Superposition

by David Walton

  “Where to now?” Jean asked.

  “Outside,” Alessandra said. Something in her voice made me look back. Her teeth were clenched.

  “You did the right thing,” I said. “You couldn’t have done anything if you’d stayed.”

  She relaxed slightly. “You can’t know that,” she said.

  “Actually, I can know it. Because the other version of you did stay and didn’t do anything except give up the letter to the varcolac. Because you ran, we have a chance here.” I opened the back door and held it open for her. “Lead the way.”

  Alessandra stepped out ahead of me, and Jean and I followed. We spread out across the backyard, searching the ground for signs of paper. There had still been snow on the ground that day, but the yard was dry and brown now. If the letter had been dropped out here, it would have blown away long ago.

  We reached the fence. “You climbed over here?” I asked.

  Alessandra nodded. I ran my eyes along the base of the fence. A stunted bush grew right against the chain link, and some vines twisted their way up. Under the bush, I saw a scrap of white. A piece of paper, dirt-encrusted and half-buried. I bent over and picked it up, shaking it to knock loose the dirt. My name was written on the front.

  “This is it,” I said. It had been lying out here for weeks, however, soaked with rain and snow, and then drying out in the sun. “I’m not sure what’s left of it.”

  Back inside, at the kitchen table, the three of us crowded around it. In most cases, a piece of smartpaper could withstand a little water, but this had been exposed to the elements for months. I smoothed it out against the table, and then entered the password. The letter came up on the screen, still legible, although dark lines crisscrossed the paper along the fold lines, where the paper had been the most damaged. I entered the second password, and the programming circuits sprang into view.

  I took some time familiarizing myself with them, with suggestions and questions from Jean. Alessandra, unfamiliar with coding principles, lost interest in the conversation and started raiding the cabinets for something to eat. I discovered that there were core, indecipherable modules that must represent the equations provided to Brian by the varcolacs. Built around those modules, however, was a great deal of code I could understand, presumably added by Brian to interact with and control the core modules.

  Before long, I was starting to make sense of it. “Look, he’s got a set of subroutines here to create particular effects,” I said. The subroutines had names like GroundStateSpin, MacroDiffraction, StrongNuclearForce, and Tunneling. There were different versions of each, and optional circuitry that was cut off from the system that provided still more variation. “He was experimenting,” I said. “Interacting with the modules in different ways, seeing what they could do.”

  There was even a subroutine called TeleportExperimental, with an intriguing comment that read, “Do not use before solving destination bug!!!”

  “There’s a lot here,” I said. “It must have taken him months to write all this.”

  I spotted some graphics modules, and realized that the code was designed to work with a pair of eyejack lenses. I went upstairs, rummaged in a drawer until I found the pair that had come with my phone, and brought them back down.

  “Let me try it. I don’t want you killing yourself,” Jean said.

  “You’re our star witness,” I said. “Besides, there’s an extra one of me. I’ll do it.”

  “You have a daughter.”

  I gave her a look. “So do you.”

  Jean held up her hands, relenting, and I put the lenses in my eyes. They quickly recognized Brian’s smartpaper as being in range and synched to it. I initiated the main program, and the now-familiar tugging sensation began in my chest, like a bass thrumming so deep I couldn’t hear it. A basic menu appeared over my vision with the subroutine names. I scrolled through and selected GroundStateSpin, since I thought I could guess what that might accomplish.

  Overlaid on my vision, a curved, double-headed arrow appeared. When I looked at an object in the room, the arrow would move over it and the object would highlight. I chose a tea kettle on the counter and blinked at it. It started spinning, just like the gyroscope, its spout whipping around and around like a boy on a merry-go-round.

  It was incredible. I could move things with my mind. Jean and Alessandra stared at it, transfixed. I made the tea kettle stop, and started twirling the flour canister. Best of all, the energy for the spin was coming from the ground spin state of the particles. We could turn generators with this technology, maybe solve the world’s energy problems.

  What could the other subroutines do? I went back to the list and chose Tunneling. I still had the flour canister selected, and now, in my vision, a cone projected out from the center of the canister and into the room. I found I could rotate the cone around the canister and change its length. On the other side of the kitchen wall from where the flour canister stood was the living room, and I knew there was a small, decorative table standing against that wall. I aimed the cone directly through the wall and blinked.

  The flour canister disappeared. At the same moment, there was a tremendous cracking sound like a gunshot. It was too loud just to be the canister shattering. I raced around into the living room, followed closely by Jean and Alessandra. The decorative table was smashed into splinters and covered in flour. Shards of table and porcelain were embedded in the wall.

  Hastily, I quit the program and shoved the Higgs projector into my pocket. The thrumming sensation stopped.

  “What were you trying to do?” Alessandra asked.

  “I was trying to tunnel the canister through the wall and have it land on the table,” I said. “I think it appeared in the table instead, and the stress of all that matter suddenly appearing in the middle of already-existing matter tore the table apart.”

  “It looks like we’ll have to be more careful,” Jean said. She held out a hand. “May I give it a try?”

