Stones (Data)

by Jacob Whaler

  “How did you do that?” Elsa Bergman’s eyes are fixed on Ryzaard from across the table.

  “Do what?” Ryzaard shoots back.

  “Vanish into thin air,” Elsa says.

  Kalani nods vigorously. “Take our jaxes.”

  “Change into new clothes,” Jing-wei chimes in.

  “First of all, I didn’t vanish into thin air.” Ryzaard strokes his mustache. “Like I said, the Stone gives its Holder a direct connection to different levels of reality. One of them is the flow of time. All I have to do is relax, reach out and grab it. The result is what you just saw. Time stopped for all of you.”

  “But not for you.” Jerek lifts an eyebrow.

  “Correct.” Ryzaard pauses to make sure everyone is keeping up with the conversation. “The Holder is in a kind of protective bubble. There’s no change in the flow of time for me.”

  Jing-wei leans forward, hands folded on the table. “So you collected our jaxes while we sat here like statues and went to your office to change clothes.”

  “And have a few drinks, a couple of smokes, look through some papers, get some work done. I enjoyed several hours of time to myself.”

  “And the rest of us only got a few micro seconds.” Jerek’s eyebrows knit together and form a deep furrow. “Of course, you realize that all of this violates the laws of physics.”

  Ryzaard shakes his head and chuckles. “And that is one thing you all need to understand. The Stones are not bound by the laws of physics.”

  Kalani presses his club and its shark teeth into the mahogany table, scratching deep lines of white. “It’s not fair. You can stop time whenever you want. You can kill us whenever you want.”

  “The Stones stand above all things, including physics and fairness. It’s a simple reality you all must accept.” Ryzaard sits down and swivels in his chair, glancing at Alexa. “But you need not worry about me using the Stone for mischief against you. Each of you has unique talents. You are part of an elite team. I need you.”

  “Can we see another demonstration?” Jerek says. His interest is clearly piqued.

  “There will be plenty of time for that later,” Ryzaard says. “In fact, your job will be to use all the resources of MX Scientific to unlock the Stone’s secrets and help me enhance its powers. I want all of you to think carefully about how we can put the Stone to more effective use to accomplish our purposes.”

  “Which is?” Jing-wei’s eyebrows lift slightly.

  “You already know. To remake the world. Change everything. Do away with suffering and waste.”

  Jerek’s body tenses, as if he’s unable to contain the excitement. “When do we start?”

  “We already have,” Ryzaard says.

  A palpable sense of enthusiasm fills the room. The young people start talking all at once, brainstorming on the possibilities implied by such a power.

  “Dr. Ryzaard.” Alexa speaks loudly enough for everyone to hear. “Perhaps you could tell us what happened after you got the Stone from the holy man. What did you do with it?”

  Ryzaard nods to thank her for helping get the discussion back on track.

  “Very well.” Ryzaard settles into his chair. “After extracting the Stone from the ashes of the old man, I brought it back with me to Oxford. It’s a tricky business. The Stone is controlled by the mind, but it takes training and practice. I worked with it for years, years of trial and error, luck, strange dreams, visions, mistakes. At first, it was almost as if I was dealing with…” He casts his eyes around for the right word.

  “Magic?” Elsa Bergman says as she weaves her slender jax through her fingers.

  “Yes. Magic.” Ryzaard drops his elbows to the table. “And that’s how the Stones have been treated throughout history. Their proper use has always required discipline and concentration. It is very sensitive to the Holder’s state of mind. That’s why it is well-suited to meditation. The kind practiced by Buddhist monks and holy men.”

  “But you are neither a Buddhist monk nor a holy man, are you?” Jing-wei leans forward with a half-smirk on her face.

  “No, Jing-wei, far from it, although I find meditation techniques useful.” Ryzaard’s eyes follow a thin line of smoke curling up from a cigarette still balanced on the edge of the table. He raises it to his lips and takes a long drag, exhaling a stream of light-blue smoke toward the vent in the ceiling. “Volumes of ancient lore speak of the Stones and how to unlock their powers, if you know what to look for, but I grew tired of the limits of the old ways. I began to search for a different approach to unlock their full potential. A path more suited to the modern era. Any guesses what I’m talking about?”

