by David Walton
Sandra had no intention of changing her mind. She’d seen murder before, and she knew how it could tear a family apart. She wasn’t some stream-addicted kid high on crime shows. She knew what she was asking for. And she knew she could handle it.
She surveyed the unfamiliar data spread out in front of her. It seemed to be strings of characters—the RFID keys—with geolocation points attached. Many of the keys had now been expanded into their meaning: credit card accounts, membership cards, articles of clothing, phones, entry gates. Even the baseballs, it seemed, had been tagged with RFIDs, presumably so that claims that a certain ball had been hit by a certain player in a certain game could be verified, years later. Most of the data points were connected to people’s names, thousands of them. Most of those people were now dead.
What if she spotted something important in this mountain of names before the experts? Something critical that led to an arrest? That would get her noticed, no matter how young and green she might be.
The first thing to do was to visualize the data. That was easily done; she entered the geolocation points into a globe, and once she zoomed in close enough, she could see the points scattered on the ground like a field of yellow flowers. It was the same basic pattern she had noticed on site, but she was no expert. The distribution meant nothing to her.
Angel had said it was no bomb, but what he really meant was it was no ordinary bomb. Something had caused the stadium to tear itself apart, and no explanation seemed to fit. What she needed was to know where each point—it was easier to think of them as points rather than people—had started in the original stadium. If she could do that, then she could plot connections between where each point started and where it ended up, maybe even find the convergence point for all the vectors and discover where the bomb itself—if that’s what it was—had been hidden.
Sandra thought she knew just how to accomplish that. Each seat, after all, had a number painted on the seat back and armrests. She had access to the police database of eyejack views of the wreckage, and she could easily find a map of the stadium’s seating chart. The hardest part would be searching through the millions of view frames to find all the instances when a police officer saw one of the seat numbers. Fortunately, she had some experience.
She and Alex had been Life Loggers for years, making their eyejack views publicly visible and interacting with viewers. Simply the fact that they were twin teenage American girls had brought them a lot of traffic. It was something they did together, but her sister hadn’t been interested in maintaining the site. Learning the practical skills, like using pattern-match programs to find and mark interesting features in vast quantities of eyejack data, had fallen to Sandra.
She downloaded the latest version of one of her favorites, and initiated a search. Finding the shapes of numbers in video streams was one of the program’s built-in features, so she didn’t even have to go through the process of training it to recognize a particular face or object. In moments, it started spitting out individual frames of the views in which numbers were visible. Since the views were all geo-tagged, she could tell where each number had ended up. And since she had a seating chart, she knew where each number had started.
Before long, vectors began blooming on her display, but they didn’t fit the pattern she’d been expecting. She’d imagined a shape like a porcupine, lines radiating outward from some central point. Instead, she got a mess. The lines were stacked every which way, more like a spilled box of toothpicks than any kind of pattern. She sighed. This was going to be harder than she thought.
Either the programs she was using didn’t operate the way she was expecting, or else each person and object in the stadium had been flung along different lines of force. Which didn’t make any sense at all.
A thought occurred to her: partial numbers. The seat numbers in the stadium had three, four, or five digits. A five-digit number that was partially obscured, or at a bad angle, might be interpreted by the software as a four- or three-digit number. That would contaminate her data. Probably not enough to make it as haphazard as what she was seeing, but perhaps there were other issues as well. Now that she thought about it, there could be other numbers visible, too—numbers from signs, numbers from jerseys, anything other than seats—and that would confuse her results as well.
She posted a question about the problems she had thought of to a few of the discussion boards she used to frequent. The alternative—that she had made some fundamental blunder in setting up the software—was more discouraging. She spent a few minutes looking at example views and verifying the seat numbers, but as far as she could tell, the software was doing what she intended.
Her phone chimed, the sound of an incoming message. It chimed again, and then twice more. It continued to chime erratically, until the sounds came so quickly it sounded like an old-style telephone ring. What on Earth?
She checked and saw that there were answers to her discussion board queries. Thousands of them. That didn’t make any sense; a lot of people used those boards, but not that many. She started browsing the responses, and realized that what she had written revealed the fact that she was investigating the stadium disaster. Of course. Word had spread as rapidly as it always did online, and now she was being bombarded, mostly with well-wishers and conspiracy nuts. She did a keyword search for the program name, and was able to find a few meaningful responses, one of which offered a patch she could use to cull out the false data. Another message was from someone called TheAngelG. The message read: Sandra! I see great minds think alike. Angel.
All the messages made her nervous. She could easily get in trouble for interacting with the public about an ongoing investigation, especially one of this magnitude. What if a reporter found her query and jumped to conclusions, even assumed she was a detective? They’d bury her at a desk filing paperwork for the rest of her career.
She applied the patch and checked her results again. No good. The lines were different, but just as chaotic. Could it be that seats had really been thrown in such random directions, with such different degrees of force?
