Select (Select #1)(16)

Jaynes came to the attention of outside financial circles when he was profiled without his permission in a best-selling book about the profiteers from these two events. The book dubbed him “the Oracle of Austin.” From there, like it or not, he was on the map. And things got stranger as people began to look more closely at the man himself.

In early 2013 Jaynes, a rumored adrenaline junkie, went skydiving in Monterey, California. When his chute deployed at fourteen thousand feet, Jaynes cut it loose, prepared to deploy his backup chute at six thousand feet. In a one-in-a-million chance, however, the backup didn’t deploy properly. Jaynes plummeted to the ground, outside the drop zone. When the instructors found him, he was reportedly sitting on the side of the road with only facial lacerations. He stunned bystanders by refusing emergency medical care, citing his preference for his own physician. He then walked away from what should have been an unsurvivable incident.

There is no record of a Novak Jaynes before the year 2001, when he registered his fund with the SEC. Jaynes has declined to be interviewed for this article, and all the research tools available in this day and age yielded no results. Witness protection is one theory, though Jaynes would never live such a public life if this were the case.

Over the past two years, Novak Jaynes himself seems to have broken with his strictly private nature by becoming a major philanthropist—donating to the University of Texas at Austin’s athletic facilities and medical school, Austin’s New Central Library, and countless other civic projects in and around the city. As a by-product of his celebrity, Jaynes’s family has been put in the spotlight as well, and very quickly it has become clear that Novak Jaynes’s family warrants as much scrutiny as the man himself. Jaynes has two daughters in his immediate family. But then there’s the extended family.

Ten families seemingly related to Jaynes live on the same street in a winding, exclusive neighborhood. All of this is notable, certainly, but things grow odder when you hear that this group keeps almost exclusively to itself. Those who have seen them together speak in hushed tones about their pure beauty—”a band of angels” was one vivid description—and how there are so many of them who look so stunningly alike.

Who are these kids who routinely receive national recognition in the various arenas in which they compete? They all attend the same exclusive private academy, St. Philip, a school that prides itself on sending students to the Ivies, which strangely none of these children attend, opting instead to stay local. When speaking to former and current students about the presence of Jaynes’s group at the school, it’s clear there is endless fascination and speculation where this group of children is concerned. There was both admiring and disparaging talk of the immense talent these children seem to possess—their incredible athleticism, their photographic memories. But then there were the stranger observations and rumors most likely born of envy: the eerie calm of the group, their seeming ability to communicate with just their eyes, and, most persistent, the conviction that if you watched them on the fringes long enough and hard enough, you would eventually catch them doing something out of the ordinary—making the impossible catch, jumping a little too high, each of them avoiding the cafeteria salad bar on just the days of the E. coli breakout.

Regardless of the rumors, we all like to study the shiny people, the powerful and talented, to see how they differ from us. But there is something uncanny about a mysterious group of so many similar people, as if they are their own island, living among us but also apart from us.

In the years since Jaynes’s outrageous windfalls, his fund has performed steadily, yielding only slightly better than average returns. Could this be an attempt to stay off the radar? If so, he is lying low for now.

You can’t see the Jayneses’ home from the road, but from the water you get an unobstructed view. Staring at the architectural wonder of glass, rock, and steel, you have to wonder what takes place inside and what the Oracle’s next act will be.

Jesus. But it was what was in the comments section that elevated us to the status of urban myth. Everyone and their brother claimed to have seen us do extraordinary things. More than one person said they’d seen us off to one side, mastering a professional-level gymnastics move or skateboard trick before simply dropping it to move on to the next thing. Others commented on ESP-level powers of anticipation—turning to the exact page in a book before we were told, opening a door before someone knocked. It was all true. Those were moments when we had been sloppy.

The article had surprised us when it appeared out of nowhere a little over a year ago. No one spoke about how much it had gotten right. Suddenly anyone who hadn’t heard about our presence in Austin was aware of us. That’s when Novak began to make changes and segmented us into smaller groups. After a bit the conversation died down, but from there on out you could feel people’s excitement when they thought they had identified one of us around town.

I wondered if John had made his way to the one comment that unnerved us most of all, the one that named us. After reading this, John would feel both better and worse. He’d know he wasn’t making things up, but he would also be scared. Even if you thought you were an open-minded person, it had to be different when you saw something so strange with your own eyes.

I exited the article and went through his open tabs. The first tab was a search for “Julia Jaynes.”

“Hand it over.” Victoria’s voice cut through the car.