An Adult's Luck

The first thing he did was buy a lifetime supply of caramel popcorn. That was easy enough to decide on. A measly five-hundred g’s was pocket change for a man with forty-billion in lottery winnings. Zachary’s luck had started back in ‘09. He’d been a kid then, so he had the luck of a kid. Twenty bucks under his shoe on the way to school. That was enough for at least four bags of caramel popcorn. Next; a pack of baseball cards. Did he collect baseball cards? Absolutely not. But with his luck, he’d managed to flip a five dollar pack into a ten dollar sale on the recess lot. 

Then, as a teenager, he’d had teenage luck. He was about to lose his virginity to a dimepiece, mythical as all hell to the rest of the gross goobers in his class (that was already lucky enough). Trouble arose when she asked to see a condom (he’d forgotten it at home). Luckily, he quite literally pulled one out of his ass. How’d it get there? According to Zach–he was just a lucky guy. 

So it was no surprise to anybody who’d known Zach for a while (since ‘09 at least) when he’d won the Mega Ultra Super Sigma Billion on his first ticket. He was an adult, and now he had adult luck. 

“Ma’am,” he said to the older waitress, “I think I’d like a t-bone steak.”

She raised a brow. “Sir, that’s not an item on the menu.”

Zach gave her a couple of hundreds. “It is now.”

She was flabbergasted. “Uh, thank you, sir. We’ll see what we can do.”

Zach turned back to his two friends, Sadie and Mark. “Easy peasy.”

“Jesus,” Sadie said. “That was some American Psycho shit.”

Mark nodded. “What now?”

Zach chortled. “What do you mean?”

“I mean–what now?”

“Maybe I’ll buy Earth,” Zach said. 

“No, seriously,” Mark said. 

The older waitress brought out the t-bone steak and set it down on the table. “Your steak, sir.”

“Ah, thank you. Give the chef my compliments.”

Sadie rolled her eyes. “Forty billion and you’re already acting like the Queen owes you a blowjob.”

Zach shrugged and dug into his food. “Order whatever you want. It’s on me.”

Back at his condo, Zach perused his stock options. Forty billion was fine and dandy, sure, but it was time to get serious. He was confident that with his adult luck, he could double–no–triple it. He closed his eyes and picked a bunch of random Israeli tech start-ups. The next day, when he woke up, he checked how his investments we’re doing. Somehow, they were already up fifty percent. Not bad at all. 

By the next weekend, they’d already gone up two-hundred and thirty percent. Zach’s initial forty had more than quadrupled. 

Emails were pouring in from various media outlets, now. Tucker Carlson and Don Lemon wanted interviews with the fabled Zachary Smith, the flipper of billions, the luckiest man alive. But Zach wasn’t interested in fame. All the emails went straight to the trash, emptied and forgotten. No, Zach was interested in something greater. He couldn’t put his finger on it yet, but he wasn’t satisfied. Not quite. He decided to sleep on it. 

A month had gone by and by this point, his net worth was in the trillions. Zach was the richest man to ever live, and he still hadn’t moved out of his condo. Protestors crowded the neighborhood block, demanding that he give away his hard-earned money. He paid them no lip service. He was a recluse of unstoppable growth now, not a member of functioning society. Text messages from Sadie and Mark were left read, but unreplied. They said stuff like, “Hey buddy, we’re worried about you. Dinner?” Those were the first few texts. By the thirtieth day, it was more like “Dude. What the fuck?”

No lip service, though. Or finger service, in this case.

Zach began journaling his thoughts. I can’t really sleep these days. There’s something eating away at me. It’s like I’ve left the house, and I know I’ve forgotten something, but I can’t remember what I’ve forgotten. I’m just waiting to travel long enough for whatever it is to hit me, out of nowhere. I’m in desperate need of an epiphany. I wonder if God accepts prayers from trillionaires.

God did in fact answer prayers from trillionaires, but Zach never prayed, so it was worthless. 

I hear the yelling outside and I think to myself, “Okay, and?” I’m really not trying to be glib anymore, I just don’t know who I’d even give this money to. Sure, there’s charity and shit, but like–really? I can’t even wrap my head around it anymore. I guess that might be the problem. What the fuck does a human know about a trillion dollars? I need the luck of a god. Adult luck isn’t cutting it. 

