Read Online [Brackets] by David Sloan - Free Book Online Page B

going to lose, huh? You have some kind of intuition about it?”
    Perry snorted, but didn’t answer right away. Cole shrugged and began to dig around for his own phone.
    “Listen,” Perry said, speaking as quietly as pos sible for no apparent reason. “L et me ask you something. What kind of luck have you been having since you filled out the bracket?”
    “Kind of a mixed bag, I guess,” Cole said evasively.
    But Perry was unsatisfied. “Aren’t you the guy who almost got blown up last week by a serial arsonist stalker?”
    “Well, yeah, but…”
    “And from what I remember in the press conference, you have a girlfriend that you don’t want to talk about. Things aren’t going well?”
    Cole frowned. “That’s personal.”
    “What about work. You like your work? Things going well there?”
    “What’s your point?”
    Perry shuffled his feet. “All of your bad luck really started with the bracket, didn’t it?”
    Cole thought a moment. “Maybe, but isn’t having this bracket thing also really lucky?”
    Perry pointed his finger. “That’s my point. Don’t you see how wrong it is that we’re here? Do you know what the odds are of making it this far? For just one, it’s like one in nine million trillion, or something. It’s the odds of flipping a coin sixty times and having it come up heads each time. Four of us did it. And I didn’t even look at the teams I was choosing. Did you?”
    Cole thought about that morning that now seemed forever ago. He remembered thinking about Nera, but not much else. “Um, no.”
    “You see!” he cried, then hushed. “Since I filled out this bracket, everything in my life has blown up. I’m convinced, I know that something else is going on here. There is some force at work here, some greater power that has drawn us in. It’s bigger than just the bracket. It’s… it’s…” Perry died down as he struggled to define what it really was. Cole just looked at him with raised eyebrows.
    “Sooo… what’s going to happen?”
    Perry nodded opaquely. “I have a hunch.”
    “Is it a good hunch?”
    Perry shook his head slowly. Then he asked, as if suddenly hopeful, “ H ave you ever been to Kaah Mukul?”
    “No. Never tried it.”
    Perry sighed. “That’s too bad. That would have helped us know.”
    Cole was about to ask what a game in a virtual city had to do with a real -life basketball tournament, but Tucker came back just then, stepping over their knees with his eyes trained to the court below. Behind him was Neeson. The players had cleared the floor, and the music was queuing up for the pre-game introductions. Tucker looked down at the three men beside him.
    “You guys ready for this?” he yelled, clapping his hands energetically. “It’s game time!”

-[West Division]-

[ West Division : Play-in Game]
    [ Wednesday , March 17]
     
     
    The office of Myung-Ki Noh had been designed with the ostensible purpose of providing a private place to work. Though he would never admit it, most of his time was spent looking out of the window. The office walls, black, shining, and opaque from the outside, were completely clear from inside, allowing him the singular pleasure of pacing around the best vista in the entire city. This was his Olympus, his Cosmic Mountain, and he relished the opportunity to view the manifestation of his vision and the spectacl e of his numerous subjects in panorama. The small desk in the center of the room, empty except for a video monitor, was rarely touched. There was no chair, no bathroom, no door, and no need for them. After all, he wasn’t really there.
    Much as he enjoyed it, Noh never allowed himself to come down unless he had a reason. This time, he had come to think. A meeting four days ago between himself and certain heads of state from China had provided an intriguing opportunity which he had accepted. With the help of some of his best programmers , he had developed a plan and set it in motion. Since that time, however , Noh had