Supersymmetry

CHAPTER 24

“Sandra!” Her mother had her by the shoulders, but she was looking up at someone else. “We need to get her back to the hospital.”

“No.” Sandra blinked her eyes, looked around. She was on the floor in the High Energy Lab. Her mother and Angel were there, looking concerned. “I’m back. I’m okay.”

“This isn’t right,” her mother said. “You have a concussion, maybe worse. You need medical care.”

Sandra stood up, a bit shaky. Her head throbbed. “No, I don’t. It’s not medical at all. I wasn’t unconscious.” She turned to Angel. “I was there with Alex. In her mind. It was like I was her, seeing what she saw, thinking her thoughts.” She sank into a chair. “I don’t even think she knew I was there.”

Was that what it would be like, when their probability wave finally collapsed? Would she be absorbed into Alex without a glitch? Not only did Alex not know she was there; she, Sandra, hadn’t known she was there. She hadn’t been aware of herself, like a ghost trapped in Alex’s body. She had been Alex.

And now she was back. How long would it last? How much time did she have left before she ceased to exist as an individual?

“I have to lie down,” she said.

Her mother pulled the thin mattress off the broken bed. Sandra stretched out on it, trying not to cry from the pain. Her mother sat next to her and massaged her scalp.

“She’s in Slovenia somewhere, at a scientific institute,” Sandra said. “Sean is there, too. And I’m pretty sure the varcolac is somewhere nearby.”

“Is there anything we can do?”

She shook her head. “I don’t think so. Hopefully she has a plan.”

She lay quietly for a time, thinking. Wondering what her life would have been like if she and Alex had never split. Would she even have existed? It was so hard to think about, the concept of being Sandra, and yet being different. She and Alex were just two examples of millions of possible Alessandras that might have been, each of them her, and yet each of them not. If she and Alex did some day combine, she probably wouldn’t mourn the day. She would be a new person, and that person would be glad to be alive. But that person wouldn’t be Sandra Kelley.

“Angel?” she said.

He came to her side.

“Can you tell from the data how long I have left?”

“What do you mean?”

“From my father’s data. If the trend continues, can you plot how long it will be until Alex and I converge into a single person?”

For once, he was solemn. “I can’t. It’s a complex pattern, not linear. Maybe someone else could tell, but not me. I’m sorry.”

She met his eyes. She hadn’t had much time to think about it, but she really liked Angel. He was funny, relaxed, unintimidated by petty authority figures. He was intelligent and self-sacrificing and cared about doing the right thing. He wasn’t much to look at, but that was growing on her, too. She could trust him.

She took a deep breath and let it out. “I don’t think I have very long,” she said.

The Turkish soldiers had no eyes. They rose to their feet, ignoring the bullet wounds in their chests and heads, and set off toward the main entrance of the institute, the doors that the American soldiers had just entered. Alex felt the panic start to flutter in her chest like a trapped moth. The varcolac was here.

There was no time for fear. She teleported to the low roof of one of the Institute buildings, and her team followed close behind. Alex cued the quadcopters from her eyejacks, and they rose out of their case four at a time. As soon as each group reached eye level, she sent them teleporting down to surround a single eyeless Turkish soldier. A flash of electricity, the puppet fell, and Alex moved on to the next.

“What can we do?” shouted Vijay.

“Find another way into this building!” she said. He ran off across the roof, the others following him.

There were too many soldiers. She took out as many as she could, but they reached the doors anyway. An American who’d been left at the entrance fired his M4 into them, but the bullets passed through them like water. He slammed the doors in their faces, but they walked right through without a pause. She heard the soldier scream.

Alex surrounded another puppet soldier with quadcopters. This time, however, the puppet reached out and grabbed one with each hand. The flash of their energy shields still took him down, but he took the two copters down with him. They smashed into the ground, writhing and sparking as the blades dug into the dirt. The next soldier did the same thing. Unlike the puppets at the prison, these were learning. The varcolac was here, altering their behavior to react to her attack.

She teleported the remaining copters back to the roof. “Vijay?”

“Over here,” he called back. “There’s a way in.”

She ran over to see a metal door, which they had unlocked by the simple expedient of teleporting a pebble into the lock mechanism, blowing it apart. The door hung open.

“Let’s go.”

She led them inside and down a flight of concrete stairs, which opened at the bottom into a long, poorly-lit hallway. It was evening, and most of the eight hundred scientists that worked here during the day were gone. She had to find Sean and warn him what he was up against. Then, once his explosives were set, she could teleport him and his team back to Poland. Assuming they lived that long.

