Ring Transport - Origins Pt. 02

Going up in altitude, my finger slipped a little on the top, and the center of the map where I was shifted, too. So, the top was like an online map, starting where I was and I could move anywhere.

Getting practiced with going up and down and zooming in and looking, I decided to look inside of Krista's nose, it being a convenient thing to look at, and being aimed at me at that point.

Zooming in farther and farther, I could see small hairs, then skin roughness, then skin cells, and then even a bunch of really fast-moving things going on inside the cell.

That was a little freaky, so rather than zoom out, I just let go of the cube and waited, and it all faded away, leaving me back in the RV.

Trying it again, I went up in altitude, up and up until I was as high as a small plane might fly. I was looking down on a night-side street-light dominated view from seriously high up. I thought about looking for the space station, but it was somewhere in orbit and I figured if I couldn't see it, I couldn't go there.

The other side, the right side of the box, changed the colors I was seeing, and I discovered there that if I tapped as I let go of the box, my view stayed that way. So, I moved my view and changed the lighting so it was light out around me, despite being night. Quickly, I figured out this was IR, since as I zoomed in on a car on a road somewhere, the engine was warm and the exhaust system was, too.

Going the other way, the glow from the car vanished and I was just looking at the frame. Then, I was looking below it and into the iron in the soil, I guessed, and other dense stuff.

That left the front and back of the cube. I couldn't tell what the front controlled, and the back didn't seem like it did anything, either. I let go of the cube, resetting it, and then just moved my finger on the backside. Nothing much happened. I was about to ask Krista for something, and all of a sudden, she started glowing (cube-vision, not in real life).

I realized I had seen her glow because I thought of her. As an experiment, I thought of the idea of 'milk' and looked towards the fridge. Of course, it started glowing through the door.

Ah! This was a finder-function! I thought about Krista again, and moved my finger on that backside. In one direction, it made me glow, in the other, it was just her. I figured, maybe it's identifying all people at one end, and her particularly in another. The up/down didn't seem to make any difference, either, she glowed in all of that.

I let go of the box and said, "Hey Krista. Come here a moment."

She got up and came over, sitting down opposite me. "What's up?" Her usual cheerful self was evident.

"The box, the cube here. It's a 'finder'. I can find things with it. And, look at stuff, anywhere."

"Really?" Her lower lip and jaw jutted forward in an interested-wondering expression. "Can I see?"

I said, "I... think that'd be a bad idea. I don't know why. Regardless, what should I look for? If I think of something, it glows in my vision, sort of, and I can see through things to see that thing I'm looking for."

"Oh! What about, how far is the closest gold mine?"

I laughed, "Sure, I guess so. Let me try." I put my finger center, then a finger on the back, and thought about a gold nugget. I even said, "Gold" out loud.

There wasn't much near me (except some stuff in the RV with us, a few pieces of jewelry of Krista's. So, I zoomed out, gaining altitude to about airplane height and then shifting around the map.

As I rose in altitude, I could see a couple of bright but small glows coming from the RV park near us, of course, and the houses down the road we were on. Going farther up, I looked around, like I was sitting in mid-air, way-high-up, and I saw some bright glows from the desert area, at least a couple of miles away. Keeping looking at that, I zoomed over to that and down, and found it was a small trailer parked there, abandoned, but having some cheap-looking gold gold-plated jewelry under an overturned dresser.

Panning up, I zoomed out and around, and said, to Krista, "Yep. I'm finding gold, but it's all in jewelry somewhere. I have to filter by brightness or something, give me a minute."

Playing around and zooming, I got to some mountains about an hour from us, and found a giant stripe of gold running from deep in one direction, sideways and down. It was utterly inaccessible without massive mining equipment.

Another 10 dead-ends later, I came back towards our RV park west of Reno, but I looked in the desert areas on the road south towards Vegas. Maybe 30 miles south of us, there was a super-bright glow, visible from far away, but it wasn't from a house, just in the middle of scrubland, a quarter mile or more from the road.

Getting closer, I found the glow was underground, near some bushes, and there was a pretty large glow coming from there. There were a series of suitcases or briefcases buried side by side near a row of bushes. I looked in the first one and found it had gold coins, wrapped nicely.

