Supersymmetry (20 page)

Ryan hated his body. He was tired, his eyes hurt from studying log files and pattern data, and he felt sick from all the Coke and chips he had consumed. The physical body was so weak and needy, a hindrance to the true life of the mind. It had to be fed, and it had to be rested—several hours out of every day, wasted—and it had to be coddled with nutrients and vitamins and exercise to keep it in working order. It was an obstacle. Worse, it would someday betray him completely, snuffing out the bright candle of his true self. It was a failing of the body, not of the consciousness. He envied the varcolac's unencumbered existence. If the technology had existed to upload his mind into a computer, Ryan would have done it in an instant.

He wondered if the varcolac had ever had a physical body. He still wasn't clear if there was a race of varcolacs, or just a single intelligence. Had it been born out of the complexity of the particle interactions of the universe? Or had there once been a physical race of creatures, living their sad, short little lives and then dying, their consciousnesses dragged screaming into the void? What if one of these creatures, a scientist and inventor, had discovered a way to imprint his consciousness on the fabric of the universe? That might have been millions, even billions of years ago. And now it was here, at the edge of his world, trying to make contact. What if the varcolac knew the secret to doing this and could teach Ryan? What if he could project
his
mind onto the universe and live forever?

Ryan brought up the module that controlled the energy pattern keeping the varcolac contained beyond the wormhole. It felt somehow wrong to keep such an amazing creature confined. There was so much he could learn from it, if he could only communicate with it. In fact, as Alex had shown him, there was so much he already
had
learned from it. So many of the Higgs projector applications—teleportation, invisibility—had been made possible through the equations the varcolac had solved for him.

Ryan loaded a simple pattern on his tablet, one of the earliest he had used to shape the wormhole when he had first created the baby universe. If he replaced one of the incredibly complex patterns he had been forced to devise with this simple one, the varcolac would escape in a moment. Just a push of a button, and it would be done. The varcolac would be out, free to do as it pleased. It apparently wanted the Kelley family destroyed, but that didn't mean it would destroy him. Ryan was a kindred mind, practically a varcolac himself in spirit.

It was going to escape anyway. It was inevitable. It had sent the singlet back in time from the future to cause the attack on the funeral parlor. It must, therefore, at some time in the near future, be free to act outside the wormhole. And if the varcolac was going to escape anyway, wouldn't it be better for Ryan to let it loose on his own terms? He could establish himself as an ally, rather than an enemy.

But he wasn't going to do it. It was foolish, an insane choice that couldn't be taken back again. The varcolac might communicate with him, but it might just as soon kill him the moment it was out. Ryan sat with the pattern on his tablet, however, unable to set it aside, as the minutes ticked by toward evening. It was like looking over the edge of a cliff and thinking about jumping. Just imagining how easy it would be to simply vault over the railing. He had no intention of setting the varcolac free. But his hand hovered over the controls anyway, flirting with the idea. Of course, he wouldn't do it. He drew his hand away.

Or at least, he tried. He
intended
to pull it away. But there was his hand, touching the button, pressing it. Releasing the varcolac into the world.

He stood frozen with his finger still on the button, staring at his hand like it belonged to someone else. He couldn't believe what he had just done. He wanted to go check the logs, to see if the complex patterns of equations had really been replaced by the simple one, but he was finding it hard to move.

He hadn't meant to just let it out. It was stupid. Suicidal. His childish dream that he was a superhuman seemed insane now. He was a human being, the same as everyone else, only with an intelligence that had isolated him from others and stunted his social development. Was that so hard to accept? It had been true of many scientists and thinkers before him. Maybe his problem was worse than simple social awkwardness; maybe he was going insane. Or maybe . . .

Could the varcolac have influenced his mind? It had been manipulating him all along, using the solutions to the equations he had designed to get him to do its bidding. What if his immersion in its technology, or just his proximity to the wormhole, had given it access to his brain? Why else would he have done such a cataclysmically stupid thing?

