by Jacob Whaler
“Understood.” Jing-wei’s face vanishes from the holo.
CHAPTER 95
Ryzaard jumps to the familiar spot in space just outside the purple sphere above the planetary network, an aura of blue fire clinging to his body.
With a Stone in one hand, he lays the other on the sphere’s cold surface. As he relaxes, his mind is instantly drawn into the sphere, down the long cable and into the planet’s core. He cycles through the network once, holds it in his thoughts and travels seamlessly through his implant into the Mesh.
His mind expands to fill the infinite white space.
He senses billions of other minds, coming into view as clearly as dots on a page. He stares at them, sifting and reshuffling until he finds the one he is looking for.
The President of the United States.
In less than a nanosecond, he jumps into the mind, finds his bearings and looks out through the eyes. They are in a meeting. The voice of a woman floats through his ears.
“We need your decision, Mr. President.” The eyes sweep around a large crystal table where twenty men and women sit, some staring down at slates or jaxes, others staring back at him.
All of them, including the President, wear the blue jewel behind their ears.
A woman with five stars on the shoulder of her military uniform stands. “Do we blow up the Chinese embassy in Vienna or not? We’ve determined the terrorists are hiding in a small room on the southwest corner of the fifth floor. Attack ships are standing by at a safe distance with surgical missiles primed and ready to be fired on your command. If we don’t release the prisoners they’ve demanded, the terrorists will remotely detonate a nuclear device in the heart of Barcelona and destroy the entire city. Five million people will die. And it will be blamed on you.”
The President looks up. “If we blow the embassy, it will constitute an unprovoked attack on the Chinese. It’s what they’ve been waiting for. It’s what they want. Total war.”
“That’s why the terrorists are hiding there.” The woman’s voice is clear and unequivocal. “They figure it’s the one place in the world safe from attack.” She puts her slate down on the table. “So what is your decision going to be, Mr. President? You have less than three minutes to decide.”
Ryzaard breathes in slowly. This meeting he has stumbled onto looks like a good opportunity to test the new technology.
Hovering in the President’s mind, he senses the words blow it up begin to make their way from the man’s brain to his vocal cords. Relaxing into his Stones, Ryzaard tears the thought from the President’s mind, and replaces it with the words give me a minute to think.
Leaving the man cycling in thought, Ryzaard’s mind jumps through the Mesh to the standing woman and into her slate where he reads the precise coordinates of the room in the Chinese embassy in Vienna. Instantly seeing its location in the Mesh, he jumps to a jax in the same embassy room, identifies its owner, and makes his way into the man’s mind through his implant.
Ryzaard finds himself looking through the man’s eyes at three other men sitting around a table. He senses their desperation.
“The deadline is about to pass.” The man’s hand reaches for a rectangular gold card with a luminous green square in the center. “Threats without action are meaningless. It’s time to make good on our promise. We must destroy Barcelona.”
Too easy.
Taking control of the man’s mind, Ryzaard raises the man’s arm, reaches down to his side, finds the pulse rifle, and in a single smooth motion, raises it above the table and sprays projectiles across the bodies of the other three men. As their chests implode, Ryzaard brings the point of the rifle up to the man’s mouth and taps the trigger. After a flash of lightning, the man’s mind fades to black.
Problem solved.
Ryzaard jumps back to the conference room at the White House and enters the President’s mind.
“Do we blow the Chinese embassy up or not?” The woman’s voice rises in intensity. “Do we release the prisoners or not?”
“Not.” The President smiles. “The problem has taken care of itself. Everyone back to work.” He gets up to exit the room, leaving incredulous stares around the table. As he approaches the door, his personal jax lets out a high-pitched beep, and a holo of a young man jumps above it in his hand.
“Good morning, Mr. President. The Chinese embassy in Vienna just discovered the location of the four terrorists. There must have been an argument. One of them shot the rest and then killed himself. The Chinese assure us they have no knowledge of the plot and thank us for our restraint.”
“Thank you.” The President glances back at the table. “Like I said. Problem solved.”
Ryzaard jumps out of the President’s mind and releases control as the man strides down the corridor. Receding back into his neutral spot in the middle of the Mesh, like a spider in its web, he reaches out again to all the minds floating in white space, feeling for concentrations of pain, stress, suffering.
Miyazawa’s shrine pulls him closer. Its visitors swell into the hundreds of millions. The Shinto priest has made upgrades to his Mesh-point since Ryzaard’s last visit. To an individual visitor, the throng appears to be no larger than a few thousand souls, and each one enjoys the illusion of moving to the front row for a close-up view of the priest.
From his perch on a mountain peak overlooking the plain, Ryzaard jumps down into the mass of shrine visitors and opens himself to their thoughts. Contact with their Mesh avatars is no longer necessary for him to receive raw input from their minds. It comes to him from every individual accessing the Mesh-point in chaotic waves of emotion and longing.
Reaching back to the planetary network, he routes the mass of thought from his mind into the network’s core.
What he gets back is well-organized streams of data that he holds in a small corner of his mind for reviewing, sifting and cataloguing.
Order from disorder.
