The Lead Cloak (The Lattice Trilogy Book 1) (5 page)

As for Elvin, he was trying to pretend it wasn’t that big of a deal, that it was just like having sex with any girl. Shaw wanted to punch him in the face for saying it. He didn’t feel very sentimental about sex, but there was something quite different between sex and what he’d just done. He just couldn’t put it into words.

The three left the jump café and once Shaw and Peter came out of their thoughts, they talked about their favorites of the women they’d encountered, the women they’d wished had been in the program, how the sequence of women had been arranged. But it was subdued, and Shaw got tired of it far quicker than he normally would have. Despite his brain having just experienced twenty-eight minutes of continuous orgasm, all Shaw wanted to do was go home and jack off for real. Did that mean he was addicted? Had he pushed it too far?

He eventually decided he wasn’t, though at times he still felt a strong urge to go back and try it again. Even today, years later, he sometimes caught himself thinking about it, bargaining with himself—
ten minutes wouldn’t be so bad, right?
—before realizing what he was doing.

Elvin hadn’t been so lucky. For a couple of weeks he’d tried to get Peter and Shaw to go back with him, but they told him they needed to spend their time training for their next boxing match. Finally, he called them pussies and went on his own.

“See, no big deal. I chose a custom program that let me add some girls from school to the mix too. You know Andi? Man, she was awesome. Lynae was hot too. Next time I’m going to jump
into
her. You guys should totally try it.”

Elvin started spending more time at the rental box, and when he wasn’t there, he was thinking of women he wanted to try, sequences of jumps he wanted to experiment with. Instead of boxing with them in the ring, he’d decided to give it up, calling it boring—“They’re making us wear fucking headgear like little girls.” While Shaw and Peter trained, Elvin did research on the wrap on his forearm, making lists and lists of women. No longer was he letting the pre-set jump program choose the women for him. He was in control. He tried to tell Peter and Shaw—during the few times he saw them anymore—that he was like a conductor, and the women were his orchestra. He’d built a sequence that he really wanted them to see, wouldn’t they try it?

They wouldn’t.

As Elvin slipped away from them, Shaw came to realize it wasn’t just the continuous sexual pleasure that made orgasm jumping so dangerous. It was the feeling of absolute control, paired with the feeling that it could always be better. Elvin could fuck any woman who had ever been fucked. By now, he’d probably jumped into a few thousand of them … but what was that when compared to the billions of women he hadn’t? Weren’t they likely to be better? The hunt was almost all he thought about. That and the organization and creation of elaborate sequences of women.

Elvin eventually lost everything. Rehab for OJs wasn’t as advanced at the time, and he dropped out of school and was eventually imprisoned for breaking and entering into Peter’s parents’ house, intending to use the family’s new jump box while they vacationed in the Andes.

These days, only a few clinics in the world, including the one Ellie worked at in St. Louis, had been able to take true addicts and turn them back into productive members of society. The rest lived in essentially long-term shelters, homes for the broken spirits who still spent their time planning their next jump.

Most of the women who worked in the clinic with Ellie hated the Lattice. Ellie tried not to get into arguments with them, but everyone there knew what her husband did. And no one understood how she was able to be with a man whose job was to protect the Lattice, despite seeing some of its worst effects every day.

Shaw wasn’t exactly sure either, even having been inside Ellie’s head. She had an academic view of the Lattice. She had a list of positive and negative effects the Lattice had on society. The positive effects simply outweighed the negatives, and so she didn’t hate the Lattice, and thought well of her husband for protecting it. It was as clear as that. Understood with a logic and orderliness of the mind that Shaw couldn’t hope to match (it was always disconcerting to jump into her head and discover someone so clearly smarter than himself).

Maybe he didn’t have an orderly list of the positives and negatives of the Lattice like Ellie did. But he
loved
using the Lattice. (Too much, maybe?) More than that, he owed his life to it. Sure, it could create addicts like Elvin and the rest of the OJs in Ellie’s clinic, but—

Ellie put a hand on Shaw’s, and he looked up with a start.

