Stones (Data) (59 page)

“No need to use those barbaric methods anymore.” Ryzaard drops his hand into the outer pocket of his tweed jacket and takes out the small stone box. He flips up the lid, turns it upside down, and lets the Stone fall out into his other hand. Then he casually tosses it to Matt.

Matt shoots off the couch like a coiled spring, his arm outstretched to its full length for the Stone, the toe of his right shoe on track to kick Ryzaard in the groin.

With the ease of a ballet dancer, Ryzaard takes a small step back, focusing his mind. Matt hangs in the air, motionless, his hand inches from the Stone.

I should kill him now
, thinks Ryzaard.
It would be so easy.

Instead, he wraps his fingers around the Stone floating close to Matt and lands a foot hard into Matt’s belly. When he’s done, he calmly walks to the other side of the room and drops Matt’s Stone back into the little box. Turning to face him, Ryzaard relaxes and allows time to flow again, standing still to observe the scene.

Matt’s fist closes on empty air, and he crashes down onto the floor, biting into his tongue and curling up in a fetal position around his bruised belly, looking confused and hurt.

“Surely we don’t have to play these games again, do we?” Ryzaard says.

Matt lifts his head in the direction of the voice. Blood flows out the corner of his mouth onto the floor. “Go to hell,” he says, forcing the words out slowly between gasps and swallows.

“No reason to become angry.” Ryzaard walks back to Matt, his shoes making crisp tapping sounds on the hard floor with each step. He stops and looks down on the curled figure on the floor.

Matt swallows hard and seems to brace for another blow, making a visible effort to slow his breathing. “Not fair,” he says in a whisper.

Ryzaard bends down near Matt’s face and begins to whisper. “Nothing is fair. That is the essence of power. Either you have it or you don’t. And right now, I have it, and you don’t. A simple truth, but an important one for you to grasp if you would like to preserve your life. You need to have a clear understanding of reality.
To see reality as it truly exists
, to quote your friend, Mr. Naganuma.”

Matt’s eyes close, “He’s no friend of mine.” A pool of blood forms beside his lips.

Ryzaard smiles. “He saved your life.”

“He betrayed me.”

“That may be true from your perspective. But he really had no choice. You see, both of us want the same thing. We may disagree over details, but it is only details.”

“I hate you all.” Matt’s foot jumps up to the back of Ryzaard’s knee, just brushing it before stopping, frozen in time.

Ryzaard stands over Matt. A stream of red stretches from his mouth to the floor, bloodshot eyes stare forward with a look of cold concentration.

Incredible persistence. Naganuma was right.

Ryzaard abruptly leaves Matt and walks out of the room back into his office and over to the desk. Pulling open the bottom drawer, he finds an old book, thick as a couple of bricks, with yellowed pages.

The Complete Works of Plato.

He smiles and goes back into the room where Matt still lies motionless on the floor. Gently placing the book under the middle of Matt’s right thigh, he adjusts it slightly, and then stands back to appraise its position.

It should work.

Ryzaard jumps up and comes down with both feet on top of Matt’s thigh. There’s an audible snap, like the breaking of a tree branch in the forest.

Satisfied, Ryzaard moves back a couple of steps, folds his arms and relaxes into the flow of time.

Matt’s raised leg finishes its movement through the air toward the back of Ryzaard’s knee, but Ryzaard and his knee are no longer there. Instead, pain visibly explodes in his broken thigh bone. Involuntary screams of agony escape from his mouth as his neck and spine arch back.

Ryzaard waits patiently with folded arms until the screams die down into quiet whimpers.

“Perhaps you’ll listen to me, now that I have your attention.” He starts pacing back and forth past Matt, still writhing in pain on the floor. It’s as if Ryzaard is a professor again, delivering a lecture at Oxford, hands clasped behind his back.

“Three words, Matt, three words.” The silence is broken only by the sound of shoes on the hard floor. “
Life is suffering.
That is the fundamental flaw in the design of this world. And, believe me, it
has
been designed. Evil has free reign. The powerful prey upon the weak. The weak suffer. Sickness, disease, poverty, death, manipulation, fear, capitulation. Human potential is ravaged and squandered in the Darwinian jungle we all inhabit.”

Matt opens his eyes and looks up at Ryzaard. “Why?” he says, the word barely escaping his bloody lips.

“Why? Why is the world like this? The answer and the responsibility lies squarely with those who made it, those who rampage through the universe building worlds with abandon, each flawed and filled with suffering. You know who I am talking about. You have seen them.”

Matt groans. “The Allehonen.”

“Yes! They have the power to stamp out evil, and yet they refuse to use it. They build a planet, set everything in motion and then simply walk away, turning their backs on the those whom they profess to love, abandoning them to wasted lives of suffering and pain.”

Matt lies on his back. His eyes slowly open and close. The ebb and flow of his breath, the rise and fall of his belly, begins to take on a rhythm, a steadiness.

“The Allehonen,” he whispers. “They’ve shown me things. They will help if we trust them.”

Ryzaard walks by and roughly kicks the book out from under Matt’s thigh.

A silent scream passes through his throat, but he closes his mouth before it can escape.

