The Lead Cloak (The Lattice Trilogy Book 1) (11 page)

“To be honest, I don’t pay much attention to stories about attacks on the Lattice anymore,” Wu said. “This last one got a little more notice here because they actually penetrated the defenses with an imposter.” Her eyes flickered to Yang. Shaw was glad to see he didn’t flinch under it. “But I didn’t really understand that it was so serious until I heard about the spheres. We were following along when suddenly the university and my name were mentioned. I thought you deserved an official welcome.”

An empty subway train pulled into the station, and the three followed the herd into a car.

“I’m afraid we’re not going to be much help, though,” Wu said, grabbing onto a bar for support. “These spheres are the work of a true genius. If you hadn’t just come from Ada Dillon, I would have suggested she was the most likely person on Earth who could have built them.”

“She said she didn’t think anyone alive could have designed them.”

“So we should look to the dead scientists then?” Wu smiled, her cherubic face warm with laughter. “Perhaps it was Einstein or Bohrs or Huxley. Because we don’t have any graduates who could have pulled this off.”

“I’m sure that’s unfair to your students and to your teaching,” Shaw said diplomatically. “Besides, aren’t these kinds of advances often accidents? Maybe someone stumbled across the concept while trying to test for something else. Antibiotics were discovered that way, if I remember my history correctly.”

“I see your point, but generally accidents in the lab need a genius to understand the significance of what has been revealed. No one but Wulfgang Huxley would have understood the data he was receiving when trying to measure gravitational waves. But he stuck with it, and the Lattice was born.”

“The Lattice was an accidental discovery?” Yang asked, surprised.

Wu looked surprised too. “Of course. He was trying to measure gravitational waves from supernovas and black holes.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“Don’t you
work
at the Lattice Installation?”

“We just try to keep it safe,” Shaw said. “Trumped-up security guards.”

“Ah.” Wu seemed incredulous that anyone would not know the story about the invention of the Lattice.

“So what happened?” Shaw asked.

“With Huxley and the accidental discovery?”

Shaw nodded.

“He thought that a resonant structure of stable rhodium atoms might be able to detect gravitational waves. He was correct, but the structure picked up a lot more than that. It could feel the gravitational pull of every atom within a couple hundred meters. That’s when Huxley started to realize just what he had.”

“Every atom? They exert gravity?”

“An infinitesimal amount, but yes. Everything has its own gravitational field, however small.”

“That’s amazing that things that small can be detected by their gravitational pull from so far away.”

“Do you know anything about quantum entanglement?” Wu asked.

“Just enough to launch this trip.”

“When I say it was a ‘resonant’ structure, what I mean is that every atom is entangled with another atom somewhere else in the Lattice. If one atom is acted upon, the entire Lattice is. It means that the entire Lattice essentially acts as a single atom. But the Lattice is a few trillion times bigger than an atom. Which is why it is sensitive to the gravitational pull of even the tiniest field—it senses all those little pulls and then amplifies them into a scale we can measure.”

“The same way a rainbow is actually millions of individual rainbows,” Yang said. Wu eyed him appreciatively. “Yes, exactly. But while the Lattice is an amazing design, some of the real genius is in the math that runs it. That’s why Huxley was unique: he could envision both the technology and the math to use it. … Do you want me to keep going? I don’t want to bore you.”

“If you wouldn’t mind. People have tried to explain it to me before but you’re probably the first to use plain English.”

“I can try plain Mandarin and see how you do with that,” Wu said, laughing again. She looked at the subway map on the wall. “We’ve got some time before we get to campus. So, Huxley’s first lattice of rhodium atoms was very small, just a few centimeters in length, just to see if it could be built. Remember, he was trying to detect astronomical phenomena—supernovas and neutron star mergers and black holes—so he was planning to build something larger. He was surprised that even such a small lattice of the atoms was registering so much data. Huxley’s students began charting it, and that’s when he realized that they were getting
everything
—a full picture of every atom within range.

