Supersymmetry (15 page)

Sandra heard talking from her parents' bedroom; it sounded like a comedy show on the stream. She didn't want to startle her mother by walking in on her, so she sneaked downstairs and out the front door, and then rang the doorbell. A few minutes passed before her mother opened the door. Her normally pale face was leached of color, except for the skin around her eyes, which was red and raw. She wrapped her arms around Sandra without a word and buried her face in Sandra's hair. Sandra remembered her mother as such a strong presence in her life, but her thin body felt fragile in Sandra's arms.

They went inside. Her mother went through the mechanical actions of pouring Sandra a cup of coffee. The forensics crew must have been through, looking for evidence to support the claim that her father had been here after the explosion, but the kitchen had since been cleaned to an antiseptic shine. Sandra had last seen her father right there, sitting at that table, poring over the data she had given him.

“Is Claire here yet?” Sandra asked. She knew without asking that Claire would take care of the arrangements for the funeral. Claire was the planner in the family, the organizer of all details, and always had been. Even from California, Sandra had no doubt she was already making calls and writing lists of what needed to be done.

“Her flight doesn't come in until nine-thirty.”

“And Sean?”

“He called.” Her mother's voice sounded dead, devoid of emotion. “You know the military.”

“Will they let him come home?”

“You mean, was it his choice or theirs for him to stay in Poland? I don't know. He said something about a special mission.”

Considering the current friction with Turkey, talk of a special mission was a frightening thing. Turkey's influence had been spreading across the Balkans for years, and now Greece, Bulgaria, Romania, Serbia, Croatia, Hungary, and Slovenia had all been quietly assimilated, either through military threat or economic pressure. Allied with an increasingly powerful Iran, Turkey maintained a strong source of oil and a secure southern border. The growing Turkish navy now dominated the Mediterranean. Worse, they had apparently recovered a stockpile of Soviet nuclear warheads left over in Romania from the Cold War. The Romanian government had previously declared the weapons disassembled, but Turkey now claimed they were operational.

American politicians were anxious to restore balance in the region before Turkey grew into a world power, so they were pouring troops and money into Poland and Germany. War seemed inevitable. As a Force Recon marine, Sean wasn't trained for a back-row seat. Sandra didn't know how her mother would survive if the next funeral was his.

“I'm sure he'll be okay,” Sandra said.

Her mother forced a smile and squeezed her hand. They sat there for a while, their hands clasped across the table, not talking about war, or her father, or varcolacs, or what the future might hold. Memories flashed through Sandra's mind, cued by this so-familiar kitchen. The memories that came from both before her split with Alex and those that came after merged seamlessly together in her mind. It was as if at fourteen years old, she had suddenly gained a twin sister. It felt to her like Alex was the new one, and she the daughter who had always been there. Of course, it would have felt just the same to Alex.

Sandra wanted to share some of these memories with her mother. They were good memories, on the whole. Her father had loved them all, though imperfectly, and they had loved him. He had been a father who was present in their home, for whom family, rather than work or friends or other ambitions, was the highest priority. She said none of these things to her mother. There would be time for such remembrances. For now, she just held her hand.

A ping told Sandra that someone was trying to contact her. She checked her phone, and saw that it was Angel Gutierrez. “Hello?” she said.

“Sandra. It's me. Do you have some time to talk?”

“Yeah, sure.”

“I mean, in person? I don't think this should be going over the airwaves.”

“Sure. Where are you?”

“At the robotics lab at U-Penn.”

Sandra turned to her mother. “I need to go meet someone.”

“Go ahead,” her mother said. “I'll be okay. I'll have to pick up Claire from the airport soon anyway.”

Sandra left the house and closed the door behind her, then spoke into her phone again. “Is there anyone else there at the lab with you?”

“No. Why?” Angel said.

“Send me the GPS data from your phone.”

“Um, okay. Done.” She could hear the confusion in his voice. “Does that mean you're coming?”

