The Lead Cloak (The Lattice Trilogy Book 1) (3 page)

“Because Yang wasn’t conscious of being drugged. Standard protocol is that the night before someone starts, we check their thoughts. As far as the jumper was concerned, Tim Yang was in bed, sleeping soundly, and excited about starting today. We had no idea he hadn’t woken up.”

“When was the next scheduled jump into Yang?”

“We stopped that practice four months ago—there were too many ways to game the system if we had regularly scheduled checks. Instead the AI randomly gives jumpers their assignments. Even the jumpers don’t know who they’re looking in on until a minute or two before their jump. Even so, the system’s designed so that everyone working here or at the Geneva Lattice—me included, in case you were wondering—is checked at least three times a week.”

“When was the last jump into me?”

“Besides right now? Saturday.”

Three days ago. “And did you find anything?”

“Of course not. What concerns me was something from today.” The General quoted Shaw’s thoughts back to him, reading from his contact lens, “It would almost be worth it to let a raider get close, just to put a little thrill into the game.”

“And you know I immediately pushed the idea away,” Shaw said, his voice tight.

“You did,” Braybrook acknowledged. “But your next thought was, ‘It’s that kind of thinking that can cost you your job.’ That’s not exactly refreshing. We’d rather your next thought would have been, ‘But putting my desire for thrill-seeking ahead of the Lattice is a fucking bad idea.’”

“I can’t take it back, sir.”

“No. You can’t.”

Shaw nodded, thinking. After a few short seconds, the conclusion he came to was: You don’t trust me anymore.

General Braybrook sat forward. “That’s not true, Byron.” Usually anyone using a scribe played into the illusion of having a normal conversation, but Braybrook didn’t seem to care about convention today. “You feel that you owe your life to the Lattice, we know that. We don’t doubt your loyalties—your actions today to save it were proof enough. But the head of security for the Lattice can’t be wishing his job had more excitement. Wishing it is more like … like a risky bayonet charge that pulls victory from the jaws of defeat.”

“That’s not fair, sir.”

“This is not Little Round Top. We can’t afford to have another raid like this.”

“We won’t.”

“I know. But I can’t have you in this position while you’re feeling this way. We came
so
close today. In the grand scheme of things twelve kilometers may as well have been twelve meters. We were a hair’s-breadth away from losing the Lattice.”

“Geneva could have taken over.”

“We have a fail-safe so we never have to use it!” Braybrook sat back and stared at Shaw. “There’s something else. Dvorak, L.R.I., and the other three companies that produce Lattice readers have agreed to pool their resources and pay for a massive new ring of lead shielding around the Lattice tower. The President’s given the green light for them to start work immediately.”

“That’s very generous of them, but I should be on site for that. I want to stay here, sir,” Shaw said. He wasn’t sure how much more clearly he could say it—or think it.

“I know. But for now we can’t allow it. Besides—”

“So you say you trust me, but you don’t want me running the show for awhile. Is this a paid leave of absence?” It was dangerous to interrupt a general, but Braybrook looked understanding.

“On the contrary. If it’s excitement you want, I’d like to give it you.”

Shaw opened his mouth and closed it again. He waited.

“I want you to track down these raiders. Find them and arrest them.”

“With all due respect, sir, now that the attack has happened, tracking them down is as easy as a few hours of jumping. I hardly think that qualifies as exciting or even interesting.”

Braybrook shook his head. “You’re wrong. We’ve already started our research, and what we’ve found is worrisome to say the least. Ono had no direct knowledge of the hovercraft’s design. So far as the preliminary jumpers can tell, he never talked to anyone. If he’d failed in his mission, if we’d caught him before the attack, he wouldn’t have been able to tell us anything relevant about the hovercraft, except the estimated time of the attack. Same with the pilot. But
someone
coordinated this attack.

“These raiders are the most sophisticated we’ve seen. We’ve been combing over everything we can of Ono and the pilot—you’ll have access to all the investigation’s jump logs of course—but we’ve got no hard leads to whoever planned this attack. These raiders know what they’re doing, and they’re still out there.”

