst Mares was born in 2053. But then, how old was his grandfather? Maybe he was an Eternal, like one of Isaac Asimov’s characters.

The room seemed to shrink as Mares revealed his cards one by one. Four nines stared up from the table, high cards, exuding a quiet power. Mares leaned back, satisfied, certain of his victory.

“Four of a kind - four nines in fact,” he said, a smug grin spreading across his face. “Hard to beat.”

Biltong’s grin didn’t falter. He laid his cards out with deliberate slowness, as though savoring each moment.

“Unless,” he said, flipping the last card, “it’s a royal flush.”

Mares gave a sharp intake of breath. Spades glinted in the dim light, from ten to ace. The perfect hand. The kind of hand you might get once in a lifetime, if you were lucky. Or maybe if you were cheating. Or maybe if time itself had a say in the matter.

“What the hell,” Mares muttered, staring at the cards, disbelief and anger battling for dominance on his face. “That’s impossible.”

“Not impossible,” Biltong corrected, his eyes glinting. “Just… unlikely. Maybe this is just the universe’s way of revisiting the present. A time traveler, proving a point.”

“Bullshit,” Mares snapped, slamming his hand on the table. The chips rattled, some tipping over. “You’re saying you won because of time travel?”

“I’m saying,” Biltong replied coolly, gathering his winnings, “that if I were a time traveler, I’d come back to this exact moment, play this exact hand, just to watch your face when you lost.”

“What are the odds?” asked Mares.” I still don’t believe it. The pack must have been rigged.”

“Well,” said Biltong, “I had Ace and Jack of the same suit.”

The community cards were Queen, King, Ten of the same suit as my Ace and a Jack, plus two nines, hearts and spades.

The five community cards (Queen, King, Ten, and two Nines) and my two hole cards (Ace and Jack) provided me my royal flush. Your two Nines as your hole cards made up your Four of a Kind: Two of the Nines were on the board as community cards. So, one other player, you, indeed had four Nines. You said:

“What are the odds of this happening?”

“So I was dealt Ace and Jack of the same suit. The community cards included the Queen, King, Ten of my suit (to complete the royal flush), plus two nines. You had to have the remaining two nines. The probability of being dealt a specific suited hand (Ace and Jack of the Same Suit) is, look, I’ll tell you if it’ll make you any happier. There are 4 possible suits and each has 52 cards in the deck. The probability of being dealt Ace-Jack of the same suit is: one in one hundred and ten point five. The probability of flopping a specific Royal Flush is one in two million, one hundred and eighteen thousand, seven hundred and sixty. The probability of Two Nines appearing in the remaining cards: one in nine hundred and ninety. So, the overall odds would be, well, let’s see, if my math is not too rusty, combinatorics as my grandfather would say, are a useful invention, and make stupid old time travel intelligent again, by retrocausality. I perfected a time sequence which seems real to you in which the overall odds of this specific scenario happening is one in twenty three billion.”

There was a silence. A charged, uncomfortable silence, where the fabric of reality seemed to stretch thin, like a rubber band pulled too far. The room felt colder, the shadows deeper, as though something unseen had shifted.

Mares laughed, breaking the tension, but it was a nervous sound, high-pitched and strained. “Yeah, right,” he said, forcing a smile. “You had me going for a second there.”

Biltong just smiled, that same mysterious smile, as he pocketed the chips. “Maybe I’m just lucky.”

But the words lingered, and the room didn’t quite return to normal. Mares stared at the cards, his expression darkening with each passing second. The thought gnawed at him—what if Biltong wasn’t lying? What if something was amiss? What if that pyramid out in Nazca was just the beginning?

Mares felt that something had gone wrong, something beyond the game. Biltong’s royal flush had seemed like the pinnacle, the impossible hand, but in its wake, things started to unravel, slowly, almost imperceptibly, until his mind gave up.

The table fell silent as his words hung in the air, the game all but over. The rain outside slowed to a steady drizzle, and the tension in the room seemed to ease, though an unease lingered just beneath the surface.

