Superposition

^{CHAPTER 36}

“My best guess is that she went to the NJSC,” I told Nick. “That’s where her equipment and research is. That’s where I’m going now.”

“I’m coming with you,” Nick said.

“I’m an escaped murder suspect. You’ll be aiding and abetting,” I said.

“I don’t care about that. In fact, I’ll drive. Hide that little toy car in my garage, so they don’t find it here.”

“Sounds good,” I said. “One more thing—do you have a pair of eyejack lenses I could use?”

We switched cars as quickly as we could, and then Nick floored the accelerator. “We won’t get there faster if we get pulled over,” I said. “If the police recognize me, we won’t get there at all.”

He nodded in agreement, but he didn’t slow down. On the way, I explained what I thought Jean was trying to do. “She can manipulate the Higgs field,” I said. “She can change the wavelengths and basic constants of normal matter, which means she can control how it behaves to an almost magical degree. The real issue, though, is that the Higgs field extends across multiple universes. Which means that the probability waves she can influence extend there as well.”

“You’re losing me,” Nick said. “What does that mean in English?”

“It means she can access alternate versions of your daughter. She can dip into other universes to change how probability waves resolved in the past. It means she can retrieve versions of your daughter that might have been if different choices had been made…”

“…or different genes had expressed,” Nick finished. “She wants to ‘cure’ her Down Syndrome, doesn’t she?”

“That’s my guess,” I said.

His knuckles turned white against the steering wheel. “She’s been talking like that for months. I told her it would just be killing our daughter and replacing her with someone else. I thought it was just crazy talk, though, not that she could actually do it.”

“I’m not sure how well she can control it, either,” I said. “She can’t have studied it very thoroughly before Brian’s death, and she certainly hasn’t tried something like this before. No one has. She could end up killing Chance and not replacing her with anything.”

Nick gunned the engine and zipped through an intersection just as the traffic light turned red. He was silent for a moment, then said, “Jean killed Brian, didn’t she.”

I sighed. “I’m pretty certain she did.”

Nick slammed a palm against the steering wheel. “How could this have happened? We were so perfect for each other, so in love. I thought we were happy. Then Chance was born, and it was the best thing that ever happened to me, but Jean was so upset. So angry. She felt ripped off, somehow, as if life had cheated her. Her dream of how things were going to be had been swept away.

“But it was our daughter, you know? Jean couldn’t see that. She had been planning to breastfeed; she’d been reading all these books about brain development, bought all the right toys and music, and suddenly, none of it mattered anymore. She left me to feed her, talk to her, put her to bed. She would just sit there and let Chance cry. Then after a while, she just stopped coming home.”

I didn’t know what to say. I rested my hand on the stolen gun in the pocket of my sweats. I didn’t want to shoot Jean. I was no marksman; I wasn’t sure I could hit her even if I tried. If she was holding the baby, I wasn’t even going to point the gun in her direction.

“Can I use your phone?” I asked. I cringed as soon as I said it, realizing that it was an insensitive response to Nick’s story, but Nick didn’t seem to mind. He pulled it out of his shirt pocket and handed it over.

It was the new, slim type, about the size and thickness of a credit card. I tapped the screen, searched public records for the listing for Officer Richard Peyton of the Media police force, and called him. He picked up after the first ring.

“Peyton.”

“Officer Peyton, this is Jacob Kelley.”

A beat of silence. “Where are you, Mr. Kelley?”

“I want to turn myself in. But I will only do it, personally, to you.”

“All right. We can do that. Where are you?”

“At the NJSC.”

“I have no jurisdiction in New Jersey.”

“Only to you,” I said, and hung up.

Two minutes later, we careened into the NJSC parking lot and jumped out of the car. We headed straight for the Dirac building and Jean’s office. Nick made a phone call and when we arrived, Carolyn Spiers, the building’s administrative assistant, was holding open the door.

She did a double take when she saw me. “Aren’t you supposed to be in jail?”

“They let me out on good behavior,” I said. “We just need to see Jean.”

“I don’t think she’s here,” Carolyn said. Her desk was right in front of the entranceway. “I would have seen her come through.”

“We’ll check anyway,” I said.

We didn’t knock. I held the door handle down, quietly counted to three, and we rushed in. I had the gun out, but I kept it pointed at the floor. Jean was standing behind her desk, looking down at Chance, who was lying on her desk on top of papers and writing implements. Jean had the Higgs projector and she was manipulating circuitry symbols on its surface. Chance watched the smartpaper, transfixed, occasionally batting at it with a chubby hand.

Nick started walking toward them, but I held up a hand. I didn’t know for sure what Jean could or couldn’t do, but the situation required careful handling.

