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Sequence Page 6


  THEO

  I lied.

  Pause.

  The truth is, you can’t change your luck.

  Laboratory

  DR. GUZMAN

  Perhaps not. But then why did He send you here if it wasn’t to kill me?

  DR. GUZMAN finds a glass pipette.

  MR. ADAMSON

  It’s possible He sent me here to inform you, or even to warn you, that you have ventured into God’s territory.

  DR. GUZMAN

  What exactly is God’s territory? The Middle East? The Vatican? Alabama?

  MR. ADAMSON

  This lab. You’re playing around with something sacred. You’re trying to rewrite God’s very own text. Our genetic code. Why is that fair game? Nobody would dare mess around with Shakespeare, and Shakespeare is merely one of His creations.

  DR. GUZMAN

  Shakespeare never killed anyone. He never blinded anyone. He never took away someone’s child by making a typo.

  MR. ADAMSON

  God doesn’t make typos.

  DR. GUZMAN draws GAG --> GTG.

  DR. GUZMAN

  No? Well your God must have been a little hungover one morning because He stuck a thymine instead of an adenine in the hemoglobin gene, so I’m pretty sure He goofed.

  MR. ADAMSON

  God does not goof.

  DR. GUZMAN

  Is that right? Did He intend for this one simple polymorphism to cause the red blood cell to sickle? Did He intend for one in five hundred black people to be crippled by this disease? I’m pretty sure He meant to hit the A on his four-key typewriter.

  MR. ADAMSON

  How do you know that? What if Shakespeare intended to write, “To pee or not to pee.” Maybe Hamlet had a prostate problem and that was the question. Or why don’t we just assume the writer did what he intended to do, and accept it at face value?

  DR. GUZMAN

  So what did your God intend to do? What was He thinking when He created sickle-cell disease? Or muscular dystrophy? Or retinitis pigmentosa?

  Pause.

  What was He thinking when He put you in a sex-free wheelchair for the rest of your goddamn life?

  MR. ADAMSON

  I will walk again. I will have children. When God decides it’s time.

  DR. GUZMAN

  Right. While you sit around and wait for two legs and a penis to drop from the sky, my job is to hit the delete button and fix what needs to be fixed, by whatever means necessary.

  MR. ADAMSON

  My job is to preserve and protect His original manuscript. In all its glory.

  DR. GUZMAN

  How, exactly, do you intend to do that? You can’t even preserve and protect your own underpants.

  MR. ADAMSON

  People think just because you’re in a wheelchair, you’re an easy target. I can protect myself, Dr. Guzman.

  DR. GUZMAN finds a bottle of clear liquid.

  She sets it on top of the briefcase.

  DR. GUZMAN

  I don’t see how. Unless you’re hiding a weapon in here.

  Auditorium

  CYNTHIA

  So you admit it! You might want to change the title of your book.

  THEO

  To what? You’re completely screwed and there’s nothing you can do about it? You think that’s what people want to hear?

  CYNTHIA

  Doesn’t matter. You should tell them the truth.

  THEO

  Fine, here it is. I think you were born unlucky. I think your baby has the misfortune of having an unlucky mother, and if you open that envelope, I’m betting the test is positive. You can’t change your luck. You got what you got. I’m sorry.

  CYNTHIA

  Don’t be sorry. There’s no reason to apologize for being an arrogant, know-it-all prick. Some people are born that way. You got what you got.

  THEO

  I am sorry. I’d help you if I could.

  CYNTHIA

  Go to hell.

  THEO

  I couldn’t save my wife. And you expect me to help you?

  CYNTHIA

  What happened to your wife?

  THEO

  Car accident. A long time ago. Only one of us survived. Guess which one.

  CYNTHIA

  The lucky one?

  THEO

  The one who wasn’t pregnant.

  CYNTHIA

  I’m sorry.

  THEO

  Apparently, my luck has an asterisk.

