The Lead Cloak (The Lattice Trilogy Book 1) (10 page)

“A
new
Lattice? But … why?”

Dillon exited the pew. “Progress, Colonel. The current Lattice has been the dominant platform for nearly three decades now. It’s starting to show its wear.”

“What could possibly be wrong with the Lattice? It’s …” Shaw was about to say “perfect” but the word caught in his throat. “… fine.”

“And yet, only a few days ago its vulnerabilities were laid out for all to see. What if the Lattice didn’t have to have a centralized structure in the Nevada desert? With an expensive backup under the streets of Geneva? Wouldn’t that be better for everyone, if it couldn’t be destroyed so easily?”

“But …”

“And what if you had the power to
search
for people and thoughts? I don’t just mean searching a database of tags, but to actually search the Lattice itself, and in real time. Wouldn’t that be helpful to you?”

Shaw thought back to the morning of the raid. You couldn’t just search for people who were trying to destroy the Lattice … you had to wait for them to reveal themselves. But what if he could? With a few strokes of a search query, what if he could locate anyone who hated the Lattice? Who was actively working to destroy it? Then no amount of spheres could have masked the true masterminds of the raid. The thoughts of the terrorists would have revealed themselves, years ago, probably, as they were just dreaming up their plan.

“Why isn’t it searchable?” Yang asked. “I mean, why can’t I search for a person and just—find them? It pretty much works if they’re famous enough to have a public tag list, but otherwise …”

“That’s what everyone wants. To say a name and have their wrap search the Lattice, right? That’s what you want?” Yang nodded. “Do you have any idea what it would take?” Dillon continued. “We would need to teach the Lattice to recognize how that name corresponds to a particular group of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen atoms. We could search for that person’s DNA, but then we’d need to figure out how to report only the person, and not DNA fragments like a strand of hair in their brush. Not to mention that our own bodies contain a lot more DNA than just ourselves. We are a multitude of viruses, bacteria, and parasites at any given time—and some of it is essential. How do we teach the Lattice what is human and what is not if it reads the DNA of a bacteria in our stomach instead of us?

“There are many other problems, of course, but those should suffice to illustrate the point: the foundation of the Lattice is too old. Every atom in the solar system is tracked. Do you know how much computing that takes already? Then to model it into a Lattice reader to an experience that is indistinguishable from reality? That’s another massive undertaking. And now you want it to
search
those atoms? For the Lattice to
understand
what it’s searching, that’s a whole new order of magnitude. Right now the best we can do is use sensors, AIs, and other technology to detect what the Lattice finds. But it’s still an overlay—it’s not native to the Lattice itself. Even if Moore’s Law continues to hold true—and not everyone is sure it can—we’re decades from having computers strong enough to manage search within the current platform.

“That’s why I’m starting over. A new Lattice itself. Faster, more streamlined, not loaded up with decades of code patches and work-arounds. If we can make the foundation of the Lattice better, our current computing power can do the rest.”

Shaw was silent. “How long? Until you think your new Lattice will be ready?”

“Five, six years,” Dillon said with a shrug.

Shaw exchanged glances with Yang. “And Braybrook thought you could be a help today …”

“I don’t have a working prototype for you to try out, if that’s what he was hoping. But I can offer one piece of information, and you can be the judge of how helpful it is.”

“Please.”

“Those spheres the raiders used? They’re
growing
. On a molecular level. It took awhile, but my team found the starting molecule. The molecule builds the rest of the sphere using nitrogen atoms out of the air. I still don’t understand the mechanics of it. But to develop these little molecular machines—and then transport them—would take incredible sophistication in nanotechnology
and
quantum teleportation.”

“And who do you think has those kinds of skills?”

“No one alive. Even my background, as illustrious as it is, isn’t complete enough to do something like that.”

Shaw and Yang left Ada Dillon to finish her prayers and hurried back to the airport. They boarded the shuttle to Shanghai and Shaw found himself feeling moody and contemplative.

