Read Too Like the Lightning for Free Online Page A

like eggs laid by the chubby clouds. “And the computers? How deep would an intruder have to get to reach them?”
    â€œDeep,” Ockham answered. “Many stories, many tiers.”
    Thumps through the ceiling made both glance up, the footsteps of a bash’mate upstairs.
    â€œHow about to reach an interface?” Martin asked.
    â€œThe next room has some interface nets.” Ockham nodded to his left. “But they’re set-set nets, Cartesian, no one who wasn’t trained from birth could get them to respond.”
    Mason: “Your security is mostly automated?”
    Humanist: “I could have fifty guards here in two minutes, three hundred in five, but human power is less than four percent of my security.”
    Mason: “You think there’s no danger this intruder could return and cause a mass crash?”
    Humanist: “A mass crash is not possible.”
    Mason: “You’re sure?”
    Are you disconcerted by this scriptlike format, reader? It was common in our Eighteenth Century, description lapsing into naked dialogue; to such Enlightened readers all histories were plays, or rather one play, scripted by one distant and divine Playwright.
    Humanist: “A mass crash is not the danger. The system will ground all the cars if any tampering’s detected, and they can self-land even with the system dead. The problem is shutting down all transit on Earth for however long it took us to recheck the system, could be minutes, hours. The Censor told me a complete shutdown would cost the world economy a billion euros a minute, not to mention stranding millions, cutting off supplies, ambulances, police. That’s your catastrophe.”
    Mason: “Or at the very least the century’s most destructive prank.”
    Humanist: “Utopians?”
    Confess, reader, the name had risen in your mind too, conjured by stereotype, as talk of secret handshakes brings Masons before your eyes, or war brings priests.
    Martin frowned. “Not Utopians necessarily, though such mischief is not beyond them.”
    Humanist: “They have a separate system. They’re the only ones.”
    Mason: “Do you think they’d reap a profit if they shut you down and then let the other Hives rent out their cars?”
    Humanist: “They wouldn’t.”
    Mason: “Rent their cars?”
    â€œThey don’t have the capacity to put that many extra cars in the sky, they don’t have the reserves we do. They’d be overrun.”
    At Ockham’s signal the house summoned its second showpiece: a projection of the Earth in her slow spin, with the paths of the cars’ flights traced across in threads of glowing gold. Hundreds of millions crisscrossed, dense as pen strokes, drowning out the continents so the regions of the globe were differentiated only by texture, oceans smooth masses of near-parallel paths, like fresh-combed hair, while the great cities bristled with so many crisscrossing journeys that Earth seemed to bleed light. Each car’s position en route was visible like a knot in the thread, crawling forward as the seconds crawled, so the whole mass scintillated like the dust of broken glass. The display is functionless, of course, a toy to dazzle houseguests, but a Humanist bash’ must make some amends for a shabby trophy wall.
    Humanist: “Gold is my system. The Utopian cars are blue, and Romanova’s Emergency System cars are red. Can you see them?”
    Martin squinted as the end of a baseball game in Cairo made the city blaze with fresh launches. “Not a trace.”
    â€œExactly. I have eight hundred million passengers in the air at a time. Making them compete for thirty million Utopian cars would do a lot more harm than profit. A shutdown helps no one.”
    More footsteps on the stairs above. “¡Ockham!” a voice called down in Spanish. “¿Can you come help move Eureka’s bed? A mango fell behind it. Well,