Superposition

^{CHAPTER 11}

Marek’s scream pierced the air. More than anything, I wanted to see what was happening to him, but once I did see, I almost wished I couldn’t. Marek was in pieces on the ground. His arms and legs and hands and fingers had been torn apart. Incredibly, there was no blood. It was like an old Saturday morning cartoon where the hapless villain is shredded in a propeller or flattened under a steam roller, but he gets up, shakes it off, and is as good as new.

In fact, as I watched, the man with no eyes put Marek back together again, piece by piece. He did it with meticulous care, as if assembling a model airplane, pausing to peer—with no eyes—at the result. It was almost as if the man wanted to see how a human being was assembled. I reached out tentatively and realized that the air above the cables was no longer electrified. Perhaps the thing could only perform one miracle at a time—or was just distracted. I stayed where I was, however, afraid to move lest it disappear and leave Marek spread out in pieces on the floor. Though how Marek could possibly survive the encounter, I didn’t know. Finally, when the man finished the last piece of his gruesome puzzle, he stepped back as if to admire his handiwork. Marek opened his eyes. Incredibly, he seemed alive and perfectly whole. He felt his head, his arms, his legs. He said something that sounded like varcolac and crossed himself.

The man with no eyes still stood between us and the door we had come through, blocking our exit, but there was another way out of the bunker, an emergency exit with stairs up to the outside. All the experiment rooms were reachable through maintenance access doors all along the ring, deep in the Pine Barrens. They couldn’t be entered without an access card or key, but they allowed easy exit in case of emergency.

“Can you run?” I asked.

“I think so,” Marek said.

“Follow me, then,” I said.

Marek took a careful step backward. The man with no eyes seemed to regard him, but made no move. Marek took another step.

“Now!” We bolted for the emergency exit, not looking back to see if the man with no eyes was coming after us. There was a service elevator, but there was no time to punch the button and wait. We used the stairs instead.

We took them two at a time. Twenty flights later, breathing hard, we broke out into the pine forest. I still didn’t know if we were being followed, but we didn’t stop to find out. After a few moments to catch our breath, we struck out running along the overgrown path toward the road.

In a short dirt driveway, perhaps a hundred feet off the road and obscured by brush, we found a battered Toyota Viva, a car that I recognized at once.

“This is Brian’s car,” I said. “He must have parked here and snuck down the maintenance access.”

“How did he get in?” Marek asked.

“They don’t monitor them,” I said. “They’re pretty remote. When I was working here, Brian and I rigged this one so we could go in and out without triggering the alarm.” That was back when we were installing equipment for CATHIE and had every expectation of long and fruitful study. We sometimes got claustrophobic in our buried, underground bunker, and it was good to be able to come up for fresh, pine-scented air and occasionally, depending on the weather and how late we were working, a narrow view of the stars overhead.

We looked in the car. The keys were in the ignition. I tried my phone and still got no service. “Looks like we’ll need to borrow his car,” I said.

I climbed into the driver’s seat, and Marek got in the other side. I turned the key, and the engine started easily. I got the car turned around, and it rumbled over the uneven dirt toward the road. When we pulled out onto the highway with a scrape of gravel under the wheels, I let out a long breath.

“It didn’t hurt at all,” Marek said. He seemed to be embarrassed that he’d lost his nerve. “It was just…”

“The most terrifying thing I’ve ever seen,” I said.

Marek held his hand up to the light, flexing his fingers. He said something in Romanian that sounded like a curse.

“What?”

“This finger,” he said. “When I was young, a teenager, there was an accident. My hand was crushed under a heavy beam. Several bones broke, but we were poor, and I was strong and proud. I never saw a doctor. But this finger…”

He flexed it again, and I remembered that it had always been stiff, the bones fused together in a slightly bent position. Now he was bending and unbending that finger along with all the others.

“It is not possible,” Marek said.

“That’s not the only impossible thing we just saw,” I said. “That guy took you apart and put you back together again. Seriously, no pain? You’re not just showing me how tough you are?”

Marek gave me a look. “I was screaming like a baby.”

He wiggled his finger some more. I supposed that technically, that thing had healed Marek, but I wasn’t ready to consider it a miracle. I wasn’t at all sure that healing had been its purpose. It had looked more like an engineer taking a machine apart and putting it back together again to see what was inside.

