Superposition

by David Walton

  “Mr. Kelley,” Judge Roswell said in her stern voice. Her face was too pleasant to pull it off effectively, and she looked more like a scolding grandmother than a fierce authority figure, but I knew her affable appearance wouldn’t stop her from holding me in contempt of court, so I sat down quickly.

  “I’m sorry, Your Honor,” I said.

  “Mr. Sheppard, is there a point to this line of questioning?”

  Terry glared at me. “I apologize, Your Honor. I have no further questions.”

  CHAPTER 17

  UP-SPIN

  I needed help. Colin had given us a place to stay, at least for the time being, but I needed to figure out what was happening. I needed to find out if it was possible that a different version of my family was still alive, and if so, where they might be. Marek was self-employed, so he had some flexibility, but he still had to fulfill his contracts, not just stay with me all the time. Besides, Ava—his wife and Elena’s sister—hadn’t been pleased that he had been gone all night without calling, and she didn’t like his explanation that he had been with me. She had seen the headlines, too. I only heard one side of the conversation, but she sounded furious and upset.

  I left Alessandra in Colin’s safe house and borrowed Colin’s car. Jean Massey lived in a two-story condominium in Princeton, not far from the college. She understood the physics involved, and she worked at the NJSC. I couldn’t just stroll around the facility asking people if they’d seen my wife and kids. The police would still be crawling everywhere, and I was a murder suspect. Jean could ask around though, if she was willing.

  She answered the door, and when she saw me, her eyes flew open wide. “Jacob? Is that really you?”

  She had a smartpaper in her hand, and I could see the headline on the newsfeed. She knew I had been arrested. “I can explain,” I said. “May I come in?”

  “Of course.” She held the door open, briefly looking out past me to see if anyone else was there. “What’s going on, Jacob? The police were all over the facility yesterday, looking for you, and the paper this morning said you had been arrested and your family was missing.”

  “It’s a long story,” I said.

  She pointed me to a seat in her living room and offered me coffee. The room was sparsely decorated, with a few inexpensive prints and personal knick-knacks. A baby swing sat in a corner, and there was a tiny pacifier on the coffee table next to a stack of diapers and scattered physics journals.

  “I left you in Brian’s office, and then I never heard from you again,” Jean said. “Then the police came and said Brian was dead and asked all sorts of questions about you, and then this . . .” She held up the news article. “Why aren’t you in prison? Are you out on bail?”

  I explained everything as best I could. I told her about finding Brian in the bunker, about the varcolac, and about seeing the second Brian, and what he had told me. I told her about racing home and finding my family dead, escaping the varcolac again, and evading the police.

  She asked a lot of questions, but she didn’t once question my sanity or the truth of what I was saying. She seemed to have no trouble at all accepting the idea that there were two of me. I figured she’d spent so much time thinking about quantum physics that it seemed more natural to her than the normal world.

  “I’m so sorry about your family,” she said. “Really, I can’t imagine.”

  I didn’t want to dwell on that. I had a quantum puzzle to figure out and the very real possibility that my family was not dead. I had to keep pushing forward or I would go mad. “The varcolac is a probabilistic entity, like a particle,” I said. “I think that contact with him can cause splits, where more than one possible path exists for a time.”

  Jean thought about it. “So how many splits have there been?” she asked.

  I started listing them on my fingers. “Brian was the first,” I said. “One version of him I found in the bunker, the other I met up with in the forest. Both versions are now dead, and the second body disappeared, so I assume that means the split has resolved. Then, if my theory is right, my family split, one version leaving the house before the varcolac arrived, and the other version . . .” It was still hard for me to say it aloud. “Their other versions were killed, by the varcolac. We don’t know if that split has resolved or not. Finally, me. I’m both here and in prison, so we know my split hasn’t resolved yet.”

  “But that means that Alessandra split twice,” Jean pointed out.

