Supersymmetry

CHAPTER 13

Sandra wanted to disapprove of teleporting, but she just couldn’t manage it. The thrill of choosing a new location with her eyejacks and then just being there was so electrifying, she couldn’t hide her enthusiasm.

“I told you you’d like it,” Alex said.

The three of them stood on an outcropping at Hawk Mountain Sanctuary in Kempton, Pennsylvania, watching red-tails ride the thermals in search of prey far below. The mountain had been recently surveyed, its location data verified via GPS, making it an ideally safe teleport location.

Sandra wanted to protest that just using the technology at all was daring the varcolac to reappear, but she had enjoyed the experience too much to want to object. “Where does the power come from?” she asked instead.

“The power?” Ryan asked.

“The energy, I mean. We’re transporting mass across a distance, instantaneously. It has to take a tremendous amount of energy to accomplish that, doesn’t it? Where does the energy come from?”

“Through the wormhole,” Ryan said. “There’s a whole universe full of energy that we’re tapping.”

“But the universe is—”

“In my lab? No. You can’t keep a universe in a lab. My baby universe is outside of our universe entirely. Parallel to it, if you will. Think of it like this: the other universe is rotating with respect to ours. That’s not exactly accurate, because there are more dimensions involved, but it’s close enough. When we teleport, we’re slipping out of our normal dimensional space and using the spin of the other universe to shift position. Which means every time we teleport, we’re slowing down its rotation with respect to us by a tiny, fractional amount. Stealing its energy.”

“What happens if it stops rotating?”

Ryan snorted. “Not going to happen. The moon has been robbing Earth’s rotational energy for years, but none of us feel the difference. Your tiny mass is nothing to a universe. The effect is just too small.”

“It seems wrong,” Sandra said. “It seems like it shouldn’t be possible.”

Ryan shrugged. “Ever seen an airplane take off? That seems impossible, too.”

“But there’s already mass in the spot we teleport to. Air can just move out of the way, I guess, but what happens if you teleport to a place where something already is?”

“I’ll show you,” Ryan said. He picked up a small rock from the ground and hefted it. He looked out toward the view, then walked to the other side of the outcropping and looked out again.

“What are you doing?” Sandra asked.

“I have a rangefinder on my eyejack system,” Ryan said. “It needs two points to triangulate.”

“What are you triangulating on?”

He pointed. “See that hawk?”

Alex spoke up. “No. Don’t you dare.”

“Your sister wants to see what will happen.”

“It’s a beautiful creature. It’s probably endangered. Don’t—”

Ryan held the rock up between two fingers. “Bye-bye,” he said. The rock disappeared. Out over the valley, high above them, the hawk he had indicated puffed outward suddenly, like a bag of popcorn in the microwave. The bird plummeted, wings spinning free, until it fell out of sight among the trees far below.

Sandra watched in silence, horrified.

“It didn’t explode,” Ryan said. He sounded disappointed. “The skin is pretty strong, I guess.”

Sandra didn’t say anything. She stared at Ryan. The casual cruelty with which he had killed the hawk made a chill run down her spine. The media presented him as charmingly neurotic, the caricature of an eccentric scientist, but this was something different. It didn’t even seem to occur to him that the hawk’s life mattered, or that anyone else might find the action upsetting.

“I can’t believe you did that!” Alex said. “You just killed it, for no reason.”

“I was demonstrating the principle,” Ryan said. “When you teleport something, it reenters our space at a single point, then rapidly expands outward until it reaches a pressure equilibrium. If I teleported you into a haystack, you’d be fine. The hay would shift. But if I sent you into, say, a block of granite, you would be crushed. The granite wouldn’t expand to accommodate you. If I teleported the block of granite into you, however, you would expand just fine to accommodate it.”

“You’re a monster,” Alex said. “You could have used another rock instead of a living thing. You just wanted to see it blow apart, didn’t you?”

“Wasn’t it you I saw demonstrating this technology on people?” Ryan said.

“They were actors. It wasn’t real.”

