Supersymmetry

CHAPTER 19

Less than two hours after Alex walked into the prison, the news feeds gleefully announced her capture. She was the perfect news story—it was hard to beat a young female assassin for ratings—and they had hardly stopped talking about her since Secretary Falk had died. Now, there was fresh grist for the mill, and the talking heads could barely contain their delight. A female murderer caught visiting another female murderer! And both of them physicists! Was there a conspiracy? Had the older one trained the younger? Old footage of Jean Massey’s trial and conviction were replayed, and the speculations were as varied as they were ridiculous.

Sandra didn’t know what to do. All her friends were policemen, likely to side with law enforcement and the justice system. But Sandra wasn’t about to trust the courts with this; there were too many witnesses who had seen Alex pull the trigger. For her to be exonerated, she would have to prove the existence of the varcolac, and prove that Falk and his agents had been killed by it not by her, and there wasn’t much likelihood of that. No, the only way for Alex to get out of prison was for Sandra to break her out. But none of her cop friends would help with something like that. The ones who had been most likely to support her—Danielle and Nathan—had come to her dad’s funeral, and now they were dead.

Her phone chimed. It was Ryan Oronzi. She thought about ignoring him, but he might know something. “What is it, Ryan?” she said.

“Alex isn’t picking up.”

“She’s a little busy right now, being captured and interrogated. Don’t you watch the news?”

“Not much. I guess I have to talk to you then.”

“I guess you do, then.”

“I just wanted to let you know… the varcolac is out again.”

“What?”

“I just thought you should know.”

“What do you mean, it’s out? You mean it’s loose? I thought you said you could control it!”

“Not indefinitely. It defeated its protocol and escaped.”

“Ryan, this thing is trying to kill us. You have to capture it again!”

“It’s not an animal. It’s a thinking being. We can’t just keep it caged up forever.”

Sandra took a deep breath. “It’s a killer. If you can’t control it…”

“It’s not my fault. I’m not a miracle worker.”

“Not your fault? Are you kidding me?”

Ryan’s voice took on a childish whine. “I’ll do what I can, okay?”

“You’ll do better than that, and do it quick, or there will be more deaths on your head.”

“I’ll try, all right?” He sounded affronted. “I’m not powerless. I still have some tricks up my sleeve.”

“If that’s true, then how did it escape? I thought you had them set to apply automatically.”

“Well, I may have accidentally… look, never mind.”

“Accidentally what? Accidentally let the varcolac loose?”

“Never mind. I’m sorry I called. I’ll fix it.”

“Where is it now? Can you at least tell me that?”

The line went silent for so long that Sandra thought he had disconnected. “Well,” he said finally, “I can tell you what its next target will be.”

“What, it sat down and shared its plans with you over coffee?”

“I can see it in the logs, just like I did with the funeral home. Its attacks leave residue both forward and backward in time.”

Sandra didn’t care about the science. “Where?”

“Tomorrow morning, 5:46 AM, at the Muncy State Prison.”

“You’re kidding me.”

“No. Why, what’s there?”

For a moment, Sandra couldn’t speak. She suddenly knew, beyond all shadow of a doubt, that Alex was still being held in that prison, and that at 5:46 the next morning, she would still be there. Why else would the varcolac attack at that place and time?

“You bastard,” Sandra said, and cut the connection. She lashed out, knocking a picture frame and a clay dish onto the floor.

How did the varcolac know where Alex would be? She felt like she was playing a deadly game against an opponent who kept changing the rules. Was it attacking from the present or from the future? One thing seemed clear: it was trying to track down and destroy her family. Sandra had originally assumed that the attack on Alex at her demo hadn’t been personal, just an opportunity created by the use of Higgs technology, in which Alex’s presence had been entirely coincidental. But since then, its attacks had been purely against her family, as far as she could tell. What did it have against them? Was it afraid that the people who had banished it fifteen years ago could do so again? If so, she thought it had overestimated them.

Alex was captured, her eyejack taken away. Sandra didn’t realize how much she had been relying on Alex, both intellectually and emotionally, until she was gone. She beat her fists against the bed and buried her head in her pillow, repressed tears lodging painfully in her throat. What chance did they have against such an enemy? They couldn’t kill it, and they couldn’t reason with it. Now Alex was trapped, an easy target for its next attack.

