Crystal Clear

CRYSTALS FOR SALE - $49.99 + $7.99/month subscription fee. STAY CONNECTED – WAIT TIL YOU SEE – YOU NEED THIS IN THE OFFICE – WOW! WOW! WOW! – HUGE HELP FOR YOU!

This was an advertisement that appeared on the front page of an industry catalog suspiciously placed in the top of my mailbox at work. Normally I just throw away those things (because the receptionist refuses to just listen to me and do it for me) but I’ll be honest: this intrigued me. See, these catalogs usually are just hawking ergonomic office crap or pens or stress balls or whatever other garbage these companies can crank out and sell to office managers trying to blow their budgets before the new fiscal year. I have no use for those things. I do, however, have some ideas for magical crystals.

Still not quite sure about the ad I flipped through the rest of the booklet. It was all the normal stuff and nothing else seemed out of the ordinary. I even showed it to Greg - he scooted across our office in his chair and had a hearty chuckle at it himself. It wasn’t that expensive, really, and I cracked a half-joke about buying it. Greg laughed, then I laughed, and then I actually went ahead and did it. On a personal card, of course - you try explaining that purchase to accounting.

The ad was quite vague, really; I was curious if I’d really get anything at all. At best I figured they’d be some pretty rocks with a funny story that I could show off on my desk. I dated a crystal girl once. She was fun. Maybe they’d remind me of her, although hopefully not too much. At worst I was out the price of a nice dinner. I might not have believed in magic back then but I did believe in a night out at the casino - a little gamble is something I could get behind.

It took a few weeks for them to show up, actually. Longer than I expected. Maybe there are special precautions that you have to take to send them through the mail, like lithium batteries or something. Unlike Gustavo Fring or Steven Universe fanfic writers I’m not that well versed in crystal shipping. But they showed up at my apartment door like any other package, and I excitedly unboxed them first thing when I got inside. I had honestly forgotten ordering them and it was a fun little surprise.

Inside the normal brown cardboard box was a smaller, much more colorful box with the company branding all over it. I don’t exactly know how to describe this, but do you know how sometimes you order something from Amazon or somewhere online and you can just tell that it was made cheaply? Where the spa cing on the w ords is a little weird or it’s written in one of those funny typewriter fonts? Maybe the logos and symbols are just a little bit… off? That’s how this looked. Instructions and advertising were written in lots of languages on both sides.

When I cracked open the box I actually laughed out loud. First of all, it was only one crystal, not crystals. And what a crystal it was. See, I’d had questions about this thing when I bought it but I put them out of my mind. It was advertised as a subscription, but like, how do you subscribe to a crystal? Would some wizard come and take it away from me if I didn’t pay? Would it just magically stop working? Like many things in our increasingly complicated world I just assumed that someone smarter than me had figured out a good solution. The actual solution? It’s connected by WiFi.

Yep, WiFi. And how does the rock connect to WiFi, you might ask? Well, jammed through the top of what I think is a rose quartz tower (I’ve never actually confirmed what it is) was an antenna. Not a subtle antenna either. A full-on 1950s sci-fi UFO antenna, with silver coils around the shaft and a big round metal ball on top. It looked absolutely ridiculous. It did then and, even after seeing what it can truly do, it still makes me giggle. An outrageous design for an outrageous product.

But supposedly it wasn’t just a pretty little rock - it was supposed to actually do something. I read the instruction booklet that came in the package and it told me that I needed to download an app. An app. To control my WiFi crystal. Sure, why not. Upon downloading the app I was assaulted with ads. Tons of ads. Like a flash game site on AOL in 2002 amount of ads. I understood the business model better then. Sure, I was paying them money to “subscribe” to the crystal, whatever the hell that meant, but I was also the product, my attention monetized masterfully.

But I made an account and was able to get it to pair with the crystal successfully. At least that’s what the app claimed. It showed a little status bar that was fully green. It almost looked like a battery level, and I half-wondered if I was going to find a little charger hole in the bottom of the tower. Luckily, they took care of that for me: the base that it came with was a wireless charger. The whole thing was so absurd that I sat there, still in my work clothes, laughing to myself like a maniac at the kitchen table.

There was only one thing I still couldn’t figure out: what the hell did it do? The ad was very vague but I figured I’d find more in the instructions - nothing. Nothing on the app, either. I tried looking up reviews online but I couldn’t even find a record of it existing. Not even a Reddit post from 8 years ago with a dead link that would answer all of my questions. This admittedly spooked me a little, but at the same time it wasn’t that surprising. I was probably the only fool who actually bothered to buy it, so why would I expect a bunch of reviews?

I played around with it that night but to no avail. I tried whatever I could think of to make it do something, anything really. At first I just left it on the charger for a while in my living room. I thought that it might’ve just been dead. My first guess, less cynical than a lot of others, was that it was some sort of lamp. Maybe it would light up from the inside and change colors or something like that. My friend had some LED lightbulbs like that at his place - I thought that maybe the app controlled the lights. This didn’t prove to be the case. I also thought that it could be some sort of speaker or noise machine but, unfortunately, I was wrong again. The more practical guesses that I tested out yielded nothing.

So I tried out some impractical guesses. I held the crystal up against my skull, right where my third eye was supposed to be. I really, truly tried to take it seriously. I sat cross-legged on my living room carpet with my eyes closed and focused on my thoughts. I spent almost 20 minutes there. It was meditative and contemplative and, as far as I could tell, totally pointless. I didn’t feel any different (except maybe a little silly) and nothing about the crystal changed either. I checked the app, too, but nothing.

