Superposition

^{CHAPTER 19}

I found Terry Sheppard’s office a few blocks from the courtroom in a row of townhouses that had been almost completely renovated as lawyers’ offices. You could hardly walk down the street without banging your head on a shingle. I wondered how anyone chose a single lawyer from the crowd. I had no trouble picking because, apparently, I already had. I’d never met Terry Sheppard before, but according to the news stream, he was my lawyer.

Several of the adjoining offices shared a secretary, a heavy woman with curly gray hair and a large flower pin. I told her I didn’t have an appointment, but that I was pretty sure Mr. Sheppard would see me right away. Her expression said she’d heard it all before, and she invited me to take a seat, but she made the call. Moments later, a man with a huge mustache opened a back door with a worried expression.

“Jacob?”

I stood. “Mr. Sheppard.”

“What on Earth? You’re supposed to be in prison. Has there been… some change? Were you released?”

“Not released,” I said.

With a furtive look around the waiting room, he motioned for me to follow him, which I did. His office was very nice, with leather-upholstered chairs and cherrywood bookshelves stacked with law texts. A childishly painted porcelain mouse, half-hidden on his desk, gave a personal touch to an otherwise professional room. A framed photograph showed a round, smiling woman and a little girl, perhaps six years old, who I guessed was the source of the mouse.

“How did you get out of prison?” he asked.

“I was never there.”

He narrowed his eyes. “I met you there for the first time yesterday. You paid a retainer’s fee and hired me to defend you. A job that will be made much more difficult if you have somehow slipped away unnoticed.”

I chose a leather chair and settled myself into it. “Don’t worry. If you call the prison right now, you’ll find that they still have custody of Jacob Kelley.”

He stared at me, trying to make sense of this. I had pity on him. “Think of me as Jacob’s twin brother. That’s not quite right, but it will do for now.”

Sheppard’s eyes flicked right and left, and he blinked several times. I realized he was eyejacked. In a few moments, he said, “It looks like Jacob Kelley has no siblings at all. Mother and father deceased, closest relative an uncle, living in South Philadelphia.” His eyes focused on me again. “No twin brothers. So, I think I’ll go ahead and make that phone call.”

A few more eye blinks and a pause, and he said, “Yes, this is Terry Sheppard. I’d like to inquire about the status of an inmate. Yes. Could you transfer me to the officer in charge of the ward? Thank you.” Another wait, during which Sheppard drummed his fingers on the desk. “Yes, thank you, I heard a report that my client, Jacob Kelley, received a black eye in a fight in the yard, and I’m concerned it may affect his scheduled court date. Well, if you can see him, could you just confirm that his face is not injured in any way? No? Glad to hear it. I appreciate it, Officer. Thank you for your time.”

Sheppard squinted at me and rubbed at his mustache.

“Clever ruse,” I said. “You made sure they could see him without giving the idea that you thought he might have escaped.”

“And unless the guard is blind or lying, Jacob Kelley is still in prison. Which means that, despite the evidence of my eyes, you are not Jacob Kelley.”

“On the contrary,” I said. “I am Jacob Kelley.”

“I don’t appreciate being jerked around,” Sheppard said. “What do you want?”

“I want to meet him. I want to meet the other Jacob.”

Sheppard popped the lenses out of an old pair of glasses and lent me a New York Yankees baseball hat as a crude attempt at disguise. I wasn’t terribly worried—I didn’t think the prison guards probably paid too much attention to visitors’ faces—but Sheppard seemed agitated. I told him to relax. They couldn’t very well arrest another man as Jacob Kelley when they already had one behind bars.

The truth was, I was more nervous about meeting a duplicate of myself than I was about the guards. The idea had grown on me for several days, but for the other me, it would be an immediate shock. I wasn’t sure how I felt about there being another me sharing space in the universe. Would I even like myself?

The version of myself that I was about to meet saw the man with no eyes in the CATHIE bunker, found Elena and Claire and Sean dead just as I did, fought with the man in our living room, but didn’t run from the police. He hadn’t been to see Colin, and he almost certainly did not know there were two of us.