The tears broke free, and she sobbed silently into her pillow. Her phone chimed again. She growled, expecting it to be Ryan again with some inane comment. But it wasn’t. It was Angel Gutierrez.

“I saw the news,” he said. “I thought you might need someone to talk to?”

Ryan tried to shake away the sense of guilt he felt after talking with Sandra. It was why he didn’t like people very much. They were always finding ways to make him feel bad. Why should Sandra shout at him? It wasn’t like he’d wanted those people dead. He hadn’t killed them himself. He was trying to stop the varcolac, too. They were on the same side.

The best thing he could do now, he thought, was to put Alex and Sandra out of his mind. Either the varcolac would kill them or it wouldn’t. There wasn’t much he could do about it. The only thing he could do was try to capture it in the wormhole again, however long that took. He didn’t want them to die, but it wasn’t his problem. The most important thing was to get the varcolac back under lock and key.

Which wouldn’t be easy. The equations Ryan had created previously were compromised. If the varcolac had been in his mind, then it would already know the solutions. That was the only explanation Ryan could think of to account for how it had been able to unravel the Riemann function pattern so fast. If it had truly solved it from scratch, then it had just been playing with him all this time, and it could escape whenever it wished. He didn’t think that was true. Which meant he had to devise a new equation, a tough one, and hope it would hold the creature better than the last.

Ryan considered a Maass wave form approach, but discarded it. He had used non-holomorphic L-functions in a previous pattern, and the varcolac would be ready for it. He needed something that would last. Perhaps a Navier-Stokes equation instead. That would take a little extra work on his part, but it would be worth it in the long run. No sense formulating something fragile and having it unravel again.

He took a pencil and paper and started crafting the general shape of the equations he wanted. He had several software suites designed for higher mathematics and visualization, of course, but when he was inventing something new, he always liked to start on pencil and paper. It gave him a freedom of expression that someone else’s software package didn’t allow.

Of course, it was all just a stopgap. No matter how brilliant the problem he set, the varcolac would defeat it sooner or later. Could he really just continue to devise new equations indefinitely? Eventually—and quicker than Ryan liked to admit—he would be out of ideas, and there would be nothing to stop it from running loose, killing and destroying whatever it wished, remaking the world into whatever form it thought appropriate.

Fifteen years ago, as Alex had described it, they had defeated the varcolac by removing its source of exotic particle energy. This had been as simple as shutting down the super collider, leaving the creature with no hold on the physical world. But that was impossible here. Ryan had formed his baby universe out of the quantum froth of the multiverse. Now that it was created, there was no way to destroy it, or even to destroy the wormhole connecting it to their universe. Ryan had tried. The new universe’s space-time was hurtling outward in its frame of reference like a trillion joule freight train, and there was no stopping it. The varcolac had a practically infinite supply of energy to draw from.

Ryan might contain it for a while, but eventually, it would break free for good. It was inevitable. His prior hopes that it might communicate with him seemed silly now. How could he communicate with something so alien? It reminded him of a term he remembered from the books he had read in his childhood: varelse. An intelligence that was varelse was so utterly different than humanity in kind and experience that there was no hope ever to communicate with it. The varcolac wasn’t biological. It didn’t even exist along the same dimensional plane. How could it understand the concept of human life and death? Of the individual? Of the limits of physical reality? Ryan wasn’t even sure it could be called alive, in any measurable sense of the word.

If there was no hope of killing it, and no hope of reasoning with it, then there was no hope at all. Ryan had to admit the truth. He had signed the death warrants of all nine billion inhabitants of planet Earth. He was the most brilliant scientist of his generation, and he had destroyed the world.

“Of course I’ll help,” Angel said. “What kind of friend would I be if I turned you away in your hour of need?”

“But it’s illegal and dangerous,” Sandra said. She sat next to him on a lopsided and worn couch in his quadcopter lab. In the mesh cage, a dozen copters flew through some kind of automated test scenario. “I’m talking about breaking into a maximum security prison on high alert to rescue a criminal wanted for the murder of a high-ranking government official. Not to mention that the varcolac may be trying to kill us at the same time.”

“Heck of a first date,” Angel said.

She smiled despite herself. “Look, I’m just saying, we only met a few days ago. You don’t have to help me. I totally understand.”

