by Jacob Whaler
She has the implant in place behind her right ear.
The Shinto priest is personally giving each person the jewel. On a table behind him, an exquisite crystal bowl holds thousands of them like tiny jelly beans.
Reaching in, Matt grabs a small handful of the blue gems, each roughly the shape of a miniature Stone. He drops them into his pocket and walks away to mingle among the people that have just passed through the line and received the implant.
The looks of ecstasy on their faces are unmistakable.
“OK,” Matt says. “I think we’ve seen enough. Let’s get back to the car and start the world up again.”
Yarah reaches out for his hand. They walk back through the sea of statues and turn the corner.
“Where’s the car?” Matt’s heart stops as he searches, not finding it.
Yarah points. “Right over there, where we left it.”
Matt stares at it and realizes he’s been looking on the wrong side of the road. “I want to do one more test with the Stone.” He jumps them both to the side of the car. “Looks like that works, too.” Stooping down, he looks inside. Jessica still sits in the front seat looking into the back with her mouth open in midsentence.
Slipping into his seat next to Yarah, Matt releases his grip on the flow of time.
“—doing?” Jessica stares at Matt.
He smiles at her and winks at Yarah. “Yes, Jess. I know exactly what I’m doing.”
CHAPTER 93
“The Stones work inside the box?”
Jessica looks into Matt’s face, over to Yarah and back to Matt.
“Yes,” Matt says. “As long as they’re inside the box with the lid open.”
“But I don’t get it,” Jessica says. “If Ryzaard can’t detect them, how can you use them?”
Matt looks at Yarah and nods. “Tell her.”
Yarah giggles. “If I go into my Stone, I can see it. Millions of tiny hairs of energy coming off the Stone, like rays of the sun. When it’s in the box, it holds all the filaments inside, even though the lid’s open. Like a magnet. Nothing gets out of the box, so there’s nothing for anyone to detect.”
Jessica nods. “But you can still use it?”
“Exactly,” Matt says. “We’ve tested it, and it works.” He leans back in the seat. “I’d say this new development places us in a much better position than we’ve been for a long time. It’s easy to use the Stones, and Ryzaard can’t trace us. The best of both worlds.”
“Agreed.” Jessica looks suspiciously at a man walking past the car to the shrine. “What about Michiko? Shall we tell her when she gets back?”
“No. Not yet.” Matt turns to Yarah. “But when we get home, I’ve got a special job for you.”
Yarah’s face turns into a smile. “What do you want me to do?”
“I have a feeling Michiko’s going to be spending a lot of time on the Mesh. See if you can hitch a ride inside her mind and find out what it’s like.”
Yarah nods her head up and down vigorously.
An hour later, Michiko turns the corner and walks down the street to the car in her blue kimono. When she approaches the side, the door pops open and she slips down into the driver’s seat.
Matt holds his breath, waiting for her to speak.
She looks in the rear-view mirror at the blue jewel behind her right ear.
“Well?” Jessica asks.
Michiko starts up the car and engages the motor-tone. “It’s painless. Nothing more than the feeling of something pressed against your skin.” Easing forward, she does a U-turn on the street, heading back in the direction they came from. “I don’t feel any differently.”
Matt leans forward. “What about the Mesh?”
“I haven’t tried to access it yet.” Michiko stares through the windshield. “I thought it best to wait until we get back home.”
She drives in silence, all eyes upon her.
At the house, they all enter the back room with the low table. The three of them sit down, waiting for Michiko.
She moves down the hall to her room. “I need to change out of this old kimono before I forget how to breathe.” A door slides shut behind her.
“Can you tell what she’s doing?” Jessica looks at Yarah and pours grape juice into cups for each of them.
Matt puts the cloaking box on the table with the lid open. Two Stones superimposed on each other glow inside.
Yarah sits on the tatami floor and closes her eyes. “I haven’t tried yet. I’m going in.”
“Wait.” Matt moves close to Yarah, his hand on her shoulder. “I’m coming with you. I need to see what’s going on inside the Mesh.”