  CYNTHIA heads for the door.

  This Fibonacci sequence. I don’t understand. Why would my bets be following that pattern? That’s quite a…

  CYNTHIA

  Here’s what I can’t figure out. Why this sequence? There are hundreds of mathematical sequences out there. You could have picked your coin flips according to the digits of pi. Why Fibonacci? This sequence you just happened to choose is almost… spiritual.

  THEO

  I didn’t choose it. It chose me.

  CYNTHIA

  Yeah. That’s the thing. I’d feel better if you had chosen it. It would make the probabilities more palatable.

  Pause.

  Theo, why is your briefcase combination the first six digits of the Fibonacci sequence?

  THEO

  I don’t know why. Those numbers just came to me one day.

  CYNTHIA

  You had no idea about their significance?

  THEO

  No. I just knew I’d never forget them.

  THEO checks his watch.

  CYNTHIA

  You’re a strange man, Theo. Mathematically speaking.

  THEO

  What did you mean, spiritual? You mean God? Is this God communicating with me?

  CYNTHIA

  Is God giving you gambling tips? That’s your theory?

  THEO

  It’s possible. God invented Las Vegas.

  CYNTHIA

  God invented religious delusion.

  THEO

  Well, what’s your theory? Why am I following this Fibonacci sequence?

  CYNTHIA

  I don’t have a theory. I just identified a pattern. The question is, why? Why are you following this predetermined pattern? It’s almost as if your picks have already been written down and sealed away.

  THEO’s phone starts ringing in his briefcase.

  THEO

  And I’m just opening the envelopes. One by one.

  CYNTHIA

  You don’t have to. You could just tear it up and walk away right now. You could die a lucky man.

  Laboratory

  MR. ADAMSON

  Do you really believe I would do that?

  DR. GUZMAN

  If anyone is an easy target, it is me. A public advocate of stem-cell research. A blind woman alone in a basement lab, foolish enough to open her door in the middle of the night.

  DR. GUZMAN uncorks the bottle.

  MR. ADAMSON

  What is that?

  DR. GUZMAN

  H2SO4. pH of 1.26. This will burn through anything.

  MR. ADAMSON flips his astragalus.

  MR. ADAMSON

  Tails!

  DR. GUZMAN

  Ah. So you’re saying we should increase our sample size? I might make a scientist out of you yet.

  DR. GUZMAN pulls out her coin, flips it. Again she tries to catch it. Again she misses. The coin falls to the floor.

  Dammit. I could have sworn I was able to flip a goddamn coin six months ago.

  DR. GUZMAN examines her glasses.

  She drops to the floor, searches for the coin.

  Mr. Adamson, are you in favour of embryonic stem-
cell research?

  MR. ADAMSON

  No. But that doesn’t mean—

  DR. GUZMAN

  You, if anyone, should be cheerleading this whole thing. You have the most to gain.

  She finds the coin, shows MR. ADAMSON.

  Heads, not your lucky day. Do you actually know what the odds are of you ever walking again? One in a billion. That’s with a B.

  MR. ADAMSON

  I’m an optimist.

  DR. GUZMAN

  You’re an idiot. The only chance you have is if some stem-cell researcher gets lucky and stumbles on a cure. Before some myopic fundamentalist kills us all in the name of God. If you want to walk to your altar one day, we are your only hope.

  DR. GUZMAN draws up the sulphuric acid in a pipette.

  MR. ADAMSON

  That doesn’t make what you’re doing right.

  DR. GUZMAN

  Oh, so it’s a matter of morality, of conscience. Why didn’t you say that, instead of invoking your nebulous God construct?

  She attempts to burn her way into the briefcase.

  MR. ADAMSON

  God gives us our conscience.

  DR. GUZMAN

  Actually, the conscience gene was discovered two years ago. Made quite a splash. Fox News called it “The Cheatin’ Gene”! Where the hell did you get this briefcase, Mr. Bond?