She smiled. “The way you go into your head sometimes … it’s like you can jump without your ring.”

He laughed and ate another slice of pizza.

When it came time for the bill, the server waved him off. “I saw what you did. Your money’s no good.” He reached out and touched Shaw on the shoulder, startling Shaw. He held it for a moment and then walked away.

Shaw and Ellie exchanged glances. “Let’s get out of here,” he said.

They left the café, thanking the server on their way out.

“That’s a first,” Ellie said, laughing.

“He could have asked permission,” Shaw answered. He hadn’t been as taken by the gesture of respect.

“You didn’t ask Ryce Greenly when you met him if you could touch his shoulder.”

“That was different. Greenly is a god. He was undefeated in the ring for nine years, longer than anyone. I bet he could whip any of today’s fighters, even at his age.”

“Maybe that’s how that boy just felt. Meeting a hero.”

“Ugh. I hope not. I do my job perfectly for six years and on the day I come closest to fucking it all up, I’m suddenly a hero?”

“A hero who gets us free pizza.” She squeezed his arm.

The street was full of people enjoying the warm October night. Beautiful couples were out for walks. College students moving between bars in packs. An obese man was on the nearest bench eating a chocolate ice cream cone and scratching at his belly.

“That looks fabulous,” Shaw said, indicating the cone with a nod of his head.

“It doesn’t take too many of them to end up looking like him either,” Ellie replied.

“I thought you were always the one defending fat people.”

“I am. If he doesn’t want the treatment, we can’t force it on him just because we don’t like the way he looks. But I
can
still make sure that you stay lean.”

“I thought the reason we get the treatment is so we can have pizza and ice cream on the same night.”

“You know it doesn’t work like that,” Ellie said. “We were bad enough already tonight, we don’t need to compound it. If you want an ice cream cone so much, use one of the diet programs and go jump into someone enjoying one.”

“It’s not the same.”

“It tastes the same. Probably better than that one. Those programs find some fabulous food.”

“But you lose the feeling of a guilty pleasure, of an indulgence. That’s half the fun.”

Ellie smiled. “Fine. You can have half the fun. Split it with me?”

Shaw kissed her. “Perfect.”

“Just don’t expect this to be free too, By. Not everyone cares that you’re a conquering hero today.”

“As long as you care.”

“I don’t care if you came back a hero or in shame. Whatever it takes to get you home for a few days in a row.” She kissed him. “Although it’s a nice bonus that it got to be as a hero.”

Ellie’s next shift at the clinic started at seven a.m., and Shaw got up early with her, making egg whites and eating them with her on their small balcony before she left for work.

“If I’m still in a jump when you get home, buzz me,” he told her as she left. “Wherever I am, it’ll wait until tomorrow.”

Shaw stayed in the morning sun for another half hour reading the report General Braybrook had given him from the jumpers’ research into the bombing. They had only conducted preliminary jumps, which meant Shaw’s job was to fill in the details. Reading through the report on his unfolded wrap, Shaw could practically feel the growing alarm in the jumpers as they continued to find dead ends. All the normal techniques for finding collaborators weren’t working.

Research on the hovercraft was disconcerting, too. Normally, raiders used army surplus or built a drone from scrap. But this hovercraft was professional and state-of-the-art. From their ship to their communications, this was a new kind of raider.

He went back inside and cleaned his plate. He was so lost in thought that he forgot the drawer was open next to him and bumped into it, causing the plate in his hand to drop and shatter.

“Damn it,” he muttered. Shaw had lost count of how many different designer table settings Ellie had bought. He remembered that this one came from a special limited edition set that she’d licensed from some New York designer that she loved. Shaw went for a broom in the other room. He swept up the shards of china and threw them into the recycle bin. In the office Shaw found the printer on standby. The wrap on his forearm had already reported the broken plate to the designer and ordered the printer to create a replacement.

Normally, printing at home was free, save for the cost of the material. Ellie loved high-end designers, though, which meant license fees to print plates at home. Their license for this set was for eight printed plates. If the designer wanted to make sure Shaw really had broken a plate, and that they only had eight printed, she could always jump in to the apartment and check.

