by Jacob Whaler
I see you, Yarah.
As he stares up at it, a black seam appears along its side and opens up. Matt fights the urge to raise his arms, to push back, to run. The opening morphs into a gaping hole full of infinite blackness. As it descends down over him, he has the distinct impression that he and the space around him are being swallowed whole.
As it closes over him, he is thrust into chilling cold.
The seam closes up, forming a tight seal. Space and time are sucked away. Even the darkness is gone. All that remains is a tangible sense of nothing. Breathing stops. Just like before, he experiences complete sensory deprivation.
And then a brilliant flash engulfs him. The nothingness opens up, and the world comes back into existence. Opening his eyes, he and Yarah are sitting on the floor of the hotel, each holding a Stone in their hands.
The cloaking box is between them with its lid open.
Yarah’s face is pale, drained of blood. “What just happened?” she says.
Matt shakes his head. “You’ll have to tell me.”
“I did what you said.” Yarah reaches out and takes Matt’s Stone from his open palm. “I went inside you, found the Stone. Then I brought the two of them together like this.” The two tips touch the box from opposite sides. “There was a flash or explosion, and it all disappeared.”
“Strange.” Matt looks down at the Stones. Both of them are jet black and remind him of dead rats. Taking his Stone in his hand, it feels heavy, like an ordinary rock. He tries to open his mind to it, but he finds nothing to grasp. He looks across the room and tries to jump there. Nothing.
“My Stone’s dead,” Matt says. “What about yours.”
Yarah hefts her Stone in her hands. She closes her eyes to find the connection. After thirty seconds she looks up in frustration. “It doesn’t work.”
Matt gets a sick feeling.
What if we destroyed the Stones?
CHAPTER 31
They let me go.
Less than five minutes before, Jessica had been resting on the bed in the YMCA hotel room. Matt and Yarah were doing work on the Stones. The sound of their voices whispering in the room put her to sleep.
There was a blur. She woke up inside a cathedral, smelling the ocean and staring up at Ryzaard from the inside of an energy shell that almost ripped her nerves from her body when she moved.
Jessica stands at a railing at the edge of a courtyard across from the cathedral structure. As her heart races out of control, she peeks over the railing at a cliff face that drops away to the floor of a large plain 500 meters below. In the distance, she sees an organic-shaped brown smudge. A faint cloud of smoke floats above it. It’s a village, and she estimates it’s twenty kilometers away.
Racing to the opposite end of the courtyard, she looks around for another way out or down. All she sees is a sheer drop to a sandy beach facing an ocean.
It takes two seconds to make up her mind.
She runs back to the side of the courtyard facing the village, straddles the railing, finds a foothold and starts to drop down onto the edge of the cliff. She’s made descents like this before, but always with a climbing harness, shoes and a rope. With none of these, it’s not going to be easy.
But she has to try.
The cliff face is studded with protruding rocks and plenty of handholds. Testing the first one with her bare foot, she steps on it and gingerly presses down until it supports her full weight. It’s firm and solid. Repeating the procedure, the descent starts to take on a familiar rhythm. To her surprise, she finds that, without a rope, she depends more on toe strength and being able to find reliable footholds. It turns out to be an advantage not having climbing shoes.
It’s tempting to look up. Ryzaard and Jhata both have Stones, and they both have reason to use Jessica for their own twisted ends. The same question comes back into her mind.
Why did they let me go?
She pushes the thought out of her mind and concentrates on getting down the cliff face.
CHAPTER 32
Matt and Yarah sit on the floor, the open cloaking box between them, staring down at their cold, black Stones.
“Tell me again,” Matt says. “What happened?” He tries to speak in a calm voice, but the fear in Yarah’s eyes is unmistakable.
“I just did what you said.”
Matt leans back, his shoulder blades brushing against the foot of the bed behind him. “Let’s go over it again, step by step. Maybe we can reverse it.” He picks up his Stone and cradles it in his palm. “First, you came into my mind, right?”
“Right,” Yarah says. “It was easy. You opened up to me without any resistance. I dropped down a few levels until I got to the Core.”
“The Core?” Matt’s head twists to the side. “What’s that?”
Yarah picks up her Stone and passes it from hand to hand. “It’s the deepest place inside a person’s mind. You can see everything, feel everything, control everything. It’s like you become them. But you have to be careful. Very careful.” Yarah looks up.
“Why?”
“Because it’s so easy to . . .” Yarah’s voice fades to a whisper and then dies away.
Matt gently touches her shoulder. “To what?”
Her gaze drops down, body trembling. “It’s where you go to kill them.”
Matt sees the fear in Yarah’s eyes. “Good to know. You’re the only one I would trust to go there. So you dropped down into my Core. Then what?”
“It was like I was in two places.” Yarah closes the fingers of her right hand into a fist. “I had my Stone.” The fingers of her other hand close. “And I was inside you with your Stone. I felt the power of each one.”
Matt leans forward. “OK, now go nice and slow. What happened?”
