by David Walton
The memories clashed and vied for ascendancy. At times, I slipped into one viewpoint and thought of that one as the real me and the other as the imposter. I tried to claw my way up, back out into consciousness, but my identity was fractured and my mind overwhelmed. I couldn’t let go of either Jacob. They were both me.
The later visions seemed to stretch farther apart, like having one foot on land and one in a canoe as it drifts away from shore. We no longer fit in a single mind, but the wave was collapsing. There could be only one Jacob Kelley.
We were different, but there was much we had in common. We both loved Elena and Claire and Sean and Alessandra. Sean was suffering, dying. We had to help him. I stopped fighting, and just let it happen. I felt an internal click, as of two machined parts coming together, and without understanding quite what I had gained or lost, I knew I was one person again.
I opened my eyes. Sean was still screaming, the others yelling and crying. The square where my double had been was now empty. The air was filled with acrid smoke and the smell of burning flesh. Sean! I had to try again to reach him.
I pushed myself up, but my body betrayed me, muscles spasming and dropping me back to the floor. How long had Sean been held in the wires? My sense of time was completely lost. Through the haze, I saw Alex yanking off her socks and shoes. There was a small amount of water puddled in the gaps around the drain, and she splashed her hands in it, followed by her feet. I tried again to stand, and this time I managed a shaky vertical. Alex planted her feet on the grate and knelt in front of it, holding her hands forward as if she was going to push something. What was she doing?
I figured it out just as she uncoiled like a spring, kicking forward hard with her legs and straightening her body with her arms outstretched toward the wire bundle. “No!” I shouted, but it was too late. The force of her kick was hard enough that she reached the bundle and grasped it just as electricity jolted through her wet hands, down the length of her body, and across her wet feet to the grounded drain pipe.
It worked perfectly. I watched, horrified, as an unspeakable number of volts arced through her body in a blazing flash, and then everything went dark.
Or not quite dark. The varcolac glowed. It dropped Sean, who slumped to the floor. I ran and scooped Sean up. The electric fences were no longer operational. Light streamed from the varcolac in every direction, and then it seemed to dissolve, disintegrating into photons just as the steel pipe had done in the bunker so long ago. When it dwindled to a single point in space, there was a pulse of sound, like a deep bass drum.
“Run!” I shouted. I yanked Claire and Elena up and pushed everyone toward the open door. “Get out of here!”
The point exploded. The air shimmered, and the cinder block walls cracked. The ceiling crumbled, dropping pieces of masonry into the room.
“Wait!” Alessandra said. She stood rooted, staring at her double. Alex’s body was stretched motionless across the floor, her skin and clothes blackened. “Is she . . . did she . . . ?”
“Go!” I said. I pushed her out the door, and looked back at Alex. Everything in me screamed to go back for her. I wanted to believe she could still be alive, even though I knew it was impossible. But I couldn’t carry both her and Sean, and to try would be to endanger Sean. He was alive. I had to save him. Crying, I pushed out of the door after the others, just as the ceiling collapsed.
“Keep running!” I said. We ran up two flights of stairs and burst out into the accelerator tunnel. The varcolac was gone, but that didn’t mean we were safe. The explosion had rocked the tunnel foundation and fired who knew what kinds of exotic particles through us and all the collider equipment. Cracks snaked across the tunnel roof and along the floor.
We ran, Claire in the lead, followed by Alessandra and then Marek and Elena. Carrying Sean, I fell behind, but not out of earshot. “Hide in the bunker!” I shouted.
We could see the entrance to the CATHIE bunker just ahead, where only hours before the varcolacs had surrounded us. I hoped it would be better protection than the open tunnel, where chunks of rock were already falling from the crumbling ceiling.
Before we could reach it, a large chunk of concrete landed on the back of Marek’s leg, and he went down. “Go,” he said. “It’s just my ankle. I’m right behind you.”
“I’ll come back for you,” I said.
I ran past him with Sean and ducked into the bunker, where the others were already gathered. I placed Sean in Elena’s open arms, and then stopped, staring at them. All four of my family members had begun to shimmer, flickering back and forth between one image and another. Behind Elena and Claire and Sean, I saw their bodies as I had found them in the house, twisted and lifeless. Behind Alessandra’s face, I could see Alex as she was now, blackened and burned by electricity. What was happening to them? Was this how I had looked when my probability wave had collapsed? Each of them wavered between themselves and their double, only in their case, each of their doubles was dead.
But hadn’t Elena and Claire and Sean had already resolved to these versions of themselves? Their bodies had disappeared. Yet here they were, flickering between the two possible paths their lives had taken. Their quantum state must have been linked to the varcolac’s, a kind of entanglement that forced all states linked to its existence to reach a final resolution, one way or another, now that it was gone. From a quantum perspective, it was simply a matter of probability. A coin toss whether they would live or die.
I stared at them, unable to move. There was nothing I could do to change what was going to happen. But I could help Marek. With a cry, I tore my gaze away and raced back into the corridor. Marek had pulled his leg free, but he couldn’t put any weight on it. I draped one of his arms over my shoulder and supported him like a crutch. Together, we hobbled back toward the bunker.
