Supersymmetry

CHAPTER 23

Sandra’s headache was in full force now, like a tide of pain washing through her scalp. She tried to ignore it, concentrating on the graphs in front of her. An empty pizza box and cups of soda were scattered around her, the remains of a dinner now long finished. She was getting hungry again, though she knew her body probably needed sleep more than it needed food.

Her father’s phone had been crammed with data, so much so that it was difficult to determine what was important and what wasn’t. She had sorted by date modified, to start out with, and immediately found the data that Angel had sent her the day after the stadium explosion, showing the pattern of the blast. She located her father’s analysis of it, too, the ten-dimensional look that turned all the crazy lines into simple, coherent curves. But what had been so sensitive and important that he felt the need to hide his phone in the toaster?

She gradually pushed backward in time. He had obviously been using the phone for a great deal of analysis and study of quantum effects, far more than she would have expected from a retired scientist. He still taught some courses locally, at Swarthmore College, but this was high-level stuff, a personal project of some kind that seemed to have been going on for years.

It took her a long time before she figured out that the target of the study was herself.

“He’s been monitoring me,” she said. “Me and Alex both. For years. Since the beginning.” By the beginning, she meant the split, the point at which she and Alex had ceased to be Alessandra and had taken different paths. “He’s been gathering data at a quantum level.” She stared at it further. “I think it’s in our phones. He hid some kind of device into our phones that monitors us and sends the data back to him.” She looked up at her mother. “Did you know about this?”

She shook her head. “No. He didn’t say anything.”

“What was he looking for?” Angel asked.

She knew. The math was beyond her, but she knew what he must have been studying. She and Alex were a quantum fluke, a probability wave that refused to collapse. Every other probability wave in their crazy lives had collapsed, a single path taking precedence. Even her father’s own experience, both in prison and out of it at the same time, had eventually come back together. But she and Alex hadn’t. For fifteen years.

Of course he was curious. Of course he wanted to study them, noninvasively. He was their father. Beyond the simple scientific interest, he cared about them as his children. He wanted to understand why the wave held for so long and whether it would ever collapse again.

Sandra wanted to know, too. She brought up graph after graph, trying to make sense of it. The notes were terse, cryptic, not meant for anyone besides her father to read. But finally, she thought she understood. The strength of the probability wave field, constant for many years, had started to deteriorate over the course of the last three months. At last measurement, it was less than a third of its original strength. She thought of the recent occasions when Alex’s thoughts had mixed with her own, when their minds had seemed to almost collide. Was it happening? Was there anything they could do?

But there was something more. She discovered a text file with some scribbled notes. It read, “NJSC funding increase, new parking garage, November 5th. Coincidence?”

The date coincided, roughly, with the time the probability wave field had started to diminish. Her father had been suggesting a causal relationship—that something going on at the NJSC was weakening the field, making it more likely that she and Alex would collapse into one person again. The note was followed by a bewildering array of mathematical notations and equations.

Sandra looked up at the universe simulated in flashing colors behind the glass. Her head pounded. She felt so angry. She glared at her mother, who had been looking over her shoulder. “Did he tell you about this?”

Her mother shrugged helplessly and shook her head.

“I bet he told Alex. He was always telling her things, things he thought I was too stupid to understand. Maybe he was hoping to nudge things somehow so that, when the wave collapsed, it was Alex’s mind that came out on top.”

“Don’t think that,” her mother said. “It’s not true. He loved you.”

“Did he? He never liked me much before the varcolac came, and then afterward, he had Alex. She was like this brand new daughter who had saved the world with him, who liked quantum physics, who risked her life to save us all. Not even Claire could compete with that.” She stood up and clenched her fists. “I’m tired of these riddles! I’m not smart enough to solve them. I never have been.”

Her mother wrapped her arms around her, and Sandra sobbed. “I miss him so much,” Sandra said finally. “I don’t know what to do. Why didn’t he just tell us what to do?”

Angel put an arm on her shoulder and wiped a tear off her face with his thumb. He acted as if crying were a normal thing, not a sign of weakness or frailty, not something to be uncomfortable about. It made her feel safe. She wiped her face on the hospital sheet she was using as a dress. “You should look at this,” he said.

Her phone pinged as it attached to his feed, and suddenly she could see what he saw. It was a video feed of sorts, though he was viewing it in non-immersive mode, like looking down into a glass box instead of standing in the scene itself.

The display was strange: granular and oddly colored, with some data missing. It was like the image was made of a constantly-moving fuzz, which kept shifting around. Even so, she could make out five people on a roof of some kind, though she couldn’t see the background or anything more than a few feet away. The people’s faces were gray and indistinct.

“What is this?” she asked.

“It’s the quantum data your father was collecting from Alex’s phone,” he said. “I used the location references to put together a 3D image.”

“So… this is live? One of these people is Alex?”

“The closest one, I think. I don’t think it was meant to be used to spy on her, exactly, but the data is there.”

“Where is she? What’s she doing?”

