by David Walton
Ryan tried to put himself into the varcolac’s perspective. What did it want? Why was it trying to break into their world? Just to kill people? Or was it trying to learn something? He knew the varcolac was intelligent, incredibly so. He knew now that it had been manipulating him even as he kept it contained, influencing him through the equations it solved for him. But had it really been manipulating him, or simply communicating to him? What if it had recognized him as the one human truly capable of communicating at its level of intelligence?
His mind returned again to his childhood dream, that he was in fact the progeny of a superior alien race, planted here in this human body. He had always known it was a ludicrous fantasy, but it seemed to explain so much—not just his intelligence, which was so far beyond anyone else’s, but also how awkward and isolated he felt, and how incomprehensible human social interaction so often seemed. Only in lecture mode, when he was explaining his ideas to others, did he feel remotely comfortable.
But what if it wasn’t so ludicrous? What if Ryan’s mind was in fact not a human mind, but a varcolac’s? He had never belonged with the people surrounding him; he was something different, something greater. Maybe he was destined for something far beyond the simple fame of a smarter-than-average scientist.
The varcolac wasn’t evil, after all. It was just intelligent. Now that he thought about it, it had been the Secret Service agents that had attacked first, not the varcolac. It had only defended itself. When Alex started firing, it fought back, but it wasn’t the aggressor. It had just been trying to communicate. Though there was the baseball stadium. If the varcolac really had destroyed that, as seemed to be the case, it could hardly be considered self-defense.
He returned to the logs surrounding the time of the stadium explosion, scrutinizing the data for anything he had previously missed, looking for some indication that it had been an attempt by the varcolac to communicate. How would a quantum creature know what destruction it had caused from a human perspective? Did it understand the concept of human life and death?
Ryan grew lost in the work, drinking Cokes from his fridge and eating potato chips when he got hungry, barely aware of the taste as they slid down his throat. He studied the times right around the Higgs singlet spikes, filtering by frequency. And then he found it: a barely discernible pattern at the edge of the EHF band.
But it wasn’t quite what he was expecting. Two hours before the Higgs singlet spike that had destroyed the baseball stadium, the wormhole had registered a burst of EHF energy. The more he looked at it, the more he was sure that it wasn’t just a random fluctuation. It looked purposeful. He couldn’t say why, exactly, but he trusted his intuitions where mathematical patterns were concerned. To be certain, he ran it through a Shannon entropy plot to measure its randomness. No question. It wasn’t just some natural phenomenon; there was information encoded there. It meant something.
He worked all night, and by the morning, he had the answer. Encapsulated in the tiny burst of data was a representation of the location of the blast and its exact time. Direction, distance, and time were encoded in terms of Higgs particle wavelength, amplitude, and frequency, and measured from the wormhole and the time of the varcolac’s escape the next morning. It hadn’t been easy to crack the code, but once he had worked it out, it was irrefutable. It was a signal, or possibly just a measure of the varcolac’s own thought process, but it was there. If he had known all this ahead of time, he could have actually predicted the place and time of the stadium blast two hours before it had happened.
Ryan searched the rest of the data that had been gathered from the wormhole in the days since, looking for similar patterns. He found only one. It had appeared in the logs an hour earlier, just a tiny packet of energy at the same EM frequency as the first signal. He decoded it using the same method, and came up with a location, sixty-two miles away, and a time, 11:26 AM. He checked his watch. It was already past 11:00.
Ryan’s body surged with adrenaline. Did this mean what he thought it did? He identified the location using an online mapping program: Chelsey Funeral Parlor, in Media, Pennsylvania. He didn’t recognize it. He had been expecting another large population gathering, like a skyscraper or a sporting event. A funeral parlor? Why would the varcolac target that?
Whatever its significance, it wasn’t going to be there for much longer.
