A Character With OCD In The Worst Possible Situation [FICTOID]

“Every game?”

“Yes, every single solitary game.”

“But…there must be thousands of possibilities -- millions!”

“There are 69,352,859,712,417 possible variants in the first ten moves alone, with ten to the 120th power total moves possible.”

“And you’re determined to play each one?”

“You think I have a choice?”

The two friends sat on the cold stone flor of a small monk’s cell in a monastery high in the mountains of Tibet, a chessboard with elephants instead of the traditional knights lay between them.

The man in the monk’s robes played against himself, turning the board around for each move.  He documented these on a chalkboard.

“It’s inhumane,” his friend said, sipping on his tumeric tea.  “Why did you start this?”

“I came to the coast in search of poppy seeds,” the man in the monk’s robes said.  “For my import / export business.

“While I was talking with one dealer -- playing chess with him, actually -- he observed that if we put a poppy seed on one square of the chessboard, then two on the next, then doubled it on the next and so on and so on, by the time we finished we’d have more poppy seeds than existed in the world -- 18,446,744,073,709,551,615 to be exact.

“That got me to wondering how many possible games there were and with my obsessive-compulsive disorder, well, here we are.”

Black defeated white on the 257th move.  The man in the monk’s robes duly noted it on his chalkboard, reset the pieces, and began again.

© Buzz Dixon