Stones (Data) (15 page)

Little by little, worries about Matt seem to melt away as a new purpose takes form in his mind.

Who is Dr. Mikal Ryzaard? Why is a former professor of archeology heading up the management team for the new combined entity? What is MX Scifin?

It’s time to get some answers.

But getting answers isn’t easy. Over the years, since he and his son fled New York and disappeared from common society, MX Global has been a constant object of his attention, like monitoring a sleeping dragon from afar. Long ago Kent exhausted all public sources of information about this corporate monster.

The search for new data might require that he do the unthinkable.

Go back to MX Global headquarters, the source of all his woes.

“W
ould you like a quick demonstration of what the Stone can do?” Ryzaard blows a cloud of smoke in the direction of the young Tongan face on the other side of the table. “To help you understand what I have been talking about.”

Kalani’s tongue droops out of his mouth in the shape of a long J and then flicks back in. “Show us.”

Ryzaard stands up and makes a fist around the Stone. “Watch carefully.”

And then he vanishes.

A gasp, half terror and half delight, rises from everyone at the table except Alexa. Diego Lopez falls backwards into his chair and crashes to the floor. Jerek Grey slaps the cone device onto the table and stares into the holo screen above it at a graph and flowing numbers. Elsa Bergman thrusts her blonde head under table. Kalani grabs his wooden club. He and Jing-wei both jump up and search the room. But it is no use.

Ryzaard is gone.

Silence is the only sound in the room as they scrutinize each other’s faces for an explanation.

The first to speak is Kalani.

“Where’s my jax?” He rifles through his pockets and gets down on hands and knees to scour the floor, the white soles of his bare feet visible as he bends over. The others discover their jaxes are gone as well, stripped from pockets or hands. A general sense of panic engulfs the room.

Alexa sits quietly with her hands in her lap, watching the scene unfold.

There is a clicking sound of footsteps coming from the corridor. Kalani fingers his club again. As the door slides open, Ryzaard walks through, wearing a dark blue jacket and bright green bowtie, as if to emphasize the fact that he’s changed his clothes.

“Please don’t be alarmed.” He raises his hands to calm the room and walks back to the table. “I believe you’re missing these.” He scatters five jaxes in the center of the table. Hungry hands reach out to snatch the devices. All of them return to their seats and stare at him.

Ryzaard remains standing.

“That was nothing more than a simple demonstration.” He looks down in an apologetic manner. “It’s an old professor’s trick. Do something completely unexpected to fix the attention of the students.” His hand opens around the Stone, glowing dark purple. “I trust it worked.”

Uneasy laugher floats through the room.

“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 instincts 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.