Superposition

^{CHAPTER 23}

Colin let Alessandra and I stay in his house on the condition that I not spend any more than ten hours a day there. In other words, I was welcome to sleep there but not to mope and not to drink. I agreed to his terms. I still didn’t have a plan, but at least I was up and moving around. So I did the only thing I could think of. I called Jean Massey and asked if she could meet us for lunch.

We took Colin’s car. He was hesitant to let us borrow it at first, but Alessandra reminded him that he was the one insisting that I get out and do things, and how could I do that without a car? I drove carefully, keeping close to the speed limits so as not to draw any attention or get pulled over.

As we crossed the bridge into New Jersey, Alessandra said, “I don’t hate you, you know.”

I reached over and squeezed her hand. “I know.”

“I just didn’t think I could stand another night in that basement.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I guess I’m pretty messed up right now. I haven’t been much of a help to you.” We were silent for a while, then I added, “And I don’t love Claire more than I love you.”

Alessandra didn’t answer.

“She’s like your Mom,” I said. “She’s pretty, she follows the rules, she studies hard. People like her easily. I know what to expect with her, and I’m proud of her. You, on the other hand…” She glanced at me, concerned, but I went on. “You’re more like me. You’re not satisfied doing what other people tell you. You question the rules. You lose your temper sometimes. Claire can get manipulated or run over by other people, but you stand up for yourself. It means we clash more. But it doesn’t mean I love you any less.”

She considered that for a moment. “Okay,” she said.

“Okay? That’s it?”

“I don’t love Mom more than I love you, either,” she said. I glanced at her sidelong, but she was smiling. “I’m good, Dad. Thanks.”

We met Jean at Einstein’s Brain, a classic American restaurant near the NJSC, which featured cheap food, red vinyl seating, and more pictures and paraphernalia from the great physicist than I had seen anywhere else, even at the Einstein Museum on Nassau Street. They didn’t actually have a piece of Einstein’s brain at the restaurant, though I knew there was one on display at the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia, about ten blocks from the court building where I was on trial.

Jean had dark circles under her eyes, and her hair looked like it hadn’t been brushed, but she put a hand on my shoulder and gave me a compassionate smile.

“How are you holding up?” she asked.

I shrugged. “We’re getting through. How are you? You look tired.”

“I’ve been up late working on your trial,” she said.

“Thanks,” I said. “I hope it’s not taking you away from your family too much.”

She grimaced. “To tell you the truth, Nick and I aren’t doing so well.”

“Oh, Jean. I’m sorry to hear that,” I said. “I hope it’s not because of the trial.”

“No, nothing like that. We just don’t see eye to eye anymore.” She waved a hand dismissively. “It’s an old story. But look at you!” Jean hugged Alessandra and exclaimed over how tall she had grown. “I hope my daughter grows up to be as lovely as you,” she said.

I remembered Chance and what Nick had said at their house, and I wondered how much of the tension between Jean and Nick was due to their daughter’s condition. “I’m sure she will,” I said.

We settled down at a table. Jean bought a “Relativity Reuben,” and Alessandra and I both chose the “Black Hole Burger.”

“What about the trial?” I asked. “What secret strategies have you and my double been planning together?”

Jean seemed a bit relieved at the change in subject. She related the difficulty of explaining quantum physics to a lawyer—“like teaching knitting to a sea turtle”—and her concerns about getting a jury to understand it, much less believe it.

“You can convince them,” I said. “What about the footage from Alessandra’s viewfeed I sent to Sheppard. Is he going to use it?”

Jean shook her head. “No, he’s not planning to.”

Alessandra looked up from her burger. “Why not? Then they could actually see the varcolac; they’d know that Dad’s story is true.”

“He doesn’t want to bring up the varcolac in testimony at all. He says the science is hard enough to swallow,” Jean said.

“But it’s part of what happened,” Alessandra said.