“You can’t stop me,” Jean said. “Just leave me alone.”

“What are you doing?” Nick asked. “If you don’t want Chance, just leave her with me. I’ll take care of her. You don’t have to have any part of her.”

“I do want her,” Jean said. “That’s what you never understood. You love her defect, her extra chromosome. I love her. I want her to be whole.”

“She is whole, Jeannie. She’s her. She’s Chance.”

“Would you want to have the problems she will have?” Jean asked. “Do you want to trade places with her? You’re being emotional, Nick, not practical.”

Nick took a step forward, pleading. “She needs our emotions. She needs our love.”

Jean’s eyes blazed. “Don’t you dare tell me I don’t love our child. You have no idea the things I’ve done for her.”

“Like Brian?” I asked.

Spots of color bloomed in her cheeks. “Brian betrayed me. He deserved everything he got.”

“You were his new girlfriend, weren’t you? The one he dumped Lily Lin to be with,” I said.

Nick’s head jerked at me, then back to Jean. “Brian Vanderhall? That’s who you were sleeping with?”

“For all the good it did me,” Jean said bitterly. “Yes, I slept with him, Nick. I did it for us, for Chance. I was everything he wanted: sexy, compliant, the female assistant to the brilliant scientist. Only I was different, because I understood the research, understood its implications—sometimes faster than he did. I swallowed my pride, accepted that he would overlook my contributions when he published, because I knew what this discovery could do.

“I knew it could change the past. Just a quirk of luck, that extra chromosome, like the random collisions and emissions of particles that happen a trillion trillion times a second. It didn’t have to happen. It shouldn’t have happened. We could undo it, choose a different path, a different random possibility. And we did it, Brian and I. We found the quantum intelligences, spoke to them, learned from them. Out of their knowledge and our own experimentation, a technology was born, more powerful even than I had been expecting.”

“But then Brian wanted to destroy it,” I said. “He took it away from you, without telling you what he was doing.”

“He was afraid.” Jean’s voice oozed contempt. “He thought it was too powerful, that the intelligences would demand it back. I told him that power was the only way to keep them under control.”

“He came to my house to show me and ask my advice,” I said. “You followed him to my house. You’re the ghost Officer Peyton saw in the snow outside. Then you followed him back to the bunker and killed him there, not realizing there was another version of him still alive.”

“He betrayed me,” Jean repeated. “I gave him my body, and I gave him my mind, and he didn’t give me anything in return.”

Nick was looking back and forth between us in growing consternation. “But you defended him,” he said. “You spoke out in his favor at his trial.”

“She had to get close enough to me to find the projector,” I said. “She didn’t know where it was.”

“I didn’t want to hurt you or your family,” Jean said. “I didn’t know Brian would mail the projector to you, or that you would end up accused of the crime. I was honestly trying to help.” She pressed a button on the pager several times. On the table, Chance blurred and became a montage of babies, some happy, some crying, some kicking, some reaching, some clapping hands.

I slowly lifted my gun and pointed it at Jean’s head. I wasn’t going to shoot with Chance so close, but I hoped Jean wouldn’t know that. “Step away from her,” I said.

Jean made a guttural sound, like an animal’s growl. “I told you, I’m not going to kill her. I love her.” She looked back down at Chance, whose image started shifting through the medley of different possible Chances. Some of them became a little more solid, a little more real, while others faded into smoke.

“Last chance,” I said. “Step back.”

“Leave me alone,” Jean said. “You can’t win this.” She flicked her eyes, and the gun was yanked out of my hands and clattered uselessly into the corner. She had the Higgs projector synched to her eyejack lenses, and she was much more adept at using it than I was.

But she wasn’t the only one with a Higgs projector. The one I had used to escape from prison was in my pocket, synched to the lenses I had borrowed from Nick. I didn’t know how to do much with it, and I had a feeling Jean had some custom subroutines in her version that she had written herself, but I had to try.

My mind raced. I remembered how I had tunneled the flour canister into the decorative table in my house when we found the projector… and a wave of dizziness hit me. That had been my double, not me. Once again, I was remembering something that I, the Jacob in prison, had never done.

I remembered how the table had exploded. I could tunnel a bullet or even a paper clip into Jean’s brain, and she could do the same to me. I didn’t want to kill her, though. I wanted to get the projector away from her. The problem was, she might have no such reservations about killing me.

One of the possible Chances became clear, a new version with a beautiful face, slimmer, with clear, round eyes and a closed mouth. “There she is!” Jean cried, exultant, her eyes wet with tears. “There’s my child!”