A billionaire once grew bored with building spacecraft and so decided to do something novel, something outrageous, something which didn't involve subterranean highways or flying cities or plugging every earthling into a supercomputer designed to crystallize hive intelligence.
Something different.
There's a cryptic announcement on his socials. It's just a word, and it's a weird kind of word: hyperborean. No one knows what to think about that word. They ask ChatGPT what it means, in normal usage, and come to learn that it means "relating to the extreme north" or something to do with the eternal spring of an alien civilization called The Greeks. Will he finally mold an absolute zero biome? Has he totemized Antarctica? Safe Money believes, rationally enough, that it's nothing special, perhaps yet more crypto, maybe a SuperBowl ad or a clothing line.
No, he reveals through a Joe Rogan laser beam meme. Hyperborean's none of these things that have already been done.
It's something different, remember. It's a coin flipping tournament.
Pundits begin queuing up eye rolls until he reveals that the winner takes home one billion dollars. Yes, a billion dollars. He plans to mint an actual billionaire. Promising fairness, he donates 1,000 Bitcoins to a charity dedicated to building perfectly balanced coins that have been mined on the blockchain, forged from Kazakhstani tungsten, and imprinted by decentralized Brazilian farmers.
Very ex nihilo he creates a tax-sheltered power organization to enroll 1,073,741,824 global competitors. Not one more, not one less. Exactly that number. He'll need a lot of hands to process logistics, that is, to do everything, so those who do volunteer--or, teer, as it becomes known--have their hyperborean entrance fees waived. He also creates his own nation state, so the winner need not pay taxes. The winner will truly be, he assures us, a billionaire.
The rules are simple. A quantum computer randomly selects one player to flip and the other to call heads/tails in the billionaire's invented, culturally-agnostic language Argos. Failure to call, or to not speak in Argos, guarantees forfeit. Matches are sudden death; lose, and return to life as you know it save for the crushing terror of being on the wrong side of fortune.
It gets off to kind of a slow start. While the actual flip battles average 2.02 seconds, updating the blockchain takes several months, managing the logistics of such a staggering number of competitors becomes so difficult as to almost collapse the whole enterprise, and sometimes people die in the interim, the inconvenience of which requires even more updating.
So, a year passes, and then another. The billionaire returns to fundraising for his heliosphere, and we--well, we do what we do best, which is the things that we do.
Yet once the player pool shrinks, the pace quickens. Months between rounds become weeks, and soon enough only 8,192 competitors remain. The Top Tiers, they've been christened. Hyperborean can no longer be ignored for the disruptive and colossal force that it is. ESPN claims that the odds of winning hyperborean are about 172 times greater than nailing back-to-back holes in one. Skip Bayless even argues that the winner will become history's greatest athlete, having done the "statistically impossible."
The Top Tiers clearly have a talent but its exact nature resists scrutiny. Most analysts posit that the Tiers intimidate their opponents into guessing wrong; coin flipping, they argue, is ultimately a "mental game," though one also demanding tremendous physical exertion, requiring players to possess near supernatural control over their autonomic systems so as to inerrantly perceive the coin's gyrations through space. Certain psychologists such as Daryl Bem tour the NPR circuit and credit ESP, and physicists propose that certain players can apprehend space at such an infinitesimal level that they can actually see, and not simply predict, the coin's rhythmic gravity. The Tiers appear in their local news clone outlets, the articles from which all sound like this: "Our neighbor could become a billionaire, and isn't that just the most beautiful thing?"
And people cry, they weep.
Soon the tournament's all anyone talks about. A Twitter account claiming to be the Institutional Theory of Art manages to prove, through titan algebra, that all "recreational establishments" (think chain restaurants, gyms) simultaneously air hyperborean coverage. When it's time for the Sweet 16 . . . well, everyone wants in. Dubai wins the hosting bid, and a specially designed arena goes up in record time by a well-regarded merc construction outfit.
For those who cannot afford to attend, Facebook leases multiverse-based Valhalla Halls through its new machine learning platform, What You Can Afford to Pay (WYCAP). On WYCAP, every transaction fills consumers with the euphoric dread-anxiety of knowing that if the product were to cost one more cent then they'd pass on it but at that exact price point they have no choice but to buy.
Every so often on cable television a math teacher tries to explain probability but it's just noise. Consider instead our finalists, who showcase stories tailored for slow-motion melodramas: Johnny D, an assistant Target manager from Tulsa, hungry for his big break; Clara, a London-based desktop publishing exec who entered on a "lark"; and a mysterious kid from somewhere in the developing world whose name no one can pronounce so he goes by what Charles Barkley labeled him: Wishbone.
And then, like that, it's over. Someone won 30 straight coin flips, an achievement understandable only through scientific notation. It doesn't matter who. They become the world's first minted billionaire and start a coin flipping league to give back. Their next initiative promotes galactic charter schools.
Second and third place give interviews, explaining their strategies without, of course, divulging too much. They diversify their life portfolios and offer investment advice and run for office. They, and the other Tiers, become the future's oligarchs, and we're lucky for it. To quote the pseudocode of our best screening software: "We discard 99% of applications because we don't want unlucky people working for you."
Who better to lead us into the post-climate world than the Tiers, those who defied the statistically impossible, who proved that anyone, absolutely anyone, can with enough luck and fortune and chance and even fortuity lurk deep within the tails of some probability distribution? We watched, and we answered: No one.