Superposition

by David Walton

  “If that’s what science gives you, what good is it?” Marek asked. “You can talk professor as much as you like, but there was a varcolac in that bunker, and you let it out.”

  “And more to the point,” I said, “that varcolac tried to kill us.”

  “You’re not seriously going to call it that,” Brian said. “They’re not spirits. They’re physical creatures, the same as we are. Although their ‘bodies’ are composed as much of photons as they are of other particles. I think they’ve been around a lot longer than we have, maybe even from the first few seconds of the big bang.”

  “Well then,” I said slowly, “we can probably call them sprites or faeries or angels or demons or varcolacs, and not be wrong. Most primitive cultures have animistic belief systems. Maybe they’re based on something real: other beings that live in the fabric of the universe.”

  “Call them what they are,” Brian said. “They’re quantum intelligences. And I doubt anyone else has seen them before. Before I contacted them, I don’t think they were any more aware of our existence than we were of theirs.”

  “How did you even know they were there?”

  “I didn’t. You saw my resonators?” When I nodded, Brian grinned like a proud little boy with a model airplane. “That’s where it started. That was the beginning. Normal human interactions are no more noticeable to them than the rotation of the Earth is to us. They speak in entanglement and probabilities and weak and strong forces. When I communicated quantum effects over a distance, however—when I could turn them on and off with a switch and see the results, it was like picking up radio waves from a distant galaxy, or . . . or, I don’t know, a UFO landing on their front lawn. They suddenly knew that someone else was out there, someone with the intelligence to communicate and respond.

  “It was nothing that made sense at first. I would charge the resonator, and it would spin, sometimes one way, sometimes another, sometimes fast, sometimes slow. It was a complex probability wave, but I made enough observations that I knew what it was. I couldn’t predict any one measurement, as you might expect, but I could predict the distribution of any hundred. Then, inexplicably, it deviated.”

  “Interference from another wave pattern,” I said.

  “Yes, but this time, the pattern wasn’t predictable. The oscillating frequency kept getting higher. Finally, I got a look at the values . . .”

  “Prime numbers,” Marek said, jumping back into the conversation. “They were a list of primes.”

  Brian looked startled. “How did you know?”

  Marek rolled his eyes. “That is what the aliens always send, don’t they? In all the books and movies. Primes don’t occur in nature, so if you get primes, you know it’s from something intelligent.”

  “I don’t know if they did it on purpose to communicate or not, but there it was. I fed the numbers back into the system—I flipped my switch twice, then three times, then five, etcetera. I barely left the bunker, not to sleep, not to eat. We followed primes with natural ratios like pi and the golden mean, and then more complex mathematics. I programmed my smartpad to control the switch, and soon we had a language of sorts going, based entirely on math. I told them about us—our chemical makeup, our genetics. They sent me formulas to describe what they are—it was fascinating! Soon they were feeding me formulas that I implemented in meta-circuitry on my pad, and that’s when things really started to happen. Through the resonators, we broke the barrier between the macro and subatomic worlds. When we dream of tapping the quantum realm, we think of making faster computers to play video games, but there’s so much more that’s possible. It’ll revolutionize everything, what we think of ourselves, what it means to be human. There’s almost nothing they can’t do.”

  I thought about how that thing in the bunker had behaved, and a chill went up my spine. “And now they know we’re here.”

  Brian didn’t pick up on my tone. “It’s amazing. For more than a century, we’ve looked for aliens in distant galaxies, but they were here all along, right among us. Through us even, in the very molecules that make up our air and food and our own bodies. Another whole civilization, living on Earth—or in the Earth, I should say. The surfaces of things aren’t as important to them as they are to us, and things like gravity and electricity are just one more kind of particle interaction.

  His eyes glistened. “They told me they could make me just like them. I was going to have all their power, live an immortal life across the universes . . .”

  “Okay,” Marek said. “We get it. They’re great and all. Practically gods. So how come you’re sleeping in the backseat of your car at the same time as you’re lying dead on your bunker floor?”

  “As I’m what?” Brian asked.

  “A bloody corpse with a hole in your chest,” I said.

  “What are you talking about?” Brian asked.

  “Look,” I said. “This is not a thought experiment. You pulled me into this, and I have a right to know what’s going on.”

  “I’ve been telling you,” Brian said.

  I braked hard and pulled off the road. I jammed the gearshift into park, and then turned around to face him.

  “You’re saying you don’t know about the body.”

  “What body?”

  “Or the letter. There was a letter for me in your office.”

  “The letter I sent you?” he asked.

  “Sent me? I found an envelope with my name on it in your jacket pocket in your office. It told me to go look in the bunker.”

  Brian shook his head. “I mailed that letter to you,” he said. “I sent it yesterday.”

  I pulled the letter out of my pocket and waved it in his face. “If you mailed it yesterday, how did I pull it out of your jacket pocket today?”

  “I don’t know! What body are you talking about?”

  “You are, as we speak, lying dead in the CATHIE bunker with a bullet hole in your chest,” I said.