Maybe it had been the atmosphere of the church, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that Dillon was reaching too far and too fast into the realm of what should be unknowable. He owed a lot to the Lattice, but what Dillon was building chilled him. Was she doing it to build her—clearly already vast—ego? Or for the money that would certainly come to her if she were successful? He couldn’t imagine the world she described—search for anyone who hates the Lattice and round them up. Search for … anything. Anyone. Any thought. A database of all the thoughts of humanity—instantly searchable. It was a whole new bargain, and one Shaw wasn’t prepared to make.

The plane’s intercom dinged, stirring him from his thoughts. A voice spoke in Mandarin Chinese, and Shaw looked to his wrap. “Ladies and gentlemen, I am pleased to let you know we are now in international airspace. You are now free to remove your helmet for the duration of the flight.”

Shaw unclipped his, listening to the cheers around him. Despite the excitement, plenty of Americans kept their helmets on, and as he took his off, he thought he understood why. He felt naked without it. Like he’d gone to work without a shirt.

Yang still had his on, and he smiled—a little sheepishly, Shaw thought. “Have you actually
looked
at the stats on head injuries?” Yang asked. “I can’t believe there are only three countries with public helmet laws.”

Before Shaw could respond, he noticed his sleeve light up. Iverson, back at the Lattice Installation, inviting him to a chat room. Yang’s wrap was glowing as well. Shaw couldn’t help but chuckle. It was distracted people trying to check their wraps and Lattice readers while on the go that had triggered the public helmet laws in the first place.

“What do you think, should I put my helmet back on before accepting the chat?” Shaw asked.

“It’s your cranium, sir.” Yang smiled and touched his ring to his temple. Shaw followed suit.

Shaw was in the desert again. In the distance he could see the Lattice tower, shimmering in the heat coming off the baked ground. He was glad he couldn’t feel the full extent of the heat in the jump.

“Hello, sir. I’m glad to hear you’ve recovered well.” Iverson’s avatar appeared next to him, and he saw Yang’s materializing on the other side of him.

“Keeping the Lattice safe while I’m away, Johan?”

“Yes, sir. Our jumpers finally figured out how the raiders were able to jam our ground-based lasers. It’s … well … I wanted you to see first thing.”

“Lead on.”

Shaw’s avatar was pulled across the desert toward a pillbox of lasers built into the ground. It was an escorted jump, so both he and Yang were being pulled along by Iverson. They could move around a little, within a few meters of the escort, but Shaw had found escorted jumps were a lot more painless if he just went with the flow, especially when he was using a ring. Escorted jumps weren’t so bad in a jumpbox with scrollwheels, where he could move around freely and easily. But this was one of the few areas where the ring’s interface came up short. It was easy enough to spin the ring on his finger and change the direction he was looking. And moving forward and backward wasn’t so hard. But he couldn’t do both very easily.

Iverson took them inside the pillbox, and to a bank of eight lasers inside.

“To refresh your memory, our ground-based lasers were off-line during the raid.”

“I remember it quite well,” Shaw said.

“Of course. Sorry, sir. I’m going to take us
inside
the laser to show you exactly what went wrong.”

The world grew around him, expanding and expanding until Shaw felt like he was the size of a cat … a mouse … a pea … a speck of dust …

“Just how small are we going, Iverson?” he asked. But by then they’d stopped shrinking.

“We’re at one-ten thousandth our normal size. I’ll take you inside the laser.”

Shaw’s avatar was pulled forward again, toward the closest laser—which at his new scale, seemed to fill the entirety of his field of vision, looming over their tiny avatars.

They passed through metal casings and hard plastic, and Shaw saw the immense central core of the laser that generated the weaponized light, illuminated by a green glow from the base of the laser. Of course, the laser wasn’t longer than a meter, but from this perspective inside of it—and amplified by the mirrors at either end—it was as if he were looking up inside an immense hollow skyscraper.

“The time is two days ago, just a few seconds before we spotted the hovercraft,” Iverson said. “Watch.”

Shaw watched. The chamber stayed empty. He spun his ring on his finger, circling his field of vision, looking for something to change.

“Above us!” Yang called.

