The Magic Bullet

        1980 was a good time to be alive because everyone still did what they were supposed to. Parents let their kids disappear for hours at a time, school buses meandered on the road packed with out-of-control miscreants, teens drove home drunk from prom and scout troops showered naked together. But it was a relatively boring time because the world was so safe.

              The state lottery offices were closed on account that it was a Monday, however the blonde secretary whose nickname was "Casper" because her face was so pale sat clacking away. The deputy whose job was to guard against tampering (making sure nobody dropped a fake ticket in through the mail slot or did something to the machine to mark the numbers) sat eating his lunch at the front desk. Then the secretary heard a groan of pain and found him lying on the floor holding his stomach.

              "What is it your appendix?" she exclaimed, but then she saw the blood pooling from a gunshot wound at the waist and another one leaking from his back.

              The case became a "locked room mystery" that would circulate all over town, because the front door was locked, the secretary never heard a shot and there was no one else present. There was also no sign of a bullet; it had gone clean through him and the police searched the offices meticulously for it. The officer was wearing a sidearm that was still fully loaded and showed no signs of being fired. It was conjectured that the shot had both entered and exited the building in some nonchalant way (even though it was made of brick); the gun could have been held directly up to the mail slot (which was the large old-fashioned kind even though the door was reinforced with steel), and the bullet lodged itself between two pieces of furniture and then dropped to the floor and rolled down a vent, but this soon gave way to other theories. The deputy could have wanted some paid leave, injured himself and the secretary retrieved the bullet and replaced it with one she was carrying. Or his pistol could have gone off accidentally and she pocketed it to protect his reputation, but the theories grew worse from there talking about ice bullets and materials that dissolve in water.

              Trist was allowed to go back to work after a few days. He passed by the enormous new IBM typewriter that had fenders like a Mercedes and was promised to be "the very latest innovation in typewriting". His dusty office was piled with books on computer programming and statistics (mixed with paperbacks like The Red and the Black to cure his boredom), and cases of little digital storage tapes held in place like projector slides which contained a record of every drawing in the state's history. (The weekly results were sent to the massive tape decks at the state mainframe computer via a system nobody knew the name for.) Trist's job was to keep a statistical record of every number played and ensure fairness. Like all employees he was ineligible from playing himself.

              He turned on the Commodore and opened his mail. There was something new sitting on the desk, one of those magnetic humanoid desk thingies you see at science fairs where the little man balances on his little round hands and feet. This one was waving at him.

              Casper the friendly secretary stepped in with her high forehead to welcome him back. It was widely known that the security guard had eyes for her, and she admitted openly that she had planned to go on leave herself (since she was a witness) to help him recover, but when people started talking she changed her mind. Tristan asked her if she knew who had given him this knickknack but she didn't know.

              The next day when he came into work the little man was gone. In its place on the desk was a perfectly round, flat metal disc with a hole in its center like a record. Trist picked it up and examined it. It was as thin as a sheet of paper; he got out an Agfalupe to see if there were any markings or grooves on it but there were none. Nonetheless he felt that he was looking at some kind of digital storage device.

              On a whim he slid it into the floppy drive, which although discs are square and this was round took it immediately and something came up on the screen. It looked like a floor plan of the lottery offices with the deputy seated at the front desk like one of those crime-scene drawings. Could the police have left this behind? A dotted line indicated the path of a bullet from the keyhole in the front door, through the deputy's body and then made a sharp 90-degree turn, zigzagging around the secretary's desk and through the door of his own office.

              Was someone telling him this was the path the bullet had taken? It seemed preposterous. Trist was reminded of the JFK assassination and something called the "single bullet theory" in which one bullet was responsible for inflicting eight different wounds by changing course in mid-air to explain how there was only one gunman (a theory many people thought was questionable). Did this mean the mystery bullet was somewhere in his office? It could have lodged in a book or even the spider plant hanging from the ceiling.

              While Trist was thinking the disc suddenly popped back out of the toaster-sized floppy drive on its own and clattered to the desk. Then it started melting before his eyes like mercury and changed into a perfectly-round steel ball, like a musket ball.

              Trist was reluctant to touch it knowing that mercury is poisonous, but then it transformed back into the flat disc again. He felt this was an invitation to put it back in the drive, so he wrapped a paper towel around his hand and slipped it back in.

              Another image appeared on the screen. This time it had somehow pulled up a microfiche image of a newspaper article. (Now the Commodore wasn't even supposed to open a file unless you typed "load" and the file name.) Trist leaned closer; the article was from a Florida newspaper dated 1974 and described how a family had found a much larger silver sphere on their property which had the ability to levitate and move around on its own. After showing it to dozens of experts, it was eventually surmised that the sphere contained three smaller spheres allowing it to move. Trist seemed to recall hearing this story before as well, and wondering at the time why they didn't just take it to a lab and cut it open. Perhaps people at that time just weren't curious.

              The image was gone and another one took its place. This one was a diagram of a multi-story office building, possibly a bank, with a line marking the complex, meandering trajectory of a single bullet coming in the front door and eliminating everyone inside from room to room. Trist turned off the monitor and jumped back from it.