“Better try the police again,” I said.

Marek tapped some buttons on his phone, but shook his head. “No bars.”

I wasn’t too surprised. “We can’t be that far out,” I said. “Shouldn’t take more than a few minutes to get in range of a tower.”

Pine trees were whizzing by on both sides. The road was narrow and straight, with no other cars in sight. I pushed down on the gas and reflexively checked my rearview mirror for flashing lights, though at that point, a cop car would have been welcome. As I did, I noticed an old brown blanket draped over some junk in the backseat. The blanket moved suddenly, rearing up to fill my view. It fell away to reveal a man, lights flashing where his eyes should be.

Marek shouted. I slammed on the brakes and swerved, sending the car into the opposite lane. I spun the steering wheel hard the other way, adrenaline pumping through my veins, but we were moving too fast. Instead of righting itself, the car skidded sideways off the road and smashed into a tree. My head smacked into the steering wheel, but we didn’t hit hard enough to set off the air bags.

I felt stunned and dizzy, but I fumbled with my seatbelt clasp, afraid to look back, expecting at any moment to be grabbed from behind. My hands were shaking; I couldn’t find the button. Finally, I found it and the seatbelt popped open. I reached for the door and scrambled out. Marek was already out on the other side, and we ran for the trees.

I risked a backward glance and saw the man just getting out of the car behind us. Using the door. I stopped. The man climbing awkwardly out of the car wasn’t the creature that had chased us in the bunker. What had seemed to be missing eyes had in fact been reflections from a pair of glasses. His clothes were wrinkled and his hair was tousled from sleep, and he moved like his body hurt from a night spent sleeping in the back seat of a car. It was Brian Vanderhall.

I advanced on him, feeling both foolish and furious. “What’s going on here?” I asked. I was more angry than astonished. This was a trick, some kind of small-minded, immature trick of Brian’s to get him out of some trouble or other, probably with a woman. He had somehow faked his own death, but the trick had gone sour, and now he and everyone around him were going to take the fall. It was typical Brian.

Brian lifted his hands as if to ward off a blow, then seemed to recognize me. “Jacob?” He blew out a breath of relief. “I thought you were car thieves. What are you doing here?”

“What am I doing here?” I barely knew where to start. “You’re supposed to be dead!”

Marek came up behind me. “This is Brian?” he asked.

“Yes. Are you okay?” My head was ringing from the impact, and I’d have a bit of a bruise over one eye, but no real injuries.

“Fine, I think,” Marek said.

Brian was wearing the same shorts and T-shirt as the day before, and one side of his face had a pattern pressed into it from where he’d been sleeping against the car upholstery. He looked worried and confused. “How did you find me?” he asked.

“By running up the stairs to get away from that thing with no eyes, who nearly killed us by doing impossible things, which I hope you are about to explain to me.”

Brian’s eyes went large and wild. “You went down there? Is it following you?”

“Of course I went down there! You nearly got me killed.”

“Us killed,” Marek said.

“Tell me you didn’t turn the power on,” Brian said.

“Of course, I turned it on. You told me to go down there and look around. So you’d better start telling us what’s happening.”

“I don’t know what’s happening,” Brian said. “I didn’t tell you anything. Trust me, I wouldn’t have told you to turn the power on down there.”

“I don’t trust you as far as I can separate a pair of quarks,” I said. “Tell me what you do know.” I was angry enough to get back in the car and leave him there. I’d seen his corpse on his floor of the bunker, and if that had just been some kind of elaborate hoax, I wasn’t finding it very funny. I remembered that I still had Brian’s Glock in my pocket, but I decided not to give it back to him quite yet.

I examined the car. The brakes had taken most of our forward momentum, so the hood of the car was only slightly staved in, and none of the glass was broken.

Brian rocked from foot to foot. His skin was peppered with goose bumps. The snow hadn’t lasted, but it was still pretty cold outside. “Can we get back in the car?” he asked. “I’m cold.”

“Fine,” I said, disgusted.

