by David Walton
Babington’s voiceover continued. “Bullets don’t usually have a wavelength, or not so much of one that you can tell. We’ve learned how to manipulate that. Our bullets are like particles, traveling in every possible path toward their target. With no obstacle, the probabilities average out to a straight path, the path we expect. But when an obstacle stands in the way, it only stops a part of the wave. The rest of the paths still exist, and so the bullet diffracts around the obstacle, just as light would diffract.”
On the large screen, the audience saw a slow-motion replay of a bullet flying through space, then blurring as it passed through and around a tree before striking its human target, just as solid as ever.
“So far, so good,” Rod said with a flip of bright red hair and a boyish smile.
Vijay scowled. “That’s what people say just before everything goes wrong.”
“Nothing’s going to go wrong,” Lisa said. “We’ve practiced this so many times I could do it in my sleep. I could do it with one hand while bouldering at Coopers Rock with the other.”
Vijay groaned. “You guys are killing me.”
Two more scenarios followed, involving Jeeps with mounted .50-caliber machine guns, and finally, a Turkish Altay battle tank. They went perfectly, despite Vijay’s fears.
Tequila leaned over to Alex’s station. “This last one’s all you, girl,” she said. “Knock ’em dead.”
Alex pulled the Higgs projector from her pocket. It was a slim card, not much different than a personal phone in appearance, but it turned its owner into something like a god. She slipped it back into her pocket. Show time.
Alex stood and stepped away from her station. As she did so, the doors behind her opened, and five Turkish soldiers ran out, shouting and pointing their guns at her. She wore a dark skirt and a light blue blouse; she was obviously part of the support staff, not the show. Nevertheless, the Turks dragged her out onto the floor in front of the VIP stage with a gun to her head, while she feigned terror. The Turk closest to her tore open his jacket, revealing a dynamite vest.
Several of the audience jumped to their feet, unsure if this was part of the show or real. Secretary Falk’s Secret Service detail held their ground, however; they’d been briefed on what to expect. The American marine from the first three scenarios put his gun on the ground and raised his hands. He was quickly tied and blindfolded.
She was ready for this. With a sister on the police force and a brother in Force Recon, she’d been around guns for years, knew how to handle and shoot them. Sean had even sneaked her and Sandra onto the base one evening and let them go through the MARSOC shoot house. She’d helped to choreograph a lot of this fight, working closely with the military guys who consulted for Lockheed Martin. She took a few deep breaths, willing her muscles to relax.
The Turks pointed their weapons at the stage. “Secretary Falk,” said the one with the dynamite, speaking English with no trace of a Turkish accent. “Instruct your men to put their weapons on the ground.”
CHAPTER 4
Ryan Oronzi was barely watching the demonstration. He was stuck in the VIP section by Babington’s decree, but he had his tablet with him and was using it to study the logs from the control system around his baby universe. Energies from his universe had been used to create the Higgs projectors, and they drew a lot of their power from it. Ryan was watching to make sure the intelligence inside didn’t make another break for freedom.
It was the last scenario now, the one in which the girl would escape from supposed terrorists. Everything had been stable so far, the monitor levels normal, but . . . there was a pattern. Something wrong, something that snagged at Ryan’s subconscious. He had learned not to ignore the part of his mind that noticed such things.
It was Ryan’s mind, after all, that made him special. He had always known, from his earliest memories, that he was different from other people. Better. He had insights they couldn’t fathom, saw patterns too complicated for others to perceive. When he was young, he had even fantasized that he wasn’t really human. He had imagined himself as a member of an alien race of superior intellect, who had placed his mind into a human body to guide the human race to a higher level of knowledge or achievement. It wasn’t a thought he had entirely given up on, but he had learned not to mention it to other people.
Ryan brought up a modeling engine on his tablet and starting plugging in the data from the last half hour. His greatest fear was that whatever was on the other side of the wormhole would solve his latest protocol and escape. He didn’t know what would happen if it did, but he didn’t want to find out.
Nobody else believed his claims that the patterns in the wormhole were produced by an intelligence acting on the other side. It was a hard thing to defend. The patterns fluctuated with apparent randomness. Even Nicole thought that his equations were just failing to adequately predict and contain them. But he could tell the difference. No random fluctuations could outsmart the traps he was setting, and certainly not with increasing speed.
He studied the data. To his relief, none of the numbers he saw came anywhere close to exceeding the latest protocol. None of his proximity alarms had been tripped. This latest set of equations was holding up better. But no.
There was a pattern to the numbers. A chill went down his back as he recognized it. The numbers shadowed the solution to the equations, only an order of magnitude smaller. The intelligence was getting more clever. It was intentionally solving the puzzle in a way that avoided tripping his proximity alarms. In fact, it had already solved it. It was hiding its tracks, so that it could break out all at once, denying Ryan the chance to apply another protocol when it started to get close. Which mean that it, too, recognized that there was an intelligent being on the other side of the wormhole. It knew Ryan was there.
Ryan leaped to his feet, interrupting the scenario. “Run!” he shouted. “Everyone out, right now!”
