The Lead Cloak, page 25
“No one could have.”
“But—”
“I lost my whole family in Las Vegas, Byron. I know the difference between terrorism and an accident. You made a mistake. I know you’ll have to live with it, but I’m here to tell you: I don’t blame you for those deaths.” Erling moved onto the bunk next to Byron and sat with him. “The only reason I’m here—the only reason I agreed to sign up, is because Wulf and Taveena assured me that we are not terrorists. A terrorist, by definition, tries to create terror—to scare people into change. We are trying to create peace. We value human life. No innocents will die if we can absolutely help it. One life lost is too many.”
“And Ono? The hovercraft pilot?”
“We had good reason to think they would live. A twist of fate and they might have. But believe me, I think about those deaths every day. Just as you will think about those people on the hotel every day of your life.”
Shaw nodded slowly. The weight was still there on his shoulders. But it had shifted ever so slightly.
“Why did you sign up, Erling? Why did they recruit you? It wasn’t just Las Vegas. Annalise said something about a boyfriend … but she said I should ask you.”
“And that’s it? That’s all she said?”
Shaw nodded.
“Well … I appreciate her discretion. It was … heinous.” Erling looked like he was deciding whether to continue, when there was a buzz at the door. “After this is all over, I’ll tell you the whole story.”
“I’d like that.”
Erling pushed forward and aimed toward the door. “And don’t despair. The vote’s not over yet. I swear to you, I’ll do everything I can to see that you have the chance to see Ellie again.”
“Thank you, Erling.”
Erling opened the door, and Wulf stepped gracefully into the room. He took a moment to inspect Erling’s black eye, and then with a wave, Erling was gone.
“She’s definitely going to lose her hand,” Wulf announced.
Shaw nodded. It wasn’t a surprise. He’d seen her mangled hand as Kuhn and Taveena pulled Annalise out of her suit after the airlock had closed. She was still passed out from the pain, but she was alive and she was breathing.
“Can you clone her another one?” Shaw asked.
“We think so. The tether squeezed her pretty tight. It broke her wrist, and ruptured blood vessels all up her forearm. We’ll have to replace a lot—more than the last time. I’m going to wait until she’s awake and let her decide.”
“She told me that she’s willing to give everything to destroy the Lattice.”
“She is.”
Shaw nodded again. “I let her down.”
“You let everyone down,” Wulf said.
“But at least I tried to save her! Taveena was just going to let her die out there. She killed the tether as it was coming back together, she cost Annalise her hand …”
“Annalise is willing to sacrifice herself to destroy the Lattice. Taveena would sacrifice herself, and you, and me, and everyone on this ship, if she could do it.”
“She’s really the leader here, isn’t she? I mean, you said you were in charge, but it’s her. She’s pulling the strings.”
Wulf smirked. “It’s not exactly a secret. I’m running the day-to-day because I know when people need breaks, when they’ve hit their limit. I know how to manage a team—no one can build the Lattice on their own, not even the great Wulfgang Huxley. But Taveena … has no limits. And she can’t understand that other people might. If she were still our leader, we would have gone out in a blaze of glory, or we would all be dead from exhaustion trying to keep up with her. She’s got more drive than anyone—there was a reason she was a triathlon champion.”
“Not all triathlon champs start terrorist groups.” Not terrorists, Erling had said. But it was hard to avoid the word. How many terrorists would have said they were trying to create peace, too?
“Not all triathlon champs are whip-smart nano-technicians, either. She’s one of a kind. She killed me, just so she could have a conversation. Does that sound like something a reasonable person would do? She doesn’t get that anyone would find that extreme. The vote that you’ll face in two days … the only reason we have it is because it was the only way I could persuade Taveena that she didn’t get total say over the fate of everyone. Before that, she wanted to be Solomon, deciding everyone’s fate on her own.”
Shaw was quiet. “What did Taveena tell you when she’d unburied you that made you want to destroy the Lattice? You’ve never told me why you’re here.”
