Tyche
Copyright© 2020 by Old Man with a Pen
Chapter 86
Saturday, I hustled over to the Math section of the Hard Sciences building, found the instructors mailbox and dropped my answer sheet in the box. Mine was not the only paper that day.
I was the only one who had written my answer immediately after class a week ago. I didn’t need two more days and two more whiteboards to confuse the situation. The answer was and could ONLY be...
The building fell down. The math ended up with a negative number ... negative numbers mean a mistake ... and mistakes fall down ... collapse in a pile of rubble ... electrocute the contractor ... or produce cataclysmic or catastrophic results ... poison gas, nuclear reaction, twisting bridges or crashing aircraft.
And I was right.
A simple transposition and two large construction cranes collapsed on a road in downtown Moscow ... Russia ... at the same time.
Monday morning the class assembled. The professor was absent. A teaching fellow stood in his place and confessed that the math was wrong and apologized. He, the assistant, was responsible for the mistake.
“Tyche,” he pronounced Tyche, Ti ... sh. “Miss Flintkote, would you come forward and present the correct math.”
I went forward and wrote my name on the board. TYCHE. Like NIKE but a T instead of an N.
Well ... that was embarrassing... 16 years old ... killed one instructor and caught another one in error. My rant about double checking, cross checking and “being sure” was ill received.
“Never take a supervisors word as gospel. A friend was electrocuted because the super said he’d sent a man to disconnect the power to an abandoned transfer station ... the station had been abandoned for 35 years... ‘The only town that line went went to has been a ghost town since before 1920, of course the power was off. How could it NOT be?’ The man never checked. He assumed.
“Thank you, Miss Flintkote.”
“Not going to attempt my name?”
“No.”
“Chicken.”
At the Union...
“How did you know? You didn’t even discuss it with any of us.”
“A look at the Math Monday I could SEE the result in my head ... All fall down ... go boom...” I said that like I was three.
To read the complete story you need to be logged in:
Log In or
Register for a Free account
(Why register?)
* Allows you 3 stories to read in 24 hours.