“You’re wrong,” Ryzaard says. “They won’t help. That would violate one of their fundamental principles. Their prime directive. Non-intervention. But there is an answer to all of this. It’s an answer given to the world over two thousand years ago.” Ryzaard bends down and picks up
The Complete Works of Plato
and begins to thumb the wrinkled and yellowed pages. “No doubt you’ve read this before, in your freshman Western Civilization class.” He licks a finger and turns a few pages, stops and runs his eyes down the lines of the paper. “I’ll quote from Plato’s
Republic
. Listen carefully. Four simple words.
Philosophers must become kings.
That is the answer. The Philosopher King. Power concentrated in the hands of wise rulers, people like you and I and Naganuma, who can protect the weak and eradicate suffering.”

Matt shakes his head slowly from side to side. His mouth opens. “Dictatorship, totalitarianism, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Tenzing.” He spits out a mouthful of blood and swallows. “It’s been tried. Always fails. Always turns into a nightmare. More suffering than before.”

Ryzaard lowers his voice to a whisper. “You’re right. But this time it will be different.”

“Absolute power corrupts…”

Letting his eyes drop down, Ryzaard holds his breath and stops the flow of time. He stoops down and stares into Matt’s face, seeing the lips parted as if in the middle of a sentence, frozen in pain. Ryzaard’s eyes become shiny with liquid.

A tear drops down onto Matt’s face. An old word of scripture from the Christian Bible floats through his mind.

Blessed are the merciful…

With a gentle movement, he kneels on the floor and puts his hand on Matt’s abdomen. In an instant, he sees the ruptured spleen and, with minimal effort, heals the wound. Then he reaches up to Matt’s mouth and closes the cut in his tongue. Pressing fingers into Matt’s thigh, the bones come together, fusing back into perfection.

With ease, Ryzaard puts one hand under Matt’s back and another under his legs, lifts him up and walks to the closest dental chair, staring down at Matt as a father might look at his son.

The son Ryzaard never had.

And never will. He drops Matt into the chair and pulls a thin gold card out of his shirt pocket.

He steps back and relaxes, restoring the flow of time. At the same instant, he swipes his thumb on the card. Metal binders at Matt’s ankles and wrists light up and close around him.

“Perhaps now you are ready to cooperate,” Ryzaard says.

Matt looks around in surprise at being in the chair and out of pain.

Ryzaard pulls out his jax and brings it close to his mouth. “Alexa,” he says. “Bring the girl in.”

“A
re you sure?”

“Yes, they confirmed it. They’re in his office right now.” The tall man adjusts his sunglasses in the late afternoon sun. “He’s gone. He took his backpack with him, along with bottles of water, protein bars, climbing equipment and his slate.”

“Climbing equipment?” Little John drops back in his camp chair in the shade of the tent, looking out through the open flap at the highway where two large trucks are lined up, bumper to bumper. Several dozen youths are unloading pallets of canned food and water. “Sounds like he’s going somewhere for a while. Any idea where?”

“They found this in his office.” The man hands a jax to Little John.

He looks at the holo screen, a jumble of dark lines, circles, and boxes. “What is it?”

The tall man takes a step forward. “Design plans for MX Global world headquarters. The bottom ten floors. They also found one of these.”

Little John looks again at the image on the holo screen. It’s a small red cylinder-shaped object. “What is it?”

“The Children did a materials analysis and some quick research on the Mesh. It’s new, not yet available on the market. But it’s got a magnetic core tightly packed with shaped-charges, the kind used in demolitions and mining.”

Little John shakes his head. “I don’t believe it. He’s really going to do try to take them down.” His gaze goes back up to the tall man. “Do we have someone on his tail?”

“Yes. One of the best. Right behind him.”

K
ent steps off the subway at exactly 5:07 in the afternoon.

For a split second, his gaze is drawn up to the ceiling of the station through hundreds of meters of concrete, glass and steel as his mind reaches out to Matt.

Stay alive until I can get to you.

He listens for an answer, but doesn’t feel anything as he’s swept into a flow of human bodies moving onto the platform and heading for the escalators up. Pushing gently through the mass of flesh, he works his way to the right. As he nears the edge, he slips out of the main current and drifts off down a dark hallway, past a bathroom and around a corner.

If the building plans are still correct, there will be a utility entrance down this hall. If the door is still there, it will be unguarded, maybe forgotten.

Kent swipes a finger down the side of his jax and studies the drawings displayed on the holo screen. It casts a green glow on his face in the dark.

Audible footsteps and voices come down the hall behind him.

His heart takes a long rest before it begins to beat again. The game could be up if someone is tailing him. In desperation, he moves further into the darkness until he bumps up against an abrupt wall. The hallway simply terminates in a dead end. Sounds drift closer. Kent tries to flatten himself against the wall, but the daypack is still on his back, making him stick out.

A young man sporting sunglasses, probably in his early twenties, walks around the corner just fifteen meters away. He looks straight ahead, directly at Kent, and keeps walking closer, his hands making karate chop motions in front of him.

Kent holds his breath.

A loud voice penetrates the silence. “Hey Demetrius, where you going?”

The young man stops and spins around.

“The bathroom’s back here,” the voice says. “You walked right past it.”

“Sorry, man. Guess I just got too much into this movie I’m watching. I love these CineViews. Feels like I’m really there, part of the action.” The young man disappears back around the corner.

As the voices draw farther away, Kent’s pulse feels like a Japanese
taiko
drum. He exhales and slows the beating. When the voices fade to nothing and he’s again bathed in silence, his fingers go down to his side and find a raised line on the wall behind him. Turning around, he steps back and follows the metal seam with his hand. It runs from floor to ceiling where the utility door has been welded shut.