“How is that possible?” Jessica says.
Yarah opens her eyes and turns to Matt. “I think it’ll work if I come to you first. Open yourself to me and just let me come inside. Then I’ll take us to Michiko, and we can see what she’s doing.”
Jessica stands and walks across the room to a spot where two pulse rifles are leaning against the wall, their butts on the tatami floor. “I don’t like this. You’ll both be in a trance if anything happens.” She grabs the rifles and checks the projectile packs for each one. “Don’t be gone long.”
“Don’t worry. Technically, I’m not going anywhere. We’ll be back soon.” Matt sits in a lotus position, closes his eyes and fills his lungs with fresh oxygen. Relaxing, he opens his mind as the air slowly flows out through his nostrils. “Ready.”
Sitting beside him so their knees touch, Yarah closes her eyes. “OK. Here I come.” Her hands slowly uncurl with the palms facing up to the ceiling. “You feel a little tense. Relax more and open up. I’m not going to hurt you.”
Matt floats in the darkness behind his eyes and focuses only on the rise and fall of his belly. All fear floats out in the breath until his mind and emotions become empty vessels. He senses a massive presence behind him and fights the urge to turn and look. As it comes closer and looms over him, he drops all defenses and lets it settle over him.
A burst of light brings pressure behind his eyes. For an instant, he loses contact with his senses. Then a voice with multiple echoes pierces the silence and fills the inside of his head.
I’m inside your mind. I’m going to make the jump to Michiko. Not sure how this will feel to you.
The voice ends abruptly.
He fights back the claustrophobia. All he feels is incredible forward motion through empty vacuum. Counting backwards from ten, he slams into a wave of sound and color when he gets to three. It swirls around him like the vortex of a storm.
You’re floating away. Focus on something. Grab it.
A blue square dances in the chaos. Matt reaches for it. After a jerk, the dizzy motion stops. Colors turn into images, sounds into words.
He floats in an endless white space. Multi-chromatic dots move above and below, in all directions.
Sorry for the rough ride. Michiko was just connecting to the Mesh when we made the jump into her mind. We both see and feel what she sees and feels.
He relaxes and tries to speak back to Yarah, but he has no voice or mouth to speak with.
Gazing out at the inside of the Mesh, his eyes are pulled away to focus on a floating dot. Colors blur by on all sides, as though shooting through narrow tubes at light speed. When they stop, he stands in front of a massive luxury hotel, its shape and colors more pristine and sharp than any he has ever experienced in the real world. It rises hundreds of stories above him. Or below him. It doesn’t matter. There’s no sense of gravity or direction.
So this is a Mesh-point, Matt thinks.
“That’s right.” Yarah’s voice booms in his mind. “It’s all so pretty!”
Matt tries to move to the open door directly in front.
Instead, he shoots up in a blur to the middle of the building and enters through another door. Claustrophobic terror returns. He wants to scream out to Yarah that he has no control over anything but his own thoughts and is completely captive to Michiko’s sensory input.
>
Yarah’s voice fills his head again, sounding much more mature than the little girl he knows.
Matt, I know your fear. Don’t fight it. Relax. We’re just riding in Michiko’s mind. She’s in control. I’ll pull us out if anything bad happens.
Carried forward through the door, Matt sees a live band playing on a rotating disc of gold just above eye level. A crowd of twenty thousand fans fills the hall in a ring around the band. From the outside, it is no larger than a standard hotel room. On the inside, it has hundred foot ceilings and spreads out like a football stadium.
It’s clear Michiko is a fan of the Cubes. The all-woman band on the stage bears more than a slight resemblance to their terrestrial selves, but their exquisite muscles and body proportions exude a sense of impossible perfection that reminds Matt of Michelangelo’s David. He is crushed under the weight of the sound. Vibrations cut through him like rolling waves of lightning.
But more than the sound, Matt is deluged by the sharp visual clarity and intense pastel colors far beyond anything possible in the real world. Every surface and texture is like transparent glass lit from within. The aroma of vanilla whiskey adds to the atmosphere of barely contained ecstasy.
