The Lead Cloak (The Lattice Trilogy Book 1) (26 page)

“When I lost my virginity, it was so … perfect. I loved that boy so much. And then three years later, he died. It took me years to get over him. I thought I had, until I won that triathlon. Then suddenly men were coming up to me out of the blue to say how sweet that night was, how much love they’d felt in the room. Like they’d been there. I just wanted to fucking kill them for bringing him up. Because all they’d done was make me remember Dod and how much I missed him.

“I couldn’t take it. I wondered if there was anything I could do to make them stop saying those terrible things. And I thought—what if I was fat? Would they still come up to me? So I skipped the treatment. Just once, I told myself. Just to see what would happen. I kept running. I loved it, and I was still good, still blazingly fast. I hate to lose, you might have noticed. Eventually skipping the treatment caught up with me. I got a little meat on my thighs. But most importantly, there were fewer comments. So I skipped it again. And they all but died away. A few missed treatments and I’d gained twenty-five pounds. That’s all it took. The bigger I got, the more invisible I became. It was like they saw me as something in their way, not a person anymore. I lost most of my runner friends. My boyfriend didn’t understand, and he left me. But the men stopped talking to me, and that’s all the mattered.

“And that’s when I started to pay attention to what was
really
going on. It became an experiment. No one looked at me in the street. And I started to wonder, was anyone jumping into me anymore? I used to have a desirable body. Those men could still jump into my past and find me there, looking thin and beautiful. But were they? I started doing research. I turned all my attention to it, dropped the nanotech research I was doing at Stanford. I fell off my tenure track, but I was hooked. I logged eight million jumps into men and women from all over the world. Do you want to guess how many of those jumps were into fat people?”

He shook his head.

“Less than three thousand. That’s about four hundredths of a percent. And yet, at least twelve percent of the world’s population skips the treatment for religious or cultural reasons. So I knew I was on to something. Did people assume that if you were ugly on the outside, you were ugly on the inside? I mean, it’s so trite. But maybe that’s what it was. Or they didn’t want to get infected by the fat virus? Whatever it was, I was almost totally invisible. No one paid any attention to me at all. I was free to go where I wanted and do what I wanted without anyone jumping inside me.

“So I started to make that my goal. I thought that if I was invisible, then maybe I would have a chance to do what no one else had been able to do—to destroy the Lattice. Without even realizing I’d made the conscious choice to do it, I started planning attacks. I couldn’t even say what triggered it exactly. Whether there was one particular moment, or whether the idea had always been there. Maybe it was realizing that I had an edge no one else did: No one paid attention to me. I kept coming up with ideas for destroying the Lattice. Eventually, I realized I needed help. I needed people I could trust. And we needed to be
completely
invisible. Truly invisible, not just the kind of invisibility I’d been enjoying.

“I got a new lab, this time on the Navajo Rez, where they didn’t ask any questions and where my weight didn’t stop me from paying them for the space. And I started focusing all my attention on building a new kind of nanoshock. One that would preserve the entire nerve structure for up to three days. No one else could have built it in secret. But I knew no one was checking up on me anymore. Eighteen months later it was ready.”

“And you used it to fake your own death?”

“No. I used it on Wulf first.”

“How do you go about faking the death of such a famous person? If there’d been any sign, they would have found you.”

“Just the power of suggestion. I found a would-be raider who was … sympathetic. Who had been planning a raid on the Lattice Installation. We talked and talked, and I let him realize on his own that killing Wulfgang Huxley—the father of the Lattice—might have an even greater impact than taking out the Lattice itself. I let him steal a modified nanoshock from me. Again, he thought it was his idea and he didn’t know it was modified. But I put all the pieces in front of him. It was six weeks later that he was finally able to get close enough to Wulf to carry it out.”

“That’s crazy,” Shaw whispered.

“I was waiting for Wulf. Underground, under his grave. Just like we had people waiting for you. Except I had to use some special dirt-eating nanobots I’d built to tunnel in to his coffin. We couldn’t teleport the spheres like we can now—that part of it is all Wulf’s brilliance.