She rounded a corner and felt a gun at her head. A man grabbed her by the back of the neck and shoved her face against a wall, but not before she got a glimpse of his blackened face and gray fatigues.

“I’m an American,” she said. The soldier turned her around and held her at arm’s length, taking in her appearance, processing the sound of her voice. “I’m Sean Kelley’s sister,” she added. The expression on the soldier’s face would have been comical in any other situation.

“Team Alpha,” the soldier murmured. “We have a situation at entry point one.”

“Copy that,” a familiar voice replied. “Do you need help?”

Alex grabbed the radio. “Sean,” she said. “It’s me.”

Ryan couldn’t find Alex anywhere. She wasn’t in the room that had been assigned to her to sleep. She wasn’t in the training center. A soldier said she had gone down the street with all of her old team members to a local pub, but she wasn’t there, either. He supposed they could have left there and gone on to sample another pub, but he was starting to suspect something worse. She had left him behind. She had forced him to get on that plane so they could fight the varcolac together, but then she had abandoned him to go on by herself.

Fortunately, he still had access to the logs from his baby universe and associated programs back at the NJSC. Every Higgs projector still ultimately drew energy from there, and so any Higgs projector activity was still logged in that system. He couldn’t track her if she was just walking around the city, but if she did any teleporting, he would be able to see exactly where she went.

When he looked at the log, he was astonished. She had left the country. She was behind enemy lines. Not only that, but she had made copies of the latest projector software—including the teleportation and invisibility modules—for her friends on the team from Lockheed Martin. Of course—she had taken them along, but not him. What were they doing?

Ryan looked up the coordinates with a mapping program and found the address: the Jozef Stefan Institute in Ljubljana. It was a physics institute, mostly, though they did some of the softer sciences as well. They had their own particle accelerator there. There weren’t many of those in Eastern Europe; most of Europe’s accelerators were in Germany, Switzerland, or the United Kingdom. In fact, it was probably the only one in all of Turkish-controlled territory.

Of course. It was obvious, now that he thought of it. The Institute was where Jean would be. The handful of projectors Ryan had given her wouldn’t be enough; Jean—meaning the varcolac, of course—would want thousands of soldiers to have projectors. It would want men killing each other at an unprecedented rate. That meant the Turks would need to make a lot more.

Alex had gone to Ljubljana to stop her. She had taken her team along with her, but not him. She hadn’t even told him she was going. Why? Because he was competition. She wanted the varcolac all to herself. He had thought her uninterested in such things, but why else would she have left him behind? She wanted to be the One.

But that was rightly him! He had made the baby universe. He had summoned the varcolac into the world. He had traded equations with it and learned its secrets. He had been born for this. But first Jean, and now Alex, wanted to steal it away from him.

He couldn’t let that happen. But how could he stop them? Alex was one thing; she was just a human. But Jean had the varcolac on her side. If he teleported away after them without a plan, he was just going to get himself killed.

What he needed was a new weapon. Jean had taken out his Higgs projector as easily as thinking. He could theoretically make a new one, hardened against EMPs, but that would take time and materials, and he didn’t have either. There were two options: either he had to have the strength to overpower her or he had to catch her unawares. The former was unlikely, not with the varcolac helping her, which just left the element of surprise.

But how could he surprise a creature who could see every quantum interaction, every electromagnetic wavelength, every particle emitted or absorbed? By itself, he could perhaps fool it. The varcolac had, after all, spent countless years completely unaware of human intelligence and only recently understood just how many humans there were. Particle interactions hadn’t even given it a concept of matter, never mind individual human intelligence.

But with Jean, it was another story. Paired with Jean, it understood the significance of the particle interactions on a large scale. It could parse the meanings of interrupted beams of light and radiant energy sources and know that where there were signs of a human body there was a human intelligence.

The invisibility module wouldn’t help. It was practically a toy, designed only to absorb and re-emit visible light according to Maxwell’s equations. It didn’t even stop the infrared signals of his body heat, never mind the countless interactions of radiation across the electromagnetic spectrum. Static electricity, friction, the Brownian movement of displaced air: all of these created a trail of evidence to eyes that knew how to look. He didn’t know which of these effects might escape the varcolac’s notice and which might be as obvious as a forest fire. His only option was get rid of them all. Instead of a module to hide him from visible light, he needed a module to hide him from reality itself.