“It has nothing to do with Brian’s death, that we know of,” Jean said. “And Terry’s afraid that if we show it, we’d lose the jury entirely. They might just refuse to believe it, and dismiss everything the defense has to say after that. It’s like people’s home videos of alien abductions. Would you believe it, if you were on the jury?”

“Well, what’s the strategy, then?” I asked.

“Terry says the best way to win a murder trial is to have an alternate theory. A way that someone else could have done the crime that fits the evidence just as well as the story the prosecution is telling. If you can do that, then there must be a reasonable doubt that the defendant is guilty, because it’s equally possible that the alternate person is guilty.”

“So who’s the other person?” I asked.

“Brian himself.”

I made a face. “He didn’t commit suicide,” I said.

“Actually, I think it’s the best explanation,” Jean said. “He split, and there were two of him. Brian’s always been pretty self-centered. So one of him figured the only way to guarantee his own survival was by killing the other.”

I was skeptical. The version of Brian in my car had seemed honestly surprised that his double was dead. In fact, he didn’t seem to realize that he even had a double. Brian was an accomplished liar, however—all those years of trying to juggle multiple relationships with women had taught him that—so I supposed I couldn’t be sure.

“Listen,” Jean said. “I knew Brian, well enough anyway. He was egotistical, self-absorbed, vain. He was in love with himself.” I thought that was a bit harsh, but I let it slide. “He would have done anything to save himself,” she continued. “Even shoot someone else. Even if that someone else was himself.”

“So you think you could stand in front of yourself—the same face you see in the mirror every day—and pull the trigger?”

“It’s not unreasonable. Trust me, people will go to any length to secure their own survival, or the survival of someone they love. Things they don’t want to do, things they would never normally do. They’ll do whatever it takes.”

Alessandra stood with a sudden scrape of her chair. Her face was mottled red.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“I’m just going to the bathroom,” Alessandra said.

“Alessandra, she didn’t mean…”

She walked away without listening. When she was out of earshot, Jean said, “Is she okay? Did I say something wrong?”

I sighed. “When the varcolac attacked, Alessandra saw it kill her mother, and she ran away, straight out of the house, without warning Claire or Sean,” I said. “She thinks she’s a coward. It probably saved her life, but she thinks it makes her a terrible person.”

Jean looked stricken. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean…”

“It’s okay. You weren’t even talking about her.”

I ate the last bite of my burger, which was actually pretty good, black hole or no. A poster on the wall advertised the restaurant’s coffee while explaining Brownian Motion. I had tried their coffee before, however, and knew better than to try it again.

“There is one more alternate theory Terry has, in case the one with Brian doesn’t fly,” Jean said.

“Who’s the murderer in that one?”

Jean shrugged. “You are.”

I almost spilled my soda. “What?”

“Think about it,” she said. “It’s all about reasonable doubt. If you killed Brian, then the version of you on trial couldn’t have done it. How can the prosecution prove that it was him and not you?”

“But we’re the same person,” I said. “We will be the same person again. Besides, I didn’t do it.”

“When do you think your split with the other Jacob started?” Jean asked.

“Don’t go there. It wasn’t until I left the house after my family was killed. The day after Brian died,” I said.

Jean was implying that maybe I had killed Brian—that the split had occurred much earlier than I thought and my double had killed him while I was home with my family—but I dismissed the thought. What reason would even a different version of me have for doing such a thing?

“The question is, what can I do now?” I asked. “I want to understand what happened, but I don’t know where to start. Have you seen any more of Brian’s research notes? Anything that would explain more about the varcolac or what Brian discovered before he died?”

Jean shook her head. “I’ve been all through his things,” she said. “Terry insisted on getting all Brian’s smartpads back from the police in the discovery process, and I’ve been going through them all with a fine-toothed comb. There’s nothing of significance. What we need is the Higgs projector. Brian’s letter that had all the programming circuitry on it.”

“They were both destroyed,” I said. “The varcolac took one version from Brian and the other from Alessandra and disintegrated them. Though…” A thought struck me with a surge of adrenaline.