Finally, by inches, Ryan forced himself to move. He brought up the logs and saw what he already knew to be true. The patterns were broken. The equations compromised. There was nothing stopping the free quantum flow of particles from one universe into the next.

It wasn't too late, though. He could fix this. In the warehouse, during the demo, he'd been able to stuff the genie back in the bottle by introducing a new equation to control the shape of the wormhole. The energies that gave it life and power in their universe came from the baby universe; if he reblocked that path, the varcolac would be recaptured. His fingers flew over the touch screen, fueled by adrenaline.

It didn't take long. He already had several equations saved off that he had worked out previously. Each was deviously complex, patterns that would require years of effort by high-level mathematicians to solve, if they could solve them at all. He chose one of these, a tricky piece of work based on a generalized form of the Riemann zeta function. He loaded it into the software that regulated the wormhole and initiated the procedure. In his photoionization display, the laser-light arcs shifted and reformed, representing the invisible quantum reality. The pattern held.

Ryan took a deep breath and let it out. Nothing was going to get through that barrier for quite some time. He had done a foolish thing, an insane thing, but no harm had been done. No varcolac had appeared, and no one had been killed. No one would ever know.

His smile faded as the pattern unraveled in front of him.

CHAPTER 18

T
he Muncy State Correctional Facility for Women stood at the end of a picturesque gravel drive lined with old, full-growth maple trees. The main building looked like a courthouse or a prep school, solid limestone and brick architecture with two chimneys and a central tower topped with a white cupola in classic American Renaissance style. In the 150 years since its construction, however, the prison population had grown twenty times larger. Alex had already seen the place from satellite photos and knew that behind the charming, old-school facade was a dull, white monstrosity of a building that might have been mistaken for an enormous warehouse or distribution facility, except for the twelve-foot fence topped with razor wire.

Alex walked up to the front entrance, surprised by how quiet it was. She could hear the wind brushing through the leaves and birds chirping in the distance. She walked through the open doors and was stopped by a turnstile with interlocking steel teeth that reached from floor to ceiling.

“Name and business?” said a woman through a small grating set into a piece of glass.

“Sandra Kelley, to visit Jean Massey.”

She passed her ID through a drawer. The woman studied it and her face carefully, and then pressed a button. The turnstile buzzed. Alex walked through, feeling an odd sense of entering a place from which few returned easily. A female guard met her on the other side and frisked her thoroughly. She indicated a bench. “You'll have to wait here while I call a block warden.”

Alex sat, taking deep breaths to calm her nerves. As Sandra, she had every right to be here. At the first hint of any trouble, she could teleport away. The guard ignored her. Alex regarded her: middle-aged, Hispanic, a solid strength and no-nonsense expression. She wondered what sorts of things the guard had seen and how it felt to come to work at such a place every day.

Ten minutes later, a light-skinned woman with African features and short-cropped hair bustled into the room and smiled at Alex. “You must be my visitor.”

Alex cocked her head. “Warden?”

“That's what they tell me, hon. You can call me Aisha. You ready?”

“I guess so.” Alex stood up.

“It's a bit of a walk, I'm afraid. The Charlies don't get many visitors. Follow me.”

Alex followed her through a locked set of double doors, which the warden opened with a key card. A sharp smell hit her, institutional and antiseptic. “Charlies?” she asked.

The warden pointed. “A-block is that way, the Alphas; they're in minimum. The Bravos are in B-block. Our maximum security ladies, they're in C-block. Our Charlies.”

She navigated through a bewildering maze of corridors, through multiple gates and checkpoints, some of them electronic, and some of them with human guards. Alex noticed that the warden didn't carry any weapons, but the guards, sitting in glass-enclosed booths, were holding automatic rifles in clear view. Alex assumed that the people who actually came in contact with prisoners were unarmed to avoid the possibility that a prisoner might take the weapon and use it against them, while the glassed-in guards, protected from easy assault, could fire on prisoners through the glass if needed. It was a simple, low-tech solution to the problem of arming guards without tempting prisoners.