“You work for Lockheed Martin,” he said, annoyed now. “What, you think the military is paying you billions so they can put on stage performances? This technology is meant to kill people—quickly, efficiently, and from a distance. It’s made to make our soldiers invincible. So don’t get all high and mighty on me.”

“The bird didn’t have to die.”

They kept arguing, but Sandra wasn’t looking at them. She was still staring at the empty space where the hawk used to be. No wonder the military was so interested. Ryan had basically just snapped his fingers and the bird had died. He could have done the same to her. For that matter, she now had the same power, to kill or destroy at a distance and then disappear from the scene. What would happen if this ability went public? If anyone could kill with a thought and then escape the consequences? It could tear the whole fabric of society apart. Never mind the varcolac—it was this technology they should fear.

“Shut up, both of you,” she said.

Alex and Ryan stopped arguing and looked at her. Sandra was surprised; she hadn’t expected that to work.

“Well?” Alex said. “What do you want?”

“Arguing won’t get us anywhere. We’re supposed to be talking about how to defeat the varcolac. Or at the least, discussing what we think it’s capable of.”

“Right,” Ryan said. “Time travel.”

“So you keep telling us,” Alex said. “Though I don’t know how we’re supposed to defeat it if it can just go back in time and change anything we do.”

“How does that even work?” Sandra said. “I thought time travel was impossible.”

“Einstein was the first to suggest that it might really be possible,” Ryan said. “We always say that Einstein’s theory of general relativity sets the speed of light as a limit for travel, but that’s not exactly true. His equations do allow for velocities faster than the speed of light, but only if you use negative values for time. Einstein himself recognized that, at least in theory, relativity meant time-travel was possible. But it wasn’t until more than a century later that M-theory was experimentally proven and gravity was successfully incorporated into quantum mechanics.”

Sandra sighed. “I knew this was how this conversation was going to go. What’s M-theory? Though really, I’m afraid to ask.”

“It stands for Membrane Theory,” Alex said. “Think membranes in multiple dimensions.”

Ryan frowned. “That’s not what it stands for.”

“What, then?”

“I don’t think it stands for anything. I know it doesn’t stand for membrane, though.”

“Matrix?” Alex said.

“Look, I don’t care,” Sandra said. “Just tell me what the Muffin Theory says, and why I should care.”

Ryan laughed. “Okay, here’s how it works. You normally live in four dimensions, right?”

“The fourth being time?”

“Yes. But space-time is actually composed of eleven dimensions. There’s the four you usually think about, and seven more that are all curled up where you can’t see them. The four dimensions we generally experience are what we call a ‘brane’—they’re roughly fixed in reference to each other, and they float around in the other dimensions, which we call the ‘bulk.’ Most particles, and thus most matter, are confined to the standard four dimensions, but there are some exceptions.”

“Like gravity,” Sandra said.

Ryan raised an eyebrow and whistled.

“I did grow up with a physicist as a father,” Sandra said. “I picked up a few things.”

“Well, you’re right.” Ryan threw a pebble over the edge of the ridge and watched it fall into the wooded valley below. “Gravity—meaning, of course, the gravitons that communicate the force of gravity—bleeds out into the other dimensions. It’s what makes gravity the weakest of all the standard forces.”

“And the varcolac lives out among those other dimensions,” Sandra said.

“That’s what we think,” Alex said.

“So, I’m losing the thread a little. What does this have to do with time travel?”

Ryan scooped up a handful of pebbles and started throwing them over the edge, one at a time. “It has to do with a very special particle called the Higgs singlet.”

“The God Particle,” Sandra said.

“Nope,” Alex said. “That’s the Higgs boson. This is a different one.”

“The Higgs singlet’s remarkable, special property is that it is affected only by gravity, and not by any of the other forces,” Ryan said.

Sandra wrinkled her forehead. “So… it can travel into those other dimensions?”

“Exactly. If there’s a sufficiently high velocity collision of protons in the super collider, then Higgs singlets will also be created that travel backward in time, through those other dimensions. That is, their decay paths appear in our universe before they’re created in the first place.”

