Supersymmetry

CHAPTER 26

“Sandra,” Angel said. “You should take a look at this.” He was watching the feed from the module her father had planted on Alex’s phone.

“I can’t,” she said. “It puts me too close to her. Next time, I might merge with her and not come back.”

“They’ve found Jean,” he said. “At least, I’m pretty sure it’s Jean. She’s glowing—I don’t know if she’s really glowing, or if there’s something different about her that the quantum field monitor… oh no.”

“What is it?”

“She just killed someone. She waved her hand, and somebody just fell over.”

Sandra stood and gripped his arm, wanting to see, but not wanting to see. “Was it Alex? Or Sean?”

“I don’t think so.” He clenched his fists, his face pale. “She just killed another one. They can’t hurt her at all. She’s just murdering them.”

“We have to teleport there,” she said. “We have to stop her.”

“We can’t do that.”

“Yes, we can! If we have her phone, then we have her coordinates.”

“It’s too far! The error term at this distance would be on the order of half a mile. We could end up on the other side of the city, or a thousand feet in the air, or buried in rock. The one place we won’t end up is in that room.”

Sandra was crying. “It’s going to kill Alex and Sean. We have to try!”

“And even if we miraculously showed up right next to her, what would we do?” He said it gently, sadly.

“We could teleport them out of there.”

“They have Higgs projectors. If that would work, they could do it themselves.”

“Turn it off, then,” she said.

“What?”

“Turn it off. If we can’t do anything about it, I don’t want to know. I don’t want you to watch her die.”

“Wait.” His eyes were intense, watching the scene unfold. “There’s somebody else there.”

“Who?”

“He… he killed her.”

“Killed who? Killed Alex?”

“No, killed Jean. I think. That or she teleported away just as he appeared there. She’s gone, at any rate.”

Sandra couldn’t stand it anymore. She plugged back in to Angel’s viewfeed and immersed herself in the scene. The picture was grainy and gray and incomplete, the faces a blur, but she knew immediately who each person was. Tequila and Wilson and Cash and Rod were dead. She had never met any of them, but she knew their names. She knew Tequila’s sister was getting married this fall, and that Rod’s wife was six months pregnant. Alex knew them, and so Sandra did, too.

She saw Ryan Oronzi, their savior, standing in triumph where Jean had once stood. And she saw the scientists, their eyes erased, advancing. They had to get out of there. Why didn’t they just teleport away? Though she could immediately answer her own question from Alex’s knowledge: their projectors were no longer working. Besides, they had come there for a purpose. Jean was nothing, just a tool. It was the varcolac that had to be stopped.

She saw Ryan kneel at a marine’s side and pull at his belt. What was he doing? CPR? But then he stood again, and Sandra saw the knife in his hand. The metal of it glared brightly in the quantum display, standing out over the dullness of other materials. Alex didn’t see it. Her attention was caught by the approaching scientists. Sean was standing in front of her, ready to fight them. Sandra silently called to them, look, look, look! Alex did look, then, but it was too late. All she had time to see was Ryan’s mad, deranged eyes just as he swung the knife up and into her heart.

Sandra screamed. She shouted Alex’s name. There was blood everywhere, soaking Alex’s shirt and pants, flooding onto the floor. Alex collapsed. She raised no hand to stop her fall. She lay where she fell, her face on the concrete, her eyes staring wide. Sean was at her side in a moment, calling her name, but there was nothing he could do. He tried to put pressure on the wound, but with every breath, more blood poured out of her.

She was dying quickly. Alex was dying in front of her, and Sandra couldn’t even hold her hand. It was impossible, unreal. It was a grainy, gray-on-black image with no soul, utterly distant from events in Slovenia. At the same time, it was as starkly real to her as if it had been projected on fifty-foot screens in living color. It couldn’t be happening. Alex couldn’t die. She was her other self.

Sandra screamed and cried to her, though of course Alex couldn’t hear. Or maybe she could. Their eyes seemed to connect, and Alex mouthed something Sandra couldn’t understand.

A memory came, unbidden, of a party, fifteen years earlier, when Alex had first returned from the hospital. She had been in a wheelchair then, still lame from the effects of her electrocuted spine, and at the time they didn’t know if she would ever be able to walk again. They had loved each other so much then. They could finish each other’s sentences, finish each other’s thoughts almost. They were two halves of the same whole. When had the idea that they might be forced back together become so unbearable?