  “Let’s not try it again just yet,” I said. “I want to study the programming a little more, get a better understanding of what a module does before running it. I don’t know how well Brian tested his software, either—I don’t want to blow up a city block because he accidentally used English units in one place instead of metric.” I looked around the room where Elena had died. I felt tired. “I want to get out of here,” I said.

  Driving back, Alessandra asked, “Why did the varcolac want to take that letter anyway? It can do all this magic stuff without it.”

  I shrugged. “How could we know? This was an alien encounter, from both sides, neither of our species comprehending the other. The varcolacs originally provided the equations for the core modules to Brian, probably in good faith, but we don’t know what that information meant to them. Maybe it was simply a kind of textbook, an explanation of who they are and how they’re made. Regardless, when Brian put this together”—I gestured at the smartpaper—“it had some effect that they didn’t like, and they wanted it back. Who knows what changes this has made in their world? It could be killing them, or causing some other disruption—we just don’t know.”

  “This is the creature that murdered Mom and Claire and Sean,” Alessandra said. “It’s not just misunderstood. It’s a killer.”

  “I’m not sure if it means to be,” I said. “You could be right—it could be acting out of rage or simply enjoy killing; I don’t know. But look how it took Marek apart and put him back together. Look how its body is so awkwardly assembled out of different parts. It’s trying to understand us, and not getting very close. I doubt life and death even mean the same thing to it as they do to us. The idea that a being’s total existence is enclosed by a piece of matter is probably incomprehensible to them.”

  “So it was all, what, some kind of cosmic accident?” Alessandra asked, anger simmering in her tone.

  “If anyone’s to blame for this, it’s Brian,” I said. “He thought he could trade with a radically different intelligence and come out ahead. He was
greedy and stupid. The varcolac . . . we have no idea what motivates it. All we know is that it wanted to reclaim Brian’s copies of this programming.”

  “And it killed people to get it.”

  “Yes,” I admitted. “It did.”

  “Is that programming a threat to them? Could you use it to hurt the varcolac?” Alessandra asked.

  I remembered Brian making the varcolac disintegrate, at least momentarily. “Maybe,” I said. “Brian said the varcolac gets its power from exotic particle leakage from the collider, such that when he used his circuitry to eliminate those particles, the varcolac lost its coherency. So I guess, if we learn enough about how to use the projector, perhaps it would be a threat.”

  “Well then,” Jean said. “I guess we’d better learn.”

  CHAPTER 24

  DOWN-SPIN

  “That was a train wreck,” I said. Terry had come again to visit me in the prison meeting room. He sat in one of the yellow chairs, looking tired. I paced the room. “Marek looked like he was lying, because half the time, he was.”

  “It wasn’t that bad,” Terry said.

  “I was embarrassed to put him in that situation,” I said. “He’s one of my only loyal friends, and I hate that he had to perjure himself on my account.”

  “He told the truth where it counted,” Terry said. “He told the court that he saw Vanderhall alive. That’s crucial for our case, and it was important for the jury to hear him say it.”

  I let out a sigh and threw myself down in a chair. “It’s only important because we’re trying to prove that Brian killed himself. Which I don’t believe for a minute. The Brian I saw in the woods didn’t know that another version of him was lying dead in the bunker.”

  “He wouldn’t necessarily tell you . . .”

  “No. He didn’t know. I’m sure of it.”

  “It’s not that important,” Terry said.

  I raised an eyebrow. “The truth isn’t important?”

  “Look,” Terry said, running a hand through his hair. “I’ve been a defense attorney most of my career. People hate me. They think I don’t care about truth, that I just try to set criminals free because the money is good. They don’t understand when I say that the truth is irrelevant to my work, just like it’s irrelevant to the prosecutor’s work. My job is to present all the evidence and arguments that may demonstrate your innocence. The prosecutor’s job is to present all the evidence and arguments that may demonstrate your guilt. The judge makes sure we play fair, according to the rules. But ultimately, it’s the jury who decides what really happened.

  “It doesn’t matter to me, as far as my job is concerned, whether you killed Vanderhall or not. It also doesn’t matter to me if he killed himself. But the fact that there’s another explanation that fits the facts; that is important. Maybe you killed him. Maybe somebody else did it. The point is, there’s more than one workable explanation, and that means the case against you isn’t proven. It doesn’t mean you’re innocent, but it does mean that, under our law, you can’t be convicted.”

  I thought about it. “I see your point. It still seems wrong to try to convince the jury of something we know isn’t true.”

  “I’m trying to get you out of jail,” Terry said, exasperated. “I’ll use every trick I can.”

  “Why don’t you use my double as the scapegoat?” I asked. “Show him to the jury, take his fingerprints, show that the physical evidence that matches me could match him just as well.”

  “It won’t work,” Terry said.

  “Why not?”

  “For one thing, you’re the same person. If I understand all this, you’re just momentarily following different paths. You’re not twins. He’s you.”

  “But what if he killed someone, and I didn’t? Should I be held responsible?”

  “For another thing,” Terry said, “you’re going to resolve again, right? Eventually? What then?”

  “We should at least bring him out,” I said. “Let everyone see that there really are two of me. It would make Jean and Marek’s testimony much more believable.”