“Once he’d gotten that far, Huxley began working on a way to visualize those atoms. By this point, he had a fixed position and an atomic weight for everything picked up by the Lattice. What more did he need, but a network of computers fast enough to run it? He moved his research from MIT to CERN in Geneva, the only place on Earth at the time with enough computing power to run the visualization. He eventually got it running, and the visualization worked. He produced a completely accurate vision of every atom within ten meters or so of that original Lattice.”

“That’s all the farther it reached?”

“The Lattice was only a few centimeters long, so the viewing area was exponentially larger than its length. That’s part of its incredible usefulness—if it had to be as big as the Earth to view the whole Earth, it wouldn’t be very functional.”

“I didn’t realize that the first working Lattice was in Geneva,” Shaw said. “I always thought that one came later.”

“On the large scale, that’s true. The grant that had originally funded the research came from your military. The U.S. military called Huxley back from CERN to recreate the Lattice to be used as a spy tool. Remote viewing. One hundred percent accurate and able to see through any wall. Better than any drone or wiretap.

“Huxley built a new Lattice, this time one meter long, with a range of eighteen hundred kilometers or so. After that was a success, the military and NASA funded the creation of the Lattice Installation—although at the time people called it Area 51. He built the Lattice that is still there today: Eighty-one point five meters tall and kept as close to absolute zero as we can get it. Its range extends just past Neptune’s orbit. So he still managed to help us understand a lot about astronomy.” Wu smiled to herself, brushing a stray hair from her eye.

They were all silent for a moment, listening to the train.

“Did you know I met him? Huxley, I mean,” she continued. “Not in a jump, but in person. He lectured here once about a year before he died—he’d gotten really jaded about the Lattice by that point, but people still wanted to hear the story. I spent five minutes with him before he spoke. Oh, this is us.” The trio pushed their way out of the subway car when it stopped and stood together on the crowded escalator.

“Why was he jaded?” Shaw asked.

“He never imagined the consequences of the Lattice, beyond the immediate: remote viewing and astronomy. He was appalled when de la Barca discovered that the Lattice could map the neurons in your brain and assemble it into a thought. And especially horrified the way his invention has become a … pornography machine.

“The only new use for it he liked was that it could view history—well, the last five billion years of history, anyway.”

“That seems like a lot.”

Wu shrugged. “The Milky Way was formed by then, and the solar system was just about to take shape. All the
really
interesting questions take place in the eight billion years before that, though. But the computations fail to describe the universe before then.” She guided them out of the subway station onto a bustling street. Shaw glanced at Yang, who seemed to have given up on the conversation and was looking around at Hefei.

“This way. We only have a few blocks,” Wu said. “Actually, it was Ada Dillon who realized that you could take that current snapshot of atoms in the Lattice and then go backward in time. She realized that once you had the known position of all atoms, you could reverse-compute the location of every atom in the solar system, second by second, back to about five billion years ago. After that, things just start … fading. Nothing makes any sense.”

“Besides a history lesson, what else can I be of help with?” Wu asked.

“I was hoping to—”

Yang had been drifting behind and he rushed to catch up. “We’re being followed,” he whispered. “No! Don’t look. You two keep talking, keep walking. I’m playing the sightseer.”

He fell back again. Wu and Shaw tried not to vary their pace. Shaw’s body was tense, his eyes watching street vendors and garbage cans for possible weapons.

“Why are we pretending we don’t know?” Wu murmured. “All someone has to do is have us tagged and relay it to whoever’s following.”

“Maybe it’s someone working alone. Don’t worry yet. Keep talking.”

Wu said something in Mandarin that Shaw didn’t check his wrap to translate. He thought he understood it anyway. “What were we talking about?” She asked in English.

“The Lattice can’t read anything past five billion years ago. Could it be the universe that was just … weird then, not the Lattice?”

“No,” she exhaled, and took a deep breath. “No, it’s the Lattice itself, though a lot of scientists thought like you did for a while. It’s funny, reading the Lattice can do so much, and it has transformed so much academic research, from astronomy to archaeology to literature, it’s hard to accept that it has limitations.”

Wu almost glanced over her shoulder and Shaw quickly tugged on her arm. She stopped and looked up at him gratefully. People weren’t used to being scared on the street anymore, Shaw thought.