What had gone wrong? How had such resentment built up between them? Of all the people for her to avoid, why had she chosen her other self? And now Alex was dead, or nearly so. Sandra had never even said goodbye. She had never said she was sorry for unfair words, for time together cast aside. Now it would just be… her. Just Sandra. It did not seem possible.

She would not allow it. Sandra closed her eyes. She felt Angel’s hand on her back, but she didn’t acknowledge his presence. She knew what she had to do.

She reached out, hesitantly at first, less familiar with the concept than Alex had been. She tried to remember what it had felt like in the funeral home, when multiple versions of Alex were collapsing back together, and she had felt the same pull. She tried to recreate it.

Together again. She was Alex, and Alex was her. She was Alex and Sandra, Sandra and Alex. They were one person.

It wasn’t working. She felt a surge of panic. She didn’t know how to do this. Alex was bleeding out on the floor, and she didn’t know how to make this work.

Alex, she thought. My name is Alex. And then: Alessandra. My name is Alessandra Kelley. I am a police officer and also a physicist. I love investigating crimes, and I love science. I love to seek out, to hunt down, to discover the truth. I am two sides of the same coin. I am Alessandra.

And then it happened. There was no flash, no fireworks, no rush of energy or sense of invasion. It was so subtle she almost missed it.

She opened her eyes.

“What happened?” her mother asked. “Is Alex okay?”

Alessandra smiled, a little sadly. “Yes,” she said. “I’ll be just fine.”

Ryan stood over Alex’s dead body and grinned. He had done it. He had killed both Jean and Alex, and now he was the only one left who could warrant the varcolac’s attention. He could feel it now, entering his mind, giving him that growing sense of clarity and intellect. It had accepted his sacrifice. It had found him worthy once more.

He and the varcolac were one now, in purpose and power. Nothing could stand in his way. Barely anyone was left alive in the world who even understood what was happening, never mind who had the power to stop him. He sensed something else, too; the varcolac was stronger. It was breaking free, breaking more fully into this world. There was no stopping it now.

The marine who had been trying to save Alex’s life roared and rushed him, but Ryan flicked his fingers like he was shooing a fly, and the marine flew backward and crashed against the wall. He slumped to the floor and lay still.

Outside, someone was shouting with an amplified voice through a speaker. The man spoke in Turkish, a language Ryan wasn’t sure he had even heard spoken before, but he found now that he could understand it perfectly. The voice told those inside the building that it was surrounded, and they should surrender peacefully. A dozen armored soldiers burst into the cellar laboratory and trained their submachine guns on Ryan and the handful of other still-living people in the room.

Ryan laughed. He laughed with power and delight and invincibility. It didn’t matter what anyone thought of him anymore. It didn’t matter what they did to contain him, to push him down and marginalize him. He was the only one who mattered anymore.

Ryan tossed his supercomputer backpack and oxygen tank onto the concrete floor. He wouldn’t need them. He rose from the ground, effortlessly, and spun gracefully in the air. The soldiers shouted at him to stop, but he ignored them. They fired their tiny, insignificant weapons, and Ryan barely noticed. With a flick of his hand, they all died.

Giddy, Ryan shot up higher, passing through concrete and steel and wood like they didn’t exist. From above the roof of the Institute, he could see the Turkish soldiers arrayed in the streets around him, with their armor and guns and trucks and grenades. They would kill him, if they could. That made it self-defense.

Ryan spun, waving a hand or throwing a fist, and each gesture scattered men and their vehicles like bowling pins in a hurricane. They crashed into buildings, into each other, or were crushed by their own falling trucks. He tossed one man five hundred feet in the air and watched him fall. He made another man’s body heavier and heavier, laughing as the man tried to run away, until his body crumpled from its own weight.

It was only what they deserved. These were bad men, killers who imposed their will on others by violence. They were the sort of men who had mocked and bullied him all his life. They didn’t deserve to have their minds joined with the glorious whole. Humanity would be better off without them.

But the goal, ultimately, was not killing. When the soldiers were all dead, Ryan stopped to consider. Now was the time to make the varcolac’s vision real. It was time to bring humanity into the next stage in their evolution. He needed to start assimilating other minds into his own.

Ryan dropped back down into the cellar. Most of the people there were dead, but there was one woman, Lisa, who sat cowering behind a control station. She was a computer programmer, an intelligent woman. He would assimilate her mind, her memories, her knowledge into his own. He walked up to her, took her head and chin in his hands, and broke her neck.

No! That wasn’t what he had wanted to do. What was wrong with him? Ryan waved his hands up and down and flexed his fingers. They moved as he intended. He looked at Lisa’s dead body lying slumped on the ground. Maybe it had just been an accident. He didn’t know his own strength.

