Superposition

^{CHAPTER 9}

He was dead. Brian was dead. I felt for a pulse, though there could hardly be any doubt. His skin was cold. There was a lot of blood on the floor. I realized it was on my shoes and backed hastily away.

A Glock 46 lay tossed on the floor in a corner. I was pretty sure it was Brian’s gun, the same one he had fired at Elena.

Marek had his phone out, but he shook his head. “No reception.” There were call stations every mile along the tunnel, so we would have to drive to one of those to call the police.

My hands were shaking. I was trying to look anywhere but at the body. A pair of microscopes on a central table drew my attention. It occurred to me that whatever Brian had been studying was probably what got him killed. I peered into one of them. I couldn’t see anything.

“Shouldn’t we go?” Marek asked.

“We can’t help him now,” I said. “And there’s something here he wanted me to see. I just want to take a look, before the police come and trample everything.”

I searched for an electrical box, found it under the table among the snaking cables, and switched it on. Equipment hummed as it came to life and cooling fans spun up. I fitted my eye back into the microscope’s eyepiece and adjusted the focus. A digital readout told me the magnification and scale. The object in the scope was a tiny piezoelectric resonator, barely more than a micrometer in length, but gigantic compared to the size of an electron or any other particle in the quantum world. It took me a little tinkering to figure out the setup, but once I did I was able to send a tiny pulse of energy and set the resonator oscillating.

It was what we’d been working toward for years—a relatively “large” object displaying quantum effects. Considering that the resonator was not cryogenically cooled, this was a remarkable scientific feat all on its own. But there was another microscope. I switched eyepieces, already knowing what I would find. A second resonator, vibrating much like the first… except that it was not connected to the electrical source. I checked the computer readout and saw that the frequency and direction of the oscillation was the same as the first one. The two microscopes were right next to each other, but as far as the quantum world was concerned, it might as well be on the other side of the world.

“Um… Jacob?” Marek said.

My eye was still pasted to the microscope. “This is incredible. He’s actually demonstrated entanglement on a macro scale.” It was more than incredible. My mind was soaring with visions of ansibles and faster-than-light communication. It was the biggest discovery of the century. Why had it not been accomplished in the open, with journal publication and world fame? Why was Brian hiding underground in the bunker of an abandoned collider experiment?

“Jacob? Are you seeing this?” Marek asked.

I pulled away, a little annoyed to be interrupted, but my annoyance disappeared as soon as I saw what Marek was talking about. All around the makeshift lab, objects were now spinning. Soda cans rotated rapidly where they stood; ballpoint pens spun on their ends or on their sides; a coin twirled on a tabletop as if flicked. The swivel chair behind me whirled crazily. Marek was standing against the wall, his eyes wide. “What’s happening?” he asked.

“I don’t know.” I walked around the objects, peering at them from all sides. I gingerly tapped a Coke can, which dipped and then sprang right back up again like a gyroscope would. I went back to the microscope table and reached out to switch off the power, but as I did so, I caught sight of my reflection in a mirror on the wall. The mirror was the same as the one in Brian’s office, a cheap plastic variety with a gold-painted frame. It was a reverse image, the same as in his office, with one difference. The objects that were spinning on my side of the mirror weren’t spinning on the other side.

Impossible. I thought about what I was looking at. Millions of photons were striking the glass, knocking electrons into higher energy states, being absorbed and then emitted back again. Despite the fact that in most mirrors the light appeared to travel in straight lines, bouncing off the surface with an angle of incidence equal to the angle of reflection, I knew that wasn’t really what happened. Individual photons actually took a myriad of possible paths—all possible paths, in fact—from the source to the mirror, and then from the mirror to my eye. It was just the averaging out of probability waves that made it appear to reflect in straight lines. In this mirror, however, the probability waves averaged out to show me a reverse image, as if the light was coming from behind the mirror instead of in front of it.

Hesitantly, I shifted my position so that I could see my own reflection, and once again, my image in the mirror had no eyes, just blank skin where the eyes should be. I felt my own eyes, and they were normal. The mirror figure did the same, touching the skin over its grotesquely missing eyes. I eased backward, reaching for the power switch again, only it was gone. Completely gone. I looked in the mirror, and there it was, just as it should have been. I was getting scared. Something was happening here that went way beyond the usual study of quantum effects. Something Brian had discovered that had terrified him and sent him running to knock on my door.