He climbed in the backseat again and wrapped himself with the blanket. Marek got in the passenger’s side, and I took the driver’s seat and tried the ignition. Nothing. I tried three more times, and finally the engine sputtered and caught. I backed the car away from the tree and, after spinning my tires a bit, got it back onto the road and moving forward again. I continued toward Lakehurst, though at a more careful speed. I tried my phone again. There was still no reception, but at this point, it wasn’t clear what I would tell the police anyway.

“Start talking,” I said.

“Okay,” Brian said. “You remember the nature-as-computer argument?”

I rolled my eyes. “Yes. We had this conversation already.”

“We did?”

I glanced back at him in the rearview mirror. He was wrapped up in the brown blanket so that only his eyes were showing, like an animal in a cave. “Yes. At my house. So was that thing in the bunker one of the quantum intelligences you were talking about? The oh-so-friendly fairies who gave you their technology?”

Brian looked puzzled. “When was I at your house?” he asked.

I was getting irritated. I was getting tired of being pushed around, and I wanted some answers. “You were at my house last night. You fired a gun at my wife, and I punched you. You seriously don’t remember that?”

Brian looked blank. “I haven’t been to your house in years. I wanted to come, to tell you everything, but I didn’t.”

“Okay,” I said. “Something is seriously wrong with you.”

“You’re right about the quantum intelligences,” Brian said. “Though I don’t know how you know. They’re formed from the interactions of the subatomic world, life springing out of complexity. That’s what you saw.”

“I know what I saw,” Marek said. “It was a varcolac. My grandmother saw one when she was a girl.”

“What’s a varcolac?” I asked, mauling the pronunciation.

“A demon. A monster. They live on the other side of the world,” Marek said.

“New Zealanders live on the other side of the world,” Brian said.

“No, not like that. On the other earth, the mirror world, on the other side of ours. There are the gentle folk, the blajini, who fast all year and benefit humankind, though they don’t understand us. Then there are the varcolaci, who devour and kill.”

I raised my eyebrows. “You think the thing we saw in the bunker was a monster from some kind of Romanian myth?”

“Some say they are the souls of unbaptized children,” Marek said. “Others say they are the spirits of those who drowned after Moses commanded the Red Sea to flow back over their heads. But they exist.”

“So… Egyptian monsters from a Romanian myth about a Jewish fable,” Brian said. He gave a derisive laugh. “Listen to me. This isn’t story time. We’re talking about self-aware intelligences generated from the complexity of particle interaction on a large scale.”

Marek twisted around in his seat to face Brian. “You think using scientific words changes what it is?”

“I’m talking about something physical, not a spirit.”

“I hear what you’re saying. You’re saying that if a thing is complicated enough, it will be conscious,” Marek said.

“Pretty much,” Brian said. “If it’s a network, like a brain or computer, with a means of passing information. People tend to romanticize consciousness, as if it’s something spiritual. It’s just a word we use to describe complexity.”

Marek looked at me. “This is why I hate scientists,” he said.

I grinned. “I’m a scientist.”

“Not like that. Why is calling them quantum intelligences any better than calling them varcolaci?”

“Look, I’ll step you through it,” Brian said. “Is a toaster conscious?”

“No,” Marek said.

“Why not?”

“It’s a machine. It does what it was built to do,” Marek said.

“What about one of those automated lawn mowers or vacuum cleaners? We say things like, ‘It tried to go around the tree, but it got confused.’ Doesn’t that indicate a consciousness? That it consciously intends to mow the lawn?”

“It’s still just a machine. It follows its programming,” Marek said.

“What about a dog? Is it conscious? Does it intend to get in the lawnmower’s way, or chase the cat, or shed on the carpet? Or is it just following its programming?”

“A dog is conscious, I think,” Marek said.

“Or do we just say that, because the dog’s programming is more complex, and we can’t always predict it?” Brian asked. “What about you? I grant you the label of conscious because I ascribe intent and unpredictability to your actions, but when it comes down to it, you’re just following your programming, too. Consciousness is just when that programming becomes complex enough to warrant using a certain vocabulary.”

Marek’s hand darted into the backseat, quick as a snake, and grabbed Brian by the neck, just under his chin. I could only see him through the mirror, but I could tell Brian hadn’t seen it coming. His mouth slammed shut and his eyes bulged.

“Is it just my programming if I break your neck?” Marek asked.

