BIMBO OR BILLIONAIRE: WIN / WIN
By Interstitial
Synopsis:
Maths wizard Emma is closing in on the elusive solution to the Reimann Hypothesis. Not only that, and for reasons that are not entirely obvious, she also fancies her chances on the legendary game show Bimbo or Billionaire. What could possibly go wrong…?
NOTE: This is an interstitial twist on the well-known Bimbo or Billionaire franchise, which originated with The Hands That Lead. The rules of the game remain the same, but all the rest is my own particular brand of madness, and nobody else should be blamed for it.
BIMBO OR BILLIONAIRE: WIN / WIN
1. HAPPY GO LUCKY
“Yes, folks, tonight’s contestant is Emma, and it is time to get the answer we all want… the answer to the question that’s on all your minds... Is she a... Bimbo! Or! Billionaire!” The announcer’s voice came roaring across the PA system and the audience roared back in demented response. They always know they’ll get what they want. The words are always the same, across every single episode, and this one was no different. It’s the most predictable part of this sexy little show, actually, and scripted with hard-wired Pavlovian precision to excite the masses to a feeding frenzy; bear baiting, cock fighting, Christians and lions; bread and circuses for a very bad age.
Oh, just listen to me going on, all patronising and pretentious in my head. You would think I’d have learnt by now. I guess you’re only hearing one random word in ten anyway, which if I had to guess would probably be along the lines of: “Emma wants your sexy hard cock very bad.” Because we all know that’s how this game works, right?
Anyway, I’ll try to rein in the social commentary from now on. As for the prototype, yes; I’ve been working on it for nearly two years now, in between filming of course, and no, I certainly haven’t given up hope. Only last week I managed to turn a mouse from white to green! Okay, it died shortly afterwards; but some progress at last. I really think I’m close to cracking the whole thing now. You just wait.
I admit I was nervous as hell that day. In the studio, the audience wouldn’t stop shouting. Jack, the presenter, leered at the audience, egging them on shamelessly. It was his skill at manipulating the crowds that had won him presenter of the year two years in a row, I thought. It was instructive to see him in his element; like a shark amongst the shoals.
“Thank you Dan! And now, it’s time to meet this evening’s contestant, Emma.” He turned to me with a wolfish grin, and I felt exactly like prey. “Good evening Emma!”
I’d noticed everything Jack said seemed to end with an exclamation mark.
I assembled my face into my best available smile. “Hi Jack,” I said, exactly as rehearsed. “I’m so pleased to be here!” And indeed I was, I thought, although the Collar of Fate was an uncomfortable presence around my neck and a reminder of exactly how random this show could be. As the format dictated, I wore nothing else except my bra and panties. I admit I was nervous, standing there on display, but it’s amazing how fast you can get used to things.
“So Emma. Tell us a little about yourself!”
“Well, Jack, I’m twenty four years old, and I’m a PhD math student.” Oooh, went the audience. Get you! “Yes, and I’m working on the Reimann Hypothesis, since you ask, and I work part time in a local bar, and they call me—ah—Happy-Go-Lucky!”
This was not entirely true.
“Tell us something about this Reimann Hypothesis, Emma? I’m sure the audience is all agog!”
The audience gave no indication of being any such thing.
“Jack, it’s a little technical. But mathematicians have been trying to crack it for years. It’s a well-documented example of a long-standing problem that has become accessible to analysis only recently, with the twenty-first century math toolkit. The Reimann Hypothesis is all about the distribution of prime numbers, and it rest on certain conjectures about the zeta function for complex numbers. Many other proofs in number theory rest on the solution to this one, including a variety of hypotheses referring to the solvability of problems in polynomial and non-polynomial times. And numbers are extremely important; if you understand numbers, you can understand everything. If you don’t understand numbers, you don’t understand anything—right?”
Silence. The audience shuffled uncomfortably in their seats. I thought I detected a tumbleweed passing.
“Right, Emma, sure. And why do you want to play … Bimbo or Billionaire, Miss Happy-Go-Lucky?”
“Jack, with the economy being so poor these days, I’m just here for the money!”
Whoop! Whoop!, went the audience, back on familiar territory.
This was also not entirely true.
The game was a simple concept, and in theory you could argue there was pretty much a fifty-fifty chance of winning that elusive billion dollars if you played the game out to the end. In theory. In practice, nobody had actually ever done so. Therefore, the game was if not precisely rigged, then at least patently skewed towards a certain early outcome. I had studied the odds in detail, with my maths head on.
Everyone knew the show involved one contestant, and twenty-four numbered boxes. Twelve represented money, in escalating order of value, with the precious last box containing a full billion dollars. Twelve represented changes, administered via the Collar of Fate, in a predetermined order designed to create a—bimbo (I hated that word)—via the added bonus of audience participation.