“She didn’t tell me anything. She just gave me the opportunity I needed to do what I’d dreamt of, that’s all.”
“But you created it. You’re as famous as Einstein or Galileo. And now you want to destroy it?”
“I do,” Wulf said. “With a passion.”
“I know the Lattice has done both good and bad. But it seems like you can only see the bad.”
“I see both sides. But it’s not a list of pros and cons. That’s the wrong way to approach new technology. Do you know anything about the Amish?”
Shaw shrugged. “They don’t like technology. They’re stuck in the past. They have buggies and horses like it was three hundred years ago.”
“That’s what everyone thinks. But they are actually very smart about how they approach new technology. A young Amish person will want to try something new. A tractor, electricity, a car, a cell phone, the Lattice … and the elders will let him. Did you know that? They let him try it, and they watch. They watch what it does to the community’s quality of life. Most of the time, after a few months, it’s clear to everyone that for all the supposed efficiencies and benefits, it does more harm than good. So the technology’s abandoned. Sometimes it’s kept, though. The Amish might not have electricity, but some of them have pneumatic power tools. Because it wasn’t the tool that was the problem, it was the electricity and what it powered that drew people away from their families. Some sects even use Lattice tablets for soil monitoring. Others are expert weather bidders. The Amish choose what parts of technology they want to keep. The rest they do without.”
“So you want everyone to give up technology and live like the Amish?”
“No. That’s not practical or even desirable. But I want us to look at a new technology and decide that just because we can do something, doesn’t mean we have to.”
“You think the whole world is going to just give up the Lattice?”
“Obviously not. If I did, I wouldn’t be trying to destroy it. But you keep making the same mistake you did with Taveena—not everyone is actually going to lose the Lattice when it’s gone.
“Think about it this way. What would have happened if in 1960 the internal combustion engine were suddenly uninvented? All engines just suddenly disappeared. Developed countries would be set back, no question. Countries at war would be set back. But for most of humanity, who could never hope to own a car and didn’t rely on them, life wouldn’t change at all. It would go on like normal.”
“Are you hoping to bring the developed countries down to size or something?”
“No, no, no. I’m just saying that the vast majority of humanity won’t be overly inconvenienced if the Lattice vanishes, but since developed countries rely on it more, they have more to lose. They also have the most to gain, I hope. I do want to inconvenience them a bit. Because I think it’s a good time to pause things and let people catch their breath. Did you ever lose power as a kid? The lights went out in a storm or something?”
“A couple times.”
“And your family lit candles or used wraps for light. If you were lucky they pulled out an old-fashioned deck of cards and suddenly it’s a magical night. You think, ‘why don’t we do this more often?’”
Shaw nodded. “But then the power comes back on and everyone forgets.”
“Exactly.”
“So won’t the power just come back on? If you’re successful, won’t they just rebuild the Lattice?”
“I’m the only one who can. Of course, a lot of people study the Lattice and know it intimately. But they use the Lattice to study it. That’s their notes, their reference. I don’t think they can just replicate it. Or if they can, it’ll take them years. Ten years maybe to get a prototype working again—”
“Ada Dillon thinks she can get her new version live in five.”
Wulf gave out a short laugh and sighed. “The woman’s a genius, no question. But she’s arrogant and overconfident. My hope is that by the time she’s got her new and improved Lattice operational … maybe the world won’t want it anymore. I want to give the world a chance to say, ‘you know what? Maybe this Lattice thing wasn’t so great after all.’ But the only way they’re going to say that is if they experience life without it.”
“I do hear where you’re coming from,” Shaw said. “I hope you know that. I just don’t know if I’ll be where you need me to be in two days for the vote.”
“Frankly, I’m not sure it matters anymore.”
Shaw had expected that as well, despite Erling’s pledge to do whatever he could to help him. “So there’s truly no chance?”
“You needed five. Annalise was one of those. You helped to save her in the end, sure, but she wouldn’t have been out there in the first place if … well. I don’t know where Kuhn is, either. I just don’t see where you’re going to get the five votes.”