  “Science.” The confidence in Jerek’s voice shows he’s sure where the conversation is going.

  “Exactly.” Ryzaard allows a thin smile on his lips. “And what is the first step in the scientific method?”

  “Data.” Jerek’s eyes are wide open, both palms on the table. “Lots of data.”

  “Right again.” Ryzaard takes another pull on his cigarette. “I needed hard data on the Stone. Not folktales. So I started hanging around the Physics Department at Oxford and struck up a friendship with a Dr. Harold Fishman.”

  “The same Dr. Fishman who pioneered the use of high-energy beams to penetrate solids?” Jerek says.

  “Yes, rather convenient wouldn’t you say?”

  “Didn’t he die in his sleep several years ago?” Jerek’s eyebrows rise up. “I remember reading about it when I was an undergrad at MIT.”

  “A tragic loss.” Ryzaard shakes his head, doing his best to feign sorrow. “Nonetheless, he was helpful when I needed him.”

  “Did you show him the Stone?” Jerek says.

  “Of course. And I asked him to analyze it.”

  “Really?” Jerek moves closer to the table, resting elbows on it. “What did he think of it?”

  Ryzaard leans back. “After several attempts, he still had no idea what it was or where it came from. It was like a black box. Completely impenetrable.”

  “By design, no doubt,” Jerek says.

  Ryzaard strokes his mustache. “The problem was that Dr. Fishman was attempting to penetrate the Stone with radiation. He thought he could force it open, like using a crowbar on a wooden box. I suggested that we focus on communicating with it. That’s when we had a breakthrough.” He presses the glowing tip of the cigarette into the table top, twisting it and letting it drop.

  “How can you communicate with a rock?” Thick lines form across Kalani’s brow.

  “At my suggestion, Dr. Fishman designed a mechanism that beamed a stream of information directly at the Stone and monitored any feedback. I took it back to my office and began to experiment. Radio broadcasts produced no effect. I tried prime time TV, World Cup soccer, Tibetan Buddhist chants, Mozart. Even Shakespeare and Keats. Nothing happened.” Ryzaard pauses to make sure everyone is keeping up. “Then we moved on to numbers.” He looks directly at Diego Lopez, the math whiz from Chile.

  “I started out with the prime-number sequence, one number every second. No reaction. We tried speeding up the sequence to ten numbers per second. Still nothing. Then we put it on a thousand numbers per second, one number every millisecond. After twelve seconds, we detected a signal from the Stone. We tried it over and over, with different starting points and always got the same result. The Stone sent out a signal after twelve seconds.”

  Kalani looks up from his slouching in the chair, sits up and leans in closer, both elbows on the table, his cheeks resting on his hands. “What kind of a signal?” Kalani says. His eyes focus intently on Ryzaard.

  “At first, we didn’t know,” Ryzaard says. “Our instruments detected something, but there was no way to interpret it. So we turned it into a contest and enlisted the help of the graduate students at Oxford’s Mathematical Institute. We asked them to decode the transmission.”

  “What was it? More numbers?” Diego stares into Ryzaard’s eyes.

  “Very good,” Ryzaard says. “Your ins
tincts are sound. The grad students came back to us a few weeks later with a decoding algorithm. We incorporated it into our mechanism. It turns out the Stone was broadcasting a prime-number sequence twelve seconds in the future from the stream we were beaming at it. That gave us an idea.”

  “Stock quotes,” Elsa Bergman says.

  “Exactly,” Ryzaard lights another cigarette and lets it hang from his lips. “It was a momentous day when I sat in my office with Dr. Fishman and beamed live streaming stock quotes into the mechanism and got live future quotes back. We knew we had something of great value.”

  “The Xerxes Diviner.” Jerek and Elsa both say it at the same time.

  “Yes, although it’s gone through several upgrades, it was basically the same device we’ve been using for the past two years.”