Sandra sat down on a rock, enjoying the fresh breeze blowing her hair back. A large golden eagle caught a thermal and emerged over a ridge, dwarfing the smaller red-tailed hawks circling below it. “Why does going into other dimensions mean going back in time?”

Ryan stood on the edge of the cliff. “You see that eagle out there?”

“Don’t kill it,” Alex said.

“I’m not going to kill it.” He turned back to Sandra. “Why can’t the eagle instantaneously travel over here, to our ridge?”

“It can’t fly that fast.”

“What if it was a really good flier?”

Sandra rolled her eyes. “It couldn’t fly faster than the speed of light, so it still couldn’t do it instantaneously.”

“Exactly. Alex, I think your sister’s smarter than you.”

Alex stuck out her tongue.

“So, we could describe the places the eagle could theoretically fly with a sphere, expanding as time passes. In the first nanosecond, it could reach no more than about a foot in any direction, even flying at the speed of light. In two nanoseconds, two feet in any direction.”

“Okay, with you so far.”

“We call that a light cone, and I’d show you how we draw it if I had some paper.”

“Why doesn’t that bother you?” Alex said.

Ryan turned, confused. “What? Not having paper?”

“No. You’re afraid of taking the elevator, yet you crouch at the very edge of a cliff, and you don’t blink an eye.”

Ryan glared at her. “I’m not afraid of taking the elevator. I just don’t trust the people who built it. This cliff is a different matter. It’s solid stone. It’s not going anywhere.”

“If you say so.”

Ryan turned back to Sandra. “As I was saying, our expanding sphere image isn’t quite accurate.”

“Why not?” Sandra asked.

“The planet,” Alex said.

“Two points for the ugly sister,” Ryan said.

Alex rolled her eyes. “Nice.”

“The point is, the sphere will be slightly deformed toward the Earth,” Ryan said. “Our speed-of-light eagle can fly farther toward the Earth than it can away from it.”

“Because of gravity?” Sandra asked dubiously.

“That’s right. Earth’s gravity isn’t a pulling force, like a giant magnet attracting things toward itself. Gravity deforms space-time. Even a beam of light, which has no mass, will bend when it passes by a massive planet. So our speed-of-light eagle will actually travel farther if it flies toward the Earth than if it flies away from it, though by only the tiniest amount. Our sphere is deformed, but not noticeably. So, what would happen if we made the Earth more massive?”

“The sphere of possible places it could go would deform more,” Sandra said.

“Right.”

“Wait a minute, though. You’re talking about the places the eagle could theoretically fly in a given amount of time. It could fly here, but not to China. But haven’t we been breaking that law all day? Haven’t we been teleporting to places outside our own light cone? Traveling faster than the speed of light?”

Ryan grinned. “Sort of. It’s all part of the puzzle. One thing at a time: what if we put a black hole near the eagle? How would that affect its light cone?”

Sandra looked at Alex, but they were both looking at her, waiting. “I don’t know,” she said. “It would deform the sphere even more, I guess.”

“That’s right,” Ryan said. “In fact, it would deform the sphere so much that it couldn’t fly away from the black hole at all. Even flying at the speed of light in the other direction, it would still end up traveling toward the hole. It wouldn’t be able to escape the hole’s gravity, any more than light itself can. Space-time is warped so badly that the bird is unavoidably sliding down the slope toward it. But let’s keep going. What if we keep adding mass to the black hole?”

“The slope increases. The bird slides toward it faster.”

“Yes. And if we keep on going?”

“Um… faster still?”

“Eventually the slope becomes vertical. At that point, the bird isn’t sliding toward the black hole; it arrives there instantly. What if we add even more mass?”

Sandra shrugged. “You’re going to tell me, I bet.”

“Space-time becomes so warped that the slope is backward: the only solution to the equation is negative. Now, instead of a black hole, we call it a wormhole. Unlike the wormhole that connects my baby universe to ours, this one connects our universe in the present to a point in the past. The eagle is sucked through the wormhole and arrives before it left. Of course, it’s been ripped apart into its constituent atoms, but besides that, it’s fine.”

“What do you have against birds?” Alex asked.