“Yeah. One more thing. Can you clear away anything within about five meters of where you're standing?”

“Um, it's pretty clear already.”

“Pretty clear?”

“Nothing but a folding chair, which I just slid out of the way.”

“Great. Now walk five meters away yourself, and don't move.”

“This is really weird, Sandra. Are you watching me or something?”

“Did you do it?”

“Yes. How long do I have to stand here?”

Sandra smiled. “Not long at all.”

CHAPTER 14

S
andra materialized in the University of Pennsylvania robotics lab. Angel, standing five meters away, leaped back with a shriek and crashed to the floor, knocking over a folding chair with a clatter. Sandra shrugged. “Sorry,” she said. “Did I startle you?”

He looked up at her from the ground with an expression of utter astonishment. “Where did you come from?”

“My parents' house. It's about twenty miles west of here, in Media.”

“No, I mean, just now. Were you hiding in here?” He looked up, examining the ceiling tiles above her.

She laughed. “Nope. I just teleported right in. That's why I needed the coordinates. And why I asked you to stand aside.”

“You . . .”

“Teleported.” Sandra was enjoying this, despite the seriousness of the situation—or maybe even because of it. “I'll tell you all about it. But you wanted to tell me something, too, right? Which should we do first?”

Angel stood shakily to his feet. “I think we'd better start with you explaining how you just did black magic in my science lab.”

The lab's interior was two stories high, and most of the space was taken up by a central cage, no more than a wooden framework wrapped with tightly stretched mosquito netting. The inside of the cage was entirely empty, except for a series of cameras and motion sensors affixed at regular intervals. Outside of the cage, the room was cluttered with metal folding chairs, ladders, scraps of wood and piping, tablets, wiring, and card tables piled with random electronics. Sandra saw a few surprising items as well: hula-hoops, brightly colored beach balls, and marching-band batons.

“Okay, fine. Watch. This is the technology my sister was working on.” It was supposed to be super-classified, Sandra knew, but she wasn't a government employee. No one had sworn her to secrecy. If she wanted to show off for Angel and tell him all about it, she'd do as she pleased. Sandra looked inside the wood-and-mesh cage and estimated the distance. Teleporting this close, she wasn't too worried about making a mistake. She disappeared and reappeared in the middle of the empty cage. To her, it seemed as though the entire room had suddenly shifted. Angel was still staring at the spot she had been standing a moment earlier. “Hey,” she said. “Over here.”

Angel turned and saw her, his face incredulous and a little frightened. “Is this really happening?”

“There's more. Soldiers with this technology can walk through walls, dodge bullets, even rip an enemy's gun out of his hands from across a field. They'll be practically invincible.”

“What's the catch?”

Sandra teleported back so she was standing right next to him again. “The occasional massacre of a stadium full of people.” She kept her tone light, but she felt a pain in her throat like she was swallowing a rock. “You asked if it was a quantum weapon that destroyed the stadium. You weren't too far off. Only it wasn't a person who pulled the trigger.”

She told him the whole story. She hadn't intended to go into her whole childhood and the events of fifteen years ago, but he was such an intent listener that she just kept talking. Besides, he seemed at least somewhat familiar with her father's murder case and the public claim made in court that there had been two versions of him. And he nodded at everything she said, no matter how outlandish.

“You're really taking this in stride,” she said.

He laughed, a little nervously. “This isn't the first crazy thing to happen to me today.”

She wrapped up her story with an explanation of how she had split into two, and the probability wave had never resolved. “So, my sister is really me,” she concluded. “There are two of me.”

Angel shook his head, dismissive. “That's ridiculous.”

“Ridiculous, but true,” she said.

“No. Ridiculous and false.”

“Angel, I—”

“I'm not talking about your story. I'm talking about your claim that your sister is really you. That's observably false, and to claim otherwise is just semantics. Even identical twins of the normal stripe start out as a single zygote. No one says they're really the same person. As soon as you split, you became two people. Different.”

