by David Walton
“What’s the catch?”
Sandra teleported back so she was standing right next to him again. “The occasional massacre of a stadium full of people.” She kept her tone light, but she felt a pain in her throat like she was swallowing a rock. “You asked if it was a quantum weapon that destroyed the stadium. You weren’t too far off. Only it wasn’t a person who pulled the trigger.”
She told him the whole story. She hadn’t intended to go into her whole childhood and the events of fifteen years ago, but he was such an intent listener that she just kept talking. Besides, he seemed at least somewhat familiar with her father’s murder case and the public claim made in court that there had been two versions of him. And he nodded at everything she said, no matter how outlandish.
“You’re really taking this in stride,” she said.
He laughed, a little nervously. “This isn’t the first crazy thing to happen to me today.”
She wrapped up her story with an explanation of how she had split into two, and the probability wave had never resolved. “So, my sister is really me,” she concluded. “There are two of me.”
Angel shook his head, dismissive. “That’s ridiculous.”
“Ridiculous, but true,” she said.
“No. Ridiculous and false.”
“Angel, I—”
“I’m not talking about your story. I’m talking about your claim that your sister is really you. That’s observably false, and to claim otherwise is just semantics. Even identical twins of the normal stripe start out as a single zygote. No one says they’re really the same person. As soon as you split, you became two people. Different.”
“But we share the same memories of growing up. I’m one possibility of how I turned out; she’s another. She’s what I would have been if just the slightest things had been different. And . . . well, there’s always the possibility that the probability wave could resolve, and we would become one person again.” She said it lightly, but the dread of considering that possibility gave her a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach.
“Yeah, well, that’s really odd,” Angel said. “I admit it: you’re a weirdo. You’re not the only one, though. I have six toes on my left foot. That’s like one in three thousand. Very odd, but I’ve learned to cope. Want to see?” He reached down as if to untie his shoe.
She laughed in spite of herself. “I’ll pass.”
“You’re different people,” he said again. “It’s who you are now. The past doesn’t matter.”
She was quiet for a moment. “You had something you wanted to tell me,” she said.
“Right,” he said. “Well, it’s kind of less impressive than teleporting around the lab.”
“Let me hear it.”
“I’ll have to show you instead.”
Angel scooped up a tablet and tapped a series of commands. The lab filled with a whirring noise like a swarm of bees, the same as Sandra had heard from Angel’s cases in the stadium parking lot. “Come with me,” he said.
She followed him through a gate in the mesh wall into the cage. He opened a black case, and six quad-copters rose out of it in eerie precision. “These weren’t at the stadium,” he said, raising his voice to be heard over the hum. “I’ll show you these first, so you can see the difference.”
At commands from his tablet, the copters snapped into various formations: a horizontal line of six, a two-by-three stack, a rotating ring. They moved to their new positions quickly and precisely, often only inches apart, with no collisions, or even last-minute swerves. Each seemed to know exactly where the others were going to move, which she supposed made sense, since it was surely the same software controlling all of them.
“Now watch this,” Angel said. He went out of the cage and returned with a handful of hula-hoops, batons, and tennis balls. He tossed a hula-hoop in the air, and all six copters flew through it, quick as lightning, before it fell back into his hand. He threw two at once, and they did the same. Then he tossed a baton in the air, end over end, and one of the copters caught it, balanced vertically on top of a portion of its frame that extended up between the rotors. It hovered there, adjusting its position back and forth slightly to keep the baton balanced, for all the world like a vaudeville performer with a push broom on his nose.
“Impressive,” Sandra said.
“I like to think so,” Angel said. “But I just want you to know what’s normal, before I show you what’s abnormal.” He tapped the tablet, and the copter jerked suddenly higher, lofting the baton in a slowly twirling arc. Another copter caught it vertically again, dipping to cancel out the baton’s spin and momentum. The copters began a game of catch, flipping the baton to one another and catching it perfectly. Angel started throwing the hula-hoops into the game, and the copters again responded seamlessly, sometimes dashing through a hoop to catch a baton on the other side. Finally, he began hurling tennis balls at the copters, trying to disrupt their rhythm, but they dodged the balls effortlessly without interrupting the game with the batons.
Sandra knew the hard part of this performance was designing the copters in the first place with the ability to move precisely and know their exact position at any moment. The tricks themselves were just mathematics; the encoding of position and velocity and spin and momentum into a simulated model of reality. Even so, it was remarkable to see.
Angel touched the tablet, and the baton and hula-hoops dropped to the floor. “One more thing.”
He left the cage and wheeled in a stand with a wooden wall and a window. The window was adjustable; it could be made wider or narrower in both horizontal and vertical directions. Angel demonstrated the copters diving through the window in different configurations. When he made the window into a narrow vertical slit, the copters would actually hurl themselves sideways, momentarily losing control of their flight as they flew through the window at a ninety-degree angle, before regaining control on the other side.
“Watch what happens when I do this,” Angel said. He closed the window even farther, making it impossible for the copters to fit through the gap, no matter how they oriented themselves. He tapped the tablet, but the copters didn’t move. “They can detect that there’s no way through,” he said. “But watch this.”