              Nobody talked about how violent a race humanity was, how the ability to propel a lead ball with gunpowder had shaped the course of human history simply because it had the force to kill a man. It was the decider of leaders, nations and fathers, and was carried with distinction and even "honor". But if a projectile was self-directing (which probably already existed) someone could rob any corporation or just murder people on some unprecedented scale. It was a power no man should have, unless... it also could be used for good.

               He started typing and pulled up an image of the machine that randomly chooses the numbers for each weekly drawing. The sphere seemed to understand and projected a simple course through which it could be painted white, dropped into the machine and rapidly select the numbers of his choosing. This was the most practical use of this power coming to him rather than a bank robber or an assassin. The problem was Trist and everyone related to him were ineligible, even cousins, which meant he could only arrange for the winnings to go to someone else.

               He tried to think of anyone he knew who could be trusted with this secret. The religious girl he once liked would never go through with it, in fact whoever knew he was involved would forever have him over a barrel. Honesty wasn’t a qualifier but a disqualifier, his involvement and the wounding of the deputy was just too conspicuous. It was a lot like the dating game where you’re trying to find someone decent enough to do the dirty. Honor among thieves, he was forced to admit, doesn’t exist and it would be traced back to him.

              So what if he chose an absolute stranger? He could offer a small cut and they wouldn’t have to know anything about him, all he needed was a name for the winning numbers to go to. Even then however he’d be forever trusting someone he didn’t know with an unknown outcome. He wondered if there was a way to keep tabs on the fate of poor and homeless people who were previous winners; he only knew about the ones who had ironic or newsworthy cases of bad fortune. It was a shame considering all the statistical means at their disposal.

              The thing seemed to understand and pulled up a series of images on the screen that it connected like a family tree. It started with an old photo of him taken from the employee files that looked young enough to be a yearbook photo, pairing him with a homeless man he had never met snatched from a newspaper article on city poverty. He wondered if its ability to do this had something to do with its turning into a liquid, extending itself into a network that was essentially just moving bits of metal. Then to his amazement it rapidly typed in a faux conversation between himself and the homeless man, telling him exactly what to say and the man’s responses. Once a financial agreement was reached the bullet from the previous screens entered the picture and went straight through him, eliminating his accomplice. Then it pulled up a photo of a woman who must have been the poor man’s mother, instantly generating her grief-stricken conversation with the police, and then the magic bullet went through her and the deputy on call as well. This process spread across the screen from person to person like a morbid projector presentation on how to be a mass-murderer.

Tristan got up and instinctively grabbed an old brass sconce the spider plant was sitting on to smash it in, realizing that wouldn’t solve the problem. The screen went blank and the images were replaced with an alternative strategy; this time he was paired with a pretty young blonde woman he didn’t know, their instant conversation getting longer and longer but with the same outcome, the bullet going right through her and then some unrelated people who might have been her friends, neighbors or the postman.

“It all connects to murder” he realized. Then he feared in his heart what else the thing had in mind and what it would do if he refused to participate. In essence a bullet was just an agent of death waiting for any human accomplice to give it purpose, any purpose. If he trusted it with any task it would simply work its way back to its only function, and if he rejected it it might just eliminate him too and roll back out the door to find someone else.

Trist’s random thoughts started to accumulate into a single philosophical problem he typed onto the screen for it to resolve, “How do you stop the violence?”. To his surprise, the bullet on the screen divided into two smaller bullets, one of them continuing from where it left off on a rampage eliminating everyone Trist had ever known, its path of destruction meandering through the population growing larger and faster until its work was superimposed on an image of the Earth, which turned to reveal the second bullet was doing the same on the other side. When all of humanity had been destroyed the two bullets eventually met, preventing each other from going any further.

“But how do you prevent any violence?” Trist typed in. After a brief thought, the two bullets on the screen were replaced with an image of a police officer and a criminal. The disc spat itself out of the drive, clattering to the desk and reformed itself into two little wire-limbed ball-handed men, who proceeded to get into a silent argument and started clobbering each other.

Trist watched them wondering how long this could possibly continue, until one of them found some kind of advantage like luring the other one into a paper-cutter. They were evenly matched but circumstance still eventually favors a winner because one of them has to be the first to think of something. He went into the computer’s simple drawing program and used his knowledge of statistics to design something that would allow the bullet to get in its own way perpetually. The two little men reformed into two hollow spheres, but there still had to be a catalyst to put them at odds with each other like Archimedes’ lever. Within a few minutes he had perfected a nameless device that consisted of five silver balls, each suspended by a rod from a simple frame that held them in a horizontal row above the desk. When he reached out and pulled back the farthest sphere on the right, it immediately swung to the left like a pendulum hitting the other spheres and causing the one on the other end to swing back. It was a perpetual motion machine, which no one else in the office would suspect was more than a toy, and Tristan finally relaxed as he watched it swinging back and forth on the desk late into the night.