Superposition

by David Walton

  I resisted it for a while. Like most physicists, I went through a phase where I believed we just didn’t understand enough. That behind the exploding chaos of trillions of particles spontaneously transforming into other particles was a set of rules to predict it. Einstein himself had clung to that view until he died. Eventually, though, I came not just to accept the truth, but to love it. The world might be chaotic and unpredictable at its root, but it could be controlled. The random firing of particles could be mastered and made to keep order, to follow Newton’s laws in aggregate, to bend to the will of mathematics and technology. In the end, the chaos didn’t win.

  Which was why what Brian had showed us was so disturbing to me. He had found a way to let the chaos out. I believed him when he said it would change the world. Whether it would change the world for the better, however, was harder to predict.

  A sharp knock on the wall snapped my attention back to the present. “What are you doing in there?” Elena called from the bedroom.

  I realized I’d been brushing my teeth for far longer than was practically necessary. I spit and rinsed my mouth, then headed back into our bedroom, but no one was there.

  “Elena?” I said.

  The door shut with a bang behind me, revealing Elena hiding behind the door, wearing one of my T-shirts. It was long enough on her to serve as a nightgown, but only just. She wrapped her arms around my neck and planted a long kiss on my mouth. I returned the kiss eagerly, delighted but surprised. Elena was a morning person, generally, and it had been a long day.

  “Seriously?” I asked. “You’re not tired?”

  “Mmm,” she said. “I’ve been wanting to do this ever since you punched Brian in the face.”

  “That’s me, your big protector,” I said.

  She reached an exploratory hand up the inside of my thigh, and her eyes sparkled. “Yeah, you could say that.” She took a few steps back and made sure I was looking. She has this thing she does where she crosses her arms, takes hold of the bottom of her shirt, and pulls it over her head in one lightning-fast move. She knows I like it, and it’s gotten to be a thing with us, kind of a secret signal, where she’ll catch my eye—in, say, a crowded room—and she’ll subtly cross her arms and finger the hem of her shirt. She did it now, and I grinned at her.

  “You are so hot,” I said.

  “How hot?” she asked, still toying with the hem of the shirt.

  “Ionizing radiation hot,” I said. “Neutral pion decay hot.”

  Elena snorted. “You’re such a romantic,” she said. Then she pulled off the T-shirt, and we both stopped talking for a while.

  Afterward, Elena settled in with a computer on her lap to work on our finances a little before bed. Despite my background in math, I’m no good with a budget, and she’s always managed the money side of things. I lay on my back, staring at the ceiling, tired but wide awake, still unable to put the day’s events out of my mind.

  Brian’s research at NJSC had to do with quantum computing, a concept that was getting close enough to reality that large manufacturers were starting to invest heavily in it. It was just the sort of thing the NJSC was willing to prioritize: promises of breakthroughs right around the corner that would benefit everybody, with significant grant money available to be claimed. What was lacking to make it a reality was the ability to connect quantum effects to large mechanical objects (large in this context meaning at least ten micrometers across) without storing those objects at near absolute zero. Any warmer and the natural vibrations of the atoms in the material tended to drown out any quantum effects.

  We knew it was possible, because birds did it. When photons struck their eyes, entangled electrons were scattered and forced to spin in different ways depending on the Earth’s magnetic field. The change in electron spin subtly changed the chemical state of the molecules, which in turn altered the flow of cellular signals through the bird’s eye. The result was that the bird could actually see the magnetic field, and thus know which way was north, regardless of where it was or what the weather was like. The bird’s eyes weren’t cryogenic, though. So we knew it could be done.

  It seemed that Brian must somehow have succeeded, far beyond anyone’s expectations, and found a way to have quantum properties affect the everyday world. An electron never stops spinning; it’s a perpetual motion machine, moving endlessly without any loss of energy. A particle fired at an atom might have a wavelength larger than an atom; it has a pretty good chance of passing right through it without hitting it. To apply these principles to gyroscopes and bullets was crazy, though. A bullet is made up of trillions of atoms, and although it did technically have a wavelength, it was something like ten to the minus thirty-four meters long, so it shouldn’t be able to diffract around anything.

  “It’s eating you up inside, isn’t it?” Elena said.

  I sighed and nodded. “It bothers me. It shouldn’t be possible, and if it is possible . . .”

  Elena finished my thought. “Then the world isn’t as stable as you want it to be.”

  She was right. To Elena, it didn’t make any difference if the world was made of quarks or superstrings or tiny elves. She cared about her children and her husband and exercise and eating well and whether Penn State beat Purdue. But it made a difference to me. I needed to know if the world was inherently predictable or chaotic, whether the random outcome of trillions of probabilistic encounters ultimately resulted in order that I could control.

  Elena sighed. “I think you should take Marek with you.”

  “What?”

  “When you go out to the NJSC tomorrow. Take Marek with you.”

  I pushed up on one elbow. “Who says I’m going to the NJSC?”

  Elena gave me a look. “What have we just been talking about? Go find out what Brian was researching; get it settled it in your mind.”

  “I can’t leave you alone here. What if Brian comes back?”

