Dalton walked into his apartment so tired and thankful that the cat went unscolded for his actions.

Mr. Waffles turned his head to notice Dalton’s entrance but was otherwise distant and unperturbed at the sight of his owner. The cat had more important things on its mind.

He slept in his bedroom, that was now immersed in light that punched through the thin plastic blinds on his windows. It didn’t stop him from taking a morning siesta that lasted a few hours. Dreamless he rested, but unconsciously thankful of the air conditioning. His alarm woke him and he started his shower.

Warm moisture wafted into the bathroom. He walked into his tiny shower stall. The white acrylic pan had a corner drain and the whole shower was encased completely in artificial materials. A 36 inch box with temperature controlled water was a king’s abundance compared to Bean the Culvert Man. The warm water rolled off his skin, and he was thankful for every second.

He had never been a nature lover. Now that his ordeal was over, his contact with raw Nevada, and a man who lived in it, thrilled him.

A shower thought popped into his mind. How much of my life is artificial? Virtually all of it.

The water was heated; the air was cooled, his food was automated and never touched a human hand, his clothes spun off of large machines and folded by robots, and delivered without having ever been touched by a person. Maybe a chef was in the kitchen when the prep robot constructed his meals, but a drone delivered them, so that might be the closest activity he engaged in that was touched by a human.

Automation had abstracted him from the world. He was far from any ground truth.

I made fake data for a space probe millions of miles away. He laughed. He made an inventory of what in his life was experienced first hand versus data from proxy.

The warm water felt great, but he began to slowly turn the knob towards the cold. Eventually he turned it all the way to C, which was almost lukewarm in reality (being held in a small tank internal to the apartment). It was nowhere near Tahoe cold.

“Yah.”

He twisted the handle off and endured the cool air on his skin for a moment, then left the shower. He dressed and quickly to visit the phone store.

He exited his apartment in the familiar double-step method of descent.

The store was in another nondescript strip mall with eggshell stucco walls and red faux roofing tiles. His car dropped him off at the front and went to park itself.

“How can the kiosk help you?” an automated voice asked as he opened the door. He pushed past the entrance and went striaght to the saleswoman, who made eye contact with him. “Hey, I need a new phone. My last one, um… broke.”

The lady looked at his phone. Dalton didn’t care to get a rebate on his used model; he had enough to purchase one outright.

“And can you recycle this one?”

“Sure. Okay, let’s get you squared away with the Model XX. Do you want to lease it?”

“No.”

“What about a payment plan?”

“No.”

“You can put it on credit and just pay it off later.”

Dalton thought about this. Credit was just another distortion of ground truth. At that moment, he curled his lip and just said, “No thanks, I’ll pay for it now.” Maybe it was loose credit that enriched the billionaires into trillionaires. Distortions of the ground truth of what true value.

“Protection Plan? We have three different options. Bronze, Gold, and—”

“No, thank you! I just need a phone.” Dalton said and took a deep breath.

“Are you sure?” she asked. But with a no gesture from Dalton, she continued, “No problem, sir.” The lady was overly cheery now. “Your total will be…” five digits popped up on the screen as she gave a big smile.

“I’ll pay it all now.” He swiped his card.

“Great choice, sir. Debit, credit, or crypto?”

“Debit.”

“Once again, a splendid choice. Hey before you leave, do you want to enter our sweepstakes? Everyone has a good chance of winning something.”

Dalton was annoyed and showed it on his face. Was she trying to come onto him? He thought. No one hit on people in public. Everyone did that from the safety of a screen. Plus, the Trillionaires kept their STEM employees well paid, but she didn’t know that. In actuality, the company incentivized the young lady to sign people up for the payment or insurance plan, since it brought in more revenue than a full payment.

“No, thank you. Please, just the phone.”

“Okay, okay, here you go, mister, so log-on and you’ll be on your way.”

Dalton thought more about what the phone-store lady said. There were four ways to finance a phone, but the best way, cash, was the last option. Now Dalton imagined his own ‘Well Actually’ guy replying to his own thoughts. But technology depreciates, you’d be better renting your phone for a higher monthly cost. But those were the same class of idiots who’d stoop down for a dime on their way to the fancy coffee shop. They could have saved three orders of magnitude not going to the store.

Dalton logged on and left the store. He looked at his phone and tried to call up his car, but his phone had yet to sync up with his cloud data. “Shit, how will I find the car?” He lifted his gaze up at the nearly empty parking lot. His car was right there, parked in a plain view. He walked over and got in.

Immediately, his phone lit up with messages and many non-noteworthy notifications. He scrolled through and saw a group message from yesterday:

Today was the day? He thought they had a week to put the final touches on the landing. There was nothing for him to do anymore. All the quality synthetic data he had trained the AI on was going to be tested by reality. The project’s unorthodox approach would be tested.