Shaw was silent. If the masterminds behind the morning’s raid were still alive, then they were almost certainly listening to this conversation now.

Braybrook nodded, confirming Shaw’s thought. No more secrets, not even their thoughts.

Except one. How could these raiders orchestrate a complex military operation and stay hidden from all the jumps that would follow? He started to wonder what it would take. De-centralization, trust of shared-purpose, trust of strangers.
It couldn’t be possible, could it?

Shaw’s mind was full of speculation when he saw Braybrook grinning at him. “It looks to me like this is going to be right up your alley.”

Shaw stood, and nodded. “I’ll find them for you, sir. Thank you for the opportunity.”

“Go home, Shaw. Spend a night with your wife. You don’t need to be here for this. Just … be watchful.”

“Sir?”

“We don’t quite know what these raiders are capable of. I worry that you will make too tempting a target, especially if you make progress.”

“Then it’ll be that much easier for you to track them,” Shaw said, and there wasn’t any bravado behind his words.

“Nevertheless, I’m assigning you Yang—the real Tim Yang. He’ll accompany you, and protect you.”

“I’ve never actually worked with Yang, sir. Wouldn’t Iverson or someone else I know be more suitable?”

Braybrook shook his head. “He’s learned our security measures in preparation for starting here, and he knows Geneva’s security, too. Besides, the world just watched someone with Yang’s face nearly destroy the Lattice. I imagine seeing his face will provoke some … interesting reactions during your interviews. Understood?” He didn’t wait for confirmation, and dismissed Shaw with a small nod. “Get to it, Colonel.”

The military shuttle from the Lattice Installation to San Francisco was less than an hour. From there Shaw would charter a slingshot back to his home in St. Louis, another two hours. Normally he only made the trip for long three-day weekends to see Ellie, but he hoped to do as much jumping from home as he could before this new job took him away again.

As the shuttle turned, Shaw looked from the brown desert to the sprawl of the Lattice Installation. At its center was the one hundred meter tower, gleaming in the bright sunlight. The warmth of the sun couldn’t penetrate to the inner core, the home of the Lattice itself. Kept near absolute zero, the lattice of rhodium atoms was well-insulated from the desert heat. Those thin fibers of rhodium atoms, arranged in a lattice-like structure … that’s what today had been about, that’s what he’d nearly died trying to protect.

Shaw looked through his small window on the shuttle until the Lattice Installation was out of sight before he settled back in his chair.

The Lattice
… he didn’t have to be at the Installation to feel its presence.

Anyone connected to it could have universal knowledge of the present and past. The entire scope of human history, planetary history, astronomical history, was captured in the Lattice.

As easily as Shaw escaped into 1863 and the Battle of Gettysburg, so too could he soar over the rings of Saturn, as he’d done once on a tour of the solar system he’d taken with Ellie. So too could he witness Pompeii’s eruption. Travel into the Great Red Spot on Jupiter. Listen to Socrates speak in the Forum. Travel to the interior of the sun. Watch Columbus make landfall in the New World.

So too could he jump into the mind of another, as he’d done many times for work and recreation. After all, what was the mind but a series of electrical impulses, just as easily mapped as any other series of atoms?

He’d jumped into the mind of Einstein, to experience the rush of thoughts at the exact instant his mind was illuminated with the special theory of relativity. He’d jumped into the minds of women giving birth. Babies being birthed. People at the instant they died. Schizophrenics. Sociopaths. Artists. Politicians. Prophets. Cats! Dolphins!

He’d jumped into the mind of Jesus Christ, as almost all recreational jumpers had done at some point or another, just to see what was there. And, just as the jumpers before him had discovered, he found a mess of indecipherable thoughts. The mind of a madman? Or just what you would expect from a man who was both God and man? Even looking into the mind of Jesus gave equal evidence to the devout and the skeptics alike.

Humanity had the power to see and know everything, if only they bothered to look.

What an enormous gift! What an enormous burden.

Maybe humanity wasn’t ready to cope with such abundance of intimate knowledge. But no one had asked humanity. In the twenty-eight years since Wulfgang Huxley had invented the Lattice, its continued ability to know more and more about people’s daily lives became … assumed. Commonplace.

