Supersymmetry

CHAPTER 14

Sandra materialized in the University of Pennsylvania robotics lab. Angel, standing five meters away, leaped back with a shriek and crashed to the floor, knocking over a folding chair with a clatter. Sandra shrugged. “Sorry,” she said. “Did I startle you?”

He looked up at her from the ground with an expression of utter astonishment. “Where did you come from?”

“My parents’ house. It’s about twenty miles west of here, in Media.”

“No, I mean, just now. Were you hiding in here?” He looked up, examining the ceiling tiles above her.

She laughed. “Nope. I just teleported right in. That’s why I needed the coordinates. And why I asked you to stand aside.”

“You…”

“Teleported.” Sandra was enjoying this, despite the seriousness of the situation—or maybe even because of it. “I’ll tell you all about it. But you wanted to tell me something, too, right? Which should we do first?”

Angel stood shakily to his feet. “I think we’d better start with you explaining how you just did black magic in my science lab.”

The lab’s interior was two stories high, and most of the space was taken up by a central cage, no more than a wooden framework wrapped with tightly stretched mosquito netting. The inside of the cage was entirely empty, except for a series of cameras and motion sensors affixed at regular intervals. Outside of the cage, the room was cluttered with metal folding chairs, ladders, scraps of wood and piping, tablets, wiring, and card tables piled with random electronics. Sandra saw a few surprising items as well: hula-hoops, brightly colored beach balls, and marching-band batons.

“Okay, fine. Watch. This is the technology my sister was working on.” It was supposed to be super-classified, Sandra knew, but she wasn’t a government employee. No one had sworn her to secrecy. If she wanted to show off for Angel and tell him all about it, she’d do as she pleased. Sandra looked inside the wood-and-mesh cage and estimated the distance. Teleporting this close, she wasn’t too worried about making a mistake. She disappeared and reappeared in the middle of the empty cage. To her, it seemed as though the entire room had suddenly shifted. Angel was still staring at the spot she had been standing a moment earlier. “Hey,” she said. “Over here.”

Angel turned and saw her, his face incredulous and a little frightened. “Is this really happening?”

“There’s more. Soldiers with this technology can walk through walls, dodge bullets, even rip an enemy’s gun out of his hands from across a field. They’ll be practically invincible.”

“What’s the catch?”

Sandra teleported back so she was standing right next to him again. “The occasional massacre of a stadium full of people.” She kept her tone light, but she felt a pain in her throat like she was swallowing a rock. “You asked if it was a quantum weapon that destroyed the stadium. You weren’t too far off. Only it wasn’t a person who pulled the trigger.”

She told him the whole story. She hadn’t intended to go into her whole childhood and the events of fifteen years ago, but he was such an intent listener that she just kept talking. Besides, he seemed at least somewhat familiar with her father’s murder case and the public claim made in court that there had been two versions of him. And he nodded at everything she said, no matter how outlandish.

“You’re really taking this in stride,” she said.

He laughed, a little nervously. “This isn’t the first crazy thing to happen to me today.”

She wrapped up her story with an explanation of how she had split into two, and the probability wave had never resolved. “So, my sister is really me,” she concluded. “There are two of me.”

Angel shook his head, dismissive. “That’s ridiculous.”

“Ridiculous, but true,” she said.

“No. Ridiculous and false.”

“Angel, I—”

“I’m not talking about your story. I’m talking about your claim that your sister is really you. That’s observably false, and to claim otherwise is just semantics. Even identical twins of the normal stripe start out as a single zygote. No one says they’re really the same person. As soon as you split, you became two people. Different.”

“But we share the same memories of growing up. I’m one possibility of how I turned out; she’s another. She’s what I would have been if just the slightest things had been different. And… well, there’s always the possibility that the probability wave could resolve, and we would become one person again.” She said it lightly, but the dread of considering that possibility gave her a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach.

“Yeah, well, that’s really odd,” Angel said. “I admit it: you’re a weirdo. You’re not the only one, though. I have six toes on my left foot. That’s like one in three thousand. Very odd, but I’ve learned to cope. Want to see?” He reached down as if to untie his shoe.

She laughed in spite of herself. “I’ll pass.”

“You’re different people,” he said again. “It’s who you are now. The past doesn’t matter.”

She was quiet for a moment. “You had something you wanted to tell me,” she said.

“Right,” he said. “Well, it’s kind of less impressive than teleporting around the lab.”

“Let me hear it.”

“I’ll have to show you instead.”

Angel scooped up a tablet and tapped a series of commands. The lab filled with a whirring noise like a swarm of bees, the same as Sandra had heard from Angel’s cases in the stadium parking lot. “Come with me,” he said.

She followed him through a gate in the mesh wall into the cage. He opened a black case, and six quad-copters rose out of it in eerie precision. “These weren’t at the stadium,” he said, raising his voice to be heard over the hum. “I’ll show you these first, so you can see the difference.”

At commands from his tablet, the copters snapped into various formations: a horizontal line of six, a two-by-three stack, a rotating ring. They moved to their new positions quickly and precisely, often only inches apart, with no collisions, or even last-minute swerves. Each seemed to know exactly where the others were going to move, which she supposed made sense, since it was surely the same software controlling all of them.