I knew Marek well enough by now to know that he wouldn’t really do it, but Brian didn’t. “There’s no need for that,” he croaked.

Marek made a deep sound in his throat that eventually became recognizable as a chuckle. He let go of Brian’s throat and began to laugh heartily. Brian laughed, too, though not very convincingly, and rubbed at his throat.

“Free will is real,” Marek said. “I can choose to break your neck if I wish.”

“Science says not,” Brian said. “Everything you do is just the accumulated result of a series of probabilistic outcomes.”

“But I can decide. I haven’t decided yet, but really, it could go either way,” Marek said.

The superior grin flashed back onto Brian’s face. “In fact, it goes both ways. Every decision you make is made the other way by another version of you in a parallel universe.”

“We don’t really know that,” I put in.

“It’s basic mathematics,” Brian said, pouting now that I hadn’t backed him up. “Say the number of particles making up the Earth and its environment in space is N. Each particle can only have a finite set of values—position, velocity, spin, etc.—so the number of possible states that a set of N particles can be in is another number, M. M is staggeringly large, but finite. In an infinite universe—which ours assuredly is, or is so vast as to make the difference unimportant—those M states will all occur, and all be repeated, again and again. Not to mention all of the other infinitely sized bubble universes. Everything you do is being repeated by someone exactly like you—millions of yous, in fact—in every possible slight variation.”

Marek made a disgusted look. “A person is not the same as a toaster. If you don’t know that, your science is worth nothing.”

Brian held his hands protectively over his throat, but he kept talking. “We want to believe we’re special. But every great scientific discovery in the past has had to break us of the idea of how special and different we are as humans. Copernicus made us give up the idea that the Earth was the center of the universe. Darwin made us give up the idea that humans are greater than animals. Einstein made us realize that even our perspective on motion and time is not absolute.

“Quantum mechanics is the worst, though. It undermines our sense of purpose. It tells us that everything is driven by probabilities, the random dice roll of a billion particles. Every decision you think you make is in fact a rolling probability wave, the result of a giant quantum computer that’s calculating you and everything else. Worse, the opposite of every decision you make is probably being made by a parallel you in another universe. Einstein didn’t want to believe it either, but science doesn’t lie.”

“If that’s what science gives you, what good is it?” Marek asked. “You can talk professor as much as you like, but there was a varcolac in that bunker, and you let it out.”

“And more to the point,” I said, “that varcolac tried to kill us.”

“You’re not seriously going to call it that,” Brian said. “They’re not spirits. They’re physical creatures, the same as we are. Although their ‘bodies’ are composed as much of photons as they are of other particles. I think they’ve been around a lot longer than we have, maybe even from the first few seconds of the big bang.”

“Well then,” I said slowly, “we can probably call them sprites or faeries or angels or demons or varcolacs, and not be wrong. Most primitive cultures have animistic belief systems. Maybe they’re based on something real: other beings that live in the fabric of the universe.”

“Call them what they are,” Brian said. “They’re quantum intelligences. And I doubt anyone else has seen them before. Before I contacted them, I don’t think they were any more aware of our existence than we were of theirs.”

“How did you even know they were there?”

“I didn’t. You saw my resonators?” When I nodded, Brian grinned like a proud little boy with a model airplane. “That’s where it started. That was the beginning. Normal human interactions are no more noticeable to them than the rotation of the Earth is to us. They speak in entanglement and probabilities and weak and strong forces. When I communicated quantum effects over a distance, however—when I could turn them on and off with a switch and see the results, it was like picking up radio waves from a distant galaxy, or… or, I don’t know, a UFO landing on their front lawn. They suddenly knew that someone else was out there, someone with the intelligence to communicate and respond.

“It was nothing that made sense at first. I would charge the resonator, and it would spin, sometimes one way, sometimes another, sometimes fast, sometimes slow. It was a complex probability wave, but I made enough observations that I knew what it was. I couldn’t predict any one measurement, as you might expect, but I could predict the distribution of any hundred. Then, inexplicably, it deviated.”

“Interference from another wave pattern,” I said.

“Yes, but this time, the pattern wasn’t predictable. The oscillating frequency kept getting higher. Finally, I got a look at the values…”

“Prime numbers,” Marek said, jumping back into the conversation. “They were a list of primes.”