Michiko’s eyes carry Matt to focus on one of the band members. From a distance, her shirt has a shimmering bronze appearance, but the view zooms in on alternating metallic fibers of blue and red that contrast like stripes on the American flag.
In that moment, Matt receives a visceral understanding of the terrible beauty of the blue jewel. Like the powerful derm patches he has heard of, once you taste this form of non-reality, nothing less real will ever satisfy.
No wonder people are rioting over the implants.
Michiko mingles with the crowd. The music lifts them all until they float around the center stage like asteroids orbiting the sun.
Then her gaze turns back to the entrance. She floats past humanoid, avian and reptile avatars of Mesh skimmers caught in the trance of the sound. Moving through the open door, she emerges into the brilliant white space between Mesh-points.
Guess we must be going somewhere else now, Matt thinks.
Colors fly past in a narrow tube until they stop in front of a traditional Japanese country house with a thick thatch roof, a high peak in the middle and low-hanging eaves over the entrance.
“Gomen kudasai!”
This time, the voice is Michiko’s. It sounds like she’s talking at the bottom of a pool of water.
She stoops down and walks through the front door into an open room with a sphere of blue light floating in the middle. An iron pot hangs on ropes from an overhead beam of wood. In the corner, a young woman is bent over a long, narrow Japanese koto, plucking its strings, making music. Visible ripples of sound swim through the air.
The woman looks up. She bears an uncanny resemblance to a hip Japanese actress. “Is that you, Michiko? Come in.” The woman stands and walks to the door. “How do you like my new Mesh-home?”
Matt’s gaze scans the room in a circle.
“I just got the blue jewel,” Michiko says. “It’s incredible.”
“More than incredible.” The young woman draws her legs up and sits lotus style in mid-air. “You can go anywhere, see anything. Be anything. Build your own world. Live in the Mesh. All from Shinto.” She turns and opens her hand. Two cups of tea float to her from off a counter, and she hands one to Michiko. “Dozo, please enjoy it.”
Michiko lifts the cup to her lips.
Hot liquid floods Matt’s tongue and runs down his throat. He wants to scream, but has no voice.
The woman leans forward and stares into Michiko’s eyes. “You’ll need to upgrade your avatar. You can be anyone you like.”
“I see you’ve picked a familiar face for yours.” Michiko says. “Where did you get it?”
“There are avatar shops everywhere. It’s cheap and easy.” The woman scans the room. “I’ve always wanted to have a traditional country home. I made this to look like my great-grandmother’s house in the mountains outside of Hiroshima.”
Michiko sips more tea and gazes around the room at the rich colors of the dark wood walls and the bare earth floor. “It’s very relaxing. I’ll come back when I have more time. Thanks for the tea.” She takes another drink and lets go of the cup. It floats back to the counter. “I should be on my way.”
Her friend comes closer and reaches out to touch Michiko. “Have you seen this?” She opens her hand and presses it against Michiko’s, palm to palm.
Two walls of white light slam into Matt. He is sandwiched between them.
“Can you hear me?” It’s the voice of Michiko’s friend, sounding as if filtered through a thick wall. “I’m speaking to you without moving my lips. Try it.”
“Amazing.” Michiko’s voice speaks back. “I merely think the words, and you hear them.”
“I discovered it by accident a few days ago.” The friend’s mouth remains closed as she gazes at Michiko. “It works with everyone in the Mesh. I’ve tried it with avatars from France, Germany, Zimbabwe, Cuba. Direct mind-to-mind communication. Language doesn’t matter.”
She pulls her hand back, and Matt senses the pressure of the two walls pull away.
“I’ve got to be going now.” Michiko’s upper body drops forward in a short bow.
The friend bows back. “Come again whenever you’d like.”