He sent the copters back to their case, and opened a new case. A new set of six copters flew out. “These are from the set I used at the stadium,” he said. They hovered on one side of the too-small window, the same as the others had. This time, however, when Angel gave the command, all six copters dove, following each other in tight sequence. When each one reached the window, it turned, a rapid twisting motion like the first set had done, and reemerged on the other side.
It was less impressive than it might have been, considering all that Sandra had seen in the last twenty-four hours, but it was still dramatic. The opening was no bigger than her fist; there was no room for the copters to pass through it.
“They turned into another dimension,” she said. She had seen the varcolac do essentially the same thing, and given Ryan’s explanation on the mountain, she felt confident in assuming that a few of his extra curled-up dimensions were involved.
“Is this normal for you?” Angel asked. “Flitting in and out of other dimensions like taking a cab?”
Sandra smiled. “Not exactly. But I guess I’ve had an interesting life.”
“How did this happen? This is the same hardware and the same software I’ve been working with for years. They clearly picked up this ability at the stadium site, but I don’t see how that’s possible. Even if your varcolac used some weird quantum magic to destroy the stadium in the first place, my copters weren’t even there at the time.”
Sandra thought about it. “It must be in the data.”
“You mean the RFID data? That doesn’t make sense.”
“There aren’t too many options. I’m going to go out on a limb and assume your copters aren’t smart enough to learn a new behavior of this magnitude. So, either there was some magic quantum pixie dust at the scene that
stuck to their rotors, or there was something in the data they picked up at the scene that altered their operations.”
Angel returned the copters to their case. Their engines quieted, making the empty room ring with the sudden silence. “I’m going to vote for the pixie dust. We’re not talking about altering their behavior to fly in figure eights. We’re talking about behavior that should be impossible. I don’t care what software or data you load into their onboard computers; you won’t be able to make them do that.”
“I’m not so sure.” Sandra said. Her throat was dry. “Do you have anything to drink?”
“Sure.” They exited the cage, and Angel led the way to a mini-fridge on a cluttered tabletop. “Coke okay?”
“Perfect.” Sandra popped the tab and took a long swallow of cold sweetness. She sighed and wiped her mouth. “The only thing I can think is that your copters are somehow accessing a Higgs projector, the same as the software in my eyejacks.”
“How does that work?”
“There’s a wormhole in the High Energy Lab in New Jersey that’s connected to a bubble universe. Somehow, Ryan Oronzi has figured out how to tap the power from it to affect the Higgs field in our universe, allowing quantum effects in the macro world. I have a copy of Oronzi’s software modules from my sister that accesses that projector, allowing me to create certain quantum and probabilistic effects.” She accessed a method from her eyejack display, and let go of the can of Coke. It hovered there, untouched, until she grasped it again.
“That’s really freaky,” Angel said.
“The point is, it’s the Higgs projector that’s causing the effect, not the software. I don’t know how far its reach is. Considering it’s another universe, though, the distance may not matter.”
Angel shook his head. “It doesn’t make any sense. Even if someone stored such a method on a chip, it would have to be written as a self-executing virus, and the virus would have to know how to plug in to the specific maneuver interfaces in my software. In this version of my software. And the only way that could happen is if I did it myself.”
Sandra grinned. “Is there something you’re not telling yourself?”
Angel rolled his eyes. “I’m not that crazy.”
“I don’t know what to tell you,” Sandra said. “Maybe my sister or Dr. Oronzi would have a better idea.”
“I’m sticking with the magic pixie dust theory, until you can prove it wrong.”
CHAPTER 15
Ryan was ready for the drop when he and Alex materialized on the top floor of the High Energy Lab. Alex wasn’t. She yelped and nearly fell over as they dropped six inches to the floor.
He laughed, and she glared at him. “What was that? We just teleported in here yesterday, and we didn’t fall then. I thought you had a pretty good lock on this place.”
“There’s some error drift with the distance you travel,” Ryan said. “Yesterday we teleported from the parking lot.”
“Error drift? So we could have ended up two inches under the floor instead of over it?”
Ryan found his favorite chair—a tattered recliner they had lugged up here at his request, and sat down. “Nope. The drift is always up. The module uses a tangent plane to shortcut some of the math.”
“So if I had tried to teleport to California . . . ?”
Ryan shook his head. “Disaster.”
Alex’s face soured. “That’s a bit dangerous, isn’t it? Shouldn’t you adjust for the curvature of the Earth?”
“I did. That’s why we came in so close.”
“I mean adjust in the software, not in your head. I thought everything you designed was supposed to be oh-so-safe.”
“Not safe for you. Safe for me.” That was the whole point, after all. He had written the software, so he knew exactly what it would do and how far to trust it. If he hadn’t written it, he wouldn’t be using it at all.
Alex stared at the glowing universe in its laser-light display. She muttered something under her breath. He caught the word “hubris.”