Shaw pressed a button and the printer went to work. Within a minute it had reprinted the piece of china. As long as it could fit inside the half-meter cube, and could be made from some combination of aluminum, plastic, rubber, compressed sawdust, crystal, porcelain, or glass, Shaw could order it and print it at home.

The only thing lacking, Shaw felt, was true wood. The fake grain that covered the compressed sawdust was mostly convincing until you ran your fingers over it. The texture was just wrong. To buy anything made of true wood meant shipping costs, or actually going out to a commons to buy it. And when you could print a reasonable facsimile of it at home—what was the point of going through all that trouble?

Shaw took the reprinted plate back into the kitchen and replaced it in the cabinet.

He washed his hands and grabbed his wrap from the kitchen table, where it was lying flat. As he curled the soft screen around his forearm, the jump reports he’d been reading automatically reformatted so that whether he was looking at the outside or inside of his arm, he could easily read the text. He went back into the small office—the only room in the apartment where they had space for a jump box.

A light flashed green on the box, recognizing Shaw’s wrap approaching, and then stayed illuminated, recognizing his intent to use the box. It logged Shaw into the military servers at the Lattice for faster use. Since there weren’t any secrets anymore, it was more about convenience than it was about security. The report from the initial investigative jumpers yesterday, complete with bookmarks in the Lattice, were loaded into his personal jump box.

Sliding inside it, he looked up at the welcome screen that was just barely a foot above his nose. The welcome faded and the list of tags from the jump report replaced it. Shaw went to open the first one and then hesitated. Everyone would expect him to go through the tags to get caught up to speed. In fact, these tags would serve as the key connection to everyone who wanted to learn more about this raid. Why bother finding your own tags, when these were already assembled?

The raiders had already used the natural routine of Lattice security to their advantage—first with Yang’s double and again with the lasers. If Shaw had a chance at beating these raiders, he needed to confound their expectations, not fit into their patterns. Shaw pushed aside the jump tags.

One of the reasons he was using the box instead of his ring was the greater ability for manual controls, so it made sense to strike out on his own. There was a touch screen keyboard on the ceiling of the jump box, where he entered yesterday’s date, at 0745 hours.

A globe of the Earth appeared on the screen, and Shaw zoomed in on it until he was staring at the roof of the Lattice Installation. Close enough.

He tapped the screen and jumped.

Inside the jump, Shaw was hovering above the roof of the Lattice, the hot desert sun causing him to squint in the light. Back in the box, using a scrollball under his right hand, he aimed for the Installation. He sailed through the solid walls of the metal building—it was still hard for Shaw not to instinctively flinch when he passed through them. Inside the jump, he was only viewing the arrangement of atoms as they were at that particular moment in time. They were not the real atoms, just the Lattice’s representation of them in the jump box. Because of it, Shaw could jump through solid rock to the Earth’s core as easily as he could fly through the vacuum of space.

Inside the Installation, Shaw flew through the hallways until he found Tim Yang showing his badge at the security entrance. Not Tim Yang, this was Yukihiro Ono in disguise, Shaw reminded himself. Ono was ushered through security and Shaw pulled his hand backward over a different scrollball in the box, this one under his left hand, to cause time in the jump to slow and then come to a complete standstill.

Moving forward with the other wheel, Shaw maneuvered until he was right up against Ono’s back, then inside his head. He jockeyed around, his vision filled with the pink and gray innards of Yukihiro Ono. He pressed down on the scrollball. The jump box took a moment to read Ono’s biochemistry and molecular structure and then it buzzed. Shaw backed out of Ono again and pushed the wheel under his left hand forward. Ono began moving again, and this time Shaw stayed with him, the tag created. Now that the jump box recognized Ono, it would keep Shaw within four meters of him at all times, freeing him from having to navigate. It also meant that he could watch Ono at a pace faster than real time, and still be able to keep up.

He pushed the time wheel forward again, moving it past the resistance that marked real time, and stopped when Ono appeared to be moving at two or three times the normal pace.