CHAPTER 16
Alex hated funeral parlors. All the furniture and decorations were unreal, larger than life, like a magazine photo instead of a real place. The flowers were too bright. The tables and divans along the walls were so polished they looked like plastic. The staff, too, seemed fake, sympathy rolling automatically off their tongues in practiced, meaningless phrases. Even the air seemed dreamlike, free of dust and speared with artful beams of sunlight.
Alex wasn’t technically there at all—she was watching through Sandra’s viewfeed—but her brain couldn’t tell the difference. If she weren’t so accustomed to it, it would have been disconcerting to be trapped in someone else’s point of view, unable to change the angle with a flick of her eyes. But Alex had been watching viewfeeds since elementary school, and her eyes tracked with Sandra’s by habit, moving so quickly that it gave her brain the impression that she was the one in control.
She was, in reality, sitting in Sandra’s apartment, staying away from the windows. Teleportation meant she could come and go secretly, and she would be able to escape quickly if anyone showed up at the door, but she still didn’t want to be seen. Besides Sandra’s place, she’d been spending a lot of time in the woods at Ridley Creek State Park, a few miles away from her parents’ house, staying off the main paths and using the invisibility module to stay out of sight. Being invisible was a liability in any more public place, since people would try to walk through her, close doors in her face, or even drive their cars right at her. Which was why Alex wasn’t at the funeral right now—it would be too crowded. The chance of her accidentally being discovered was too great. Besides, she didn’t want to be there.
Alex could disconnect from the funeral feed at any time, but she knew she wouldn’t. It was hard to bear now, but if she didn’t at least watch her own father’s funeral, the loss of it would haunt her forever. It made her feel trapped. Maybe she should have gone after all, stayed invisible and tried to keep to empty corners. If she had been there in person, she could have decided on her own where to look, where to sit, how to respond, instead of being caught in Sandra’s viewpoint.
Sandra stood in a line with their mother and Claire, greeting the guests, accepting their platitudes with good grace. Their mother shook hands and endured kisses with stiff resignation, her polite expression clearly strained. Claire, on the other hand, greeted each guest with the same poise and practiced gravity as the funeral director, her shining blond hair flowing over the shoulders of her expensive black dress.
The two sisters seemed to fit together: Claire and Alessandra, one blond and the other dark. Watching through Sandra’s eyes, Alex felt like an outsider. The truth was, she had always thought of Sandra as the real sister, the original Alessandra. She, Alex, was the interloper, the girl who had suddenly appeared when their father was accused of murder. She was the one who had hidden away with her father, had fought the varcolac, and had been forever changed by the experience. When Sandra—the real Alessandra—returned, Alex had felt like a stranger in her own home. A freak of nature. A quantum mistake.
On second thought, maybe it was better that she wasn’t there at the funeral in person. She might have snatched a too-perfect vase from a too-perfect table and smashed it on the too-perfect floor.
Two uniformed police officers, a man and a woman, came through the line, friends of Sandra. Sandra greeted them with hugs and called them Nathan and Danielle. Their sympathy seemed sincere. Alex supposed police officers grew used to funerals and knew how to talk and act. Another woman, also in uniform, hung back and didn’t go through the line. Sandra kept glancing at her nervously.
“Who’s the woman in the back?” Ale
x asked.
“Detective Messinger,” Sandra said under her breath, after accepting yet another well-meaning hug by a distant relative. Their mother’s family was large and mostly lived in the area, though their father had never gotten on very well with them.
“Is she the one who’s been interrogating you?”
“Yes. I think she half-believes me about the varcolac, but she could just be trying to gain my confidence.”
Alex suspected there were probably other officers and agents there in normal clothes, blending into the crowd. Watching to see if she would make an appearance, perhaps. Alex had no experience on the street with identifying cops, and there were enough of her parents’ friends she didn’t recognize that she couldn’t be certain.
The greeting line seemed endless. Alex didn’t know how her mother and Sandra could stand it. Finally, everyone filed into the small chapel.