  MR. ADAMSON

  But where did the gene come from in the first place? We are here because God created us.

  DR. GUZMAN

  Bullshit.

  MR. ADAMSON

  Prove it.

  DR. GUZMAN

  Prove what?

  MR. ADAMSON

  If you’re a scientist, prove God doesn’t exist.

  DR. GUZMAN

  That’s impossible.

  MR. ADAMSON

  Exactly.

  DR. GUZMAN

  But that’s the wrong question. Unicorns with paisley headbands may have roamed the planet a million years ago. But they didn’t need to. The God hypothesis was advanced to fill a void. To explain the inexplicable. So the better question is, can we prove the need for God doesn’t exist?

  MR. ADAMSON

  And?

  DR. GUZMAN

  And I can.

  Auditorium

  The phone continues to ring.

  THEO

  I don’t think so. That’s Vegas on the phone. They want my pick.

  CYNTHIA

  Fine, go ahead, risk it all. But if I’m right, if Fibonacci is right, your next pick should be tails.

  THEO

  Say it does come up tails. Then what?

  CYNTHIA

  Then you take a cold shower.

  THEO

  No, I mean, what if your Fibonacci sequence holds true? What would that mean? That maybe somebody is trying to tell me something? That I have some pretty powerful cosmic forces in my corner?

  CYNTHIA

  Sure. You’re a conduit to the spiritual centre of the universe. God is speaking to you via your coin flips. You do have quite the ego.

  THEO’s phone stops ringing.

  I should be going. You have a coin to flip. And a God complex to indulge.

  Laboratory

  DR. GUZMAN

  God is unnecessary. God is redundant. There is nothing in the universe that cannot be explained by science. We are the product of genes and evolution and probability. We do not need God to be our fudge factor.

  DR. GUZMAN looks in a drawer.

  MR. ADAMSON

  So life began purely randomly. In the beginning, there was nothing. And then all of a sudden, one day, without any help from God…

  DR. GUZMAN

  Or aliens.

  MR. ADAMSON

  All of a sudden, life appears.

  DR. GUZMAN

  Plausible.

  MR. ADAMSON

  Far-fetched.

  DR. GUZMAN

  Of course. But far less far-fetched than postulating divine intervention.

  MR. ADAMSON

  So life magically appears one day…

  DR. GUZMAN

  Not magically. First there was the Big Bang. Or does His existence preclude the Big Bang?

  MR. ADAMSON

  Not if He was the Big Banger.

  DR. GUZMAN

  Well, unfortunately, since He hadn’t yet created plasma tv, or actual plasma for that matter, we’ll never know for sure what actually happened at the moment of the Big Bang. Everyone has their own theory.

  DR. GUZMAN finds a Bunsen burner.

  Let’s see how your 007 briefcase likes a thousand degrees Celsius.

  MR. ADAMSON

  Heads!

  DR. GUZMAN

  N equals three? Why not? Let there be heads.

  DR. GUZMAN flips another coin. This time she doesn’t even try to catch it. She doesn’t bother looking for it.

  MR. ADAMSON searches for the coin.

  But we do have a supercollider that can approximate the condition of the universe one billionth of a second after the Big Bang, which gave us the Higgs boson, your “God particle,” followed by the main attraction, our entire universe.

  MR. ADAMSON

  But not life.

  MR. ADAMSON locates the coin.

  It’s tails.

  DR. GUZMAN

  But everything necessary for life. First came our sun. Then came the earth and its big primordial soup, the prebiotic oceans, from which the first self-replicating DNA was born.

  MR. ADAMSON

  Spontaneously. Randomly. Miraculously.

  DR. GUZMAN

  Yes. Yes. And hell no!

  DR. GUZMAN finds a flint lighter.

  MR. ADAMSON

  So life began on Earth at the exact time and place when conditions could support life. Our sun happened to be the perfect age. Our planet happened to be the perfect temperature. Then, out of this soup, life just began. What are the chances of that?