Brian looked startled. “How did you know?”

Marek rolled his eyes. “That is what the aliens always send, don’t they? In all the books and movies. Primes don’t occur in nature, so if you get primes, you know it’s from something intelligent.”

“I don’t know if they did it on purpose to communicate or not, but there it was. I fed the numbers back into the system—I flipped my switch twice, then three times, then five, etcetera. I barely left the bunker, not to sleep, not to eat. We followed primes with natural ratios like pi and the golden mean, and then more complex mathematics. I programmed my smartpad to control the switch, and soon we had a language of sorts going, based entirely on math. I told them about us—our chemical makeup, our genetics. They sent me formulas to describe what they are—it was fascinating! Soon they were feeding me formulas that I implemented in meta-circuitry on my pad, and that’s when things really started to happen. Through the resonators, we broke the barrier between the macro and subatomic worlds. When we dream of tapping the quantum realm, we think of making faster computers to play video games, but there’s so much more that’s possible. It’ll revolutionize everything, what we think of ourselves, what it means to be human. There’s almost nothing they can’t do.”

I thought about how that thing in the bunker had behaved, and a chill went up my spine. “And now they know we’re here.”

Brian didn’t pick up on my tone. “It’s amazing. For more than a century, we’ve looked for aliens in distant galaxies, but they were here all along, right among us. Through us even, in the very molecules that make up our air and food and our own bodies. Another whole civilization, living on Earth—or in the Earth, I should say. The surfaces of things aren’t as important to them as they are to us, and things like gravity and electricity are just one more kind of particle interaction.

His eyes glistened. “They told me they could make me just like them. I was going to have all their power, live an immortal life across the universes…”

“Okay,” Marek said. “We get it. They’re great and all. Practically gods. So how come you’re sleeping in the backseat of your car at the same time as you’re lying dead on your bunker floor?”

“As I’m what?” Brian asked.

“A bloody corpse with a hole in your chest,” I said.

“What are you talking about?” Brian asked.

“Look,” I said. “This is not a thought experiment. You pulled me into this, and I have a right to know what’s going on.”

“I’ve been telling you,” Brian said.

I braked hard and pulled off the road. I jammed the gearshift into park, and then turned around to face him.

“You’re saying you don’t know about the body.”

“What body?”

“Or the letter. There was a letter for me in your office.”

“The letter I sent you?” he asked.

“Sent me? I found an envelope with my name on it in your jacket pocket in your office. It told me to go look in the bunker.”

Brian shook his head. “I mailed that letter to you,” he said. “I sent it yesterday.”

I pulled the letter out of my pocket and waved it in his face. “If you mailed it yesterday, how did I pull it out of your jacket pocket today?”

“I don’t know! What body are you talking about?”

“You are, as we speak, lying dead in the CATHIE bunker with a bullet hole in your chest,” I said.

Brian’s face got very pale, and that look of terror came back into his eyes. “Oh, no.”

“Explain to me how that’s possible,” I said.

Brian stared at me as if he didn’t understand the words. His jaw flapped like a fish on a hook. His gaze, which had been staring off into the distance at some bright, imagined future, suddenly snapped into focus. He began shaking violently. “No, it can’t be,” he said.

“What?”

“Give me the letter,” he said. “Did you get through the passwords?”

“Passwords, plural?” I said.

Brian used his finger to scribble “137.036” on the page, and the letter reappeared. “I told you to ‘say goodbye to Cathie,’” Brian said. “The second password is the date they shut our program down.” He traced some more numbers.

“And I was supposed to figure that out?” I asked. “I thought you wanted me to go look in the bunker.”

Brian showed me the paper. It was now filled with tiny programming circuits, connected with a tangle of colored lines. I knew if I touched any one of the circuits, it would expand to show me more circuitry inside. The paper was humming. I could feel a strange internal tugging sensation, just as I had felt when Brian had made the gyroscope spin.

“You programmed all this?” I asked.

“Most of it.”

“What it doing?”

“It’s a Higgs projector,” he said. “It’s locally altering the Higgs field.”

“Oh, come on,” I said.

“I’m serious.”

“What, you figured out how to isolate the Higgs field in your office, with an Erector set and some Play-Doh? A project like that would be a billion-dollar operation, if it were even possible.”

