Supersymmetry

CHAPTER 12

“Dr. Oronzi!” Alex said. He was just sitting there on the bed, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

“Please, call me Ryan.”

“Fine. But how did you find me here?”

“The module you stole uses an unclassified map server that we host outside of the lab. Whenever you teleport, it logs your location. We didn’t want anyone to teleport and not know where they ended up.” He chuckled. “You chose a pretty wet itinerary.”

Alex narrowed her eyes. “I didn’t want to die. How did you teleport in here so precisely?”

“I had your actual location to key off of. Normally, we have to do the same thing—either aim for water, or, more commonly, have someone waiting at the destination already to make more accurate measurements. I wasn’t mocking you; it was smart not to trust the data.”

Alex still stood with her back to the door. Though she supposed it would do no good to run from a man who could track her location and teleport to wherever she went. It was a disturbing thought. Though if she simply powered down her eyejack lenses, he would lose his track. And she was pretty sure she could outrun him.

She stepped into the room. There was no chair, but the dresser was low and bare, so she hopped up to sit on top of it. “You’ve been keeping secrets,” she said. “This technology can do more than you’ve been letting on.”

He shrugged. “It’s unproven research. Not ready for prime time.”

“Yeah? Or did you just want to keep it to yourself?”

“The government pays the bills. They know what I’m doing.”

Alex shook her head, still amazed. “I get the teleportation thing, at least partially,” she said. “We were already using tunneling concepts to shift the location of objects. But invisibility? How is that remotely possible?”

“Not that hard, really,” Oronzi said. “The Higgs projector makes it possible, but it’s just a matter of recalculating Maxwell’s equations for each photon that comes into the field, so that a new photon is released on the other side with the same direction and energy, as if the first had never been captured. There’s actually a small time delay, but not so much that anyone would ever notice.”

Alex crossed her arms and examined him. “So what do you want from me?”

“You promised you would tell me what you know about the varcolac. I did my part: if not for me, you would have been caught by now for certain.”

Alex felt a sense of indignation rising up in her, although he was probably right. “Maybe you underestimate me.”

He shrugged, acknowledging the point. “It doesn’t matter. What matters is that I need to know everything I can about this thing. I need to know how to beat it.”

Alex’s eyes were adjusting to the dim light, and she saw how haggard he looked. “Haven’t you been sleeping?”

“I’ve been fighting this thing for weeks. I barely go to sleep, because I’m afraid it might break through my equations during the night. And now you tell me that it’s just been playing with me all this time, tricking me into doing what it wants.”

“I don’t know that ‘tricking’ is the right word,” Alex said. “It’s so different from us, so alien, that I don’t know if it can understand why we do things. It doesn’t intentionally deceive. I think it’s just solving the probability equations to make what it wants the most likely outcome.”

Oronzi pursed his lips. “I don’t know about that. It’s been pretty deceptive.”

“Has it? Can it really put itself in our place and predict what we would do with certain stimuli as opposed to others? Maybe it can to some extent, but I would guess it’s more in a mathematical way than by sympathy or imagination.”

“What does it want?”

“I don’t know. We never did know. It kills casually, as if death means nothing to it. And yet it knows we’re there. It nearly electrocuted my mother and my brother, but was it trying to kill or torture them? Or does its kind communicate through electrical energy? Or feed off of it? We don’t know if it meant us harm or not, but it harmed us all the same.”

“How did you get rid of it?”

“We shut down the super collider.”

Oronzi blinked. “Seriously?”

Alex pulled her feet up onto the dresser and hugged her knees. “The collider powers hundreds of huge electromagnets at thousands of volts per second. It has a huge electric potential, and the varcolac was tapping into that. We think it was also feeding off of the exotic particles the collider produced. At any rate, once we shut it down, the varcolac was gone.”

“Only this time, it’s got its own universe to draw power from,” Oronzi said. “Thanks to me.”

“Can’t you shut down the universe? You created it, after all.”

