It had been a good chunk of Jon's life without the stone, but now he had it back. And he needed it.
As an adult, he knew that good things generally didn't just fall out of the sky. But the stone did exactly that. If he wanted, he could be a millionaire, or a king, if the stone didn't have some hidden catch that he had never discovered as a teenager.
Since his roommates were gone, that was an ideal time to start esting the stone. Maybe he could use it to wish himself a job. No, that was funny. If he could wish to be a millionaire, why would he need to wish himself a job? But then, the stone is supposed to change reality--maybe the easiest way for the stone to wish him a millionaire would be to change it so that he had a good job, anyway.
Jon decided to start small. He had just finished watching the last episode of Heroes. He always liked that old show. And unlike wishing for a job, wishing for more of it was something he could not possibly accomplish on his own. "I wish that Netflix had an extra season of Heroes available."
His computer screen changed and showed the new episodes. Jon began watching the first episode of the nonexistent season, and a few minutes in, the computer gave a warning about buffering and then the playback halted. He tried to play the episode again and it wouldn't play; he tried to select it again and it was missing, Then he realized what had happened--the stone had a limited range and it only changed reality so that those episodes existed insofar as his computer had partly loaded some of the data.
Worse yet, now everyone in however many miles would think the show had an extra season. "I wish I had a Blu-ray set of that nonexistent season. And I wish that no reality change was caused by my past wishes about that show."
It was a good thing, he thought, that he hadn't wished to become a millionaire. The bank computer was as outside the stone's range as Netflix. He'd either have to wish himself some gold or something, or he'd have to tell the stone to go travel to where the bank computers are to make the wish. Jon settled for getting a few hundred dollars of extra cash with serial numbers of bills that had been lost in a fire, and went on to his next wish.
Jon wasn't seeing anyone at the moment and could use a girlfriend. He prepared to wish for one and then stopped. Making someone who wasn't his girlfriend become his girlfriend would be no better than slipping her roofies. Then Jon got an idea that seemed less questionable. "I wish...."
