Far Horizons: Tales of Sci-Fi, Fantasy and Horror. Issue #14 May 2015 | Page 12

did set the building on fire with her toaster. She didn’t
break her neck in the puddle at poolside on her way
to water aerobics class, she didn’t choke on a piece of
biscuit. She had her first physical, and she was proclaimed fit as a fiddle, as healthy as a woman ten years
younger.
She was living the high life, and I was failing. I don’t
like failure, so I took a closer look at her lifeline. After
a long, in-depth look at all the lives her life touched,
I called the office. “This one is not happening,” I told
the number-cruncher. “I’m out. My advice is, don’t
mess with her. Take the loss.”
He didn’t listen. More fool him. My replacement on
the job had no better luck than I did. Unlike me, he
didn’t have the sense to back off when all the reasonable, likely death probabilities were exhausted. The
fool tied whole handfuls of actuality into existential
knots. Don’t even get me started on collateral damage. The company is going to be cleaning that up for
decades, I’m sure.

Fate’s godmother.
Turns out that one of the brats from Granny Fannie’s
old neighbourhood grows up to become one of history’s greatest scientific minds. A snot-nosed little girl
who went home with a quilt from Fannie’s moving
party eventually unlocks the mysteries of trans-dimensional travel and change the future of humanity.
Messing with probabilities to protect people she
loved? Child’s play.
The moral of this story? Do not mess with the golden
years of a super-genius’s beloved babysitter.
Just… don’t.

More disasters and fluke accidents occurred in that
ten square miles of Florida than hit the rest of the
state that month. All to no avail. Parts dropped off an
airliner and crashed into the building. Cars smashed
through the front windows. An overturned tanker full
of poison gas derailed on a nearby railway.
Granny Fannie skated through every incident without a scratch. So did a surprising number of innocent
bystanders.
The number-cruncher and the replacement actuary
were contemplating an earthquake timeline when the
higher-ups finally contracted a case of common sense
and pulled them off the case.
Fannie got her payoff and spent her fortune over the
course of twenty-five happy, golden years. Some
enterprising young cousin of hers sold the story of her
first month in retirement to a Hollywood producer for
a fortune. “The Luckiest Woman in the World” they
called it, and they were right.
Only it wasn’t luck. It was Fate. Or more precisely,

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