Michiko walks out the front door back into empty white space. She jumps through a tube of blurred color that stops on an open plain ringed by jagged mountain ranges. Hundreds of thousands of people mill around, many dressed in white robes. In the far distance, a torii gate stands in front of a Shinto shrine. A priest raises his arms on a platform, his body perfectly framed by the gate. Michiko’s vision zooms in on him, and she is pulled forward through the crowd to a standing position in the front line only a few meters from the priest.
Matt recognizes the priest. Miyazawa, the leader of the Earth United Shinto Alliance.
“To be one with each other is to be one with the Kami.” Miyazawa steps through the torii gate. “It is time. Let us be one.”
As Matt stares through Michiko’s eyes, across the wide, white plain, each man and woman in the mass of humanity reaches out to their neighbor to join hands.
Matt thinks about what had just happened with Michiko and her friend. Before he has time to react, Michiko turns to the women on each side of her and allows them to take her hands in theirs.
I’ll try to protect you.
Yarah’s voice is the last thing he hears before a mountain of heavy light crushes him from all sides. He has the sensation of being pressed into an area the size of a small dot, thousands of voices mixing and floating in a harmonious unity that almost makes him forget the pain.
Can’t do it much longer. I’m pulling us out.
The air is suddenly damp and heavy. With his chest heaving from exhaustion, Matt’s eyes flip open. Yarah is beside him on the tatami floor, her eyes just opening.
Jessica sits on the opposite side of the low table and stares at Matt. “What happened?”
“We followed Michiko into the Mesh. It’s an incredible world.” Matt stops to catch his breath.
Yarah jumps up. “They communicate with their minds by joining hands. The colors are so clear and beautiful. You can move from place to place just by thinking about it.” She stops and looks at Matt. “I want to get my own blue jewel and go back.”
He takes another deep breath. “So do I. That’s the problem.”
CHAPTER 94
Ryzaard makes his way up one strand of the spiral staircase that serves as the spine of the building. Moving with hands behind his back, he swings his gaze from side to side, looking very much like the Oxford professor that he once was.
The project is entering its final phase.
The blue jewel is worn by billions of humankind every day. Earth’s population is moving to the Mesh.
Elsa joins Ryzaard on his walk with her slate tucked under an arm.
“How is the work going?” Ryzaard says.
“Day by day, your implants devastate world economics.” She pulls out the slate, and a red holo pops into the air above it. “Worker productivity is down 20% this week alone. The whole world is taking a vacation. In the Mesh.”
Ryzaard keeps moving up the stairs, taking Elsa with him. “No need to worry. It’s a necessary evil at this early stage. We want 100% penetration. An initial period of euphoria is to be expected. All a part of the plan.” He looks over at Jing-wei working in front of a bluescreen. “It won’t last forever.”
They walk two more flights of stairs up in silence. Elsa’s breath begins to grow heavy. “I’d better get back to work. It’s a full-time job finding the money to support this project.” She drops back down the spiral and disappears from view.
Ryzaard works his way effortlessly up and walks to his office in the corner. Dropping onto his meditation cushion, he hears the signal on his jax.
Jing-wei’s face floats above its golden surface waiting for permission to speak.
“What’s the latest?” Ryzaard says.
Her eyes meet his. “A couple of recent developments I thought you should know about.”
He closes his eyes and nods.
“We completed the most recent distribution of implants to world government leaders at a special reception today at the United Nations.” The holo switches to a view of a large hall filled with men and women from around the world. A woman dressed in Shinto robes stands in the center of the floor. Lines form as the attendees descend down steps to receive the blue jewel. “As you can see, it was very well attended, including both the President of the United States and the President of the People’s Republic of China.”
“I’ll have a look around inside their minds,” Ryzaard says. “But you said developments. What else is going on?”
The view of the hall at the United Nations disappears. “It’s Miyazawa. He’s returned to his Shinto shrine base in northern Japan. Our sources say he’s going to perform a purification ritual. They say he’s been acting strange lately.”
“Interesting,” Ryzaard says. “But none of my concern.” His hand goes up to the Stones floating above his chest. “I’ll be out of touch for a few hours. See that I’m not disturbed.”