Ryzaard himself is surprised at the power of the planetary core and the ease with which it replaces complexity with clarity. He suspects the core has other functions that are yet undiscovered. For now, he is content with the power the planetary core gives him to analyze and search minds on a massive scale. Each of the millions of people gathered in the Mesh at Miyazawa’s shrine becomes open to his view, their memories and thoughts now a matter of mathematical precision. In a few seconds, he knows them all. If he wishes, he can probe their minds without restriction.
He runs down the list of visitors to the shrine like an accountant reviewing a statement of profits and losses. With the help of the planetary core, he scours the collection of minds for any that stand out from the rest, any that might harbor hostility or indifference to the messages being delivered by Miyazawa. After a few seconds, one of them catches his attention. A single blue dot floating in a sea of red.
A Japanese woman different from the others.
It’s not the pain and suffering. She has plenty of that, like all the others. But she has a certain aloofness, as if she is here only to observe and not be observed.
Her name is Michiko.
Ryzaard decides to take a closer look.
CHAPTER 96
Alone at last.
With his legs neatly folded under his body, Miyazawa sits on a zabuton cushion on fresh tatami in the solitude of his personal study. He has just given orders for his white transport to leave the courtyard of his mountain shrine and come back in the morning. At his insistence, all the assistant priests have gone with it, leaving him without human companionship for the first time in months.
The voices of the Kami stir within the background of his mind, like the constant creaking of a ship on a voyage through rough seas. Though the volume of their stirrings varies from quiet murmurs to ear splitting cries, they never completely leave him.
Without thinking, his hand goes back up behind his right ear and touches the smooth jewel. Fingertips dance over its surface and trace the imperceptible boundary between glass and skin. A warm,
viscous liquid drips down his neck. Bringing his hand down, he sees the blood.
On its own, his hand tried to remove the implant again.
It’s clearly the will of the Kami that Miyazawa receive the jewel, but a part of him has rejected it and wants it gone. It is that part of him that must be found and cast off. Otherwise, there will be a constant war within.
No oneness with the Kami.
Dropping both arms to his side, he waits for his hand to move again. It doesn’t take long. The fingers work their way up behind his right ear searching for the subtle edge where the jewel blends with skin, trying to tear out the implant.
Warm blood trickles down his neck.
Miyazawa forces the bloody hand to the tatami floor. He pulls a length of black cord from a nearby drawer and lashes the offending appendage to the leg of the low table at his side so that it won’t wander again. Then he pulls in a deep breath, holds it for ten counts and slowly lets his lungs deflate as he goes deep inside to search for the source of the conflict, reaching out to the Kami that even now crawl through him like maggots.
Little by little, they come like a rising tide, engulfing him until all is submerged in a sea of black. Voices swirl in and out of his head. A warm liquid runs from where the cord cuts into his wrist until it pools in his palm. As the hand fights against its lashings, the table moves up and down.
Opening his mouth, Miyazawa speaks. “I implore the great Kami. Take away that which fights within me. Cleanse me that I may be One.”
A multi-voice breaks into his mind.
Go to Ryzaard. He has the power to cleanse. The only path to purification.
“What would you have me do?”
Take the power from him. Then you will be One.
In the darkness behind his eyelids, a pinpoint of light appears. He rushes to it. One by one, bright dots gather in neat rows forming a rectangular matrix. The lights morph from round spheres to the shape of bear claws, larger at one end and coming to a point at the other. Like ancient samurai armor, they float over the chest of a man, held in place by some invisible force.
Ryzaard.
“Take the Stones from him?” Miyazawa says.
It is the will of the Kami.
“I’ve seen how he uses them. The only way to take the Stones is to kill him.” Fear floods Miyazawa’s chest. “He is the one that made all things possible. The great benefactor of Shinto. How can I kill him?”
Fire explodes under his skin. His bones have the sensation of ripping from their joints, muscle and tissue roughly stripped away, all rearranged in a different order. Sweat breaks out across his chest and back, drenching the white undergarments clinging to his body.
He tries to open his eyes, but they are locked shut. An entity appears in the darkness, a vaguely humanoid figure with holes for eyes and no mouth. Like something made of smoke, its form is in constant flux. Silver needles emerge through its purple skin.
You will obey the will of the Kami.
A jagged-toothed mouth yawns wide and lunges for him, taking him down.
Opening his eyes, his garments are soaked in sweat and blood.
CHAPTER 97
No longer dressed in her kimono, Michiko enters the dining room in silence and sits at the low table. The blue jewel behind her ear stands out against the reddened skin that envelopes it.
“Did it hurt?” Yarah says.
“No, it was completely painless.” Michiko leans forward with her elbow on the table. “But being in the Mesh is amazing. So real. No wonder there’ve been riots to get the implant. It grows on you, like a derm patch that’s instantly addictive.”
Matt’s eyes go to the open cloaking box on the table. “I know.”
“So you were tagging along.” Michiko looks between Matt and Yarah. “Both of you. I should have guessed. Aren’t you worried about giving our position away to Ryzaard?”
