Supersymmetry

CHAPTER 28

“Is that him?” Alex Kelley said. She had only been at the NJSC for a week now, and it was her first glimpse of the famed Ryan Oronzi.

Tequila Williams looked where she was pointing and nodded. “In the flesh. Smartest guy in the world, so they say. They also say he’s cracked.”

Oronzi was at least a hundred pounds overweight, his hair askew, dressed in a T-shirt and a pair of worn jeans that would have benefitted from a belt. “He looks like a plumber,” Alex said. It was hard to believe he was the genius behind all the technology they were about to demonstrate that day.

Tequila giggled. “I guess if you’re smart enough, you can do and say what you like, and people just call you eccentric. It’s like being old.”

“Or rich,” Alex said.

Oronzi’s arrival quickly attracted the attention of the generals and executives gathered near the stage, who tried to shake his hand, but Oronzi just pushed past them without a civil word. It took Alex a moment to realize that he was heading straight for them. For her.

He didn’t stop until he was standing directly in front of her. “Alex Kelley?”

Alex traded glances with Tequila, startled and not sure what was going on. Was this related to the demo? Was he hitting on her? “That’s me,” she said. She held out a hand. “Very glad to meet you, sir.”

His eyes were wild, like he had seen a ghost. “I have something to show you.”

There was no way to keep it a secret. Ryan told her the basics of what he had found encoded in the pattern of his baby universe, and once he had shown her enough of the eyejack visuals to convince her, there was nothing for it but to cancel the demo. The only way to do that, however, was to explain what had happened to their superiors and to their superiors, until enough of them believed what was going on. A message from the future. And not just a message, but a semi-complete eyejack feed covering weeks of the most extraordinary and terrifying events.

Once Nicole heard what they had, the CIA got involved. The feed was classified at the highest level of national security, but it was too late to keep it contained. By that time, too many people knew, and the story was too amazing, too outlandish to keep quiet. The media got wind of it, and a series of speculative stories drew the attention of an international audience. The tantalizing ambiguities dropped by Ryan Oronzi, along with the flat denials by Secretary of Defense Jared Falk and his staff, only served to fan the flames.

The media had few details, and Alex didn’t come forward with more, not wanting the notoriety of the press nor the attention of the American national security machine. She spent a fair amount of time in Ryan’s lab, however, reviewing the contents of the feeds and drawing out the highlights. Ryan himself was blown away by what he saw. The sight of himself destroying the world as a slave to the varcolac shocked him out of the worst of his egomania. The best thing that happened to him, however, was when Alex introduced him to her father.

In some ways, the two men had little in common. Jacob Kelley was outgoing, athletic, and charming, while Ryan Oronzi was awkward both physically and socially. In the world of high-energy physics, however, their interests collided. They could talk for hours about Lorentz invariance and whether a tachyonic anti-telephone could practically be built. But the real reason for their friendship was a mutual commitment to keeping the events of the Other Future, as they had taken to calling it, from ever coming true.

Jacob had, in fact, discovered a method to enhance and sustain the probability field that kept Alex and Sandra separate and kept the varcolac from interacting in the material world. Ryan insisted on getting Jacob a security clearance, and once it came through, Jacob spent more and more time at Ryan’s lab, the two of them eventually succeeding in cutting the ties to the baby universe and setting it adrift in the quantum froth. The CIA never released the recordings of the Other Future, but they did increase funding to the NJSC’s High Energy Lab to “investigate and protect against the possibility of anti-timeward weapons systems.”

Of course, Sandra had also seen the feed, though she was not strictly cleared for it. Ryan and Jacob sneaked her past security one day, using Alex’s credentials. When she returned after six hours, she wrapped Alex in a hug and wouldn’t let go.

That left only one person who had played a significant part in the Other Future but didn’t know it. Sandra decided it would be too much—and too awkward—to tell him all at once. It would imply a relationship that they didn’t actually have, making it hard to actually get to know him in real life. She was working a six-days-on, three-days-off cycle on patrol, but her days off happened to coincide with a robotics conference in Philadelphia. She checked the scheduled participants and bought herself a ticket.

When the synchronized quadcopter demonstration was over, Sandra walked up to the young, stocky, Hispanic man who had led the presentation. It was strange; he only looked familiar in a vague way, from seeing him on the feed. He wasn’t very much to look at, though apparently they had become good friends in the Other Future. It seemed odd to use the past tense about something that would have happened in the future and now wouldn’t, but, in a way, it was also in the past from her perspective. The Other Future was a cause that was producing effects in her life. In a very real sense, those events had actually happened, albeit in a kind of timeline loop that ended where it began. The past tense would do as well as any other.