While the organ was playing something somber, a ping notified Alex of an incoming call. She ignored it at first, but it kept pinging over and over, evidence that whoever it was was calling over and over. She checked and saw that it was Ryan Oronzi. She rolled her eyes and answered it.
“Ever hear of just leaving a message?” she said.
“Alex? This is Ryan.”
“I know who it is. There’s this new invention—you might have heard of it. Instead of calling over and over, you can just send me a message, and I don’t have to interrupt my father’s funeral to answer you.”
“Listen to me. The varcolac . . . wait. Did you say funeral?”
“Yes. My dad’s funeral is going on as we speak.”
“At the Chelsey Funeral Home?”
“Yes.”
“In Media?”
“Yes! Did you just call to check the address? If you were planning to go, you’re a bit late.”
The organ music stopped, and the minister walked toward the front. His hair was long and gray, drawn back into a leather tie. He wore ecclesiastical black with a traditional white collar.
“They have to leave,” Ryan said. He sounded agitated.
“What are you talking about?”
“I found some data. It points to that funeral home. The varcolac is going to destroy it.”
“What? I thought you said the varcolac was contained!”
“It is contained. It sends particles back in time, remember? Sometime in the future, it’s going to break out and send a Higgs singlet back in time to this moment. Can you imagine the precision and understanding it takes to create the effect you want through the chain reaction of a single particle? It’s incredible.”
“I’m not interested in how incredible it is! Is there anything we can do?”
“We can . . . well. Never mind.”
“What?”
“There’s less than a minute left. Not much we can do, at this point.”
At the funeral, the minister turned to face the assembled guests. He had no eyes. Where his eyes should have been was just blank, featureless skin.
Alex leaped to her feet. “Sandra!” she shouted, just before her viewfeed went black.
She flicked the viewfeed aside, revealing her true surroundings: the front room of Sandra’s two-room apartment. She frantically tried to reconnect to Sandra’s vision, but she couldn’t. The varcolac’s presence must be interfering with the signal. The alternative—that the varcolac had already destroyed Sandra and her system with it—didn’t bear thinking. Alex had to get to that funeral home, and she needed to do it now.
She brought up the last image she had received from Sandra, the horrible, eyeless face of the minister staring out at the guests. She knew Sandra’s precise location as of seconds before, but she might have moved by now. If she teleported there, she might appear right in the middle of someone else’s body. Or she might arrive just as the building exploded.
It didn’t matter. Her sister was in danger. She had to do it, and she had to do it now.
Sandra stared into the eyeless face of the varcolac, at first too startled to react. It was happening again. She would be captured or killed, and all these people with her. She thought of her mother losing another loved one, or else dying herself. She was not going to let that happen.
The varcolac swiveled its head toward her, seeming to stare at her despite its lack of eyes. It opened the minister’s mouth and groaned.
It was an awful sound. It was as if someone had taken the mouth and throat of a corpse and played air through it with a bellows. It was the most terrifying sound Sandra had ever heard. The funeral director approached the minister, solicitous as always, but clearly disturbed by the varcolac’s face. “Sir, is everything all right? Do you need help? Should we call 911?”
The varcolac didn’t even look at him. It raised a hand, and the director cried out and clutched at his chest. He collapsed to the floor, shuddered once, and then lay still, his eyes staring out at nothing. The room erupted then, guests scrambling over one another and trying to push out the doors. Sandra stood, but she didn’t run. She was a police officer, sworn to protect the people of Pennsylvania. Besides, it couldn’t be a coincidence that it had shown up here, of all places. It had come for her.
She didn’t have her firearm—she was suspended, and besides, it hadn’t seemed appropriate for a funeral. She didn’t think it would do much good against the varcolac anyway. She had seen how Alex had fought in her demo, and knew she had some of those same capabilities available through the software Alex had copied for her, but by the time she figured any of them out, she could be dead.