Now his thoughts jumped back to the next phase of work—as if success had already occurred. Instead of landing data, he had imaginary seafloor data and trained the submarine’s AI to navigate it. There would still be a week or more of surface operations and then an unknown amount of melt time. He could make updates.

So he proceeded to his goal unhurried by the amazing feat of piloting that would take place soon.

He texted his coworker for more details.

At first glance, that seemed beyond bad luck. What were the chances? This is where raw probability and human thinking break down, but Dalton had been trained to think in absurd probabilities. He inflated the one-in-a-million type chances to train deep neural networks on edge cases. Nothing was surprising to him.

He started mulling over the true probabilities. It wasn’t a one-in-a- million event. First, they were flying at an extraordinarily low altitude, lowest ever attempted. Second, they were in an orbit that flew directly over past ice plumes, (themselves near thin ice). Third, the geysers lasted for hours or even days. So really, the layman’s probabilistic thinking of * * was poorly reasoned. The project actively chose an unstable orbit over terrain with recent activity, where larger plumes were statistically more likely to be seen from Earth. Every ‘layman’ assumption would be incorrect. That was the problem with most people. A one in a thousand chance looks like a one in a million. The human brain’s evolution wasn’t directed towards parsing that minutia.

Dalton ordered the car to drive to work. On the console’s generic art program, he wanted to visualize the difference between a million and a billion. He drew one line in the center from left to right. Then another line vertical from the half-line to the top. He drew horizontally again, now a quarter across the screen. At each time bisecting the remaining shape. The car’s smooth ride did not jar his hand.

He wrote the fraction in each shape. One out of two chances. He then bisected the remaining piece, so now there were ½ and two ¼ squares. He did this ten total times. That was what one in 1000 looks like (well, more like 1/1024th, but it was approximate). If he could repeat that process on the pixels ten more times, then that would be one in a million. He enlarged the digital canvas and started again. Eventually repeating the process in fine enough detail to fit 1/(2^9) in a tiny box.

He zoomed out as the car zoomed along. But he couldn’t tell the difference between one thousandth and one millionth. The human visual cortex had little use for such distinctions; our brains lacked any intuitive sense of visualizing that. At any practical everyday experience, a billionth looks like a millionth.

What were the odds of the Europa Project succeeding? They would know tomorrow. They were going to cancel out all the forward velocity using wheels on a flat ice surface and a drag brake to slow down the craft.

It was madness. One in a billion? Or one in a million? But the raw odds of the universe didn’t know about Dalton. He and the team had simulated a billion insane landings. In Dalton’s mind they—the collective they—had crossed a new threshold. It was the end of raw odds. If the universe was the house, humanity had an automated system to break it. Every crazed idea, moonshot, or crank with enough computing power (so long as they followed the laws of physics), could simulate a machine to do it. Every one-in-a-million could be simulated up to a 95 percent chance of success.

Chance had been domesticated.

Which reminded Dalton, I need to trade in these chips for cash, but I’m banned now. There’d be plenty of people willing to take chips. If no one else would help him, then certainly Bean would.

Tonight was landing day—and neither Europa or Jupiter could do anything about it. Even this unfortunate plume strike had been simulated hundreds of times. The odds looked good. They could determine whether it would land in ‘one piece,’ so to speak, but tomorrow was the big day. He didn’t have any specific duties for the landing, but still wanted to be there.

He had a quick lunch, a simple cheeseburger, and fries for $75. He had changed into normal clothes, and sat outdoors to soak up more of Nature. The cement of the location had sucked up enough heat already, he regretted the outdoor eating.

As he finished eating, he now had anxiety about the landing. None of his worry was focused on anything specific. They had trained the AI on as much data as could be imagined. Bad data, radiation, loss of radar signal, everything except an asteroid strike on the lander. Logically he was confident it would land, but couldn’t shake the uneasiness. He had been confident about many things in the past, which didn’t turn out the way he expected.

A worker came up to him and took his tray.

“Hey man, are you done?”

“Uh, almost? Why?”

“Check the news. A carrier got hit.”

“A what?”

“The Navy carrier Dorie Miller got hit. They think it was the Chinese.”

Dalton thanked the worker and got into his car, and ordered it straight to work. His stomach churned as he read the news headlines. Then he turned into a news talk station on his car’s console. He found a live stream and listened in.

“Earlier today, a hypersonic missile has struck the aircraft carrier Doris Miller in the South China Sea. CVN-81…”

The reporters beat the war-drums for the ride to work. Every data stream he could find seemed entirely coordinated to beat at the same tune: war.

“The Chinese claim the explosion was internal to the ship and likened it to the explosions that the Gerald R. Ford experienced four years ago. Which was an accident with the fuel piping.”

“—First, this is a far larger explosion than what we saw on the Gerald Ford.” The other commentator cut in. “Second, each ship of that design was refitted… I believe the Dorie Miller was refitted in Bremerton last year. Don’t quote me on that, though.”

