Supersymmetry (22 page)

“You'll do better than that, and do it quick, or there will be more deaths on your head.”

“I'll try, all right?” He sounded affronted. “I'm not powerless. I still have some tricks up my sleeve.”

“If that's true, then how did it escape? I thought you had them set to apply automatically.”

“Well, I may have accidentally . . . look, never mind.”

“Accidentally what? Accidentally let the varcolac loose?”

“Never mind. I'm sorry I called. I'll fix it.”

“Where is it now? Can you at least tell me that?”

The line went silent for so long that Sandra thought he had disconnected. “Well,” he said finally, “I can tell you what its next target will be.”

“What, it sat down and shared its plans with you over coffee?”

“I can see it in the logs, just like I did with the funeral home. Its attacks leave residue both forward and backward in time.”

Sandra didn't care about the science. “Where?”

“Tomorrow morning, 5:46 AM, at the Muncy State Prison.”

“You're kidding me.”

“No. Why, what's there?”

For a moment, Sandra couldn't speak. She suddenly knew, beyond all shadow of a doubt, that Alex was still being held in that prison, and that at 5:46 the next morning, she would still be there. Why else would the varcolac attack at that place and time?

“You bastard,” Sandra said, and cut the connection. She lashed out, knocking a picture frame and a clay dish onto the floor.

How did the varcolac know where Alex would be? She felt like she was playing a deadly game against an opponent who kept changing the rules. Was it attacking from the present or from the future? One thing seemed clear: it was trying to track down and destroy her family. Sandra had originally assumed that the attack on Alex at her demo hadn't been personal, just an opportunity created by the use of Higgs technology, in which Alex's presence had been entirely coincidental. But since then, its attacks had been purely against her family, as far as she could tell. What did it have against them? Was it afraid that the people who had banished it fifteen years ago could do so again? If so, she thought it had overestimated them.

Alex was captured, her eyejack taken away. Sandra didn't realize how much she had been relying on Alex, both intellectually and emotionally, until she was gone. She beat her fists against the bed and buried her head in her pillow, repressed tears lodging painfully in her throat. What chance did they have against such an enemy? They couldn't kill it, and they couldn't reason with it. Now Alex was trapped, an easy target for its next attack.

The tears broke free, and she sobbed silently into her pillow. Her phone chimed again. She growled, expecting it to be Ryan again with some inane comment. But it wasn't. It was Angel Gutierrez.

“I saw the news,” he said. “I thought you might need someone to talk to?”

Ryan tried to shake away the sense of guilt he felt after talking with Sandra. It was why he didn't like people very much. They were always finding ways to make him feel bad. Why should Sandra shout at him? It wasn't like he'd
wanted
those people dead. He hadn't killed them himself. He was trying to stop the varcolac, too. They were on the same side.

The best thing he could do now, he thought, was to put Alex and Sandra out of his mind. Either the varcolac would kill them or it wouldn't. There wasn't much he could do about it. The only thing he could do was try to capture it in the wormhole again, however long that took. He didn't want them to die, but it wasn't his problem. The most important thing was to get the varcolac back under lock and key.

Which wouldn't be easy. The equations Ryan had created previously were compromised. If the varcolac had been in his mind, then it would already know the solutions. That was the only explanation Ryan could think of to account for how it had been able to unravel the Riemann function pattern so fast. If it had truly solved it from scratch, then it had just been playing with him all this time, and it could escape whenever it wished. He didn't think that was true. Which meant he had to devise a new equation, a tough one, and hope it would hold the creature better than the last.

Ryan considered a Maass wave form approach, but discarded it. He had used non-holomorphic L-functions in a previous pattern, and the varcolac would be ready for it. He needed something that would last. Perhaps a Navier-Stokes equation instead. That would take a little extra work on his part, but it would be worth it in the long run. No sense formulating something fragile and having it unravel again.

He took a pencil and paper and started crafting the general shape of the equations he wanted. He had several software suites designed for higher mathematics and visualization, of course, but when he was inventing something new, he always liked to start on pencil and paper. It gave him a freedom of expression that someone else's software package didn't allow.

Of course, it was all just a stopgap. No matter how brilliant the problem he set, the varcolac would defeat it sooner or later. Could he really just continue to devise new equations indefinitely? Eventually—and quicker than Ryan liked to admit—he would be out of ideas, and there would be nothing to stop it from running loose, killing and destroying whatever it wished, remaking the world into whatever form it thought appropriate.

Fifteen years ago, as Alex had described it, they had defeated the varcolac by removing its source of exotic particle energy. This had been as simple as shutting down the super collider, leaving the creature with no hold on the physical world. But that was impossible here. Ryan had formed his baby universe out of the quantum froth of the multiverse. Now that it was created, there was no way to destroy it, or even to destroy the wormhole connecting it to their universe. Ryan had tried. The new universe's space-time was hurtling outward in its frame of reference like a trillion joule freight train, and there was no stopping it. The varcolac had a practically infinite supply of energy to draw from.