Babington’s hand closed on his shoulder like a vise. “They’re not really terrorists, remember? It’s part of the show.” The closest member of Secretary Falk’s security detail chuckled.
“You don’t understand—it’s the intelligence,” Ryan said. “I warned you to cancel . . .”
“And I warned you to keep your mouth shut,” Babington growled, trying to steer him away from the stage.
On the floor, the abducted girl sprang into action. The big screen showed her viewpoint, revealing that she, too, was wearing eyejack lenses connected to a Higgs projector. The dynamite-vested soldier was flung away over a wall. A fiery explosion on the other side cued rousing action-movie theme music as the girl ripped the guns out of the other soldiers’ hands. One man pulled a backup pistol from his vest and fired at the girl’s head, but it was his compatriot on her other side who collapsed. The big screen showed the bullet blurring around the girl’s head in slow motion and striking the soldier behind her. In moments, all the soldiers were down, leaving only the girl, brushing off her hands. The audience erupted into applause, including the Secretary of Defense, who was beaming.
“You see?” Babington hissed into Ryan’s ear.
“No,” Ryan shouted over the music. “Everyone needs to get out of here. We have to shut it all down!”
Babington just glared at him, and Ryan gave up. He huddled over his tablet. His only chance was to change the protocol again before the intelligence made its move. He had no idea what it might do if it escaped, but he knew how clever it was, and how powerful. Ryan still had several backup protocols queued up, though it was getting harder to make them complex enough to hold the thing inside for more than a few days.
The lights went out. The pounding music fell suddenly silent, and the applause died away. Even Ryan’s tablet, though it had its own battery source, fell black and dead. Ryan whipped out his phone. Nothing.
“Staker, what is this?” Secretary Falk asked. “Another scenario? We weren’t briefed on this.”
The lights came back on. The audience members breathed sighs of relief, looked at eac
h other and smiled, but Ryan stayed frozen. Falk’s security detail were on their feet, not laughing anymore, surrounding the Secretary.
Behind them, Secretary Falk stood. When Ryan saw him, he started to moan softly, uncontrollably. Falk had no eyes. Where his eyes should have been was only a flat mask of skin, as if they had never been there. Ryan knew at once that this wasn’t the Secretary at all. It was the intelligence. The thing that wasn’t Secretary Falk looked around with its missing eyes. It seemed relaxed, unconcerned.
One of the Secret Service agents looked back and noticed, his eyes going wide with shock. “Sir? Are you all right, sir?” Falk brushed his hand casually through the air. The agent who had spoken collapsed to the ground and lay motionless.
The other two agents drew their pistols and took shooting stances. “Sir, please sit down,” one of them said. The other started talking on his radio, calling for backup.
Falk stepped toward the closest agent with an expression of curiosity. He reached for the agent’s gun. “Don’t do that, sir,” the agent said. Falk touched the gun, which crumpled away like burning paper. The other agent fired at Falk, but the bullet blurred around him, just like in the demo scenarios, and blasted harmlessly into the wall. The first agent, now unarmed, picked up a chair and swung it down as hard as he could on Falk’s head. This time, it was Falk that blurred, like a vibrating tuning fork, causing the chair to crash uselessly to the floor. Falk gestured and both agents fell to the ground where they lay, unmoving.
Ryan started backing away toward the exit. There was no beating this creature, not with guns or strength. There was some kind of field preventing his electronics from working. If he could get clear of it, he might be able to do something.
The creature staggered. It took Ryan a moment to realize it had been hit by a rubber bullet. The abducted girl from the scenario had one of the Turkish soldiers’ rifles. She fired again. The creature blurred, but instead of passing through, the bullet blurred as well, striking the creature and knocking it back. The girl was fighting it using the Higgs projector, an incredibly gutsy move, in Ryan’s opinion. She might be adept at using it, but this was how this creature lived. It was like trying to outswim a shark.
The Falk creature waved its hand, but the girl was unaffected. Instead, she used the projector to teleport a chunk of rubble from the floor to a position directly over the creature’s head, where it fell, knocking it to the stage floor. The audience members were frozen, afraid to move. Ryan kept walking backward. He reached the edge of the stage and backed down the stairs.
The rubble exploded, and the creature rose again, its suit jacket white with concrete dust, an inhuman growl coming from its throat. Ryan decided to abandon subtlety. He turned and ran.
At the end of the room, his tablet beeped and the screen came to life. He gritted his teeth as it cycled through its boot-up sequence. Out on the floor, the girl sent one of the Secret Service agent’s pistols flipping out of his lifeless hands in a graceful arc toward her. She caught it and turned it toward the creature, firing live rounds now instead of rubber. The creature blurred, but the bullets struck home anyway, ripping into its chest and out of its back. It growled, apparently unfazed, although blood streamed down its body, red tracks coursing through the white dust. It lifted its hands, and the Altay battle tank, still parked on the demonstration floor, lifted into the air and flew toward the girl.
Ryan frantically stabbed at his tablet, injecting a fresh protocol into the system controlling his baby universe. The tank lurched and fell back to the ground, shattering the floor and sending dust and debris flying, though none of it reached the girl or the crowd. The eyeless creature shuddered, and its face cleared. Secretary Falk, his eyes suddenly normal, stood amid the carnage, looking down in shock at his bloody chest. He blinked once before collapsing to the floor.
