by David Walton
“It’s the quantum data your father was collecting from Alex’s phone,” he said. “I used the location references to put together a 3D image.”
“So . . . this is live? One of these people is Alex?”
“The closest one, I think. I don’t think it was meant to be used to spy on her, exactly, but the data is there.”
“Where is she? What’s she doing?”
He shook his head. “It’s all locally referenced. There’s no global locator data, or anything like that. You can just call her, if you want to know where she is.”
But Sandra could hardly hear him anymore. Her awareness of the room was fading, the colors shifting. She could see what Alex was doing. No, more than that. She was sliding into Alex’s viewpoint, falling into her mind. And she couldn’t stop.
The Jozef Stefan Institute was in Ljubljana, Slovenia’s capital and largest city. It would almost certainly be guarded. Instead of teleporting to the roof of the Institute, Alex chose an old castle, a tourist attraction that looked down on Ljubljana from a rounded hill in the city center. It was night, so the castle was closed to the public, its ramparts deserted.
Catching her breath, Alex looked around, astonished. For some reason—perhaps because she had never heard of the place before today—she had pictured Ljubljana as a dirty slum of a place, poor and overcrowded. Instead, she found a picturesque old European city, clean and colorful, with red shingled roofs and cobblestone streets and the blue ridges of the Alps in the distance. Lights danced through the night, not garish with neon or strobing color, but subtle and tasteful.
The Institute itself was a university and center of scientific endeavor, one of Slovenia’s proud achievements. Its five buildings formed a sort of square in a residential area of the city, with a courtyard in the center where flowers bloomed. It was a place of peace and human accomplishment. And it was surrounded by Turkish soldiers.
It could mean only one thing: that Jean had reached and convinced the leadership of Turkey, and that they recognized the importance of this place. Alex’s mind raced. Now that she was here, it was increasingly clear to her how unprepared she was. How would she find Sean? She didn’t know his plan of attack or where he was coming from. Maybe he was waiting until the dead of night. Maybe he had already rigged the place with explosives and was putting as much distance between himself and the Institute before it blew. Or maybe the varcolac had already killed him.
It made her suddenly sad. Why did there have to be war? Hadn’t Europe suffered enough in the last century and a half? When humanity was capable of such beauty and discovery, why did countries have to pit their aspirations against each other in widespread destruction? She hated to see this beautiful city scarred. And she didn’t want her brother to die.
Alex unlocked the large black hard case she had brought with her: Angel’s quadcopters. If it came to a showdown with the varcolac, it was the best weapon she had, the only weapon she knew that could even slow it down. Though ultimately, it had not even been the varcolac itself she had fought at the prison. It was a shadow of itself, created by a Higgs singlet sent precisely back in time, like an automated computer program given certain goals and functions by its creator. And she had very nearly lost.
An alarm sounded. A soldier on the roof was pointing in their direction and talking into a radio. They’d been spotted.
“What do we do?” Tequila asked.
The soldiers stood at alert with weapons raised. Alex saw an officer speaking rapidly to a squad and pointing at the castle. Then they started to die.
Gunfire tore into them, sounding like distant pops from Alex’s vantage point. The soldiers’ bodies danced and fell. A few started shooting, but their weapons were wrenched out of their hands by invisible forces. Alex watched, aghast. It had to be her brother and his team out there, using their projectors and killing these men. Somehow, it seemed more awful in this idyllic city with its old-world charm. The old world had bloody conflicts too, of course. But everything about this place spoke of peaceful cooperation and advancement. The blood on the cobblestones was lurid, garish, wrong.
She understood the reasons. She didn’t even blame Sean, not really. This place had to be destroyed. It was a military installation now, whether it had been built for that purpose or not. It was possibly the enemy’s single most powerful asset. If it had been bombed from the air, it would have somehow seemed more justifiable, though of course the soldiers would have died just the same. A team of insurgents was the more humane option; it would allow them to kill the soldiers without killing the scientists inside.