In theory, it should be easy. The Higgs field already did the hard work of capturing particles and reconfiguring them according to his software’s specifications. For the invisibility module, his software had to solve Maxwell’s equations for each photon that came into the field and reproduce it properly on the other side. A reality module would work much the same way, but instead of Maxwell’s equations, it would solve Schrödinger’s equation for the probability of a particle being present in a region of space. It would reproduce all particles, not just photons, essentially rerouting reality itself around him. He would be completely undetectable by any means.

It was a concept he’d been playing with for years, a pet project of sorts. He had the software, fully tested in simulation. There had been nothing really stopping him from using it except the guts to actually try it. Now he had no choice. Unless he wanted to die in obscurity like the rest of humanity he had to challenge Jean and regain his place.

It took him an hour. The real challenge was performance. In daylight, there were roughly 10²¹ photons that entered his space every second, but there could be as many as 10⁵⁰ total particles passing through the same space, requiring many orders of magnitude more processing power. The sort of computer that could fit in a phone card was no longer sufficient. Ryan liberated a hardened supercomputer from the military training center and fit it into a backpack. It was oppressively heavy, but it could do the needed calculations fast enough to eliminate any noticeable delay. Of course, Ryan couldn’t say for sure what would be noticeable to a varcolac, but it was the best chance he had. He stole an oxygen tank as well, and strapped it to his chest—after all, air molecules would be routed around him just like any other particle.

Now he was as ready as he’d ever be. He plugged the coordinates for Jozef Stefan Institute into his teleportation module. Jean wouldn’t get away with this. Not if he could help it.

Alex could tell that Sean was not happy to see her. At first he stared at her with eyes gone wide, as if she were a ghost. Then his eyes turned hard, and she could see the anger growing. “What are you doing here?” he asked, with barely suppressed rage. Alex knew the rage was because he loved her, and he assumed that her presence here meant she was doing something incredibly stupid. And maybe she was. But she also knew things he didn’t. And could do things he couldn’t.

Instead of answering, she teleported to the far end of the hallway and then back again. He stared at her, his anger dissolving again into astonishment and confusion.

“Let’s assume I’m here for a good reason,” she said. “We don’t have much time, so listen up. The varcolac is here.”

Sean had personal experience with the varcolac. He had been only five years old when it had kidnapped him, along with their mother and sisters, but she was sure he remembered the experience. He had almost died.

“How do you know?” Sean whispered.

“For one thing, the soldiers pouring into the building have no eyes.”

He cringed. It was like a childhood nightmare come to life. Just as quickly, however, the hard look of an elite marine returned.

The marine who had originally found them, apparently the team leader, asked, “Kelley, what’s this about?”

Alex explained as best she could in a few terse sentences.

“It doesn’t change anything,” he said. “We do the job, we get out.”

Alex indicated her team. “Let us stay close,” she said. “When you’re done, we can teleport you out of here.”

The team leader looked like he was going to object, but then he shook his head. “Fine. We don’t have time to argue.” He eyed the wall. “This looks load bearing.” He slapped an explosive onto it and twisted something on its surface. It stuck fast and emitted a tiny whine.

“This way,” he said. Alex followed him, trusting the rest of her team to do the same. “Kelley, is this floor cleared?” he asked.

“Yes, sir,” Sean said.

“Okay. Johnny is dead. Wilson and Cash are holding the stairs. The first floor is overrun. We need to get down to the cellar.

They reached the stairs. Two Marines were holding position there, one behind the other, shooting at any Turkish soldier that turned the corner. The bullets passed right through the Turks, impacting the floor on the other side of them, yet they showed no inclination to climb the stairs.

“Why won’t they die, sergeant?” one of them called back, his voice stressed.

“Do you have any spare magazines?” Alex asked.

Sean gave her an odd look, but handed one over. Alex thumbed a bullet out of the top, and then waited for another Turkish soldier to come into view at the bottom of the stairs. As soon as it did, she teleported the bullet into its brain. Its head exploded, raining blood and gray matter all over the floor. Its body fell and didn’t get up.

“You did that with the Higgs projector?” Sean asked.

“Newer version. I can copy it for you, but not here.”

“Hand over your spares to Sean’s sister and her unit, then follow me,” the team leader said, apparently taking the oddness of the situation in stride.

Wilson, Cash, and Sean all handed over fresh magazines to Alex and her teammates. The team leader charged down the stairs, shouting incoherently, and his men followed him. “Come on!” Alex said.

They hit the first floor on the heels of the Special Ops crew. The puppet soldiers advanced, blasting them with pulses of energy. The Higgs projectors protected them, shielding them with flashes of blinding light.