“You’re really going for the hard sell, aren’t you? I mean it. I’ll help. This is your sister’s life in danger, right? And maybe the fate of the human race. How could I pass it up?”

She let out a breath. “Thank you. So. How hard is it to reprogram your quadcopters?”

They worked side-by-side for hours, fueled by mushroom-and-green-pepper pizza and Diet Coke. Computer science wasn’t Sandra’s field, but she had done enough programming in her teenage years that she wasn’t completely useless. Angel, however, was fast and brilliant, incorporating unfamiliar code with astonishing facility. All the while, he chattered inanely about everything and nothing, bleeding away Sandra’s stress and worry.

Eventually, Sandra gave up trying to help, and went hunting on the web for information they could use. Within a few minutes, she had the blueprints for the Muncy State Prison, along with a description of its security features.

Angel was surprised. “They actually publish that stuff online?”

“Not exactly. I mean, the prison doesn’t post it on their website or anything. But it’s not classified under the Espionage Act or anything, either. Any time a construction company does work, there’s going to be records of it publicly available, if you know where to look and how to get it.”

Angel glanced over the information. “Your sister should have done this research before she went. The whole place is shielded. She probably couldn’t teleport out, once she was in.”

“I didn’t think of it either,” Sandra said. “We just felt so invincible, with that ability—it seemed like no one would be able to capture her. Even now, they won’t be able to keep her. If I had the time to wait for her to go on trial, or even just to be transferred, I could teleport in and steal her away before they even knew I was there. As it is, the varcolac may kill her before I get the chance.” She took a deep breath and let it out. “Why can’t people leave well enough alone? If Vanderhall and Jean Massey hadn’t gone messing with Higgs particles fifteen years ago, then none of this would ever have happened.”

“But then you never would have existed. At least not as you are now. You and your sister’s lives would never have diverged, and you would be living some compromise life somewhere.”

“Maybe that would have been for the best.”

Angel studied her for a long moment. “Do you believe in God?” he said asked finally.

“What?” The question took Sandra by surprise. “No, I guess I don’t.” Though she had noticed a cross on a chain around Angel’s neck, just visible under his collar. “You do, I’m guessing?”

“I’d say about ninety percent,” Angel said. “But that’s not the point. Let’s say there is a God, for the sake of argument. Or a super-powerful alien intelligence. Or an artificial intelligence that just dreamed us up one day. Whatever you like.”

“I think you should keep programming.”

“I am programming.” And in truth, his fingers had never stopped moving across the keys while he talked. “Humor me, okay?”

Sandra didn’t know where he was going, but he seemed earnest. “Okay. There’s a God. So what?”

“Our deity, or alien, or whatever he is, created the world. But instead of doing it fourteen billion years ago, he did it twenty thousand years ago.”

“You’re kidding me,” Sandra said. “We’re talking about Young Earth Creationism here? The whole world, slapped together in six days by an Almighty Being? You’re a scientist! For heaven’s sake, there are galaxies out there that are billions of light years away. Just point a telescope at Andromeda, and you can look at something millions of years old.”

“You’re missing the point.”

“I guess I am.”

“The universe is billions of years old,” Angel said. “I’m not suggesting otherwise. But let’s imagine that our godlike being created the whole mess—billion-year history and all—ten thousand years ago.”

Sandra paused to work that one out. “So, then God’s deceiving us? He created a fake fourteen-billion-year history? The dinosaurs and the Carboniferous period and the Andromeda galaxy, they never existed? It’s all just a scam? ‘April Fools. Love, God.’”

“Right. Not very nice of him, maybe. But here’s the question: would it matter?”

Sandra threw up her hands. “Of course it would matter. If it never happened, it’s like a big cosmic joke.”

“But what’s the difference, practically? The history is still there. It’s still consistent, following the same predicable laws. You can still study it and learn things that are true. And as far as we’re concerned, that history is gone. Vanished in smoke. All that really matters is what we can learn from what we have now. What it left behind.”

“I don’t understand what you’re trying to tell me.”

“What does it mean for history to be ‘real’? What about last Tuesday? Was that real?”

“Of course.”

“How do you know?”

“I was there. I remember it.”

“But your memories are just a set of electrical impulses and neuron states. What if an AI just dreamed you up five minutes ago? It could have made you complete with your memories of your life, paperwork and souvenirs from your childhood, dental history, etc., every bit of it consistent. But not real.”

