Superposition

by David Walton

  With the help of the car’s GPS system, I found Jean Massey’s neighborhood and pulled up to her front door. I stepped out of my car, eyeing the place warily. The tiny yard was neatly mowed, with a small flowerbed under the eaves. I couldn’t imagine Jean doing any gardening, so I guessed this to be Nick’s work. Suddenly, I remembered the phone call—Nick, accusing me of sleeping with his wife. But that had been the other Jacob, not me. I had been in prison at the time, but the memory flashed into my mind as if I had actually experienced it.

  I knocked on the door. Nick answered, wearing a white polo shirt and slacks and bare feet.

  “Hi, Nick,” I said. “Is Jean—”

  “She’s given you too much as it is,” Nick said. “I’m sorry, but this is our family time. She’s not available.”

  I shoved my foot in the door before he could close it. “Is she with your daughter right now?” Some of my urgency must have come across in my voice, because he stepped back. I pushed inside. “Your daughter’s in danger,” I said. “Where is she?”

  He believed me. I didn’t know how Jean had been acting since she arrived, but clearly it hadn’t put his mind at ease. I followed him up the stairs and down the hall.

  “Honey?” Nick called.

  I walked slowly after him and peered into Chance’s bedroom. It was empty.

  “Jean?” Nick said, and then louder, “Jean!”

  “She took her,” I said. “They’re gone.”

  Nick stood in the center of the room, surrounded by Chance’s things—her changing table, her crib with blankets still tangled and warm, a scattering of baby toys—and bellowed his wife’s name.

  CHAPTER 35

  UP-SPIN

  Elena sat up with a groan. I was by her side in an instant, as close as I could get with the bundle of wires between us.

  “Are you all right?” I asked.

  “My head hurts.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  She pressed fingers into her temples. “Not your fault.”

  I wanted to hold her in my arms, to stroke her hair and press her close. My space was roughly square, with three edges made of bundled wire and one edge against the wall. I examined the spot where the wires passed into the wall, but there was no way to cross it. I started to kick the wall. The wall was made of cinder blocks and didn’t budge, but I kept kicking anyway, thinking that if I could knock loose even a small amount, then over time I could widen it, tear some of the wall away, and then get around the wire barrier to Elena.

  “Use your keys,” Marek called. He was in a center square, out of reach of a wall, but I understood what he meant. I pulled my keys out of my pocket, chose the largest one, and started scraping the wall close to the floor. A little dust drifted down, and a shallow scratch appeared. I kept scraping. It was going to take a long time to make any progress this way, but it was better than just waiting for the varcolac to come back and start hurting my family again. I scraped until my muscles ached, but I accomplished little more than a small pile of dust on the floor. It wasn’t going to work.

  I noticed Alex scrabbling at a round metal grating that covered a drain on the floor. I wasn’t sure what she would accomplish if she got it loose—the drain was far too small for her to fit inside, and probably didn’t lead anywhere very helpful anyway—but at the least she would have a piece of metal, a possible weapon if it came for her again. It was difficult for her to make any headway, since moving her broken arm made her gasp with pain.

  “Here,” I said. I tossed my keys across the gap. They flew across the wires with no ill effect, landing on the floor at her feet and sliding a few inches. She used a key as a lever, trying to pry up the grating, but it wouldn’t budge and there were no visible screws. I wondered if it was welded to the pipe underneath, or if the concrete floor had just been poured around it, holding it fast. Whatever the reason, it wasn’t moving.

  I had found my family, but now I was going to lose them again. The varcolac was going to come back and torture them all while I watched, and eventually they would all die, and still the varcolac wouldn’t kill me: it would just smile hideously and watch my reactions, and maybe kill Marek, too, just for fun.

  I paced my cell. I had to do something. I couldn’t just sit here, helplessly waiting.

  I started looking at the wires. Where did the energy for the electric shock come from? The varcolac must be manipulating the electromagnetic field somehow, allowing a free flow of electrons out of the wires and into anyone who got too close.