Ryan might contain it for a while, but eventually, it would break free for good. It was inevitable. His prior hopes that it might communicate with him seemed silly now. How could he communicate with something so alien? It reminded him of a term he remembered from the books he had read in his childhood:
varelse
. An intelligence that was
varelse
was so utterly different than humanity in kind and experience that there was no hope ever to communicate with it. The varcolac wasn't biological. It didn't even exist along the same dimensional plane. How could it understand the concept of human life and death? Of the individual? Of the limits of physical reality? Ryan wasn't even sure it could be called alive, in any measurable sense of the word.

If there was no hope of killing it, and no hope of reasoning with it, then there was no hope at all. Ryan had to admit the truth. He had signed the death warrants of all nine billion inhabitants of planet Earth. He was the most brilliant scientist of his generation, and he had destroyed the world.

“Of course I'll help,” Angel said. “What kind of friend would I be if I turned you away in your hour of need?”

“But it's illegal and dangerous,” Sandra said. She sat next to him on a lopsided and worn couch in his quadcopter lab. In the mesh cage, a dozen copters flew through some kind of automated test scenario. “I'm talking about breaking into a maximum security prison on high alert to rescue a criminal wanted for the murder of a high-ranking government official. Not to mention that the varcolac may be trying to kill us at the same time.”

“Heck of a first date,” Angel said.

She smiled despite herself. “Look, I'm just saying, we only met a few days ago. You don't have to help me. I totally understand.”

“You're really going for the hard sell, aren't you? I mean it. I'll help. This is your sister's life in danger, right? And maybe the fate of the human race. How could I pass it up?”

She let out a breath. “Thank you. So. How hard is it to reprogram your quadcopters?”

They worked side-by-side for hours, fueled by mushroom-and-green-pepper pizza and Diet Coke. Computer science wasn't Sandra's field, but she had done enough programming in her teenage years that she wasn't completely useless. Angel, however, was fast and brilliant, incorporating unfamiliar code with astonishing facility. All the while, he chattered inanely about everything and nothing, bleeding away Sandra's stress and worry.

Eventually, Sandra gave up trying to help, and went hunting on the web for information they could use. Within a few minutes, she had the blueprints for the Muncy State Prison, along with a description of its security features.

Angel was surprised. “They actually publish that stuff online?”

“Not exactly. I mean, the prison doesn't post it on their website or anything. But it's not classified under the Espionage Act or anything, either. Any time a construction company does work, there's going to be records of it publicly available, if you know where to look and how to get it.”

Angel glanced over the information. “Your sister should have done this research before she went. The whole place is shielded. She probably couldn't teleport out, once she was in.”

“I didn't think of it either,” Sandra said. “We just felt so invincible, with that ability—it seemed like no one would be able to capture her. Even now, they won't be able to keep her. If I had the time to wait for her to go on trial, or even just to be transferred, I could teleport in and steal her away before they even knew I was there. As it is, the varcolac may kill her before I get the chance.” She took a deep breath and let it out. “Why can't people leave well enough alone? If Vanderhall and Jean Massey hadn't gone messing with Higgs particles fifteen years ago, then none of this would ever have happened.”

“But then you never would have existed. At least not as you are now. You and your sister's lives would never have diverged, and you would be living some compromise life somewhere.”

“Maybe that would have been for the best.”

Angel studied her for a long moment. “Do you believe in God?” he said asked finally.

“What?” The question took Sandra by surprise. “No, I guess I don't.” Though she had noticed a cross on a chain around Angel's neck, just visible under his collar. “You do, I'm guessing?”

“I'd say about ninety percent,” Angel said. “But that's not the point. Let's say there is a God, for the sake of argument. Or a super-powerful alien intelligence. Or an artificial intelligence that just dreamed us up one day. Whatever you like.”

“I think you should keep programming.”

“I am programming.” And in truth, his fingers had never stopped moving across the keys while he talked. “Humor me, okay?”

Sandra didn't know where he was going, but he seemed earnest. “Okay. There's a God. So what?”

“Our deity, or alien, or whatever he is, created the world. But instead of doing it fourteen billion years ago, he did it twenty thousand years ago.”

“You're kidding me,” Sandra said. “We're talking about Young Earth Creationism here? The whole world, slapped together in six days by an Almighty Being? You're a scientist! For heaven's sake, there are galaxies out there that are billions of light years away. Just point a telescope at Andromeda, and you can look at something millions of years old.”

“You're missing the point.”

“I guess I am.”

“The universe is billions of years old,” Angel said. “I'm not suggesting otherwise. But let's imagine that our godlike being created the whole mess—billion-year history and all—ten thousand years ago.”

Sandra paused to work that one out. “So, then God's deceiving us? He created a fake fourteen-billion-year history? The dinosaurs and the Carboniferous period and the Andromeda galaxy, they never existed? It's all just a scam? ‘April Fools. Love, God.'”

“Right. Not very nice of him, maybe. But here's the question: would it matter?”