The ten-eighty-ten rule. It was a simple description of how people reacted in moments of crisis.
The rule stated that ten per cent of people were un-phased by life-threatening events. They saw their only goal as survival and logically planned a strategy to achieve it. It was from this ten per cent that ninety per cent of all major catastrophe survivors came.
The next bracket, the eighty per cent, could not cope with high-pressure events. They froze, unable to act without coercion. The vast majority of remaining survivors came from this group, but only because they were assisted by the first.
The last ten per cent were the ones to avoid. They made emotional decisions, which invariably proved wrong. Maybe one in a million of these individuals could be counted as survivors, and blind luck was their only saviour.
Overall, the rule said one simple thing: If you have three people in front of you during a crisis, one screaming at people around them, one stood staring blankly at a wall, and another assuredly doing something, unless you have a solid idea of your own copy the doer if you want to live.
A phone rang and rang. It twitched and buzzed, unanswered on an open personnel folder in the back of the car, the caller known and the risk taken through ignorance high.
Decisions that should have ensured success were being met with failure. At every turn, the circular pattern, the net binding history into repeating blocks was unfurling. It was not supposed to happen this way. Each new pathway should have some measure of limitation. Each new opportunity should not be soured before it was even tasted. Was time, the universe’s own ouroboros, beginning to unravel? It was a disconcerting thought.
The race across the desert of Canaan toward the hidden location was about to begin, and uncertainty and doubt were unwanted companions. Surely, it could not be true no more chances would be presented before the singularity was met. The raging odds at the heart of the cosmos, the very power woven into the Tree of Life should mean luck changed its current course. Perhaps, just one more time, the artefacts and their carriers would be located and their final goal discovered. All it would take now was one last act of divine providence and Ophiuchus could finally be unbound.
Chapter 42