Chapter 10: Greed Is Human Nature

“We don’t have enough cash. You can transfer it by PayNow,” another Brother An cut into the street transaction.

Zhou Yongtai had learned a thing or two at the food court just now. He knew that PayNow was Singapore’s electronic payment system.

“We really only have ten dollars,” he explained, as guileless as a child.

Brother An rolled his eyes and pulled faces, exaggerating every expression. “Walao, she’s a great painter, you know. She can’t find a job, so she’s come here to perform for the gods. And you two are being so mean, haggling over every single dollar. What’s one dollar, anyway?”

His tone sounded as though he were standing up for Luo Nan, but in truth he was only fanning the flames, evidently hoping neither side would give way so that he could enjoy the spectacle.

The phrase “performing for the gods” was rather grating as well.

The painter, Luo Nan, lowered his eyes without a word.

Ada’s OP2 visual system, however, clearly detected through infrared thermal sensing that the temperature around his chest had risen.

The intense and intricate human sense of self-respect had been a subject of careful observation and study for Ada’s great-great-grandparent among the servant machines.

Ada rotated her flawless artificial eyeballs and fixed them on the irritating old man. “Exactly. What’s one dollar? Why don’t you give me one?”

Don’t think that just because we’re human and machine, I can’t give you a piece of my mind. A string of code, human-like in its muttering, flashed across the chip in Ada’s mind.

Brother An was annoyed. “The young lady is quite something. I can tell at a glance that you must bully your boyfriend all the time.”

Ada no longer replied to him. She turned to Luo Nan, adjusting both her tone and speaking pace. “Mr. Luo, how about this? Could you wait here for us for a while? If we win the lottery, we’ll pay you and collect the painting. If we don’t win, and the money isn’t enough to cover the price, you don’t have to tear up the painting either. This is a wonderful piece of work. You can use it to advertise and attract customers who want their portraits painted. We won’t mind.”

Ada spoke with complete fluency.

Even the Chinese faces among the onlookers—though their command of written Chinese had declined after years of disuse, leaving them somewhat puzzled by formal words such as “painting fee” and “attract customers”—could understand the general meaning of her speech, as well as recognize from the girl’s courteous manner that she was a respectable person.

That impression even softened everyone’s surprise that such a young couple did not have PayNow and carried only cash.

The awkwardness vanished from Luo Nan’s eyes.

He smiled and nodded. “All right. Thank you. I’ll wait on the bench.”

Zhou Yongtai also took the opportunity to show his goodwill. “Then we can spend a little more on the numbers. If the result is good, Mr. Luo, I’m willing to pay double the painting fee and buy such a fine work.”

The rules of the Toto lottery had changed considerably over the past few years. Fourth, fifth, and sixth prizes could be drawn and paid out on the spot. Only the first and second prizes, worth hundreds of thousands or millions, required winners to visit the lottery company’s headquarters on a later date to collect their money.

The winding line moved forward slowly. After they entered the lottery hall, Zhou Yongtai leaned close to Ada’s ear and whispered, “Are you planning to calculate only the numbers for the smaller prizes?”

“Yes. And we’ll buy only the old version. In the new version, the numbers have to be in the correct order. Although the prize money is ten times higher, it’s far more difficult to predict. I’ve been checking the rules on the Toto website. Judging from the previous draw’s prize pool and winning results, if four of the six numbers on one ticket match, along with one additional number, we can win six hundred Singapore dollars.”

Zhou Yongtai was somewhat reluctant. “But if we buy the new version and get four of the six numbers in the correct order, we can win seven thousand Singapore dollars! Ada, this is 2035, and you’re from 2085. With your computing power, you could try the new version. At worst, we can spend all ten dollars on lottery tickets and try ten times. What do you say?”

——

Trying out the old-fashioned women’s-fiction standard of one thousand words per chapter—crossed out. Actually, two competitions happened to overlap, and the author is currently writing two novels at once…