“But we share the same memories of growing up. I'm one possibility of how I turned out; she's another. She's what I would have been if just the slightest things had been different. And . . . well, there's always the possibility that the probability wave could resolve, and we would become one person again.” She said it lightly, but the dread of considering that possibility gave her a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach.

“Yeah, well, that's really odd,” Angel said. “I admit it: you're a weirdo. You're not the only one, though. I have six toes on my left foot. That's like one in three thousand. Very odd, but I've learned to cope. Want to see?” He reached down as if to untie his shoe.

She laughed in spite of herself. “I'll pass.”

“You're different people,” he said again. “It's who you are now. The past doesn't matter.”

She was quiet for a moment. “You had something you wanted to tell me,” she said.

“Right,” he said. “Well, it's kind of less impressive than teleporting around the lab.”

“Let me hear it.”

“I'll have to show you instead.”

Angel scooped up a tablet and tapped a series of commands. The lab filled with a whirring noise like a swarm of bees, the same as Sandra had heard from Angel's cases in the stadium parking lot. “Come with me,” he said.

She followed him through a gate in the mesh wall into the cage. He opened a black case, and six quad-copters rose out of it in eerie precision. “These weren't at the stadium,” he said, raising his voice to be heard over the hum. “I'll show you these first, so you can see the difference.”

At commands from his tablet, the copters snapped into various formations: a horizontal line of six, a two-by-three stack, a rotating ring. They moved to their new positions quickly and precisely, often only inches apart, with no collisions, or even last-minute swerves. Each seemed to know exactly where the others were going to move, which she supposed made sense, since it was surely the same software controlling all of them.

“Now watch this,” Angel said. He went out of the cage and returned with a handful of hula-hoops, batons, and tennis balls. He tossed a hula-hoop in the air, and all six copters flew through it, quick as lightning, before it fell back into his hand. He threw two at once, and they did the same. Then he tossed a baton in the air, end over end, and one of the copters
caught
it, balanced vertically on top of a portion of its frame that extended up between the rotors. It hovered there, adjusting its position back and forth slightly to keep the baton balanced, for all the world like a vaudeville performer with a push broom on his nose.

“Impressive,” Sandra said.

“I like to think so,” Angel said. “But I just want you to know what's normal, before I show you what's abnormal.” He tapped the tablet, and the copter jerked suddenly higher, lofting the baton in a slowly twirling arc. Another copter caught it vertically again, dipping to cancel out the baton's spin and momentum. The copters began a game of catch, flipping the baton to one another and catching it perfectly. Angel started throwing the hula-hoops into the game, and the copters again responded seamlessly, sometimes dashing through a hoop to catch a baton on the other side. Finally, he began hurling tennis balls at the copters, trying to disrupt their rhythm, but they dodged the balls effortlessly without interrupting the game with the batons.

Sandra knew the hard part of this performance was designing the copters in the first place with the ability to move precisely and know their exact position at any moment. The tricks themselves were just mathematics; the encoding of position and velocity and spin and momentum into a simulated model of reality. Even so, it was remarkable to see.

Angel touched the tablet, and the baton and hula-hoops dropped to the floor. “One more thing.”

He left the cage and wheeled in a stand with a wooden wall and a window. The window was adjustable; it could be made wider or narrower in both horizontal and vertical directions. Angel demonstrated the copters diving through the window in different configurations. When he made the window into a narrow vertical slit, the copters would actually hurl themselves sideways, momentarily losing control of their flight as they flew through the window at a ninety-degree angle, before regaining control on the other side.

“Watch what happens when I do this,” Angel said. He closed the window even farther, making it impossible for the copters to fit through the gap, no matter how they oriented themselves. He tapped the tablet, but the copters didn't move. “They can detect that there's no way through,” he said. “But watch this.”