  Brian’s face got very pale, and that look of terror came back into his eyes. “Oh, no.”

  “Explain to me how that’s possible,” I said.

  Brian stared at me as if he didn’t understand the words. His jaw flapped like a fish on a hook. His gaze, which had been staring off into the distance at some bright, imagined future, suddenly snapped into focus. He began shaking violently. “No, it can’t be,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Give me the letter,” he said. “Did you get through the passwords?”

  “Passwords, plural?” I said.

  Brian used his finger to scribble “137.036” on the page, and the letter reappeared. “I told you to ‘say goodbye to Cathie,’” Brian said. “The second password is the date they shut our program down.” He traced some more numbers.

  “And I was supposed to figure that out?” I asked. “I thought you wanted me to go look in the bunker.”

  Brian showed me the paper. It was now filled with tiny programming circuits, connected with a tangle of colored lines. I knew if I touched any one of the circuits, it would expand to show me more circuitry inside. The paper was humming. I could feel a strange internal tugging sensation, just as I had felt when Brian had made the gyroscope spin.

  “You programmed all this?” I asked.

  “Most of it.”

  “What it doing?”

  “It’s a Higgs projector,” he said. “It’s locally altering the Higgs field.”

  “Oh, come on,” I said.

  “I’m serious.”

  “What, you figured out how to isolate the Higgs field in your office, with an Erector set and some Play-Doh? A project like that would be a billion-dollar operation, if it were even possible.”

  “I didn’t. They did. They gave me the equations for the core modules; I just wrote wrappers to interface with them.”

  “What’s a Higgs field?” Marek asked.

  “It’s an invisible field, uniform throughout the universe, that gives our universe its physical qualities, including the idea of matter itself,�
�� I said. “The theory is that the big bang produced not just one universe, but countless, frothing up out of the early expansion like so many bubbles. Each universe could have a different Higgs field, stronger or weaker than ours, and thus have a different set of basic constants. That means it could have a different set of fundamental particles, and thus a different periodic table, and, obviously, an entirely different structure,” I said.

  “So, the varcolac told you all this?” Marek asked.

  “The quantum intelligences,” Brian said. “I think maybe they are the Higgs field, or it’s part of them somehow. They . . .” He trailed off, his eyes wide, staring at something behind me.

  I turned. Through the windshield, I could see it coming. The varcolac strode through the trees as if they weren’t there, heading right toward us.

  I yanked the gearshift into reverse and hit the accelerator. The car lunged backward and smashed into a tree. I turned the wheel and shifted into drive, but the rear wheels just spun, throwing up loose dirt. I revved the engine frantically, but it was no good. “Out of the car!” I shouted. Marek was already out his side and running. I pushed my door open and ran the other way, not much caring if Brian followed or not.

  I was fast and in shape; Brian was not. I heard him scream, and, despite my desire to put as much distance between myself and the varcolac as possible, I turned around. He was frantically doing something on the smartpaper as the varcolac bore down on him.

  I heard a deep thrum, like a bass woofer turned up loud, and the varcolac disintegrated. Brian dropped to his knees, breathing hard. “That was close.”

  “What did you do?” I asked.

  “It’s tied to the collider,” Brian said. “It feeds off the exotic particles the collider produces, and it draws a tremendous amount of power from it to maintain its physical manifestation. I altered the Higgs field locally to eliminate those particles.”

  Brian touched a few spots on the paper. The thrum stopped and the tugging sensation in my chest subsided.

  “Shouldn’t you leave that on?” I asked.

  “It’s gone now,” Brian said. “It won’t come back unless . . .” He stopped with a strangled choke as the varcolac reappeared less than a foot in front of him. Brian shrieked and dropped to his knees. He held the letter out in a shaking hand. “Take it!” he said. “Just take it!”

  The varcolac bent and touched Brian. Brian’s eyes unfocused, and his body glowed. Tiny particles lifted from his body, like sand in a windstorm, flowing from him into the varcolac. As we watched, Brian disintegrated completely and flowed into the varcolac itself. Horribly, the varcolac’s jumbled features took on a little of Brian’s appearance. The varcolac now held the smartpaper in its hand. A moment later, the paper burst into violent flame and was gone.

  The varcolac turned toward us. We stood frozen, watching it. It took a step forward, then turned on its heel and disappeared. It didn’t just vanish: it turned, like it was walking around a corner, only into some other dimension of space that I couldn’t see. It might still have been quite close, for all I knew, invisible, watching us and getting ready to pounce, but if so, there was nothing I could do about it. For now, as far as I could tell, the varcolac was gone.

  Marek ran up to me. “You all right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Let’s get out of here,” I said. I ran to the car and climbed in.

  Marek climbed in next to me, but I had the car in gear and was pulling out before he had the door closed.

  “Where are we going?” he asked.

  I stomped on the accelerator, pulling us into a tight U-turn. “There are two of those letters,” I said.

  “What?”

