The last letter of lucky is Y

 Today I made a stunning discovery, one that destroyed my prior understanding of the cosmos. I was in this buzzer based multiple choice competition. This competition had a reputation, which said that the answer was often Y. Well I took that to heart, every meeting since, I had guessed Y, sometimes even before the question was read. Today, I went overboard on guessing Y. I might have guessed Y five times, and those five times in a row I guessed it right. Furthermore, everyone who guessed Y but me, guessed it wrong. I spiced things up, by copy pasting wikipedia articles about the letter Y into chat. By the end, people were questioning the nature of reality. 

I got lucky. But I was willing to make guesses, because I knew guessing it wrong would still bring me social credit, just for continuing the legend of the person who always blindly guesses Y.

It actually wasn't that lucky, my streak is not that impressive, I only guessed Y five times in a row, which has a 1 in 4^5 chance of happening only 1 in 1024. It wasn't even as if those five questions were in a row, and sometimes the question had been read. Each logical leap, each misremembering of what had happened, so small in the moment, a small change in probabilities, compounded and compounded with all the others to create a story of luck that had never happened, and onwards to stranger hypotheses still. 

But, the story sounds better, and among the people in the competition, that story was what had actually happened. It was, in the grander narrative of 2020, the year of the black swan, just another sign that reality has been fraying on its edges.

And I had bought the story at times. In this hyper state, I felt as if I could continue guessing Y forever, I believed that we lived in a simulation. I needed to remind myself of all the ways I was misremembering events, that I had hyped up the mundane. 

But I did learn about old SAT guessing strategies (always guess C, which is the third choice, just like Y), about experiments where 75% people would choose 3 when prompted to pick a point on a number line extending from 1 to 4. I understood how it feels to believe in the paranormal, the feeling of gesturing at the miracles of gods, aliens, and things stranger still. We came out of this believing in the god of the Y, and that belief in Y, not Y itself, is the true story here.