When the soldiers lay dead on the floor, the marines appeared, seemingly out of nowhere, and advanced on the entrance. They ran quickly, in a crouch, anonymous in their masks and urban fatigues.
Alex could immediately tell which one was her brother. Sean had been born with a short arm, half the normal length, with a tiny hand at the end of it that couldn’t grasp anything very well. For most of his growing up, it had been that way, a source of frustration and occasional ridicule, though he could do just about anything he put his mind to learning. He was athletic and coordinated, and worked twice as hard as anyone to prove he could not only do the same things others could, but do them better.
Then a prosthetic was invented that could enclose his short arm and operate off of the signals of his nerves and muscles. It was a wonder of engineering and made his left arm more precise and powerful even than his right. Sean had joined the military—an impossibility before the prosthetic—and, true to form, had dedicated himself to being not just a capable soldier, but one of the very best.
It was the prosthetic that gave him away. It was bulky where it enclosed his left arm, and even under specially fitted fatigues, it stood out.
They disappeared inside. Maybe they would set their explosives and leave safely, and the facility would be destroyed. Sean knew what he was doing. He and his team were in superb shape, crack shots, experts in infiltration and sabotage. They were trained with the Higgs projectors and knew when and how to use them. Alex began to hope that their presence wouldn’t be needed, that Sean and the other marines had everything under control.
Then the bodies on the ground started to rise.
CHAPTER 24
“Sandra!” Her mother had her by the shoulders, but she was looking up at someone else. “We need to get her back to the hospital.”
“No.” Sandra blinked her eyes, looked around. She was on the floor in the High Energy Lab. Her mother and Angel were there, looking concerned. “I’m back. I’m okay.”
“This isn’t right,” her mother said. “You have a concussion, maybe worse. You need medical care.”
Sandra stood up, a bit shaky. Her head throbbed. “No, I don’t. It’s not medical at all. I wasn’t unconscious.” She turned to Angel. “I was there with Alex. In her mind. It was like I was her, seeing what she saw, thinking her thoughts.” She sank into a chair. “I don’t even think she knew I was there.”
Was that what it would be like, when their probability wave finally collapsed? Would she be absorbed into Alex without a glitch? Not only did Alex not know she was there; she, Sandra, hadn’t known she was there. She hadn’t been aware of herself, like a ghost trapped in Alex’s body. She had been Alex.
And now she was back. How long would it last? How much time did she have left before she ceased to exist as an individual?
“I have to lie down,” she said.
Her mother pulled the thin mattress off the broken bed. Sandra stretched out on it, trying not to cry from the pain. Her mother sat next to her and massaged her scalp.
“She’s in Slovenia somewhere, at a scientific institute,” Sandra said. “Sean is there, too. And I’m pretty sure the varcolac is somewhere nearby.”
“Is there anything we can do?”
She shook her head. “I don’t think so. Hopefully she has a plan.”
She lay quietly for a time, thinking. Wondering what her life would have been like if she and Alex ha
d never split. Would she even have existed? It was so hard to think about, the concept of being Sandra, and yet being different. She and Alex were just two examples of millions of possible Alessandras that might have been, each of them her, and yet each of them not. If she and Alex did some day combine, she probably wouldn’t mourn the day. She would be a new person, and that person would be glad to be alive. But that person wouldn’t be Sandra Kelley.
“Angel?” she said.
He came to her side.
“Can you tell from the data how long I have left?”
“What do you mean?”
“From my father’s data. If the trend continues, can you plot how long it will be until Alex and I converge into a single person?”
For once, he was solemn. “I can’t. It’s a complex pattern, not linear. Maybe someone else could tell, but not me. I’m sorry.”
She met his eyes. She hadn’t had much time to think about it, but she really liked Angel. He was funny, relaxed, unintimidated by petty authority figures. He was intelligent and self-sacrificing and cared about doing the right thing. He wasn’t much to look at, but that was growing on her, too. She could trust him.