  What if I could get higher? If I crossed the wires close to the ceiling, would that be far enough away not to cue the electric shock? The ceiling was wooden planking and beams, with no drop ceiling to hide the pipes and wires. There weren’t many secure places to hold on, and I realized it would be very difficult to climb around up there. Besides, I couldn’t reach it, and I had nothing to stand on to lift me higher. That wasn’t going to work either.

  “What’s going to happen to us?” Alessandra asked. She was sitting calmly in her square, not doing anything. Claire had been crying more or less constantly since we’d been here, erupting into tears again just as she seemed to get under control. Alessandra hadn’t cried at all. My heart went out to Claire and her anguish, which was perfectly understandable under the circumstances, but once again, I was impressed by Alessandra. Why had I never seen it before?

  “We’re going to escape,” I answered her. “I don’t know how, but we’re going to find a way.”

  “I didn’t mean that,” Alessandra said. “I meant, what’s going to happen to the two of us.” She nodded at Alex. “Her and me.”

  I stopped my manic pacing. “You’re the same person,” I said. “She is you. At some point, you’ll come together again.” In fact, I was a little surprised their wave hadn’t collapsed already. Their paths had converged again; their situations were practically the same. I supposed we didn’t know all the rules yet. Maybe the longer the separation, the harder it was to come together.

  “That’s not quite right,” Alex said. “You keep saying that we’re the same person, but I don’t think it’s really true. We started the same, but we’re different people now. We might react the same to a lot of things, but not everything. We know different things, and we have different memories.”

  “Then . . . one of us has to die?” Alessandra asked.

  “No,” I said quickly.

  “Sort of,” Alex said. “Don’t sugarcoat it, Dad. We have to become one person again. That might mean just you, or just me, or some combination of us where we remember a little of both. We don’t know for certain.”

  “You don’t look scared,” Alessandra said. “How can you not be scared?”

  Alex laughed. “You don’t look scared either.”

  They shared a look and a subtle smile.

  “I still say you’re the same person,” I said. “Who you are is constantly changing. Who you were in third grade is different from who you are now, but it was still you. Right now you’re just experiencing two different states at once. Like going back in time and seeing an earlier version of yourself.”

  Alex looked sad. “I know you’re trying to encourage us, Dad. But if we converge, and I don’t remember all the time you and I spent together, then it doesn’t feel to me like I will exist anymore. Not this me, anyway.”

  “Your memory isn’t everything,” I said. “You forget things all the time; it doesn’t make it not you. All of the cells in your body will be completely replaced in a few years, but you will still be here. Memories come and go. You don’t remember being born, or even being two years old, but those experiences are still important to who you are. If, when you converge, you don’t remember some things, those things will still be part of your identity, your personality, your growth as a person.”

  Alex didn’t respond. Instead, she looked at Alessandra. “If I’m the one who doesn’t make it,” she said, “then get my viewfeed and post it. Let people know about me.”

  “Me, too,” Aless
andra said. “Promise?”

  “I promise.”

  “First things first,” I said. “We have to find a way to get out of here.”

  CHAPTER 36

  DOWN-SPIN

  “My best guess is that she went to the NJSC,” I told Nick. “That’s where her equipment and research is. That’s where I’m going now.”

  “I’m coming with you,” Nick said.

  “I’m an escaped murder suspect. You’ll be aiding and abetting,” I said.

  “I don’t care about that. In fact, I’ll drive. Hide that little toy car in my garage, so they don’t find it here.”

  “Sounds good,” I said. “One more thing—do you have a pair of eyejack lenses I could use?”

  We switched cars as quickly as we could, and then Nick floored the accelerator. “We won’t get there faster if we get pulled over,” I said. “If the police recognize me, we won’t get there at all.”