Alex stood in the shooting stance Sean had taught her years before, the Secret Service agent’s Sig Sauer P229 still locked in her two-handed grip. The varcolac was gone. She didn’t think she’d killed it, but at least it hadn’t killed her, and most of the people in the warehouse were still alive.
Then it occurred to her how this scene would look to others. The demo area was brightly lit, but the lights over the audience were dim. She doubted very many people could have made out Falk’s missing eyes. They would have seen an exchange of gunfire, after which she was still standing with a gun in her hand, and the Secretary of Defense was dead on the floor, lying with his security detail in the growing puddle of his blood. Alex caught Tequila’s gaze from the control booth. Her face was frozen in shock.
The demo was being recorded, but what would the video show? The cameras were angled to cover the stage. Who would believe that she had been firing not at Secretary Falk but at a quantum intelligence that had taken over his body? It wasn’t credible. No one would understand. All they would know was that Falk was dead, and she had pulled the trigger.
She threw the gun on the floor and ran.
CHAPTER 5
“You were dead,” Sandra said. “I saw your body.”
She sat with both of her parents in their living room. The two of them sat on the sofa together, her father leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, her mother pressed close to him and holding him possessively. “I’m here now,” he said. He opened his hands as if to demonstrate his presence. “I was tired, so I left in the eighth inning to beat the traffic.”
“Show me your wallet,” she said. He raised an eyebrow, but he pulled it out of his pocket. It was black, leather, and absolutely identical to the one that Sandra produced from her bag. She shouldn’t have taken it from the scene, but this situation went beyond normal police procedure. She opened it and produced his driver’s license. Her father pulled its duplicate out of his own wallet. Her mother took them both and held them next to each other, comparing.
“This happened once before,” Sandra said. “You know what that means.”
He shrugged. “Maybe. A quantum event, at the very least. A probability wave left unresolved.”
Her mother gripped his arm. “Which means it could resolve again, right?”
“At some point,” her father said. “Or maybe not, as Sandra knows well enough.”
“You’ll forgive me if I don’t find that very comforting.”
“There’s nothing we can do,” her father said. He was acting very calm, but Sandra could tell he was rattled. He was putting a brave face on it for her and her mother. “I don’t know what the future will bring, and that’s as much as any of us can say.” He stood. “And now, Sandra needs to get some rest.”
“I’m fine,” Sandra said. Though even as she said it, she felt the weariness of the night overtaking her, both the long hours without sleep and the emotional strain.
“Nonsense; you’re asleep on your feet.” Her father wrapped her in a ferocious hug. He’d been a boxer in his youth and still had the size and strength, though he was softer than he must have been years ago. She relaxed into his embrace, feeling some of the worry and stress slip away. With no other cops to see her, she let the tears come. Her mother joined them, pressing a kiss into Sandra’s cheek.
Her parents led her upstairs to her old bedroom.
“If it is like fifteen years ago . . .” she began, but her father put a finger to his lips. “Sleep,” he said. “Then we can talk.”
She lay on the bed, blue uniform and all, and let him close the door. She was so tired. From down the hall, she could hear her parents in hushed argument, her mother’s tones of fear and worry, her father’s of reassurance. Their voices faded away as she drifted off to sleep.
She woke, terrified, with explosions ringing in her ears. A dream of blood and gunfire, barely remembered, that faded quickly. She focused on the pink sheets, the Delia Sharp poster on the far wall, the smell of home. Her parents’ house. Her old bedroom. She was safe.
A moment later, the memory of the shattered stadium and the thousands dead hit her consciousness, and she knew that no one
was really safe, not ever. What time was it? How long had she slept? A Miss Kitty alarm clock on the bedside table read 11:37, but she didn’t know if she could trust it. She doubted anyone had used it in years.
Her phone said 2:45 PM. She checked her mail, and found a message from her sergeant, detailing a new shift schedule for the next several days. All officers except for a tiny contingent were to report to the stadium site in a twelve-hours-on, twelve-hours-off rotation. She was due back again at 6:00 PM.
There was another message, this one from Angel Gutierrez. He had completed his survey and forwarded her a link to the raw data. She sat up in bed and started paging through it, trying to make sense of it. There was way too much to look at on the phone’s tiny screen, so she shifted the output to her eyejack lenses. Her entire field of view became her output screen, as if she were sitting in a large, empty room with the data projected on all the walls.
Math had never been her strong suit—that was Alex’s forte—but she had grown up with a physicist for a father. He’d insisted they both take calculus in high school, although by that time Sandra had known she was heading for a career in law enforcement. Not much call for math in her field, unless you were a forensics egghead, which she most decidedly wasn’t.
What she wanted most was to make detective and work homicide, but that possibility was many years away. She would have to do her stints on patrol first, learning the ropes and proving herself smart enough—and hard enough—for the job. She’d made the mistake of voicing her goal out loud at the academy, prompting knowing smiles from her teachers. “Everybody thinks that as a cadet,” they said. “Give it a few years on the force, and see if it changes your mind.”
