The Lead Cloak (The Lattice Trilogy Book 1) (6 page)

Shaw flew past Ono by a few feet and twirled the scrollball, giving him a view of Ono’s face instead of his back. Ono went through his morning as Yang, filing out paperwork, getting a tour of the Installation for his new job, dropping off a duffel in the temporary housing he’d have on base. It wasn’t too long before Ono was hurrying down the hallway to retrieve Shaw from the bathroom.

Slowing time closer to normal speed again, Shaw watched himself adjust Ono’s cuff. Trying not to focus on himself, he noted Ono’s eyes searching out his own as he adjusted the cuff. Apparently this small moment had really touched Ono, but Shaw had been oblivious to it then, and even now still couldn’t see what the big deal was.

Ono and Body Shaw—which was how Shaw thought of himself whenever he saw himself in a jump—went back down the hallway toward the command room again. Ono still appeared nervous, something Shaw remembered registering before, but he’d written it off to nerves about the raid.

They were soon in the command center, and Ono stayed closed to Body Shaw, his face strained. When Body Shaw asked for the wireless, Ono jumped to get it almost enthusiastically. When Body Shaw deviated from standard operating procedures and tried to reason with the pilot, Ono’s face seemed like a child looking up in wonder and surprise.

And when he swiped at Body Shaw with the nanoshock, there truly did seem to be a sense of regret in his face. Shaw tried to ignore his body writhing on the floor and put down the memories of the pain it had caused. Instead he watched Ono’s manipulation of the touch screen table. It was practiced, and speedy, but not fluid. Ono had trained, but he wasn’t altogether comfortable with it, and perhaps again there was a hint of regret in his face as he fired the nukes harmlessly into the hills.

Suddenly Ono’s face contorted in pain, and he collapsed. Body Shaw had grabbed his ankle and the nanoshock had turned on the man who had first wielded it.

Shaw pulled back on his time wheel again and brought the jump to a halt. He left the jump and rested in the box. What had he learned? Mostly he had been watching for signs of Ono making contact with anyone after entering security. But there had been no communications, and he had scarcely been alone during his first two hours inside the Installation. The raiders had left him to fend for himself, a lamb amongst the wolves.

It was a suicide mission, even more than the pilot. The pilot at least had a chance of taking out the Lattice—and thus destroying the only tool that could have been used to identify him afterward. But Ono was a goner. He’d first attempted to destroy the Lattice with its own nukes. When that failed, he still probably would have died during the destruction of the Lattice by the raider’s missile. The only other possibility was capture or dying before he’d completed his mission.

Shaw grimaced. He wasn’t particularly looking forward to jumping into Ono’s head to see what motivated him, but it was the next step. He set the box to go back to the tag he’d left on Ono at the security perimeter. He found himself once again facing the pink and gray innards of Ono. Instead of moving back out, Shaw moved forward, trying to arrange himself even further inside.

After a little jockeying, the scrollball buzzed under his hand, and the jump box confirmed that he’d locked in. Instead of seeing the innards of Ono’s brain, Shaw was now
in
his brain, and his vision changed to Ono’s vision. Wherever Ono looked, he would look. Whatever Ono thought, he would think. Well, maybe it wasn’t as simple as that. The full range of data he experienced in another’s brain was overwhelming. The parts he was looking for—thoughts, emotions, memories, ideas, and fragments of dreams—were small skiffs in the ocean of the subconscious mind. It took the experience of many jumps to sift out the tumbling, confused roar of the ocean’s surf from the thoughts you were looking for.

Every time Shaw jumped into another’s brain he was in awe of its power. Nothing he’d visited in creation so far could match the scale.

There was a weird feeling of doubleness being inside another’s brain like this. Because in addition to Ono’s thoughts, Shaw could still think his own thoughts. He could register his own surprise, disgust, laughter, while simultaneously thinking someone else’s thoughts of vengeance, lust, or compassion. Once he started time back up again, he would be aware of everything going through Ono’s brain at that time, but still be fully cognizant it was Ono’s brain and not his own.