This was a find!

I told Krista about it, but it seemed like it was down about a foot. I knew that even if we got to the place, we didn't have a shovel, and that was a lot of digging. Plus, we'd had a busy day. So, we had something else to do for the next day, going coin-hunting in the desert.

Memorizing the location as being near a milepost I narrated to Krista, over to a ditch, and all that stuff, I let go of the vision, reasonably confident I could find it again.

I asked Krista for other neat ideas, and she said, "Hold on!" Getting her purse, she pulled out a $20 bill, and then a $100 bill, too, one of the ones I'd given her for grocery shopping.

Going out again, I looked around, and used the thought of the 100 versus the 20, sliding my finger for specificity, to find just $100 bills. Expanding it out, there weren't that many outside of the RV or our area, but looking to Reno, they were everywhere, and in big numbers.

Seeing money in a casino, then some banks, wasn't a surprise. I laughed and kept looking.

In a subdivision in a residential section of Reno, there was a 2 bedroom ranch house with a tiny yard, and it was glowing immensely with light from bundles of $100 bills. Staying there, but letting go of the find-this side so I could see it in normal light, I just looked around. The place was normal looking, like anybody's house, except... no food in the fridge, the clothes in the closets were all mismatched and just a jumble of random clothes.

The house was obviously some kind of safe-house or drug house or something. I thought of 'drugs' and looked again, and there was a bunch of them in the freezer in the garage, in various kinds of frozen-food packaging as well as flour sacks, rice sacks, sacks of beans, all that. It was a fake-food drug bonanza, if that's what you wanted. I didn't worry about what kind of drugs they were; that was enough for me.

Looking around, there was a key to the front door under a rock outside (find 'key').

Backing away, I told Krista the street address, which she wrote down.

One other thing occurred to me, whether I could 'instruct' anyone through the thing. Going in the house next door, there was a guy watching TV, some kind of dumb movie. I zoomed in on his face, and said, kind of doing a 'PUSH' on him, "For the next 3 minutes, you're very thirsty." I wanted to not leave him thirsty forever by accident.

But, nothing happened at all. I told him to bend over, all sorts of things. Nothing happened. Apparently, I had to be very close to make the PUSH thing work on a stranger.

That was enough experimenting for the night. I had to think about what I wanted to do. This was obviously a way to make a lot of money, sure, but also to find out interesting things that were hidden to everyone else but me.

I put the cube away, wrapped in my coat, under the bathroom sink, not really sure where I should put it.

Sitting back, Krista saw I was done looking at it, and we talked a little more. Her face was so fresh and eager, I sometimes forgot I was young, too, and was amazed at how this beautiful person would think of being with me. Then, I'd move, I'd feel the strength of my body flowing through me, none of the aches and pains of TLB's old body, plus even more strength from having been working out pretty steadily.

Youth is wasted on the young!

I laughed at myself, that's sooooo something an old guy would say.

Really, though, getting older really meant having seen more things, having perspective to compare things to. I compared Krista's face and body to my ex's and while yes, I vaguely remembered my ex's youthful body, I remembered her old one, too. Krista didn't think like an old person, so she wouldn't know how aches and pains could build up over years and just Not Fucking Go Away, damnit, that was something only old people knew.

I didn't want to wish bad things on people - Krista getting pains of old age - I wanted all of us to be more eternally young. What's the point of getting old, we had tech, we should be able to fix this aging thing.

Now, I realized, I was sounding like someone telling the IT guy the new keyboard they had wasn't as good as the old one, and why did they have to change things anyway. Tech can be hard, even if it's trying to make people happy, and I wasn't happy with lots of things.

Tech ideas got me thinking, and I knew I had tech I had to learn myself. That tech started with math, so I got out my pre-calc book and started in on the problems again.

Krista interrupted me with a kiss before locking the door, lowering all the blinds, and making our hideaway far more private.

Coming back from the bathroom, she was naked, and she knelt in front of me, turning my dining-room chair slightly to get access. Of course I let her. She unzipped me, took off my shoes, socks, pants, underwear, shirt, undershirt -- she stripped me bare, all while I was ostensibly reading and doing math problems.