“Though what?” Alessandra asked, coming back to the table. Her eyes were red, and I guessed she had been crying in the bathroom.

“The letter,” I said gently. “There was a letter from Brian that came to the house the day the varcolac came. When I was at the house, I saw the varcolac take it from you and destroy it. But that wasn’t in your viewfeed.”

“I don’t understand,” Jean said.

“Alessandra split briefly,” I said. “One of her left the house; the other stayed. I saw the version of her that stayed, and I saw the varcolac take the letter from her. But this Alessandra was never there.” I turned back to Alessandra, trying to keep my voice calm. “So what happened to the letter? Did you have it when you left the house?”

“You mean, after it killed Mom, and I ran away?” Alessandra’s voice caught, and I thought she might start crying again.

“I don’t blame you for that,” I said. “But I need to know. What happened to the letter?”

Alessandra was very still, remembering. “I saw it on the coffee table, and I opened it. Nobody was explaining anything to me, and I thought maybe I could find out for myself. When Mom came in to tell me we needed to go, I shoved the letter into my pocket and pretended to be reading a fashion magazine.”

“So then, when the varcolac arrived…”

“The letter was still in my pocket,” she said. “I didn’t know it was important.”

My heart was racing. “So it split with you,” I said. “That means there was a third version.”

“Wait a minute,” Jean said. “If the varcolac could sense the existence of this letter from miles away and go teleporting to your house just to destroy it, how could it not know that there was another version of it out there?”

“I don’t think it did sense it,” I said. “When it killed Brian, it assimilated him. It drew him into itself, and then its face looked a little bit like Brian’s, as if it had incorporated Brian into itself. I think after that, it knew everything Brian knew. Brian knew a copy of the letter had gone to my house and where my house was, so the varcolac knew, too. But it didn’t know everything.”

“Well, what happened to the third version?” Jean asked. She leaned forward. “Where is it now?”

Alessandra shrugged. “I don’t know. When I remembered about it later, I looked, and it was gone.”

I let out a breath, disappointed. “It resolved,” I said. “It split, and then it resolved again.”

Jean shook her head. “It shouldn’t have. Alessandra resolved with her other version because their paths became close again. But the letters followed different paths. One was burned; the other got away. It’s still out there somewhere.”

“You mean, it just fell out of her pocket? That’s just as bad. We’ll never find a letter that fell out of her pocket somewhere in the neighborhood a month and a half ago.”

“We’ll never find it if we don’t look,” Jean said.

I hadn’t been back to our house since the day I found Elena and Claire and Sean dead, and it felt surreal to pull into the driveway now, just as I had done a thousand times before. It was a bit of a risk to be here. We didn’t know our neighbors well, but there could be trouble if anyone saw and recognized me. I could have let Jean come by herself, but I was up and doing things now; I didn’t want to go back to waiting for someone else to do something for me.

I stepped over the threshold, feeling a strange sense of displacement. Elena’s body had lain right there, empty and broken, but there was no sign of her now. I walked through the house in a daze, seeing familiar objects as if they were unfamiliar, remembering laughter and life along with the still agony of death. Which was true? When all this was over, what would remain?

While we were here, there were some personal effects I wanted to collect from upstairs. I prowled through the rooms, which looked as cluttered and normal as if we had never left. Alessandra went into her bedroom and emerged with a battered stuffed rabbit, given her the day she was born. In Sean’s room, I saw the Legos and the army men and remembered the half-finished spaceship and how his shortened arm had been on the wrong side.

In my room, I saw the bed where Elena and I had slept and made love, and I remembered Claire lying there with her mirrored T-shirt. Were my children truly dead? Or were they prisoners of the varcolac? Was there a difference? I sifted through the accumulation of things on our dressers, but I found nothing but painful reminders of our old life.

Back downstairs, we all met up again. “So where should we look?” I asked.

