Supersymmetry (18 page)

Sandra flushed with horror and rage. She wanted to tear the varcolac to pieces, but she didn't know what to do. How could such a creature even be harmed? It could kill every person here with a gesture.

For that matter, why was it even here? If it had the power to destroy a baseball stadium, why didn't it just destroy the whole building, or the whole block? Why weren't they already dead?

Nathan and Danielle, both in uniform, advanced on the varcolac, spreading out and drawing their sidearms. “Police!” Danielle shouted. “Hands on your head!”

“No!” Sandra yelled. “Get out of here! It'll kill you!”

They either didn't hear or didn't listen. Danielle raised her weapon and fired three shots at the varcolac, center mass. It blurred, and the bullets passed through it, punching holes in the paneling at the back of the room. The sound was deafening in the enclosed space.

The varcolac raised its hand toward Danielle, but suddenly Alex was there, standing between them. There was a brilliant flash of light. Alex fell back a step, but stayed on her feet. She pointed at the wall, and the varcolac flew toward it as if gravity had suddenly been turned on its side. The minister's body hit the wall with an audible crunch. It fell to the floor, and for a moment, Sandra thought the fight was over, but the minister stood again. One of its arms was twisted at an angle, and it dragged one leg behind it, but it came at them, eyeless and terrifying.

Then Sandra saw something that took her breath away. She called her sister's name and pointed. Behind Alex, Nathan and Danielle's faces were also covered with blank skin where their eyes had been just a moment ago. All three varcolacs advanced, surrounding them.

Ryan could see what was happening in the funeral parlor through Alex's viewfeed, but there was nothing he could do about it, not directly. If he teleported there, he might be killed. Then who would devise the next equation to trap the varcolac? He was like a general, too valuable to be risked on the front line. He wanted them to survive, but when it came down to it, his life was worth more than theirs.

The crazy thing was, as far as he could tell, the varcolac was still trapped in the wormhole. The creatures attacking Sandra and Alex at that moment had somehow been manufactured by the varcolac in the future, through the Higgs sequence it had sent back in time. Or that it
would
send back in time. Ryan had underestimated the complexity of the sequence of particle interactions the varcolac could initiate with a Higgs singlet. He had imagined it doing the equivalent of sending a billiard ball back in time with exactly the direction and spin to impact each of the other balls and win the game—a difficult enough concept. Instead, the particle it had sent back in time had initiated a sequence that had created an instance of the varcolac itself, an extension of its own intelligence and physical presence.

Ryan was in awe. This creature had such mastery over time and space that it could recreate the pattern of its own existence with the chain reaction of a single, precisely aimed particle. Which meant that it understood its own configuration down to every quark and gluon. It could replicate some portion of itself, and these replications were mere extensions of its mind. Could it be that it was a species of one, communicating itself across the universes and the ages? Its awareness and experience must be vast.

But it wasn't invincible. It was no god, free to rewrite the laws of nature as it saw fit. It was confined by the wormhole, at least to some extent. It had been banished from the world when its source of power was removed. There was still some chance that they would be able to defeat it.

On the other hand, they couldn't hold it back forever. They had to come to terms with the fact that varcolac would, eventually, win. If it was sending particles back in time from some later date, that meant it was going to escape from the wormhole—something that had been seeming increasingly inevitable anyway. It occurred to Ryan that perhaps, instead of fighting it, he should be helping it. If there was no way to win, wouldn't it be better to join the winning side?

But no, that was ridiculous. He didn't even know what the varcolac wanted. He couldn't trust it to reward him for helping it, if it even noticed that he had. He had to keep it contained as long as possible. In the time that remained, he would study it, collecting as much data as possible about how it worked and what it could and couldn't do. That way, if there was some way to defeat it, he would find it. And if not, he would at least know better what he was dealing with.

Sandra shouted her friends' names, but it was no use. They were varcolacs now, or at least its puppets. Danielle pointed her gun at Alex and fired. Alex blurred, just like the varcolac had, but Nathan disappeared and reappeared behind Alex, trapping her between them. Alex blurred again just as he fired.

Was it three varcolacs? Or was the same creature inhabiting all three bodies? It hardly mattered. The varcolacs advanced on Alex from all sides. Two of Sandra's friends were going to kill her sister, or else her sister was going to kill them. Though she supposed her friends were probably already dead.

The varcolacs raised their hands, firing shot after shot of whatever invisible energy they used to stop people's hearts. Alex blocked with some kind of energy field of her own, producing more of those blinding bursts of light. “Sandra!” she shouted. “Get Mom out of here!”

Their mother still crouched next to Sandra's body, watching the fight with an expression of terror and rage. Claire was there, holding her back. Whether their mother was foolhardy enough to try to attack the varcolacs, Sandra didn't know, but she might risk anything if her children were in danger. Sandra teleported to her and wrapped her arms around her. She didn't know for sure that this would work, but so far the software governing the teleportation seemed to be able to account for her clothing and anything she was carrying. Sure enough, the room around them disappeared and was replaced by Sandra's old bedroom, in her parents' house.

