Superposition

^{CHAPTER 31}

The blackness swirled, lighter blacks competing with the darker ones. I couldn’t feel any part of my body, but I was still conscious. As my vision cleared, I could see sparks in the darkness, not like stars, which were always far away, but more like fireflies. They were white, tiny, and moved quickly, blinking off and back on again. I tried to track the movement of one, but found that I couldn’t. What were they?

The more I watched, the more I could sense there was a pattern to the movement, and I thought I could discern some meaning in it. Colors. Texture. Temperature.

The constant motion was making me feel sick. I tried to close my eyes, but I found that closing them didn’t make any difference to what I could see. The motion seemed to intensify. The more I watched, the deeper I could see into the cloud of lights, and now I was watching millions or even billions of them. Not only that, but I could see forward and backward in time, as well. I saw that each light was not eternal, but had a lifetime, interacting with other lights, altering their shape and their purpose. In fact—and this came like a jolt of new sight, a pattern coming into focus—the whole constellation of lights was connected. It was a single system.

As soon as I realized that, I saw that this system of lights was just one of many, and that each system had its own span of existence through time. The systems interacted with each other, trading millions of lights among them, composed of different sets of lights from one moment to the next, but still tracing out a continuous path as a single system.

Was this how the varcolac saw the world? What were these systems I was seeing? Humans? The varcolacs themselves? Or were these only the beginnings of more complex ideas? Perhaps the systems I was now perceiving were only cells or bacteria. As this thought occurred to me, my sight leapt to the next level of complexity, and I saw systems of systems, each composed of trillions upon trillions of lights, and I knew that I had not even come close to the end. The concept now in place, my vision jumped back, and back, and back again, perceiving each departure as a new combination of particles, all intertwined, all shared and traded, yet somehow distinct.

Finally, I opened my eyes. At first, I thought I was simply viewing the next level of complexity, the systems upon systems, and I suppose I was. But there was something hard and cold against my face. I had hands again, and legs. I was back in the real world, at least as I understood it. My face was pressed against a concrete floor, and I could see the pebbly, sand-colored surface, feel the rough texture on my cheek and forehead. There was light coming from somewhere above me, and a persistent buzzing sound, like a high-voltage electric fence.

I lifted my head and looked around. I was still underground, somewhere in the accelerator ring structure. It was an enormous, dimly lit, concrete room, and I recognized it. It was a sub-basement below the collider ring, an access room for the electric power coming into the collider from the grid. Thick bundles of cable stretched across the floor, running in different directions and across each other. The bundle that ran right in front of me was thicker than my leg and a riot of different colors, all twisted together. Near the walls, the bundles converged, forming super-bundles that passed into conduit pipes. Banks of switches covered one of the walls, out of reach.

All of the crisscrossing bundles of wire divided the floor into spaces of different shapes and sizes, like a skewed chess board. In many of these spaces were people, one person to a space, lying asleep or unconscious. To my right, I saw Marek and Alex, each in their own spaces. To my left were four more people, the sight of whom made my breathing quicken and my heart rate spike. It was my family—Sean, Claire, Alessandra, and Elena, lying there as if they’d just gone to sleep for the night. None of them was moving, but I could see their chests rise and fall with each breath. They were alive.