Superposition (21 page)

Back downstairs, we all met up again. “So where should we look?” I asked.

“Why don't we just take it in order?” Jean suggested.

We walked through the events of that day from Alessandra's perspective, choreographing her movements from the moment she picked up the letter from Brian. We moved from the living room into the kitchen. I remembered sitting there with Elena, watching Brian's gyroscope spin. Anything left in that room would already have been found by the police, but we looked anyway. The trashcan was empty. I traced my hand along the countertops and browsed halfheartedly through the cabinets. It was odd to see a variety of canned goods and boxed cereals and snacks there, as if the tenants were out for the day and would soon return.

“Where to now?” Jean asked.

“Outside,” Alessandra said. Something in her voice made me look back. Her teeth were clenched.

“You did the right thing,” I said. “You couldn't have done anything if you'd stayed.”

She relaxed slightly. “You can't know that,” she said.

“Actually, I can know it. Because the other version of you did stay and didn't do anything except give up the letter to the varcolac. Because you ran, we have a chance here.” I opened the back door and held it open for her. “Lead the way.”

Alessandra stepped out ahead of me, and Jean and I followed. We spread out across the backyard, searching the ground for signs of paper. There had still been snow on the ground that day, but the yard was dry and brown now. If the letter had been dropped out here, it would have blown away long ago.

We reached the fence. “You climbed over here?” I asked.

Alessandra nodded. I ran my eyes along the base of the fence. A stunted bush grew right against the chain link, and some vines twisted their way up. Under the bush, I saw a scrap of white. A piece of paper, dirt-encrusted and half-buried. I bent over and picked it up, shaking it to knock loose the dirt. My name was written on the front.

“This is it,” I said. It had been lying out here for weeks, however, soaked with rain and snow, and then drying out in the sun. “I'm not sure what's left of it.”

Back inside, at the kitchen table, the three of us crowded around it. In most cases, a piece of smartpaper could withstand a little water, but this had been exposed to the elements for months. I smoothed it out against the table, and then entered the password. The letter came up on the screen, still legible, although dark lines crisscrossed the paper along the fold lines, where the paper had been the most damaged. I entered the second password, and the programming circuits sprang into view.

I took some time familiarizing myself with them, with suggestions and questions from Jean. Alessandra, unfamiliar with coding principles, lost interest in the conversation and started raiding the cabinets for something to eat. I discovered that there were core, indecipherable modules that must represent the equations provided to Brian by the varcolacs. Built around those modules, however, was a great deal of code I could understand, presumably added by Brian to interact with and control the core modules.

Before long, I was starting to make sense of it. “Look, he's got a set of subroutines here to create particular effects,” I said. The subroutines had names like GroundStateSpin, MacroDiffraction, StrongNuclearForce, and Tunneling. There were different versions of each, and optional circuitry that was cut off from the system that provided still more variation. “He was experimenting,” I said. “Interacting with the modules in different ways, seeing what they could do.”

There was even a subroutine called TeleportExperimental, with an intriguing comment that read, “Do not use before solving destination bug!!!”

“There's a lot here,” I said. “It must have taken him months to write all this.”

I spotted some graphics modules, and realized that the code was designed to work with a pair of eyejack lenses. I went upstairs, rummaged in a drawer until I found the pair that had come with my phone, and brought them back down.

“Let me try it. I don't want you killing yourself,” Jean said.

“You're our star witness,” I said. “Besides, there's an extra one of me. I'll do it.”

“You have a daughter.”

I gave her a look. “So do you.”

Jean held up her hands, relenting, and I put the lenses in my eyes. They quickly recognized Brian's smartpaper as being in range and synched to it. I initiated the main program, and the now-familiar tugging sensation began in my chest, like a bass thrumming so deep I couldn't hear it. A basic menu appeared over my vision with the subroutine names. I scrolled through and selected GroundStateSpin, since I thought I could guess what that might accomplish.

Overlaid on my vision, a curved, double-headed arrow appeared. When I looked at an object in the room, the arrow would move over it and the object would highlight. I chose a tea kettle on the counter and blinked at it. It started spinning, just like the gyroscope, its spout whipping around and around like a boy on a merry-go-round.

It was incredible. I could move things with my
mind
. Jean and Alessandra stared at it, transfixed. I made the tea kettle stop, and started twirling the flour canister. Best of all, the energy for the spin was coming from the ground spin state of the particles. We could turn generators with this technology, maybe solve the world's energy problems.

What could the other subroutines do? I went back to the list and chose Tunneling. I still had the flour canister selected, and now, in my vision, a cone projected out from the center of the canister and into the room. I found I could rotate the cone around the canister and change its length. On the other side of the kitchen wall from where the flour canister stood was the living room, and I knew there was a small, decorative table standing against that wall. I aimed the cone directly through the wall and blinked.

The flour canister disappeared. At the same moment, there was a tremendous cracking sound like a gunshot. It was too loud just to be the canister shattering. I raced around into the living room, followed closely by Jean and Alessandra. The decorative table was smashed into splinters and covered in flour. Shards of table and porcelain were embedded in the wall.

Hastily, I quit the program and shoved the Higgs projector into my pocket. The thrumming sensation stopped.

“What were you trying to do?” Alessandra asked.

“I was trying to tunnel the canister through the wall and have it land on the table,” I said. “I think it appeared
in
the table instead, and the stress of all that matter suddenly appearing in the middle of already-existing matter tore the table apart.”

“It looks like we'll have to be more careful,” Jean said. She held out a hand. “May I give it a try?”

