Superposition

^{CHAPTER 39}

The lights went out. One moment, the varcolac was holding Claire over the wires; the next, the room was plunged into complete darkness. Jacob had done it!

“Run!” I shouted. I didn’t know if the varcolac was still there, but I didn’t want to wait around to find out. I raced toward where I thought Claire had been and nearly tripped over her where she lay, slumped on the floor. I threw her over my shoulder and groped blindly toward the exit, hoping that everyone else was headed the same way. A second later, an arc of electricity stabbed through the darkness into my body, and once again I was thrown back onto the floor.

The lights came back on, more feebly this time, but enough to see that no one had made it out.

“It must control the backup generators,” Marek said. He, too, was lying on the floor, and I assumed he’d found out that our electric cages were operational again in much the same way I had. I sat up and cradled Claire in my arms.

The varcolac cocked its head, sniffed the air, and then vanished. I closed my eyes and could see where the other Jacob was in the tunnel.

Get out of there, I thought. I think it’s coming for you.

Claire moaned and opened her eyes. I stroked her hair and kissed her forehead. I could see places where her skin was burned in lightning fork patterns.

Alex was crying softly. “This is all my fault,” she said.

“No,” Elena said. “No, it’s not.”

“I ran,” Alex said. “At the house. I was a coward; I just ran away and left you and Claire and Sean to die. If I’d stayed, if I’d fought…”

“If you’d stayed, you would have been killed with the rest,” I said. “You couldn’t have done anything. I couldn’t have done anything if I’d been there, either.” The words prompted a pang in my own conscience, however. If I had been there with my family instead of off on a wild goose chase to find Brian, what might have been different?

“I could have warned them. Maybe they could have gotten away, too,” Alex said.

“Look around you. They’re here. They’re alive.” At least for the moment, I didn’t say.

“I don’t want to be a coward,” Alex said.

“You found Lily Lin. You found the viewfeed that proved that Mom and Claire and Sean and Alessandra were still alive,” I said.

“That was skill with a network, not courage,” Alex said. “Next time, I don’t want to be the one who runs away.”

“Listen, if you get a chance, you run,” I said. “Don’t sacrifice yourself out of some stupid idea of heroism. You’re no good to anyone dead.”

I wanted to say more, but I was interrupted by the reappearance of the varcolac. In one of its hands, held as easily as if he weighed nothing, was Jacob, limp and unconscious. In its other hand was the only remaining Higgs projector.

It dropped Jacob on the floor. The projector—the last copy of it available on Earth, as far as I knew—flared with light and disintegrated. The varcolac stepped across the wires without effect and stopped in Sean’s square. Sean looked up at it in silent horror.

Dread gripped my throat. Why was it doing this? Was it malicious or just curious? Did it know it was hurting them? Did it care? Sean was fragile; he always had been. I didn’t know if he could withstand a prolonged electric shock. If I couldn’t stop this now, there was a very good chance that Sean would die.

The varcolac grabbed him by the collar, ignoring his struggles, and rotated like a steel crane toward the wires. The lightning arced into Sean’s body, and he screamed and danced and jerked.

I stood paralyzed, overcome with terror and panic. Claire and Alessandra were crying; Elena was shouting Sean’s name. Marek had his hands balled in fists, as helpless as I was. Alex was yanking again on the drain cover in her square.

There was no time for cleverness, no way to climb up or around, no way to distract the varcolac from its task. I had heard that a dog could ram its way through an invisible fence if it was determined enough. I knew it was a bad analogy—a dog’s electric fence was intended to keep him out by small shocks of pain, not throw him back by sheer voltage. Even so, it was the only chance I had. If I killed myself trying, we could hardly be any worse off.

Starting from the far side of my square, I ran at the fence, head down, barreling forward with all the speed and strength I could muster. I shouted an animal cry of determination and rage and plowed into the barrier with every intention of running straight through it and tackling Sean away from the wires and the varcolac.

I didn’t make it. By sheer inertia, I pushed a few inches farther than I had before, but I was still hurled back into my square, the shock snapping my head back with skull-cracking force against the concrete. Pain flooded my mind, I saw the galaxies of lights again, and suddenly my vision split and I was two people at once. My memories flashed through my mind. I lashed out with a two-punch combination to the policeman’s face at the same time that I peacefully accepted the handcuffs. I saw the back of the police car and the questioning at the station and my first night in jail; at the same time, I drove into Philadelphia to find Colin with Marek and Alex and slept in Colin’s safe house. It was finally happening. The probability wave was collapsing. Jacob and I were merging back together.

The memories clashed and vied for ascendancy. At times, I slipped into one viewpoint and thought of that one as the real me and the other as the imposter. I tried to claw my way up, back out into consciousness, but my identity was fractured and my mind overwhelmed. I couldn’t let go of either Jacob. They were both me.