“I can keep working them.”
“Maybe you can. It’s up to you. But if you want, I’ve brought you this.” Wulf pulled a ring out of his pocket. He held it out in front of him and released it, letting the ring hang in midair. “It’s not a guided ring. You can jump where you’d like.”
“I don’t understand. You think I have an open mind now? That I’m not an addict?”
“No … I just thought … well, if it were me, and I knew what was coming …” Wulf seemed rather embarrassed, and gave two scratches across his body. “I just thought that you might like to see your wife one last time.”
Chapter 26
It was finally his. Just hanging there waiting for him.
And for the first time, he didn’t want it.
Everything he’d heard, every reason these people had for hating it, came back to him. He wanted to be strong enough to ignore it. Strong enough that it didn’t have an effect on him.
But the ring meant seeing Ellie. And no matter how much he hemmed and hawed about it, he knew that he couldn’t resist the chance to see her.
Shaw sat forward in his bunk and plucked the ring from the air. That was all it took for the entire world—the entire solar system—to be his to see. How could he possibly turn that gift down? How could anyone?
He slipped it on slowly. It felt so right on his finger.
Shaw put it to his temple. And jumped.
There was so much he wanted to see! He wanted be awash in the jump, bathe in the feeling of otherness, of absolute freedom, absolute knowledge about anything he wished to see. Ellie, Gettysburg, Saturn, Caesar, St. Louis, Elvin and Peter. Anywhere! Anyone!
He would jump to see Ellie first, right?
No.
Then he would spend all his time there with her. Laughing, traveling, making love, watching her mourn after he died.
He couldn’t start there. He had to build up to it. He’d been cooped up with the same people in a confined space for almost a week—he needed time to acclimate before he saw her.
Shaw navigated the public tags. When he found the one he was looking for, he jumped.
Mar de Plata, the last place Grace Williams had been surfing. The waves were crashing against the sandy beach, the sun so bright on his eyes he had to turn away.
But there were so many people! The beach was crowded with surfers and topless sunbathers and children. More than he could take. He went through the tags again, and found a more remote location.
He found her again, five months earlier, surfing in the Mentawai Islands off of Indonesia. The beach only had a couple dozen surfers scattered across it. He watched Grace Williams and her partner Nosipho as they swam out to meet the next wave.
He saw Grace tense, her whole body taut and ready. She turned and swam her board toward shore, getting a jump on a massive wave that was building behind her.
Shaw marveled at her poise, a world of water all around her, and she was calm in the center of it. He wanted to join them! To get lessons and feel what she did.
He moved forward into the water, but the feeling of water on his skin was faint—the sense of touch was partially disabled in the Lattice. The lapping of water on his knees, the sun’s heat on his back, a breeze on his shoulder—all muted by the Lattice.
Then he couldn’t help but picture the drowned gambler Taveena had shown him floating in the water in front of him.
He watched Grace and Nosipho for another wave, but the joy was gone. He jumped away. Taveena’s guided tour had brought up memories he’d forgotten. He searched public tags of himself and found his first jump to Ancient Rome. He watched Caesar in the command tent with his troops, listening to a translation of his Latin in his head. In truth it wasn’t too far removed from the Civil War jumps he did now. Battle hadn’t changed much in the centuries between Caesar and Lee. Had Shaw changed so little as well that from the time he was a boy to his adulthood he still jumped to the same old battles?
Damn them all! This used to be fun!
Shaw went back to his teens. He and Elvin and Peter, the inseparable trio, lounging on his school’s bleachers, waiting for their chance in the ring. Elvin was talking about what he was going to do when he graduated—the women, the fights, the victories. It was hard to believe how readily he’d lapped it up back then. Of course Elvin would go on to do those things. He was Elvin.
Was Shaw’s revulsion just hindsight, because he knew how things would truly go for Elvin? No. Elvin was a cocky bully, constantly setting up ways for his friends Peter and Byron to tell him how great he was. And they did it, every time. No—Peter didn’t do it. It was always Shaw. Shaw watched his old self and his friends with new eyes.