They passed above an open mess hall, crossing on a balcony. Below them, rows of women in rust-colored jumpsuits ate at tables, served by other women in the same clothes. On seeing the warden, several called up to her with various complaints. “Hush now, ladies,” she called down to them without breaking stride. Alex followed, careful not to meet anyone's eye.

“I apologize for this,” the warden said. “They didn't think things through when they built the guest area for C-block. As I said, we don't get many. The first year, sure, but when someone's on the mile, or put away for life, it doesn't take long for family and friends to write them off. What's the point of visiting someone who's never going to get out anyway? They think they will, and they promise to, but after a few months, maybe a year, they start to move on. Are you related to Jeannie?”

“She was a friend of my father's.” Alex heard screaming, faintly, through one of the doors.

“Will you accept my signal?” the warden asked.

A ping told Alex of an incoming feed to her system. “Um, sure,” she said.

“Then here we are,” the warden said.

She unlocked a side door with her keycard. They entered what looked like a small conference room, with a central wooden table and several chairs. To Alex's surprise, Jean Massey was already sitting in one of the chairs. She was dressed in one of the same rust-colored jumpsuits as the women in the mess hall, with a large D.O.C printed on it in white. She wore no handcuffs.

The warden squinted at Alex. “Can you see her?”

“Of course.”

“Good. You must have a modern kit; sometimes we have to adjust for older models, or lend people one of our own.”

Her response confused Alex momentarily, until she realized:
Jean isn't really here
. The room was configured to project Jean's image to her eyejack display, creating the illusion of a face-to-face meeting without actually putting people together. Jean was probably sitting in a similar room somewhere else in the prison, seeing Alex the same way.

It made sense. Without true physical contact, there was no fear of an inmate attacking a guest, or vice versa, nor any concern that a guest would try to smuggle contraband in to a family member. It did, however, put a wrinkle in Alex's plans to teleport Jean away. She had to touch her to do it, and she didn't even know where in the prison Jean was. Alex almost gave up and walked away right then, but she had come this far. She could at least talk to the woman. She pulled back a chair and sat down.

Fifteen years earlier, Jean Massey had been an amazing young woman. In her thirties, she had been a recognized expert in her field, published in top journals, and employed at the New Jersey Super Collider, the largest scientific instrument in the world. Together with her boss, Dr. Vanderhall, she had pioneered dramatic new processes and made discoveries that could have revolutionized human experience. She had been, in short, everything that Alex herself now aspired to be. That is, until she had killed Dr. Vanderhall and tried to kill her own daughter.

Jean had a daughter named Chance, who had Down Syndrome. Thanks to a twist of fate, the random dice roll of a pair of genes, Chance would never reach the heights of her mother's brilliance and achievement. But who was Chance Massey, exactly? Was the Down Syndrome her identity? Jean hadn't thought so. She had tried to use the Higgs projector to change the past, to alter the fall of the dice, and resolve her unborn daughter's probability wave as a healthy, able child. She didn't see it as murder, but as choosing a new life for her daughter. Alex and her father had seen it as the destruction of one person in order to create a different one.

It was confusing to Alex. How did morality work, when nonlinear time came into play? A birth was just the accident of a particular sperm implanting in an egg at a particular place and time, causing a particular set of genes to come together. At the time, it wouldn't have been immoral to avoid that genetic combination, if the power existed to do so, or to choose not to allow that sperm and egg to combine at all. There was no human being created yet, and so no one to harm. But later, when the child was almost a year old, it seemed like murder to go back in time and make a different choice.

But what about the other version of Chance, the one that had never been given an opportunity to live? For that matter, what about the thousands of other possible Chances, the alternate combinations of genes that would have yielded different people? Why were they any less valid than the one who lived? Alex supposed that, morally speaking, there had to be a distinction between choosing not to create a life and killing one that already existed. But it wasn't always so simple. What if Alex were to send a particle back in time to affect her own life? To, say, change a choice she had made yesterday? That would make her a different person, of sorts. Would that be the same as killing herself in favor of someone else?