We had only taken a few steps when the ceiling came down on top of us.
CHAPTER 40
We were lucky. Back near the power conduits, the entire ceiling had collapsed, filling the tunnel with rock and crushing the accelerator equipment and anything else in its way. Where Marek and I were, the damage was less, though we were still half-buried with falling debris. In front of us, the door to the CATHIE bunker was no longer visible. The entrance was blocked with collapsed masonry.
I called to my family, who were either dead or trapped inside, but I heard no answer. I had sent them there for their safety, figuring the bunker was structurally isolated and thus more likely to withstand the tremors, but I hadn’t considered the volume of air. There was ventilation all through the tunnel and experiment bunkers, of course, but if it had been compromised by the collapse, there would be four people inside with not very much oxygen to go around. If they were even still breathing.
There would be a rescue crew, eventually, but we couldn’t afford to wait. I started picking up rocks from near the door and hurling them aside as fast as I could. I was haunted by the sight of their flickering images, wavering between life and death, like a macabre slot machine with more at stake than just a few coins.
In the early part of the twentieth century, when the quantum nature of subatomic particles was just beginning to be perceived, there was a dispute among scientists, some of whom found the notion of collapsing quantum waveforms to be too ridiculous to be true. One of the leading scientists of the day, Erwin Schrödinger, wrote a letter to Albert Einstein and others with a reductio ad absurdum argument, describing a thought experiment involving a cat in a box, meant to demonstrate that the probability wave concept was nonsense. In subsequent years, Schrödinger’s cat became even more well known than the scientist himself.
According to Schrödinger’s experiment, a cat was enclosed in a steel chamber along with a flask of hydrocyanic acid and a Geiger counter. In the Geiger counter was a tiny amount of a radioactive material, small enough that in the course of an hour, one of the atoms of that material might or might not decay, with equal probability. If the atom did decay, the Geiger counter would detect the emission, pr
ompting a hammer to fall and shatter the flask, releasing cyanide gas that would kill the cat. If no atom decayed, no hammer would fall, and the cat would live.
The chance of radioactive decay was not a simple chance in the larger world, like flipping a coin, but a fundamental, subatomic, quantum probability. It meant that if the box were left closed for an hour, the atom would exist simultaneously in both states, decayed and not decayed, in a probability wave that had not yet collapsed. The cat, as a result, would be split: both alive and dead at the same time, entangled in the same probability wave that governed the atom. Until you opened the box.
Schrödinger’s thought experiment, ludicrous or not, was exactly the situation my family was now in. Both alive and dead, their probability waves would be indeterminate until I opened the door. The thought crossed my mind that I should stop digging, that it was better to be caught in a state between life and death than to be completely and irreconcilably dead. But that was no argument. The air inside would only last so long, and then there would be no living possibilities.
Eventually, a rescue crew arrived, and the work went much faster. The door was uncovered, the men shouted for anyone inside to stand back, and they smashed it open with a fire axe. A thin swirl of rock dust drifted out of the open doorway. I waited, holding my breath.
Elena emerged, coughing but smiling. “We’re all here,” she said. “We’re all okay.”
She ran to me, stumbling, and we had our reunion at last, colliding into an embrace despite our injuries and holding on to one another like we would never let go. The children came out next, Claire and Alessandra and Sean, bruised and burned but alive, completely alive. I hugged them each in turn, though as I reached Sean, I could tell that he was about to collapse. His skin was badly burned, and he was just starting to feel the pain, which I knew would get a lot worse before it got better. I held Alessandra close, thinking of Alex lying dead under tons of rock, and knowing that even if Alessandra remembered none of the last few months, she was still the same person I had come to love and admire.
The medics arrived with kits and stretchers. They took Sean and Elena and Marek away, loading their stretchers onto golf carts to take them to the elevators, and from there to waiting ambulances and to the hospital. Claire and Alessandra, unharmed, were left behind with me.
I hugged them both again. “I’m so glad you’re safe,” I said.
Claire gave me a tired smile. Somehow, even filthy with dust, she was beautiful. “Will the others be okay?”
“I think they will. Sean might be in for a long recovery, but he’ll make it.”
“I don’t understand,” Alessandra said. “What happened to Alex? What did she do?”
I explained as best I could about the final sacrifice she had made that had saved us all. I told Alessandra that Alex was dead, but not really dead, because everything Alex had been was part of who Alessandra was. They were the same, both of them, and I praised her for her quick intelligence and willingness to sacrifice herself for her family.
“But that wasn’t me,” Alessandra said.
I knew how it sounded, me heaping more praise and affection on a dead girl than I had ever shown to her. It would take time to turn that around. Time for me to demonstrate that I understood her better now, and loved her, not to the extent that she could be like Claire, but for herself.
“It was you,” I said. “It really was. You just don’t remember it.”