“Why don’t we just take it in order?” Jean suggested.

We walked through the events of that day from Alessandra’s perspective, choreographing her movements from the moment she picked up the letter from Brian. We moved from the living room into the kitchen. I remembered sitting there with Elena, watching Brian’s gyroscope spin. Anything left in that room would already have been found by the police, but we looked anyway. The trashcan was empty. I traced my hand along the countertops and browsed halfheartedly through the cabinets. It was odd to see a variety of canned goods and boxed cereals and snacks there, as if the tenants were out for the day and would soon return.

“Where to now?” Jean asked.

“Outside,” Alessandra said. Something in her voice made me look back. Her teeth were clenched.

“You did the right thing,” I said. “You couldn’t have done anything if you’d stayed.”

She relaxed slightly. “You can’t know that,” she said.

“Actually, I can know it. Because the other version of you did stay and didn’t do anything except give up the letter to the varcolac. Because you ran, we have a chance here.” I opened the back door and held it open for her. “Lead the way.”

Alessandra stepped out ahead of me, and Jean and I followed. We spread out across the backyard, searching the ground for signs of paper. There had still been snow on the ground that day, but the yard was dry and brown now. If the letter had been dropped out here, it would have blown away long ago.

We reached the fence. “You climbed over here?” I asked.

Alessandra nodded. I ran my eyes along the base of the fence. A stunted bush grew right against the chain link, and some vines twisted their way up. Under the bush, I saw a scrap of white. A piece of paper, dirt-encrusted and half-buried. I bent over and picked it up, shaking it to knock loose the dirt. My name was written on the front.

“This is it,” I said. It had been lying out here for weeks, however, soaked with rain and snow, and then drying out in the sun. “I’m not sure what’s left of it.”

Back inside, at the kitchen table, the three of us crowded around it. In most cases, a piece of smartpaper could withstand a little water, but this had been exposed to the elements for months. I smoothed it out against the table, and then entered the password. The letter came up on the screen, still legible, although dark lines crisscrossed the paper along the fold lines, where the paper had been the most damaged. I entered the second password, and the programming circuits sprang into view.

I took some time familiarizing myself with them, with suggestions and questions from Jean. Alessandra, unfamiliar with coding principles, lost interest in the conversation and started raiding the cabinets for something to eat. I discovered that there were core, indecipherable modules that must represent the equations provided to Brian by the varcolacs. Built around those modules, however, was a great deal of code I could understand, presumably added by Brian to interact with and control the core modules.

Before long, I was starting to make sense of it. “Look, he’s got a set of subroutines here to create particular effects,” I said. The subroutines had names like GroundStateSpin, MacroDiffraction, StrongNuclearForce, and Tunneling. There were different versions of each, and optional circuitry that was cut off from the system that provided still more variation. “He was experimenting,” I said. “Interacting with the modules in different ways, seeing what they could do.”

There was even a subroutine called TeleportExperimental, with an intriguing comment that read, “Do not use before solving destination bug!!!”

“There’s a lot here,” I said. “It must have taken him months to write all this.”

I spotted some graphics modules, and realized that the code was designed to work with a pair of eyejack lenses. I went upstairs, rummaged in a drawer until I found the pair that had come with my phone, and brought them back down.

“Let me try it. I don’t want you killing yourself,” Jean said.

“You’re our star witness,” I said. “Besides, there’s an extra one of me. I’ll do it.”

“You have a daughter.”

I gave her a look. “So do you.”

Jean held up her hands, relenting, and I put the lenses in my eyes. They quickly recognized Brian’s smartpaper as being in range and synched to it. I initiated the main program, and the now-familiar tugging sensation began in my chest, like a bass thrumming so deep I couldn’t hear it. A basic menu appeared over my vision with the subroutine names. I scrolled through and selected GroundStateSpin, since I thought I could guess what that might accomplish.

