Mardock Scramble

–Looks like I’m better than you at predicting the cards, Uncle. I’ll give you some tips on what you need to do to win.

The Doctor raised a finger and wagged it from side to side, as if to say his pride wouldn’t permit him to take advice from a girl. “Don’t you worry about me. It might look like I’m losing at the moment, but you never know when my luck might start to turn.”

Balot smiled, but under the table she nudged the Doctor softly with her tiptoe. The Doctor nudged her back. Confirmation. He’d understood the plan. However many sensors there may have been overhead, none of them would have been able to see under the table, surely? There wasn’t any watching the customer down there. Not usually.

Starting from the very next hand, Balot fed Oeufcoque’s instructions to the Doctor under the table.

First, one tap on the side of the Doctor’s foot. The signal to hit. The Doctor hmmed.

Then the dealer brushed against his earpiece and whispered a few words into the built-in microphone.

Balot intercepted the electronic transmission in order to eavesdrop on it, a reflex reaction now. She snarced the electronic waves, turning them to sound waves inside her head.

Balot was stunned by the message. It was a transmission to the observation room. Asking them to check the cameras. To check if she was somehow giving the Doctor a signal.

She sensed the piercing gaze of the dealer bearing down on her face like the muzzle of a gun. She was about to turn and meet his gaze when Oeufcoque stopped her.

–Don’t look at the dealer. It’s just a trick to try and catch out people with guilty consciences. To smoke them out of their den. Stay still. You’re not doing anything illegal.

Yes—this was an accomplished dealer, and they couldn’t overlook that fact, even when he was starting to fall under their spell. All it took was his intuition—a sixth sense, almost—to work out that something underhanded was going on. Still, it was as Oeufcoque said: as long as they weren’t caught in the act, there was nothing the casino could pin on them, however suspicious they were. There were limits to the dealer’s abilities. And there was no way for the casino to tell for sure whether the pair at the table were indeed sitting ducks, or whether they were a ticking time bomb, biding their time before going off with an almighty bang, leaving only a huge bill in their wake.

Balot stuck to the important hands, giving the Doctor his signal as subtly as she could. Two nudges of the foot to stay, one to hit. Three when he had to double down. On the rare occasions he was supposed to split, Balot was to tug on his sleeve as if to hurry him up.

The dealer seemed to be picking up on many of these signals, or so she thought, but then he appeared to lose interest, as if he had been worrying over nothing. Balot’s efforts at misdirection had obviously paid off.

Suddenly it occurred to Balot to inject a bit of life into the proceedings. She wanted to revive the sitcom atmosphere of earlier, get her double act with the Doctor back on the road. She prodded his arm playfully.

–I’ve got it, Uncle! I’ve worked out a foolproof plan to win.

The Doctor’s eyes opened wide in surprise. The dealer, caught up in the moment, did the same.

“What sort of plan?” asked the Doctor.

–Before I go into that, I want to change some of my chips.

“Well, it’s not me you should be asking, then, is it? Ask Mr. Handsome over there on the other side of the table.”

Balot nodded and turned to the dealer to offer him a single thousand-dollar chip.

–I’d like to change this into a thousand one-dollar chips, please.

Time stood still as the dealer and the Doctor turned to stare at Balot.

–That way, I’ll be able to make a thousand bets with just this single chip!

The Doctor was the first to break the silence. “Where’s the fun in that?”

Balot puffed her cheeks out in a sulk. It was a convincing act, if she did think so herself. She was sure that this was one of the skills that she had picked up since she first met Oeufcoque.

“Look, gambling is fun precisely because there’s an element of risk. It’s a nice idea you’re suggesting, but it’s kind of missing the whole point of what a casino is about. Please—if you want to play a game, let’s think up one that involves trying to win as much as we can, not one that just involves trying to survive as long as we can…”

–Okay, okay. I’ll just win lots, then.

The Doctor was visibly relieved. He turned to the dealer to give him an apologetic look that said, Sorry about this, it’s her first time, and you know what young girls are like…

The dealer managed to pull himself together long enough to flash the Doctor a brief, sympathetic smile. But his confusion remained, more palpable than ever.

Surely at this point the usual thing for her to do would be to throw caution to the wind and start betting big? And yet she was talking about whittling her stake down to a feeble dollar-a-pop! The dealer’s face started to show all this—and the fact that he just couldn’t work out what Balot was thinking.

She seemed indifferent when she was winning but got excited when she was losing. She got emotionally attached to cards—all gooey and sentimental—whether she won or lost, and it was impossible to tell what she was being sentimental about. Her conversation was all over the place, but somehow she managed to come up with all sorts of nonsensical rules and fun and games with her uncle.

Worst of all, though, she was winning—not in a big way, he didn’t think, but steadily, ominously. In all his career, he had yet to come across a customer quite so baffling and inexplicable.

The point tally displayed by Oeufcoque showed that the odds at this point were now overwhelmingly in the players’ favor, but just as Balot was about to press home her advantage, the red marker appeared. The round was brought to an end just before things started to get really interesting.

Balot took a deep breath and checked the statistics for the round. The percentages were comprehensively in their favor: averaged with the Doctor, the two of them had managed to win at a rate of well over 60 percent. Or to put it in simple terms, an initial stake of ten dollars would be, on average, increased to seventy dollars within ten hands. As far as winning streaks went, this was overwhelming.

–It’s all going to hinge on this next round. Use the shuffle to convert all your chips into ten- thousand-dollar pieces.

Oeufcoque ordered, and Balot followed. The result was an intimidatingly tall stack of high-value chips, right in front of her.

The dealer touched his earphone again to order replacement chips for the ones he had paid out. The manager replied, and the dealer quickly cut him off in a low voice. I’ll get them all back, and more. Balot intercepted the whole exchange.

Balot shrugged her shoulders. She felt exceedingly calm.

06

The dealer started his shuffle and Balot scrutinized his movements.

She could sense the intention behind his movements more clearly than ever. It was as though he were no longer concerned with keeping up appearances. As a result Balot could read the complex patterns of the cards as they flowed left and right—they shone like neon cafeteria signs in the night.

–He’s trying to manipulate the shuffle so as to force the high-value cards toward the bottom of the stack, out of our reach.

Oeufcoque understood immediately.

–Can you tell how many he’s trying to take out of play?

–As many as he can. He’s trying to make sure all the tens—including the royals—end up at the bottom of the shoe.

–In that case, we consider those cards discarded from play. Try and get as accurate a reading as you can for me so that I can adjust the count accordingly.