She made a show of reading his nametag and held out her hand. “Angel Gutierrez?” she said.

He gave her a dazzling smile. “You pronounced it right,” he said. “Most of you gringos are hopeless at Mexican names.”

She smiled back. “I once knew someone named Angel.”

“Well, nice to meet you”—he glanced at her nametag—“Sandra.”

“Nice to meet you, too. I just wanted to tell you that your demonstration was remarkable. Those copters are pretty versatile, working together like that.”

“Thanks. We think they have a lot of promise.”

The moment stalled. Sandra didn’t want to leave, but she didn’t know what else to say.

“Well, it was good to meet you,” she managed, hating herself.

“Bye,” Angel said. He turned to go.

“Angel!” she called. He turned back. “Could we… that is… would you like to have a drink?”

“A drink? Right now?” It was eleven in the morning.

“No, I mean… sometime. Just…” This was ridiculous. “I’m sorry. It was a stupid idea.” She turned and walked away, her cheeks burning.

He came after her. “Wait.” He touched her shoulder, and she turned around. “I don’t have any plans for lunch.”

She let out the breath she was holding. “Neither do I.”

He was obviously confused—she was pretty sure he wasn’t accustomed to strange girls asking him out—but he took it in stride. “The hotel’s restaurant is pretty awful, but they do serve food,” he said. “I have to clear my stuff out for the next demo. Meet you there at noon?”

She thought about offering to help him gather his things, but she thought that would be pushing it. “Noon it is.”

She was tempted not to tell him. It would have been easier to enjoy the lunch, to ask him questions about his work and completely avoid the inevitable awkwardness of telling him what she knew. But the longer she delayed, the more it would seem like she’d been deceiving him, and the more difficult it would be. Best to get it over with.

She took a deep breath. “Actually,” she said, “this isn’t the first time I’ve seen you.”

“I knew it,” Angel said. “You’ve been stalking me. Pretty girls do that all the time.” He sighed theatrically. “Am I going to have to call security?”

She grinned. He was just like he seemed on the feed from the Other Future, never embarrassed, always making her feel at ease. “I’ve got something to tell you. It will be hard to believe—I didn’t believe it at first.”

She was expecting another joke, but he was quiet now, looking at her curiously. There was nothing for it. She sent his eyejack system the first clip she had decided on—that of Angel himself flying his quadcopters at the wreckage of the baseball stadium. It was unquestionably him, complete with quadcopters and quirky sense of humor. It was also just as clearly at a disaster that had never occurred, in a scene that had never existed. She watched him watch it with growing astonishment.

Finally, his eyes refocused on hers. He was pale. His lips moved, but it took a few moments for him to say, “What is this? CGI?” But of course, it wasn’t, and he knew it. No program, no matter how talented its designer, could capture a person so completely.

“It’s from the future,” Sandra told him.

Over dinner, Alex sat with her father and Ryan and listened to them talk about how they had finally disconnected their universe from the wormhole.

“But, the varcolac is still out there, isn’t it?” she said.

“I’m sure it is,” her father said. “I can’t imagine how it could be killed. It must be distributed through the particles of a thousand worlds. Nothing we could do would be likely to harm it in any existential way.”

“But we’ve destroyed the technology that would give it access,” Ryan said. “The baby universe is gone, and my notes for how to create it are destroyed. There are only a few people who even know such a thing is possible.”

“The thing about science,” Alex said, “is that if something can be done, someone will eventually discover how to do it. You can’t just put a lid on it and make it go away. Somebody will eventually do it again.”

Her father nodded gravely and wrapped his arm around her. “Let’s just hope that it doesn’t happen any time soon.”

A knock on the door interrupted them. Alex was suddenly reminded of a knock on that same door that had started everything fifteen years ago, when Brian Vanderhall had come in out of the snow, babbling about an intelligent quantum creature.

Her father opened the door. Sandra stood there, smiling, drawing a young man in by the hand. He was short, Hispanic, a little pudgy, with dark glasses. She recognized him at once.

“Angel,” she said. “Welcome.”

He came in nervously and shook hands all around. “You must be Alex. Dr. Kelley. And Dr. Oronzi, a pleasure.” He gave an awkward smile. “This is a bit strange, I must tell you.”

“I’ve shown him the highlights and summarized the rest,” Sandra said. “He was supposed to be on a panel at the conference in the afternoon, but he skipped it. We’ve been talking pretty much nonstop since lunch.”

“Welcome to the inner circle,” Alex’s father said with a smile. “It’s been a real shock for all of us, I can tell you.”