Shaw looked up into the chamber above him. Specks of light filled the space—something glittering and shimmering, floating through the chamber and catching the green light like fireflies. They must have been infinitesimally small, considering the microscopic scale he himself was at? Where had these come from?

“What are they?” Shaw asked.

“Spheres.”

That was all it took. Their beauty was gone. How they caught the green light no longer interested him.

“We’re inside what’s called the gain medium,” Iverson said. “The light is amplified in here before it’s sent out.”

Iverson was cut off by an intense rumble, and the green light grew immensely brighter.

“Back at the Lattice, this is when I activated the lasers to track the hovercraft,” Iverson said when the initial rumble subsided. A low hum persisted.

A thin ray of green light shot through the middle of the chamber. It stayed there for half a moment, and then collapsed. Again, the green ray went through the chamber. It collapsed again.

“It’s trying to establish a beam,” Iverson said. “So that it’s ready to go when we give it the command.”

The beam appeared and collapsed, flickering maybe twenty times, Shaw thought, before it eventually stopped.

“Now it’s reporting a critical error back at the Lattice. It won’t be back online until someone can manually review it. And, of course, that didn’t happen until after the attack.”

“The spheres were blocking the beam?” Shaw asked, though it seemed pretty clear.

“Yes, sir. They’re light enough at this size that they can drift in the air like a speck of dust. Anytime one of them crosses the path of the beam, it refracts the light away, breaking the amplification and disabling the laser.”

Shaw found himself marveling at the ingenuity, the creativity. To disable the weapon from within … brilliant.

“I guess the raiders figured out they can use the spheres for something more than just communication,” Yang said, apparently thinking along similar lines.

“If they can teleport a sphere in here, they can teleport one anywhere,” Iverson said.

“I wonder why they didn’t take out the space lasers, too,” Yang said. “Are their orbits too fast?”

“They planned on harnessing their energy, remember?” Iverson said. “It gave them a boost of speed.”

“No … I agree with Yang,” Shaw replied. “They might have adapted the hovercraft to absorb the laser’s energy, but it would have been a lot easier to just take them off-line like these here. There must be a reason they couldn’t pull the same trick in space. Dillon told us these spheres are growing at a molecular level. Maybe there are no building blocks in the vacuum of space.”

“I’ll have some jumpers check out the idea. They might be able to test for it,” Iverson said.

Shaw nodded. He remembered what Ellie had said last night at dinner. Why go through all the trouble just to invent this new technology, and only use it to communicate? That was clearly incorrect. These raiders had found a whole new host of uses for these spheres. Shaw had the feeling he’d just scratched the surface of what they could do.

As the bullet train between Shanghai and Hefei slowed down, Shaw shook his head at the massive city that was passing by his window. Twenty-five million people lived in Hefei. Shaw generally had trouble remembering the names of Chinese mega-cities like this one, and he wondered how many of them had heard of St. Louis, Missouri. Certainly more than Missourians had heard of Hefei. It was a lingering cultural chauvinism left over from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but it was still hard to shake this far into the twenty-first. The world only got to globalize once, and when it did, the U.S. had been at the forefront. Its fingerprints were on the world now in the same way that Europe’s had been for centuries beyond its colonial days.

Shaw and Yang got off the train and began walking down the platform toward the grand station. The swell of people was hard to take, and they had to fight to keep together. Shaw hadn’t been to Asia in ages, not since college, and he had forgotten what it was like to feel so alone and so different from everyone around him. And how close everyone around him was.

Yang nudged Shaw’s elbow and pointed ahead. A woman was watching them intently. Shaw realized he had just seen her face on his wrap during the flight to Shanghai. She was the chair of the School of Experimental Physics at the University of Hefei, she spoke English, and he had picked her as his most likely point of contact to meet with when he arrived. That had been less than two hours ago.

“Good evening,” she said in clear English, extending her hand. “I’m Professor Dao-ming Wu. The feeds said you were coming to see me.”

Wu guided Yang and Shaw through the train station and down to Hefei’s old subway line. As they walked through the crowds, she described how much she and her colleagues in the school had been following the news about the nitrogen spheres.