  DR. GUZMAN

  One in ten to the fortieth. About the same chance as a monkey sitting down at a keyboard and randomly typing a passage from Shakespeare.

  MR. ADAMSON

  Doesn’t that seem far-fetched to you?

  DR. GUZMAN

  Sure. Unless.

  MR. ADAMSON

  Unless what?

  DR. GUZMAN

  Unless that monkey who sat down at a keyboard was exceptionally lucky, and just happened to type Hamlet on its very first try.

  DR. GUZMAN tries to light the Bunsen burner.

  Mr. Adamson, are you sure you don’t believe in luck?

  Auditorium

  THEO

  Being lucky is not all it’s cracked up to be. Doesn’t necessarily mean you’re better off. Or happier.

  CYNTHIA

  Poor rich baby. Money can’t buy you happiness? Should we write a country song?

  THEO

  Forget I said anything.

  CYNTHIA

  In psych class, we read that lottery winners got an immediate jump in their happiness scores, but a few months later they returned back to their baseline.

  THEO

  So you can’t change your happiness or your luck.

  CYNTHIA

  Not true. Rich people are happier, but only if they earn the money themselves. Stolen loot, lotteries… not so much.

  THEO

  Why is that?

  CYNTHIA

  Because it’s cheating. And they feel guilty. Do you feel guilty?

  THEO

  Should I?

  CYNTHIA

  Did you know people who won the lottery with numbers they chose themselves end up happier than those who w
on with randomly selected numbers?

  THEO

  Because they think they deserve it.

  CYNTHIA

  Idiots.

  THEO

  Happy idiots.

  CYNTHIA

  Have you earned your wealth? Do you deserve it?

  THEO

  Not a penny.

  CYNTHIA

  There you go.

  THEO

  Maybe that’s why I get death threats every day.

  CYNTHIA

  From who?

  THEO

  People who don’t think I deserve my good fortune.

  CYNTHIA

  People who think you’re cheating.

  THEO

  How do I prove I’m not?

  CYNTHIA

  By losing?

  THEO

  What if I can’t lose?

  CYNTHIA

  Have you tried?

  THEO

  How exactly do you try to lose a coin flip?

  CYNTHIA

  Right. I see your point. But if you could. Would you?

  Pause.

  Theo, do you want to lose?

  THEO

  What I want… doesn’t matter, does it?

  CYNTHIA

  If only you could perform a luck-ectomy.

  THEO

  If only.

  CYNTHIA

  How would one go about doing that? Carry a black cat under a ladder on Friday the thirteenth?

  From a hidden compartment in his briefcase THEO pulls out a gun.

  THEO

  Or maybe I could use this.

  Laboratory

  DR. GUZMAN

  I’m starting to think there’s nothing in here.

  DR. GUZMAN cannot get the Bunsen burner to light. She keeps trying.

  MR. ADAMSON

  Then can I have it back?

  DR. GUZMAN

  Perhaps we could work out a trade of some kind. Is there something you have that I might want?

  MR. ADAMSON

  Like what?

  DR. GUZMAN

  I always thought luck was a bunch of bullshit hogwash. But after enough near misses and why me’s, you start to consider other hypotheses. What if I told you there are instances where somebody won the lottery, and then their child also won?

  MR. ADAMSON

  I would say they are blessed.

  DR. GUZMAN

  Dammit, think like a scientist. In a population of thousands of lottery winners, what are the chances, based on randomness alone, that there will be families with multiple winners?

  MR. ADAMSON points at the board, at the previously written 13%.

  MR. ADAMSON

  Um… Thirteen per cent?

  DR. GUZMAN

  Here’s the funny thing. The numbers are greater than they should be. Families are winning lotteries disproportionately. And how do you explain the family in Norway where a woman won the lottery. Then her father won. And then her son.