BIMBO OR BILLIONAIRE: WIN / WIN
2. BEAUTIFUL
“So, Emma, as you know, your first task is to pick twelve boxes from twenty four. Just imagine! You could get to the billion on your very first go!” And Jack turned to the audience with an arch grin. Everyone in the room laughed uproariously at that. Sure, it could happen in theory—just look at Chrissi, and think the opposite—but it was so unlikely as to be impossible, and there would be a riot if it did happen.
The boxes were arrayed in front of me, beautiful numbers on their fronts, all in neat order from one to twenty-four, and each containing either ‘bimbo’ or ‘money’. It was that simple.
The prime numbers were winking at me alluringly: two, three, five, seven, eleven, thirteen, seventeen, nineteen, twenty-three (one is strictly not a prime number, of course), and on and on beyond the boxes to infinity; the elusive pattern that is not a pattern. The basis of everything in the world.
I smiled gamely back at Jack, trying not be too lopsided, and started picking random numbers.
The first two boxes were from the money side of the board, and against all mathematical logic, I began to wonder ‘what if’. But randomness is just that, and the third box was not money, and a few cheers broke out from the audience at that.
Jack gave me a shit-eating grin. “So Emma—you’re up a big fat ten cents, and here’s your first Bimbo Box. The category is ‘hair’; our math theme is ‘binary’, and the audience options are: option A—one bedraggled blonde; option B—two streaks of ravishing red; option C—four brunette ponytails; and option D—wait for it—eight shades of beguiling blue.” What? Who the fuck had blue hair? The audience tittered like teenagers. I resisted the urge to make a snarky remark. I suspected it might not go down well. “Audience—choose NOW!”
The little graphs on the monitor started ticking up, bedraggled blonde a clear favourite at first, but then, coming up on the outside, slowly at first, then gathering momentum… eight shades of beguiling blue.
“The audience has spoken!” Jack was already excited. “I knew we had a creative and interesting bunch in tonight. Beguiling blue it is, Emma.”
The Collar came to life, and as I watched on the big monitor, I saw what the audience saw: my slightly straggly and unkempt brown hair disappeared, and in its place a bright electric-blue razor-cut bob, streaked with complex layers of deeper and lighter tones. The blue was a little shocking, but the more I looked at it the more I thought it could work. It was certainly attention grabbing. It’d need a careful choice of accessories.
How did it work? I wondered, pondering the sudden shocking blueness of my hair. I discounted magic, of course, that would just be silly. Therefore, technology; indistinguishable from magic, of course, if sufficiently advanced. The thing was very closely guarded, and as far as anyone knew there was only one in the world.
Another money box, next, and I was up to the princely sum of one whole dollar. I looked around the boxes. Random; no pattern to discern. So unlike the clarity of math. I picked another.
“Your second Bimbo Box, Emma! ‘Voice’, I believe,” said Jack. Yes, I thought, the boxes always came in a specific order. The question was, what would be the options?
“So in keeping with our theme, these options relate to vectors,” said Jack. “Audience, I know you know this, but for those at home who don’t, a vector is a quantity having direction as well as magnitude.”
He read them out, and the options appeared on the big screen. ‘Easy eastern promise’; probably some me-love-you-long-time affair, I guessed. Could be tricky. ‘Sloooow southern belle’: all sugary sweetness, no doubt, and very different from my clipped Bostonian tones. ‘Wild western wonders’: who the hell knew? And ‘Natural northern lights’; another mystery.
“Audience: choose now!” said Jack, and to some urgent music, the audience began their voting.
‘Natural northern lights’ it was. I kept my mouth shut, wondering, putting off the inevitable, and wondering how ‘natural’ could be considered a quantity that possessed actual magnitude. Some of their themes seemed woefully inexact.
“Say something for us, Emma!”
“My name is Emma, and I am here to win,” I said. The voice that came out surprised me; it was like a purr, deep and seductive, very sexy, naturally so, with a very slight accent—Scandinavian, I thought. Much better than my own. The audience enjoyed this immensely, and one bright spark shouted out ‘love the voice! Phone me!’
Shocking blue hair, sexy voice; I was enjoying myself so far. For sure I would attract attention, out there in the world. A win / win.
“We could listen to you all day, Emma. But let’s get on with the game,” cried Jack.
The next one was bad luck too, and Chrissi grinned a happy smile of commiseration or sisterhood as she opened the box. There, in big red letters, the ghastly word ‘bimbo’.
“Lips! And our theme is ‘basic shapes’. So here are the options. A: permapout; B: puffed up pillows; C: smile like you mean it; D: lipsmackingly lovely. Vote now!” And by each option, a neat geometrical shape.
Please let it be the sunny semicircular arc of ‘smile like you mean it’, I thought, or the pleasantly symmetrical ellipse of lipsmackingly lovely. But I guessed the audience would have one thing on their minds by now. And so it came to pass.
“Permapout is the audience’s choice.”
The Collar throbbed gently, and I felt my lips swelling gently, and the muscles of my face rearranging themselves, tightening slowly but inexorably. The audience cheered. I looked at myself on the monitor. My mouth was half open, my plump—and now bright red—lips in an almost perfect fat circle of pouting invitation. I tried to close my mouth, to press them together, but no dice. However hard I tried, it was still a pout, and the harder I tried the more pouty I looked. Frowning didn’t work either, it just looked like I was blowing a kiss; I tried smiling instead, and what came out was a pout of utter carnality.
My mouth looked like it was gearing up for one thing and one thing only. I licked my lips, and watched on the monitor as that simple action sent out an unmistakeable signal that could not fail to be read by any man watching.
“How are you feeling, beautiful blue haired Emma?”