  He nodded in agreement, but he didn’t slow down. On the way, I explained what I thought Jean was trying to do. “She can manipulate the Higgs field,” I said. “She can change the wavelengths and basic constants of normal matter, which means she can control how it behaves to an almost magical degree. The real issue, though, is that the Higgs field extends across multiple universes. Which means that the probability waves she can influence extend there as well.”

  “You’re losing me,” Nick said. “What does that mean in English?”

  “It means she can access alternate versions of your daughter. She can dip into other universes to change how probability waves resolved in the past. It means she can retrieve versions of your daughter that might have been if different choices had been made . . .”

  “. . . or different genes had expressed,” Nick finished. “She wants to ‘cure’ her Down Syndrome, doesn’t she?”

  “That’s my guess,” I said.

  His knuckles turned white against the steering wheel. “She’s been talking like that for months. I told her it would just be killing our daughter and replacing her with someone else. I thought it was just crazy talk, though, not that she could actually do it.”

  “I’m not sure how well she can control it, either,” I said. “She can’t have studied it very thoroughly before Brian’s death, and she certainly hasn’t tried something like this before. No one has. She could end up killing Chance and not replacing her with anything.”

  Nick gunned the engine and zipped through an intersection just as the traffic light turned red. He was silent for a moment, then said, “Jean killed Brian, didn’t she.”

  I sighed. “I’m pretty certain she did.”

  Nick slammed a palm against the steering wheel. “How could this have happened? We were so perfect for each other, so in love. I thought we were happy. Then Chance was born, and it was the best thing that ever happened to me, but Jean was so upset. So angry. She felt ripped off, somehow, as if life had cheated her. Her dream of how things were going to be had been swept away.

  “But it was our daughter, you know? Jean couldn’t see that. She had been planning to breastfeed; she’d been reading all these books about brain development, bought all the right toys and music, and suddenly, none of it mattered anymore. She left me to feed her, talk to her, put her to bed. She would just sit there and let Chance cry. Then after a while, she just stopped coming home.”

  I didn’t know what to say. I rested my hand on the stolen gun in the pocket of my sweats. I didn’t want to shoot Jean. I was no marksman; I wasn’t sure I could hit her even if I tried. If she was holding the baby, I wasn’t even going to point the gun in her direction.

  “Can I use your phone?” I asked. I cringed as soon as I said it, realizing that it was an insensitive response to Nick’s story, but Nick didn’t seem to mind. He pulled it out of his shirt pocket and handed it over.

  It was the new, slim type, about the size and thickness of a credit card. I tapped the screen, searched public records for the listing for Officer Richard Peyton of the Media police force, and called him. He picked up after the first ring.

  “Peyton.”

  “Officer Peyton, this is Jacob Kelley.”

  A beat of silence. “Where are you, Mr. Kelley?”

  “I want to turn myself in. But I will only do it, personally, to you.”

  “All right. We can do that. Where are you?”

  “At the NJSC.”

  “I have no jurisdiction in New Jersey.”

  “Only to you,” I said, and hung up.

  Two minutes later, we careened into the NJSC parking lot and jumped out of the car. We headed straight for the Dirac building and Jean’s office. Nick made a phone call and when we arrived, Carolyn Spiers, the building’s administrative assistant, was holding open the door.

  She did a double take when she saw me. “Aren’t you supposed to be in jail?”

  “They let me out on good behavior,” I said. “We just need to see Jean.”

  “I don’t think she’s here,” Carolyn said. Her desk was right in front of the entranceway. “I would have seen her come through.”

  “We’ll check anyway,” I said.

  We didn’t knock. I held the door handle down, quietly counted to three, and we rushed in. I had the gun out, but I kept it pointed at the floor. Jean was standing behind her desk, looking down at Chance, who was lying on her desk on top of papers and writing implements. Jean had the Higgs projector and she was manipulating circuitry symbols on its surface. Chance watched the smartpaper, transfixed, occasionally batting at it with a chubby hand.

  Nick started walking toward them, but I held up a hand. I didn’t know for sure what Jean could or couldn’t do, but the situation required careful handling.