Her mother still sat in her seat, staring frozen up at the varcolac. Claire was tugging at her arm, looking panicked. “Mom, you need to leave,” Sandra said. “Leave now.”
Suddenly Alex was there next to her. “Keep moving!” Alex said. “Don’t stay in one place.” She disappeared and reappeared across the room.
The varcolac advanced and raised its hand toward Sandra. No time. Sandra chose a spot on the other side of it and teleported. To her, it seemed as though the room had suddenly spun around. Across the room, where she had just been standing, a young woman that looked just like her clutched at her chest and fell to the floor.
“Alex!” Sandra screamed. But no, it wasn’t Alex. The woman was wearing the dark dress that she herself was wearing, and her hair was put up in the same style. The woman on the floor was her.
Disoriented, Sandra looked around and saw Alex, still very much alive. Then who had just died?
Suddenly, Sandra understood. The varcolac was a quantum creature, a probabilistic being. Like a quantum particle, it acted at more than one time and place at once, as part of a probability waveform. It had attacked her both before and after she teleported, and so just like her father, she had split. One version of her had teleported and appeared here. The other version had died.
Sandra flushed with horror and rage. She wanted to tear the varcolac to pieces, but she didn’t know what to do. How could such a creature even be harmed? It could kill every person here with a gesture.
For that matter, why was it even here? If it had the power to destroy a baseball stadium, why didn’t it just destroy the whole building, or the whole block? Why weren’t they already dead?
Nathan and Danielle, both in uniform, advanced on the varcolac, spreading out and drawing their sidearms. “Police!” Danielle shouted. “Hands on your head!”
“No!” Sandra yelled. “Get out of here! It’ll kill you!”
They either didn’t hear or didn’t listen. Danielle raised her weapon and fired three shots at the varcolac, center mass. It blurred, and the bullets passed through it, punching holes in the paneling at the back of the room. The sound was deafening in the enclosed space.
The varcolac raised its hand toward Danielle, but suddenly Alex was there, standing between them. There was a brilliant flash of light. Alex fell back a step, but stayed on her feet. She pointed at the wall, and the varcolac flew toward it as if gravity had suddenly been turned on its side. The minister’s body hit the wal
l with an audible crunch. It fell to the floor, and for a moment, Sandra thought the fight was over, but the minister stood again. One of its arms was twisted at an angle, and it dragged one leg behind it, but it came at them, eyeless and terrifying.
Then Sandra saw something that took her breath away. She called her sister’s name and pointed. Behind Alex, Nathan and Danielle’s faces were also covered with blank skin where their eyes had been just a moment ago. All three varcolacs advanced, surrounding them.
Ryan could see what was happening in the funeral parlor through Alex’s viewfeed, but there was nothing he could do about it, not directly. If he teleported there, he might be killed. Then who would devise the next equation to trap the varcolac? He was like a general, too valuable to be risked on the front line. He wanted them to survive, but when it came down to it, his life was worth more than theirs.
The crazy thing was, as far as he could tell, the varcolac was still trapped in the wormhole. The creatures attacking Sandra and Alex at that moment had somehow been manufactured by the varcolac in the future, through the Higgs sequence it had sent back in time. Or that it would send back in time. Ryan had underestimated the complexity of the sequence of particle interactions the varcolac could initiate with a Higgs singlet. He had imagined it doing the equivalent of sending a billiard ball back in time with exactly the direction and spin to impact each of the other balls and win the game—a difficult enough concept. Instead, the particle it had sent back in time had initiated a sequence that had created an instance of the varcolac itself, an extension of its own intelligence and physical presence.
Ryan was in awe. This creature had such mastery over time and space that it could recreate the pattern of its own existence with the chain reaction of a single, precisely aimed particle. Which meant that it understood its own configuration down to every quark and gluon. It could replicate some portion of itself, and these replications were mere extensions of its mind. Could it be that it was a species of one, communicating itself across the universes and the ages? Its awareness and experience must be vast.
