Flirting With Fire ✅

44 - Distraction

Luke

The dimly lit narrow hallway was deserted. The basement of Astro Hotel is filled with such hallways. Some led to mundane storage spaces or even empty rooms. Some led to our own private cells. The fact that it's located in the basement, has earned these spaces the moniker of the dungeon amongst our in the know staff.  But that's not where I intend to go right now. 

With quick sure steps, I marched towards the end of the corridor, wanting to deal with the emergency as fast as possible and get back to my sleeping Ivy.

I had left her alone in my room when I got the call. Some disturbance on the casino floor. The information they gave me on the phone doesn't make much sense and I hoped everything would become clearer once I get to the surveillance room.

This room is the heart and soul of Astro Hotel. This is where our best employees spend their time, watching, observing, and analyzing our patrons. Their main purpose is to make sure that not a single cheating con man can slip through our fingers. Not a single betting chip gets misplaced. Not one soul will be successful in making a fool out of the Lombardis.

The room is equipped with screens that showcase a view of the whole Astro hotel and casino. They don't just show what can be seen with the naked eye. They can also analyze a person's reaction and determine if there was any deception involved.

There is some fifty personnel working in that room and all of them have their eyes fixed on a screen. Their leader, Seth, a man in his late forties, stands in the middle of the room, one hand scratching his jaw as he ponders on one particular screen. Which also happens to be the biggest screen in the room. 

I gently pat his shoulder, greeting him while bringing him back from his deep thoughts.

"Seth, what's up? What's the emergency?"

He looks at me, slightly surprised at my sudden appearance but quickly recovered himself. He must have been so lost in his own head that he didn't even realize my arrival. He pointed at the big screen in the middle of the room, and he spoke. "We've got five people who hit the jackpot on the slot machines, all at the same time."

I watch the screen and saw all five people who were jumping and celebrating their winnings. My eyebrow raised slowly, in surprise.

"Five? Is that–"

"Nope. It is impossible," he answered while shaking his head. "We're talking about the jackpot. The chance of having two winners at the same time is almost one in a million. Five, there's got to be a catch. But he's the thing. Our computers are saying that their reaction isn't made up. Those cries and smiles are all genuine."

Seth is one of the top authorities in machine learning. He practically designed our facial recognition software and fine tune them to analyze every tick and tremor to identify when someone is being genuine and when they are not. Not many can act and fool his program. Not even an experienced actor. So to think that five random individuals managed to do that was unthinkable.

"What are you saying? If those people aren't faking it. That means, someone set them up to win. So someone tampered with our machines?"

"Yes," he replied slowly. "But to what end," he mumbled to himself and scratched his jaw again.

"Did you check the rest of the gaming floor? Anything suspicious there?"

"Already did. There's nothing. We've run diagnostics on our system, there's no tampering detected. We've even sent people to physically check in with people on the floor, and so far, all of them reported nothing suspicious going on."

I stare at the various screens, trying to make sense of what's happening.

"Has my father been notified?"