  “You can’t stop me,” Jean said. “Just leave me alone.”

  “What are you doing?” Nick asked. “If you don’t want Chance, just leave her with me. I’ll take care of her. You don’t have to have any part of her.”

  “I do want her,” Jean said. “That’s what you never understood. You love her defect, her extra chromosome. I love her. I want her to be whole.”

  “She is whole, Jeannie. She’s her. She’s Chance.”

  “Would you want to have the problems she will have?” Jean asked. “Do you want to trade places with her? You’re being emotional, Nick, not practical.”

  Nick took a step forward, pleading. “She needs our emotions. She needs our love.”

  Jean’s eyes blazed. “Don’t you dare tell me I don’t love our child. You have no idea the things I’ve done for her.”

  “Like Brian?” I asked.

  Spots of color bloomed in her cheeks. “Brian betrayed me. He deserved everything he got.”

  “You were his new girlfriend, weren’t you? The one he dumped Lily Lin to be with,” I said.

  Nick’s head jerked at me, then back to Jean. “Brian Vanderhall? That’s who you were sleeping with?”

  “For all the good it did me,” Jean said bitterly. “Yes, I slept with him, Nick. I did it for us, for Chance. I was everything he wanted: sexy, compliant, the female assistant to the brilliant scientist. Only I was different, because I understood the research, understood its implications—sometimes faster than he did. I swallowed my pride, accepted that he would overlook my contributions when he published, because I knew what this discovery could do.

  “I knew it could change the past. Just a quirk of luck, that extra chromosome, like the random collisions and emissions of particles that happen a trillion trillion times a second. It didn’t have to happen. It shouldn’t have happened. We could undo it, choose a different path, a different random possibility. And we did it, Brian and I. We found the quantum intelligences, spoke to them, learned from them. Out of their knowledge and our own experimentation, a technology was born, more powerful even than I had been expecting.”

  “But then Brian wanted to destroy it,” I said. “He took it away from you, without telling you what he was doing.”

  “He was afraid.” Jean’s voice oozed contemp
t. “He thought it was too powerful, that the intelligences would demand it back. I told him that power was the only way to keep them under control.”

  “He came to my house to show me and ask my advice,” I said. “You followed him to my house. You’re the ghost Officer Peyton saw in the snow outside. Then you followed him back to the bunker and killed him there, not realizing there was another version of him still alive.”

  “He betrayed me,” Jean repeated. “I gave him my body, and I gave him my mind, and he didn’t give me anything in return.”

  Nick was looking back and forth between us in growing consternation. “But you defended him,” he said. “You spoke out in his favor at his trial.”

  “She had to get close enough to me to find the projector,” I said. “She didn’t know where it was.”

  “I didn’t want to hurt you or your family,” Jean said. “I didn’t know Brian would mail the projector to you, or that you would end up accused of the crime. I was honestly trying to help.” She pressed a button on the pager several times. On the table, Chance blurred and became a montage of babies, some happy, some crying, some kicking, some reaching, some clapping hands.

  I slowly lifted my gun and pointed it at Jean’s head. I wasn’t going to shoot with Chance so close, but I hoped Jean wouldn’t know that. “Step away from her,” I said.

  Jean made a guttural sound, like an animal’s growl. “I told you, I’m not going to kill her. I love her.” She looked back down at Chance, whose image started shifting through the medley of different possible Chances. Some of them became a little more solid, a little more real, while others faded into smoke.

  “Last chance,” I said. “Step back.”

  “Leave me alone,” Jean said. “You can’t win this.” She flicked her eyes, and the gun was yanked out of my hands and clattered uselessly into the corner. She had the Higgs projector synched to her eyejack lenses, and she was much more adept at using it than I was.

  But she wasn’t the only one with a Higgs projector. The one I had used to escape from prison was in my pocket, synched to the lenses I had borrowed from Nick. I didn’t know how to do much with it, and I had a feeling Jean had some custom subroutines in her version that she had written herself, but I had to try.