Yarah swallows and closes her eyes, trying hard to remember. “It was weird and yet so wonderful. Your memories merged into mine. I couldn’t tell the difference.” She pauses and opens her eyes. “I saw your mother. She was so real, so beautiful. Just like mine.”
For an instant, Matt sees an image of his mom. He pushes it away so he can focus on the problem at hand. “Tell me about the Stones. You brought them together and touched the cloaking box, right?
Yarah nods her head. “It felt like I was holding one in each of my hands. I could feel their power. Lots of power. I’ve never felt so much power before. It was like a river inside me. I could do anything. I wanted to just run away and find Jessica. But I didn’t.” Her gaze floats up to Matt.
“Go on.”
“Then I looked down at the box and brought the tips of the Stones to it. When they touched, all the power left my body. There was a white flash. An explosion.”
“What about the box?” Matt opens his eyes wide to emphasize the point. “Did you see what happened to the box?”
Yarah scrunches her nose up, trying to remember. “I’m not sure, but there might have been a burst of light inside the box just before everything turned white.”
Picking up the box, Matt turns it around in his hand and then peers inside. He touches his Stone to it. Nothing happens. In frustration, he slams it back down on the floor and stares down at it. The lid hangs open. That bothers him, so he flips it shut, lets out a sigh and lies back down on the floor, gazing up at the ceiling.
Without the Stones, we have zero chance of finding Jessica.
“Wait!” Yarah yells. “My Stone.” She jumps to her feet. “It’s glowing. I can feel it.” She bounds up onto one of the beds and begins jumping up and down with the exuberance of a real eight-year-old. “It’s working now!”
Matt sits up and grabs his Stone. A faint purple aura floats around it. Gripping it tightly with his fingers, it’s alive with tension. He looks at the far end of the room, vanishes and reappears, five meters away.
“I don’t understand.” Matt comes back, sits next to the box and stares down at it. “What did we do?” He picks it up and passes it back and forth between his fingers, scouring its surface for the answer. The edge of
his fingernail slides under the lid. Without thinking, he flips it up.
Yarah stops jumping. “What happened?” She steps down onto the floor. “My Stone is dead again.”
“So is mine. I wonder—” His flips the lid shut on the box.
Both Stones light up.
“You’ve got to be kidding,” Matt whispers. “Something so simple.” He flips the lid up and watches the glow on the Stones instantly vanish. He shuts the lid and watches the Stones jump back to life.
Yarah kneels down beside him as he opens and shuts the lid. “What’s going on?”
Matt grins. “I think I know. When you touched it with both Stones, you turned it inside out.”
“Inside out?”
“It’s like you reversed the polarity on a magnet.”
A furrow appears on Yarah’s forehead. “What?”
Matt grabs the box and holds it close to his eyes. “So now it works in reverse. It deactivates the Stones outside of it instead of the ones on the inside. You open the lid to turn on the box, close the lid to shut it down.” He hands the box to Yarah.
Her eyes jump back and forth between her Stone and the box. “Open the lid, the Stones turn off. Close the lid, the Stones turn on.” She repeats it over and over, like a magic spell.
A big smile spreads across her face. She looks up at Matt. He already has a huge grin. “You know what this means?”
“Yeah,” Matt says. “We have a way to fight Ryzaard. Let’s go.”
CHAPTER 33
Jhata walks into her laboratory and drops four objects on the neon white table, the three jade-like pieces of the Lethonen implant and the jax she got from Ryzaard. Then she slips off her Stone belt and lays it out on the table. Picking up one Stone from the belt, she holds it tightly in her fist.
Her lab is very different from what she saw on Earth, a planet where technology is still stuck in the dark ages, dependent on electronic instruments and massive inputs of power. Jhata prefers a more refined, less primitive, approach. Her mind is the only instrument she needs, and the Stones are the only source of energy.
The first order of business is a careful inspection of the jax.
Holding it in her palm, she stares down and drops her mind inside it. Her thoughts fall into a pattern of connections and computational switches. As expected, it’s a primitive device with a quantum connection point to Earth’s planetary network Ryzaard called the Mesh.
Whatever implant she creates will need to connect to the Mesh. She deposits a complete copy of the internal schematics and connection parameters of the jax in a memory cache in her mind. It should be a simple matter to build a connection into the final version of the implant so that whoever receives one will have direct access to the Mesh.
Based on what she’s seen, it won’t be too difficult to upgrade the technology and make it work even better.
Now for the implant itself.
She puts down the jax and picks up one of the implant fragments supplied by Ryzaard. Staring down into it, she accesses the power of her Stones to drop her mind to the molecular level in a nanosecond, floating above the glossy green surface. From this viewpoint, there are no cracks, gridlines, or any other indications of structure. The surface takes on the appearance of a mirror.
The Lethonen told Ryzaard they had built this device, but it’s too much for Jhata to believe. They aren’t known for their creative abilities.
It’s more likely that they stole it. Or found it.
She drops into the surface, going below the atomic level, and confirms her suspicions. Ryzaard’s implant isn’t built with atomic matter. She sympathizes. She doesn’t build with atoms either. That’s best left to more primitive peoples.