I was just thinking of running myself when the man with no eyes came out of the mirror. He didn’t step or climb through, as if the mirror were a window. He refracted through as beams of light, and as he did, his face split and angled as if seen through beveled glass. He was bright, brighter than the haphazard lighting in the room warranted. In the same moment that he appeared in the room, all the rotating objects froze, balanced where they stood as if captured in a photograph.

The lighting on him seemed wrong, and he moved his head from side to side as if he were seeing something else. Was he really standing there with us, or was he in some other room, in some other universe? Did he even know he was here? That question was quickly answered when he reached out and demolished a nearby computer screen. He touched it lightly with the back of a finger, as if stroking a lover’s face, but at his touch, the screen shattered, sending glass shards raining down on the desk.

I froze, too, my body disobeying my panicked signals to fight or flee.

“Where did that thing come from?” Marek shouted, backing up toward the door.

The man with no eyes had my basic height and weight and shape, but he was put together wrong, his ears a bit too small and mismatched, his jaw too big, his arms not quite connected right. His joints bent a bit too easily and in the wrong ways, as if someone who wasn’t quite sure how a human was supposed to work had put one together from spare parts.

He didn’t bother to walk around objects; the tables and wires and equipment seemed to bend around him instead, like light through a lens. He reached one of the microscopes and casually destroyed it, crumpling the metal like it was paper, looking on with an unreadable expression. This was something other, something alien, an intelligence that had no relation to humanity or the world I knew and understood. It was an enemy, and I knew how to deal with an enemy.

I sidestepped to the corner and picked up the Glock. I wasn’t a marksman, but I’d been around enough firearms in my youth to know how to use it. I set my legs, raised the Glock with two hands, and fired. The gun exploded, deafening in the enclosed space, and a cloud of concrete dust erupted from the wall behind the man. He swiveled his head toward me, apparently unharmed. I fired a few more bullets through him, but they passed through without harm just like before.

The man with no eyes stood between me and the door. I cast about for another weapon and spotted a steel pipe lying on the floor. I shoved the Glock into my pocket and picked up the pipe. The man advanced. I swung the pipe in an overhand motion, like an ax, putting the muscles of my back and shoulders behind the swing. Just before the blow struck, the man blurred into a thousand dim copies of himself. My pipe passed right through the blur without slowing down and hit the concrete floor with a jarring crash. The pipe rang with the impact. The blur coalesced into a single man again, about three feet away from where he had started.

Marek, seeing I was trapped, advanced with his fists raised. We hit him together, Marek delivering a right hook and my pipe swinging down from above. The man blurred again, but this time the blur was made of alternating spots of dark and light, the brightest in the middle, with larger darker spots on either side, and brighter spots again beyond that. I recognized it immediately, and my mouth dropped open. It was a double-interference pattern, classically used to demonstrate the wave nature of light. This creature had its own wave pattern, something that had never been demonstrated in any object larger than a nanometer.

But this was no particle. This was a thing with intelligence and purpose, inscrutable as that purpose might be. It coalesced again into a single figure where the brightest part of its waveform had been. I started to raise my pipe again, but the pipe glowed briefly and then flared out in all directions. It disintegrated in my hand, flowing away as light. I wondered how much radiation had just passed through my body, but I had more immediate concerns.

Marek and I ran for the door, but neither of us made it. As soon as I tried to step over one of the blue cables on the floor, I was thrown off my feet by a bright flash and a deafening crack. I hit the ground hard, moaning, surrounded by wispy smoke and the smell of burnt fabric.

I looked up and saw Marek on the ground, looking similarly dazed. I tentatively reached out a finger, inching it out over the wire. Nothing happened. As I leaned forward, though, I could feel a buzzing sensation at the back of my neck. I drew quickly back.

Marek looked ready to run for the door again. “Don’t try it,” I said. “The air above the cables is electrified.”

The cables spread out across the floor, crossing each other frequently. I was trapped on one small piece of floor, Marek on another. We were completely helpless.

“This is crazy,” Marek said. “How did your friend walk through here when the power was on?”

I made a wry face. “I don’t think the wires normally do this.” A moment ago, I had crossed them without difficulty.

The man with no eyes strolled forward, in no apparent hurry. He stepped between us, blocking my view of Marek. I couldn’t tell what he was doing.

Then I heard horrible, wet, tearing sounds, and Marek started to scream.