How this worked, Shaw wasn’t sure, but he was grateful it did. Some of the first jumpers who tried to see another’s thoughts like this had not been able to have the same separation. Once inside another’s brain, their own was shelved for the duration, overpowered by the vision of the jump. They had to be pulled out unwillingly—which risked significant damage to the brain—because they had been consumed so much by the jump that they didn’t know they were jumping anymore.

As it had been explained to him, the human mind was more egotistical and arrogant than any philosopher could have ever imagined. Truly seeing through another’s mind meant being subjected to that person’s egotistical and arrogant brain, and—without the sensory input from one’s own body—losing the battle. One of the early researchers had figured out how to create the separation by letting the jumper retain a partial sense of touch. It was enough of a reminder to the brain of the real world that it allowed jumpers to always understand that they were in a jump, and kept them from falling under the spell of the jump. It was why the only way to alert someone inside a jump was with touch, like the squeeze of his metal ring.

But there were still official warnings about the consequences of jumping too long into another’s brain. Too long stretches of time in the same brain could start to confuse the jumper.

Shaw took a breath and jumped into the mind of Yukihiro Ono.

くそ、ヤンはこの介して取得する方法を知っているだろう。
ID
は、再びどちら側を上に行くのですか？
—

Shaw jumped back out. He laughed at himself, shaking his head. “Of course.” He opened one of the tags he’d imported and called it up on the screen. OK, for this one he’d used their database. The jump into Ono was flagged
Japanese. Transcript and translation document by G.A.

Shaw opened the document and read from the screen.

Shit, Yang would know how to get through this. Which side does the ID go on again? [subject remembers illustration of standard uniform] If I get caught here and can’t even make it to the control room—

Please, please, please, yes!

I’m through! I made it. The only other ID check will be at the final doors, but if I’m through once … I guess now I need to drop off this duffel. [Subject remembers mental image of a map of the Installation] Second right, someone on duty will give me my bunk, and then I head immediately for the command room where … [subject imagines Lattice collapsing] [subject imagines dying in a fireball] [subject imagines dying in a hail of bullets before his mission is complete] [subject imagines self as a hero, kissing a young Japanese woman. Strong affection] [Subject remembers same woman, laughing at him. Strong affection, humiliation]

These people. These Americans. They spy and they try to keep it all to themselves. They didn’t let anyone else in, but it was our greatness [G.A. note: ‘our’ in this context means Japan’s] that allowed us to create the first Lattice Reader. They didn’t know that anyone else could use the Lattice. They thought it was all their own. Americans. Blinded by their own arrogance, believing that just because they built it, they controlled it. [subject imagines a fat American] [subject imagines fat American having sex with same Japanese woman]

They can’t control it. No one can control it.

We were the ones to build the first Reader, and it brought glory to Japan. Now Japan will help save the world from itself, and destroy the Lattice.

People’s thoughts are their own. A person can’t be judged by their thoughts. A person should be able to choose what they show the world. A person should—

Shaw scrolled forward on the document. Looking, looking … there.

What’s Shaw reaching for? What’s wrong with my cuffs? Why would he do this? Does he know I’m not Yang? Is he helping me blend in? They said I wouldn’t know who else was here, that I wouldn’t know anyone else who was part of the plan. Is he one of them? Is he here to help me?

That explained the questioning looks Shaw had gotten from him when he came out of the bathroom. Ono was in the Lattice complex alone but knew there might be others. If there were, then Braybrook’s jumpers would have already located them by now, and Shaw didn’t have the time to do the hunt by himself.

Shaw skimmed through the rest of the transcript, but it was pretty much the same stuff. More erotic thoughts of the girl, more about the greatness of Japan, his thoughts alternating between fear of success and fear of failure.

Ono did doubt himself, when Shaw tried to reason with the pilot.

I thought they were all alike [subject imagines fat American]. Why try to talk him out of it? Is it that he doesn’t want to kill? The cuffs … No, he is afraid for his own life. He is afraid that he will lose. That he will lose the control he has. But still, he has shown kindness, and it will be an honor to die with him.

