A certain resident's record and speculations on the frequency and locations of Scattered Gold Clouds, written in an attempt to strike it rich.
Scattered Gold Cloud Observation Notes
(Day 4) Another one I guessed right! These media outlets can really downplay things. Read this: "A scattered gold cloud drifted over to his beach chair and buried him under a massive pile of gold coins, leaving him seriously injured but also showering him with so much wealth that he need not work for another two or three Amber Eras..." Sure, getting pelted by all those gold coins landed him in the hospital. But what's his hospital bill compared to the 100 million credits he walked away with?
My friends told me not to overthink it, that it's all just dumb luck... As if! Those tycoons didn't get where they are by being clueless. I bet this is one big, carefully crafted puzzle, and they're rewarding whoever's sharp enough to crack their code and get on their wavelength!
I'm quitting my job to focus all my time on cracking this mystery!
There were lucky winners for three days in a row, but there's nothing so far on the fourth day. So, the Fibonacci sequence, huh. I bet a scattered golden cloud will show up again tomorrow! I'm already running scripts to map out the topology of Astropolis's main roads.
(Day 5) Yep, a scattered gold cloud appeared again, near the warehouse of the No. 5 Astropolis Public Bath. My hypothesis was spot-on. I fed those four sets of coordinates into the geographic information system's analytical model, and they fell perfectly along an Archimedean spiral centered on the racetrack.
I've already cracked the seed of their pseudo-random number generator. The next cloud happens on day 8! The location is guaranteed to be at the next tangent node along the spiral: the abandoned artificial beach on the outskirts of Astropolis. I'm planning to set up camp there the day after tomorrow.
...
(Day 8) I spent two days feeding mosquitoes like a complete idiot, from dawn till dusk, and not so much as a single rain cloud passed over this whole abandoned beach. The news even said someone ran into a scattered gold cloud on day 7... why day 7? I get it. This isn't the Fibonacci sequence, it's a prime number sequence.
(Day 11) The scattered gold cloud did not appear. I waited at the sewer entrance for 27 system hours. The sun was so bright it made me dizzy.
(Day 13) The scattered gold cloud appeared, but why why why why wh█████ Calm down. There is a logic to everything. There must be a higher-dimensional formula for this. If conventional thought won't cut it, then it's time to use brute force.
(Day 14) I ran the Lagrange interpolation algorithm all night long and finally calculated this quintic polynomial! 1/12, -5/4, 85/12, -75/4, 137/6, and the constant term is -9! Plugging in seven for the variable, the next date the scattered gold cloud appears is... the 24th of this month! As for the location, I need to perform eigenvalue decomposition on the coordinate matrix of the previous 6 locations. My personal device is already running the calculation at full capacity, and should have the results by the 20th! Just you wait! Opportunity favors the brilliant algorithm engineer!
(Day 17) This section shows signs of damage The news came on.
A reporter interviewed the executives behind the scattered gold clouds operation, asking how they selected their timing and locations. "I've got a map of Astropolis pinned up in my office. I just chuck a dart at it from about five meters away and go with wherever it lands." "Timing? At first we hit it once a day, but that got old fast... so I started rolling a die. Whatever number comes up, that's how many days we wait before the next one."
*bleep* this! What the *bleep*! Oh, *bleep*!
Polynomial Lagrangian Topological Structure Eigenvalue Salvage ██████ The 3,000 lines of code on my desk are nothing but a joke!