He shook his head. “It’s all locally referenced. There’s no global locator data, or anything like that. You can just call her, if you want to know where she is.”

But Sandra could hardly hear him anymore. Her awareness of the room was fading, the colors shifting. She could see what Alex was doing. No, more than that. She was sliding into Alex’s viewpoint, falling into her mind. And she couldn’t stop.

The Jozef Stefan Institute was in Ljubljana, Slovenia’s capital and largest city. It would almost certainly be guarded. Instead of teleporting to the roof of the Institute, Alex chose an old castle, a tourist attraction that looked down on Ljubljana from a rounded hill in the city center. It was night, so the castle was closed to the public, its ramparts deserted.

Catching her breath, Alex looked around, astonished. For some reason—perhaps because she had never heard of the place before today—she had pictured Ljubljana as a dirty slum of a place, poor and overcrowded. Instead, she found a picturesque old European city, clean and colorful, with red shingled roofs and cobblestone streets and the blue ridges of the Alps in the distance. Lights danced through the night, not garish with neon or strobing color, but subtle and tasteful.

The Institute itself was a university and center of scientific endeavor, one of Slovenia’s proud achievements. Its five buildings formed a sort of square in a residential area of the city, with a courtyard in the center where flowers bloomed. It was a place of peace and human accomplishment. And it was surrounded by Turkish soldiers.

It could mean only one thing: that Jean had reached and convinced the leadership of Turkey, and that they recognized the importance of this place. Alex’s mind raced. Now that she was here, it was increasingly clear to her how unprepared she was. How would she find Sean? She didn’t know his plan of attack or where he was coming from. Maybe he was waiting until the dead of night. Maybe he had already rigged the place with explosives and was putting as much distance between himself and the Institute before it blew. Or maybe the varcolac had already killed him.

It made her suddenly sad. Why did there have to be war? Hadn’t Europe suffered enough in the last century and a half? When humanity was capable of such beauty and discovery, why did countries have to pit their aspirations against each other in widespread destruction? She hated to see this beautiful city scarred. And she didn’t want her brother to die.

Alex unlocked the large black hard case she had brought with her: Angel’s quadcopters. If it came to a showdown with the varcolac, it was the best weapon she had, the only weapon she knew that could even slow it down. Though ultimately, it had not even been the varcolac itself she had fought at the prison. It was a shadow of itself, created by a Higgs singlet sent precisely back in time, like an automated computer program given certain goals and functions by its creator. And she had very nearly lost.

An alarm sounded. A soldier on the roof was pointing in their direction and talking into a radio. They’d been spotted.

“What do we do?” Tequila asked.

The soldiers stood at alert with weapons raised. Alex saw an officer speaking rapidly to a squad and pointing at the castle. Then they started to die.

Gunfire tore into them, sounding like distant pops from Alex’s vantage point. The soldiers’ bodies danced and fell. A few started shooting, but their weapons were wrenched out of their hands by invisible forces. Alex watched, aghast. It had to be her brother and his team out there, using their projectors and killing these men. Somehow, it seemed more awful in this idyllic city with its old-world charm. The old world had bloody conflicts too, of course. But everything about this place spoke of peaceful cooperation and advancement. The blood on the cobblestones was lurid, garish, wrong.

She understood the reasons. She didn’t even blame Sean, not really. This place had to be destroyed. It was a military installation now, whether it had been built for that purpose or not. It was possibly the enemy’s single most powerful asset. If it had been bombed from the air, it would have somehow seemed more justifiable, though of course the soldiers would have died just the same. A team of insurgents was the more humane option; it would allow them to kill the soldiers without killing the scientists inside.

When the soldiers lay dead on the floor, the marines appeared, seemingly out of nowhere, and advanced on the entrance. They ran quickly, in a crouch, anonymous in their masks and urban fatigues.

Alex could immediately tell which one was her brother. Sean had been born with a short arm, half the normal length, with a tiny hand at the end of it that couldn’t grasp anything very well. For most of his growing up, it had been that way, a source of frustration and occasional ridicule, though he could do just about anything he put his mind to learning. He was athletic and coordinated, and worked twice as hard as anyone to prove he could not only do the same things others could, but do them better.

Then a prosthetic was invented that could enclose his short arm and operate off of the signals of his nerves and muscles. It was a wonder of engineering and made his left arm more precise and powerful even than his right. Sean had joined the military—an impossibility before the prosthetic—and, true to form, had dedicated himself to being not just a capable soldier, but one of the very best.

It was the prosthetic that gave him away. It was bulky where it enclosed his left arm, and even under specially fitted fatigues, it stood out.

They disappeared inside. Maybe they would set their explosives and leave safely, and the facility would be destroyed. Sean knew what he was doing. He and his team were in superb shape, crack shots, experts in infiltration and sabotage. They were trained with the Higgs projectors and knew when and how to use them. Alex began to hope that their presence wouldn’t be needed, that Sean and the other marines had everything under control.

Then the bodies on the ground started to rise.