  “There are police swarming around this whole neighborhood.” As if to emphasize her words, we heard a helicopter chattering overhead. “He’s no secret agent. They’ll find him soon enough.”

  “Since I left Philly, I’ve only punched another person three times. Two of those times, it was Brian,” I said.

  “I’ll be fine,” she said. “I don’t need you hovering around protecting me. He’s not going to come back and shoot me again.” I leaned over and kissed her on the mouth. She punched me good-naturedly. “We already did that, you great brute. Go to sleep.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “I know how it is with you,” she said. “You get something stuck in your mind, and you can’t let it go. Better just to go get it settled.”

  I fell back onto my pillows, feeling suddenly exhausted.

  “And Jacob?” she said.

  “Mmm . . . yes?”

  “Don’t do anything stupid.”

  CHAPTER 6

  DOWN-SPIN

  The wooden spectator benches in courtroom five were hard and low and looked like they dated from Colonial times. Despite this, the crowds who gathered to see me humiliated had not abated, though they did tend to fidget in the uncomfortable seats as the afternoon wore on.

  “Officer Lin, what is your profession?” Haviland asked, in a ringing voice that suggested that her profession would be the key to the whole case.

  Brittany Lin was a pretty, dark-haired, Asian policewoman in a smart jacket and skirt and glasses like flat ovals. She was fit and athletic, and I guessed her age at about forty. “I’m a senior forensic analyst with the New Jersey State Police,” she said. Her voice was low pitched and no-nonsense.

  “And your time in that position?”

  “I’ve been a police officer for fourteen years and a forensic specialist for ten of those years.”

  “Then it’s safe to say you are an expert in your field.”

  “I know my business, Mr. Haviland.”

  Haviland went on to establish her certifications as an investigator and the status granted her as an expert wit
ness in various other courts. She had led the forensic team that had processed the crime scene in the underground bunker.

  “At the time you were called to the scene, were you aware that police had been searching for Mr. Vanderhall?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Why didn’t the police find him?”

  “The bunker was two hundred feet underground, in a supposedly abandoned experiment room. No one even knew to look for him there.”

  “Except for Jacob Kelley?”

  “Objection,” Terry said. “Assumes facts not in evidence.”

  “Sustained,” Judge Roswell said. “Mr. Haviland, please limit your questions to those about which the witness can have knowledge.”

  “I apologize, Your Honor,” Haviland said. “Ms. Lin, what did you find when you entered the bunker?”

  “I found a dead male, mid to late thirties, with a gunshot wound to the chest as the apparent cause of death. The victim had been dead approximately twelve hours,” Lin said.

  Haviland made a note on his legal pad, as if this was a new piece of information he needed to write down. “How was time of death established?”

  “The level of decomposition, given the warm temperature in the bunker and the mass of the victim, limits the time to no more than twelve hours, while the presence of firmly established livor mortis suggests at least that long.”

  “What time was this analysis made?”

  “At four o’clock in the afternoon on December third, placing the death at approximately four o’clock in the morning.”

  Haviland held up his giant whiteboard timeline. “Permission to approach the witness, Your Honor?”

  “Granted,” the judge said.

  Haviland handed a huge red marker to the witness. “Ms. Lin, can you indicate for us on this timeline, using a red X, when the victim died?”

  She complied, vigorously marking the spot as if she were etching it in blood. Haviland held it up again so the jury could see, then rotated it to include the audience. “Four AM on December third. Is that correct?” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “So, approximately eight hours after Mr. Vanderhall ran away from the Kelley residence, and five hours after the police finished questioning the family?”

  “Objection,” Terry said. “Asked and answered.”

  “Sustained, Mr. Haviland. Let’s move along.” Judge Roswell said.

  “Yes, Your Honor.” Haviland flipped to another page in his notes. “Was any suicide note found on the premises?” he asked.

  “No sir, there was not,” Lin said.

  “Were Mr. Vanderhall’s injuries consistent with a theory of suicide?”

  “No sir. Suicide was not a serious consideration.”

  “Why not?”

  Lin smiled condescendingly. “Mr. Vanderhall was shot in the middle of the chest from a distance of at least three feet. The insubstantial amount of gunshot residue found on his skin and clothing rules out the possibility that he was any nearer to the gun when it was fired. Besides which, he was then shot two more times while he was lying on the floor.”

  “He was shot a total of three times? Was one shot not enough to kill him?”

  “No sir, it would have been enough. The first shot passed through Mr. Vanderhall’s heart, almost certainly killing him before either of the other two shots was fired.”

  “In your expert opinion, what do those extra shots suggest?”

  “It’s what we call overkill. One shot might indicate an accident or a thoughtless action taken in a moment of passion. Multiple, unnecessary shots suggest that the murder was intentional. They suggest that the first shot, while sufficient to cause death, was not sufficient to complete the emotional experience. It means that this killer wanted to be very, very certain that Mr. Vanderhall was dead.”

