Supersymmetry

CHAPTER 18

The Muncy State Correctional Facility for Women stood at the end of a picturesque gravel drive lined with old, full-growth maple trees. The main building looked like a courthouse or a prep school, solid limestone and brick architecture with two chimneys and a central tower topped with a white cupola in classic American Renaissance style. In the 150 years since its construction, however, the prison population had grown twenty times larger. Alex had already seen the place from satellite photos and knew that behind the charming, old-school facade was a dull, white monstrosity of a building that might have been mistaken for an enormous warehouse or distribution facility, except for the twelve-foot fence topped with razor wire.

Alex walked up to the front entrance, surprised by how quiet it was. She could hear the wind brushing through the leaves and birds chirping in the distance. She walked through the open doors and was stopped by a turnstile with interlocking steel teeth that reached from floor to ceiling.

“Name and business?” said a woman through a small grating set into a piece of glass.

“Sandra Kelley, to visit Jean Massey.”

She passed her ID through a drawer. The woman studied it and her face carefully, and then pressed a button. The turnstile buzzed. Alex walked through, feeling an odd sense of entering a place from which few returned easily. A female guard met her on the other side and frisked her thoroughly. She indicated a bench. “You’ll have to wait here while I call a block warden.”

Alex sat, taking deep breaths to calm her nerves. As Sandra, she had every right to be here. At the first hint of any trouble, she could teleport away. The guard ignored her. Alex regarded her: middle-aged, Hispanic, a solid strength and no-nonsense expression. She wondered what sorts of things the guard had seen and how it felt to come to work at such a place every day.

Ten minutes later, a light-skinned woman with African features and short-cropped hair bustled into the room and smiled at Alex. “You must be my visitor.”

Alex cocked her head. “Warden?”

“That’s what they tell me, hon. You can call me Aisha. You ready?”

“I guess so.” Alex stood up.

“It’s a bit of a walk, I’m afraid. The Charlies don’t get many visitors. Follow me.”

Alex followed her through a locked set of double doors, which the warden opened with a key card. A sharp smell hit her, institutional and antiseptic. “Charlies?” she asked.

The warden pointed. “A-block is that way, the Alphas; they’re in minimum. The Bravos are in B-block. Our maximum security ladies, they’re in C-block. Our Charlies.”

She navigated through a bewildering maze of corridors, through multiple gates and checkpoints, some of them electronic, and some of them with human guards. Alex noticed that the warden didn’t carry any weapons, but the guards, sitting in glass-enclosed booths, were holding automatic rifles in clear view. Alex assumed that the people who actually came in contact with prisoners were unarmed to avoid the possibility that a prisoner might take the weapon and use it against them, while the glassed-in guards, protected from easy assault, could fire on prisoners through the glass if needed. It was a simple, low-tech solution to the problem of arming guards without tempting prisoners.

They passed above an open mess hall, crossing on a balcony. Below them, rows of women in rust-colored jumpsuits ate at tables, served by other women in the same clothes. On seeing the warden, several called up to her with various complaints. “Hush now, ladies,” she called down to them without breaking stride. Alex followed, careful not to meet anyone’s eye.

“I apologize for this,” the warden said. “They didn’t think things through when they built the guest area for C-block. As I said, we don’t get many. The first year, sure, but when someone’s on the mile, or put away for life, it doesn’t take long for family and friends to write them off. What’s the point of visiting someone who’s never going to get out anyway? They think they will, and they promise to, but after a few months, maybe a year, they start to move on. Are you related to Jeannie?”

“She was a friend of my father’s.” Alex heard screaming, faintly, through one of the doors.

“Will you accept my signal?” the warden asked.

A ping told Alex of an incoming feed to her system. “Um, sure,” she said.

“Then here we are,” the warden said.

She unlocked a side door with her keycard. They entered what looked like a small conference room, with a central wooden table and several chairs. To Alex’s surprise, Jean Massey was already sitting in one of the chairs. She was dressed in one of the same rust-colored jumpsuits as the women in the mess hall, with a large D.O.C printed on it in white. She wore no handcuffs.

The warden squinted at Alex. “Can you see her?”

