Supersymmetry (16 page)

He sent the copters back to their case, and opened a new case. A new set of six copters flew out. “These are from the set I used at the stadium,” he said. They hovered on one side of the too-small window, the same as the others had. This time, however, when Angel gave the command, all six copters dove, following each other in tight sequence. When each one reached the window, it
turned
, a rapid twisting motion like the first set had done, and reemerged on the other side.

It was less impressive than it might have been, considering all that Sandra had seen in the last twenty-four hours, but it was still dramatic. The opening was no bigger than her fist; there was no room for the copters to pass through it.

“They turned into another dimension,” she said. She had seen the varcolac do essentially the same thing, and given Ryan's explanation on the mountain, she felt confident in assuming that a few of his extra curled-up dimensions were involved.

“Is this normal for you?” Angel asked. “Flitting in and out of other dimensions like taking a cab?”

Sandra smiled. “Not exactly. But I guess I've had an interesting life.”

“How did this happen? This is the same hardware and the same software I've been working with for years. They clearly picked up this ability at the stadium site, but I don't see how that's possible. Even if your varcolac used some weird quantum magic to destroy the stadium in the first place, my copters weren't even there at the time.”

Sandra thought about it. “It must be in the data.”

“You mean the RFID data? That doesn't make sense.”

“There aren't too many options. I'm going to go out on a limb and assume your copters aren't smart enough to learn a new behavior of this magnitude. So, either there was some magic quantum pixie dust at the scene that stuck to their rotors, or there was something in the data they picked up at the scene that altered their operations.”

Angel returned the copters to their case. Their engines quieted, making the empty room ring with the sudden silence. “I'm going to vote for the pixie dust. We're not talking about altering their behavior to fly in figure eights. We're talking about behavior that should be impossible. I don't care what software or data you load into their onboard computers; you won't be able to make them do
that
.”

“I'm not so sure.” Sandra said. Her throat was dry. “Do you have anything to drink?”

“Sure.” They exited the cage, and Angel led the way to a mini-fridge on a cluttered tabletop. “Coke okay?”

“Perfect.” Sandra popped the tab and took a long swallow of cold sweetness. She sighed and wiped her mouth. “The only thing I can think is that your copters are somehow accessing a Higgs projector, the same as the software in my eyejacks.”

“How does that work?”

“There's a wormhole in the High Energy Lab in New Jersey that's connected to a bubble universe. Somehow, Ryan Oronzi has figured out how to tap the power from it to affect the Higgs field in our universe, allowing quantum effects in the macro world. I have a copy of Oronzi's software modules from my sister that accesses that projector, allowing me to create certain quantum and probabilistic effects.” She accessed a method from her eyejack display, and let go of the can of Coke. It hovered there, untouched, until she grasped it again.

“That's really freaky,” Angel said.

“The point is, it's the Higgs projector that's causing the effect, not the software. I don't know how far its reach is. Considering it's another universe, though, the distance may not matter.”

Angel shook his head. “It doesn't make any sense. Even if someone stored such a method on a chip, it would have to be written as a self-executing virus, and the virus would have to know how to plug in to the specific maneuver interfaces in my software. In this
version
of my software. And the only way that could happen is if I did it myself.”

Sandra grinned. “Is there something you're not telling yourself?”

Angel rolled his eyes. “I'm not that crazy.”

“I don't know what to tell you,” Sandra said. “Maybe my sister or Dr. Oronzi would have a better idea.”

“I'm sticking with the magic pixie dust theory, until you can prove it wrong.”

CHAPTER 15

R
yan was ready for the drop when he and Alex materialized on the top floor of the High Energy Lab. Alex wasn't. She yelped and nearly fell over as they dropped six inches to the floor.

He laughed, and she glared at him. “What was that? We just teleported in here yesterday, and we didn't fall then. I thought you had a pretty good lock on this place.”

“There's some error drift with the distance you travel,” Ryan said. “Yesterday we teleported from the parking lot.”

“Error drift? So we could have ended up two inches under the floor instead of over it?”

Ryan found his favorite chair—a tattered recliner they had lugged up here at his request, and sat down. “Nope. The drift is always up. The module uses a tangent plane to shortcut some of the math.”

“So if I had tried to teleport to California . . . ?”

Ryan shook his head. “Disaster.”

Alex's face soured. “That's a bit dangerous, isn't it? Shouldn't you adjust for the curvature of the Earth?”

“I did. That's why we came in so close.”

“I mean adjust in the software, not in your head. I thought everything you designed was supposed to be oh-so-safe.”

“Not safe for you. Safe for me.” That was the whole point, after all. He had written the software, so he knew exactly what it would do and how far to trust it. If he hadn't written it, he wouldn't be using it at all.

Alex stared at the glowing universe in its laser-light display. She muttered something under her breath. He caught the word “hubris.”

He didn't bother asking her to repeat herself. Sooner or later, everyone he got to know started treating him like he was either stupid or crazy. He liked to think it was because his intelligence was so much greater than theirs. He should call it Oronzi's Law:
Any sufficiently-advanced intelligence will be indistinguishable from insanity.
But he knew that wasn't all there was to it. The truth was, he didn't like other people very much, and they could probably tell.

“So, you don't think I should teleport, because I didn't personally write the code,” Alex said.

“I didn't say that. I just said that I wouldn't, if I were in your place.”

“What kind of world would that be, if nobody trusted anything they didn't make themselves? No one could build on anyone else's work. No one could even ride in the same car together. It would be ridiculous.”

“You're hardly the first person to call me that.”

She looked at him with an odd expression, making Ryan think he had probably let a little too much of his bitterness leak into his tone of voice. To cover his embarrassment, he took a tablet from a nearby desk and started manipulating it. “Take a look,” he said.