“Thank you. My next guest is a PhD Aerodynamicist at Lockheed Martin. Can you explain the hypersonic penetrator that we’re confident hit the carrier?”

“Yes, a hypersonic penetrator impacts with sheer kinetic force and does not have an explosive head on it. That the carrier’s exterior shows minor damage is exactly what you’d expect. Once the impactor hits, it’s going at mach five and all the steel it impacted gets melted instantly, then thrown rapidly into the center of the ship. And—”

Dalton turned it off. Regardless of the truth, he couldn’t do anything about it. Disturbing as it might be, Pacific tensions didn’t affect Europan tides—but perhaps they do? Dalton thought. China has long treated scientific objectives as another avenue for world domination. Like their upcoming mars landing, serendipitously timed with the Europa Project. Many countries were sending probes out. They were the political passion projects de jure. Inevitably, two would overlap. But the Chinese had landed recently and would reveal their findings shortly.

He thought more about the strike on the carrier. They were international waters. So what’s next, throw more live sailors after dead? Invade China? Nuke them back to the Great Leap Forward?

A notification informed him of something more to his interests. He switched to his favorite podcast, Coast-to-Coast AM, which was also doing a live show.

“I’ll make one comment about our carrier—and I have a nephew in the Navy—but this whole thing is being manufactured as a prelude to war. Our carriers didn’t need to be in the South China Sea. It’s nothing like Pearl Harbor. If Roosevelt had taken our battleships and parked them two hundred miles off of Tokyo Bay, and then they got bombed, that’s equivalent. No one during WWII would have thought that a wise move. Pearl Harbor—two thousand miles away—from Tokyo is nothing near as equivalent. The president and the media establishment (of which we are not a part of nor benefit from) are trying to synthesize a conflict to boost ratings… this is all a distraction from the failure of the President’s domestic agenda and the runaway inflation.” The UFO junkies were spitting fire today.

What was the real data? It didn’t seem like an accidental explosion. Based on his knowledge, the Chinese had been advancing their scientific successes. It seemed unwise to risk an attack. Subterfuge and time where they weapons. Perhaps they’ve become emboldened. Dalton thought.

Before he could dwell too much on the subject, the radio personality moved to the topic of the night, which was the Europa Mission.

“Looks like early tomorrow morning they are going to attempt a landing. We’re going to open up the lines for some listener calls.”

Various cranks and crackpots all chimed in. By now Dalton was nearing work.“ This next caller is from Darrington, Washington. Carl, you know Darrington?” the host asked.

“Yes, sir. That’s Bigfoot country.” The producer replied.

“The Europans visited me last night.” The caller said. ‘Europans’ was the Americanization of the proper term ‘Europeans,’ but no one wanted to get into an endless grammar fight over that. Same reason ‘Venereal’ went out of favor when talking about ‘Venus;’ too much unneeded complication. “They said they would bring about world peace, and we only needed to hold off killing ourselves for a few more days.”

Dalton’s car made the last turn, but he told it to pull into an unknown parking lot farther from his office to avoid the protesters.

“Visited you? Amazing! What did they look like?” The host wasted no time probing, encouraging the caller. This was solid gold.

“Well, they were squid-like and quite small. They were just arms and a brain-bag like you’d see in some old sci-fi movie. But it makes sense. Their gravity is lower and they’re supported by water.” The caller was completely lucid and intelligent as they spoke. “They could support a higher percentage of brain since they need less muscle and bone.”

The host was almost stupefied, unable to discount his logic, but replied quickly with a stock question for this genre of speculatory show. “So, how did they visit you?”

“I’m not sure. Maybe I visited them. It was a lucid dream, like they transported my consciousness.”

“Amazing, so they want world peace for us. What are the chances of that? Okay, up next we have someone who claims to have studied the moon Europa.”

Dalton paused the live stream. His hands clutched the wheel of the car. He was again anxious about the landing. Nothing could be done—no turning back. The code was pushed; the network was trained; the orbit decayed. Impact was inevitable. The only hope for peace was in the ‘hand’ of a machine millions of miles away, launched seven years prior.

Will that be enough? What were the chances of world peace? One in a thousand now? Or a million? A billionth? To the mind’s perception, every one of those looked equally bad. He wanted better odds, but couldn’t influence the universe. The ball had been rolled long ago. It had hit the fret and was about to land on the payout. This was for all the money at The Lucky Lady and every other casino.

But Dalton knew life didn’t follow any table of odds. No variance to hedge a bet on, no skew or kurtosis to even hint a bet on red, or black, or 31, or double zero. Life is one fat-tailed Cauchy distribution. The ratio of two normal distributions. Any two normally distributed occurrences and divide them! You don’t get a nice result—no happy average centered on breakeven with 99.7% of results falling within plus or minus three sigmas. The universe doesn’t follow coherence or give a flip about what it should do.

