Stones (Data) (46 page)

Matt struggles through jagged surges of pain to hear the sound of the surf. It’s farther away than before, but he still manages to hold on with a thin thread of consciousness. His drooping eyelids lift, and he looks at Ryzaard standing in the doorway, smiling. “Why?” says Matt.

Ryzaard puts both hands into his suit pockets and pulls them out. In his left hand he holds the pen-like device he pressed against Matt’s neck earlier. In his right hand he holds Matt’s Stone. “I’ll put it to good use.” He points the pen squarely at Matt and presses his thumb on a small raised stub, pushing it down with a satisfying click.

At the same instant, something moves inside Matt’s neck near a main artery.

“You have five minutes of life before that tiny capsule I implanted empties its contents into your bloodstream.” Ryzaard bends his lips into a half smile. “Try to enjoy it.” With that, Ryzaard turns and walks out the door.

A split second later, a new and distinct stab of pain shoots through a nerve along the length of his neck and through his spine. It feels like an electric shock is branching off into every corner and cell of his body.

The connection to the thin thread of sound made by the surf on a distant beach is severed, slipping from his mind like water through a sieve. A wave of cicada buzzing pierces through the window.

Matt is back in real time.

Through blurred vision, he sees the two
Yakuza
thugs clutch their chests and pull away with hands stained crimson. Seconds later, they collapse to the floor. Professor Yamamoto’s head drops down loosely and blood pours out a few inches below his chin, soaking the lower half of his white shirt on its way to a puddle on the floor.

Matt arches his back, raises his eyes to the ceiling and opens his mouth wide. His body strains against the tape holding his wrists until it cuts into his skin. As his thoughts turn to Jessica, air rushes out of his lungs with the sound of a thousand dying dreams.

R
yzaard steps outside the professor’s office, shuts the door and walks down the hall to the restroom. He enters quickly and, finding it empty, locks the door behind him. After the flight over and the events of the afternoon, he has a sudden hunger for miso and garlic. There is a ramen restaurant just a block away from the university main gate with its promise of long noodles basking in salty broth, crispy fried garlic gyoza resting on the side. While Matt’s life drains out, Ryzaard can rest at the restaurant and then jump back to the airport for the flight home. His fingers swim into his pocket and caress the rough surface of Matt’s Stone.

Two Stones. Just the beginning.

With a smile, he closes his eyes so he can see the bookstore next door to the ramen shop. His mind moves through the floor plan, searching for a quiet, empty space. He wills himself there. For half a second, the world falls away and he feels the familiar sensation of motion.

As the motion stops, he opens his eyes and is standing in front of the mirror in the bookstore restroom. After relieving himself, he walks out into the store, through the aisles crowded with college age youth and out the front door. The aroma of garlic and ginger pull him ten meters down the sidewalk and through the red
noren
curtain that hangs across the entrance.

By the time he sits down at the counter and puts in his order, his appetite is raging to the point of frenzy. There is a long two-minute wait, and then steady hands place a steaming bowl under his nose. He hunkers down with chopsticks in hand to devour the contents. When the plate of gyoza arrives, he dumps them all into the bowl with a splash.

Judging from their stares, the university students in the ramen shop are marveling at the skill of the old gaijin in the art of slurp and burp.

He drains the last of the broth and puts the bowl down with the chopsticks lying across the top. With a full belly, an exhale of satisfaction flows out between his lips. A glance at the digital clock on the wall tells him that the capsule implanted in Matt’s neck has burrowed its way into his carotid artery and injected twenty cc’s of pure distilled water, killing him in seconds and leaving no trace in his bloodstream for the police lab technicians to find.

With the former holder of the Stone now dead, it’s time for him to bond with it and forge a link that will remain until Ryzaard’s mortality reaches its end. Luckily for him, the accumulation of Stones will make it possible to put that time off to the far future, perhaps indefinitely. With a half grin on his face, he decides it would be fitting to bond with the Stone in the ramen shop on a full stomach. But there is a sudden lightness in the pocket of his tweed jacket. He reaches into the familiar space.

The Stone is gone.

Abruptly standing up from the counter, Ryzaard scatters the chopsticks and knocks the empty ramen bowl onto the floor where it shatters and attracts the eyes of the other patrons. He rushes to the exit without stopping to pay.

Not dead. Not dead. Not dead.

Like a mantra, he repeats the words over and over, as if trying to drive away an evil spirit.

Once outside, he hurries to the crowded book store next door, elbows his way through a thick crowd of young people staring up at bluescreens on the ceiling. When he is in the restroom in the back, he chooses the middle of three empty stalls.

