What to wish for when everything you want is multiplied by ten

The multiplied wish game: half a litre of blood for a sandwich

A gram of cocaine in one go. Half a litre of blood drawn. Half the lethal dose of any poison. The premise was simple —you can have whatever you want, but it will be given to you multiplied by ten— and several answers were not asking for money or houses, but wishing for controlled harm. The thought experiment, launched on a forum, turned into a series of dangerous wishes before someone pointed out that the multiplier also works with good things.

The mechanics are the usual ones: a genie, a trap contract, fine print. Except here the fine print was written by the wisher themselves. Asking for a gram of cocaine means ten grams, which is a textbook overdose. Asking for half a litre of blood means five litres, which is roughly the entire blood volume of an adult. The game does not reward ambition: it rewards reading carefully.

The calculation nobody did before wishing

The first answer that lands is from someone who has already done the reverse calculation. Donating blood once in a lifetime, at the barracks, in exchange for a sandwich and a soft drink: that is the reference price. If you got that for half a litre, the compensation for five litres should be ten times greater. Charity has an exchange rate, and someone was applying it in real time while the others were asking for poison.

There lies the interesting twist. Several of the initial answers are not looking for pleasure: they are looking for a way out. Losing five kilos. A stroke, but a tiny one. Half the lethal dose of any toxin. These are wishes from people who, deep down, want something external to solve an internal problem without having to do the work. The tenfold multiplier turns each wish into a sentence, and yet they ask for it anyway.

When the multiplier is applied to good things

The second half of the conversation changes tack. Someone points out that the problem is not the multiplier but the direction of the wish: if you ask to be covered up to your waist in gold coins, the result is a mountain of gold that will probably crush the requester. The conclusion that imposes itself is that the contract is designed to punish greed and only spares those who ask for little and well.

The logical corollary —asking for something small and valuable, not something big and dangerous— appears late and in dribs and drabs. The conversation gets tangled up in scatological variants and a detour about the size of the original wish that nobody closes. The underlying question is left hanging: if the genie exists, why does nobody ask him to make the multiplier work in reverse?

Under these rules, the rational thing would be to wish for a one-euro coin and collect ten. Nobody seriously proposed it. Human beings prefer drama to arithmetic.