  “What about Dr. Fishman? He didn’t just walk away and leave you with a goldmine of almost infinite value.” Jing-wei’s eyes narrow to tiny slits, and she tilts her head to the side.

  “Dr. Fishman claimed a right to half of all future profits generated by the device. He threatened to go public with the entire matter unless I agreed.” Ryzaard took the cigarette between his fingers and stood up with his back to the table. “I tried to reason with him, to get him to understand that what we had was much more valuable than money. We still hadn’t plumbed the depths of its potential. We had a duty to use the Stone for the benefit of the entire world, not for mere money.”

  Dropping his hands behind his back like a professor, Ryzaard slowly walks around the room.

  “But Fishman didn’t agree, did he?” Jing-wei’s voice sounded more like a statement of fact than a question.

  “No, he didn’t agree and grew more belligerent and demanding.”

  “That’s when he died in his sleep?” Jerek’s eyebrows rise in anticipation.

  Ryzaard’s head goes up and down. “It was unfortunate. I wish we could have worked something out. Lack of imagination is an all too common defect and a terrible waste.” He moves full circle around the table, going back to his seat and turning to face the young people. “But each of you is different from poor Dr. Fishman. You understand that profits generated by the Stone, however desirable, are not the goal. They simply provide the means to a far greater end.”

  “What could be more important than money?” Elsa chuckles and tilts her head to the side.

  “Power.” Ryzaard meets her eyes with a cold stare. “The power to remake the world as it should be. The power to make evil impossible. The power to do away with suffering. The power to bring Paradise.” He turns to Jing-wei. “Tell them what we’ve been working on.”

  All eyes turn to her.

  “Market quotes are just the beginning.” Jing-wei’s voice trembles with hesitation as she breaks the silence. “With Dr. Ryzaard’s, permission, we’ve already tried DNA sequences, baseball statistics, election results, GNP tables, population figures. The list goes on. The Stone appears to work on any phenomena reducible to a sequence of numbers.” She turns her empty palms up to the ceiling, as if to emphasize the enormity of what they have discovered.

  “It’s like having a crystal ball,” Diego says.

  “No, it’s better than that.” Kalani reaches out to grasp his club, bringing it close and staring at the shark teeth. “It’s like being God.”

  CHAPTER 22

  Matt jogs through the airport to the security portal, his backpack hanging off one shoulder. When he passes a black dot on the wall, someone’s clumsy attempt at hiding a camera, his hand drops into a side pocket, swipes the jax and engages its cloaking algorithm, a handy piece of rogue-ware his dad snagged off an underworld Mesh-site. It emits a finely calibrated data burst that blurs his image on any security video from the waist up.

  Balancing the new jax in his hand, he thinks about tossing it in the garbage. He purposely left it at home, hoping his dad would forget to bring it. For most people, getting a new jax is cause for celebration, but not for Matt. For him, a new jax means a new ID. It means becoming a new person with a new name, a new history. Throwing away your old self.

  And it’s the main reason he has so few friends.

  With a swipe of his index finger, he activates the jax. His dad has already downloaded the new ID, and it matches the name on a passport card Matt pulled from his drawer. It’s pretty amazing how his dad is able to get new IDs every other month or so. He never says how he does it, but Matt suspects he is getting help from contacts inside the government. It isn’t legal, but it keeps them safe from the boogeyman.

  Putting the two jaxes together, he does a quick data transfer and then wipes the old one clean. For good measure, he pops out the memory cube, drops it to the floor and grinds the crystal to fine dust. Then he kicks it with the tip of his shoe and creates a small white cloud. Walking into the nearest bathroom, he waits until it’s empty, and flushes the jax and his former identity into oblivion.

  Just like that, he becomes a new person.

  As the metallic cylinder is sucked out of sight, a tinge of sadness flashes in his mind. So many identities flushed away. So many pasts jettisoned.

  When will he be allowed to hold on to who he is?

  There is no time to mourn. He’s late for the flight. Running to the security portal, he needs to let Jessica know his new ID.

  Just before he presses the video function, his dad’s face jumps in front of his eyes. He ignores it.