“Of course.”

“Good. You must have a modern kit; sometimes we have to adjust for older models, or lend people one of our own.”

Her response confused Alex momentarily, until she realized: Jean isn’t really here. The room was configured to project Jean’s image to her eyejack display, creating the illusion of a face-to-face meeting without actually putting people together. Jean was probably sitting in a similar room somewhere else in the prison, seeing Alex the same way.

It made sense. Without true physical contact, there was no fear of an inmate attacking a guest, or vice versa, nor any concern that a guest would try to smuggle contraband in to a family member. It did, however, put a wrinkle in Alex’s plans to teleport Jean away. She had to touch her to do it, and she didn’t even know where in the prison Jean was. Alex almost gave up and walked away right then, but she had come this far. She could at least talk to the woman. She pulled back a chair and sat down.

Fifteen years earlier, Jean Massey had been an amazing young woman. In her thirties, she had been a recognized expert in her field, published in top journals, and employed at the New Jersey Super Collider, the largest scientific instrument in the world. Together with her boss, Dr. Vanderhall, she had pioneered dramatic new processes and made discoveries that could have revolutionized human experience. She had been, in short, everything that Alex herself now aspired to be. That is, until she had killed Dr. Vanderhall and tried to kill her own daughter.

Jean had a daughter named Chance, who had Down Syndrome. Thanks to a twist of fate, the random dice roll of a pair of genes, Chance would never reach the heights of her mother’s brilliance and achievement. But who was Chance Massey, exactly? Was the Down Syndrome her identity? Jean hadn’t thought so. She had tried to use the Higgs projector to change the past, to alter the fall of the dice, and resolve her unborn daughter’s probability wave as a healthy, able child. She didn’t see it as murder, but as choosing a new life for her daughter. Alex and her father had seen it as the destruction of one person in order to create a different one.

It was confusing to Alex. How did morality work, when nonlinear time came into play? A birth was just the accident of a particular sperm implanting in an egg at a particular place and time, causing a particular set of genes to come together. At the time, it wouldn’t have been immoral to avoid that genetic combination, if the power existed to do so, or to choose not to allow that sperm and egg to combine at all. There was no human being created yet, and so no one to harm. But later, when the child was almost a year old, it seemed like murder to go back in time and make a different choice.

But what about the other version of Chance, the one that had never been given an opportunity to live? For that matter, what about the thousands of other possible Chances, the alternate combinations of genes that would have yielded different people? Why were they any less valid than the one who lived? Alex supposed that, morally speaking, there had to be a distinction between choosing not to create a life and killing one that already existed. But it wasn’t always so simple. What if Alex were to send a particle back in time to affect her own life? To, say, change a choice she had made yesterday? That would make her a different person, of sorts. Would that be the same as killing herself in favor of someone else?

Jean stared off into space, her eyes focused on some distant point far beyond the walls. Alex remembered her as a friend, a beautiful and energetic woman, always cheerful and kind, with a mind like a knife with an atom-thick blade. Now her face was gaunt and deeply lined, giving the appearance of a much greater age. Her face was loose and expressionless. She didn’t acknowledge Alex’s presence.

The warden left the room. “Knock when you’re finished, and I’ll escort you back,” she said before closing the door.

Alex turned back to Jean. “I’m Alex Kelley,” she said. “You knew my father, Jacob.”

Jean registered this information with a quick flick of her eyes toward Alex’s face, and then returned to her thousand-mile stare. Alex felt intimidated. She hadn’t anticipated the possibility that Jean would be completely uninterested. Surely after fifteen years in prison she would welcome a conversation about physics? Perhaps it was too painful a subject.

“The varcolac is back,” Alex said.

That earned her another look. “I never understood why you called it that,” Jean said.

“It’s what destroyed the stadium in Philadelphia. It killed my dad.”

Jean shrugged, a slow and barely discernable gesture. The empty expression on her face didn’t change. “You expect me to weep for him?”

“I thought you could help me understand it. Specifically, how it changes things in the past. I know you once used a Higgs projector to do that, but we don’t know the principle behind it. I need to stop the varcolac before it kills any more people.”

