by Jacob Whaler
Matt follows her delicate fingers as she lifts the teapot and pours out the smooth green liquid. “You’ve studied chanoyu. The Tea Ceremony.”
“Is that a question or a statement?” Michiko pours her own cup last and sits back down with her legs perfectly aligned under her body.
“An observation.” Matt nods toward his cup. “You pour tea like my mother used to.”
“It’s no great accomplishment to have studied the Tea Ceremony.” The cup goes up to her lips. “They didn’t tell me that the Finder was an expert in Japanese culture.”
Matt senses the tension in Michiko’s voice.
“We’ve been out of the loop for quite a while,” he says. “It may help if you could tell us what you know about Ryzaard and his current plans.”
Michiko takes a sip from her cup, holding it with both hands. “The nearby freedom camp was destroyed and the people disbursed. Or killed. I don’t know if any freedom camps are left anywhere in the world. Rumors of the Finder and his last words are whispered and passed in secret by word of mouth.” She takes another sip of tea and swallows.
“Last words?” Matt raises an eyebrow.
“Yes,” Michiko says. “Two words, to be precise. It’s all the wisdom he was able to offer. Not much to go on if you ask me.” Her eyes sweep past Matt. “And now the Children still devoted to the cause wander without a leader, hanging on to those two words, always looking for the day of Abomination.”
“I remember now.” Matt pulls a small amount of tea between his lips and lets it spread out on his tongue, noting its bitter flavor. “The two words. Avoid Shinto.”
“As luck would have it, it may turn out to have been good advice.” Michiko stands. “I have something to show you. But first things first.” She looks at Yarah. “Are you hungry?”
Yarah’s eyes shoot open. She nods vigorously.
“Then let’s eat.” Michiko taps Jessica on the arm. “I have food in the kitchen.”
Jessica gets to her feet. “I’ll help you.”
The two of them leave the room, their voices trailing off. From the kitchen down the hall, the far off sound of dishes and glasses floats in the air.
Matt takes the time to decide whether Michiko can be trusted, but her and Jessica come back with platters of food before his mind settles on a decision.
It all goes down onto the table.
“Watch the video while we eat.” Michiko walks to the wall opposite the bookcase and pulls back a curtain to reveal a bluescreen. “It happened a few hours ago, just before nightfall.” She stands back and points her jax, causing the screen to light up.
It starts with a wide angle view of a Japanese Shinto shrine with three torii gates standing in the water.
“Itsukushima Shrine,” Matt says. “On Miyajima Island. One of the most famous shrines in Japan.”
“No need for commentary,” Michiko says. “Just watch.”
The view zooms in on a single Shinto priest standing on a platform in front of the shrine. Luxurious white robes envelope his body.
“Who’s that?” Jessica says.
“Mr. Miyazawa,” Michiko says. ”Master priest of EUSA. The Earth United Shinto Alliance. Watch what he does.”
As they stare, Miyazawa holds up a small, clear cube in his hand. It opens, and he takes out an exquisite blue jewel floating inside. A young woman walks forward, and he presses the blue jewel to the flesh behind her ear.
It all triggers a distant memory in Matt’s past.
They watch as the view switches to avatars of Miyazawa and the young woman travelling through the Mesh.
“Of course.” Matt’s chopsticks fall from his fingers. He rises to his feet, staring at the bluescreen, mouth open. “Why didn’t I think of this before? I should have known.”
Jessica touches his knee. “Should have known what?”
“It’s so obvious!” Matt’s hits the heel of his hand against his forehead.
“What?”
“The implants.” Matt motions up at the scene of Japanese Shinto worshipers pressing the blue jewels to their ears. The view zooms in on a close-up of a small group. Their dilated eyes and slow movements tell him everything he needs to know. He’s seen that look before. Images flood into his mind. “Ryzaard showed this to me. A long time ago. This is how he brings Paradise to the Earth. Everyone gets a blue jewel. He takes over their minds. No more crime, no more wars. A planet of zombies.”
