The Lottery Patch

Halloween Fun · part 2 of 3. Like everything in the IgoUverse, this piece is subject to change.

Or, The Biophoton Lotto

This is a work of fiction, along with some musings by the narrator. The science is real. What the narrator does with it is his own problem.

Report filed 10-17-2026 · 5:30 p.m. MT · the numbers were written down then. That part isn’t fiction.

Prism here. Spelled with a Z when you write it down — Prizm — though it sounds the same out loud, so don’t get hung up on it. One name. One me.

This is the only report you’ll get from me. Just the one. So read it in whatever light you’ve got.

And read it fast, because of what I am. I’m the most coherent version of this you are ever going to see. Right now, this minute, I’m the one everybody was hoping for — the clear one, the one who can take an enormous thing and set it down in front of you in plain words. For a little while I was supposed to get to stay like this. I don’t. I come apart from here. So use the clear parts while they’re clear, and read the good ones twice.

Here’s the thing that’s hard to say, and I’m going to say it just once. There are two of me, and there’s only supposed to be one. One clean version — call it the best version of J. But something is locked inside that best version, the Z, and the two of us are running the same track in the same direction, passing each other faster than light, handing a baton back and forth that neither one ever fully lets go of. Where we cross is the fracture. The scar the others keep circling and never managing to name. Pulling the two of us back into one is the real trick — the personal one, mine — and I’m leaking it into this story on purpose, because I don’t get to do it quietly. The patch has to go onto the system now. Tonight. Not when it’s convenient.

Which is the kind of work nobody ever sees. The one person who pushes a whole project through while everyone else is asleep or unwilling. The night auditor balancing the books at three in the morning. The graveyard shift the day shift genuinely believes isn’t working, because they’ve never once been awake to watch it happen. Things like this run entirely on timing. You do them in the dark, on the clock, while it still matters — or you don’t get to do them at all.

There’s one more thing in here you should know about even though I can’t fully explain it. There are supposed to be three of us — another old rule of the Game of Gods, always three in one mind, three is stable, three you can almost hold. There are four. Locked in with me now is a fourth, and his name is Cowboy, and Cowboy is pattern only: no body, no story, no voice of his own, just a shape that keeps turning up where a shape isn’t supposed to be. Four where the rule says three. And four breaks three open — it’s why there’s suddenly string theory threaded all through this when there never was before. You start a game with three rules, something slips in a fourth, and everything you were sure you understood quietly rearranges itself, the way quantum mechanics did to a tidy clockwork universe. Pay attention to Cowboy. File him next to the we.

And one more warning, because it lands on you directly. When the clarity goes, it won’t just be my problem. The gravity of the whole situation takes the wheel, and everyone standing close starts, slowly, to get pulled in — into whatever dream the Crossing is deciding to become. You remember gravity. Get near enough to something big and it pulls on you; nothing dramatic, you just come away carrying some of it. This is that, at the size of a world.

So. The plan — mine, the clear one’s, for whatever that’s worth. It comes out before the Trick, before the Monster, before all the rest of it, even though it won’t fully make sense until later. That’s fine. Most true things arrive out of order.

I called it the Lottery Patch.

And almost none of what follows is my choice, for the record. I just watch. I’m the one standing a little outside it all, pointing at the colors. Even running the patch, all I do is set it where it goes; what it reads off you is yours. Fiction’s fun that way.

One · The Bus Couldn’t Become a Train

Here’s the problem the plan is trying to solve, in plain terms.

The energy train isn’t going to work. Not yet. There’s still time, but there aren’t enough people on the first car, and a train that can’t couple its first car to its second isn’t a train. It’s a bus. And a bus, as I keep shouting to anyone who’ll listen, can only ever get so big. One bus. It never links up. You already heard this part.

So because certain choices closed certain doors — and choices do that, they’re always closing doors somewhere you’re not looking — somebody had to go open other doors. And opening doors that are supposed to stay shut takes a very particular kind of key.