  I thought about it. “You’re right. The first time, she would have split with the rest of the family, one version heading out and the other staying home. Then she split again, one version running away immediately, and the other version not running until after I had seen her.”

  “And that second split has already resolved,” Jean said.

  I took a sip of coffee. It was fresh, a quality brand, and it tasted good. “I think the splits resolve when the two paths meet—or become similar enough,” I said. “Both versions of her were in the street, running away from the house, so they merged again. The two versions of me are still drastically different, though, so we haven’t resolved.”

  “It still doesn’t quite make sense to me,” Jean said. “Before it resolves, a particle exists in many places and times, not just two. If this is really possible, why aren’t people splitting all the time, and into millions of different versions?”

  “I think they might be,” I said. I’d been thinking about this on the drive over. “I think that any time anyone comes in contact with the varcolac, there are a million possible paths that split off. Only, most of them resolve again, almost instantaneously, because they’re so similar to each other, and you never know it. It’s only when those paths are very different—the difference between meeting the varcolac and leaving the house before it arrives, for instance—that the paths persist.”

  “So half a million possible paths resolved to them getting away, and half a million resolved to them not getting away, leaving two distinct paths,” Jean said.

  “I think so. When I ran away from the varcolac, I ran out the back door,” I said. “If it had come after me a little to the right, however, I might have run out the front door. That could have been the difference between escaping the police and being arrested.” I heard crying upstairs. “Is that your daughter?” I asked.

  “Yes. Nick will get her. Your reasoning sounds solid,” she said. “Crazy, but solid.”

  “Really? You believe me?”

  She shrugged. “I’ve known you for a lot of years, Jacob. If that’s what you say happened, I believe it.”

  I heard footsteps on the stairs, and then Nick Massey appeared, carrying a baby girl in a pink, cotton dress. I stood and shook his hand. I’d met him a few times before, but didn’t know him well.

  “And this must be Chance,” I said. I looked down at her and frowned. She had a very round face, small chin, almond-shaped eyes, and a large, protruding tongue. She was cute, but I recognized the pattern of her features. I was pretty sure that Chance had Down Syndrome. I looked at Jean. “She’s beautiful,” I said.

  Jean looked away, but not before I saw the pain in her eyes. She picked up my empty coffee mug. “Can I get you another cup?” she asked.

  “Sure. Thanks,” I said.

  When she left the room, Nick shook his head. “Jean didn’t tell you, did she?”

  “She didn’t mention it,” I said. I remembered Jean’s reluctance to talk about her daughter when she had first let me into Brian’s office.

  “She didn’t show you a picture, either, did she?”

  “No,” I said.

  “She never does. It hit her pretty hard.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “Don’t be.” Nick picked up the pacifier and slipped it into Chance’s mouth. “She’s a beautiful girl. She’s everything I ever wanted, but not for Jean. She wanted a smart kid. A scientist. Somebody like her. She thought, with a quantum physicist and a Princeton geneticist for parents, it was a lock. As if genetics w
ere that predictable.”

  Jean returned with a fresh cup of coffee.

  “Well, nice seeing you,” Nick said, slipping out again with the baby.

  “You, too,” I said.

  “The important thing,” Jean said, “is that your family might still be alive. They were heading for the NJSC, so that’s where we have to start looking.”

  I shrugged. “That’s why I’m here. I can’t really walk around in the open.”

  “Say no more,” Jean said. “I can ask around. If they were there, we’ll find them.”

  “I’m worried,” I said. “I have to believe they’re still out there, but where? They would have seen the news by now; they would have talked to the police.”

  “Maybe they have,” Jean said. “Maybe they’re at the prison right now, talking with the other version of you.”

  “I’m afraid they may have resolved, back to the dead versions of themselves,” I said. “I don’t want to think about it, but I’m afraid of it all the same.”

  Jean shook her head. “No, that’s not right. The bodies disappeared.”

  “What?”

  “The article says nothing about your family being dead, just about Brian. They didn’t find your family. If they had resolved to their dead versions, their bodies would be there, just like Brian’s.”