“I didn’t. They did. They gave me the equations for the core modules; I just wrote wrappers to interface with them.”

“What’s a Higgs field?” Marek asked.

“It’s an invisible field, uniform throughout the universe, that gives our universe its physical qualities, including the idea of matter itself,” I said. “The theory is that the big bang produced not just one universe, but countless, frothing up out of the early expansion like so many bubbles. Each universe could have a different Higgs field, stronger or weaker than ours, and thus have a different set of basic constants. That means it could have a different set of fundamental particles, and thus a different periodic table, and, obviously, an entirely different structure,” I said.

“So, the varcolac told you all this?” Marek asked.

“The quantum intelligences,” Brian said. “I think maybe they are the Higgs field, or it’s part of them somehow. They…” He trailed off, his eyes wide, staring at something behind me.

I turned. Through the windshield, I could see it coming. The varcolac strode through the trees as if they weren’t there, heading right toward us.

I yanked the gearshift into reverse and hit the accelerator. The car lunged backward and smashed into a tree. I turned the wheel and shifted into drive, but the rear wheels just spun, throwing up loose dirt. I revved the engine frantically, but it was no good. “Out of the car!” I shouted. Marek was already out his side and running. I pushed my door open and ran the other way, not much caring if Brian followed or not.

I was fast and in shape; Brian was not. I heard him scream, and, despite my desire to put as much distance between myself and the varcolac as possible, I turned around. He was frantically doing something on the smartpaper as the varcolac bore down on him.

I heard a deep thrum, like a bass woofer turned up loud, and the varcolac disintegrated. Brian dropped to his knees, breathing hard. “That was close.”

“What did you do?” I asked.

“It’s tied to the collider,” Brian said. “It feeds off the exotic particles the collider produces, and it draws a tremendous amount of power from it to maintain its physical manifestation. I altered the Higgs field locally to eliminate those particles.”

Brian touched a few spots on the paper. The thrum stopped and the tugging sensation in my chest subsided.

“Shouldn’t you leave that on?” I asked.

“It’s gone now,” Brian said. “It won’t come back unless…” He stopped with a strangled choke as the varcolac reappeared less than a foot in front of him. Brian shrieked and dropped to his knees. He held the letter out in a shaking hand. “Take it!” he said. “Just take it!”

The varcolac bent and touched Brian. Brian’s eyes unfocused, and his body glowed. Tiny particles lifted from his body, like sand in a windstorm, flowing from him into the varcolac. As we watched, Brian disintegrated completely and flowed into the varcolac itself. Horribly, the varcolac’s jumbled features took on a little of Brian’s appearance. The varcolac now held the smartpaper in its hand. A moment later, the paper burst into violent flame and was gone.

The varcolac turned toward us. We stood frozen, watching it. It took a step forward, then turned on its heel and disappeared. It didn’t just vanish: it turned, like it was walking around a corner, only into some other dimension of space that I couldn’t see. It might still have been quite close, for all I knew, invisible, watching us and getting ready to pounce, but if so, there was nothing I could do about it. For now, as far as I could tell, the varcolac was gone.

Marek ran up to me. “You all right?”

“Yeah.”

“Let’s get out of here,” I said. I ran to the car and climbed in.

Marek climbed in next to me, but I had the car in gear and was pulling out before he had the door closed.

“Where are we going?” he asked.

I stomped on the accelerator, pulling us into a tight U-turn. “There are two of those letters,” I said.

“What?”

“There were two Brians,” I said. I squealed the tires pulling onto the road and did a U-turn, heading away from the NJSC, back toward home. “Two Brians, two letters. I don’t know exactly how, but it’s true. The Brian we found dead was the one who visited my house and left the letter in his jacket pocket. The Brian we just saw sent the same letter to me via FedEx.”

“Which means…?” Marek asked.

“It looked to me like the varcolac was after that letter,” I said. “It killed Brian for it. The other version of the letter, however—the one that went out via FedEx was probably delivered today.”

I heard Marek’s quick intake of breath. “So if it wants the other letter, too, and knows how to find it, that would lead the varcolac…”

I leaned my weight on the accelerator, rocketing the car through a red light. “…straight to my house.”