This poor kid. Shaw shook his head, and closed the transcript. OK, maybe he wasn’t a kid, but he sure acted and thought like one. And yet it was all too familiar. With only a handful of exceptions, the raids were almost uniformly the work of young men. Boys, really. Boys who thought they were being men, but who in reality were acting on the whims of their adolescent hormones.

He could remember being young as well as anyone else, but could he ever imagine himself signing up for a mission like this? What would it have taken at eighteen or twenty-three to push him into having the same zealotry as Ono, Shaw wondered.

He had jumped into his younger self more than once. His eighteen-year-old brain was a tumult of cascading emotions, usually centered on girls, but also boxing, imagining his future heroics, and living up to whatever standard Elvin was harping on that week. It was foreign territory now, like someone else’s brain. Would sexual humiliation have been enough, like it was for Ono? Could his imagined heroics have been twisted into a real-life suicide mission?

He couldn’t say anymore. There was just too much distance there. Who knew thirty-four was so far from eighteen? So far that he could barely relate or understand his own thoughts? Thirty-four was old once. It was almost exactly middle age a couple hundred years ago. Now it was, what? A quarter of his likely lifespan. Didn’t that mean he was still young? He was still coming rather than going.

He suddenly felt himself staring at the darkness of eternity and his own death. It was the nanoshock, he realized. He’d had a brush with death—a brush of just two fingertips—but it had been almost enough. Now he was lying in a coffin-shaped box thinking about all the what-ifs. Something in that made him smile. “Still alive,” he said aloud and looked back at the transcript, pushing the rest away.

He didn’t need to understand Ono. He needed to understand the people who had sent him. Almost certainly they weren’t young men. They would have known what buttons to trigger in Ono, and ruthlessly exploited his humiliation instead of trying to help him. He felt his anger rising at any group that would use a damaged soul like Ono as a weapon.

So what next, he asked. What had he learned? Too little. The main question now was—who had sent Ono? And how had they sent him?

Shaw jumped back to his tag of Ono entering the Lattice complex. But instead of going forward in time, he pulled back on his scrollball and sent time into reverse. Double speed, then triple speed, then ten times the speed. Ono was a blur. Walking backward from the shuttle drop off. On the shuttle reading. Waiting for the shuttle. Going to the San Francisco airport. Leaving a medical office.

Shaw slowed up the reverse and watched as Ono received the face-altering surgery that had transformed him into Yang. Seen in reverse time, however, to Shaw it looked like the surgeon was peeling back a layer of skin, revealing the face of Ono inside Yang’s.

His face was younger than Yang. Maybe he was just a kid after all. He was Japanese, not Chinese. A small, fresh scar on his cheek was revealed. His hair was longer. They added fingerprints, that—Shaw had to assume—contained replicas of Yang’s DNA.

Ono finished the transformation—started the transformation, Shaw corrected; watching time in reverse always confused him—and left/entered the room. Shaw tapped down on his wheel to bookmark the room, knowing he’d have to come back and investigate the doctor and the nurse later.

Ono walked backwards out of the medical office and into a cab. Shaw sped up time again and followed him back to San Francisco airport, where he walked off a plane from Kyoto. Kyoto? He arrived in the U.S. less than twenty-four hours before he was going to attack the Lattice? As Shaw watched Ono on the long flight from Japan, he tried to think through all the implications.

Ono was summoned at the last minute. Why? Because the raiders hadn’t known they would need him before then? Or because they didn’t want to alert him until they absolutely had to? The scope of this group was starting to truly worry Shaw. They were international in reach, they had sophisticated technology—I still haven’t even gotten to the hovercraft, Shaw remembered—and they were smart enough to get closer to taking out the Lattice than anyone ever had.

Shaw peered down over the back of Ono’s seat and saw that he was studying schematics of the Lattice Installation on his tablet. And in public! Shaw looked around, but no one else had noticed. Without exception, everyone in the seats around Ono was in a jump.

Ono reversed out of the airplane, waited for his flight for a few hours, then finally reversed out of the airport and into a cab. It picked him up in front of a large building on the outskirts of Kyoto. Shaw followed Ono up the elevator to his apartment. As Ono reached the door, Shaw slowed down the speed of the playback to normal time, though he was still watching Ono in reverse.