The first round involved the contestant—in this case me, Emma—picking twelve boxes out of the twenty four available. The second round would involve picking six from the remaining twelve. The third, three from the remaining six. The fourth, one from three, and the final round, if I got that far, would be one from the remaining two boxes.
It was a win / win situation, as far as I could see.
“Ok Emma, let’s get a few housekeeping items out of the way and we can get going. First off I’d like to bring everyone’s attention to our case girl Chrissi!”
As always the spotlight highlighted Chrissi and the buxom blonde waved and giggled as the crowd cheered and whistled. Everybody knew what had happened to Chrissi; it was the stuff of legend, but it didn’t stop Jack repeating it in every single show.
“Yes! Chrissi was the unluckiest contestant to ever play our game here and opened twelve bimbo cases in a row. But we just couldn’t let her leave with nothing, could we? No! So what did we do? We didn’t let her leave at all! And she’s been with us ever since.” The audience whooped with delight, and Chrissi jiggled her chest fetchingly at them, delighted at the attention.
I knew the odds of this happening were approximately one in three million, if the boxes were indeed randomly organised. Specifically, there were just under three million possible combinations of twelve boxes, but only one set of twelve within this contained no bimbo box. Chrissi had indeed been egregiously unlucky, although looked at from another point of view, she’d won the lottery of sexual gorgeousness, and a lot of guys went mad for that bimbo look, so hey ho, who was to say? Each to their own.
“And in the back of the studio we also have the fine technical folks who are operating the Collar of Fate tonight, we won’t get a chance to see them but we’ll certainly see their work on stage!”
Nobody knew quite how the Collar of Fate worked—but it worked, all right. And this was a matter of great interest to me.
“And … we cannot forget our generous benefactor, who has put up the billion dollar prize! Our mystery man that we simply call ‘The Accountant’". As always the pitch black area above the columns of monitors was backlit revealing a person sitting at a desk but obscured in darkness. Who the fuck, I thought, had that kind of money to put up for a game show?
“Of course you all know our board, two sides with twelve steps each, revealed one at a time as the cases are opened. As always the cash side starts at a penny and works its way up to one billion dollars!
“The bimbo side is divided in to two halves, the first six are physical changes that the ‘Collar of Fate’ will make and the second half are mental changes. Each of the changes will be selected by an audience vote from a list of four random selections from our database of bimbo-tastic ideas, with a few wild cards thrown in too.”
These are the rules we’re all familiar with. Jack turned back to me. “So, Emma, lovely little Emma, it’s a numbers game, you love your math, so ‘mathematics’ is our theme tonight, just for you.” The audience actually groaned at that, the philistines. “Are you ready to play Bimbo or Billionaire?”
The Collar of Fate sat warm and heavy round my neck, quiet for now but freighted with possibilities. I knew precisely what it was capable of; how it did it was a different matter entirely.
“Absolutely,” I said, giving the audience the requisite artificial giggle of enthusiasm. “Let’s play!”
A win / win situation, I’d thought, as I sat in hair and makeup being prepped for TV. Television! Who would have thought it?
The makeup girls were frowning in concentration as they worked; they were pros, and they were doing the best with what they had, but it wasn’t great.
The way I looked at this game was that I was in a no-lose position. I’d seen women transformed, and I’d seen women made rich, and everything in between, and the best place—the only place—to be was somewhere in between. I’d come to make a deal. That was the only logical thing to do.
As for ‘happy-go-lucky’: the fact was, and it killed me to know it, I just wasn’t that popular. I wasn’t totally unattractive, I thought—no beauty, of course, but who in the real world is?—but nothing had worked out in that department for some time. I also couldn’t help blurting out the wrong thing at the wrong time. Don’t do that with your tongue, it’s making me gag. Well, you’re no oil painting, mister. Bit on the small side, aren’t we? That kind of thing. Off the subject of mathematics, I couldn’t seem to help it. Perhaps it was because I was smart, Professor Wilson’s star student, in fact; and some people actually said I was a smartass. Idiots. Plus, for your further information, my smile was slightly lopsided, and not in a good way. And I could definitely do with some work on my hair.
Therefore, I thought, worst case scenario was that I’d do a deal and come out of this with a few dollars plus some significant improvements to my dating prospects, hopefully with the looks and charm to attract the right kind of guy, and the Reimann Hypothesis squarely in my sights.
A billion dollars felt as alien as the far side of the moon, but even fifty thousand—or, please!—a hundred thousand would be life changing. Okay, I might miss out on some useful transformations, but what an outcome that would be. Either way, I knew I would come out ahead.
But there was one more crucial thing. I wanted to know how the Collar of Fate actually worked.