  “There were two Brians,” I said. I squealed the tires pulling onto the road and did a U-turn, heading away from the NJSC, back toward home. “Two Brians, two letters. I don’t know exactly how, but it’s true. The Brian we found dead was the one who visited my house and left the letter in his jacket pocket. The Brian we just saw sent the same letter to me via FedEx.”

  “Which means . . . ?” Marek asked.

  “It looked to me like the varcolac was after that letter,” I said. “It killed Brian for it. The other version of the letter, however—the one that went out via FedEx was probably delivered today.”

  I heard Marek’s quick intake of breath. “So if it wants the other letter, too, and knows how to find it, that would lead the varcolac . . .”

  I leaned my weight on the accelerator, rocketing the car through a red light. “. . . straight to my house.”

  CHAPTER 12

  DOWN-SPIN

  David Haviland was apparently a morning person. He greeted the judge and the jury with a cheerful smile. I had barely slept, and, next to me, Terry didn’t look much better. He was clutching a paper cup of coffee like it was a life raft.

  “The People call Officer Brandon McBride to the stand,” Haviland said.

  McBride was a big man gone to fat, with thinning gray hair and the hint of jowls forming in his cheeks. He was wearing a tie that seemed too tight for the folds of his neck.

  “Officer McBride,” Haviland said. “How long have you been with the Media police force?”

  “Thirty-seven years.” McBride emphasized each word, apparently proud of his length of service.

  “And what is your current title?”

  “I’m a senior evidence technician.”

  “And what does that role entail?”

  “We receive thousands of items ranging in size from hair samples to vehicles, and we track and store the items and release them as appropriate. Mostly my job is to ensure that the integrity of the chain of evidence is preserved. We store the items and make sure that nothing is tampered with and there is a clear chain of custody for any item from the place where it was confiscated to its appearance in trial.”

  “On December third, did your office receive into custody a weapon taken from Jacob Kelley when he was arrested?”

  “Yes, we did,” McBride said.

  “How can you be sure?” Haviland asked.

  “I reviewed the record this morning in preparation for this trial.”

  Haviland looked at the judge. “Permission to approach the witness, Your Honor?”

  “Granted.”

  Haviland handed McBride a paper-clipped sheaf of papers. “This document is presented to the record as Exhibit A1. Officer, can you identify the document for the court?”

  “This is the evidence register for December third.”

  “Is this the same record you reviewed in preparation for the trial?”

  “Yes.”

  “Could you please summarize the entry for the court?”

  “It says that a Glock 46 nine millimeter with black polymer grips and a scratched barrel was confiscated from the Kelley residence at three PM.” McBride flipped through the pages. “There are photographs of both sides of the weapon.”

  “Do you receive many weapons?”

  “Quite a few,” McBride said.

  “How could you be sure that a particular weapon was the one received from the Kelley residence?”

  “The weapon is tagged with the evidence ID number and stored in a secure compartment. Anyone removing or returning it must sign in and out under the supervision of an evidence clerk, who also signs his or her name.”

  “Is that record part of the documentation in front of you?” Haviland asked.

  “It is.”

  “Did anyone sign this weapon in or out on December third or fourth?”

  “I signed the weapon in for the first time on December third, once I received it from Officer Carter, then I signed it out again on December fourth.”

  “And why did you sign it out?”

  “Our office received a bulletin that the New Jersey State Police wanted Jacob Kelley in relation to a gunshot murder.”

  “And when you signed it out, what did you do?”

  “I called Jersey to let them know, and then I personally walked the weapon over to bal
listics to get it test-fired.”

  “Why did you do that?”

  McBride smiled ruefully. “Well, I walked it over myself because I wanted to get some credit for making the connection. They can compare the bullet they test-fire to the slug they retrieve from the crime scene, see, and they can tell if it was fired by the same weapon.”

  Haviland lifted a plastic-wrapped handgun, and I recognized the Glock. “The prosecution would like to enter Exhibit A2 into evidence. Permission to approach?”

  The judge nodded.

  “Officer McBride,” Haviland continued, “is this the firearm you brought to ballistics?”

  McBride examined it carefully. “Yes, it is.”

  “And did you establish that it was the murder weapon?”

  “Yes, sir. We test-fired it in our forensics lab, and we were able to match the rifling marks under a comparison microscope.” He turned toward the jury. “Rifling marks on a bullet are left by the barrel of the firearm. Each one is unique, like a fingerprint. Two bullets fired from the same firearm will leave the same marks.”

  “So the gun that the police found in Jacob Kelley’s possession on December third at Mr. Kelley’s house was the same gun that was used to kill Brian Vanderhall?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Could there have been a mistake? Could this gun have gotten mixed up with a different one?”

  McBride looked affronted. “This is my job,” he said. “This is what I do every day. The chain of evidence is properly documented, and the firearm was under the proper security from the moment it was received. There is no doubt whatsoever.”

  Haviland produced another plastic bag, entered it into the record, and showed it to McBride. “Can you tell us what this is, Officer?”

  “Those are Mr. Kelley’s shoes, recovered by Officer Carter when he arrested Mr. Kelley and submitted to me at the same time as the firearm.”