“The point is, the topography of space-time allows time travel. Not for eagles or humans—the process would completely destroy us. But for single particles, yes. The NJSC, in fact, has successfully demonstrated time travel for Higgs singlets.”

“I know you’re a genius and all, so you probably know what you’re talking about,” Sandra said. “But there’s a paradox here, right? If something goes back in time, there’s always the possibility that it can interfere with its own creation. Like going back in time and killing my own grandfather. What if the Higgs singlets, traveling back in time, get in the way of the protons that were about to collide to create them? Or what if you use the singlets to send your past self a message, warning you not to perform the experiment in the first place?”

Alex spoke up. “The universe won’t allow it.”

“The universe?”

“That’s right.” She looked at Ryan. “May I?”

Ryan made a mock bow.

“All right,” Alex said. “I think we’ve exhausted the eagle analogy. Let’s move on to billiard balls.”

Sandra crossed her hands in her lap and looked up with an attentive expression, as if in class.

“The problem you raise is called Polchinski’s paradox,” Alex said. “Say you roll a billiard ball through a wormhole, so that it goes five seconds back in time.”

“Okay.”

“Only, you roll it through the wormhole at such an angle that it hits its earlier self, thus preventing itself from rolling into the wormhole in first place.”

“That’s what I’m saying. It’s a paradox.”

“And that’s why it can’t actually happen,” Alex said.

“Can’t happen? Who says? Is there a referee that cries foul and takes you out of the game?”

“Not exactly. But the universe can’t contradict itself. There’s a natural law that says self-consistency is always conserved. If you roll the ball through the wormhole at its past self, then either it will miss entirely, or else it will deliver itself a glancing blow that will knock it into the wormhole at such an angle that it will give itself that glancing blow,” Alex said.

“You’re kidding,” Sandra said. Then she made a connection in her mind, and without thinking, said, “It’s called the Novikov self-consistency principle, isn’t it?”

Ryan’s surprise was obvious on his face. “You really did grow up with a physicist father, didn’t you?”

Sandra shrugged, surprised herself. “I guess so.”

“Well, you’re right,” he said. “It’s the only way the math works out. In fact, this specific case, with billiard balls, has been studied.”

Sandra raised an eyebrow. “People have been sending billiard balls back in time?”

“No, I mean mathematically. Echeverria and Klinkhammer set up a computer simulation with billions of variations. They showed empirically that, not only do most conditions have multiple solutions, but that there are no initial conditions for which no self-consistent solution exists. It’s actually where my work started.” Ryan’s excitement grew as he spoke. “The universe is a giant quantum computer, remember? It takes these complex consistency problems and solves them. It’s doing it all the time.”

Sandra grew sober. “And the varcolac fits into that somehow, doesn’t it?”

“It’s a sentient manifestation of that quantum computer,” Alex said. “It’s like an artificial intelligence, only on a vaster scale.”

“You’re saying the varcolac is the universe?”

“No. Or at least, I don’t think so. It’s an intelligence born out of the quantum complexity of the universe. We don’t even know if there are many of them, or only one. Or if that distinction even has meaning to a being like that.”

“And it can travel in time?”

“I can travel in time,” Ryan said. “At roughly the rate of one minute every minute.”

Sandra made a face. “At some other rate than the usual,” she clarified.

“No. Not travel, exactly, not like you’re thinking. It wouldn’t be able to send its intelligence back to a point in the past; that would be like rewinding the particle interactions of the universe. But could it send a Higgs singlet back in time on exactly the right trajectory to cause a chain reaction that destroys a baseball stadium? Yes. I think it might very well be able to do exactly that.”

Sandra felt suddenly tired and sad, overwhelmed by the conversation. It wasn’t just a distracting intellectual exercise anymore. She spoke quietly. “Why? Why would it do such a thing?”

“I don’t know,” Oronzi said. “Maybe your father would have found a way to stop it, and it could see that somehow.”

Alex stood up and stretched. “This is all a possible explanation, but how do we test it? How can we know if that’s really what happened, or if it’s just a wild fantasy?”

“We go back to the lab,” Oronzi said. “We pore through the logs, double-check the math, look for anomalies. See if we can find when such a thing might have happened.”