That was his epiphany. 

After a month of preparation, not only had his trillion dollars exponentially multiplied into the quadrillions, but Zach had abandoned planet Earth–quite literally. He was on a highly classified vehicle headed straight for the Moon, sipping mojitos and eating sushi with the cybernetically stitched-together corpse of Jeffrey Epstein, and Ted Cruz. The company wasn’t ideal, but Zach had thought it through, and this seemed like the perfect plan to execute his epiphany. 

“I sure love having sex with kids,” Robot Epstein said. “They’re really fun to have sex with.”

“Does he say anything else?” Zach asked Ted. 

“Naw. He don’t,” Ted replied, groping one of the slave hires. 

After the hour-long trip, the passengers were escorted inside of the Moon, where an opulent facility awaited them. Everybody was walking around naked, and Ted and Robot Epstein started stripping as soon as they entered the lobby. Zach felt somewhat out of place with his t-shirt and cargo pants, but felt even weirder at the prospect of taking them off. 

“Rules the rules,” Ted said, tugging at Zach’s clothes like some kind of fucking pervert. 

Zach slapped him across the face with a wad of million dollar bills he’d had legally minted by the printing bureau. “No. Fuck you. I own you.”

Ted looked mortified, and his face scrunched up. He made a pouty face. “Hmph. Alright, rich boy.” He walked off. Zach had to draw the line somewhere. Nudity was simply not going to fly for him. He tapped a slave on the shoulder. “Escort me to the manager.”

The slave merely nodded, and led the way. Up the golden elevator they went to the thirtieth floor, the penthouse suite of the Moon. There was an awkward silence, but then again, there always was. A ding was heard and the slave stepped off onto a carpet floor. Zach followed him to a door with the number 666 on it. 

“Does the Devil actually work here?”

The slave shook his head. 

“Well, shit. My whole plan was banking on that.”

The slave shrugged, and knocked on the door in a musical pattern. “Come on in, my dears,” somebody said from inside. A woman’s voice. Zach hoped she had a good rack, and a big voluptuous mind for business. He entered through the doorway, with baited breath.

Waiting for him was somebody Zach absolutely did not expect to find. 

“Surprised?” God said, seductively. She was wearing a miniskirt and a bra that emphasized her luscious bust. Zach truly had an adult’s luck. But he was about to graduate. He coughed, nervously. “Your holiness–it’s an honor.”

“In the words of the prophet Jacques Webster–stop trying to be God,” she said, cryptically. 

“I don’t want to be God. I want a God’s luck.” Zach flashed a few million dollar bills. God smirked. The universe would soon be in his pocket, though neither of them knew it quite yet. 

God was evil, and so was the caramel popcorn. They divided up the known galaxy between themselves as the investors. Zach took the nebulas and had them converted into bitcoin mining stations. Supercomputers the size of gas giants as far as a distant alien telescope could see. 

The arrangement was amicable at first–but Zach thought to push his luck further. What was the luck of a God to the luck of EVERYTHING?

“I’m buying you out,” he said politely to God. She gasped and shot herself in the head. Easier than he’d expected. 

 Zach’s portfolio merged with the spacetime continuum. His prospects grew ever increasingly more scrumptious to the eye of the average investor. He received many offers from many distant worlds, with their own puny gods as tribute. None of them were worth his time. Which was saying a lot, considering his time was infinite. He’d bought immortality off a guy in the Andromeda galaxy.

And now he just had to wait. For what, exactly, Zach didn’t know. But he knew that there was nothing left to buy. He was one with the supply-demand curve. The universe expanded, and Zach’s net worth along with it. His luck increased to the dimensional level. Soon, he began scouting out alternate realities. Futures were a dime a dozen. Sixteen cents to the common man. But he was no common man. Zachary Schneider was a trans-dimensional being–so he had a trans-dimensional being’s luck.

Was Zach at peace? Was anybody? Not really. He hadn’t done anything with his luck in a long time, except use it to multiply it into greater luck exponentionally. Was it a long time, though? He couldn’t tell. 

He wondered what Mark and Sadie were up to.