Truth be told, I was doing problems, I was just doing them slightly slower because I had a distraction. That distraction level increased when she sucked me into her mouth and started rubbing her tongue around to ensure I got hard quickly.

Then - remember I'm still doing math, yeah right - she bobbed her head around and soon had me leaning back to enjoy the feelings coursing through me. Jacking me with one hand and cupping my balls gently with the other, her mouth was magical.

After a while I couldn't concentrate and had to just sit back and enjoy it.

Mmmmm... Blowjobs!

All good things must come to an end, and I did come, spurting and groaning. Her mouth stayed firmly wrapped around my cock-head as she sucked me down and drank it all up. I just stayed leaning back, spent. She to,ok her clothes and mine to the bedroom and hung them straight, I presumed, and hearing her I realized I was tired.

Even though it was only 8:30, I followed her into the bedroom and lay down.

Busy days make for great sleep.

== ==

The next day we drove to Reno, visited a hardware store for a pair of shovels, some rope, buckets, and a couple of other things. I didn't know what we'd need. Thinking ahead, we got a pair of nice sturdy day-hiking backpacks, though I didn't know what we'd put in them.

We knew what we wanted to do about the gold, but the Reno drug house was another matter.

Krista wanted to go clothes shopping since a lot of her stuff was for workouts or Tacoma weather, and we were definitely not in that. I gave her one of my pre-paid cards and settled back to wait.

With nothing to do, I got out the cube again and zoomed in on the house, and then started playing with touching the various sides to see if I could figure out any other things I could do with it.

Surprise! I could do something else pretty neat. By touching the left side in 2 places and twisting, I could wind back time! At first, I just thought it was blinking, but then I realized it was day-night cycles. This was pretty cool stuff. It took some real time to figure it out, playing with it. The distance my fingers were apart changed the rate of wind-back, and I could stop at a specific spot to look more closely.

The cube took quite a bit of getting used-to since different touches in different ways could generate a huge number of variations.

I tried twisting the other way to return to 'now' but it didn't go any farther. This wasn't a future-prediction machine, damnit! I laughed at myself for trying.

Working with all the controls was complicated but over an hour or so I got the hang of it better.

I got messed up a lot and had to reset and start again, but those times were fewer and fewer given my memory for details was pretty spot-on. Finding the right hand- and touch-combinations, I got to where I could go in for a location, time, altitude, zoom, wavelength or object-type, etc., pretty reliably. I even followed a car down the road, though I wasn't expert enough to look in the wallet of the guy driving, that took way too much coordination.

Eventually, with all this playing, I returned to get a time-lapse of the house, and how there was a guy that visited the house once a day, about midafternoon by the sun position.

Going back again to the guy visiting the house, I noticed his face, not particularly mean or nice, just a normal Hispanic guy, mid-20's maybe, driving a 5-year old mundane-looking import with no oddness to it whatsoever, just a nondescript camel-colored car.

He went in the house, and I followed him in, zooming so I was in the house with him. It was very odd as an experience.

All along the process, he did quite a few things in very specific ways.

In the kitchen, he stopped and unzipped his bag wide open on the counter. Next stop was the garage to grab a small pizza box from the garage freezer (full of drugs, I knew already), bringing it back to set on the backpack. Then, walking around quickly glancing at stuff, he flushed the toilet, ran water in the sink, and started the dishwasher without looking in it.

Back at the backpack, he stuffed the pizza box in it, and pulled out from another compartment a big ziplock with neat bundles of money in it. Going down to the basement with it, he put it in one of several garbage bags under the stairs, then picked up a handful of dust from a 5-gallon bucket nearby and threw it over the bags, making them look disused.

Those bags were the ones I'd notice before when I'd been zooming around. Thick construction-garbage bags full of bundles of cash weren't the sort of things I would easily forget.

There were tens of millions of dollars there. The amount was kind of staggering.

I knew that wherever this money was going, there was probably a whole lot more money going with it, or it was going to a place that might be an even bigger haul.

Following him back in his car, he went to a corner grocery store, but stayed in his car for about 10 minutes, checking his watch, before going in.