“Are you a physicist?”

“Yes,” Alex said. “I work for Lockheed Martin, but I’m assigned to a project that runs in the NJSC’s High Energy Lab.”

Jean sniffed, an ambiguous expression that could have been grudging respect, but was probably disdain. “In that case, you already know more than I do. I’ve been out of the field for fifteen years. I spend my time washing laundry and scrubbing floors now.”

Alex leaned close to the table. “Are they treating you well? Where in the prison do they have you, right now?” She assumed their meeting would be monitored, but it seemed an innocent enough question.

Jean smirked, the first actual facial expression Alex had seen her make. “You didn’t come here just to ask questions. You came here to break me out.”

Alex jerked up. “What are you talking about?”

“If the creature is back, that means there’s a Higgs projector. You knew you might need to barter for my help. You mean to offer me my freedom.”

Alex was disconcerted by the woman’s perceptiveness. Surely there would be someone listening to their conversation? Or did they just record them for later review?

“So where is he?” Jean asked.

“I beg your pardon?”

“The real physicist. You didn’t create the projector.”

Alex was astonished. “How could you know that?”

“You’re too young and stupid to have invented it yourself. Bring him, and maybe we’ll talk.”

“Excuse me,” Alex said. “I’m not the one who’s in prison.”

Jean raised her hands mockingly. “Well then, get me out of here, if you can. What are you waiting for?”

Alex glanced at the door, which remained closed. Were they just letting her talk, to see if she would incriminate herself? Or was there truly no one listening? They could hardly imagine the technology she had available, so perhaps they were just biding their time.

The network that was feeding her the image of Jean was simple enough, just a standard web protocol. Alex could trace it, and get a location for Jean. She could teleport to her, and then all she would have to do was touch Jean’s arm and teleport away again.

Her presence—as Sandra—would be on all the surveillance tapes, and so would her disappearance. It would make Sandra a felon, and place her squarely in the conspiracy in the minds of law enforcement. It would be the end of her police career. But she wouldn’t have much of a police career if she died. It was the best option Alex had.

The door opened, and instead of the friendly warden, a tall, official-looking man came through, followed by four armed guards with pistols drawn. “Sandra Kelley?” the official said.

Alex sat alert, ready to teleport away at any moment. “That’s me.”

“We have been instructed to detain you for questioning. Please come with us quietly. The checkpoints you entered through are locked. There’s nowhere to go.”

Alex was surprised to feel a small smile form unbidden on her face. She hadn’t wanted to stain Sandra’s reputation; now she wouldn’t have to. “Actually, my name’s Alex,” she said. “Sandra had nothing to do with this.” She teleported. Jean’s room was identical to hers, so from her point-of-view, the five men disappeared, and Jean solidified into a real woman instead of a computer image. “Come on,” Alex said. “We’re getting out of here.” She flicked her eyes to choose the coordinates for the peak of Hawk Mountain, seized Jean’s arm, and teleported.

Only she didn’t. Nothing happened. She was still in the prison.

Jean laughed. “I told you. Stupid as dirt.”

Alex couldn’t understand it. “It worked the first time. Why won’t it work now?”

“You can’t get any signals out of here,” Jean said. “You think they want their inmates making calls on contraband cell phones? The whole place is shielded.”

“But the projector doesn’t work on—”

The door crashed open, and three guards rushed in. Two of them trained their weapons on her, while the third advanced.

“On any electromagnetic bandwidth?” Jean said. “Of course not. It’s extra-dimensional quantum tunneling on a large scale. You can’t stop that with a bit of copper shielding.”

The third guard turned Alex around and yanked one arm up painfully behind her.

“But,” Jean continued, “I’m willing to bet the software driving it assumes the presence of a network connection, or at least GPS, for accurate targeting,” Jean continued. “But of course, you didn’t write it. So you don’t know.”

Alex didn’t answer. She wasn’t worried about getting Jean out anymore. She just wanted to get away herself. It hadn’t even occurred to her that she might not be able to teleport out. She cursed herself for not reviewing the code, or at least for not interrogating Ryan about its limitations. She had no doubt that, given an hour with the source code, she could have modified it to allow teleportation to known locations, even without external network connectivity. But it was too late for that now.