The first incarnation of the Lattice was as a simple remote viewer, a camera that didn’t need a lens. A camera that could see anywhere in the solar system. Then scientists realized they could configure the Lattice to peer into the past as well. By the time those same scientists translated the Lattice’s data into decipherable thoughts, it was so entrenched in the world’s economy and society that there was no turning back. It was part of people’s lives, and the march of progress couldn’t be turned back. People just … adjusted.

Adjusted to knowing that every second of their lives could be mapped by anyone with a passing interest. Adjusted to knowing that every stray thought they’d had—every horrible, vile, evil thought—could be known.

The government required search warrants before they spied on anyone’s thoughts. But everyone understood that was a polite fiction. Most people didn’t care. They were more concerned about a nosy neighbor, a boss checking on an employee’s productivity, a wife seeing if her husband was faithful.

And not only whether a husband was faithful, but whether he had looked with lust at a coworker.

At a best friend.

At a daughter.

Shaw hoped that he and Ellie had found a healthy way to handle the Lattice in their marriage. Some couples pledged in their wedding vows that they would never look inside the other’s head. Others hunted for the worst in the other, and used what they found as humiliating weapons. Ellie and Shaw tried to balance an open connection without it feeling like suspicious snooping. It was a gift to become closer to each other. They checked in on each other during the day, or let the other guide them through childhood memories.

Like many others, they used the Lattice in the bedroom, too—once, after sex, they’d jumped into each other’s heads to see what it was like to have sex with themselves. (Looking up at himself, covered with hair and sweat, Shaw couldn’t understand why any woman found him attractive; Ellie didn’t understand how Shaw could be so intensely interested in having sex beforehand, only to let his mind wander once it had started.)

When they did stumble on things they didn’t like—and Shaw was very surprised how often Ellie’s eye was caught by a handsome man; he’d always thought men did that more than women, but she put him to shame—the other would discover the worry and they’d talk it through. If it was a bigger deal than that, then there was always their monthly chat with Doctor Egan, their marriage counselor, who monitored them both and broached the difficult topics for them when they didn’t want to do it on their own.

Not everyone wanted, or could afford, a marriage counselor. Not everyone examined the Lattice as a couple and made a conscious decision how to use it.

And so people fought.
Was it a stray thought?
Was it an impulse you were going to act on?
These were the new arguments between people. And those arguments ended far too often with lives being destroyed. Those who’d been humiliated or fired or divorced after their innermost thoughts were exposed didn’t need to look very far for a target for their rage: the Lattice itself. The very thing that had created the opportunity to eavesdrop.

A few called for the dismantling of the Lattice, but no one wanted to hear it. The argument was over: the Lattice was here to stay. The only time the general public paid attention to the Lattice itself was when a company brought a new reader to market. Tablets, wraps, screens, implants, jump boxes, and—most recently—the ring. Otherwise no one cared about the complaints of a few who claimed their lives were shattered.

And so the raiders were born, angry and full of vengeance.

In the twenty eight years since the Lattice was constructed, the military base at Area 51—now simply called the Lattice Installation—had been subjected to thousands of assaults. After two years of sustained attacks on the Lattice, it became clear that they were not going to abate. Every day some new person suffered a humiliation and was converted to the cause. Because of the attacks, it was decided that a second Lattice should be built—this time at CERN, in Geneva, Switzerland, to act as a backup.

The Geneva Lattice was underground in the old CERN tunnels. Underground, and encased in lead, it was much more difficult to reach and destroy, although attempts were still made from time to time. Mostly it was the Nevada Lattice Installation that was regularly assaulted, despite its protection by sensors, space-based weapons, tactical nukes, and—of course—the Lattice itself, which was used to find that which the rest could not.

Until today, those defenses had been more than enough, and most raiders were shot down hundreds of kilometers before they reached the Lattice.

After a failed raid, the life of an attempted raider was mapped with excruciating detail, and any of his or her accomplices were found and jailed within hours.