The guards made no comment about my appearance and ushered us into a glass cage with a silver table and six yellow chairs. After a few minutes of finger drumming and foot tapping, they brought in a man in handcuffs and an orange jumpsuit with a strained, worn look around his eyes. It was me.

The guard unlocked the handcuffs and left the room, closing the transparent door behind him. The other Jacob was staring at me, mouth open.

“Do you know this man?” Sheppard asked.

“Looks like he could be my twin brother,” Jacob said.

“You were caught in the varcolac’s probability wave,” I said.

His mouth opened even wider. “Superposition,” he said. “Just like Brian.”

I nodded. I held up my left hand. “See the wedding ring?”

“Why is it on your right hand?”

“It’s not,” I said.

“We’re on opposite sides of the Bloch sphere.”

“Exactly,” I said.

“This is weird.”

“You’re telling me.”

We both laughed in uncanny echo.

“Will someone please tell me what’s going on here?” Sheppard asked.

“A Bloch sphere is a concept in quantum mechanics,” Jacob said. “It’s a geometrical representation of the uncertain state of a particle—say an electron—that’s spinning both up and down at the same time.”

“How can something spin up?” Sheppard asked.

“It’s the right-hand rule,” Jacob said. “Take your right hand and curl it in the direction of the spin.” He held out his hand in a loose, thumbs-up gesture. “The direction your thumb is pointing is the direction of the spin vector.”

“Only his is backward, from my perspective, because to me, that’s his left hand,” I said. I held out my right hand and curved the fingers the same way, causing my thumb to point down instead. “See? We represent both states at the same time.”

“Which of you is the real one?” Terry asked.

“Neither,” I said.

“At least not yet,” Jacob added.

I eyed him warily and caught him returning the look. It was oddly thrilling for another person to understand me so quickly and so completely. The problem was, it wasn’t another person. It was me, and when all this was over, only one version of me could survive. Was this what had happened to Brian? Had he killed himself to make sure his version was the one that lived?

“That doesn’t make sense,” Jacob said, as if guessing my thoughts. “The two versions are the endpoints of a probability waveform—the real Jacob exists in all possible states between the two of us, with a certain probability. The wave will eventually collapse to be you, or me, or some average value in between. So if Up-Brian killed Down-Brian, that wouldn’t make Up-Brian the final version. It would just raise the probability that the final version would be dead.”

“Though Brian might not have realized that,” I said.

Sheppard held his head in his hands. “What are you two talking about?”

“Okay, look. Every little bit of matter or energy in the universe, whether it’s a beam of light or a comet or a bacon cheeseburger, is made of tiny particles,” I said.

“They’re not really particles,” Jacob said. “They can diffract and interfere with each other, so really they’re waves. They have a certain wavelength, usually quite small, that governs how they behave.”

“Don’t interrupt,” I said. “It’s no good thinking of them as waves, as if they were ripples on a pond. They can be counted. You can have just one. They have some odd wavelike properties, but they’re clearly particles.”

Jacob was ignoring Sheppard now. “How can you call them particles? They’re not Newtonian; they have no classic idea of position or velocity. The ‘particle’ concept is just a crutch for an inadequate imagination.” He turned back to Sheppard. “What we call matter and energy are just simple wave functions. The difficulty some people have in accepting that is purely psychological.”

“Waves of what?” I asked.

“What?” Jacob said.

“A wave is the fluctuation of a medium. These waves you’re talking about—what is doing the waving?”

“The quantum-mechanical substrate.”

I threw up my hands. “And what is that? It’s just a word you made up to fill the void in your reasoning.”

“They’re waves,” Jacob said.

“Particles.”

“Waves!”

Sheppard stepped between us and waved his hands. “Stop it,” he said. “This is insane. What does this all mean? What are you going to do?”

I took a deep breath. Maybe coming here hadn’t been such a good idea. “When does the trial start?” I asked.

“Hard to say. The NJSC is a big political sore spot, so the media are running away with this one, poking at the possibility of a politically motivated killing. That will put a rush on the trial procedure, but it will still be months probably.”

“That gives us plenty of time to work, then,” Jacob said.

“The most important thing is to make sure that the final Jacob Kelley…” I said.

“…whoever he is…” Jacob added.

“…is found innocent of all charges.”