The Lead Cloak (The Lattice Trilogy Book 1) (8 page)

“They’re reporting on you too? That’s outrageous.”

“By, you can’t predict who people are going to latch on to. You should have seen it coming in the pizza place. You’re becoming a celebrity. The feeds are reporting every detail. You finding the sphere, your call with Braybrook, and your call with Zella Galway. They’re really playing up your hunt. One man versus the terrorists.”

Shaw pictured the strangers who were following the news tags and jumping in to his job, his home, his mind. He saw them as a mass of humanity encircling him—tens of thousands watching his every move. A few using a ring to jump, others lying down in a jump box, but most holding a wrap or watching a screen on their walls. But all of them finding him somehow.

Anyone could jump into his life and watch him. Not just anyone
today
, but anyone living in the future could look back on him. God, what if he really was becoming a celebrity? Would people watch him having sex with Ellie? Would they jump into his past looking for … for what? For stories that would build him into a hero worth revering? The time he saved an old man from drowning. The time he fought those two drunks outside that bar when he was posted to Germany. Or would they search out his worse moments? That time when he was thirteen and he was trying to impress the seniors in high school and he kicked his neighbor’s dog. In college, he’d cheated on his girlfriend with her roommate, Laura Whats-Her-Name, while his girlfriend slept across the room. He might not remember her last name, but it was there waiting for anyone to find out. They only had to jump to find it! And they would ignore the context, of course. That night was a turning point, a realization that he was recklessly throwing away a real relationship to seduce a girl he couldn’t even stand during the daytime. What had he been thinking? It was a wake-up call, a start to (finally) become mature, but that wouldn’t be the point. People would only see the cruelty, and then they’d be off to the next jump. God, what if Laura were one of the jumpers? What if his old girlfriend learned of it? Had she ever found out about that night?

And look at him—thinking about these things! He was giving a roadmap into his worst moments to anyone who was jumping into him right now. Anyone could—

“Byron!” Ellie shouted.

Shaw looked up at her, eyes wide.

“Finally. You were starting to scare me.” She hugged his head close. “You have panic written all over your face.”

“The Lattice never lets you forget all the terrible things you’ve done.”

“You can forget if you want to. You just need to be OK with other people not forgetting.”

“I don’t want to be a celebrity,” he mumbled.

“Do your job, get it over with. Forget that anyone’s watching.”

Ellie held him for a bit longer. There was a raindrop, then another. They left the balcony and went into the kitchen.

“So tell me about this sphere,” Ellie said, as Shaw poured two glasses of wine.

“You didn’t follow any of the tags?”

She shook her head. “I just caught the headlines.”

“You can go check it out in the box if you want to. It’s the most recent tag. I’ll have dinner ready by the time you’re back.”

Shaw served salads with a side of cuy—protein-rich and perfectly-portioned guinea pig.

The scheduled rain had grown heavy, splattering hard against the window, by the time Ellie returned.

“What do you make of it?” he asked.

“It’s ingenious. You could run an army without anyone knowing the general.”

Shaw nodded. “I imagine this room somewhere with hundreds of glass spheres on shelves. Each one for a different agent, and all run by a mastermind at the center of it. It’s frightening.”

“It is.”

“So how do we trace it?”

“Did Braybrook’s men have any ideas?”

“Not that I know of. They think it’s ‘entangled.’ Do you know what that means?”

“C’mon, By. Didn’t you pay attention in high school physics?”

“I caught enough.”

“Apparently not. This is Quantum Mechanics 101.”

“Explain it to me then.”

“Let’s say you had two particles that were bound up with each other—entangled with each other. In all ways, one will always be the opposite of the other one, no matter what. If one is charged positive, the other will be negative, if one spins clockwise, the other one spins counter-clockwise, and so on.”

“OK.”

“Now let’s separate them. We’ll put them across the room from each other, and then let’s change the spin of one. The other one will change. Instantaneously.”

“Somehow it knows what the other one is doing, even though it’s across the room?”