I pouted at Jack and purred: “Very pouty.” The audience loved that. I would get them onside, I thought, and that would make sure they weren’t cruel. I had seen girls suffer at the hands of a cruel audience.
I got up to a thousand dollars with a run of three money boxes, then, and the audience applauded. I pouted my thanks at them, and saw a good-looking guy in the front row give me the thumbs up. Good looking guys didn’t normally give me the thumbs up, so this was real progress. I pouted at him in heartfelt thanks, and the expression on my face must have been quite something, because he actually blushed.
But what goes around comes around, and the next three boxes were wall-to-wall Bimbo.
There was a coherence about the audience’s choices, I thought, as the Collar of Fate hummed warm around my neck, doing its work as commanded. For body shape, ‘complex curves’ being the theme, the fourth box in the Bimbo hierarchy, they could have chosen hourglass, pear shaped, or slender, all relatively simple projections of elliptic functions in the complex plane: they went for ‘bootylicious’. I felt my buttocks swelling, tightening, perking up behind me, and I knew I would not be unhappy with that. I felt the muscles in my legs tightening up too, a consequential blessing.
The monitor showed something positively striking, and I felt an overwhelming urge to bend over and give the audience a twerk, so I did, to much hilarity and applause. My panties were stretched, but just about holding themselves together.
My mind ticked with speculation. The Collar was so fast at what it did. To run transformations of such molecular complexity was impossible; yet it wasn’t, and here was the proof. Insights bubbled. It must, I conjectured, be running non-polynomial problems in polynomial time; a quantum computer could do that. But quantum computers were as real as fairies. Therefore, there must be a way to transform the non-polynomial problem into a polynomial one, and that implied something very interesting indeed…
The fifth box—breasts—was a different matter entirely, and my bra went in an instant, the straps snapping under pressure. I quickly raised my hands to cover them, but that wasn’t easy given the audience’s choice—‘gravity defying’. I had wondered what that meant—the other choices, ‘naturally pert’, ‘artificially obvious’, and ‘supernaturally large’ were clearer. The math theme in this instance was cardinals, a generalization of the natural numbers used to measure the size of sets. They were stretching their theme a bit here, I thought, but that wasn’t all they were stretching.
The audience whooped and cheered. I felt my breasts swelling further under my hands. My God, when would they stop? I pressed down, to no effect, and felt my nipples straining against my hands. The Collar throbbed. I dropped my hands and looked to the monitor.
My breasts bulged out proudly, full and round and high, twin globes, the nipples prominent and red, and there was surely no way on earth they could be self-supporting like that? Instinctively, I bent back slightly against their unfamiliar weight. Gravity defying they may have looked, but it was my own muscles that were supporting them. I felt the Collar give a final shudder, and I felt new and hitherto unknown muscles come into play, hoisting them a little higher. They stuck straight out now, nipples erect, an impossible display.
“My, my, Emma,” Jack was saying. “Aren’t you a picture. What do you think, audience?”
Whoop, whoop, whoop. I turned and bent in display on the stage, as I had been told was expected of me, and pouted my appreciation. I gave a little jiggle and my gravity-defying breasts wobbled gratifyingly. You had to play the game.
He turned back to me. “Now Emma, the final box of the round.”
I eenie-meenie-minie-mo’ed, and finally indicated a box to the far left; there was no telling, of course, That was the nature of randomness.
And that, by the way, was the essence of the Reimann Hypothesis. Prime number distribution; just when you thought they were getting predictable, one would pop up just where you weren’t expecting it. You could never tell with numbers—take a number, any very large number, and try to break it into prime factors, and you would be left head scratching for a very long time, even with the fastest computers on earth. It was at the heart of everything, now; every machine in the world ran on prime number factorial codes, and they were unbreakable.
Chrissie hoisted open the lid, one of her breasts falling out of her dress as she did. If she noticed it, she didn’t let on.
“Bad luck, Emma! Another Bimbo Box. And believe me, this one’s always a doozy. Let’s talk about your face!
“Listen carefully, members of the audience. Our theme is ‘probability’. The choices are: A, surprise, suprise; B, mean girl; C, significantly different; and D, ah, just your average slut. Vote away!”
‘Surprise, surprise’, came the answer on the screen. I felt the Collar doing its stuff, and the feeling was extraordinary. I could actually feel the structure of my face changing; my cheekbones swelling, my eyes widening. My brow was smooth and untroubled. On the monitor I watched as my eyes changed from the familiar dark brown to a lustrous, sparkling blue, exactly the same shade as my hair. And they were so big, those eyes! The lashes darkened and lengthened, accentuating the look of surprise. I thought I looked a little stupid, but there was no denying the allure of that look.
“You’re beautiful, Emma!” yelled someone in the audience, and I couldn’t help but agree. I tested a few expressions, but vacant wide-eyed sensual pout was the result. This was me, now, and there was no going back. I could imagine all heads would turn.
Prime numbers. Complex factorials. P/NP. The Collar must run on the same basis, I thought. It was a machine; how could it not? Another insight popped into my head. The world is all about codes. The human body is an immensely complicated code, at root. The Collar of Fate must in some way be able to factorise the attributes of the unique individual—physically, mentally—and work with the source code itself. And if that was true—
I chanced another glance at the monitor. I looked exactly like a futuristic sex doll, with my red pouting lips, vacant blue eyes, extraordinary breasts—and blue hair aside, I was pretty sure I was irresistible. Good enough progress, I thought. But I wasn’t about to stop now. Leaving aside the rest of it, I had an inkling the Reimann Hypothesis was in my sights, and the workings of the Collar were becoming clearer by the minute.