  I laughed. “You’re right!”

  “Now, I can ask around. If they’re out there, somebody must have seen them. What are you going to do?”

  “I don’t know. What else is there to do?”

  “I think you should go meet your double. Make sure there actually is a second version of you sitting in jail.”

  “I can’t just walk up to the prison and ask if they have me there behind bars.”

  “No.” Jean held up her smartpaper, which still showed the article. “But it mentions the name of the lawyer who signed on to defend you. You could ask him.”

  I thought about it. “That could work,” I said. “He’s not going to turn me in to the cops, anyway.”

  “And Jacob?”

  “Yes?”

  “Tell your double that if he needs an expert witness for the trial, he can count on me.”

  CHAPTER 18

  DOWN-SPIN

  The prosecution’s case was moving toward its climax. Haviland brought his DNA specialist to the stand, who took two hours to give the jury a primer on DNA analysis and make sure every one of them knew that it was irrefutable. The blood on my shoes was Brian’s. Scientifically proven. Beyond any reasonable doubt. Terry barely asked any questions on cross; there was nothing to be said.

  Haviland’s final witness was Officer Emilio Morales, the detective with the New Jersey State Police who had led the investigation. Haviland walked him through the reasons why he had concluded I was the murderer, which meant the jury got to hear a summary of all the evidence against me, laid out by a well-spoken and honest-looking cop.

  They covered my apparent motive for the murder—that Brian had taken a shot at my wife—and all of the physical evidence that linked me to the crime.

  “Was Mr. Kelley able to provide an alibi for four o’clock AM on December third, the time when Brian Vanderhall was murdered?” Haviland asked.

  “No. He claimed to have been home asleep at the time, but no witnesses have been able to confirm that,” Morales said.

  “Was there any more evidence that Mr. Kelley murdered Mr. Vanderhall?”

  “At the murder scene, we have Mr. Kelley’s fingerprints and shoeprints,” Morales said, ticking them off on his fingers. “He was arrested with the murder weapon in his possession, GSR on his hands, blood on his shoes, and driving the victim’s stolen car. What more evidence do you need?”

  Haviland said he was done and sat down. Terry cleared his throat and took the lectern for cross-examination.

  “Mr. Morales, my client lives with four other people: his wife, Elena; and his children, Claire, Alessandra, and Sean. Why were they not able to confirm his alibi?”

  “Mr. Kelley’s family has not been seen since his arrest.”

  Terry pretended astonishment. “Did you look for them?”

  “Certainly we looked for them,” Morales snapped. “After all that talk about them being dead when Kelley was arrested, we thought maybe he’d murdered them, too.”

  “So, you asked family members?”

  “We asked family members, coworkers, neighbors, friends. We put out an alert for them. Either they changed their identities and went somewhere far away, or they’re dead. Personally, I would guess the latter.”

  “But you never found their bodies.”

  “No.”

  “Did it ever occur to you that what my client told you about them might be true?”

  “What, that he found the bodies in his house, and then they vanished into thin air before anyone else saw them? I don’t know where you’re living, sir, but on this planet, bodies don’t just up and disappear.”

  “We’ll see about that,” Terry said. “No further questions.”

  “Mr. Haviland?” the judge said.

  “Your Honor, I am finished with this witness as well,” Haviland said with a self-satisfied smile. “In fact, I have no more witnesses to bring. The prosecution rests.”

  CHAPTER 19

  UP-SPIN

  I found Terry Sheppard’s office a few blocks from the courtroom in a row of townhouses that had been almost completely renovated as lawyers’ offices. You could hardly walk down the street without banging your head on a shingle. I wondered how anyone chose a single lawyer from the crowd. I had no trouble picking because, apparently, I already had. I’d never met Terry Sheppard before, but according to the news stream, he was my lawyer.

