The Project

Leonard Price was trying to get a circuit board he had designed to work correctly. Outside, rain drummed on the roof and distant thunder suggested it was time to call it a day.

This was so stupid. The board was supposed to download three months of lottery data from a website and build a database he could study. Instead, no matter what date he entered, the system kept returning data from three months earlier.

After an hour of troubleshooting, Leonard decided to try something different.

“Let’s see what happens,” he muttered.

He entered today’s date and pressed Enter. Lightning struck the house and the lights flickered. A thin ribbon of smoke rose from the board, and the room filled with the smell of burnt epoxy.

The system was supposed to print the output buffer as a failure analysis.

The printer beside his workbench came to life.

At first inspection the WiFi chip had a hole melted in it and the board had been destroyed, but page after page continued to feed out.

Leonard frowned.

“Crap.”

He reached for the keyboard and tried to abort the job.

Nothing happened.

The printer continued chattering away, filling the output tray with sheets covered in dates, jackpot amounts, and lottery numbers.

When it finally stopped, nearly five minutes later, a stack of paper sat in the holding tray of the machine.

He started to toss the printout into the trash when a line near the bottom caught his eye.

According to the database, in just over two and a half months the jackpot would climb past a billion dollars.

Beneath it were winning numbers for every drawing between now and then.

Leonard stared at the page.

“Yeah, right.”

The circuit had already proven it couldn’t read dates correctly. For all he knew, the numbers were nothing but garbage generated software glitch caused by the lightning strike.

Then he noticed tonight’s drawing listed near the top.

That was easy enough to check.

In a few hours he would know.

Were the numbers on the page the future—or just noise?

Leonard almost forgot about the printout.

After dinner he and his wife settled into their recliners and he turned on the television just as the lottery drawing was beginning.

The stack of paper sat on the coffee table.

Mostly out of curiosity, he found tonight’s date and looked at the correct page.

“Let’s see how wrong you are,” he said.

The first ball rolled into place.

Leonard looked down at the printout.

Then back at the screen.

A match.

He shrugged.

Six numbers were drawn every week. One match meant nothing.

The second ball appeared.

Another match.

His smile faded slightly.

The third number matched too.

Leonard sat forward in his chair.

“Okay…”

The fourth number dropped.

Match.

He reached for the printout and checked the date again.

The fifth number appeared.

Match.

Now his heart was beating hard enough that he could feel it in his chest.

There had to be an explanation.

A printing error.

A programming bug.

A coincidence so unlikely it would make the news.

The final number rolled into place.

Match.

For several seconds Leonard simply stared at the television.

The announcer’s voice faded into the background.

Every number was correct.

Not close.

Not almost.

Perfect.

Slowly, he picked up the printout and turned to the next drawing.

There were numbers listed there too.

And the drawing after that.

And the one after that.

Page after page.

Months of winning numbers.

A billion-dollar jackpot waiting near the end.

Leonard swallowed.

“No,” he whispered.

The word sounded hollow in the empty room.

This wasn’t possible.

Yet the evidence was sitting in his hands.

He began pacing.

If the database was right, he could buy a ticket for the next drawing and become a millionaire.

Nobody would suspect anything.

People won lotteries every day.

One winning ticket would look like luck.

A lucky guess.

A miracle.

Then another thought struck him.

If the numbers were real, winning the lottery wasn’t the story.

The machine was.

Somehow, impossibly, his circuit knew things that hadn’t happened yet.

Leonard stopped pacing and looked toward the workshop.

For the first time that evening, the money no longer seemed important.

He wanted to know how.

Becky his wife said, “What’s wrong Leonard?”

He held up his printout and said, “The numbers were correct. Here is a printout of the numbers for the next three months. Baby, it ends with a jackpot of a billion dollars, we are rich. We just wait and bet the numbers to a billion bucks in two and a half months.”

“Are you crazy?” She said “Wait! The pot is more than money than your old body could burn before you die. Get a ticket for the next lottery and let’s go to Stonehenge on the summer solstice and I want to go see Kampus this Christmas in Austria to wait is to tempt fate, bad karma. Don’t be a fool, Leonard.”

“But a billion bucks, baby, that is quite a stack of cash. It is in our reach. We could do it.”

“Stop being greedy, honey, cash in on it now,” Becky said. “When is the next drawing?”

“Wednesday night,” he said, “here are the numbers.”

“Then tomorrow we go to the machine at the sports bar and you will bet the numbers, we say nothing to no one at bar,” she said.

“I won’t say anything, babe. We are in and out. Nothing to drink. No betting on the ponies.”

When Leonard and Becky got to the lottery machine at the bar, he fed two dollars into the slot. Carefully, he entered the numbers from the sheet of paper he had copied from the database. He checked each one twice before pressing Confirm.

The machine whirred and printed a single ticket.

No Quick Pick.

No multiplier.

No extra games.

Just one set of numbers.

Becky slipped the ticket into her purse.

Leonard let out a breath he hadn’t realized he was holding.

They had done it.

Nobody had paid any attention.

Then a familiar voice called from behind them.

“Becky! Leonard!”

Leonard felt his stomach tighten.

Bill waved a betting slip over his head. “I just hit the trifecta at Thistledown. One, three, seven. The one horse was a long shot and still placed. Paid seven hundred and forty-six bucks. Let me buy you two a drink.”