Oronzi shook his head. “I’ve tried. It’s self-sufficient now. It may be small by universe standards, but it’s a universe. It’s expanding in its own space-time, generating its own exotic particles by the trillions. Thousands of years from now, when it spreads out enough, it may form its own stars. Maybe even its own form of life. Right now, though, it’s just an incredibly hot ball of energy. There’s no way I can destroy it.”

“Fifteen years ago, the varcolac was tied to the collider. It couldn’t go very far from it. This varcolac may be tied to your lab in the same way.”

“Unless its range is a factor of the amount of energy available,” Oronzi said. “We’re talking 10²³ times more energy than the collider. That might give it a little more room to wander.”

“We should talk to my father,” Alex said. “He studied it before. He might have a better idea.”

A soft tap sounded three times against the door. Alex froze. It was probably just Marta coming back to give her a blanket, or to ask why she could hear a man’s voice in the room. The police wouldn’t rap softly; they would shout to announce themselves, or else just break down the door. It didn’t matter. If need be, she could simply teleport away and then find a new place to hide.

Alex opened the door. When she saw who was on the other side, she almost did teleport away.

“Sandra?”

Sandra stood at the door in her police uniform, radio and gun strapped to her belt. “Hi, Alex.”

Alex crossed her arms. “Are you here to turn me in?”

“No. Though I really should. I risked my career by not telling them where you are.”

“Then why didn’t you tell them?”

Sandra paused. “Look, are you going to let me in, or what?”

Alex stood aside to let her into the room, and Sandra stepped inside. Oronzi looked back and forth between the two of them. “Wow, you two really do look exactly alike, don’t you?”

“Sandra, this is Dr. Oronzi, chief physicist at the super collider,” Alex said.

Oronzi stood. “Please call me Ryan,” he said. He extended a hand, but Sandra ignored it.

“Ryan Oronzi,” Sandra said. “I should have known.”

“And what is that supposed to mean?” Alex shut the door, already struggling with the fury and inadequacy she always felt when her twin was around.

“It means, I should have known you would be hanging out with your partner in idiocy.”

Alex couldn’t believe it. Sandra had met the man for ten seconds, and she was already insulting him. “Ryan is no idiot.”

“Maybe not, but you are. What were you thinking?” Sandra stood with her arms crossed in the middle of the room, glaring at Alex. “The last time somebody played with that technology, it nearly got us all killed.”

“I know that. Don’t you think I know that?” Alex said.

“Then why on earth did you do it? You brought the varcolac back, and for what?”

“I didn’t know that’s what we were doing,” Alex protested. It sounded weak, even to her ears. True, she hadn’t known, exactly. But she had realized how similar the technology was to what Brian Vanderhall and Jean Massey had been playing with years before.

“Didn’t know? For heaven’s sake, Alex. I knew what it was the first time I saw a video of your demo.”

“You saw a video?” Ryan asked.

Sandra waved a hand in dismissal. “The feds played one for me.”

“That’s supposed to be classified,” he said. “You don’t have a clearance for that.”

“Hardly the greatest of our concerns. Have you two figured out what we’re going to do?”

“Do?”

“To kill the varcolac. Or at least to send it back to where it came from.”

“It is back where it came from,” Ryan said. “At least for the moment. Though I don’t think I can keep it there for long.”

Alex took a deep breath. “I was just saying how we should get Dad involved. He might have some ideas.”

Sandra shook her head, and all the bellicosity drained from her face. “You don’t know, do you?”

Alex could see it in her eyes. She could see it, and she knew, but she couldn’t bear to hear it spoken. It was some trick, some malicious prank of Sandra’s to teach her a lesson. It couldn’t be true. “No,” she said. “Don’t say it. No.”

“He’s dead.”

The word hung in the room. Alex kept shaking her head, willing it away. It was not possible. Finally, she whispered, “How?”

“In the stadium.”