He didn’t bother asking her to repeat herself. Sooner or later, everyone he got to know started treating him like he was either stupid or crazy. He liked to think it was because his intelligence was so much greater than theirs. He should call it Oronzi’s Law: Any sufficiently-advanced intelligence will be indistinguishable from insanity. But he knew that wasn’t all there was to it. The truth was, he didn’t like other people very much, and they could probably tell.
“So, you don’t think I should teleport, because I didn’t personally write the code,” Alex said.
“I didn’t say that. I just said that I wouldn’t, if I were in your place.”
“What kind of world would that be, if nobody trusted anything they didn’t make themselves? No one could build on anyone else’s work. No one could even ride in the same car together. It would be ridiculous.”
“You’re hardly the first person to call me that.”
She looked at him with an odd expression, making Ryan think he had probably let a little too much of his bitterness leak into his tone of voice. To cover his embarrassment, he took a tablet from a nearby desk and started manipulating it. “Take a look,” he said.
He sent a link to her viewfeed, which she accepted. Their shared vision was overlaid with stacks of log data organized in a traditional filesystem display, like a rotating carousel of file folders.
“Did you write your own operating system, too?” she asked.
Ryan ignored her. Of course he hadn’t, but then, an operating system wasn’t likely to kill him, either. He cycled through the files until he found what he was looking for. “Here’s the log data from the morning of the demo. I’m going to graph the Higgs particle count over time.” A graph appeared in the air, showing a high quantity of Higgs activity, peaking suddenly from 11:08 to 11:14. The rest was empty except for a little random noise near the bottom, like a sandy beach with a mountain peak suddenly jutting out of it. “This matches the time that the varcolac was loose. Just as we would expect.”
“What about the previous night?”
Ryan found the appropriate log and updated the graph. The peak disappeared, leaving a nearly empty graph.
“No activity at all?” Alex asked.
“Just background radiation. Nothing out of the ordinary,” Ryan said. “But look at this.”
Ryan stabbed the tablet, and the graph changed. He filtered out the peak from the morning of the demo, and graphed just the background radiation over the whole time interval, between the stadium explosion and the demo the next morning. He zoomed in on the bottom of the graph, taking a closer look at what had previously appeared to be random. From this perspective, there were two clearly-defined spikes. One was at 11:14 in the morning, in the last moment before the varcolac disappeared. The other was at 9:35 the night before, when the stadium had imploded.
Alex whistled. “I see it. That’s consistent with a singlet sent back in time from the demo on Monday morning to the stadium the previous night. You were right.” She cast a fearful look at the spinning universe display. “Are you sure that thing’s still contained?”
“Of course I’m not. I’ve been telling Babington for weeks that I can’t keep it contained indefinitely.”
The reminder turned Ryan’s attention back to the tablet with a sudden stab of fear. He had been checking on it frequently, at least once an hour, but it didn’t make him feel safe. He had updated his alarms to detect the kind of subtle strategy the varcolac had used to escape last time, but it was clever. What if it had breached the barrier so subtly that it had escaped without him even knowing it?
He reviewed the latest logs. Everything seemed to be in order. His protocols were still in place, with no indication that any of the values he was measuring from the wormhole had so much as hiccupped. It didn’t make him relax, exactly, but there was no immediate reason for alarm.
“It’s still contained,” he said. “For now.”
“Can I see?” Alex asked.
&nbs
p; Ryan regarded her, suspicious. She was asking to see the foundation of all his research; the equations and concepts behind his control over the baby universe. How well did he know her, really? She didn’t have clearance even to be in this room, never mind to look at the technical basis of his work.
“Why do you want to see it?” he asked.
She raised an eyebrow slightly. “I just want to understand what we’re dealing with. I want to help, and the more I know, the better I can help.”
It occurred to Ryan just how young and pretty she was. He had never much liked pretty women; he always felt like they were laughing at him behind his back. She was manipulating him, trying to make him give up his data. “It’s classified,” he said.
She took a step back and gave him a sideways look, the one people gave him when they thought he was acting crazy. “You brought me in here.”
He shook his head to clear it. What was wrong with him? “You’re right,” he said. “I’m sorry. I’m just not used to working too closely with other people.”
“You run a lab full of people.”
“Well . . . when it comes down to it, Nicole runs the lab. I like to concentrate on the math. I get my best work done here at night, when no one else is around.”
“I have to go now,” Alex said. Her pretty face showed confusion and pity rather than anger. He hated her for that.
“Okay,” he said.
“I’ll see you tomorrow.” She disappeared.
Ryan collapsed back on his chair and held his head in his hands. What was wrong with him? Alex wasn’t trying to steal anything from him. He had followed her in his car and practically insisted she come with him. It wasn’t her fault the varcolac had broken out while she was on stage. Or was it? Could she have planned it that way, so as to kill Secretary Falk?
Ridiculous. He shoved his fists into his eyes and rubbed them. He wasn’t thinking clearly. He wasn’t getting enough sleep. To distract himself, he brought up the logs again. They were quiet; barely any movement in the measured values at all. Had the varcolac given up? That didn’t seem likely.
