Dumb Luck
By Michael N. Farney
“HEY, STUPID KID!”
Tommy, walking down the street from school to home, paused in his Herculean task of memorizing the addition tables. (He had labored six months at it already.) Upon a mailbox directly beside him, he saw a large metallic grasshopper with each excited leg tattooing like an army drum signaling battle.
“Hear me out! Every brainy creature on your world is about to be personally blown to Kingdom Come. You are gawking at a robot—an android actually—and I’m returning to my makers shortly so that they can annihilate your species three hours hence. Fouler beings will be lounging on your couches and drinking your beer in four.”
While such a presentment might have unsettled most hominids, Tommy was, to use a phrase that goes back to the Pharaohs, a few bricks shy of a load. “Gee,” he said slowly, “couldn’t the new guys be a little nicer. No one is good to me because I don’t reason well.”
“Yeah, kid. I noticed that. My masters made their own world even less good than yours. They enjoyed making it a lousier place every year until the day arrived when my overseers did something really, cosmically, bad. It was ugly beyond telling and when the Great Magicians who run this universe found it out, do you know what they did?”
“They killed everyone?”
“Bad deduction, Sherlock. Their revenge was a hundred times worse. They took away the aliens’ luck. You are better off dead than without luck. Marriage isn’t love. It’s luck. The kids you get are luck. Your health is luck. Weather’s luck. First thing that happened on the home planet: the volcanoes exploded, all at once. Pure bad luck.”
Tommy frowned. He found the concept of luck confusing. He was lucky to be in fifth grade, everyone said. That was true in one sense: being promoted from grade to grade had nothing to do with skill. But in what way was his advancement luck?
“After that,” the drone droned on, “we roamed the universe, all fifty million of us, stuffed inside a big fat rock. Every millennium or so, we dropped probes like me down on some habitable world. As our rotten luck would have it they all were ipso facto inhabited, not that we rued vaporizing the indigenous sentients. If those top predators proved to be less smart, less powerful, less determined, we would evaporate them just as we will everyone here.”
The words “less smart” recalled to Tommy’s mind his mother’s pet name for him: Epaminondas. “Epaminondas,” said the woman in the fairy tale, “do you see those three mince pies I’ve put on the doorstep to cool? You be careful how you step on those pies!” Epaminondas had very carefully stepped on every one.
Tommy’s wavering attention returned to the bug, who could not shut up even for a moment. “My overlords, knowing how unlucky it can be to challenge a superior race, sent down probes like me looking for the ugliest, most idiotic, mentally drained, vacuous, snot-nosed little kid and damn! With every encounter, the tiny tentacle-waver proved to be our equal. So no need to explore what their parents might be like. Our rock departed, sight unseen. I can’t say how refreshing it is to find you.”
“Why are you telling me this?” Tommy asked. “I’m insulted every day already. Scan my empty skull, report it, and murder everyone.”
“Don’t want to tempt fate by talking to any others,” said the locust. It minced its jaws in unnatural pleasure. “Furthermore, it is best to torture the thing least likely to harm us. Well, gotta fly and thanks for lifting the curse. Oh, and dwell on this during your last miserable three hours: just by being you, you have betrayed your entire world.”
***
“What a day,” said Tommy on entering the family living room.
Tommy’s father looked up momentarily from his newspaper. Ages ago, he had despaired of a son whose DNA had spelled out in its steps of cytosine, guanine, adenine, and thymine “terminally dumb but painfully honest.” There went a career in politics and, face it, a career in science, too. However he tried otherwise, he could only find hatred in his heart for this genetically challenged child. Tommy would not be following in his father’s footsteps on his way to a Nobel Prize.
“A little metal bug,” continued Tommy, “a chirpy mantis thing with a motor mouth said it came from a rock overhead that will destroy humanity three hours from now. It said it didn’t mind telling me because it knew, just by looking, it had found someone really stupid. Which you always say I am.”
“Did it point with its claws in any particular direction?” asked his Dad.
“Yeah,” said Tommy. “I was standing next to the letter box at the time. It aimed a leg across our chimney to a spot a finger’s width past the daytime Moon.” Tommy was not a deep thinker but he had an uncanny knack for being precise.
The voice from behind the newspaper did a fast mental calculation. “You know Tommy, I think that I’m the luckiest guy in the world to have created a fine young man like you.”
“Gee, thanks. The bug mentioned luck a lot. Why?”
On the other side of the newspaper Tommy heard only a voice speaking rapidly into a cell phone. “Jim, remember that demonstration we promised Congress would happen yesterday. Ready now? Luck may have been on our side. No, skip the ballgame. Move the laser cannons over so they point to that asteroid alongside the Moon and link me to the President’s hot line. Rockets? Yep. Nukes? Absolutely.”
Tommy didn’t much care. For the first time in his life, his Old Man had said something nice about him and even said it like he meant it. And just like his Old Man, he felt the luckiest person alive. 
Michael N. Farley claims to be the oldest full-time faculty member at Dakota Wesleyan University, South Dakota, where he teaches physics and astronomy. This is Michael’s first professionally-published short story.