Life had given him something for certain—unpredictability when he searched for a normal. He studied probability and statistics to gain another tool for himself to make sense of the mess world. But it was an impotent tool. The world yielded no probability curve, no average. He could depend on. The universe regularly delivered miracles and atrocities with more frequency than hitting 00. There is no average or breakeven. Whether he lived in an age of good or bad depends on nothing but fate. And on God’s timing, and how long Dalton lived.

Sitting in that office parking lot, Dalton did something he’d rarely ever tried. He sat quietly.

In the silence, a thought jumped into his mind. Hedge.

And he thought to hedge bets.

Then he prayed. What else was there to do? It was his attempt to hedge the portion of the universe that may listen to conscious decisions. Wasn’t there something with quantum physics that apparently needed an observer? He didn’t dwell on the ‘how’ of it all.

Dear God, don't let this war start. Then another prayer, which was more of a hedge: Or at least end this quickly and with little destruction.

Some portion was selfish. He wanted the project he worked on succeeding, but at least half was driven by genuine curiosity. Could it be done? Pure childhood innocent questioning which had survived unadulterated into adulthood, but sometimes bullied by the cynical part of him. There was still pure desire to know.

At the very least, this impromptu session let him sort through the madness in his mind. He couldn’t do anything more than what he had done. It was not his responsibility to save the world. His only obligation was to those around him to care for and love them, regardless of the global bombast.

Dalton played the podcast again as the car moved on.

“Hello, I’m an amateur exobiologist. And uh, I’ve looked at all the data from the ESA and NASA over the years. B-but mainstream s-science already has the answers from the Europa Clipper.”

“Answers? But what’s the question: how certain are we now about life under Europa?” The host asked.

“One hundred percent. Long-chain amino acids were consistently found. And if um, u-unicellular life, there’s multicellular. And if multicellular then there’s predation. Now if there’s predation, there is selective pressure to favor intelligence, and—”

“Wait caller. Backup, why are they sitting on this data?”

“It’s too f-fantastic for them—in fact, they have proven life on Mars for over fifty years, but no one had the courage to call it out. Too much caution.”

“Now we’ve long espoused life on Mars and we already detected it. I’m with you there. The Viking experiments were not ‘inconclusive.’ It was an excuse for NASA to do off on a multi-decade search for water instead.” “Next caller.” The host moved on.

Dalton had no particular stance in the Mars question. Or off-earth-life. In the following weeks, data would trickle in. Hard data would blast a million petty speculations back into the stupidity of flat earth and geocentric theory.

Dalton left car and streamed the rest of the broadcast to his headphones. The protesters' chants were too mute and more ludicrous than this program. But they were frenzied and furious now—word was out, landing was soon.

Extra security was around in the parking lot—Black shirted private guards armed with tasers—who had previously guarded nearby properties of the Trillionaire.

Back in the office. He had plenty of time before the landing. He wanted to preempt questions about his last-minute code pushes. They were undoubtedly in a code-freeze—that die had been cast—but corporate code security would have questions. Post-landing operations and all.

But the landing was still foremost on his mind. Perhaps a spectacular failure would bring world peace, as the news media would run stories non-stop about who’s fault it was and how the Trillionaire was a fool for thinking he could land on Europa. Yes, bad news might diffuse the zeitgeist for war with Communist China.

Good news—a successful landing—might last for a day, but pinning failure on someone would make news for months. Now he was almost praying for failure.

Please God, do something.

He was not a praying man, but the weight of the world was still in his head, though he could do no more within his power.

World War could erupt, and everything could be a target, peaceful or not. Alternatively, if they found intelligent aliens in our solar system, perhaps World Peace would bloom. We’d unite.

He could do nothing but wait.

At his cubicle he saw Marco, his cubemate, another data engineer. The Spaniard was a compassionate one to confide in.

“Marco, I don’t know how to say this.” Dalton said in a hushed voice.

“Sit down.” They both retreated to the small cubicle pod.

“I think they hacked me.” Dalton spat out. “They tried to push code.”

“When?” A look of shock came over his face.

“Last night.”

Marco let out a happy sigh. “Don’t worry. Code freeze. No one’s going to change the code now.”

“I know that, logically, but I just had to tell someone.” Dalton’s shoulders slumped and his whole body relaxed. The weight had been lifted. “And if, uh, CCS asked anything, tell them all suspect code—I mean code—was reverted.”

“Hacks happen to us all. Don’t worry ami’.” He gave Dalton a squeeze on the shoulder. “But did you change your passwords?”

“Um, sure… but let me do it again.” Dalton sat down and changed his password. He also reinstalled each of his authentication tokens.

The countdown on the wall had been updated for the landing: L-4 hours.