Something tickled at her brain. The lines were messy, but not entirely chaotic. She thought she could discern, just at the edge of her consciousness, a kind of pattern, some deep part of her brain recognizing something she couldn’t put into words. Or was it merely the human brain’s need to make sense of what it saw, like seeing shapes in the clouds?
She turned off the eyejack display, and her old bedroom sprang back into view. She might not have the mathematics background to identify a pattern, if one existed, but she knew someone who did. She descended the stairs and found her father at the kitchen table with a mug of coffee.
“Dad,” she said. “I have something I want you to see.”
An hour later, Sandra got bored and went to take a shower. Her father had become totally engrossed in the data, running it through all kinds of mathematical analysis engines. The vocabulary he used to describe what he was attempting might as well have been a different language, for all she could understand it. By the time he started mumbling under his breath about M-brane manifolds and preserved supersymmetries, she had lost patience.
Clean, she put the same dusty uniform back on, not expecting to have time to get back to her own apartment for a fresh one. Her father was still in the kitchen, staring at the data. “Look at this,” he said. “We’ve been assuming the seats traveled in roughly straight lines, as viewed from above. Simple parabolic arcs, at any rate, from their point of origin.”
She sat down next to him, and he shared his eyejack view with her, so she could see the same thing he was looking at. She made his view a transparent overlay on her vision, so she could still see him and the room around her. “How else would they travel?” she said. “Without energy added mid-flight . . .” She trailed off. “Of course. If multiple blasts went off at slightly different times.”
“That’s one possibility.” Her father was still working with the data, causing equations to fly across her vision in dizzyi
ng variety. “But I’m not finding any multiple-source solutions that work for all these paths.”
A thought struck her, like doors unlocking and swinging wide. “Not any three-dimensional ones, anyway.”
“Yes, that’s where I’m thinking, too.” Her father gave her an approving nod, a gesture that had usually been reserved for Alex. Sandra felt a small thrill of approval.
Her father attacked the data furiously, shifting and expanding it with flicks of his eyes as he applied new sets of equations. Then he stopped. “Here we are,” he said, his voice soft and awed. “Supergravity, in ten dimensions.”
Something like a vortex appeared in her vision. The globe view of Philadelphia was now twisted and wrapped in on itself. The lines connecting the seats from their points of origin were now complex curves forming a multi-dimensional tornado.
“It wasn’t multiple blasts after all,” her father said. “Just one simple equation.”
Sandra didn’t think “simple” was probably the right word. “Does this mean the seats traveled out of normal space before landing back in our normal three dimensions?”
Her father shook his head. “The other dimensions are paper-thin. It’s not as much that the chairs themselves travel through other dimensions, as that the energies do, bending the lines of force to blast the chairs in unexpected directions.”
Sandra let that go. Ultimately, she didn’t care about multiple dimensions or how they worked. What she cared about was that this destruction had come from a single source, but not a traditional one.
“Could a person have done this?” she asked. “Or a government?”
Her father raised his hands in an expansive shrug. “Not with any technology I’ve ever heard of.”
“But it’s possible?”
“Anything is possible.”
They traded looks, both of them thinking the same thing but unwilling to say it. As if by speaking the word varcolac out loud, they would conjure it into the house and repeat the horror of fifteen years ago. As horrible as this act was, it had been better when she could think of it simply as the result of human ingenuity and hatred.
She nodded. “I have to show this to my lieutenant.”
“Of course you do.”
“You should come with me.” Her father started to shake his head, but she pressed on. “I’m not sure I can explain it, or that they’ll believe me even if I can. I need your credentials to back me up.”
“I can’t, sweetheart. I need to stay here.” His manner was odd. Evasive.
“Why? I don’t understand.”
“Your mother needs me to stay. I can’t just run off again, after she came so close to losing me.”
He was lying. Sandra didn’t know why, but she knew he was. She studied his face, trying to decide whether to call him on it. “I need you,” she said.
He sighed. “Look. There’s something else here, something I need to study. It’s going to take me a while, but it’s important. Can you come back this evening?”
“I have an all-night shift.”
“Tomorrow, then. Come back here to sleep again, and I’ll tell you everything when you wake up. I’ll make sure Alex comes, too; it affects her as well.”
“Alex won’t come if she knows I’m here.”
“She will if I insist.”
Sandra narrowed her eyes. “Why wait? Why don’t you come along with me now, and you can tell me in the car?”
“I have to do some research first. Confirm what we’re looking at here.” His eyes slid to the left, then purposefully came up and caught her gaze. “You can handle this. After all, you thought of the multiple dimensions angle. I’m proud of you, Alex.”
He must have seen the scowl on her face, because he backtracked immediately. “Sandra, I mean. Come on, darling; it was a slip of the tongue. Forgive an old man some scrambled brain cells.”
“Fine,” she said. “Just stay, then. I’ll do it myself.”
“Sandra, I meant it. I’m proud of you. You’re just as bright as—”
“I’m going to be late for work.” Sandra stood and collected her phone and purse. “Goodbye, Dad. I’m glad you’re safe.”