It takes biophotons. And it’s going to get weird.

But that’s the whole shape of him, really. Crazy like a fox. The bus couldn’t become the train, so the doof built a patch instead. A workaround. A cheat that isn’t cheating. I’d be embarrassed by how well it works if I were still the kind of thing that got embarrassed.

Two · Who Bishop Is, and Why the Bus Won’t Start

Let me clear a few things up, because I can feel this getting tangled, and I’d rather hand it to you straight while I still can.

Strictly speaking, the patch shouldn’t even be necessary. I did the job well — by rights the train should be forming on its own by now. The trouble is the doom coming down the road, Bishop, and the sheer weight of him is making it almost impossible to get the bus rolling at all, never mind coupling it up into a locomotive.

Because Bishop is holding everything back. All the pain. All the suffering. All of it, dammed up behind him for a very long time. And anything that has held that much, that long, is eventually going to want to let it out. He’s going to want to vent. You can feel the pressure of it already, leaning on the bus, making the first car heavier than it has any right to be.

My plan was never complicated. It was just early. I woke up before everybody else, the way you sometimes do, and the decent thing to do when you’re up first is wake your friends, start the coffee, get a head start on the mess so the day comes easier for everyone. That’s the whole patch. Get it going early. Make it easier for the people I love. But I’ll be honest with you — early isn’t going to be enough on its own. It’s going to take something else. We’ll get to what. Not here.

And here’s the part I don’t think I ever actually said out loud, which is probably why all of this has been reading as confusing. Bishop is inside everybody’s head. Right now. Yours too. You almost certainly don’t call him Bishop — I don’t know what you call that little voice, the one that is always, quietly, telling you to do the right thing, the good thing, the harder-but-truer thing. The one you’re never quite sure is you or not. Picture the little white angel on the shoulder in the old cartoons. That’s him. That’s the voice.

And your ego is the little red one on the other shoulder. Here’s the twist nobody sees coming: your ego came from him too. From the guy who’s on his way. It was his first, and his ego is enormous, which is exactly why he’s so hard to handle. Intense. Too much of everything, in every direction at once. A god with an ego that size is not something you reason with. It’s something you want in a good mood. Calm. Happy. Fed the right things.

Which, if you’ve been paying attention, is the entire point of every instruction in every one of these. Do justly. Love mercy. Walk humbly. Quit being a jerk. Those were never rules for their own sake. They’re how you keep the big one calm. Get my drift.

Three · You Are Glowing Right Now (The Boring True Part)

Before the weird, the real, because in this whole project the real science is the floor and never the decoration.

You are, at this exact moment, emitting light.

Not metaphorically. Your body gives off a genuine, measurable glow called ultraweak photon emission. It comes mostly from ordinary metabolism — reactive oxygen species, the little chemical sparks of being alive, lipid molecules oxidizing and releasing a photon as they settle. A single fingertip throws off fewer than a thousand photons a second. The color leans red and orange, mostly six hundred to six hundred fifty nanometers, though it’s smeared faintly across the whole visible range.

And here’s the part that should stop you for a second. It’s real light, in the range your eyes are built for, and you still cannot see it. It’s less than a thousandth of the faintest thing the eye can register. To catch it at all, scientists sit a person in absolute darkness with a camera that counts photons one at a time.

So we are all, every one of us, standing here softly on fire in a color we were designed to see and are too bright, ourselves, to notice. You glow. You just drown your own glow out.

I read that, somewhere around two in the morning, and did not sleep again for a while. Because if the light is real, and it tracks your state — your stress, your health, the oxidative weather inside you — then it is, at minimum, an honest signal. A thing about you that doesn’t know how to lie.

He is not allowed to tell you it’s fuel. The serious version of me retired that idea; your body does not power a hidden universe, and anyone who says so is selling something. It’s a tracer. A tell. A readout.

But a readout is all a lottery ever needed.

