Superposition (10 page)

“I know what I saw,” Marek said. “It was a
varcolac
. My grandmother saw one when she was a girl.”

“What's a varcolac?” I asked, mauling the pronunciation.

“A demon. A monster. They live on the other side of the world,” Marek said.

“New Zealanders live on the other side of the world,” Brian said.

“No, not like that. On the other earth, the mirror world, on the other side of ours. There are the gentle folk, the
blajini
, who fast all year and benefit humankind, though they don't understand us. Then there are the
varcolaci
, who devour and kill.”

I raised my eyebrows. “You think the thing we saw in the bunker was a monster from some kind of Romanian myth?”

“Some say they are the souls of unbaptized children,” Marek said. “Others say they are the spirits of those who drowned after Moses commanded the Red Sea to flow back over their heads. But they exist.”

“So . . . Egyptian monsters from a Romanian myth about a Jewish fable,” Brian said. He gave a derisive laugh. “Listen to me. This isn't story time. We're talking about self-aware intelligences generated from the complexity of particle interaction on a large scale.”

Marek twisted around in his seat to face Brian. “You think using scientific words changes what it is?”

“I'm talking about something physical, not a spirit.”

“I hear what you're saying. You're saying that if a thing is complicated enough, it will be conscious,” Marek said.

“Pretty much,” Brian said. “If it's a network, like a brain or computer, with a means of passing information. People tend to romanticize consciousness, as if it's something spiritual. It's just a word we use to describe complexity.”

Marek looked at me. “This is why I hate scientists,” he said.

I grinned. “I'm a scientist.”

“Not like that. Why is calling them
quantum intelligences
any better than calling them
varcolaci
?”

“Look, I'll step you through it,” Brian said. “Is a toaster conscious?”

“No,” Marek said.

“Why not?”

“It's a machine. It does what it was built to do,” Marek said.

“What about one of those automated lawn mowers or vacuum cleaners? We say things like, ‘It tried to go around the tree, but it got confused.' Doesn't that indicate a consciousness? That it consciously intends to mow the lawn?”

“It's still just a machine. It follows its programming,” Marek said.

“What about a dog? Is it conscious? Does it
intend
to get in the lawnmower's way, or chase the cat, or shed on the carpet? Or is it just following its programming?”

“A dog is conscious, I think,” Marek said.

“Or do we just say that, because the dog's programming is more complex, and we can't always predict it?” Brian asked. “What about you? I grant you the label of
conscious
because I ascribe intent and unpredictability to your actions, but when it comes down to it, you're just following your programming, too.
Consciousness
is just when that programming becomes complex enough to warrant using a certain vocabulary.”

Marek's hand darted into the backseat, quick as a snake, and grabbed Brian by the neck, just under his chin. I could only see him through the mirror, but I could tell Brian hadn't seen it coming. His mouth slammed shut and his eyes bulged.

“Is it just my programming if I break your neck?” Marek asked.

I knew Marek well enough by now to know that he wouldn't really do it, but Brian didn't. “There's no need for that,” he croaked.

Marek made a deep sound in his throat that eventually became recognizable as a chuckle. He let go of Brian's throat and began to laugh heartily. Brian laughed, too, though not very convincingly, and rubbed at his throat.

“Free will is real,” Marek said. “I can choose to break your neck if I wish.”

“Science says not,” Brian said. “Everything you do is just the accumulated result of a series of probabilistic outcomes.”

“But I can decide. I haven't decided yet, but really, it could go either way,” Marek said.

The superior grin flashed back onto Brian's face. “In fact, it goes both ways. Every decision you make is made the other way by another version of you in a parallel universe.”

“We don't really know that,” I put in.

“It's basic mathematics,” Brian said, pouting now that I hadn't backed him up. “Say the number of particles making up the Earth and its environment in space is N. Each particle can only have a finite set of values—position, velocity, spin, etc.—so the number of possible states that a set of N particles can be in is another number, M. M is staggeringly large, but finite. In an infinite universe—which ours assuredly is, or is so vast as to make the difference unimportant—those M states will all occur, and all be repeated, again and again. Not to mention all of the other infinitely sized bubble universes. Everything you do is being repeated by someone exactly like you—millions of yous, in fact—in every possible slight variation.”

Marek made a disgusted look. “A person is not the same as a toaster. If you don't know that, your science is worth nothing.”

Brian held his hands protectively over his throat, but he kept talking. “We want to believe we're special. But every great scientific discovery in the past has had to break us of the idea of how special and different we are as humans. Copernicus made us give up the idea that the Earth was the center of the universe. Darwin made us give up the idea that humans are greater than animals. Einstein made us realize that even our perspective on motion and time is not absolute.

“Quantum mechanics is the worst, though. It undermines our sense of purpose. It tells us that everything is driven by probabilities, the random dice roll of a billion particles. Every decision you think you make is in fact a rolling probability wave, the result of a giant quantum computer that's calculating you and everything else. Worse, the opposite of every decision you make is probably being made by a parallel you in another universe. Einstein didn't want to believe it either, but science doesn't lie.”

“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.”