Most of my life is measured in tides. I'm a marine surveyor. That probably doesn't mean much to you. Basically, I'm the guy who maps the seabed. I spend weeks on a small research vessel, bouncing sound waves off the ocean floor, drawing a picture of what's down there in the dark. It's solitary, precise work. You're alone with the hum of the sonar and the vast, indifferent sea. My job is to find the hidden things—the shipwrecks, the underwater cables, the geological faults, the spots that are safe for a new pipeline or dangerous for an anchor.

The project was the Barents Sea. A three-month survey for a new telecommunications cable route. The weather was brutal, the days were short, and the data was a mess. We were behind schedule, and the company was breathing down my neck. Every day cost them a fortune. I was stressed, sure, but it was a familiar, professional stress. I could handle that.

The call came on a Tuesday. My dad, back in Murmansk. His voice was thin, a frayed rope. "It's the boat, son. The Stella Maris." The Stella Maris was his life. Not a job, a life. A forty-year-old fishing trawler he'd skippered since before I was born. It was his identity. The engine had seized, a catastrophic failure. The repair bill was a number so big he said it like a foreign word, like it couldn't possibly be real. He wasn't asking for money. He was just... telling me. The defeat in his voice was a colder chill than any Arctic wind. My proud, stubborn father, defeated. I sent him what I had, but it was a drop in the ocean. A real, freezing ocean.

I've never been a gambling man. My world is about calculated risks, probabilities, and hard data. Luck is not a variable in my equations. But desperation does strange things to a person's logic. One night, in my cramped cabin, the ship rocking violently, the sonar pinging its relentless rhythm into the dark water, I felt utterly powerless. I was mapping the bottom of the sea while my dad's life was falling apart on the surface. The irony was bitter.

I opened my laptop. The satellite connection was slow, agonizing. I typed something I'd seen in an ad once—vavada online. It felt like a betrayal of every rational part of my brain. I was seeking chaos as a solution. I created an account. The whole process felt surreal, like I was watching someone else do it. I deposited a small amount, a sum I mentally categorized as 'lost at sea'.

I didn't know what I was doing. I clicked on a blackjack table. It was simple. A numbers game. I could understand numbers. Hit. Stand. The dealer's face was a blank pixelated mask. I won a little. Lost a little. It was numbing, a digital distraction from the real, aching problem I couldn't solve.

Then I found a game called "Neptune's Treasure." The theme was underwater exploration. Sunken galleons, chests of gold, sonar-like pings when you spun the reels. It was a ridiculous, cartoonish mirror of my own life. I started playing it, not with hope, but with a kind of grim fascination. The bonus round was a map. A grid of squares, like the survey maps I made every day. You had to choose squares to reveal treasures, avoiding the whirlpools. It was pure chance, but it felt like my work. It felt like surveying luck.

I was running on coffee and fatigue, the ship groaning around me. I triggered the bonus. The map appeared. I clicked squares almost at random, my mind a thousand miles away in a Murmansk shipyard. I uncovered a whirlpool. Then another. I was about to lose. On my last choice, my cursor hovered over a square. A gut feeling. Not a surveyor's calculation, just a... feeling. I clicked.

The screen exploded in light. A fanfare blared from my tinny laptop speakers. I'd hit the jackpot. The main one. The number that appeared on the screen was the number my dad had said. The exact number.

I didn't move. I didn't cheer. I just stared. The pinging of the sonar outside my door seemed to sync with the blinking number on the screen. It was the most bizarre moment of my life. I had been searching the seabed for answers, and I found them in a virtual ocean on a screen.

The withdrawal process was straightforward. The money landed in my account two days later. I called my dad. "The company gave me a massive completion bonus for this survey," I told him, the lie feeling thick in my throat. "The Stella Maris is going to be fine."

The silence on the other end was different this time. It was a silence of shock, of a weight being lifted. He started to cry. I had never heard my father cry.