The red card that represented absolute, perfect victory for Balot and the Doctor.
The dealer froze, while the spectators seemed to boil over with excitement.
Some of them understood the significance of the sequence of cards that had just passed. The magic of sevens and eights. When the remaining cards were a couple of sevens and at least four eights, the dealer was doomed by the rules to lose, no matter what.
All the players had to do in this situation was stay. Whether the dealer had fourteen, fifteen, or sixteen, he’d have to draw and would end up busting.
Such was the power of percentages. The rules that had been so meticulously crafted to give the house its edge; this was the one moment when they were turned upside down, guaranteeing the house certain defeat. It was a gun fired at point-blank range: absolute.
–Hmm, I don’t seem to be able to use the chips up. They just keep on growing.
Balot was so casual as to seem offhand. The Doctor smiled at her. “Well, then, we’ll just have to ask for a nice big special container to fit everything in.”
The Doctor spoke as if he were ordering a particularly rare vintage wine, and the crowd responded accordingly. The whole floor—up until a few moments ago so serene and tranquil—was now buzzing.
Amid the noise the dealer located another radio to speak to an attendant. To ask him to comply with the Doctor’s request. To bring out the casino’s greatest treasure.
Eventually the attendant emerged from the other side of the floor, carrying a scarlet box.
He placed it down on the table and opened it, reverentially, for Balot to behold. No sooner had he lifted the lid than a golden light spilled out into the room. The light from twelve golden chips.
“Now, choose whichever one you like,” the Doctor said in an encouraging tone.
Balot knew exactly what she was doing. Gingerly, she reached out and took one of the chips that had the OctoberCorp company emblem etched onto it. The crowd bubbled up again.
“Oh, and leave the box on the table, will you? We may need a few more of those chips before long.”
The Doctor’s words caused yet another stir in the crowd. A match with million-dollar chips at stake! Normally such a thing was unheard of outside the special Shows.
Far from worrying about his catastrophic loss, the dealer seemed to be getting angrier and angrier. He started shuffling again, with a vengeance. Fully intent on taking back what he had just lost.
As he shuffled, Oeufcoque was surreptitiously dissecting the contents of the chip. He caused part of the glove to turn, gently fixing Balot’s hand so that it made a fist shape, with the chip packed away safely in her grip out of view.
Miniature laser cutters appeared inside her fist, moving about inside the space of a few millimeters to scan the contents of the chip, extracting its contents.
–Got it. This is where Shell’s memories are stored.
Oeufcoque extracted the contents of the chip carefully, cutting them out with absolute precision, taking care not to damage any of the contents. He then transferred the contents into a little pocket in the gloves he made specially for the purpose that moment. The pocket was sewn up behind the memory chip, and the hole left in the original was filled up with identical material so that no one would ever have been able to guess that it had been tampered with. The whole process was done in absolute silence.
To take the yolk without touching the white or the shell. This was what it was all about. The whole operation took slightly less than five minutes.
Balot’s right hand was released, and she slowly opened her hand that held the chip.
–One down, three to go.
The words floated up inside Balot’s left hand, and she squeezed back in return.
At that moment, Balot was assailed by a sensation she hadn’t experienced before.
Oeufcoque’s writing was always inside her glove, never on the outside. The letters themselves were inside out. Furthermore Balot’s hand was bunched tight. Their conversation should have been utterly undetectable to the outside eye.
And yet, at that very moment, Balot felt that their conversation was being watched.
Chapter 10
MANIFOLD
01
“I can’t tell,” remarked the man watching the screens, “which of them is the mark.” He slumped down into his fake leather chair.
The control room was bathed in the light of countless screens set into its walls. The room wasn’t made for a large number of staff—it was for this man alone.
Behind the man stood a floor manager trembling with anxiety and fear.
“Look at this,” said the man in the chair. “It’s like he’s being toyed with. You’re the floor manager—if you had to say which one of them appears to be getting roasted, who would you go with?”
“W-well, Chief, it seems to me that maybe it might be Marlowe?”
“Yes, I agree. With the incidents in the poker room and at the roulette tables, how many people are going to have to be fired today?”
The floor manager recoiled. Management of the dealers was his responsibility, and to him, there was nothing as chilling as a runaway dealer.
“Well, it’s no use,” sighed the chief, running his finger along a shiny black moustache. “Run a graphical search for any images we have of these guests.”
“S-so, you’re saying they’re cheats, Chief?”
“No, we can’t tell just from these screens. All I need to have is an excuse ready for the boss, if it comes down to it. Say they’re later found to be cheats, and we haven’t done anything about it. You and me and Marlowe, all three of us will get to be real swell pals, just three more dupes on the next bus to the employment agency.”
“R-right. So, how many people do you want on this?”
“Just you will be enough. Get twenty or so videos, send them to me, and go to sleep. But make it look like a few dozen others worked on it. Got it?”
“R-right. But, do you…when you say I can just sleep…”
“Once you’ve done what I’ve said, I’ll have my excuse, if it comes down to it. You, on the other hand…”
He made an exaggerated gesture of slashing his finger across his neck.
The floor manager gave a hurried bow and turned to leave, when a figure appeared before him. He took a misstep and froze in place.
A frantic voice came booming into the room. “Why are you calling for me when I’m in the middle of important business?”
The voice’s owner had swarthy skin and wore Chameleon Sunglasses the turquoise color of a robin’s egg.
“What’s going on? House Leader? Chief? Special Consultant?”
All of those titles belonged to the man seated in the fake leather chair—the question seemed to ask, “Which do you prefer being called?”
Not responding to the rapid-fire bluster, the chief turned to Shell-Septinos, slowly pushed two palms in the air, then looked at the floor manager and said, “You called for him?”
“Y-yes. Th-that’s what the regulations say to do.”
“Yes, that’s right,” said the chief, as if condescendingly praising a little child. “That’s the regulations.”
The floor manager, caught between the chief and the owner, scrunched down his shoulders, as if he were shrinking into himself.
Shell barged into the control room, glaring at the two men, and barked, “Some rich person is winning like crazy, and that’s got your spines all bent out of shape?”
“Some show-off prick with a girl along. Not that he’s a show-off prick because he has a girl with him. What I’m trying to say is, he’s a show-off prick. Word from the floor is they’re uncle and niece.”