The later visions seemed to stretch farther apart, like having one foot on land and one in a canoe as it drifts away from shore. We no longer fit in a single mind, but the wave was collapsing. There could be only one Jacob Kelley.

We were different, but there was much we had in common. We both loved Elena and Claire and Sean and Alessandra. Sean was suffering, dying. We had to help him. I stopped fighting, and just let it happen. I felt an internal click, as of two machined parts coming together, and without understanding quite what I had gained or lost, I knew I was one person again.

I opened my eyes. Sean was still screaming, the others yelling and crying. The square where my double had been was now empty. The air was filled with acrid smoke and the smell of burning flesh. Sean! I had to try again to reach him.

I pushed myself up, but my body betrayed me, muscles spasming and dropping me back to the floor. How long had Sean been held in the wires? My sense of time was completely lost. Through the haze, I saw Alex yanking off her socks and shoes. There was a small amount of water puddled in the gaps around the drain, and she splashed her hands in it, followed by her feet. I tried again to stand, and this time I managed a shaky vertical. Alex planted her feet on the grate and knelt in front of it, holding her hands forward as if she was going to push something. What was she doing?

I figured it out just as she uncoiled like a spring, kicking forward hard with her legs and straightening her body with her arms outstretched toward the wire bundle. “No!” I shouted, but it was too late. The force of her kick was hard enough that she reached the bundle and grasped it just as electricity jolted through her wet hands, down the length of her body, and across her wet feet to the grounded drain pipe.

It worked perfectly. I watched, horrified, as an unspeakable number of volts arced through her body in a blazing flash, and then everything went dark.

Or not quite dark. The varcolac glowed. It dropped Sean, who slumped to the floor. I ran and scooped Sean up. The electric fences were no longer operational. Light streamed from the varcolac in every direction, and then it seemed to dissolve, disintegrating into photons just as the steel pipe had done in the bunker so long ago. When it dwindled to a single point in space, there was a pulse of sound, like a deep bass drum.

“Run!” I shouted. I yanked Claire and Elena up and pushed everyone toward the open door. “Get out of here!”

The point exploded. The air shimmered, and the cinder block walls cracked. The ceiling crumbled, dropping pieces of masonry into the room.

“Wait!” Alessandra said. She stood rooted, staring at her double. Alex’s body was stretched motionless across the floor, her skin and clothes blackened. “Is she… did she…?”

“Go!” I said. I pushed her out the door, and looked back at Alex. Everything in me screamed to go back for her. I wanted to believe she could still be alive, even though I knew it was impossible. But I couldn’t carry both her and Sean, and to try would be to endanger Sean. He was alive. I had to save him. Crying, I pushed out of the door after the others, just as the ceiling collapsed.

“Keep running!” I said. We ran up two flights of stairs and burst out into the accelerator tunnel. The varcolac was gone, but that didn’t mean we were safe. The explosion had rocked the tunnel foundation and fired who knew what kinds of exotic particles through us and all the collider equipment. Cracks snaked across the tunnel roof and along the floor.

We ran, Claire in the lead, followed by Alessandra and then Marek and Elena. Carrying Sean, I fell behind, but not out of earshot. “Hide in the bunker!” I shouted.

We could see the entrance to the CATHIE bunker just ahead, where only hours before the varcolacs had surrounded us. I hoped it would be better protection than the open tunnel, where chunks of rock were already falling from the crumbling ceiling.

Before we could reach it, a large chunk of concrete landed on the back of Marek’s leg, and he went down. “Go,” he said. “It’s just my ankle. I’m right behind you.”

“I’ll come back for you,” I said.

I ran past him with Sean and ducked into the bunker, where the others were already gathered. I placed Sean in Elena’s open arms, and then stopped, staring at them. All four of my family members had begun to shimmer, flickering back and forth between one image and another. Behind Elena and Claire and Sean, I saw their bodies as I had found them in the house, twisted and lifeless. Behind Alessandra’s face, I could see Alex as she was now, blackened and burned by electricity. What was happening to them? Was this how I had looked when my probability wave had collapsed? Each of them wavered between themselves and their double, only in their case, each of their doubles was dead.

But hadn’t Elena and Claire and Sean had already resolved to these versions of themselves? Their bodies had disappeared. Yet here they were, flickering between the two possible paths their lives had taken. Their quantum state must have been linked to the varcolac’s, a kind of entanglement that forced all states linked to its existence to reach a final resolution, one way or another, now that it was gone. From a quantum perspective, it was simply a matter of probability. A coin toss whether they would live or die.

I stared at them, unable to move. There was nothing I could do to change what was going to happen. But I could help Marek. With a cry, I tore my gaze away and raced back into the corridor. Marek had pulled his leg free, but he couldn’t put any weight on it. I draped one of his arms over my shoulder and supported him like a crutch. Together, we hobbled back toward the bunker.

We had only taken a few steps when the ceiling came down on top of us.