Sandra shook her head. “You two go. I need to be alone for a while.”

“Are you okay?” Alex asked.

Sandra smiled wanly. “Not exactly.” In truth, she wasn’t okay at all. Her father was dead, and she had hardly even paused to let that truth sink in. Her mother was all alone, and instead of helping her when she needed them the most, they were worrying about murder charges and time-traveling quantum creatures. “Has anyone even told Claire? Or Sean?”

“I’m sure Mom called them.”

“There’s going to have to be a funeral, you know. They’ll arrest you, if they see you there.”

Alex shrugged. “That’s all right. I don’t need to go.”

“We could switch. We’ll wear the same dress. I’ll go into the bathroom with a GPS, then I can teleport out, and you—”

“No.” Alex took Sandra’s shoulders. “You go. I don’t want to see him like that.”

Sandra nodded. “All right.”

“I need to get back to the lab,” Ryan said. “If we’re right about the varcolac changing the past, we need to understand how it works.”

“I’ll come, too,” Alex said.

“Okay,” Sandra said. “I’ll see you later then.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to walk down the mountain. I just need some time to think. Then I’ll go find Mom.”

“Later, then.”

“Later. And Alex?”

Alex turned. “Yes?”

“It’s not your fault.”

Alex made a tiny shrug, noncommittal, and frowned. “Thanks.”

Ryan and Alex made eye contact and then teleported away, leaving Sandra alone on the mountain. Sandra took the trail leading from the peak back down to the road. She was still wearing her police uniform, which attracted looks from the other hikers, but the slope was an easy one, and the walk pleasant. She soon settled into a comfortable pace. The pretty, wooded surroundings and the sound of birdsong increased her melancholy.

In truth, it was more than just her father’s death that was bothering her. She was certain, quite certain, that she had never heard of the Novikov self-consistency principle, and yet she had come up with the name in an instant. She wanted to tell herself that she must have heard of it a long time ago, when she was a child, and it just came bubbling to the surface of her memory at that moment. But she knew that wasn’t true.

It was Alex’s memory. Her sister knew very well what the Novikov self-consistency principle was, and Sandra had accessed that knowledge as if it were her own. It was what had happened fifteen years ago to her father, shortly before he resolved into a single person, after having been split in two for months. It made her afraid that their probability wave, after all this time, was in danger of collapsing. Maybe the reason they had remained two individuals for so many years was because the varcolac was gone. Now that it was back, maybe they would resolve into one person again.

And what if they did? Who would Alessandra Kelley be? She and Alex were such different people now, with different skill sets, different desires, different relationships, different lives. Would either of them survive in any meaningful sense? Or would one personality dominate, and the other, for all practical purposes, die? Sandra was afraid that if it came down to strength of personality, there wouldn’t be very much of her personality left.

She thought of her father, and his brief split before death. How awful for her mother, to have him home, to think him safe, and then to have him so suddenly gone. She ought to visit her. Sandra checked her phone and found the GPS log. She had made calls when in her old bedroom, and the data was still there. No one would be in her room.

On her eyejack system, she brought up the menu of quantum functions that Alex had copied for her. There was a professional-looking menu with a military feel and a tiny Lockheed Martin logo. The options were tagged with unfamiliar icons and words like State Spin, Diffract, Tunnel, Attraction, and Probable Split. The only one she was familiar with was Teleport, and it didn’t seem very safe to experiment with the others. She accessed the teleport function, and her bedroom materialized around her.

She grinned. It was such a rush, doing that. She barely understood how it was possible. She didn’t even have as much as a battery on her to provide the power. There was so much energy bound up in the basic structure of the universe. Technology like this would make primitive techniques like burning fuel a thing of the past. If they could learn how to tap it without calling murderous alien creatures out of the space between the atoms, that is.

Sandra heard talking from her parents’ bedroom; it sounded like a comedy show on the stream. She didn’t want to startle her mother by walking in on her, so she sneaked downstairs and out the front door, and then rang the doorbell. A few minutes passed before her mother opened the door. Her normally pale face was leached of color, except for the skin around her eyes, which was red and raw. She wrapped her arms around Sandra without a word and buried her face in Sandra’s hair. Sandra remembered her mother as such a strong presence in her life, but her thin body felt fragile in Sandra’s arms.

