Ultra-short science fiction story: The Reason

"I finally figured it out."

"Figured out what?"

"The reason why everything sucks. Things just go wrong too often."

"Maybe the reason is entropy?"

"Good guess, but not bad enough. The truth is always worse than you think. No matter what we try, our plans almost never work out like they should. Things ALWAYS take longer than calculated. Case in point the F-35 fighter jet development process."

"Ah, human nature."

"Worse still. As the world's most pessimistic person, I'm interested in how and why things go wrong, no matter how unpleasant the answer."

"Well why do things go wrong?"

"Simple. It's because what many people would call 'magical beings' keep stealing most of our luck."

"But . . . how could luck ever be stolen?"

"Someone is 'transferring' a large part of the available order in our environment to make statistically unlikely events happen elsewhere. In other words, high-order potential energy is being redirected into magic."

"Is that even possible?"

"With quantum physics anything is 'possible'. Someone must have figured out a mental trick; a way to connect to a future version of themselves who inhabits a universe in which a desired unlikely event took place. Then other people did the same trick. Inevitably, they combined their future realities into a single integrated multiverse, a 'magical world' in which they secretly control the flow of entropy. This world appears absurd on the face of it, but it's fully consistent. We all live in it, though we don't know. The rest of us must suffer a lower quality of life as a result."

"Who are these bastards? Why have we never even heard of them?"

"Let me put it as gently as possible. They call us muggles."