The Lead Cloak (The Lattice Trilogy Book 1) by Erik Hanberg Read Free Book Online Page B

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