They went inside. Her mother went through the mechanical actions of pouring Sandra a cup of coffee. The forensics crew must have been through, looking for evidence to support the claim that her father had been here after the explosion, but the kitchen had since been cleaned to an antiseptic shine. Sandra had last seen her father right there, sitting at that table, poring over the data she had given him.

“Is Claire here yet?” Sandra asked. She knew without asking that Claire would take care of the arrangements for the funeral. Claire was the planner in the family, the organizer of all details, and always had been. Even from California, Sandra had no doubt she was already making calls and writing lists of what needed to be done.

“Her flight doesn’t come in until nine-thirty.”

“And Sean?”

“He called.” Her mother’s voice sounded dead, devoid of emotion. “You know the military.”

“Will they let him come home?”

“You mean, was it his choice or theirs for him to stay in Poland? I don’t know. He said something about a special mission.”

Considering the current friction with Turkey, talk of a special mission was a frightening thing. Turkey’s influence had been spreading across the Balkans for years, and now Greece, Bulgaria, Romania, Serbia, Croatia, Hungary, and Slovenia had all been quietly assimilated, either through military threat or economic pressure. Allied with an increasingly powerful Iran, Turkey maintained a strong source of oil and a secure southern border. The growing Turkish navy now dominated the Mediterranean. Worse, they had apparently recovered a stockpile of Soviet nuclear warheads left over in Romania from the Cold War. The Romanian government had previously declared the weapons disassembled, but Turkey now claimed they were operational.

American politicians were anxious to restore balance in the region before Turkey grew into a world power, so they were pouring troops and money into Poland and Germany. War seemed inevitable. As a Force Recon marine, Sean wasn’t trained for a back-row seat. Sandra didn’t know how her mother would survive if the next funeral was his.

“I’m sure he’ll be okay,” Sandra said.

Her mother forced a smile and squeezed her hand. They sat there for a while, their hands clasped across the table, not talking about war, or her father, or varcolacs, or what the future might hold. Memories flashed through Sandra’s mind, cued by this so-familiar kitchen. The memories that came from both before her split with Alex and those that came after merged seamlessly together in her mind. It was as if at fourteen years old, she had suddenly gained a twin sister. It felt to her like Alex was the new one, and she the daughter who had always been there. Of course, it would have felt just the same to Alex.

Sandra wanted to share some of these memories with her mother. They were good memories, on the whole. Her father had loved them all, though imperfectly, and they had loved him. He had been a father who was present in their home, for whom family, rather than work or friends or other ambitions, was the highest priority. She said none of these things to her mother. There would be time for such remembrances. For now, she just held her hand.

A ping told Sandra that someone was trying to contact her. She checked her phone, and saw that it was Angel Gutierrez. “Hello?” she said.

“Sandra. It’s me. Do you have some time to talk?”

“Yeah, sure.”

“I mean, in person? I don’t think this should be going over the airwaves.”

“Sure. Where are you?”

“At the robotics lab at U-Penn.”

Sandra turned to her mother. “I need to go meet someone.”

“Go ahead,” her mother said. “I’ll be okay. I’ll have to pick up Claire from the airport soon anyway.”

Sandra left the house and closed the door behind her, then spoke into her phone again. “Is there anyone else there at the lab with you?”

“No. Why?” Angel said.

“Send me the GPS data from your phone.”

“Um, okay. Done.” She could hear the confusion in his voice. “Does that mean you’re coming?”

“Yeah. One more thing. Can you clear away anything within about five meters of where you’re standing?”

“Um, it’s pretty clear already.”

“Pretty clear?”

“Nothing but a folding chair, which I just slid out of the way.”

“Great. Now walk five meters away yourself, and don’t move.”

“This is really weird, Sandra. Are you watching me or something?”

“Did you do it?”

“Yes. How long do I have to stand here?”

Sandra smiled. “Not long at all.”