Though it was strange that she wouldn’t remember any of the last few months. I stopped to consider my own memories. I couldn’t bring to mind everything about what it was like to live in jail, but I could remember the horror of my first night there. I could remember all the time I had spent with Alex, but at the same time, I could remember enduring the trial from the perspective of the accused. Some of my memories had blown away into the clouds of what might have been, but some, from both sides, were as clear as daylight. Why couldn’t Alessandra remember some of those same things? Had the Alex I had known been lost entirely? Did this version of her really remember nothing?
Aid workers brought us blankets and bottles of water. A professional team arrived who regularly dealt with collapsed buildings and cave-ins and knew how to remove debris without risking further collapse.
“How many were in your party?” one of the professionals asked me.
“Six,” I said. “Myself, my wife, three children, and my friend Marek Svoboda. My wife and son were taken to the hospital, and these are my two girls.”
“We found another body in a chamber back that way.” He pointed. “We haven’t cleared enough to reach her yet, but she’s female, a child about the age of yours. You don’t know who she might be?”
I frowned. Alex shouldn’t have left a body behind. It should have disappeared when her waveform resolved, just as the other Jacob’s had. The truth hit me like a bath of icy water. When my two minds were coming together, and I was glimpsing flashes of both our memories, there was a moment when I felt like I might have resisted, might have held back or even prevented the collapse. It was an odd thought, scientifically, but wave collapse had always shared a strange connection to consciousness. If Alex had resisted collapse, however, then that meant . . .
“That’s my daughter, too,” I said. “And she’s still alive.”
CHAPTER 41
“A little higher on the left,” I said. Alessandra lifted the left side of the Happy Birthday banner fractionally. “Perfect. Now climb down and help me with these balloons.”
The summer sun streamed through the windows, giving the dining room a bright, cheery air. Alessandra and I untangled the strings of a dozen latex balloons and tied them to the chair backs in pairs: two reds, two blues, two yellows, two greens. Claire walked through with a pile of presents, radiant herself in an orange sundress and ribbons in her blonde hair.
“Tell Sean to come down, will you?” I said. “He can help, too.”
Sean charged into the room at top speed and crashed into the opposite wall to stop his momentum. He had come home from the hospital just two weeks ago, but he was gaining in strength and energy every day. The plastic surgery had made the skin grafts on his face almost undetectable, and the doctors said that, given how young he was, the remaining scars would fade in time.
“Look what I made!” Sean said. He had taped five sheets of paper together and scrawled his own banner that read, “WELCUM HOME!” He had decorated it with pictures of fighter jets and dinosaurs, which was what he used to decorate everything.
“Great,” I said. “We’ll hang it up under the other one.”
It had long been a tradition in our house that no birthday was complete without noisemakers, so I distributed horns and whistles to everyone’s places around the dining room table. The flowered tablecloth was bright and festive, with colors that matched the fresh blooms in a vase at the center. Everything was ready.
Alessandra threw her arms around me and gave me a kiss. “Thanks, Dad,” she said.
The doorbell rang. “It’s them!” Sean shouted and galloped for the front door. I heard him wrench it open, and a brief pang of dread hit me, remembering Elena opening the door for the varcolac. But that nightmare was behind us now, and slowly but surely we were healing from it. Today was a celebration of that.
“It’s not them!” Sean shouted at the top of his lungs. “It’s only Uncle Marek!”
I went to greet Marek with a handshake so firm it would have crippled another man, and we exchanged looks of satisfaction. There was no need to thank him or say what I was feeling. It was understood. Colin arrived a few minutes later, and the room began to bustle with laughter and conversation.
Our van pulled into the driveway with Elena at the wheel. “They’re here, everybody!” I said.
The conversation hushed, and we watched from the window as Elena unfolded a wheelchair from the back and helped Alex transfer into it. Elena took the handles, ready to push, but Alex waved her off. She used the hand controls, and after one bump into the rail
, managed to maneuver up the newly installed ramp. Elena held the door open while Alex motored into the house.
“Surprise!”
The clamor startled her at first, but then she looked around at everyone and smiled. Her new skin was still pink—not a graft like Sean’s, but a nearly complete replacement. Her hair had only just started to grow back, though it was coming in unevenly, some clumps growing better than others. Almost every system in her body that could go wrong had gone wrong, and she had spent months in the hospital fighting infections that had nearly claimed her life half a dozen times.
But here she was, alive and improving dramatically each day. The most painful parts were behind her, and now, at long last, she was home. Alessandra ran up with tears in her eyes. “Welcome home,” she said and gave her sister a careful hug.
The varcolac had not reappeared, and for all we could tell, both Alex and Alessandra were here to stay. Alessandra had visited the hospital every day, and the two were now as tight as any pair of twins—tighter, even, since they shared so much history that they seemed to read each other’s minds. I was still sorting through the task of explaining to the government and our medical insurance how I suddenly had three daughters where I had previously only reported two.
We headed for the dining room, where we had cheesesteaks for lunch (Alex and Alessandra’s favorite) and shared stories about the days when the world had gone mad, some of which still hadn’t been heard by everyone in the room. For dessert, Elena had made a pair of birthday cakes, one a reverse image of the other. We sang, the girls blew out their candles, and Elena passed around generous slices with scoops of vanilla ice cream.