“Or across the continent. Not only does it know what the other one is doing, but it knows it faster than the speed of light. It knows
immediately
. It’s as if the two entangled particles are really just one particle, but split into two different places. Every computer from the last, oh, forty years or so, is based on the concept.”

“So that’s particles. We’re talking about a glass sphere, though. That’s got to be a different thing entirely.”

“It is. And that’s the amazing thing. Using entangled particles, the most we can do is send information—we give one particle a certain spin, and the other particle changes. But we’ve never,
never
been able to transport anything. That’s just been speculation. Until now.”

“Someone’s figured out how to do it.”

Ellie nodded, slowly chewing over her salad. “That’s the only thing I can figure.”

“The hovercraft, and the spheres … I just can’t believe that whoever developed them is using them to try to destroy the Lattice. Those are both trillion dollar products and this is all someone can think to use them for?”

“That just gave me an idea, By. Let’s assume for a second that you can’t track the spheres. But someone invented them and passed up all that money. If you want to find the spheres, find their origin. Find their inventor.”

“Why would that be easier?”

“These spheres are a major scientific breakthrough, years ahead of any known research. Only a handful of people have the education needed to even know where to start researching and developing something like that. Figure out who they are, and one of them will be your mastermind.”

Shaw laughed. “It’s brilliant.
You’re
brilliant. Braybrook was right. You hear that, everyone!” Shaw shouted into the air, the silent jumpers watching. “My wife is brilliant and I love her!”

“My husband is acting like an idiot!” Ellie shouted.

“But you love me.”

“Maybe. But I’m not a shout-it-from-the-rooftop kind of gal.”

“So where do I start looking for the inventor?” Shaw asked.

“I’d start with the universities. You have to assume the inventor probably has a Ph.D. or a Sc.D. in quantum mechanics or theoretical physics. So start at the top. MIT, Harvard … Sydney, Heidelberg, SupOptique in Paris. The Hefei National Laboratory.”

Shaw glanced at his wrap, which showed him a similar list of top universities. “How do you know that stuff without using your wrap?”

“I remember things. Oh! Look for graduates who have private labs on a reservation. I’m thinking of something like the research park on the Flathead reservation. They’re notoriously hands-off about what their scientists are researching, even things that are against U.S. laws.”

Shaw nodded. “I should ask at the Geneva Lattice, too. They still have a bunch of quantum mechanics researchers there from when they ran the LHC. Maybe one of them has been doing some private research.”

Ellie was quiet, thinking. She’d grown somber. “There’s something else. And I hate to say it. You won’t be able to do this from home.”

“I can talk to people in chat rooms without leaving home.”

“No, you need to meet in person. You know what it’s like talking avatar-to-avatar. They’ll brush you off and move to the next chat room or they’ll be so distracted with other things, you won’t know if they actually could have been helpful. You’ve got to meet in person.”

Shaw nodded. It was hard to argue with Ellie. “The raiders are going to know I’m coming. Whoever invented the spheres is likely listening right now,” Shaw murmured, as if being quiet would stop a jumper from listening. He shuddered, and tried to push away the feeling of being constantly watched, but it was hard.

“It doesn’t change anything. Once you narrow down the possibilities, then you can find them no matter where they go.”

“If they think I’m getting close, they could come after me—try to kill me.”

“That wouldn’t make any sense. They’d just open themselves to being found that much more easily.”

“Maybe. Or maybe there’s another assassin getting messages from a glass sphere on his coffee table.”

Ellie looked away, staring out over the city.

“I’m sorry,” he said eventually. “I didn’t mean to spoil the mood.”

Ellie smiled, her eyes thick and wet. “It’s OK. I know you’ll come back to me.”

He kissed her hard, and she threw her arms around him, holding him close.

Eventually Ellie pulled away, and checked her forearm. “We still have a few hours before your party. What do you want to do until then?”

It took Shaw a moment to remember it. “I thought it was Sagan and Naila’s party.”

“But in your honor. They rented a commons over by Tower Grove.”

Shaw nodded. Parties were all well and good. Parties in his honor were another thing altogether. “We could watch a fight,” he said. “Liston-Clay again, Johnson-Jeffries—”

“By, you know I don’t like going to the fights. Even on your last night at home.”