Once he was in there, he went and stood in front of the frozen foods section and got out his pizza box, opened and closed the freezer door without getting anything out, and went and stood in line.

Another guy, a minute later, came up behind him, also holding a pizza box. They said something, exchanged pizza boxes in line as if they'd grabbed the wrong one, smiled at each other, and each paid and left.

Now I had to choose which guy to follow. I kept my focus on the original one. He got to his car and drove to a real estate office. In the car, he opened the pizza box, took out bundles of cash, and put them in his backpack, then crumpled up the pizza box and put that in his bag, too.

The real estate office was a big firm, national, I recognized it. He had a nice office, with a locking file-cabinet, where he put his backpack while he was 'working'.

A while later, he saw actual people, a couple, and they looked at a bunch of houses and talked, very boring stuff. I couldn't hear them, of course, but I could see they were looking at small ranch-type houses.

This whole setup was fascinating. I sat back and contemplated what I'd seen for a while. Concentrating on the cube was tiring, and I may have dozed off.

Somewhere in there, Krista got back, but didn't disturb me and I was barely aware she'd gotten back. She started driving, but she knew where to go.

Eventually, Krista shouted from the front that we were almost to the right place, and I felt the RV shake and rock as we obviously were driving on a dirt road. I went up front to join her.

The road was fairly wide for being 2 lanes, and though most desert trails are just dust this one had some gravel on it, but only in about 50 yards until it went to a fallen-down sign.

After that, it was a dirt road, with some signs and little reflector posts at the side to keep people going straight.

In other states, the cleared area on both sides would have been a ditch, but apparently there wasn't enough rain nearby to warrant that. The net effect was the road had just barely enough flat-straight-gravel to say to the driver, "Fear Not, Road Not Prehistoric".

Certainly it was calm enough for our RV, so we turned in.

Rumbling along for a while, I followed our progress on the map I'd hand-drawn from memory. Soon enough, we were at our stopping point, a wide spot relatively close to where I'd spotted the coins.

Daytime desert hiking in the summer is intolerable, I've heard. Near Reno in the winter, it's actually pretty pleasant. The temp was about 10 C (50 F), which was cool enough to hike quickly and not get overheated. Walking out to the spot, it was all as I'd seen it using the cube, and I walked us right to the small clearing in front of the bushes I'd seen.

(There was one other precaution that I should mention we took. I'd read a news story once about how some criminals were captured because the authorities had tracked their cellphones even though they were off. We had delightfully wrapped ours in aluminum foil, thinking we were all super-spy for doing it. Our sense of fun in this was pretty high.)

Digging up the first suitcase, we established this wasn't going to be a super-easy task. I'd seen we'd need to dig a foot deep or so into the dirt. Luckily, the ground was pretty sandy.

I got the first suitcase out (an expensive Samsonite metal one, super-heavy and very fancy looking. We opened it up, and sure enough, it was chock full of coin rolls of gold coins!

Jackpot!

The second thru 6th suitcases were all the same, buried right next to the first. We didn't bother opening them there, since I didn't want to break the locks, but it was far too heavy to carry in one load. Each case weighed at least 25 kilos, and while I was strong, I couldn't do that.

Our backpacks were useless since the cases didn't fit in them, so we left our backpacks on and just lugged the suitcases. Krista wanted to bring two, but we established it wouldn't help since I could carry two to her one, and we'd get all 6 in two trips.

That didn't fix the problem - we still had the tools and backpacks to go back for.

After our third third trip, we left a closed-up hole, no real trace we'd been there except for maybe some footprints and shovel marks, but that would probably blow away soon enough.

Back at the RV, we had just pulled away when I thought, Hey, wait, and had Krista stop.

Going back with a shovel, I looked at where we'd pulled off the road slightly and saw we'd left a set of tire tracks. Using the shovel, I wiped those out; once back on the main road the tracks weren't visible given the hardness of the dirt and (in places) gravel.

Krista wanted to know what I was doing, but she came out and saw and we congratulated ourselves on being smart (the latest slang for which was, "semort"). Of course, it was all pure paranoia on my part, but I figured, better to be a little paranoid than a lot sorry.