CHAPTER 6
Alex ran out of the warehouse, adrenaline lighting up her senses, making everything seem bright and crisp and much too fast. She was in her car and fumbling for the keys before she could remember running to the parking lot, and driving away at high speed before she could think about where she was going. She could feel the raw power of the gun thundering in her hands, could see the bullets tearing through Secretary Falk’s chest. Her own blood roared in her ears.
Who could she go to for help? Her father came immediately to mind, but, of course, that would be one of the first places the police would look. Sean was in Poland. Claire was in California. Sandra lived close by, but she was a cop herself. Alex couldn’t put her in that position.
She needed a safe place. Her own apartment was obviously out, as was her parents’ house, or the home of anyone she knew. She stopped at an ATM and withdrew $1000 in cash—the machine’s limit—not expecting to be able to do so again anytime soon. They could track her through her bank access. She wouldn’t be able to use a hotel, either, for the same reason. The enormity of trying to evade capture was overwhelming; she would need a false identification, which she had no idea how to get. She might even have to leave the country.
Or she could turn herself in. That would be the easiest thing, maybe the right thing. But there was a varcolac loose in the world again, and there were precious few people who knew what that meant. She had to call her father. He might not know what to do either, but at least he would believe her. At least he would know what she was talking about.
Her mother answered the phone.
“Mom,” she said. “Is Dad there?”
“Alex . . .” she said, and trailed off into silence. After a moment, she realized her mother was softly crying on the other end of the line.
“Mom? What’s going on? Did they already call you?”
Her mother took a shaky breath. “Did who call?”
“Never mind. What’s wrong?”
“Your father’s gone.”
“What do you mean? You don’t know where he is?”
“He was in the kitchen staring at some data that Sandra gave him, drinking his coffee. Sandra left for work, and five minutes later, he was gone. I came back, and his coffee mug was still there, but he wasn’t.” Her voice started to shake again. “One moment he was there; the next he was gone.”
Alex looked in her rearview mirror. There was a battered green car behind her, old and rusted, a first-generation electric by the look of it. She had seen it in the NJSC parking lot. It must have left at nearly the same time she did. It was following her.
“Alex? Are you there?”
“Yes, I’m here.”
“Can you come home as soon as you can? I don’t know what to do.”
“Mom, I’m sorry. I can’t.”
“Please, Alex. I know it sounds crazy. But Sandra’s on shift, and I need you. I’ll explain it all when you get here.”
“You don’t understand. I can’t. In fact, I’m not going to be able to call for a while, either. I’m sorry.”
“Where are you?” her mother said. “What’s wrong? Are you in trouble?”
“Listen, when the police call . . . I didn’t do what they say I did.”
“Oh, Alex. What happened?”
“I have to go. I love you.”
“Alex!”
Alex disconnected. She felt panicky. She needed her father, and he wasn’t there. She didn’t know what her mother was talking about, but she couldn’t think about that right now. She needed a place to go, and a new car, and new clothes.
The green car was still behind her. Whoever it was had no subtlety. Besides which, the little electric wouldn’t be able to keep up with her modern engine if she wanted to lose it. It couldn’t be a cop. She stepped on the accelerator, quickly picking up speed. The
green car accelerated, too, but not enough to keep up. Instead, it started honking at her.
She thought for a moment it might be Tequila, but Tequila was driving a rental, a midsized silver sedan. She slowed down again until she could see the driver in her rearview mirror, an obese man in rumpled clothes. It was Ryan Oronzi.
What did he want? He clearly wanted her to stop. Maybe he had some evidence, something that could prove that it hadn’t been her fault. A recording with a good shot of Secretary Falk’s face, for instance. If he wanted to turn her in, he could have done that already. And he was hardly going to overpower her in a fight. The best thing to do was to stop and see what he wanted.
Alex took the Broad Street exit into the city, and the green car followed. She pulled into the first parking lot she saw, a Dunkin’ Donuts. Oronzi claimed the parking spot next to her. He hauled himself up out of the driver’s seat.
She strode around her car to face him. This was the genius of Lakehurst, the man who had invented the Higgs projector. Under normal circumstances, she would have been awed to meet him. Now, she just felt impatient and annoyed. “What do you want?” she asked. “Why are you following me?”
“You’ve seen it before.”
“What?”
“The thing that took over Secretary Falk. I could see it in your face. You’ve seen it before.”
“Are you here to help me? Because if not, I need to go.”
“I want to know what it is. Where it comes from. What it can do.”
This was a bad idea. She was wasting time. “If you haven’t noticed, I’m in a little trouble right now. I can’t just sit down for a little chat over a cup of coffee. The FBI and the Secret Service and the whole US military are probably out looking for me now, so if you don’t mind, stop following me. Just leave me alone.”
She stalked back around toward the driver’s door of her car and wrenched it open.
“I can help you,” Oronzi said.
She stared at him over the car roof. “How?”
“I can make you disappear.”