  “We’ll bring him out. Trust me on this,” Terry said. “Testimony is like a fireworks display. You can’t use up all your explosions at the beginning. You have to orchestrate it, slowly gain momentum until all your points come together at the end, in a huge finish. You have to save your biggest surprises for the end. It gives the other side the least opportunity to knock your argument down or distract the jury. We’ll put your double on the stand, but not until the last minute. You’ll go first, to tell your story, and we’ll give Haviland all the rope in the world to hang himself. Then, we bring out your double. The proof that it’s all really possible.”

  “As long as my probability wave doesn’t resolve before then.”

  Terry yawned hugely. “True enough,” he said. “If that happens, there’s nothing I can do.”

  CHAPTER 25

  UP-SPIN

  “Court is now in session for the People versus Jacob Kelley, the honorable Ann Roswell presiding,” the court officer bellowed.

  Alessandra and I sat in Colin’s house, watching on the stream as my trial finally began. I had begged Sheppard to let me come and sit in the courthouse, but he had flatly refused. I told him I could disguise myself, that no one would ever know, but he wouldn’t hear of it. All it took was one person to recognize me, and the game would be up. I argued that we should let the world know right away—hold a press conference and tell the truth—but Sheppard said that was a sure way to lose. Roswell hated to have the course of her trials manipulated by the media, and she was likely to sequester the jury and ban me from the courtroom.

  So I sat and watched and tried not to let the talking heads drive me into a rage. They all seemed to assume my guilt, and they reveled in the bloody drama of a man murdering his friend. They speculated endlessly about my missing family as well, mostly to wonder where I had buried the bodies. The cameras zoomed in close on my double as he sat at the defendant’s table in stony silence.

  We heard the opening statements, and then Officer Peyton described coming to our house after Brian fired at Elena. When I heard my wife’s voice on the 911 call, I clutched the arms of my chair nearly hard enough to snap them. It brought an unwelcome memory of Elena holding on to me while we waited for the police to arrive, how she felt in my arms, how she smelled. I wasn’t sure I could keep watching, but I remembered that the other Jacob didn’t have a choice. If he could do it, I could do it. I stayed in my seat.

  To distract myself, I studied Brian’s code. It really was incredible that he could have written so much of it by himself, but I figured that once he realized what it could do he probably worked on the software day and night. The varcolac had destroyed the other versions I knew about, and since nothing like this had been found in Brian’s office, I was probably holding the only existing copy. To be safe, I replicated the whole thing onto a fresh sheet of smartpaper.

  After the trial finished for the day, Alessandra and I went to the movies and watched two films in a row, drowning our stress in giant Cokes and buckets of buttered popcorn. I slept fitfully, dreaming of Haviland’s pointing finger and of a pitiless jury announcing a guilty sentence. The next morning I was exhausted, but we turned the trial on again anyway and heard Officer McBride testify about matching the gun with the bullets in the bunker. Despite the importance of the outcome, the pace of the trial itself was tedious, and I caught myself drifting off a few times. That is, until the testimony of Sheila Singer.

  The camera caught my double’s obvious shock, and I felt the same way. Singer had seen Elena and the kids—three kids, even Alessandra—alive! After all the searching and wondering, here was actual proof that they had split. At least an hour after I had seen them dead, they had still been alive.

  Alessandra gripped my hand.

  “It might not mean anything,” I said, though my heart was pounding against my chest. “They’ve been missing for months. They might just have resolved shortly after this
woman saw them.” In fact, as I said it, my excitement started to fade. Of course, they must have resolved. They couldn’t possibly have been driving around New Jersey for these past several months, looking for me. Their probability wave had collapsed, Alessandra’s to the version of her sitting next to me, and the others into their dead bodies.

  “That doesn’t make sense,” Alessandra said, when I voiced my doubts. “Their bodies disappeared. They couldn’t have resolved to those versions.”

  “Then where are they now?” I asked.

  Her eyes searched mine, looking for hope. “I don’t know. But there’s a chance, isn’t there?”

  I stood. “Come on.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “To the NJSC. To find out for sure.”

  As I drove across the bridge to New Jersey, Alessandra said, “Even if they are alive, they’re not my family, are they? They’re hers. My double’s.”

  “It doesn’t work that way,” I said. “Your double is you. You are your double. If she’s really out there, then when the probability wave collapses, you’ll resolve into a single entity again.”

  “Meaning either her or me.”

  “No, mathematically speaking, the probability wave includes all possibilities between you and her. The two of you represent the opposite vectors of the Bloch sphere, the edges of the spectrum. So you could resolve into a mixture of both of you. Are likely to, in fact.”

  “And what will that version of me remember?”

  “Not a version of you. You. I don’t know what you’ll remember, but it will still be you. It’s as if you had to make a decision, whether to buy the red dress or the black dress, and you imagined what it would be like if you went down either path. When you finally made the decision, you wouldn’t lose any part of yourself, just because you didn’t go down the path of choosing and then wearing the black dress. This is the same. The path that turns out to be reality doesn’t change who you are.”

  “It does if I don’t remember being on this path. If I won’t remember being me, the me who I am right now, then it very much changes who I am.”