“So this is the Abomination?” Jessica says.
Matt nods. “It’s finally made itself known.” He brings a bowl of miso soup up to his lips and slurps. “Now it all makes sense.”
Michiko points her chopsticks at the bluescreen on the wall. “If that is really what it looks like, a direct neural connection to the Mesh, then you have your work cut out for you if you’re trying to stop it.” She picks up a thick strip of white squid sashimi and touches it lightly to the soy sauce. “Everyone on the planet is going to crave one of those. A dream come true. It’s going to be hard enough keeping the Children raised in freedom camps away from the implants. I don’t know how you will keep everyone else away.”
“I think you’re right.” Jessica’s eyelashes drop down for a long blink, and she turns to Matt. “What can we do?”
“No idea.” Matt no longer has an appetite as nausea overtakes him. “But we’ve got to think of something. Ryzaard’s moving fast.”
Michiko stabs a ball of sticky rice with her chopsticks and stares at it. “You have a major problem on your hands.”
“We all do.” Matt says.
CHAPTER 85
He could have killed me.
Dropping onto his meditation cushion, Ryzaard lets gravity pull his hands down to his belly, the back of one resting in the palm of the other. He pulls in a deep breath and fills his lungs from bottom to top.
He could have killed me, but he didn’t. More precisely, he wouldn’t.
Matt is a source of mystery, from the day they first met. Possessed of awesome natural ability, he all but refuses to exercise his power. Not that he is afraid. Ryzaard has never sensed any fear in him. But something holds him back, and it will result in his undoing.
He could have killed me and taken my Stones. Taken over my entire operation.
The way Ryzaard did with Jhata.
Why didn’t he?
It is cliché, but maybe the answer is simple. The boy lacks the will to power. He isn’t afraid of power as some people are, but it doesn’t interest him. Perhaps he is one of those people whose natural disposition is to worry too much about others, too little about himself. It’s clear he has spent time with the Allehonen and has acquired their worldview. Ryzaard himself is very familiar with it. The Allehonen came to him years after acquiring his first Stone.
But once he understood their intent, he turned them away.
The boy is different. His thinking has been sullied with thoughts of oneness, unity, and that most self-eviscerating of all artificial constructs.
Love.
Such concepts lead to only one result. Weakness. An aversion to power. Self-abnegation.
He ends the thought with a gentle down-blink of his eyes.
More urgent work remains to be done. Although he made a cursory voyage through the Mesh with the help of his implant, he has not yet discovered all the secrets of the blue jewel. The time is fast approaching when he will stand at the head of a vast empire of bejeweled slaves. It is time to do a thorough investigation of its inner workings.
Reaching out for the Stones, Ryzaard’s consciousness floods into them, lingers for a moment, and then flows out through the implant and into the network. He plunges forward with abandon without filters or restraint, trying to take it all in at once, full of the sensation of rushing through a narrow portal into a churning ocean of sensory data. Random explosions of color and sound blur past him. Tactile stimulation reminds him of snakes and centipedes crawling over his skin. The neutral scent of air is replaced by a mouthful of tastes and odors that suff
ocate and threaten to overwhelm him.
He pushes forward through the sensory overload. Millions of other minds float nearby. For a time, he loses his way in the chaos.
And then, like a fog horn breaking through a night storm, a low-frequency pitch tingles across his body. Sensing its direction, he shoots toward the sound.
The next instant, chaos falls away, and he’s floating in the vacuum of space above a massive glass planet covered with a fuzz of long snake tails attached to floating shark heads. An aura of light blue hangs inches above his body protecting him from the ravages of deep space.
He’s been here before. It’s the planetary network first found by the Lethonen and relocated by Jhata before he killed her. A blue sphere two meters across floats a short distance away. It’s attached to the end of one of the tails instead of a shark head. His eyes are drawn to it.
Making a close inspection of its surface, one thing becomes immediately clear. It’s made of the same material as the jewel implants. He lays his open palm on its cold surface.