“You’re a creepy little man.”

“But if he did, you wouldn’t know the difference. It wouldn’t make any practical change in your life going forward. The history of last Tuesday is exactly the same whether it ‘really’ happened, or God just created it that way. Unless you’re a varcolac, it’s only the present and the future that you can do anything about.”

Whatever he was trying to do, it wasn’t making her feel any better. She crossed her arms. “So what’s the point? Where are we going with this?”

“The point is you. You’re so tangled up in knots about whose history is real, yours or Alex’s. You figure one of you must have ‘really’ experienced the events of your childhood, and the other is just a fake, a carbon copy created fifteen years ago with the same memories, but who was never actually there to experience them. You’re each terrified that you’re the imposter, and afraid that the other one knows it. But it’s a false fear. Your memories are both genuine.”

Sandra paused, taken aback by the sudden twist of subject. “You can’t be certain of that.”

“Certain? There’s nothing certain in life, not any of it. But why agonize over something you can’t change? If you popped into being five minutes ago, or fifteen years ago, or have always existed, it doesn’t change now. You’re here. You’re real. Embrace the person you were, and make sure you have reason to like the person you’re becoming. The past you can’t change. The future is what matters.”

Three hours later, Angel had twelve quadcopters up and spinning in the cage. “Let’s see how this works,” he said. “I’ve created a few unit test scenarios to prove out the mechanics.”

The copters spun up as a unit, and then suddenly disappeared together and reappeared on the other side of the cage.

“Wow!” Sandra said. “You did it!”

“So far so good,” Angel said. “We haven’t put them through their paces yet.”

Each of the copters held a different colored flag, to differentiate them by sight. They hovered in a line in order of the visible spectrum, red to blue. Then, suddenly, the colors changed as if with the flick of a switch, following the same order from blue to red. Sandra watched in confusion as the flags changed colors again, each of them rippling through from red to orange to green to blue. But the flags were just cheap plastic, nothing special. How was Angel making them change colors?

It took her a moment to realize what was happening. Each copter was simultaneously leaving its own position and instantaneously taking the position of the next copter in line. The copters themselves seemed not to move, making it appear as if the flags were changing colors.

Sandra whistled. “I hope you got the timing right. They’ll destroy themselves if two of them appear in the same spot at the same time.”

The copters began flying through the cage as a unit, veering and banking in tight formation, but all the while the flags were changing colors, indicating that the copters were actually trading places as they flew. Angel grinned. “I hope so, too.”

“How could you do all this in only a few hours?” Sandra asked, amazed.

“It’s really not hard from a software perspective. The copters model the rules of their universe and use the model to know, ahead of time, exactly what will happen when they maneuver in certain directions. All I’ve done is add a rule—the ability to change vector position to a new one, instantaneously. Most of the programming was already in place.” The quadcopters began bouncing balls back and forth to each other, continuing to rotate positions seamlessly. “It makes very little difference to the software which of the copters is in a given place, or that the rules of the actual universe don’t usually allow such movements. Now, watch this.”

One of the copters began to perform radical high-speed turns, racing forward and then suddenly flying to the left as if defying its own momentum. It did it again, this time completely reversing direction as if it had struck an invisible wall, without slowing down or showing any discernable jerk.

“How are they doing that?” Sandra said.

“They’re teleporting to their own location, only with a frame of reference rotated by 90 or 180 degrees. Momentum is preserved, so from their perspective, it’s as if the whole universe rotated to the right, and they kept traveling forward as usual. They can do it in any direction, with any orientation, making them more or less infinitely maneuverable, without the usual limitations of momentum and centrifugal force. It means, in essence, that they can turn without turning. They move the universe instead of moving themselves.”

“It’s amazing.”

Angel shook his head. “But it’s not going to work.”

“What do you mean? It works perfectly.”

“They do some neat tricks, I’ll give you that. But we need to break your sister out of a maximum security prison block. We don’t know where they’re holding her, and once we find them, the copters themselves can’t teleport her out. They can only move things with a smaller mass than themselves. Even working together, a human being is far too massive. Worse, we can’t communicate with them from the outside. Unless we go into the prison ourselves, they would have to be completely autonomous, with a flexible plan that could anticipate any eventuality. I don’t know about you, but I don’t think I’m that good, especially not in one night. The copters are a tool, but not a miracle. We still need a plan.”