“Literature? How did the Lattice affect literature?” He asked, trying to keep her mind off being followed.

“Oh. Well … Confucius’
Classic of Music
was recovered—it had been censored and burned during the Fires of Qin more than two thousand years ago, but scholars were able to jump back and read it. They found all the short stories and lost manuscripts of Hemingway that his wife lost. And it was nice to put to rest that Shakespeare really did write
Hamlet
. I’m sure there are plenty more examples, but it’s not really my area.”

He stole a casual glance over his shoulder at Yang, who was apparently gawking at the neighborhood. He didn’t see anything else unusual, and decided not to risk looking any longer. “Ever heard of a band called Pink Floyd?”

Wu shook her head.

“They were a rock band in the nineteen hundreds. They recorded an album called
Dark Side of the Moon
, and if you start it at a certain time during the first movie version of
The Wizard of Oz
, they appear to match up. People used to get high and watch them together. I haven’t thought about it in years, but I wonder if anyone’s ever checked to see if it was intentional.”

“That seems silly.”

Shaw shrugged.

“There’s a word for that. Apophenia. Seeing patterns where there aren’t any. If there’s anything the Lattice should have killed off, it’s things like that. But it just seems to have made things worse.”

“How is it you know more English words than I do?”

Suddenly there was shouting behind them. Shaw spun, ready for an attack, but Yang had already pinned the man against a building.

“Why are you following us?” Yang shouted.

Shaw rushed closer and looked at the man’s face pressed against the wall. He was Japanese, maybe in his seventies. Around him, Shaw suddenly sensed more movement. At least three people had emerged from the crowd with lasers trained on Shaw and Yang.

“Let him go!” one of them shouted.

“I think I recognize him,” Shaw told Yang, but he couldn’t place the man’s face for sure. Shaw looked at his wrap and his stomach plummeted.

“Who are you?” Yang shouted.

“Let him go, Yang,” Shaw said, but he was shouted down by the man with the laser.

The man pinned to the wall called something out in Japanese. Out of the corner of his eye, Shaw saw the men relax slightly. He approached and put a hand on Yang’s bicep, gently pulling him away.

The man caught Shaw’s eye. “My name is Shigeo Iwatani,” he said in English. “I wanted to speak to you, Mr. Shaw.”

Wu cried out, and began pulling Yang’s other arm off of the man. “Let him go, let him go!”

Yang let him go.

“Thank you,” Iwatani said, straightening the lapels of his suit jacket.

Shaw made his best attempt at a bow. “On behalf of myself, First Lieutenant Yang, and the entire United States military, I want to apologize for that. I hope you were not injured.”

Iwatani bowed back. “No, Mr. Shaw. It is I who owe an apology. I have been following you like a common thief. It was my error entirely.” He spoke again in Japanese to the three men with lasers. They holstered their weapons and gave Iwatani some space.

“Please let us get you some tea and get any scrapes looked at,” Wu said. “My office is just another block farther.”

“I would be delighted. Thank you.” Iwatani bowed again. He walked with Wu, and Shaw fell back with Yang.

“What was that about, sir?”

“They’ll be calling it a diplomatic incident when it hits the feeds in a few seconds.”

“But who is he?”

“Just the CEO of another multi-billion dollar company. I seem to be quite popular with them.”

Yang groaned. “Iwatani, of course! He runs Kanjitech.”

“Exactly. Did you hear that I spoke to Zella Galway yesterday? CEO of Dvorak?”

“I didn’t see what the big deal was.”

“I’m guessing Shigeo Iwatani apparently thought it was. Hefei is close enough to Tokyo that he must have decided to just drop by instead of calling. After I finish with him, you can bet I’m going to have to sit through a parade of CEOs—L.R.I., T-Six, Altair. I hope you don’t pin all of them against a wall.”

“He
was
following us pretty closely,” Yang muttered.

Shaw smiled. “Any one of us might have confused a CEO for an assassin.”

Wu’s assistant made tea. He brought it to Wu’s spacious office and served Iwatani first, followed by Shaw, Yang, and Wu. The hired bodyguards stayed outside the office.