Supersymmetry (23 page)

Sandra threw up her hands. “Of course it would matter. If it never happened, it's like a big cosmic joke.”

“But what's the difference, practically? The history is still there. It's still consistent, following the same predicable laws. You can still study it and learn things that are true. And as far as we're concerned, that history is gone. Vanished in smoke. All that really matters is what we can learn from what we have now. What it left behind.”

“I don't understand what you're trying to tell me.”

“What does it mean for history to be ‘real'? What about last Tuesday? Was that real?”

“Of course.”

“How do you know?”

“I was there. I remember it.”

“But your memories are just a set of electrical impulses and neuron states. What if an AI just dreamed you up five minutes ago? It could have made you complete with your memories of your life, paperwork and souvenirs from your childhood, dental history, etc., every bit of it consistent. But not real.”

“You're a creepy little man.”

“But if he did, you wouldn't know the difference. It wouldn't make any practical change in your life going forward. The history of last Tuesday is exactly the same whether it ‘really' happened, or God just created it that way. Unless you're a varcolac, it's only the present and the future that you can do anything about.”

Whatever he was trying to do, it wasn't making her feel any better. She crossed her arms. “So what's the point? Where are we going with this?”

“The point is you. You're so tangled up in knots about whose history is real, yours or Alex's. You figure one of you must have ‘really' experienced the events of your childhood, and the other is just a fake, a carbon copy created fifteen years ago with the same memories, but who was never actually there to experience them. You're each terrified that you're the imposter, and afraid that the other one knows it. But it's a false fear. Your memories are both genuine.”

Sandra paused, taken aback by the sudden twist of subject. “You can't be certain of that.”

“Certain? There's nothing certain in life, not any of it. But why agonize over something you can't change? If you popped into being five minutes ago, or fifteen years ago, or have always existed, it doesn't change
now
. You're here. You're real. Embrace the person you were, and make sure you have reason to like the person you're becoming. The past you can't change. The future is what matters.”

Three hours later, Angel had twelve quadcopters up and spinning in the cage. “Let's see how this works,” he said. “I've created a few unit test scenarios to prove out the mechanics.”

The copters spun up as a unit, and then suddenly disappeared together and reappeared on the other side of the cage.

“Wow!” Sandra said. “You did it!”

“So far so good,” Angel said. “We haven't put them through their paces yet.”

Each of the copters held a different colored flag, to differentiate them by sight. They hovered in a line in order of the visible spectrum, red to blue. Then, suddenly, the colors changed as if with the flick of a switch, following the same order from blue to red. Sandra watched in confusion as the flags changed colors again, each of them rippling through from red to orange to green to blue. But the flags were just cheap plastic, nothing special. How was Angel making them change colors?

It took her a moment to realize what was happening. Each copter was simultaneously leaving its own position and instantaneously taking the position of the next copter in line. The copters themselves seemed not to move, making it appear as if the flags were changing colors.

Sandra whistled. “I hope you got the timing right. They'll destroy themselves if two of them appear in the same spot at the same time.”

The copters began flying through the cage as a unit, veering and banking in tight formation, but all the while the flags were changing colors, indicating that the copters were actually trading places as they flew. Angel grinned. “I hope so, too.”

“How could you do all this in only a few hours?” Sandra asked, amazed.

“It's really not hard from a software perspective. The copters model the rules of their universe and use the model to know, ahead of time, exactly what will happen when they maneuver in certain directions. All I've done is add a rule—the ability to change vector position to a new one, instantaneously. Most of the programming was already in place.” The quadcopters began bouncing balls back and forth to each other, continuing to rotate positions seamlessly. “It makes very little difference to the software which of the copters is in a given place, or that the rules of the actual universe don't usually allow such movements. Now, watch this.”

One of the copters began to perform radical high-speed turns, racing forward and then suddenly flying to the left as if defying its own momentum. It did it again, this time completely reversing direction as if it had struck an invisible wall, without slowing down or showing any discernable jerk.

“How are they doing that?” Sandra said.

“They're teleporting to their own location, only with a frame of reference rotated by 90 or 180 degrees. Momentum is preserved, so from their perspective, it's as if the whole universe rotated to the right, and they kept traveling forward as usual. They can do it in any direction, with any orientation, making them more or less infinitely maneuverable, without the usual limitations of momentum and centrifugal force. It means, in essence, that they can turn without turning. They move the universe instead of moving themselves.”

“It's amazing.”

Angel shook his head. “But it's not going to work.”

“What do you mean? It works perfectly.”