“I revived him. After he’d slept and the effects had worn off, we spent twelve hours in together underground, just talking, going through the options. And I told him that if he wanted to, he could turn me in as a killer, and he could go back to the world and go back to his life. But if he saw the same corrupt system I did, I told him that he could stay with me, and that together we would destroy the Lattice. And he stayed.”

Taveena shrugged, as if that were the whole story. “I went back out into the world, and Wulf stayed underground. He started putting on weight, so that no one would recognize him or want to jump into him. Eventually, he hired a junkie—like we did with Annalise—to use my own nanoshock on me. I didn’t know when it was going to happen, but it had to look real. And, as you know, there’s not much headspace for thinking once you’ve been infected. So no one checked too hard into my death, and Wulf revived me.

“We mostly stayed underground after that. But when we needed to go out, being fat meant that no one paid us much attention. Wulf and I are the only team members who can go back into the world while the Lattice is still operational. Everyone else carries too high a risk of someone jumping into them.”

“I noticed Wulf on the bench that night. He wasn’t exactly invisible.”

“But you didn’t jump into him. You didn’t tag him and follow him. No one has, not since he got fat.”

Taveena was still perched on the edge of her bunk, and she held Shaw’s gaze.

“I don’t know what to say,” he finally said.

“That’s a perfectly honest response. Thank you. Are you still ready for a jump?”

“Oh yes,” he said, and then realized how it made him sound. Like an addict.

She recognized his chagrin and arched her eyebrows. Shaw was worried she was going to withhold the ring, but she held it out to him. “Here, go ahead and belt yourself in to the bottom bunk, and I’ll strap in here.”

“You can guide this without a jump box?”

“I have all the jumps tagged that I want to show you.”

Shaw put the ring on and felt like he had a finger back. He looked at his left hand—that ring was still gone. Had Ellie taken it?
Well, one ring reclaimed, one to go.
He strapped a belt over him and said he was in.

“Go for it,” she answered.

Shaw put the ring to his temple, and felt the rush of a new world. He was back in the Lattice, and it was as good as it had ever been.

“What if I told you that all of human society was run by a group of technological elites, who wielded their technology in such a way that it oppressed the rest of humanity?”

Shaw looked around at his surroundings. Taveena’s avatar was next to his in a chatroom.

He looked back at her avatar. “I’d tell you you’re crazy.”

“About what I expected you’d say.”

“Look, the Lattice has
opened
doors for humanity, not closed them. The idea that there’s this shadowy group of puppeteers pulling the strings of the world is just ludicrous. At the very least, you could point to them in the Lattice. Show me the smoke-filled back rooms where the world’s decisions are made and I might believe you.”

“Here’s one,” she answered.

They jumped to a brightly lit room at the top of a skyscraper. Shaw caught a quick glance out the largest window. In the distance was St. Peter’s Basilica. He thought he also saw the high serpentine walls that extended from it, separating Italy and East Rome from West Rome and the rest of the Papal States. Shaw shivered, remembering the catacombs that were under them. Why did the meeting have to be in Rome?

He pulled his gaze from the window. The room itself looked nothing like a smoke-filled room. Except that in the center of it was Zella Galway, Shigeo Iwatani, Alex Pajitnov, and Lysandra Cunningham. Four CEOs of companies who produced Lattice devices.

“Where’s Grace Williams?” he asked.

“She wasn’t invited. You’ll see why in a second. This is the first meeting of the CEOs after she invented the ring.”

“How often do they meet?”

“Twice a year. Listen.”

“It looks like a damn nuisance, is what it looks like to me,” Lysandra Cunningham said, inspecting an Altair ring closely. “T-Six has been looking at immersive mobile experiences for at least a decade. People don’t want to be fiddling around with a ring on their finger with only a limited range of navigation gestures. She won’t last longer than a year.”

“Altair’s got the money to last a lot longer than that, even if her ring fails.”

“She got it by
cheating
,” Pajitnov said, his face red with anger. “L.R.I. spent trillions to build our collector network. Why was she allowed to mine for those particles?”