She could still teleport line-of-sight, though. And she still had other tricks up her sleeve.

Through the open door, she could see a corridor. She focused on the place she wanted to be, and the eyejack automatically measured the distance. She initiated the teleportation module, and in a moment she was there. She heard sounds of consternation and shock from the guards, but she didn’t dare pause to look. She initiated the invisibility module and disappeared.

At the end of the corridor, she saw a light and teleported toward it. This was not the way she had come in, so she had no idea what direction to move or how far she was from an exit. She found herself in a central room, from which a series of cells branched like the spokes of a wheel. The arrangement allowed a guard to see every inch of the cells from a single vantage point. The cells were full, two women to a room.

It was a dead end. She jumped back the way she had come. Which way was out? She didn’t know how thoroughly they could lock down the facility, or to what lengths they could go to capture her. Her main advantages at this point were that she couldn’t be seen and that she could move faster than the guards, but they would have procedures to completely lock down sections of the prison in case of escape attempts or riots. She had to get out fast, if she was going to get out at all.

A few more jumps, and she reached a guard station separating two sections. The guard sat behind a pane of glass, and controlled another gate of interlocking steel bars. She could see through to the other side, which meant the bars were no barrier. In an instant, she was through. A klaxon blared suddenly, hurting her ears. She wondered if the station had sensors that had detected her, or if someone had manually sounded the alarm from elsewhere in the prison.

She teleported again, halting when the corridor ended in solid metal doors topped with flashing red lights. She threw herself against them, but they wouldn’t open. Her heart hammered, and she felt cold, trapped. Of course, she could estimate the distance and jump to the other side of the doors, but she didn’t know what was there. If there was another set of doors, or a person, or just a stairway, she would kill herself by jumping into it.

Teleportation, however, was not her only trick. They couldn’t do this to her, not with the power at her disposal. She spotted a trashcan, a large metal one, against the wall. It would do. She backed away and teleported the trashcan into the center of the metal doors. The doors tore apart with an explosion of rending metal, and she jumped through to the other side.

A guard blocked her path, aiming a pistol at her and shouting for her to stand down. He could see her! She realized he must have an infrared sensor, possibly on his gun, probably synched to his eyejack lenses. He was certainly communicating with the other guards, so now they would all know how to see her, too.

From ten feet away, she ripped the gun out of the guard’s hand and snatched it out of the air. Caught up in the moment, she almost shot the man, like he was a generic character in a first-person shooter video game. A chill went down her back at how easily it came to her, and she took her finger off the trigger. She had almost forgotten that her other adversaries had been varcolac puppets, empty shells controlled by their host. This man had a name, a life, a family, and she had almost shot him for no good reason, just because he stood in her way. Without his gun, he was no longer a threat. She didn’t have to kill him.

The door beyond him was glass, and she teleported beyond it just as she registered a sharp jab of pain in her back. On the other side of the door, she looked back and saw that two other guards had run up behind her while she hesitated. In the seconds she had delayed, they had shot her with something. Her vision blurred. They had hit her with some kind of tranquilizer. She had to get away, now.

The noise of the klaxon was relentless. She could hardly think. She spun, her balance wavering, and saw that the décor had changed, from institutional cinderblock to stone and paneling. She was back in the original prison building. A glass window revealed a view of the outdoors: maple trees, the road, a high external fence. All she had to do was make it out there, and she was free. One more jump.

She teleported out into the open air, but this time the shift in perspective threw her completely off-balance, and she fell to the ground. She was beyond the shielding now, and her system was connected; she could teleport anywhere she wanted. The blare of the alarm was muted now, but it seemed to be spinning all around her, to be inside her head. She tried to navigate the eyejack menu, but her eyes wouldn’t focus, and the menu options slipped away. The klaxon was her heartbeat, pounding through her veins.

Footsteps thundered on all sides, and she was surrounded, men shouting at her, weapons aimed. All she had to do was one more thing, but she couldn’t remember what it was. It was tremendously important, but she was so tired. She would remember what it was after she slept.