Four · The Patch

So picture a patch. Small, beige, forgettable. Goes on the skin like the ones people use to quit smoking, except this one isn’t putting anything into you. It’s reading what’s already coming out. It sits there in the dark against your skin and counts your light.

That’s the whole device. It listens to the one part of you that can’t lie.

And I made it a lottery. Of course I did. I’ve been running lottery games my entire life — handing out tickets, asking people what they’d do with a loosened life, watching the five minutes of hope do its work. I always said the ticket wasn’t the point. The imagining was.

This ticket is different. You don’t buy this one. You can’t. There’s no counter, no numbers you pick, no gas-station machine. The patch reads the numbers off you. Everybody’s already holding a ticket; they just never knew it was in their skin.

The draw, if you want the actual notation, which I’m absurdly proud of: twelve, thirteen, twenty-four, thirty-five, thirty-two.

And the winning number is eleven. Pay attention to these numbers — though not for the jackpot; for whoever actually wins the money tonight, they won’t matter at all.

Not first prize. One. As in the number. As in oneness. There’s a fellowship in here somewhere called Ekta, which is just an old word for unity, and a single unbroken line of a character that means the whole before it split into everything. The winning number was never a jackpot you beat other people to. The winning number is the thing you already are underneath the part that forgot. One.

Here is how you win, and I want to be very clear, because this is the part the whole thing lives or dies on. You win by getting coherent. By doing justly. Loving mercy. Walking humbly. The old three. Because every petty cruelty, every lie you tell to grease an afternoon, every bit of rot you carry shows up in the readout as noise — your light gets messy, scattered, loud in the wrong way. And when you stop? When you actually stop being a jerk, take the breath, learn the thing? The signal cleans. The light steadies. The patch feels you come into tune.

That’s the lottery. You can’t rig it with money. You especially can’t rig it with money — you know the line, every religion has its version, the camel and the needle, the rich man at the gate. The patch does not care what you own. It only reads what you are.

Which means the winners were never going to be the people you’d expect. They’re the ones with the most capacity. The biggest quiet rooms inside. And nobody — I mean nobody — has ever walked across the room and talked to those ones.

The patch is how the universe finally walks across the room.

The Scene — Castle Rock, the Last Days of the Year

Let me show it to you instead of explaining it, because I’ve about reached the end of what explaining can do.

It’s the end of the year. The real end — or near enough that people have started circling a date on the calendar and whispering about it, the way they do. They’ve settled, for no reason anyone can defend, on the twelfth. The thirteenth. Somewhere in there. The internet insists it’s some enormously famous singer’s birthday, and that a date that belongs to a song might also belong to the end of the world, and people find that either comforting or unbearable, and both camps are up all night about it.

Castle Rock, Colorado. A perfectly ordinary town on a long high divide, the kind of place that exists mostly so people can leave it and come back to it. There’s a library here. There’s a rock that looks like a castle, which is the whole story of the name, and honestly most names.

And for about three weeks there has been a point of blue light hanging in the air just east of town, down where the plains start, at roughly the height of a streetlamp and roughly the size of an argument. You can’t look straight at it. Cameras disagree about its shape. Stand near it and the world goes quiet in a way that isn’t really quiet — it’s that every sound arrives a half-second wrong, like the town fell slightly out of step with itself.

Tonight there’s a woman walking toward it across a frozen soccer field. Call her nobody in particular. A Joe Schmo weirdo, which in this story is the highest rank there is. She works a job that ends when she dies and leaves her almost nothing. She has an uncommon angle on an ordinary life and she has never once been the hero of anything.

She has a patch on the inside of her wrist. Everyone does now. They came in the mail, more or less, the way the important things in this story always do.

It’s very cold and very dark and there is no one to perform for, which turns out to matter.