“I'll be back soon,” Sandra said. Her mother started to protest, but Sandra teleported away without listening. She reappeared in the funeral parlor and grabbed Claire, teleporting her away, too. It was the best she could do for them. When she returned again, Alex was still fighting hard, a sheen of sweat glinting from her forehead. Sandra spotted a familiar person hiding behind a table, cowering with her head in her hands.

“Detective Messinger?” Sandra said.

Messinger looked up. Her eyes were wild. “Did you see it?” she said. “Did you see what it did to those people?”

“Stay down,” Sandra said.

“I'm a
cop
,” Messinger said. “But I couldn't . . . how can anyone fight such a thing?”

Sandra didn't answer. She was watching Alex, who was now sending folding chairs flying at the varcolacs. The varcolacs flickered and teleported around the room, avoiding the attack. Alex was amazing, but she couldn't keep it up forever. And how could they win against a creature that could simply find more bodies to inhabit and press into service?

Sandra felt something cold and hard being pressed into her hand. She looked down. Messinger was holding out a Glock 19, her service weapon. Sandra snatched it up. She teleported and reappeared next to Alex, immediately firing at the nearest varcolac. The varcolac blurred to avoid it.

“How do you block their attacks?” Sandra shouted.

“Turn your automated system on!” Alex shouted back, just before teleporting again to a spot behind one of the varcolacs.

Sandra quickly paged through the menu options on her eyejack system. There it was—Automated Defense. It made sense. A human couldn't react fast enough to choose the “diffract” function after a bullet was fired; they needed software to detect the attack and react to it. She toggled the option on, just in time. A varcolac appeared in front of her and a flash of light sparked through the air as the system blocked its attack.

“We have to get out of here,” Sandra shouted. “They'll just keep coming.”

“It'll find us, wherever we go,” Alex said.

“Then what do we do?”

Alex didn't answer. She clutched at her chest, and fell to her knees, her face pulled back in a rictus of pain.

“No!” Sandra shouted. But then she saw that there was another Alex standing next to her, and another, and another, until there were at least a dozen.

“Surround them,” one of the Alexes said. “Grab hold of them.”

The Alexes teleported into positions surrounding each of the varcolacs—Nathan, Danielle, and the minister—and wrapped their arms around them. Bright light flashed and sparked, like lightning arcing through the spaces between their bodies. Sandra understood what she was doing—using the shield as a weapon, disrupting whatever energy pattern allowed the varcolacs to inhabit and control these material forms. It worked, after a fashion. The two officers and the minister writhed in the flashes and fell to the ground. All three of them now had eyes again. They looked like their original selves. They were also dead.

Sandra rushed to Danielle's body, touching her, listening for her breath or some indication that she might still be alive. She was warm, flushed even, but had no pulse.

“We need to leave,” one of the Alexes said.

Sandra looked up at her, furious. “These were my friends!”

“I didn't kill them,” Alex said.

“They're still dead! Don't you even care?”

“I care about keeping you alive. I care about letting Mom know we're okay.”

“You call this okay?” Sandra waved her hand, indicating the multiple Alexes. But there were fewer of them now, only five or six. As she watched, another Alex disappeared.

“I'm converging again,” Alex said. “It doesn't last long.”

“You've done this before?” But even as she said it, Sandra knew Alex
had
done it before. She could remember the lab at Lockheed Martin when they had first gotten that particular module to work, the thrill of discovery, the promise of a bright future for their department. It was still under development, and so hadn't been included in the demo. But Sandra hadn't been there. Those were Alex's memories she was seeing.

Sandra felt the blood rush to her face. Alex had been a fool to experiment with such things, knowing what she knew. Didn't she know what was at stake? Just because something could be done didn't mean it should be.

But no. She wasn't a fool. That's what Sandra didn't understand about science. It wasn't an option to leave a discovery hidden, like a treasure buried in sand. The truth was out there. You couldn't know that things like teleportation were possible and do nothing about it. If you did nothing, you had no power—not over other people who didn't have the same moral standards, and not over varcolacs who could appear without warning out of nowhere. It was much better to have the power and knowledge and decide what to do with it than to wring your hands and hope nobody else would discover what was possible.

For a brief moment, Sandra could see the room—and in fact, the world—through Alex's eyes.

“No!” Sandra yelled the word out loud and jumped to her feet. She was Sandra,
Sandra
, not Alex. Those were not her memories, and they were not her thoughts.

Alex's probability wave had collapsed, and all the other versions of herself had converged back into the whole. Sandra took a step back, away from her sister.
She
had almost converged with Alex as well. In truth, she was like those others, wasn't she? Simply a probability split that had stayed unresolved a lot longer than it should. But she didn't feel disposable. She didn't want to cease to exist as a separate individual.

Sandra clenched her teeth. “Never do that again,” she said.

Alex looked bewildered. “Do what? Save both of our lives?”

“That splitting thing. It's unnatural. You'll only make it worse.”

“If you had a better idea for fighting off three varcolacs, you should have mentioned it a little earlier.” Alex gave a small laugh. “In fact, if splitting wasn't possible, you wouldn't even be here.”