One at a time, Alex put bullets into the soldiers’ heads. It was gruesome, horrible work, spattering all of them with gore, but it was better than dying. “Downstairs!” Sean shouted. “This way!”

They descended into the cellar, a long concrete stairwell three times as deep as any normal basement. When they reached the bottom, they entered a room as large as any gymnasium. The linear accelerator was there, a fat, steel cylinder that spanned the length of the room, connected to a host of machines and computers via a tangle of wires. The cylinder was the vacuum chamber through which the particles flew. At the far end, a giant Van de Graaff generator hummed in its own, larger compartment. A dozen scientists in white lab coats attended the machines.

And there was Jean. Alex didn’t wait to see what she would do. She dropped a bullet into her hand and teleported it into Jean’s head.

Or at least she tried. The bullet didn’t move. Alex tried to send it into the Van de Graaff generator instead, but it sat resolutely in her palm. This wasn’t good. She tried teleporting a few feet to her left, but once again, nothing happened. Afraid, she yanked the projector itself out of her pocket. It sat inert, dead, the tiny lights on its surface gone dark.

“Easy to do, once you think about it,” Jean said pleasantly. “A Higgs projector is just solid state electronics, a computer operating a program. It has electrical circuits to fry, just like anything else. A focused EMP will do it. Just a tiny one, right in your pocket.” She snapped her fingers. “Easy. The power of the quantum world is still there, of course. Only you can’t access it.”

The door to the stairway behind them slammed shut. “Why are you doing this?” Alex asked. “The varcolac doesn’t care about helping the Turks.”

“No, you’re right about that. I’m afraid it’s not going to help anyone but me.”

“But you’re human,” Alex said. “Why would you want to throw in with this alien creature? Do you really want to be the only person left in the universe? To have all that blood on your hands? You might live forever, sure, but will that really be worth it?”

Jean’s face grew hard. “What did humanity ever do for me? Took my daughter from me. Put me in a cage. Took my life, the few decades that I have allotted to me, and forced me to spend them shut up in a box. Do you know what that does to a person? Watching my precious time tick away, wasted? I have a mind with the imagination to create worlds, and humanity put me in a cage.” Sean reached for a grenade, but she flung it away from him with a gesture. “The varcolac, as you call it, won’t put me in any kind of cage at all. It will give me the universe.”

“What about the billions of people who don’t even know you? They didn’t lock you in a cage. And what about your husband and daughter? Have you even seen them since you escaped? Would you kill them with all the rest?”

Jean’s smile never wavered. “Humanity took my years away,” she said. “Now I am taking theirs.”

“You’re crazy,” Tequila said. “You’re completely out of your mind. You think this will make you happy?”

“This conversation bores me,” Jean said. “It’s time for you to die.” She turned away and snapped her fingers. Tequila’s mouth opened in shock. Her chest made a small popping noise, and she rocked back. She looked at Alex and tried to speak, but a trickle of blood dribbled out of her mouth. Her head lolled to one side, and she collapsed to the floor.

“Tequila!” Alex rushed to her side. Her friend was motionless, her eyes rolled back. She had no pulse.

Alex looked back up at Jean. “I will kill you,” she said, her voice wrenched out through the tears that closed her throat. “I will destroy you.”

“Really,” Jean said. “I’m impressed you located me so quickly, but come now. I have you thoroughly beaten. Now go home before I kill you all.” She smiled. “Oh that’s right, no Higgs projector. You can’t go home, can you? Too bad for you, I suppose.” She snapped her fingers again, and the marine team leader staggered back. He fell to the floor and died, just like Tequila.

Alex screamed in frustration. She cast about for anything she could throw, anything she could use at all to try to hurt this woman. “And where’s the varcolac now?” she shouted. “Are you so certain you can trust it? Or is it just using you to get its way? What if, when all the rest of humanity is dead, it just discards you, too?”

Jean laughed. “You don’t understand, do you? I am the varcolac. Do you think humanity is the first race it has assimilated? It barely understood humanity before, but now, with its mind entwined with mine, it understands everything.” Another snap of her fingers, and Cash and Wilson collapsed as well. Rod turned and ran for the doors to the stairway. He reached them and yanked on them as hard as he could, but they didn’t open. Jean snapped her fingers, and he fell where he stood. Alex, Sean, and Lisa were the only ones left. Sean stepped in front of them, shielding them with his body, as if that would do any good.

“Stop it!” Alex yelled. The tears ran down her face in earnest now. “Please! I beg of you. You have all the power. Show some compassion.”

Jean’s lips curled and her face twitched. “That’s the thing about prison,” she said. “It beats all the compassion out of you.”