Overlaid on my vision, a curved, double-headed arrow appeared. When I looked at an object in the room, the arrow would move over it and the object would highlight. I chose a tea kettle on the counter and blinked at it. It started spinning, just like the gyroscope, its spout whipping around and around like a boy on a merry-go-round.

It was incredible. I could move things with my mind. Jean and Alessandra stared at it, transfixed. I made the tea kettle stop, and started twirling the flour canister. Best of all, the energy for the spin was coming from the ground spin state of the particles. We could turn generators with this technology, maybe solve the world’s energy problems.

What could the other subroutines do? I went back to the list and chose Tunneling. I still had the flour canister selected, and now, in my vision, a cone projected out from the center of the canister and into the room. I found I could rotate the cone around the canister and change its length. On the other side of the kitchen wall from where the flour canister stood was the living room, and I knew there was a small, decorative table standing against that wall. I aimed the cone directly through the wall and blinked.

The flour canister disappeared. At the same moment, there was a tremendous cracking sound like a gunshot. It was too loud just to be the canister shattering. I raced around into the living room, followed closely by Jean and Alessandra. The decorative table was smashed into splinters and covered in flour. Shards of table and porcelain were embedded in the wall.

Hastily, I quit the program and shoved the Higgs projector into my pocket. The thrumming sensation stopped.

“What were you trying to do?” Alessandra asked.

“I was trying to tunnel the canister through the wall and have it land on the table,” I said. “I think it appeared in the table instead, and the stress of all that matter suddenly appearing in the middle of already-existing matter tore the table apart.”

“It looks like we’ll have to be more careful,” Jean said. She held out a hand. “May I give it a try?”

“Let’s not try it again just yet,” I said. “I want to study the programming a little more, get a better understanding of what a module does before running it. I don’t know how well Brian tested his software, either—I don’t want to blow up a city block because he accidentally used English units in one place instead of metric.” I looked around the room where Elena had died. I felt tired. “I want to get out of here,” I said.

Driving back, Alessandra asked, “Why did the varcolac want to take that letter anyway? It can do all this magic stuff without it.”

I shrugged. “How could we know? This was an alien encounter, from both sides, neither of our species comprehending the other. The varcolacs originally provided the equations for the core modules to Brian, probably in good faith, but we don’t know what that information meant to them. Maybe it was simply a kind of textbook, an explanation of who they are and how they’re made. Regardless, when Brian put this together”—I gestured at the smartpaper—“it had some effect that they didn’t like, and they wanted it back. Who knows what changes this has made in their world? It could be killing them, or causing some other disruption—we just don’t know.”

“This is the creature that murdered Mom and Claire and Sean,” Alessandra said. “It’s not just misunderstood. It’s a killer.”

“I’m not sure if it means to be,” I said. “You could be right—it could be acting out of rage or simply enjoy killing; I don’t know. But look how it took Marek apart and put him back together. Look how its body is so awkwardly assembled out of different parts. It’s trying to understand us, and not getting very close. I doubt life and death even mean the same thing to it as they do to us. The idea that a being’s total existence is enclosed by a piece of matter is probably incomprehensible to them.”

“So it was all, what, some kind of cosmic accident?” Alessandra asked, anger simmering in her tone.

“If anyone’s to blame for this, it’s Brian,” I said. “He thought he could trade with a radically different intelligence and come out ahead. He was greedy and stupid. The varcolac… we have no idea what motivates it. All we know is that it wanted to reclaim Brian’s copies of this programming.”

“And it killed people to get it.”

“Yes,” I admitted. “It did.”

“Is that programming a threat to them? Could you use it to hurt the varcolac?” Alessandra asked.

I remembered Brian making the varcolac disintegrate, at least momentarily. “Maybe,” I said. “Brian said the varcolac gets its power from exotic particle leakage from the collider, such that when he used his circuitry to eliminate those particles, the varcolac lost its coherency. So I guess, if we learn enough about how to use the projector, perhaps it would be a threat.”

“Well then,” Jean said. “I guess we’d better learn.”