Oh well. It wasn’t like she was all that important. He would try again, and he knew just whom he would try next.

In an instant, he was back in Krakow, in the elementary school gymnasium. It was the middle of the night, and the room was empty and dark, lit only by security lights. Ryan knew, however, that Nicole had been sleeping in her office most nights. She claimed she was too busy to waste time traveling to her assigned lodging and back.

He opened the office door, and there she was, asleep on an army cot. Perfect.

Ryan leaned over her and rested his hand on her head. Her breath came in a soft rhythm. He had always secretly had a bit of a thing for her. She was intelligent, quick-witted, attractive. And the secret intelligence agent thing was, of course, pretty sexy. Now she would be his forever. And not in some temporary, physical way that would be over in a moment and regretted by both of them. Not as a slave to her beauty, manipulated into doing whatever she wanted. No. She would belong to him.

He reached into her, feeling the electrical sparks of her mind. Suddenly, she was there, connected to his thoughts. Her experiences and memories were available for him to touch and access at will. He knew her childhood fears. He knew her pleasures and her regrets. She was utterly exposed.

She resisted, of course. Her mind flailed away from him, and she woke, jerking back and reaching for the pistol under her pillow. It didn’t matter. She couldn’t hurt him, and physical distance couldn’t pull her mind away from him, not anymore. She knew he was there, in her mind. She tried to close herself off to him. Reflexively, she thought of the one piece of knowledge she must hide from him at all costs, trying to close it away, keep it hidden. And by doing so, of course, she gave it to him.

She knew the location of the nuclear weapons Turkey had recovered from Romania. The CIA had uncovered the information through a combination of human and stealth drone intelligence. If the Special Ops missions tonight were successful, another mission would be sent to take the nuclear missiles out of the equation.

Ryan twisted his hand, and Nicole’s heart ruptured. He felt her thoughts slipping away. No, no, no! He hadn’t meant to do that! She was supposed to join with him! He reached out, trying to repair her heart, to put it back together, or at the least to pull her mind into him before it was gone altogether, but it was too late. Her bulging eyes stared into his as she died, and he could see the hatred there.

He hated himself. And then he knew. The varcolac was far superior to humanity, so Ryan had assumed it was above such base instincts as deceit. But of course, the varcolac was a sophisticated, intelligent being, capable of doing anything to achieve its desired outcome. It should have come as no surprise to him that the varcolac could lie.

It had never had any intention of uniting humanity into a single, efficient mind. It needed no companion with whom to travel the stars. The varcolac was, by definition, one. There was nothing it wanted from humanity that it could not simply take. He thought he had understood it, but he had understood nothing. He didn’t know what the varcolac wanted, or why. How could he have deceived himself into thinking he could understand the motivations of such a creature? The varcolac was varelse after all.

Ryan didn’t want to be the One anymore. He was done with this. He wanted to go back home to his lab and study the mathematics of particle physics. He wanted to eat French fries and drink Coke until two o’clock in the morning, immersed in solving the latest puzzle. But he was quite sure it was too late for that. He had thought he was the varcolac’s equal, or at least enough that it saw him as a kindred spirit. Now he realized he was just of sufficient intelligence to be its disposable slave.

A single, burning desire sliced through his self-loathing: the desire to teleport to the Romanian missile silo. Ryan knew the desire had not come from him, but he felt it more powerfully than any of his own desires, so strongly that he barely questioned it. Nicole’s office disappeared and was replaced by the dark inside of a silo, with the smell of dust and machine oil and wet metal. The darkness was nearly complete, but Ryan could see like it was bright day. The space was dominated by a white rocket decorated with severe-looking Cyrillic lettering. He had no idea how to tell a standard missile from a nuclear one, though the radiation symbols on doors and walls were a clue.

A burning desire filled him to fire a nuclear missile at Krakow.

No. Ryan resisted. This was not the plan. He had killed soldiers who were trying to kill him, sure. But he had planned to raise humanity to a new evolutionary plane, not murder millions. He wanted to fire the missile, like a starving man wanted food, but he would not do it. This was not his desire. It was false, placed there by the varcolac to control him. He would not be a slave. He planted his feet and clenched his eyes shut. He would not do it.

Then the pain hit him. Pure, unimaginable pain. His whole body was on fire. He screamed and writhed and fell to the ground. He didn’t know such pain was possible. It was like every nerve was being touched directly with a red hot iron.