I considered the possibility that it had some technological purpose given the big antenna. I logged on to my computer to see if I could pair to the crystal - no dice. I tried the same with my phone, too. I’m sure you can guess the result. The app showed it was on, I knew that much. In theory it was doing something. Truthfully, the little Occam’s Razor thought did start winning out - this was just a weird little scam that did nothing. It was just a rock. A pretty rock with a funny antenna, sure, but a normal, everyday rock. I didn’t want it to be true but, well, what exactly was this thing doing for me otherwise?

I took the crystal with me to the office the next day. I placed it neatly between my left computer speaker and my overflowing mailbox, pushed forward ever so slightly so that it would be displayed prominently to anyone who walked by. Greg came in late that day (no surprise there) and I motioned him over to see it.

“No way,” Greg said.

“Yep,” I replied.

“You didn’t–”

“I sure did.”

“And I thought I was bad with money.” Greg picked up the crystal and spun it around in his hand. He touched the top of the antenna with his finger and made a little “hmm” when nothing happened.

“Does it do anything?” he asked.

“Not that I can tell,” I said, truthfully at the time. “It came with an app you know.”

“Let me see it.”

I pulled up the app and showed it to Greg. This time, however, the picture of the crystal was grayed out. It wasn’t on. I tapped the icon in the middle and the little thinking wheel spun and spun until, finally, color returned to the image. The app successfully paired with the crystal.

“I’ve gotta be going,” Greg said. It was unusually early for his typical early departure.

“Leaving so soon?” I asked. Without even responding Greg stepped out of the room and closed the door behind him. If you knew Greg, like I unfortunately do, you would know how rare that was. Greg is always talking. Greg loves to talk. I don’t even think he knows what he’s saying sometimes but he loves, or maybe needs, to talk.

It was totally out of character but honestly I didn’t dwell on it too much. Maybe he just forgot a Hot Pocket in the break room microwave or something. I only started thinking it was odd when he didn’t return. And it wasn’t only Greg - not a single person came through my office the entire morning. I work in IT for a large company in a big building; I don’t exactly get a ton of visitors but it’s not usually zero either. I noticed that I still got emails from people, so people weren’t ignoring me, but no one wanted to share a room with me.

At first, if I’m being completely transparent, I thought I smelled. I gave myself a quick whiff but it came out clean. Not lilacs and honey, maybe, but fine. I decided to investigate.

Leaving our closet of an office I noticed nothing out of the ordinary. People were at their desks, bored corporate drones were “enthusiastically” filling up the conference rooms, the break room had the usual suspects. That’s also where I found Greg.

“There he is! The bear finally leaves his cave,” Greg said.

“Where have you been all day?” I asked. “Working hard in here?”

“Oh I’ve been around,” Greg said. “Around the office and all that. Getting some stuff done, checking in with Accounting. Remember that problem they were having last week with their printer?”

“Yeah,” I said. “But why haven’t you come back to our office all day?”

“I don’t know, really,” Greg said. “Good question.”

“Right,” I said. He didn’t really seem to be doing anything despite his comments. He didn’t have any equipment on him and, well, he was just standing next to the coffee machine in the break room. In fact, I did a full lap of the office floor and twenty minutes later Greg was still there, empty eyed and seemingly frozen in place.

I went back to my office and sat down at my desk. I looked at the crystal. The gears turned in my head. I looked at the crystal some more. My mouth sputtered some thinking sounds. My jaw dropped. I understood, or at least had a theory. I put the crystal in my pocket.

I did another lap through the office. I cleared out entire rooms. I found Greg in the break room still, milling about. As I got close he walked down the opposite hallway with unusually pacy, heavy steps. I poked my head into a conference room and emptied it, too. No idea where they all went. I pulled out my phone and turned off the app. I went back to my office. Greg was there, leaning back in his chair like usual.

“Can you believe how long today has been?” Greg asked. I paired the crystal again - Greg lurched up from his chair. I unpaired it - he plopped back down. I paired it and he tried to leave. I unpaired it and he started yapping at me about Warhammer. I could’ve done that all day, really, as sadistic as that sounds. It was kind of funny controlling Greg. I started to feel bad, though, and stopped.

The crystal worked. It had a real, very useful purpose. Whenever I turned it on, people dropped everything and left me the hell alone. They just got out of my way without raising a fuss. They didn’t even seem to gripe about it after the fact, or at least were too afraid to bring it up to someone with a magical crystal. I got so, so much more done in the months after I purchased that thing.

I never really did figure out how it works. Like anyone who works with technology I like to tinker with things and take them apart and see what makes them tick. The crystal, as far as I could tell at least, didn’t really have any parts to go tick. There was the antenna and the app but otherwise nothing else. I thought that maybe it droned out some subsonic sound that made people get away from it, but if that were the case wouldn’t I have been affected too?

Could it really be called technology? Maybe, I’m not really sure. Was it magic instead? Maybe, probably I guess. I certainly couldn’t explain how it worked. It just did. Is there really a difference between technology and magic? The jury is still out. No matter what it was, it worked incredibly.

I mean, talk about a deal: a one time cost of fifty bucks or so and like eight dollars a month to never be bothered by my coworkers again and actually do my job? 100% worth it – I’d bet I could even get accounting to sign off on that.