“Then what?”

“A Crawfords game? We’re only a few games into the season.”

“Only if Satchel Paige is pitching.”

“I’ll check the listings and
I suppose
we can skip forward a game or two. But only because it’s your last night home.”

A few years before Ellie had discovered a schedule of Negro League games, published without the final scores. “This is perfect, By!” She said. “We can watch a season of some of the greatest baseball players ever and not know the outcome.”

Unless it was a boxing match, Shaw would have preferred watching live games, but Ellie didn’t like how seriously everyone took it. She liked sports, but got annoyed by the rabid fans. After watching a few games of the 1932 Pittsburgh Crawfords, Shaw thought the fans were pretty rabid then too, but Ellie seemed hooked, so they kept at it. They adopted the Crawfords as their “home team” and watched their complete 1932 and 1933 seasons, leaving them somewhere in the first few games of the 1934 season.

Ellie curled up on the couch facing the jump screen and Shaw fell into the seat next to her. The only time they used the jump screen on the wall anymore was for watching Crawfords games. They could have jumped together in the Lattice to watch the game as avatars, but it wasn’t the same. Limited touch, and the food was fake.

Ever since his rescue from the Roman catacombs and the media frenzy that followed it, Shaw had done his best to avoid being the center of attention. The only exception he allowed was when he was inside the boxing ring. At least in the boxing ring, you got to hit people while they watched you.

As he and Ellie entered the commons to a roar of adulation, Shaw swore under his breath. He really should have spent time working out with a speed bag before coming. Now he’d spend the whole night trying not to punch someone.

He saw his brother Sagan and his sister-in-law Naila fighting through the crowd to get to him. They both put their hands on his shoulder and touched their helmets to his.

“That shadow you cast over your little brother just keeps getting longer and longer,” Sagan said, laughing, and Shaw pushed him away. “How am I supposed to impress Mom now?”

“Don’t listen to him, Byron. We’re all in your debt,” Naila said.

“Listen, I don’t want this party to be a big deal. It’s great to get together, but—”

“I know. We programmed the commons to eventually default to just friends and family,” Sagan said. “But friends of friends can stay only for the first two hours.”

“Shit, that could be a lot of people!”

“Don’t worry. The commons will start giving a fifteen minute warning on their wraps if it gets too crowded.”

The commons they rented was expertly furnished for a party. Banquet tables were in the center, a self-serve bar against the wall, and seats against the frosted windows.

With the exception of popular restaurants, most retail spaces were part of the commons network, rentable for a few hours or a few months. Most day-to-day items could be printed at home, so the flexible retail spaces helped furnish what couldn’t be printed: a lively atmosphere at a bar, a dance club, art galleries or a place for designers to show and sell their wares. Many changed over regularly. They were just as likely to be a bar one night as they were a high-end furniture showroom the next. More often they were both—a place to see friends and have a drink … and maybe buy the custom-made barstools to take home at the end of the night.

The commons setting helped make the party vibrant and lively. Using volume levels and data from the wraps on people’s forearms, it moderated the flow of the room. Obnoxious loudmouths who did more talking than listening would get the hook in exchange for more serious conversationalists. People in the corners checking their wraps or in a jump would be cleared out in favor of a few more extroverts. As the night progressed, the settings slowly turned the party into a quieter evening, even more intimate because of the hubbub that preceded it.

By the time the party started to thin, Shaw felt only relief. It seemed as if he’d spent the first two hours with people’s hands on his shoulder. Ellie whispered that he was accepting it with grace and style, but he wasn’t so sure.

Someone he didn’t know—whose friend of a friend was this?—cornered him. “Could you imagine what would have happened if the Lattice had gone down with so many people still connected?”

Shaw hadn’t. Would it have been as risky as pulling someone out against their will?

“I was in a rather interesting jump actually,” the unknown man said. “Bronwen put together a great guided jump. The Collected Shits of Adolf Hitler. That man had some terrible
terrible
shits. There’s this one in the bunker—”