“Let's not try it again just yet,” I said. “I want to study the programming a little more, get a better understanding of what a module does before running it. I don't know how well Brian tested his software, either—I don't want to blow up a city block because he accidentally used English units in one place instead of metric.” I looked around the room where Elena had died. I felt tired. “I want to get out of here,” I said.

Driving back, Alessandra asked, “Why did the varcolac want to take that letter anyway? It can do all this magic stuff without it.”

I shrugged. “How could we know? This was an alien encounter, from both sides, neither of our species comprehending the other. The varcolacs originally provided the equations for the core modules to Brian, probably in good faith, but we don't know what that information meant to them. Maybe it was simply a kind of textbook, an explanation of who they are and how they're made. Regardless, when Brian put this together”—I gestured at the smartpaper—“it had some effect that they didn't like, and they wanted it back. Who knows what changes this has made in their world? It could be killing them, or causing some other disruption—we just don't know.”

“This is the creature that murdered Mom and Claire and Sean,” Alessandra said. “It's not just misunderstood. It's a killer.”

“I'm not sure if it means to be,” I said. “You could be right—it could be acting out of rage or simply enjoy killing; I don't know. But look how it took Marek apart and put him back together. Look how its body is so awkwardly assembled out of different parts. It's trying to understand us, and not getting very close. I doubt life and death even mean the same thing to it as they do to us. The idea that a being's total existence is enclosed by a piece of matter is probably incomprehensible to them.”

“So it was all, what, some kind of cosmic accident?” Alessandra asked, anger simmering in her tone.

“If anyone's to blame for this, it's Brian,” I said. “He thought he could trade with a radically different intelligence and come out ahead. He was greedy and stupid. The varcolac . . . we have no idea what motivates it. All we know is that it wanted to reclaim Brian's copies of this programming.”

“And it killed people to get it.”

“Yes,” I admitted. “It did.”

“Is that programming a threat to them? Could you use it to hurt the varcolac?” Alessandra asked.

I remembered Brian making the varcolac disintegrate, at least momentarily. “Maybe,” I said. “Brian said the varcolac gets its power from exotic particle leakage from the collider, such that when he used his circuitry to eliminate those particles, the varcolac lost its coherency. So I guess, if we learn enough about how to use the projector, perhaps it would be a threat.”

“Well then,” Jean said. “I guess we'd better learn.”

CHAPTER 24

DOWN-SPIN

“That was a train wreck,” I said. Terry had come again to visit me in the prison meeting room. He sat in one of the yellow chairs, looking tired. I paced the room. “Marek looked like he was lying, because half the time, he was.”

“It wasn't that bad,” Terry said.

“I was embarrassed to put him in that situation,” I said. “He's one of my only loyal friends, and I hate that he had to perjure himself on my account.”

“He told the truth where it counted,” Terry said. “He told the court that he saw Vanderhall alive. That's crucial for our case, and it was important for the jury to hear him say it.”

I let out a sigh and threw myself down in a chair. “It's only important because we're trying to prove that Brian killed himself. Which I don't believe for a minute. The Brian I saw in the woods didn't know that another version of him was lying dead in the bunker.”

“He wouldn't necessarily tell you . . .”

“No. He didn't know. I'm sure of it.”

“It's not that important,” Terry said.

I raised an eyebrow. “The truth isn't important?”

“Look,” Terry said, running a hand through his hair. “I've been a defense attorney most of my career. People hate me. They think I don't care about truth, that I just try to set criminals free because the money is good. They don't understand when I say that the truth is irrelevant to my work, just like it's irrelevant to the prosecutor's work. My job is to present all the evidence and arguments that may demonstrate your innocence. The prosecutor's job is to present all the evidence and arguments that may demonstrate your guilt. The judge makes sure we play fair, according to the rules. But ultimately, it's the
jury
who decides what really happened.

“It doesn't matter to me, as far as my job is concerned, whether you killed Vanderhall or not. It also doesn't matter to me if he killed himself. But the fact that there's another explanation that fits the facts; that
is
important. Maybe you killed him. Maybe somebody else did it. The point is, there's more than one workable explanation, and that means the case against you isn't proven. It doesn't mean you're innocent, but it does mean that, under our law, you can't be convicted.”

I thought about it. “I see your point. It still seems wrong to try to convince the jury of something we know isn't true.”

“I'm trying to get you out of jail,” Terry said, exasperated. “I'll use every trick I can.”

“Why don't you use my double as the scapegoat?” I asked. “Show him to the jury, take his fingerprints, show that the physical evidence that matches me could match him just as well.”

“It won't work,” Terry said.

“Why not?”

“For one thing, you're the same person. If I understand all this, you're just momentarily following different paths. You're not twins. He's you.”

“But what if he killed someone, and I didn't? Should I be held responsible?”

“For another thing,” Terry said, “you're going to resolve again, right? Eventually? What then?”

“We should at least bring him out,” I said. “Let everyone see that there really are two of me. It would make Jean and Marek's testimony much more believable.”

“We'll bring him out. Trust me on this,” Terry said. “Testimony is like a fireworks display. You can't use up all your explosions at the beginning. You have to orchestrate it, slowly gain momentum until all your points come together at the end, in a huge finish. You have to save your biggest surprises for the end. It gives the other side the least opportunity to knock your argument down or distract the jury. We'll put your double on the stand, but not until the last minute. You'll go first, to tell your story, and we'll give Haviland all the rope in the world to hang himself. Then, we bring out your double. The proof that it's all really possible.”

“As long as my probability wave doesn't resolve before then.”

Terry yawned hugely. “True enough,” he said. “If that happens, there's nothing I can do.”

CHAPTER 25

UP-SPIN

“Court is now in session for the People versus Jacob Kelley, the honorable Ann Roswell presiding,” the court officer bellowed.