  “Hey Jess.” Matt looks directly into the jax. “It’s me. Sorry for the fuzzy face, but I’m in stealth mode right now. I’m at the airport, almost to security. As near as I can tell, Dad’s not following me.” He moves the jax around in a full circle inside the airport. “Finally got away. Can’t wait to get to Japan and really be free.”

  Tapping the end, he shoots off the message to give Jess his new contact info. Regret immediately pierces his chest. She hates it when he makes fun of his dad like this. According to her, he’s supposed to show more gratitude.

  He jogs a few more steps and gets a video back. Looking down, he sees Jess on the freeway in her red convertible, driving to work, her brown hair blowing wildly in the wind.

  “Your dad’s a good man. He raised you. He protected you. He deserves your respect.” She yells over the sound of the wind in her hair.

  Matt isn’t going to argue. His hand whispers a meek reply.

  Agreed.

  And follows it up with a bid for sympathy.

  Getting close to the security portal. Pray I’ll make it through.

  For someone who has spent most of his life running from the authorities, direct contact with any part of the power structure triggers an instinctive fear. And fear can be detected. At the security portal, there are stress hormone sniffers and chemical sensors constantly pulling samples from the air. As he passes through the portal, he will be vulnerable, like an armadillo slowly uncurling and exposing its soft underbelly.

  Matt slips into line.

  With his backpack still hanging off one shoulder, he moves toward four white semi-circle arches spaced ten feet apart. Each one of them has a different set of detectors, and he will be required to pass through them all. One by one, people in front stride quickly through. There’s no stopping or hesitation.

  Matt is determined to do the same.

  With a glance, he sees the hi-res camera mounted just above the first arch and ducks his head slightly as he passes underneath, quietly holding his breath.

  Nothing.

  He passes through the next two arches in silence.

  As he moves under the final one, its white color changes to red, and a security officer in a blue jumpsuit quickly approaches. He has the official seal of the Flight Safety Administration emblazoned on his chest.

  “Sir, I’m sorry for any inconvenience, but we’ll have to check your backpack. There was a strange reading when you passed the portal.” He leads Matt over to an area with a table and chairs near the wall.

  Matt thinks quickly. Maybe it was the cloaker on his jax. Dad said it was
undetectable, but maybe he was wrong. Matt curses him under his breath.

  “May I open it, sir?” says the FSA man, pointing to the backpack.

  “Sure. Nothing but clothes, climbing equipment and study materials.” Matt wants to turn and make a run for the nearest door, but he slips off the backpack and drops down into a chair. With a white knuckle grip on the arm of the chair and conscious effort, he is just able to control his breathing and slow his racing heart.

  The FSA man lays the backpack on the table and opens the flap to empty it. Matt knows all of the contents have already been quietly catalogued as he passed under the scanner. Another official with a shaved head and handlebar mustache comes over to help. He holds a portable scanning device in his hand. It takes them less than a minute to sort all the contents on the table.

  Matt taps out a message to Jessica as they are finishing.

  Got stopped by FSA. I think dad loaded some code on my jax that triggered the security portal. I’m dead. My only shot at getting away is gone. Forever.

  Jessica answers in a few seconds.

  Remember that Singapore Air jet that disintegrated over the Pacific last year. It caused them to tighten security. You’re young and have an Asian face, so you fit the profile. Just stay calm. You’ll get through.

  “Sir, what’s this?”

  Matt looks up from his jax. The man with the big mustache holds up a large claw the color of violet.

  It’s the rock Matt left at home.

  Dumbfounded, he squints his eyes and stares. How did it get here? In his mind, he clearly sees himself tossing the rock on his futon in his bedroom and turning to leave. The feel of it leaving his fingers is stuck in his memory.

  Dad must have slipped it in my backpack.

  Matt curses silently. It’s just like something dad would do. Always meddling. But why? And how did the rock change color?

  He takes in a long, slow breath. “It’s just a rock.”

  “Looks more like a crystal to me.” The man turns it over in his hand. “But there’s just one problem. It doesn’t register on my scanner. Any idea what it’s made of?”