“Now watch this,” Angel said. He went out of the cage and returned with a handful of hula-hoops, batons, and tennis balls. He tossed a hula-hoop in the air, and all six copters flew through it, quick as lightning, before it fell back into his hand. He threw two at once, and they did the same. Then he tossed a baton in the air, end over end, and one of the copters caught it, balanced vertically on top of a portion of its frame that extended up between the rotors. It hovered there, adjusting its position back and forth slightly to keep the baton balanced, for all the world like a vaudeville performer with a push broom on his nose.

“Impressive,” Sandra said.

“I like to think so,” Angel said. “But I just want you to know what’s normal, before I show you what’s abnormal.” He tapped the tablet, and the copter jerked suddenly higher, lofting the baton in a slowly twirling arc. Another copter caught it vertically again, dipping to cancel out the baton’s spin and momentum. The copters began a game of catch, flipping the baton to one another and catching it perfectly. Angel started throwing the hula-hoops into the game, and the copters again responded seamlessly, sometimes dashing through a hoop to catch a baton on the other side. Finally, he began hurling tennis balls at the copters, trying to disrupt their rhythm, but they dodged the balls effortlessly without interrupting the game with the batons.

Sandra knew the hard part of this performance was designing the copters in the first place with the ability to move precisely and know their exact position at any moment. The tricks themselves were just mathematics; the encoding of position and velocity and spin and momentum into a simulated model of reality. Even so, it was remarkable to see.

Angel touched the tablet, and the baton and hula-hoops dropped to the floor. “One more thing.”

He left the cage and wheeled in a stand with a wooden wall and a window. The window was adjustable; it could be made wider or narrower in both horizontal and vertical directions. Angel demonstrated the copters diving through the window in different configurations. When he made the window into a narrow vertical slit, the copters would actually hurl themselves sideways, momentarily losing control of their flight as they flew through the window at a ninety-degree angle, before regaining control on the other side.

“Watch what happens when I do this,” Angel said. He closed the window even farther, making it impossible for the copters to fit through the gap, no matter how they oriented themselves. He tapped the tablet, but the copters didn’t move. “They can detect that there’s no way through,” he said. “But watch this.”

He sent the copters back to their case, and opened a new case. A new set of six copters flew out. “These are from the set I used at the stadium,” he said. They hovered on one side of the too-small window, the same as the others had. This time, however, when Angel gave the command, all six copters dove, following each other in tight sequence. When each one reached the window, it turned, a rapid twisting motion like the first set had done, and reemerged on the other side.

It was less impressive than it might have been, considering all that Sandra had seen in the last twenty-four hours, but it was still dramatic. The opening was no bigger than her fist; there was no room for the copters to pass through it.

“They turned into another dimension,” she said. She had seen the varcolac do essentially the same thing, and given Ryan’s explanation on the mountain, she felt confident in assuming that a few of his extra curled-up dimensions were involved.

“Is this normal for you?” Angel asked. “Flitting in and out of other dimensions like taking a cab?”

Sandra smiled. “Not exactly. But I guess I’ve had an interesting life.”

“How did this happen? This is the same hardware and the same software I’ve been working with for years. They clearly picked up this ability at the stadium site, but I don’t see how that’s possible. Even if your varcolac used some weird quantum magic to destroy the stadium in the first place, my copters weren’t even there at the time.”

Sandra thought about it. “It must be in the data.”

“You mean the RFID data? That doesn’t make sense.”

“There aren’t too many options. I’m going to go out on a limb and assume your copters aren’t smart enough to learn a new behavior of this magnitude. So, either there was some magic quantum pixie dust at the scene that stuck to their rotors, or there was something in the data they picked up at the scene that altered their operations.”

Angel returned the copters to their case. Their engines quieted, making the empty room ring with the sudden silence. “I’m going to vote for the pixie dust. We’re not talking about altering their behavior to fly in figure eights. We’re talking about behavior that should be impossible. I don’t care what software or data you load into their onboard computers; you won’t be able to make them do that.”

“I’m not so sure.” Sandra said. Her throat was dry. “Do you have anything to drink?”

“Sure.” They exited the cage, and Angel led the way to a mini-fridge on a cluttered tabletop. “Coke okay?”

“Perfect.” Sandra popped the tab and took a long swallow of cold sweetness. She sighed and wiped her mouth. “The only thing I can think is that your copters are somehow accessing a Higgs projector, the same as the software in my eyejacks.”

“How does that work?”

“There’s a wormhole in the High Energy Lab in New Jersey that’s connected to a bubble universe. Somehow, Ryan Oronzi has figured out how to tap the power from it to affect the Higgs field in our universe, allowing quantum effects in the macro world. I have a copy of Oronzi’s software modules from my sister that accesses that projector, allowing me to create certain quantum and probabilistic effects.” She accessed a method from her eyejack display, and let go of the can of Coke. It hovered there, untouched, until she grasped it again.

“That’s really freaky,” Angel said.

“The point is, it’s the Higgs projector that’s causing the effect, not the software. I don’t know how far its reach is. Considering it’s another universe, though, the distance may not matter.”

Angel shook his head. “It doesn’t make any sense. Even if someone stored such a method on a chip, it would have to be written as a self-executing virus, and the virus would have to know how to plug in to the specific maneuver interfaces in my software. In this version of my software. And the only way that could happen is if I did it myself.”

Sandra grinned. “Is there something you’re not telling yourself?”

Angel rolled his eyes. “I’m not that crazy.”

“I don’t know what to tell you,” Sandra said. “Maybe my sister or Dr. Oronzi would have a better idea.”

“I’m sticking with the magic pixie dust theory, until you can prove it wrong.”