They sat together in the living room and made polite small talk for a few minutes, but inevitably, their conversation returned to the Other Future.

“There’s one thing I don’t understand,” Angel said.

Ryan laughed. “Only one?”

“I get that the Other Future is an alternate set of events,” he said. “Events that would have happened, only now they won’t. What I don’t understand is, does that alternate timeline still exist? Is it still going on out there, with most of the people dead, while we’re in an alternate universe right here?”

“It can’t be,” Ryan said. “As soon as you sent that particle back in time and stopped the varcolac from destroying the stadium, it ceased to exist.”

“But if it ceased to exist, how could it have stopped the varcolac? Isn’t that a paradox?”

Ryan smiled. “I didn’t say it had never existed. I said it ceased existing. The Other Future is effectively in our past, a loop tied into the string of our timeline.”

“We’ve been talking about this,” Alex said. “Think about the chain of cause and effect. The varcolac destroyed the stadium, which caused you to send a particle back, which caused the varcolac not to destroy the stadium, which caused us to be sitting here talking about it. The chain of cause and effect is unbroken. It always moves in one direction, even when it jumps backward in standard time. Nothing we do now can ever change the events of the Other Future—that’s already happened. All we can affect is our own future.”

Sandra shook her head. “It’s enough to make my head swim.”

“There’s still a problem,” Angel said. “What about the quadcopters?”

“What about them?” Alex asked.

“How did they gain the power to act as if they were programmed with Higgs projectors? There’s no reasonable explanation. As I apparently told Sandra in the Other Future, it makes no sense.”

“They must have picked it up at the scene somehow,” Sandra said. “All that quantum stuff going on…” She trailed off.

“I don’t see how. Yes, they were reading data from hundreds of ID cards around the stadium. Yes, someone could conceivably have designed a virus to affect the copters’ programming and left it there for the copters to read. But it would require very precise knowledge of the flight control software to patch it in that way, not to mention knowledge of the operating system and its vulnerabilities. I’m the only one in the world who knows their software that well.”

A chill went down Alex’s spine. “Wait,” she said. “What if you did write it?”

Angel shook his head. “I had never heard of Higgs projectors at the time, much less knew how to program one.”

“I don’t mean that you programmed it then.”

She looked around the circle. Everyone else was staring at her blankly.

“Who’s to say that the Other Future is the only time this has happened?” she asked.

It was all she had to say. Dawning realization crossed each of their faces.

“Angel says the only person with the knowledge to write a virus to insert that software, and to hide it on a chip at the stadium, is him,” she went on. “What if, in a prior future to the one we’ve been watching, the varcolac killed Sandra and me at the prison? What if Angel—with the help of Ryan, presumably—figured out a way to send that chip back in time, where the copters would pick it up?”

“Only they didn’t think of storing the eyejack data in the baby universe,” her father said. “So none of you ever knew.”

Angel’s eyes were wide. “How many times do you think this has happened?”

They talked for hours. When Alex slipped out to the kitchen to pour herself a glass of water, Sandra followed her and wrapped her arms around her in a tight hug. It was amazing. A few weeks earlier, Sandra would never have done such a thing, and if she had, Alex would have pulled away. But the Other Future had brought them together in a way that simply being the same person never had. Somehow the experience of having saved the world together—even though they only remembered doing so through an eyejack recording—superseded the fears and insecurities about their identities that they’d built over time.

“So what do you think of him?” Alex asked.

“It’s weird,” Sandra said. “I know all this stuff about him, but we only just met.”

“He is a little weird.”

“That’s not what I meant! I think he’s sweet.”

“And weird.”

They sat down on stools in the kitchen, for all the world like they were teenagers again, growing up in that house. “He’s so easygoing,” she said. “I feel comfortable with him, even though we really just met today.” Her eyes were lively, despite the late hour. Alex was glad for her. She hoped this Angel would be good to her and not hurt her. It surprised her how fiercely protective she suddenly felt toward her sister. And how comfortable she felt sitting here chatting with her. She grinned suddenly, and Sandra saw it.

“What?” she asked.

Alex shook her head. “I’m glad you’re you,” she said. “Whoever Alessandra would have been, she’s not either of us now. You’re different from me, and I’m glad for who you are.”

“We were both Alessandra for a moment there,” Sandra said. They hadn’t talked about that part of the Other Future yet, not directly. “And it was okay. We did well.”

“We did,” Alex said. “We saved the world, in fact.”

Sandra smiled. “And if we ever have to do that again… you know, to save the world again or something?”

“We could do it,” Alex said.

“We could. We will, if we have to. And if we do…”

“…it won’t be the end.”

“No,” she said. “It won’t.”