She took a deep breath and let it out. “I don’t think I have very long,” she said.
The Turkish soldiers had no eyes. They rose to their feet, ignoring the bullet wounds in their chests and heads, and set off toward the main entrance of the institute, the doors that the American soldiers had just entered. Alex felt the panic start to flutter in her chest like a trapped moth. The varcolac was here.
There was no time for fear. She teleported to the low roof of one of the Institute buildings, and her team followed close behind. Alex cued the quadcopters from her eyejacks, and they rose out of their case four at a time. As soon as each group reached eye level, she sent them teleporting down to surround a single eyeless Turkish soldier. A flash of electricity, the puppet fell, and Alex moved on to the next.
“What can we do?” shouted Vijay.
“Find another way into this building!” she said. He ran off across the roof, the others following him.
There were too many soldiers. She took out as many as she could, but they reached the doors anyway. An American who’d been left at the entrance fired his M4 into them, but the bullets passed through them like water. He slammed the doors in their faces, but they walked right through without a pause. She heard the soldier scream.
Alex surrounded another puppet soldier with quadcopters. This time, however, the puppet reached out and grabbed one with each hand. The flash of their energy shields still took him down, but he took the two copters down with him. They smashed into the ground, writhing and sparking as the blades dug into the dirt. The next soldier did the same thing. Unlike the puppets at the prison, these were learning. The varcolac was here, altering their behavior to react to her attack.
She teleported the remaining copters back to the roof. “Vijay?”
“Over here,” he called back. “There’s a way in.”
She ran over to see a metal door, which they had unlocked by the simple expedient of teleporting a pebble into the lock mechanism, blowing it apart. The door hung open.
“Let’s go.”
She led them inside and down a flight of concrete stairs, which opened at the bottom into a long, poorly-lit hallway. It was evening, and most of the eight hundred scientists that worked here during the day were gone. She had to find Sean and warn him what he was up against. Then, once his explosives were set, she could teleport him and his team back to Poland. Assuming they lived that long.
She rounded a corner and felt a gun at her head. A man grabbed her by the back of the neck and shoved her face against a wall, but not before she got a glimpse of his blackened face and gray fatigues.
“I’m an American,” she said. The soldier turned her around and held her at arm’s length, taking in her appearance, processing the sound of her voice. “I’m Sean Kelley’s sister,” she added. The expression on the soldier’s face would have been comical in any other situation.
“Team Alpha,” the soldier murmured. “We have a situation at entry point one.”
“Copy that,” a familiar voice replied. “Do you need help?”
Alex grabbed the radio. “Sean,” she said. “It’s me.”
Ryan couldn’t find Alex anywhere. She wasn’t in the room that had been assigned to her to sleep. She wasn’t in the training center. A soldier said she had gone down the street with all of her old team members to a local pub, but she wasn’t there, either. He supposed they could have left there and gone on to sample another pub, but he was starting to suspect something worse. She had left him behind. She had forced him to get on that plane so they could fight the varcolac together, but then she had abandoned him to go on by herself.
Fortunately, he still had access to the logs from his baby universe and associated programs back at the NJSC. Every Higgs projector still ultimately drew energy from there, and so any Higgs projector activity was still logged in that system. He couldn’t track her if she was just walking around the city, but if she did any teleporting, he would be able to see exactly where she went.
When he looked at the log, he was astonished. She had left the country. She was behind enemy lines. Not only that, but she had made copies of the latest projector software—including the teleportation and invisibility modules—for her friends on the team from Lockheed Martin. Of course—she had taken them along, but not him. What were they doing?
Ryan looked up the coordinates with a mapping program and found the address: the Jozef Stefan Institute in Ljubljana. It was a physics institute, mostly, though they did some of the softer sciences as well. They had their own particle accelerator there. There weren’t many of those in Eastern Europe; most of Europe’s accelerators were in Germany, Switzerland, or the United Kingdom. In fact, it was probably the only one in all of Turkish-controlled territory.