A pleasant sensation draws his mind like a breath through the glossy ceramic exterior into the sphere. He resists the urge to hold back and relaxes into its pull. The walls of the long tube blur by and he shoots into the heart of the network in the planet’s interior. Like a single free electron, he follows the connections wherever they take him, moving right, left, up or down on a pathway that turns and subdivides with nearly infinite complexity. As he moves through the network, he finds it’s an easy matter to hold it all in his mind.
And then he understands.
The glossy sphere is the control node, the point from which he can oversee and manipulate the entire network. And Jhata’s implant gives him direct access to the control node. All the other billions of nodes, the shark heads, are only one-way pathways that hold the minds with the slave implants and connect them to the network.
Everyone with a slave implant will be under his dominion.
With an image of the network comfortably in his mind, Ryzaard reaches out for his Stones and comes back to his own implant.
Continuing his forward momentum, the power of the Stones pulses through him. With the image of the network and its near-infinite complexity in his mind, he plunges into the Mesh, opening himself to it, comprehending all of it and its sea of sensory stimulation in a nanosecond.
No chaos. Only crystal clarity.
He senses the motion of hundreds of thousands of individuals entering and exiting the Mesh through their jewel implants, knows where they are going, where they have been, what they have done. The Mesh itself, with billions of Mesh-points and independent arcologies, floats in his conscious awareness like a three-dimensional cloud. He moves instantly and seamlessly between locations.
He thinks of Kalani and senses that he is in the Mesh. With no more effort than it takes to move his gaze a centimeter to the left, Ryzaard jumps to the point where Kalani stands in the center of a doorless, windowless room permeated by a light green haze. The avatar of Kalani is a meter away, searching through a mass of Chinese characters and numbers floating on the opposite wall. The boy’s hand reaches out to touch them. As he makes contact, they glow red. Ryzaard takes a step and moves into the boy’s line of sight.
Kalani’s eyes track from left to right as if he is staring right through Ryzaard.
I’m invisible to him. And everyone else.
Ryzaard wills himself to be seen.
The next instant, Kalani stumbles backwards and falls. “Don’t do that to me!” He slowly gets to his feet and looks around at the green mist. “How did you get through all the layers of encryption protocols? Just curious. I set up some pretty thick walls.”
“What encryption?” Ryzaard says.
Kalani shakes his head. “Do you have any idea where we are?”
“Yes.” Ryzaard simply opens his mind and lets the answer flow in. “At the core of China’s official Mesh-runner training academy.”
“It’s protected by nested security algorithms controlled by a series of quantum neural nets.” Kalani takes a step closer to the wall. “I don’t know how you got this far without detection, but if we aren’t careful, the Red Dragon will find us and shut us down. I’m working through the last level now.”
Ryzaard glances at the wall. “How can I help?”
Looking down at the slate in his hand, Kalani reaches around Ryzaard to the wall. “I’ve got to enter the characters in the right order. I blew the first try. There’s only one chance left, and my de-encryption device seems to be having a problem.”
“Let me have a look.” Ryzaard turns around and surveys the wall. As his eyes narrow, the correct sequence lights up in blue, and he brushes each character with the tip of a finger. He touches the last one, and the wall falls away.
“How did you do that?”
Ryzaard shrugs his shoulders. “I just pressed the blue characters in order.”
“What blue characters?”
“Don’t worry about it.” Ryzaard walks away. “I’ll leave the rest in your capable hands. I’m going to keep looking around the Mesh.”
Kalani, mouth open, becomes a blur.
The thought of Miyazawa crosses Ryzaard’s mind, and he moves through white space until he comes to rest on a wide plain nested in a box formed by three sharp-toothed mountain ranges. Half a kilometer away and elevated above him, a square Shinto shrine floats. It has a tiled roof in the shape of an upside-down V. A mass of humanity kneels on a blanket of white pearls around the shrine.
Taking a step forward, Ryzaard looks down. As expected, the plain is covered in white pearls. Thousands of Shinto pilgrims pick up the pearls and cup them in their palms.