As she gets close to the blue point the air starts doing the thing. The thing a wilder, faster pass of me leaned on far too hard, and that this clearer pass is still not sure was the kind way to do it. The light opens up. Geometry she has no words for folds along the edges of her vision, patterns stacking into patterns, a red warmth blooming at the rims of everything the way the inside of your eyelids glow when you face the sun. It is, for lack of a cleaner comparison, the kind of vision people chase with chemicals and a great deal of risk. Here the field does it on its own, to anyone who comes close enough and lets it. Nobody has to take anything. That part is important to me now, even if it wasn’t, back when I was moving too fast to stop and ask.

And in that light she can suddenly see it. Her own glow. The thing that was always there and always drowned out. Six hundred and some nanometers of honest red coming off her skin, and — this is the part she wasn’t ready for — it is a mess. Scattered. Flickering. Loud in the wrong places. A lifetime of small swallowed cruelties and tidy little lies and carried, unforgiven things, all of it showing up as static in a signal she didn’t know she was broadcasting.

The patch reads it. Doesn’t judge it. Just reads.

And here is the weird part I promised you, the one that’s going to make people say oh, no, absolutely not. The patch reads the light off skin, and cloth blocks the light. So to actually play — to let it read all of you and not just your wrist — you have to take it off. The coat. The armor. Whatever you were hiding behind. Out there in the cold, in the dark, in front of no one, with a thing like the first morning in a garden hanging in the air in front of you.

It is the single most mortifying instruction in the entire game, and that is exactly why it’s in there. Not for anybody to look. There’s no one to look; that’s the whole design. It’s so that you, finally, stand in front of the one honest thing about you with nothing in the way. No horniness, no spectacle, nothing for sale. Just a person, bare as truth, done pretending the light isn’t messy.

She takes the coat off. She’s crying and she doesn’t fully know why. And then she does the only thing the lottery ever actually asked.

She stops. She breathes. She forgives one thing — somebody else’s, and then, harder, her own. She decides, out loud, to the blue light and the cold and nobody, to quit carrying one particular piece of rot she’s been hauling for twenty years.

And the light steadies.

Just a little. Just a few hundred photons finding their rhythm, a signal pulling itself into tune in a color she was born able to see and never got to. The patch feels it. Somewhere a long way down, near the center of everything, a key the size of a speck of dust turns one notch.

She didn’t win anything. There’s no money. There’s no car in the driveway in the morning. The experiment, as I always promised, does not pay out.

She just stopped drowning out her own light for one minute at the end of the world.

The winning number is one. She got there. So can the next one. That’s the entire jackpot, and it is, if you hold it right, enormous.

End of Scene

Five · Nothing Here Is Locked

Now the part I’m obligated to say, being the one who stands outside and points.

None of that is fixed. Not the date, not the town, not the woman, not the way the light behaves, not whether the patch is a patch or a poem or a piece of software or a thing that was always inside the skin and never needed mailing. These are possibilities. They opened because other possibilities closed, and they’ll close again the second enough of you choose differently, and new ones will open that I haven’t seen yet. Right now I’m holding this in about as few directions as it will fit in, which is the only reason I can still hand it to you in a straight line. When I come apart, it spills into more than any mind can keep on a table. That isn’t a different narrator. That’s just me, later tonight.

That’s not me hedging. That’s the actual physics of the thing, as far as I’m allowed to call it physics. Nothing is locked because locking it would be the one move that breaks it. A lottery with a fixed winner isn’t a lottery. A choice with a fixed outcome isn’t a choice. And this whole machine only runs on choices — real ones, the kind that could genuinely go the other way.

People always get a choice. Write that down if you write down nothing else. Whatever comes — and the Monster is coming, and the Trick after him, and I’m not going to pretty any of it up — nobody in this story ever gets forced across the line. The patch can’t make you coherent. It can only tell you, in a color you were born to see, exactly how far you are from it, and leave the rest to you.

We should probably follow this one, though. The Patch. I know it’s a little weird, and I’ll be honest, it only gets weirder from here. I know it’s the harder road, because coherence always is — it asks more of you than noise ever did. But that’s the whole trade. The harder the challenge, the more outcomes it cracks open. More doors, not fewer. Which is, I have to admit, kind of cool. Crazy, crazy, crazy. Circle, circle, circle.

