But it doesn’t have to be like that. Be smart enough, and maybe it doesn’t have to be like that. If he can get to be good at something else, he won’t have to work. Not really.

Andy makes a map.

He starts with a blank piece of graph paper. Sitting at his little desk, wearing the glasses he hates, tracing heavy black lines over the light blue lines on the paper, creating a world.

Not a whole world, just a part of it. A tiny secret corner filled with puzzles and traps and treasures and monsters. A dungeon for heroes to explore and plunder.

With one hand he draws. With the other he fingers a set of geodesic dice, tossing them one at a time or in combination, glancing at the numbers and applying them to secret formulas only he knows. The results dictating which way a tunnel will twist, where a crevasse will open suddenly, a goblin leap from a recess, a potion of healing be found.

He could design it all. Lay it out in his head and put it on the paper, but randomness is cool. It injects chaos into the game. Chaos is cool. He wouldn’t have thought of that on his own, but reading about it lately, it’s cool. The way order is just an illusion, something we create in our heads and lay over the world to try and force it to fit all these ideas we have about the way things should be. But the world’s not really the way people think it is. Or maybe it is. Hard to really say for sure. But chaos seems to make more sense than anything else.

It explains a lot.

Like how you can be so smart about some things and so dumb about others.

Like stealing the methamphetamine and giving it to Paul.

Now that was stupid.

He stops drawing for a second and bangs his forehead against the desktop. Really, really stupid. Man, why is he so damn stupid?