Ryzaard moves forward through the avatar bodies that form the crowd, not bothering to step around or avoid them, invisible to their eyes. He leaves the front line of humanity and steps through the torii gate, its surface covered with living cherry blossoms.
The aroma is nearly intoxicating.
Passing under the gate’s crossbeam, a single clear chord of sound, as if struck from a Tibetan singing bowl, floats in the air.
Miyazawa stands on a platform high above the crowd. Ryzaard, detecting no hint of recognition in Miyazawa’s eyes, listens to the priest’s sermon.
“And so, my followers, who is to blame for the chaos that reigns in the world?” Miyazawa floats up a couple of inches from the platform. “It is the unbridled lust for power. The constant search for more. The almost ubiquitous greed that reigns in the mega-corporations that rule our planet.”
You are treading on delicate ground, Ryzaard thinks. Perhaps you need some help in delivering your message.
In an effortless instant, Ryzaard zooms in on the exact location of Miyazawa’s mind in the planetary network. The location of every other mind in the congregation jumps out at him. He gathers them all to himself and takes matters in a new direction.
Miyazawa stops for a brief moment. Eyes blinking, he turns to face a new direction.
Ryzaard sees the priest’s lips speaking the words that Ryzaard drops into his mind.
“But not all mega-corporations are corrupt. One stands above them all in integrity and concern for the welfare of our planet and our people. And for that reason, it has become the greatest and most admired commercial enterprise in the history of the world. You all know who I speak of.”
As Ryzaard nods his head, the heads of thousands of Shinto worshipers nod in unison.
“MX Global,” Miyazawa says. “The great benefactor of Shinto. The great benefactor of the human race.”
Ryzaard recalls the ease with which the Stones have enabled him to control minds to quell all opposition to his great work. Corporations, governments, the media, all of them have been as putty in his hands. With the help of a massive surveillance machine at his fingertips, at the first sign of trouble, he’s been able to use the power of the Stones to soften thoughts, calm hatred and change minds.
It was easy before. Now it has become infinitely easier.
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For the next three hours, Ryzaard roams at will through the Mesh, moving from point to point, each one like a small village or city suspended in a white sky. Streaks of blue shoot by as if on grid lines from location to location. He can only guess that these are people who have not yet received the Gift and are limited to accessing the Mesh with a jax or slate.
All of that will change within a few short weeks. As Jerek completes the fabrication of the implants, the population within the Mesh will swell to billions.
It will be only a short wait for Paradise.
CHAPTER 86
Matt walks between a row of sunflowers with a hoe propped up on his shoulder. “When is harvest time?” He wipes the sweat from his face and bends down to survey an outcropping of green growth on the ground.
“Still a couple of weeks away.” Michiko bites her hoe into the brown dirt at the base of a stalk. “But if I don’t get rid of these weeds, it’ll make planting time that much more difficult next spring.”
“This is fun.” Yarah looks straight up at the blue autumn sky between the drooping sunflower heads. “Can we stay here forever?”
A full-throated laugh breaks from Jessica’s lips. “We’ve been here a week, and you want to stay forever.”
“It’s so peaceful,” Yarah says. “And the work is fun. I want to be a farmer, just like Michiko.”
Matt digs his hoe into a spot of green fuzz. “It’s been relaxing, that’s for sure. For a few days I’ve almost felt like I can forget about the Stones.” With that, he drops his hand into his pocket. Both the open cloaking box and the Stone are there, just as they had been five minutes ago.
A faint, heart-stopping sound jumps over the horizon.
Thump, thump, thump.
Out of habit, Matt grabs his pulse rifle and freezes. “Everyone down.” He runs between Jessica and Yarah, drapes his arms around them and pulls them to the ground.
Michiko leans on her hoe and looks up past the sunflowers into the sky. “Japan Defense Forces has a base about 30 klicks from here. Heli-transports pass overhead at least once a week. I’ve gotten so used to it that I don’t even hear it anymore.”
