I return from lunch to find three more proposals on my desk. That's typical for the prioritization queue here at the Monastery of The Coin. Things reach my desk when the previous analysts finish, which can be any time.
First proposal: a wish that all silver in a certain mountain teleport ten miles to the north. The appropriate spaces north and south would be cordoned off. The Monastery would receive half of the resulting silver while the decreased price of silver would make for cheaper microchips which would... have a long and boring list of benefits. OK. I'll come back to the list later. What do the reviewers think? The Coin experts agree that the tails-scenario is the opposite direction teleport – plenty of precedent there. The geologists confirm this will not cause an eruption. The economists say dumping this much silver on the market at once is safe: they already leaked that they were considering this and watched the market respond; economists are scary sometimes. The technologists say that silver is a tiny fraction of the price of a modern microchip, and the production bottlenecks have nothing to do with it. Figures. I mark the proposal lowest priority. There's a chance it'll get wished – better this than that The Coin sit idle – but probably not.
Second proposal: a paragraph-long wish about dopamine vesicles. Attached to the wish are ten pages of differential equations and molecular biology explaining why this and its opposite both cure Parkinson's Disease: something about compensatory regulation. I miss the simplicity of the cancer wish (for all cancer cells in humans to have their intracellular salinity increased tenfold – wished once a month and nobody suffers from cancer anymore). I don't try to read the explanation. It's signed by twelve well-reputed professors in the field; that's a good sign I can understand. But how many professors did they talk to in order to get these signatures? I look at our internal biologist's analysis, and it's all based on reading the paper himself. I mark it return-to-analysis with a note about surveying experts. The biologist who looked at this is pretty new. He'll learn.
Third proposal: we take a set of test tubes and wish that every organic molecule inside them have one hydrogen replaced by a certain moiety that I can't pronounce, then repeat for a new set of test tubes until we get tails. The moiety isn't present in the molecules, so what's the opposite? Coin analysts recommend a blast shield around the tubes just in case. Applications to Alzheimer's Disease... wait, this is looking familiar. Yes. Two weeks ago I refused a request to treat Alzheimer's this way and sent a note saying “Do your fundamental research in test tubes, not people.” I guess they listened. This proposal will displace a dozen others, since it's a repeated wish, requires the blast shield, and may take several tries to pronounce. I mark it high priority anyway.
My desk is clear and the Blessing of the Indecisive is about to happen. Thousands of students in their late teens and early twenties are gathered in the courtyard. Each of them impressed their teachers with their diligence, their responsibility and their morals. One of the senior monks will stand before them and wish that those in the east half of the courtyard gain a great talent for mathematics and the natural sciences, while those in the west half gain a great talent for language and the humanities.
Predicting the opposite of a wish is a tricky business, and variants of this one have gone wrong in the past, but if The Coin lands tails for this exact wish it swaps which group gets which blessing. We've tried a few other pairs of blessings (testing on two people, not thousands!) but most of them have become curses on tails. Making the two blessings adequately opposite seems to be key. In any case, this is a well-tested wish. We've been doing it annually for decades.
I like to watch the Blessing. I know what I do here is important, but I rarely get a chance to see the faces of the people I'm helping.
The crowd is still, nervous, waiting. The monk comes forward. He holds The Coin aloft. He speaks the wish. He flips.
Before the coin lands, a dozen students from the front of the crowd rush the podium, push the monk off it and grab for The Coin.
Things like this don't happen often. Most people appreciate that humanity is better off with The Coin in our custody than anyone else's, or at least realize that holding the world's most powerful magical artifact without a reputation like ours is a very risky position to be in. It's been years since anyone tried to gather an army to attack us. (That would-be conqueror got his cerebral cortex included in the monthly cancer wish. He lingered for three weeks as a vegetable. Our strategists thought that sent a stronger message than just dropping dead.)
But that was an enemy we knew about. Somehow a cabal of students managed to slip past our screening, get the necessary endorsements, and position themselves closest to The Coin. Just how long a con did they run here?
The attackers form a defensive ring, weapons drawn (how did they smuggle those in here?), and shout religious slogans. That's half an explanation, anyway. We call ourselves a monastery, but To Do Good is our only religion. We steer clear of gods and holy books and all such things. Not everyone approves.
Our security monks will make short work of their defensive ring, I'm sure. One variant of the blessing that does work is violence/diplomacy. We keep that one to ourselves. Our fighters (and our negotiators) are downright superhuman.
Which the attackers probably know. So this is a diversion. I reach into the inner pocket of my robe and draw out a demagnatized compass that always points exactly away from The Coin. As I thought, it's moving through the crowd at a decent pace.
I explain the situation to the student nearest me, stumbling over my words. He then explains it to three more people in a handful of clear, concise sentences. I guess I know which way the coin fell.
The humanities students organize themselves amazingly fast, and soon there's a clear path between me and the coin. I charge.
The thief with the coin is good at this. I bend to follow him, and the people around me shift out of my way. On the other side of the courtyard, the mathematics students have formed a human pyramid with a security monk at the top. He must have a compass like mine, and he can see the path I'm taking. If he can triangulate...
He throws a dart. The coin stops moving.
I reach the thief first. He's unconscious, a sedative-tipped dart in his neck. Thrown from several hundred feet away, atop a human tower that must have been swaying at least a bit. No unaugmented human could have done it.
I run my compass over the body and find The Coin. Then, slowly, recapturing my breath, I walk back toward the security team. The students stay out of my way.
I contemplate flipping it. Better a suboptimal wish than that The Coin sit idle. None of today's proposals are workable, but yesterday I marked as low-priority some weather manipulations that would have been very convenient for me. I strain my mind but can't quite remember the wording. Weather is not a subject to mess around with. Better idle than wishes gone wrong.
As I walk past the students – so young, so vigorous – the thought enters my head to wish all their clothing two feet to the north/south. That would –
That would embed the clothing in those who happened to be standing exactly the wrong distance apart: killing them. This is why we don't make unchecked wishes.
Also, forcing nudity on others to satisfy my own prurient interests is wrong. Not all of them would be amused.
Funny how I thought of the other first, though. I guess that's what being here does to you.
I hand over The Coin, unflipped, to a security monk. He asks me, very diplomatically, to attend a debriefing. There will be a lot of work done looking back over this and making sure it doesn't happen again. My role will probably be limited to telling my story. Even today, my story was a small piece of what happened.
Come to think of that, every day is like that. I am a small piece of something much bigger. There's maybe a thousand of us here full time, each doing our own little piece to keep the coin flipping smoothly in the service of humanity. And despite the occasional glitch, this is an institution I am proud to be a part of.
The world is in good hands.