After taking a moment to catch his breath, he clears his mind, closes his eyes and focuses on the image of Professor Yamamoto’s office. With practiced skill, he wills himself there. All around him goes black for an instant, and then he disappears from the bathroom stall in a flash of light and reappears standing next to the table in the professor’s office. It takes a few seconds for his eyes to adjust to the new surroundings, and he turns to the chair where he left the boy less than ten minutes ago.

Then he drops slowly to his knees.

Matt is gone. The tape that was on his wrists and ankles still hangs idly in place on the chair.

T
he gentle buzzing of the Turing Box forces Kent’s eyes to open. The thermal image scan is complete. He rolls off the mattress onto the floor and rubs his eyes. It has taken longer than planned, but the results will give him a good idea of the human and mechanical activity on the 175th floor of the MX Global building, enough at least to know where to start listening.

He puts the Turing Box on the desk. Brushing its bluescreen, he observes the TurBo passing through the colors of the spectrum, starting with deep red and moving through pink, yellow, green and blue, ending with purple. As he stares at the screen, the colors mix until shapes that vaguely resemble the layout of an office building floor begin to form. He taps fingers on the bluescreen, confirming that all the data overlays are complete.

The TurBo is good at collecting raw data from the thermal scan, but now he needs customized algorithms to analyze and organize what he’s picked up, algorithms that do not come installed on the TurBo.

He taps the screen and sprays the unscrubbed data to his slate for further analysis.

But where is the slate?

Sleep is still hanging heavy on his eyes, and his frantic search for the slate takes a full minute as a terror-induced sweat drenches his T-shirt. Just when he’s sure that he accidently left it outside his office during one of his excursions and that someone will pick it up and link all the data to him, he finds it under a large plastic carton of Chinese take-out.

The data analysis is a slow process, but by late afternoon he has a fairly complete picture of the 175th floor across the street.

And it looks like he hit the jackpot.

He leans back and studies the final product on the slate’s bluescreen, a diagram of the floor with a line drawn neatly down the middle at the point where the elevators open, dividing it into two equal sections, an east wing and a west wing. The west wing is filled with work stations arranged in a circle around a central meeting room in typical retro-corporate style. Based on heat signatures, it’s got an unusual concentration of bluescreens and electronic equipment, more indicative of a research lab than a business office.

The east side of the building tells a different story. It’s entirely devoid of the telltale signs of high energy consumption and the heat output of electronics. In fact, it consists mostly of empty space, with only one long office on its outside edge looking out to the old Brooklyn Bridge. A long corridor connects that lone office to the work area on the west side.

It is clear from the layout that whoever occupies the lone office wants privacy and isolation and is in a position to demand it, in spite of the high price of office space in Midtown Manhattan. And they are not keen on surrounding themselves with wall-to-wall hi-tech gadgetry. Put those facts together, and it points to only one conclusion: the head of the organization, an old man, occupies that office.

Kent smiles with the knowledge that he has finally found the office of the new President and CEO of MX SciFin, Dr. Mikal Ryzaard.

M
att knows he is dreaming.

He can tell by the murky fog that hangs all around and the muffled sound of a man’s voice that floats loosely through his consciousness, never quite taking hold. It has a general quality of urgency as it rises and falls in spikes that jolt him halfway out of relaxation, only to let him fall back into that contented place from which he does not want to move.

The fog thins out, and the head of a massive snake floats into the corner of his eye. It must be part of the dream. Nothing to be afraid of. Large fangs glisten near his neck, which is resting comfortably on a white pillow. There is only a slight pricking sensation as the fangs sink into his moist flesh. Bliss and repose take over. He gives himself up to the overpowering need for sleep within the dream.

But sleep does not come.

Through closed eyes, his sight is drawn inside his body. A black sphere moves slowly across his line of vision from left to right against a white background. He knows the sphere has entered his body from the outside, and it’s trying to get to a large blood vessel on the far right that resembles a tree with multiple branches. If the sphere makes contact with the blood vessel, the sphere will open and release a poison that will flow through his body and instantly kill him.

The black sphere was put there by Ryzaard.

But Matt is not afraid. Dying means rest, and he is utterly exhausted and tired of fighting, tired of living, tired of trying. Relaxation takes over as he gives himself up to the inevitable end of life.

Then there is a bone-jarring flash. Lightning seems to strike only a few inches away and startles him.

“
Okiro! Okiro!
”

Someone is yelling at him to wake up, shouting in Japanese. It’s a man’s voice, the same one he heard earlier in the dream. He tries to ignore it, to block it out. It fades for a time, and then comes back, this time louder and more insistent.

“
Omae, Okiro!
”

The black sphere is only a hair’s breadth from touching its target. Matt looks at its round shape and wants to separate himself from it, to look away, to ignore it. But he can’t. He reaches out just before the sphere kisses the thin wall of the blood vessel and finds that he
can
move it back. But it takes great effort, and it is easier to ignore the whole thing and just let it go.