Mares took his earlier winnings and boarded the train intending to be leaving Peru. He was definitely going to try and stay safe. That was when things began to fall apart. Getting off the train to relieve himself, in a station toilet that he couldn't find. The one on the train was broken. He bent down. A street lamp illuminated the platform, whereupon someone stepped out of the shadows asking, "Are you going to Nasira Almeida’s?" As he walked quickly, and he didn't want to hang around the toilets, he was soon done and then he heard a shot in the plaster walls, orange, they were, and the walls began to fall around him. As if plasterboard was being hacked away. He was behind a protecting wall. The police were closing in.

Mares surrendered, bringing his hands up. He called, "Yes, yes, yes," but it was only the cleaner, dressed in orange, who spoke in Portuguese.

“It is not for nothing that I am the great-grandson of the famous Mares family, which owns the mansion with a garden of fynbos," Mares muttered.

He may be the enemy of other men, of other times, but not of fireflies, words, gardens, waterways, or sunsets.

The police were polite, asking him to describe what happened. As he ascertained that they were holding him as a suspect for some murder, he asked what the charges were.

"We will soon have this tied up," they said. A guard appeared in the cell when he mentioned food, and then a meal – quite pleasant, really.

Mares began to reason with himself; this will soon be over. He needed some diplomatic help, as he hadn't informed anyone about his trip.

It had turned out that he was committed not for the murder of someone who was in the toilet, but was being held nevertheless. This made no sense to him.

His family approved of his work in the Canadian Spacetime Agency, as he had done valuable research. Basically, everything about this time and place was off.

His girlfriend appeared on his cell phone.  "I'm on vacation. It's time I went out and had fun. That's why I'm here. I've been sightseeing. It's a beautiful city," she said. Mares took the bait. “We have our first retrocausality experiment set up,” she said. As Mares listened to her words, a chill ran down his spine. The retrocausality experiment—this was the culmination of all his work, the very thing he had abandoned everything for. Now, it was being realized without him.

Flora continued to speak enthusiastically about the experiment, but Mares’ mind was elsewhere. He couldn’t shake the feeling that things had gone terribly wrong, not just with the experiment but with his life as a whole. The decision to step away from his work, the subsequent arrest and imprisonment, the alienation from his family—all of it had led him to this point, and he wasn’t sure he liked where he had ended up.

When Flora finished speaking, she looked at him expectantly, waiting for a response. Mares forced a smile, trying to mask the turmoil inside. "It sounds incredible, Flora. Truly, it does. But I think…I think I’ve had enough of time travel, of experiments. It’s not where I belong anymore."

Flora frowned, her excitement dimming. "But Mares, this is your work. You can't just walk away from it. Don’t you want to see what we’ve achieved, what you started?"

Mares shook his head slowly. "I did want that, once. But now, I just want peace. I’ve lost too much trying to chase after something that, in the end, might not even matter."

Flora stared at him, confusion and disappointment etched on her face. "So, what are you going to do now?"

Mares looked out at the city again, at the life he had once found so alluring, and sighed. "I’m going to find a place where I can be still, where I can live without the weight of the past or the future hanging over me. Maybe that’s in Toronto, maybe it’s somewhere else. But it’s not here."

Flora nodded, though her expression remained troubled. "I hope you find what you’re looking for, Mares. But I think you’re running away from something you can’t escape."

Mares didn’t have an answer to that. Maybe she was right. Maybe he was running away. But for now, all he wanted was to leave behind the complications of his old life. As he walked away from Flora, he felt a strange mix of relief and sorrow. He was free, thanks to her word which carried weight, but he was also alone, and the future seemed as uncertain as ever.

He boarded the next train out of the city, not knowing where it would take him. As the train sped away from the city, Mares leaned back in his seat and closed his eyes, letting the rhythmic clatter of the tracks lull him into a state of calm. For the first time in a long time, he allowed himself to simply be, without worrying about what came next.

But as the train carried him further into the unknown, a nagging thought lingered in the back of his mind: Could he ever truly escape the past? Or was he doomed to repeat the same mistakes, over and over again?