And he understood what he’d never noticed then. Peter couldn’t stand Elvin. He could barely look at him. He only grunted at his jokes. But when Shaw said something! Peter was all ears—quick with a funny response, eager to agree.
Body Shaw said that he was thinking about applying to West Point, and Elvin scoffed and asked why you’d want to spent your day doing pushups. Peter said he thought Shaw had a real shot of getting in. They kept talking until Elvin, clearly feeling left out of the new conversation, said that at least you got to kill people. And the uniform would get you laid. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad.
Shaw couldn’t believe it. His whole understanding of his teen years shifted before his eyes. Elvin acted like the leader of the group, and Shaw treated him that way. But it wasn’t true. Shaw was the true leader and he’d never known it. Elvin had never been in charge. And yet he’d spent so much time worrying about what Elvin thought of him.
Shaw jumped away, leaving the boys on the bleachers.
This was the Lattice at its best, right? A kind of therapy, a way to get a second look at yourself. To see your life with more objective eyes. This couldn’t have happened before. Not until Wulf had built it.
Was it enough?
Shaw jumped to watch his own death. He watched the black goop of the shock cover him as he writhed on the floor. He watched Yang’s devotion, how he accompanied him to Ramstein Air Force Base and then to DC. They’d known each other for just a few days, but Ono’s impersonation, which had at first made it so hard for Yang and Shaw to relate, eventually tied them together, each victims in their own way of the same deception.
He watched his parents cry over his coffin. He wanted to do anything he could to stop them from crying.
And then Ellie entered.
His heart was breaking as he saw the pain she was hiding inside. Her sister couldn’t see it—she was self-involved enough, Shaw thought, that she needed feeds to tell her what her sister was feeling. But Shaw could tell. How torn up Ellie was inside. How much anger and sadness was in her. She was a mess of emotions, and she was doing everything she could to keep them in.
He could barely stand to see her like this. Shaw searched the tags again. He found her most recent tag and jumped to see her.
There she was, now and in the moment. It was barely past dawn in St. Louis, but Ellie was up. The smell of brewing coffee hit Shaw’s nose, and he was transported back to countless mornings, padding into the kitchen half-naked, finding Ellie at the window watching the morning begin. She loved the Arch, the way it looked steely and dull or dazzlingly luminescent depending on the cloud cover or the position of the sun.
He reached out, wanting to wrap his arms around her waist, but his avatar’s limbs passed right through her. He was a ghost, haunting his wife.
On a whim, Shaw checked the ring’s settings and saw that all chat and messaging functions were disabled. He was trapped. On the wrong side of some sort of ethereal plane, unable to go back, to tell her how he missed her, how he loved her.
He jumped back and kept watching her. She was wearing a thin robe, pulled tighter than she normally wore it. Was she too aware these days of how many people could be watching? Or was it his absence? She was alone in their home, the warmth of her husband gone.
He wanted more than anything to stay there with her. But at the same time he felt like a voyeur, peering through a window at his own wife. He couldn’t think of anything more miserable.
Shaw found a new tag, this one of her thoughts.
He jumped in, expecting to slip into the same comfortable familiarity he’d found seeing Ellie in their kitchen. But where her orderly mind had once been a precision clock, he now found all the gears exploded into shifting fragments, a consciousness that was roiling and heaving in emotions, and all of it was of loss, of grief, of heartbreak, of betrayal, of anger, and of hate.
Oh the hate! He’d never jumped into Ellie when she’d felt anything so powerful, anything so consuming as the anger she felt—toward the raiders, toward the Army, the CEOs of the Lattice reader manufacturers, the country, the job that took Shaw away from her. How she loathed everything—vigils for her husband, the feeds that reported on her loneliness, Shaw for leaving her, herself for sending him away, the Lattice for taking him, the OJs in her clinic who were too weak and fell under its spell, her fellow nurses who would never save them.