“No,” Alex said, and there was force behind it now. “No, that’s not true. He was alive this morning. Mom said he had just been there, sitting in the kitchen. She said you were there with him.”

“He split. I did see him at the house this morning, but I also saw his body at the stadium. So there were two versions. Then the second version—the one sitting in the kitchen—disappeared with no trace. You know what that means.” Sandra seemed to lose all her energy. There were no chairs, so she sank down to sit on the floor. “The varcolac killed him.”

“I don’t understand,” Alex said. “You’re saying it was the varcolac that destroyed the stadium?”

“Yes,” Sandra said.

Ryan cleared his throat. “Not possible. The creature broke out for the first time at 11:08 this morning.”

“Are you sure of that?”

“Absolutely. I’ve been tracking its progress for weeks. I have alarms set to tell me when it solves another equation and breaks through another layer. This morning was the first time, and it lasted only six minutes before I got it back under control.”

“In that case, I have some data for you to look at,” Sandra said.

Alex heard a ping, indicating Sandra was trying to share a viewfeed to her eyejack. She accepted it automatically, but her head was spinning. Was this all their father’s death meant to Sandra? Data? She knew Sandra had never been as close to Dad as she was, but she wouldn’t have expected this coldness from her.

“This is force vector data from the stadium site, connecting known objects to their final positions,” Sandra said. “And here is an overlay using an equation Dad suggested before…” She swallowed. “I mean, when I was with him this morning. The pattern only makes sense using a ten-dimensional construct.”

Ryan stood up from the bed and spun in place, examining the data through his own eyejack. “Extraordinary.”

“Parabolic solutions didn’t work,” Sandra said. “We couldn’t figure out what kind of single or even multiple force would have caused the objects to end up where they did. It wasn’t until Dad suggested trying a ten-dimensional equation that we could nail down a single point of origin.”

“This was definitely not accomplished by any human being,” Ryan said.

“Why not?” Alex asked.

“Because I couldn’t have done it.”

“I told you,” Sandra said. “The varcolac destroyed the stadium.”

Alex couldn’t believe it. Sandra was trying to blame their father’s death on her. After all that had happened in the last twenty-four hours, all she could think of was assigning blame. “It wasn’t the varcolac. Ryan just told you it didn’t even break out until this morning.”

“I don’t know what to say, then,” Sandra said. “Is somebody else out there releasing multidimensional quantum creatures into the world?”

“Hang on,” Ryan said. “Think about it.” He stretched his pudgy fingers back, cracking them loudly. “I think we need to consider the possibility that the varcolac, while free in our universe from 11:08 to 11:14 this morning, initiated the destruction of the stadium at 9:35 last night.”

Alex knew exactly what he meant, but it was ridiculous. Impossible. “Time travel?” she said, letting the scorn drip from her voice. “That’s pure fantasy. I can’t believe you would even suggest it.”

“Actually, it explains the nature of this data,” Ryan said. “It could have used a reverse-time Higgs singlet. The time parameter would require this kind of dimensional complexity…”

“No. Absolutely not.” Alex felt angry at him for even suggesting it. “There is no way we caused that stadium to blow. It happened the night before.”

“It’s not your fault,” Sandra said.

“You’d better believe it’s not my fault! I was just doing my job. I didn’t know there was a varcolac involved. I didn’t let it get free. That was him!” She jabbed an accusing finger at Ryan. “And I certainly didn’t send it back in time to kill my father and thousands of other people!”

Sandra stood and held out a tentative hand as if to pat Alex on the shoulder. “You couldn’t have known.”

Alex didn’t want to cry, but once she started, she couldn’t stop. “Yes, I could,” she said, the tears running freely. “I could have known. You were right. I should have said something. I didn’t want to believe it.”

Sandra slowly wrapped her arms around her. “It’s not your fault,” she said. “But we’ll make it right.” Alex sank her head against her sister’s shoulders. She didn’t say anything, but she knew that Sandra was wrong. Thousands were dead, her father among them. It could never be made right again.