The pain stopped. Then once again, the desire, hot and radiant with promised pleasure, to fire the missile. Just one. None of those people cared about him anyway. They were all going to die, one way or another. And he wanted to fire the missile. He needed to.

The varcolac had learned the inner workings of his mind. It knew how to apply pleasure and pain. It knew what motivated him and where he was weak.

The pain came back, and this time it didn’t stop. It rolled over his body in waves. The body was where humans were weak, and the varcolac knew it now. Ryan collapsed to the ground, helpless, unable to think of anything but continuous, unendurable pain. He wanted to die. Anything to stop it. But he knew the varcolac would not let him die until he did what it wanted.

As soon as he thought that, the pain stopped. Desire. Like a glass of water after three days with none. Fire the missile.

He couldn’t win. Not against this. He was the varcolac’s slave, as surely as any poor soul whipped and beaten by his own kind. Ryan stumbled to the control panel. With the varcolac’s intelligence and powers, he didn’t have to worry about passwords or special keys. All that security was just layers wrapped around a simple electrical current applied to a wire. He reached straight through it all to the firing mechanism and induced the needed current.

The missile roared as engines engaged. Alarms sounded, vying with the mechanical groan of the silo doors opening. The entire silo rose on an elevator, lifting out of its underground hiding place. Ryan could see stars through the gap above.

A surge of pleasure ran through him as the missile ignited and leapt off of its platform and into the sky, leaving a cloud of fire and black smoke. He doubted anyone was supposed to be standing in the silo when the missile was fired, but it couldn’t harm him. The heat rushed around him, intensifying the sense of pleasure and goodness he felt. He knew that it wasn’t right, that the varcolac was just making him feel that way, but he had no strength left to resist.

He heard the varcolac’s voice as clearly as if it had been spoken in his ear. Another. Again.

“Alessandra,” she said. “Use the full name. I’m not simply Alex or Sandra. I’m Alessandra again.”

Angel looked unsettled, as if he didn’t know whether to hug her or run away. Her mother, on the other hand, took the change in stride. She gave Alessandra’s head a quick kiss. “What happened out there?”

Alessandra’s head was still pounding. Apparently resolving the long-standing probability wave that separated them didn’t remove the results of her concussion. Angel had teleported out and brought back some Ibuprofen earlier, but it wasn’t cutting the pain nearly enough. She was tempted to ask him to go steal some Vicodin.

“Ryan Oronzi is working for the varcolac,” Alessandra said. “Or it’s possessing him, or something. He has powers he shouldn’t have, and he’s using them to do what the varcolac wants. He tried to kill me—to kill Alex—just to please it. I should have known, the way he talked about it before, as if he admired it or wanted to be just like it.”

“What about Sean?” her mother asked. She used a businesslike tone, but Alessandra could see the desperation in her eyes.

“The last I saw, he was still alive. He’s smart and strong, Mom. He’ll find a way.” She tried to sound like she meant it, though all she could think of was the casual way Jean had killed her friends. Could he really survive against a varcolac?

“What about you?” Angel asked. “How do you feel?”

“Okay, I guess. My head is about to explode, but besides that…”

“Not physically—I mean, about what just happened. You and your sister… I mean… you…”

Alessandra shook her head. “I’m not thinking about that right now. I haven’t had time to process what it means.” She didn’t want to think too hard about it. Who was she now? What had she lost? She remembered not wanting this to happen, both as Alex and as Sandra, each of whom had feared they would lose their identities. Now that it had happened, now that she was just her, Alessandra, she wasn’t sure it was such a bad thing. But did that mean that it wasn’t? Would her prior selves have agreed? Or were they dead, leaving only her… whoever she was?

She couldn’t think about it, not now.

“What’s that thing in the middle of the room?” Angel said. He pointed to the 3D display of Ryan’s universe.

Alessandra raised an eyebrow, wondering at the question. “It’s a photoionization microscopy display, used to visualize quantum n-dimensional data in an intuitive, three-dimensional arrangement.”

His eyebrows went up. “Wow. It’s really true.”

“What?”

“Sandra didn’t know that. A few hours ago, she said she didn’t know what that thing was.”

He was right. She could remember saying she didn’t know. She could even remember not knowing. But now she knew now exactly what it was and how it worked.

“My father knew this would happen,” she said. “At least, he knew the probability field was weakening, making it more likely that… we… would come together.” She had started to say, “Alex and I,” or else, “Sandra and I,” but neither seemed right. Although, neither did referring to either of her previous selves as “she.” The pronouns were confusing.