Of course. It was obvious, now that he thought of it. The Institute was where Jean would be. The handful of projectors Ryan had given her wouldn’t be enough; Jean—meaning the varcolac, of course—would want thousands of soldiers to have projectors. It would want men killing each other at an unprecedented rate. That meant the Turks would need to make a lot more.
Alex had gone to Ljubljana to stop her. She had taken her team along with her, but not him. She hadn’t even told him she was going. Why? Because he was competition. She wanted the varcolac all to herself. He had thought her uninterested in such things, but why else would she have left him behind? She wanted to be the One.
But that was rightly him! He had made the baby universe. He had summoned the varcolac into the world. He had traded equations with it and learned its secrets. He had been born for this. But first Jean, and now Alex, wanted to steal it away from him.
He couldn’t let that happen. But how could he stop them? Alex was one thing; she was just a human. But Jean had the varcolac on her side. If he teleported away after them without a plan, he was just going to get himself killed.
What he needed was a new weapon. Jean had taken out his Higgs projector as easily as thinking. He could theoretically make a new one, hardened against EMPs, but that would take time and materials, and he didn’t have either. There were two options: either he had to have the strength to overpower her or he had to catch her unawares. The former was unlikely, not with the varcolac helping her, which just left the element of surprise.
But how could he surprise a creature who could see every quantum interaction, every electromagnetic wavelength, every particle emitted or absorbed? By itself, he could perhaps fool it. The varcolac had, after all, spent countless years completely unaware of human intelligence and only recently understood just how many humans there were. Particle interactions hadn’t even given it a concept of matter, never mind individual human intelligence.
But with Jean, it was another story. Paired with Jean, it understood the significance of the particle interactions on a large scale. It could parse the meanings o
f interrupted beams of light and radiant energy sources and know that where there were signs of a human body there was a human intelligence.
The invisibility module wouldn’t help. It was practically a toy, designed only to absorb and re-emit visible light according to Maxwell’s equations. It didn’t even stop the infrared signals of his body heat, never mind the countless interactions of radiation across the electromagnetic spectrum. Static electricity, friction, the Brownian movement of displaced air: all of these created a trail of evidence to eyes that knew how to look. He didn’t know which of these effects might escape the varcolac’s notice and which might be as obvious as a forest fire. His only option was get rid of them all. Instead of a module to hide him from visible light, he needed a module to hide him from reality itself.
In theory, it should be easy. The Higgs field already did the hard work of capturing particles and reconfiguring them according to his software’s specifications. For the invisibility module, his software had to solve Maxwell’s equations for each photon that came into the field and reproduce it properly on the other side. A reality module would work much the same way, but instead of Maxwell’s equations, it would solve Schrödinger’s equation for the probability of a particle being present in a region of space. It would reproduce all particles, not just photons, essentially rerouting reality itself around him. He would be completely undetectable by any means.
It was a concept he’d been playing with for years, a pet project of sorts. He had the software, fully tested in simulation. There had been nothing really stopping him from using it except the guts to actually try it. Now he had no choice. Unless he wanted to die in obscurity like the rest of humanity he had to challenge Jean and regain his place.
It took him an hour. The real challenge was performance. In daylight, there were roughly 1021 photons that entered his space every second, but there could be as many as 1050 total particles passing through the same space, requiring many orders of magnitude more processing power. The sort of computer that could fit in a phone card was no longer sufficient. Ryan liberated a hardened supercomputer from the military training center and fit it into a backpack. It was oppressively heavy, but it could do the needed calculations fast enough to eliminate any noticeable delay. Of course, Ryan couldn’t say for sure what would be noticeable to a varcolac, but it was the best chance he had. He stole an oxygen tank as well, and strapped it to his chest—after all, air molecules would be routed around him just like any other particle.