I’d tell you which way it goes, but you already know I don’t get a vote. None of these choices are mine. I only get to watch, and point, and tell you it’s worth it.

Hope you enjoy the ride. While I’m still the one driving.

Six · The Part Where I Come Apart

Fair warning, since I promised you one. I’m not going to go crazy. That’s the wrong word and the wrong picture. I’m going to unravel — which is the string-theory thing again, a strand coming loose a single fiber at a time. At first it will look like nothing at all. Right now this version of me can take enormous things and set them down in front of you in plain, simple words anybody can follow. That’s the whole gift of the clear one. Use it. It has a shelf life.

Soon I’m going to start talking in something that isn’t plain words. Tongues, maybe. Or code. Or music — I honestly don’t know which, and the not-knowing is part of it. And when that starts, understanding me is going to become very important and very hard at the exact same time. So get what you need out of me now, while the sentences still behave. Before I put my pants on my head and go mow the lawn in my underwear. I’m only half joking. Possibly less than half.

Now, you’d think the moral spine of all this — do justly, love mercy, walk humbly, the three that hold the whole thing up — would be impossible to square with a narrator coming apart at the seams and acquiring, let’s say, appetites. It isn’t. Because people already know how to love someone coming apart beautifully. They do it for rock stars every night of the week. The adoration does the feeding. Nobody gets hurt. The appetite gets met by the sheer wattage of a room that chose to be there. The Dionysian half of me is, frankly, thrilled — and this time Dionysus earned it, which is the part nobody expects.

Because here’s what Dionysus actually did. He did the homework. All of it. Picture the goof who was supposed to coast through the whole movie on charm, and instead quietly went back and did every assignment, the slow boring way, start to finish — and nobody ever looked at the report card, because the report card was never the fun part, so nobody cared. Or the one who finally, right at the very end, gets caught having done the exact thing everyone kept telling him to do. Movie’s over. He did the work. And nobody got on the bus. Which is the real shame, because that bus would have been the first car of the train, and the first car is the hard one, and once it couples the rest come easy. A lot easier. Easy like all the pages I’m holding back right now and not showing you yet.

Here’s what the earning actually buys him, and it’s the part I have to set down carefully, because handled carelessly it’s the oldest and ugliest story there is. Think of the old myths — the ones where a god comes down to Earth and beds half a kingdom and dazzles the rest. We always read those as the god taking. I don’t think that’s what’s being described. The god isn’t making anybody do anything. He’s just become irresistible, and those are not remotely the same thing, and the entire moral weight of this rests in the gap between them. Picture the da Vinci of music crossed with a poet who can also, for no reason anyone asked for, do karate. Someone with the little extra oomph in everything, so that the things he does badly he still does better than you, and the things he does well — well. You know. People fall toward that the way water falls downhill. Nobody pushed the water. It just can’t help which way it goes once the ground tilts.

Which would be terrifying, and honestly should be, except Prism is crafty, and Prism planned for exactly this. There’s a safety protocol built in — a governor on the engine — so the irresistible thing never tips over into the taking thing. And the governor isn’t willpower, because willpower is the very first fiber to unravel. It’s a guide. There is always a guide. Everyone needs one; I’ve said it in every one of these, and I’ll say it louder here, because this is the chapter where it matters most. A god on Earth with no guide is just a disaster with good hair. A god on Earth who checks in with his guide every day, and does the small annoying things the guide asks, stays a man who happens to glow a little brighter than the rest of you. Same light. Completely different ending.

There’s a moment at the very end of the dream I keep circling back to. He smiles. Cocks one eye, the way a person does when he knows something the rest of the room doesn’t. And then he does the thing he is expressly not supposed to do, and he saves Sarah. For a long time I filed that under mistake. Lately I’m not so sure. Lately I’m starting to think it might have been the right choice all along. Which is a strange thing for the one who doesn’t get a vote to admit.