Dropping down further, the surface of the implant fragment looks like an ocean covered with tiny waves moving with violent motion. She touches it. Ripples of stillness spread out in a perfect circle from the point of contact. After a few seconds, the stillness lapses back into turbulence.
She drops far lower to the point where the tiny waves are the size of continents.
And she makes the first discovery.
The material is shot through with tiny filaments in a constant state of twitching and pulsing. It’s all very suggestive of an energy phenomenon that can be used to transport objects vast distances, an approach employed by some advanced cultures with no Stones. She’s heard others refer to them as wormholes, but she finds that description to be disgusting. What she’s looking at are millions of magnitudes smaller than anything she’s seen before.
The miniscule size of the filaments is a big hint.
This device wasn’t designed to transport objects. It’s designed to transport electrical pulses from brain neurons. In other words, thoughts. Minds.
The next order of business is clear. Still gripping the Stone, Jhata drops her mind into one of the pulsing filaments to see where it takes her.
Everything turns to a blur.
When it comes to a rest, Jhata sees brilliant dots of light in a sea of black. It takes a moment to realize that she’s floating in space.
Far below, a most unique world hangs suspended. It orbits no star, yet the planet itself is massive, far larger than any she has seen before.
She drops down for a closer look. Drawing near to the planet surface, she makes a most startling discovery.
From a distance, the entire planet appears to be covered with fine hairs, like microscopic cilia on a unicellular creature. When she gets within a kilometer of the surface, she sees the hairs are actually long cables connected to the surface. The outer ends of the cables connect to large heads that look like they come from lethal marine predators with massive mouths and rows of teeth.
All of this reinforces what Jhata already knows.
The planetary structure can’t be the work of the Lethonen, brutes without imagination. It must be a world they stumbled upon, hidden in deep space.
But what is the planet’s connection to Ryzaard’s implant?
Dropping into the forest of cables, Jhata follows them down to the planet where they are securely anchored to a glass-like surface. The world beneath the glass is a boiling sea of fire. With ease, she takes her mind through the barrier and floats in the center.
The whole interior of the planet is a massive network of organic webbing built of colored spheres connected by tubes and filaments. The construction material is unfamiliar. In design and function, it appears to mimic the neural networks of sentient creatures. Though the details might vary, on every planet she has visited, the basic design is the same.
Jhata wonders what is going on inside the network and floats close to a semi-translucent filament at the point where it intersects with a handful of other tubes. Multicolored light pulses through the interior of each.
To complete her investigation it will be necessary to enter the network.
Such a linkage of her mind is possible, though not without risk. The Stones make it easy, especially for a natural telepath, to directly interface with any kind of network or computing device. Machines. Biological systems. Physical forces. Electromagnetic fields. Other minds. Performing the interface is a matter of experience and practice. The Stones themselves provide the link.
One could say such a connection is the ultimate function of a Stone.
To be a universal connector.
But connection is the easy part. The problem is knowing what her mind will connect to.
Jhata prepares herself to enter and instantly jump away.
Gripping the Stone tightly in her mind’s eye with her right hand, she slowly stretches out her left hand and brushes the surface of the tube. It’s warm and soft. One by one, her fingers wrap around it. Tentatively, she begins to open her mind to the interior, letting it leak through slowly, and using the Stone to form a protective barrier so that she can instantly jump away if danger appears.
Her first impression is instant awareness of the billions of nodes connected to the planet’s surface, each one empty and waiting fo
r prey to fall into its jaws. Little by little, she pushes into the network until she is fully inside. It pulls her along its pathways through one nexus after another. A sense of danger gives way to unfettered freedom of movement. Her rate of motion is instantaneous. Light speed is a snail’s pace in comparison.
As she travels through the network, random turns and branches pop into view.
She takes them all, making one complete circuit, and then does it again before ejecting from the system.
Jhata has to admit that this planet-sized computing device is an impressive achievement.
How did the Lethonen ever find it? Who built it? She may never know. And it doesn’t really matter.
The simple fact is that it now belongs to her.
Ryzaard won’t be able to stop her from taking it over. He must have known this. Only pure desperation would have forced him to reveal it to her.
Based on what she’s seen, Ryzaard’s plan for using the network is sound. The right kind of implant will connect the minds of an entire planetary population to the network.
Whoever controls the network will have complete control of the minds.
Jhata has seen all that she needs to see.
Her job is a simple one.
Create an implant that instantly links with the human mind and connects it to both the Earth’s Mesh and the planetary network she’s been exploring.
There is one more matter to be handled.
A hunch.
The Lethonen would never have introduced Ryzaard to the planetary network unless they themselves had found a master control node from which they could control everything connected to it, including Ryzaard.
All Jhata needs to do is find the control node.
And sever it.
CHAPTER 34
Ryzaard peers over Diego’s shoulder.
The young man turns around. “While you were gone, we got some interesting readings on the location algorithm.” He moves his fingers across the bluescreen on the wall. “The two Stones at the YMCA just down the street look like they’ve been switching on and off. Take a look.”