  CHAPTER 7

  UP-SPIN

  Marek Svoboda was my brother-in-law, married to Elena’s sister Ava. He was Romanian, a carpenter by trade, and a genius with crown molding. He had immigrated to the States ten years earlier, when the Russo-Turkish war over the Balkans in the twenties had devastated his country’s economy. The retirement of the Baby Boomer generation had caused a serious shortage of working-age people in the United States, and Marek had taken advantage of the immigration incentives the United States was offering at the time. For years, he worked in construction, sending most of his paycheck back to his family in Romania, until he discovered that his wife had married another man and kept it a secret so Marek would keep sending her money. Now he was married to Ava, and he didn’t send his salary anywhere if he could help it.

  He was nearly as big as I was and more densely muscled. He’d helped me with a lot of carpentry work at our house over the years and had come to be a good friend.

  “How far away is it?” he asked. I was driving; he was picking the music. At the moment it was some kind of Latin/Slavic fusion rock that sounded like a family of cats caught on a firing range.

  “Not far now,” I said. It had been nothing but pine forest on either side of us for miles. The New Jersey Pine Barrens covered over a million acres, and every acre of it looked pretty much the same. For large portions of it, there wasn’t even any cellular phone coverage. It was considered an International Biosphere Reserve by the United Nations and protected from most development. Despite this, we were actually driving over the particle accelerator, which ran underneath the trees, a huge ring buried two hundred feet beneath the surface and stretching thirty miles in circumference.

  I had spent most of the trip trying to explain to Marek how it worked. “It’s like a big racetrack,” I said. “We use thousands of magnets to get little particles zipping around at the speed of light and then, bang! They smash into each other.”

  “Little?” Marek held up his thumb and forefinger with only a small space between them. “Like this big?”

  “Um . . .” I grinned. “Actually, you could line up a few million subatomic particles between your fingers right now.”

  Marek took being off by six orders of magnitude in stride. “And you shoot them as fast as light?”

  “Well, it’s more like 0.999999 times the speed of light, but close enough.”

  “So, millions of dollars, to smash little bits together,” Marek said.

  “Actually, it’s more than ten billion dollars. But yeah, pretty much.”

  Marek’s eyebrows knitted together as if in pain. “And the point is?”

  Marek had a thing about money. He complained about every dollar of taxes he had to pay and raged about government waste, seeing his own salary being spent on things he didn’t care about. He always thought products were overpriced, though math wasn’t his strong suit. He would drive ten minutes out of his way to save two cents on a gallon of gas.

  “It’s trying to answer some of the deepest questions we have about the universe,” I said. “Questions like, ‘Where does mass comes from?’ and ‘Why can’t we see most of the matter in the world?’ and ‘What happened during the first few fractions of a second of the beginning of the universe?’”

  The endless trees finally gave way to housing developments and strip malls. A sign with a picture of the Hindenburg said, “Welcome to Lakehurst, Airship Capital of the World.” In the distance, a jet took off from McGuire Air Force base.

  Marek frowned. “You are trying to find God?”

  I shook my head, ready to correct him, but Marek’s family had been Orthodox for centuries, their faith surviving even through the Communist regime. As far as I knew, Marek himself never went to church, but religion was a fundamental part of his ethnic and family identity. “Something like that,” I said instead.

  The buildings of the NJSC loomed ahead of us, twelve of them in all, dominated by the silver-domed Feynman Center. I had called ahead and arranged with Jean Massey, a friend from the days when I’d worked there, to get us in. We entered through the employee gate, and security waved me through when I showed my ID. I turned left beyond the Einstein Building onto Strange
Street, and parked in front of the Dirac Building, where I had worked with Brian before I left. I turned off the car but made no move to get out.

  “Are you okay?” Marek asked.

  “Fine,” I said. “Just some people in there I haven’t seen for a while.”

  We got out of the car. The doors all required card readers to get in, but I called Jean and she buzzed us through.

  The girl at the front desk said, “Hey, are you guys from the police?”

  “Not hardly,” said Jean, coming around the corner. She handed each of us a visitor’s badge.

  “Jeannie,” I said. “Good to see you.”

  We shook hands, and she gave me a quick peck on the cheek. Jean Massey was about thirty-five, thin as a rake, with big glasses and flyaway brown hair that already showed streaks of gray. She was about the most brilliant person I remembered working with in my old career, though she was so unassuming you could miss her at a party. We walked through the building toward Brian’s office, things looking pretty much as I remembered them.

  “How are you?” I asked. “How’s Nick?” Shortly before I had left the NJSC, Jean had married a young genetics professor from Princeton. The office staff had oohed and aahed over her wedding dress and all the plans, and everyone seemed to think it was a match made in heaven. I was a bit afraid to ask, given how quickly marriages sometimes fell apart, but Jean just smiled.

  “Doing fine,” she said.

  “And did I hear you had a baby?”

  “Yeah, that’s right.”

  “I’m sorry, I forget. Girl or a boy?”

  “A girl. Chance.”

  “Chance?”

  She answered wearily, as if tired of explaining. “That’s her name.”

  I didn’t mention that Elena used to have a cat named Chance. It had been run over by a car shortly after we started dating, to Elena’s great distress. I didn’t mention that either. “Um, that’s cool, actually,” I said. “Sounds like a quantum thing. Or a genetics thing, maybe. Or both.”