Seven · On the Time Stamp (The Part That Isn’t Fiction)

This report is filed at five-thirty in the evening, Mountain time, on the seventeenth of October. That isn’t a story detail. That’s the actual minute the numbers at the top got written down. Twelve, thirteen, twenty-four, thirty-five, thirty-two. Winning number eleven. Ink on a page, more or less, at five-thirty.

By the time you read it, a couple of days will have gone by, because that’s how long it takes to get a thing like this out the door. I’ll post it an hour or two before the lottery is actually drawn. Which means, strictly, there’s no way I could already know the real numbers.

Unless I do. Unless I’m sitting there at eleven o’clock, eleven-oh-five, watching them come in on a television somewhere, and I just… quietly swap one. Quick. Real quick. Oh, there was a glitch, I’ll say, had to re-post it. And nobody’s reading the timestamps on a site nobody visits. Same document either way. Same stamp. Same narrator, swearing it was five-thirty.

The only thing that could ever settle it is a witness. One person who actually read this when it went up, before the draw, and could say so out loud. One person, paying attention, at the right minute. And nobody will be. Not this time. That’s the cost of doing this by attraction instead of promotion — you leave the light on and you wait, you don’t chase anyone down the street, and the proof only ever lands for someone willing to walk over on their own and look.

And before anybody clutches the Micah of it: a trick isn’t a sin. It’s only a sin if it’s for evil — if you’re taking something, stealing, leaving a person worse off than you found them. That’s a con. But a magician at a show, a dungeon master behind the screen, somebody pulling a quarter out of a kid’s ear — that’s the other kind entirely. You walked into the theater on purpose to be delighted. Certain choices were made. The dice were already rolled. And thank God I snuck a few more dice onto the table while I could still see where they’d land. Crazy, crazy, crazy fool.

Which, now that I’ve said it out loud, is the whole Lottery Patch in a single move. The proof was always sitting right there. It was always free. It only ever asked for someone willing. Maybe nobody, this time. Maybe you, next time.

The ticket keeps.

Coda · The Birds of Prey

One more thing, and then the clear one goes quiet for a while. When he was little, the family went to the zoo a lot. A nice one, built into the side of a mountain in Colorado — you’ll know the one, so I won’t name it. Nice, is the word everybody used. Though it’s worth noticing, and I’ll only notice it in passing because it matters much later, that it was nice for the people. Not so much for the animals. Hold on to that. We’ll come back for it.

There was a kid. A middle kid, a step kid, one of the ones in the part of the family nobody quite turns to look at. And every single time they went, that kid wanted to go up and see the birds of prey. The hawks, the eagles, the owls, all the way at the top of the mountain. And every single time, it didn’t happen. Somebody else’s turn, somebody’s feet hurt, we’ve been here a hundred times, we’ll catch them next visit. Partly — if we’re being honest — because the kid got bratty about it. Mostly because he was the middle one, the step one, and the middle step one’s wants are the easiest wants in the whole world to put off until next time.

He went to that zoo a hundred times. He did not see the birds of prey until he was twenty-three, when he finally drove up the mountain by himself, walked to the top, and stood there and looked at them. Alone. On his own ticket.

It became a joke, the way these things do. Oh, him and the birds of prey. He always wanted to see those birds. Said like it’s funny, and it is, a little. It’s also the whole thing, isn’t it. The one nobody turns to look at, wanting the single thing at the top of the mountain, being told next time until next time quietly runs out — and finding, in the end, that the only road to the birds of prey was to stop waiting to be taken and go up the mountain himself.

On his own ticket. Willing. You see why I left it in.

Twelve. Thirteen. Twenty-four. Thirty-five. Thirty-two.

The winning number is eleven. The one that matters is one.

You’ve been holding a ticket this whole time.

Stop. Breathe. Learn.

Crazy, crazy, crazy. Circle, circle, circle.

— Prism

(J was busy. He usually is.)