Sandra considered this. “We need a relay.”

Angel raised a questioning eyebrow.

“The place is shielded, and we can’t trust the copters to act entirely on their own. So we use them as waypoints. The copters search the prison, and then we can teleport to the location of any one of them.”

“But they won’t be able to signal out to us.”

“That’s why at least one needs to be left near the entrance. As a conduit to the outside.”

Angel nodded. “That could work. But there’s one more thing.”

“What’s that?”

“The varcolac is still out there, planning to attack. For all we know, it could be the same kind of attack that destroyed the stadium. Complete devastation.”

“That’s why we have to be fast. We need to be able to teleport her out before that happens.”

“But what about everyone else in the prison? The other prisoners, the guards? They’ll all die.”

Sandra raised her hands helplessly. “We can’t rescue all of them. Maybe if we get Alex out of there, it won’t attack the prison at all.”

Angel sucked on a lip, thinking. “I think we need to be prepared to fight it.”

“Prepared? You haven’t seen this thing. There’s no being prepared.”

“As much as we can.”

“There’s maybe one thing,” Sandra said. “It’ll add to the confusion at any rate, and that could be a good thing.”

“What are you thinking?”

“We need to call the Muncy State Prison ahead of time,” she said, “And tell them we’ve planted a bomb.”

By nightfall, running on almost thirty-six hours without sleep, Ryan had his equation. This new pattern would give them another week, or a few days at minimum, to judge by the time it had taken the varcolac to solve the patterns in the past. In that time, he could develop a suite of backup equations to have in reserve. There might be no hope for the world, but at least he could delay Armageddon for as long as possible.

He loaded the new equation into the wormhole pattern regulator and sat back to watch the new configuration form in his photoionization display. He was so tired. His eyes stung, and his muscles ached, and he felt jittery from all the caffeine he’d drunk. This had to work. It had to.

But the moment the pattern started to form, it flew apart like dandelion seeds in the wind. The full dataset hadn’t even finished loading before it unraveled.

Dismayed, Ryan paged through the logs, trying to understand. Had he loaded an old pattern by mistake? But no. Not only had the varcolac cut through his new equation like a scalpel through dry skin, it had started to do so before he had even fully loaded it. It was impossible.

But it had happened, so of course it was possible. It meant that the varcolac had known what equation he was going to use before he had even set it in place. It wasn’t just out-thinking him. It was living inside his mind.

And suddenly, it was there. The moment he realized that it must be, Ryan could sense its presence. In fact, now that he thought of it, the new equation he had just devised was beyond even his capability. He was thinking on a higher level than ever before, picturing higher-dimensional shapes in his mind like no human could. It was communicating with him, but not through words or pictures or codes. It had infiltrated his own sense of self.

Chills went down his spine. He didn’t feel tired anymore. There was something inside him, something he couldn’t get out. Normally, Ryan hated the idea of anything foreign inside his body. He found body piercing disturbing, and he hated getting splinters. The idea of having pins in a broken bone or undergoing something like cardiac catheterization was intolerable. But this was different. The varcolac wasn’t physical. It wasn’t in his body, not in the same way. There had been theories for years that the human brain was too capable for the space it inhabited, that its processing capacity might in fact reach through electrical fields into other dimensions. It was in this domain—in Ryan’s mind—that the varcolac was interacting.

How long had it been there? He remembered the duplicate Ryan, the one that had pushed the button releasing the varcolac when he, Ryan, had not intended to. He recognized that now for what it had been: a standing probability wave, quickly resolved, in which both possibilities occurred. The sort of probability wave that had previously been experienced only when encountering the varcolac. It seemed circular: encountering the varcolac had caused him to split into versions of himself that both did not and did release the varcolac, the second of which caused him to encounter the varcolac, which caused the split in the first place. But that was exactly the sort of behavior that occurred among particles on the quantum scale.

Regardless of the cause, the varcolac was there in his mind. It was subtly influencing him, reading his thoughts, increasing his capabilities. It was like taking off a veil to see that the world was a lot brighter and clearer than he had realized. Only it wasn’t his eyes that had been veiled, but his mind. He could imagine anything, solve anything, keep any amount of information at the front of his consciousness. It was taking him over in ways he didn’t understand, making him into something newer and better and more powerful. And he loved it.