“And his data seemed to suggest that Oronzi’s work was the cause,” Angel said. “But how could that be? After all this time, what could have made a difference?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe his work just shook things up.” It wasn’t an answer the physicist part of her was satisfied with, but at this point she really didn’t have a better one.

Angel stroked his chin. “It must have been essentially the same technology that you used fifteen years ago, right? The wave didn’t resolve then. The technology was still there. But the varcolac wasn’t.”

“What do you mean?”

“According to your story, you split at exactly the same time that the varcolac was shut out of our universe. The standing probability wave was created at that moment.”

“You’re saying the varcolac had something to do with it?”

“I’m saying, what if it was your probability wave that kept the varcolac from returning? For years and years, you two are completely separate, and there’s no sign of the varcolac. Then as soon as the wave starts to lose strength, the varcolac starts interacting in the world again. It can’t be a coincidence. I’m wondering if one is the cause of the other.”

“Or if both have the same cause,” she said. Then she sat up, ignoring the sudden throb of pain in her head. “That’s it!”

“What’s it?”

“You’re right. You must be. I always wondered why the varcolac was going after Alex and me. It seemed to have a specific vendetta, showing up wherever we were. I mean, why kill us? It was like it wanted revenge for shutting it out fifteen years ago. But what if you’re right, and it was our standing probability wave that it was trying to kill? Maybe the wave had been weakening, allowing it access, but it wasn’t completely gone. It was still preventing the varcolac from fully interacting with our world.

“It makes sense of a lot of things. It explains why it wanted to kill us particularly. It also explains why it failed, despite its power—it’s not at its full strength. It’s only partially able to manipulate things in our universe. Not only that, but it explains why it wasn’t able to possess us directly, despite seeming to be able to possess anyone around us and use them to attack.”

“What about your father? The varcolac attacked him first, not you.”

“No, it didn’t. Remember, it killed him by sending a particle back in time.”

“I don’t understand.”

“My dad knew about the standing wave. If we’re right, he knew it was what was keeping the varcolac out. What if he figured out a way to delay its collapse or even strengthen it? It would have preserved us—me—as two different people, and it would have kept the varcolac away. But then, what if after he did so, the varcolac had to attack in a different way, by sending the Higgs singlet back in time to kill him before he figured it out in the first place?”

Angel held her gaze intently. “Let’s say that’s right. What happened to the original timeline? In which your father defeated the varcolac and preserved you as two separate people?”

Alessandra pressed her lips together and shook her head. “It was destroyed. Erased. A new history began with the stadium disaster.”

“How do you know?”

She shrugged. “I don’t entirely know. But the multiverse theories have always been a bit fanciful. It’s hard to believe that entirely new universes are being created all the time, whenever any particle’s probability wave collapses. The math certainly doesn’t require it. Remember Ryan’s illustration with the billiard balls? There’s only one timeline. The universe solves the equation so that causality is preserved.”

“You’re saying that it creates a loop? That the changed event in the past causes a situation that results in the particle being sent back in time to change the past?”

“Pretty much. Not in the same way, necessarily, but somehow a sequence of particles will cause that one to be created and sent back with the exact properties needed to cause this timeline. It sounds crazy, but the math works out. The solutions are possible, and the universe finds them.”

“What would happen if we sent a particle back in time to smash into the varcolac’s particle, and we stopped it from destroying the stadium and killing your father?” Angel asked.

Alessandra gave a rueful smile. “We would all die.”

“What? What do you mean?”

“This timeline, in which you are I are living, would be erased. We would cease to exist—to have ever existed. Time would be recreated from that point forward. The stadium would never have been destroyed. My father would live, perhaps long enough to defeat the varcolac, but you and I would never know it.”

“What do you mean? We would still be alive, too.”

“No. Other very similar people named Angel and Sandra and Alex would still be alive. But they wouldn’t be us. They wouldn’t have our memories or experiences. They would be as different from us as Sandra and Alex were from each other. Different options, different choices, different people.”

Angel’s forehead wrinkled at the thought. “I see what you’re saying,” he said. “I wouldn’t have thought of it that way, but then, I haven’t lived side by side with an alternate me for the last fifteen years.”

“Sandra!” her mother called. Alessandra thought about correcting the name, but she heard the concern in her mother’s voice. Her mother had been sitting in a corner of the lab, reading something on her phone.

“What is it?” Alessandra asked.

“You’d better look at this,” her mother said.

She held up the phone. The news headlines read: NUCLEAR BLAST DESTROYS KRAKOW. WAR DECLARED.

Angel caught her eye. We have to do something, he seemed to say. He was looking to her for a solution. But what could she possibly do?