“We figured out a way around that little problem while you were at the shrine.” Matt moves a hand toward the cloaking box. “We can use the Stones without detection. As long as they stay in this box with the lid open.” His eyes drift up to Michiko’s blue jewel. “I wonder how closely Ryzaard can monitor the Mesh and everyone that enters it.”
“Good question,” Jessica says. “But even if he can monitor everyone in the Mesh, how can Michiko lead him to us?”
The little girl stares down at the table. “It all depends.”
The three adults shift their gaze to her.
“Depends on what?” Michiko says.
“On whether he can read thoughts.” Yarah puts both of her small hands up on the low table. “If he can read thoughts, he can see memories. Images. Anything a person might have seen with their eyes. People’s faces. It’s all recorded. Waiting for someone to find.”
Michiko leans back and puts her hands on the tatami. “If you were with me, you must have seen it. I visited my friend, and she showed me something. In the Mesh, you can speak to people directly from your mind. They hear the words in their mind and answer back. A very efficient form of communication.” Her eyes move from one spot on the table to another, as if she’s looking at pieces of a puzzle. “She told me anyone can do it. If that’s true . . .” She pushes her body back from the table, jumps up and walks quickly to the sliding door.
“Where are you going?” Jessica says.
Without looking back, Michiko opens the door and passes through. “Stay here. I’m going to make sure we aren’t being watched.” She runs down the hall to the front door.
“Something’s wrong.” Jessica reaches behind her for the pulse rifle and slips the strap over her shoulder before turning back. “Can you hear it?”
“What?” Matt says.
“The frogs and insects.” Jessica’s eyes squint. “They’ve gone quiet.”
It’s as if the world is taking a long, slow inhale.
Matt puts the cloaking box in a side pocket and then takes Yarah and Jessica in each hand.
Closing her eyes, a look of deep concentration moves across Yarah’s face.
And then her eyes shoot open. Her gaze jumps straight up to the ceiling.
A protective film of blue light glows around the three of them as jagged tongues of fire pierce the air above. The room instantly bursts into orange flames, and the four walls disintegrate like a blow torch cutting through a spider web.
Matt’s eyes scan in a circle. The house has been reduced to a skeleton form, all the walls and insulation blown away to reveal only the main beams and framing materials. Half a second later, the beams turn to gray ash and are sucked out into the night air.
Through the protective film, Matt catches a glimpse of attack ships floating a hundred meters above them in the night sky.
The view is cut off by a sea of white that engulfs the three of them.
CHAPTER 98
“Bio-scans are complete. One confirmed dead.” The face in the holo speaks in the clipped language of a military man.
Ryzaard floats above the meditation cushion without opening his eyes. “What about the other three?”
Awkward silence lasts for several seconds. “We had all four on the scans.” The face bends down to look into a slate. “DNA analysis only identifies one set of remains. No explanation, sir.”
“Clean up the area. I want it as fresh as field of daisies by morning.”
“Understood.” The holo fades from view.
Breathing in deeply, Ryzaard scans the Mesh for any sign of Matt, Jessica or the little girl. Nothing.
“Diego,” he says. “Tell me you were able to trace them when they made the jump.”
A holo of Diego’s face flashes into view. “I’ve been closely monitoring the area during the entire operation. But even with two dozen extra satellite monitors and a cluster system, nothing shows up on the location algorithm. I don’t understand. If they used the Stones, I should have caught it on my scans.”
“The answer is clear enough.” Ryzaard speaks without any change in tone. “They’ve reen
gineered the cloaking box to hide the Stones and allow their use. Quite a feat. Your location algorithm is effectively useless.” His eyes slowly open and focus on the disembodied face of Diego floating in space. “Call the troops together for a meeting. This changes everything.”
CHAPTER 99
When the white light fades, the three of them are standing on the edge of a cedar forest. A full moon blazes above the courtyard of a Shinto temple. A single light burns in the living quarters less than fifty meters away.
No one speaks for a long time as they listen to a lone owl in the trees.
Finally Yarah breaks the silence. “Michiko’s dead, isn’t she?”
“I’m afraid so,” Matt says. “Ryzaard must have found her in the Mesh, which means he’s carefully monitoring everyone that enters. The rest is like Yarah said. He got inside her mind, read her memories and found her connection to us. Then he located her in the physical world, probably through her jax. He’s got shock troops all over the world. Once he finds someone he wants to eliminate, it doesn’t take long for his people to go out and destroy them.”
Jessica shakes her head and stares at a small broken twig on the ground. “How is it possible?”
“He’s got a massive number of Stones, and a large chunk of the computing power of the world.” Matt drops his hand to the ground and picks up a small white pearl. Holding it between his finger and thumb, he lifts it up to the moonlight. “With that kind of technology behind him, he probably knows the identity of everyone in the Mesh and can read their minds, at least to some degree.”
“And pretty soon, every person in the world will get the implant and enter the Mesh.” Jessica picks the twig off the ground and twirls it between her fingers.
Matt lets the pearl drop. “It won’t be long before he’ll be able to control what they think, what they do, who they are. They’ll all become his spies. We won’t have anywhere to hide.”