  Several of the adjoining offices shared a secretary, a heavy woman with curly gray hair and a large flower pin. I told her I didn’t have an appointment, but that I was pretty sure Mr. Sheppard would see me right away. Her expression said she’d heard it all before, and she invited me to take a seat, but she made the call. Moments later, a man with a huge mustache opened a back door with a worried expression.

  “Jacob?”

  I stood. “Mr. Sheppard.”

  “What on Earth? You’re supposed to be in prison. Has there been . . . some change? Were you released?”

  “Not released,” I said.

  With a furtive look around the waiting room, he motioned for me to follow him, which I did. His office was very nice, with leather-upholstered chairs and cherrywood bookshelves stacked with law texts. A childishly painted porcelain mouse, half-hidden on his desk, gave a personal touch to an otherwise professional room. A framed photograph showed a round, smiling woman and a little girl, perhaps six years old, who I guessed was the source of the mouse.

  “How did you get out of prison?” he asked.

  “I was never there.”

  He narrowed his eyes. “I met you there for the first time yesterday. You paid a retainer’s fee and hired me to defend you. A job that will be made much more difficult if you have somehow slipped away unnoticed.”

  I chose a leather chair and settled myself into it. “Don’t worry. If you call the prison right now, you’ll find that they still have custody of Jacob Kelley.”

  He stared at me, trying to make sense of this. I had pity on him. “Think of me as Jacob’s twin brother. That’s not quite right, but it will do for now.”

  Sheppard’s eyes flicked right and left, and he blinked several times. I realized he was eyejacked. In a few moments, he said, “It looks like Jacob Kelley has no siblings at all. Mother and father deceased, closest relative an uncle, living in South Philadelphia.” His eyes focused on me again. “No twin brothers. So, I think I’ll go ahead and make that phone call.”

  A few more eye blinks and a pause, and he said, “Yes, this is Terry Sheppard. I’d like to inquire about the status of an inmate. Yes. Could you transfer me to the officer in charge of the ward? Thank you.” Another wait, during which Sheppard drummed his fingers on the desk. “Yes,
thank you, I heard a report that my client, Jacob Kelley, received a black eye in a fight in the yard, and I’m concerned it may affect his scheduled court date. Well, if you can see him, could you just confirm that his face is not injured in any way? No? Glad to hear it. I appreciate it, Officer. Thank you for your time.”

  Sheppard squinted at me and rubbed at his mustache.

  “Clever ruse,” I said. “You made sure they could see him without giving the idea that you thought he might have escaped.”

  “And unless the guard is blind or lying, Jacob Kelley is still in prison. Which means that, despite the evidence of my eyes, you are not Jacob Kelley.”

  “On the contrary,” I said. “I am Jacob Kelley.”

  “I don’t appreciate being jerked around,” Sheppard said. “What do you want?”

  “I want to meet him. I want to meet the other Jacob.”

  Sheppard popped the lenses out of an old pair of glasses and lent me a New York Yankees baseball hat as a crude attempt at disguise. I wasn’t terribly worried—I didn’t think the prison guards probably paid too much attention to visitors’ faces—but Sheppard seemed agitated. I told him to relax. They couldn’t very well arrest another man as Jacob Kelley when they already had one behind bars.

  The truth was, I was more nervous about meeting a duplicate of myself than I was about the guards. The idea had grown on me for several days, but for the other me, it would be an immediate shock. I wasn’t sure how I felt about there being another me sharing space in the universe. Would I even like myself?

  The version of myself that I was about to meet saw the man with no eyes in the CATHIE bunker, found Elena and Claire and Sean dead just as I did, fought with the man in our living room, but didn’t run from the police. He hadn’t been to see Colin, and he almost certainly did not know there were two of us.

  The guards made no comment about my appearance and ushered us into a glass cage with a silver table and six yellow chairs. After a few minutes of finger drumming and foot tapping, they brought in a man in handcuffs and an orange jumpsuit with a strained, worn look around his eyes. It was me.