“Because Altair got the contract to clean up the radiation in old Las Vegas. All those heavy elements the blast left in the ground … it was like a brick wall for those particles. The ruins collected damn near every one that came its way,” Galway said.

“And because none of us thought of it,” Cunningham added.

“That too.”

“The ring will be a success,” Iwatani pronounced, and everyone looked at him and quieted. He was by far the oldest of the four in the room. “It’s the cheapest mobile immersive experience, and people will love that they do not have to carry a second wrap. It’s got … style. People love things with style. I propose that Ms. Williams should be invited to our meetings.”

Pajitnov and Cunningham both started to protest, but Iwatani held up his hand and they stopped. “Ms. Williams found a cache of entangled particles waiting for her in the ground. I do not believe there are any more of these to be found. Does anyone here?” No one did. “The concern is not Ms. Williams. It is the
next
Altair I worry about. What is to stop another company from producing its own Lattice reader? What is to stop a new manufacturer from competing?”

“They don’t have a trillion dollars, for one,” Galway said.

“Many don’t. A trillion dollars is a lot of money. But some companies have it. And some will want to use it. How many more competitors can our market hold? Isn’t five enough?” No one answered that either.

“What’s your proposal, Mr. Iwatani?” Cunningham asked.

“That we urge the United States military to construct a lead shield to … protect the Lattice.”

The room got very quiet and stayed that way. Eyes flickered back and forth. There was a whole conversation happening, but Shaw couldn’t understand how they were actually communicating.

“What, are they all just thinking about the idea?” he asked Taveena.

“Of course.”

Scribes
. They were thinking, but they were also listening to each other think via scribes.

“But why?”

Taveena froze the jump. “Because thoughts are messy. And not easily quoted. They’re sharing ideas, arguing about perception. But eventually they all come around to Iwatani’s idea. To encase the Lattice Installation in lead. Sound familiar?”

Shaw’s avatar nodded. “Braybrook mentioned it right after the attack, and then Galway brought it up the next day. They said they were trying to protect the Lattice.”

“Is that what you heard just now? Listen for the intent, not just the words.”

Shaw paused. He remembered what Dr. Wu had told him in Hefei. Particles went through the Lattice and came out entangled. If you could recover one, it would drive your connection to the Lattice. And he’d just heard that certain materials would stop particles like a brick wall. Or a lead wall.

“No,” he answered. “They want the lead shielding to keep entangled particles from getting away from the tower where other companies could collect them.”

“Exactly. Let’s see how they’re doing on that, shall we?”

Jump.

They were in the blinding light of the desert. Ahead of them was the tower of the Lattice rising out of the center of the sprawling Installation. A thin and elegant cylinder, it wasn’t originally more than thirty feet in diameter, plenty of room for the stairways, walkways, and elevators that the quantum engineers used for monitoring the freezing core where the Lattice itself was.

Once the attacks started, it was given a round of protective woven nano-fiber shielding, as well as a full complement of defensive weapons, as Shaw knew well. But now … Shaw barely recognized the geography.

A tall strip of lead surrounded the entire Lattice Installation. The giant circle was at least half a mile across. It was maybe eighty feet tall and, Shaw thought, sloping inward.

“It’s a dome,” he said in wonder. And Taveena’s silence confirmed it.

“How thick?”

“Thick enough. A nuclear attack won’t penetrate. But more importantly, neither will entangled particles. All the collectors the Lattice companies have built elsewhere won’t be needed. They’re lining the interior of the dome with particle collectors and will split them evenly.”

“Can you take us up?”

They rose into the air, and Shaw looked down on the massive black ring in the empty desert. It radiated the sun’s light, much more than natural lead. What had they invested in this thing? What had it been worth? A lead cloak around the entire Installation, representing billions of dollars in materials and nanotechnology builders. Billions? No, more. Trillions. “I just can’t imagine the cost,” he said.

“The cost can be calculated. What you can’t imagine are the profits. The dome is a one-time expense. The profits will last forever. When the shielding is up, no other company will be able compete with them.”