#pronounced pratchett-skew
She looked at the coin. She weighed it in the palm of her hand, and ran her finger along the milling. As a final test, she pressed her thumb against the inside of her index finger, balanced the coin on top of her nail, and flicked it into the air.
It made a high, silvery whisper, a faint zzziiiiiing-g-g-g, hung in the air glittering and celestial for a moment before falling with a soft splat into the palm of her hand.
It landed heads-side-up.
She flipped it again.
Zzziiiiiing-g-g-g.
Tails-side-up.
Somewhere, the counterfeiter was saying, “…and we have fifty-thousand minted already, and we’re expecting two-hundred-and-fifty-thousand by the end of the week.”
Zzziiiiiing-g-g-g.
“So if everything is to your approval, ladies and gentlemen, might I start the bidding at-”
“It’s sloppy,” she said.
Heads turned. She held up the coin. “You had these balanced?” she asked. “If you flip it, it’s 50-50 odds that it’ll land on heads?”
The counterfeiter gave her a condescending smile. “Of course. Our methods have ensured that our coins are weighed down to the-”
“It’s sloppy,” she said again. “If you flip it, it always lands heads-tails-heads-tails.”
The faces looked blank. The counterfeiter looked haughty.
She rolled her eyes. “Everyone knows that a coin never lands heads-tails-heads-tails,” she said. “Real coins land heads-heads-tails-heads-tails-tails-tails-tails-heads.”
She flipped the coin. Zzziiiiiing-g-g-g. She caught it in her palm. “Tails,” she said. “You start distributing these, and eventually you get one bored bastard who’ll notice that he’s got this coin that always lands heads-tails-heads-tails. And he shows it to his buddies, and they also find out that they’ve got coins that always land heads-tails-heads-tails. And eventually professional people find out that there’s a surplus of coins that all land heads-tails-heads-tails, and they start looking very closely at these coins and where they came from.”
The counterfeiter had the uneasy look of professional pride starting to curdle.
Zzziiiiiing-g-g-g. “Heads again,” she said.
One of the others cleared his throat. “But if they wanted to find out if it really was perfect, they’d have to flip forever to be sure, wouldn’t they?”
“Maybe,” she shrugged. This time she flicked the coin so that it smacked the counterfeiter between his eyes. “But then they’d notice that all of these coins misspell the queen’s name, you stupid bastard.”