“They do some neat tricks, I'll give you that. But we need to break your sister out of a maximum security prison block. We don't know where they're holding her, and once we find them, the copters themselves can't teleport her out. They can only move things with a smaller mass than themselves. Even working together, a human being is far too massive. Worse, we can't communicate with them from the outside. Unless we go into the prison ourselves, they would have to be completely autonomous, with a flexible plan that could anticipate any eventuality. I don't know about you, but I don't think I'm that good, especially not in one night. The copters are a tool, but not a miracle. We still need a plan.”

Sandra considered this. “We need a relay.”

Angel raised a questioning eyebrow.

“The place is shielded, and we can't trust the copters to act entirely on their own. So we use them as waypoints. The copters search the prison, and then we can teleport to the location of any one of them.”

“But they won't be able to signal out to us.”

“That's why at least one needs to be left near the entrance. As a conduit to the outside.”

Angel nodded. “That could work. But there's one more thing.”

“What's that?”

“The varcolac is still out there, planning to attack. For all we know, it could be the same kind of attack that destroyed the stadium. Complete devastation.”

“That's why we have to be fast. We need to be able to teleport her out before that happens.”

“But what about everyone else in the prison? The other prisoners, the guards? They'll all die.”

Sandra raised her hands helplessly. “We can't rescue all of them. Maybe if we get Alex out of there, it won't attack the prison at all.”

Angel sucked on a lip, thinking. “I think we need to be prepared to fight it.”

“Prepared? You haven't seen this thing. There's no being prepared.”

“As much as we can.”

“There's maybe one thing,” Sandra said. “It'll add to the confusion at any rate, and that could be a good thing.”

“What are you thinking?”

“We need to call the Muncy State Prison ahead of time,” she said, “And tell them we've planted a bomb.”

By nightfall, running on almost thirty-six hours without sleep, Ryan had his equation. This new pattern would give them another week, or a few days at minimum, to judge by the time it had taken the varcolac to solve the patterns in the past. In that time, he could develop a suite of backup equations to have in reserve. There might be no hope for the world, but at least he could delay Armageddon for as long as possible.

He loaded the new equation into the wormhole pattern regulator and sat back to watch the new configuration form in his photoionization display. He was so tired. His eyes stung, and his muscles ached, and he felt jittery from all the caffeine he'd drunk. This had to work. It
had
to.

But the moment the pattern started to form, it flew apart like dandelion seeds in the wind. The full dataset hadn't even finished loading before it unraveled.

Dismayed, Ryan paged through the logs, trying to understand. Had he loaded an old pattern by mistake? But no. Not only had the varcolac cut through his new equation like a scalpel through dry skin, it had started to do so
before he had even fully loaded it
. It was impossible.

But it had happened, so of course it was possible. It meant that the varcolac had known what equation he was going to use before he had even set it in place. It wasn't just out-thinking him. It was living inside his mind.

And suddenly, it was there. The moment he realized that it must be, Ryan could sense its presence. In fact, now that he thought of it, the new equation he had just devised was beyond even his capability. He was thinking on a higher level than ever before, picturing higher-dimensional shapes in his mind like no human could. It was communicating with him, but not through words or pictures or codes. It had infiltrated his own sense of self.

Chills went down his spine. He didn't feel tired anymore. There was something inside him, something he couldn't get out. Normally, Ryan hated the idea of anything foreign inside his body. He found body piercing disturbing, and he hated getting splinters. The idea of having pins in a broken bone or undergoing something like cardiac catheterization was intolerable. But this was different. The varcolac wasn't physical. It wasn't in his body, not in the same way. There had been theories for years that the human brain was too capable for the space it inhabited, that its processing capacity might in fact reach through electrical fields into other dimensions. It was in this domain—in Ryan's mind—that the varcolac was interacting.

How long had it been there? He remembered the duplicate Ryan, the one that had pushed the button releasing the varcolac when he, Ryan, had not intended to. He recognized that now for what it had been: a standing probability wave, quickly resolved, in which both possibilities occurred. The sort of probability wave that had previously been experienced only when encountering the varcolac. It seemed circular: encountering the varcolac had caused him to split into versions of himself that both did not and did release the varcolac, the second of which caused him to encounter the varcolac, which caused the split in the first place. But that was exactly the sort of behavior that occurred among particles on the quantum scale.

Regardless of the cause, the varcolac was there in his mind. It was subtly influencing him, reading his thoughts, increasing his capabilities. It was like taking off a veil to see that the world was a lot brighter and clearer than he had realized. Only it wasn't his eyes that had been veiled, but his mind. He could imagine anything, solve anything, keep any amount of information at the front of his consciousness. It was taking him over in ways he didn't understand, making him into something newer and better and more powerful. And he loved it.

CHAPTER 20

S
andra and Angel stood on a hillside behind the prison, the quadcopters hovering over their heads like a swarm of large, well-trained insects. It was not yet light. Sandra had hardly slept, but she felt wired, partly from the coffee she'd been drinking, and partly from sheer terror.