He sent a link to her viewfeed, which she accepted. Their shared vision was overlaid with stacks of log data organized in a traditional filesystem display, like a rotating carousel of file folders.

“Did you write your own operating system, too?” she asked.

Ryan ignored her. Of course he hadn't, but then, an operating system wasn't likely to kill him, either. He cycled through the files until he found what he was looking for. “Here's the log data from the morning of the demo. I'm going to graph the Higgs particle count over time.” A graph appeared in the air, showing a high quantity of Higgs activity, peaking suddenly from 11:08 to 11:14. The rest was empty except for a little random noise near the bottom, like a sandy beach with a mountain peak suddenly jutting out of it. “This matches the time that the varcolac was loose. Just as we would expect.”

“What about the previous night?”

Ryan found the appropriate log and updated the graph. The peak disappeared, leaving a nearly empty graph.

“No activity at all?” Alex asked.

“Just background radiation. Nothing out of the ordinary,” Ryan said. “But look at this.”

Ryan stabbed the tablet, and the graph changed. He filtered out the peak from the morning of the demo, and graphed just the background radiation over the whole time interval, between the stadium explosion and the demo the next morning. He zoomed in on the bottom of the graph, taking a closer look at what had previously appeared to be random. From this perspective, there were two clearly-defined spikes. One was at 11:14 in the morning, in the last moment before the varcolac disappeared. The other was at 9:35 the night before, when the stadium had imploded.

Alex whistled. “I see it. That's consistent with a singlet sent back in time from the demo on Monday morning to the stadium the previous night. You were right.” She cast a fearful look at the spinning universe display. “Are you sure that thing's still contained?”

“Of course I'm not. I've been telling Babington for weeks that I can't keep it contained indefinitely.”

The reminder turned Ryan's attention back to the tablet with a sudden stab of fear. He had been checking on it frequently, at least once an hour, but it didn't make him feel safe. He had updated his alarms to detect the kind of subtle strategy the varcolac had used to escape last time, but it was clever. What if it had breached the barrier so subtly that it had escaped without him even knowing it?

He reviewed the latest logs. Everything seemed to be in order. His protocols were still in place, with no indication that any of the values he was measuring from the wormhole had so much as hiccupped. It didn't make him relax, exactly, but there was no immediate reason for alarm.

“It's still contained,” he said. “For now.”

“Can I see?” Alex asked.

Ryan regarded her, suspicious. She was asking to see the foundation of all his research; the equations and concepts behind his control over the baby universe. How well did he know her, really? She didn't have clearance even to be in this room, never mind to look at the technical basis of his work.

“Why do you want to see it?” he asked.

She raised an eyebrow slightly. “I just want to understand what we're dealing with. I want to help, and the more I know, the better I can help.”

It occurred to Ryan just how young and pretty she was. He had never much liked pretty women; he always felt like they were laughing at him behind his back. She was manipulating him, trying to make him give up his data. “It's classified,” he said.

She took a step back and gave him a sideways look, the one people gave him when they thought he was acting crazy. “You brought me in here.”

He shook his head to clear it. What was wrong with him? “You're right,” he said. “I'm sorry. I'm just not used to working too closely with other people.”

“You run a lab full of people.”

“Well . . . when it comes down to it, Nicole runs the lab. I like to concentrate on the math. I get my best work done here at night, when no one else is around.”

“I have to go now,” Alex said. Her pretty face showed confusion and pity rather than anger. He hated her for that.

“Okay,” he said.

“I'll see you tomorrow.” She disappeared.

Ryan collapsed back on his chair and held his head in his hands. What was wrong with him? Alex wasn't trying to steal anything from him. He had followed her in his car and practically insisted she come with him. It wasn't her fault the varcolac had broken out while she was on stage. Or was it? Could she have planned it that way, so as to kill Secretary Falk?

Ridiculous. He shoved his fists into his eyes and rubbed them. He wasn't thinking clearly. He wasn't getting enough sleep. To distract himself, he brought up the logs again. They were quiet; barely any movement in the measured values at all. Had the varcolac given up? That didn't seem likely.

Ryan tried to put himself into the varcolac's perspective. What did it want? Why was it trying to break into their world? Just to kill people? Or was it trying to learn something? He knew the varcolac was intelligent, incredibly so. He knew now that it had been manipulating him even as he kept it contained, influencing him through the equations it solved for him. But had it really been manipulating him, or simply communicating to him? What if it had recognized him as the one human truly capable of communicating at its level of intelligence?

His mind returned again to his childhood dream, that he was in fact the progeny of a superior alien race, planted here in this human body. He had always known it was a ludicrous fantasy, but it seemed to explain so much—not just his intelligence, which was so far beyond anyone else's, but also how awkward and isolated he felt, and how incomprehensible human social interaction so often seemed. Only in lecture mode, when he was explaining his ideas to others, did he feel remotely comfortable.

But what if it wasn't so ludicrous? What if Ryan's mind was in fact not a human mind, but a varcolac's? He had never belonged with the people surrounding him; he was something different, something greater. Maybe he was destined for something far beyond the simple fame of a smarter-than-average scientist.

The varcolac wasn't evil, after all. It was just intelligent. Now that he thought about it, it had been the Secret Service agents that had attacked first, not the varcolac. It had only defended itself. When Alex started firing, it fought back, but it wasn't the aggressor. It had just been trying to communicate. Though there was the baseball stadium. If the varcolac really had destroyed that, as seemed to be the case, it could hardly be considered self-defense.

He returned to the logs surrounding the time of the stadium explosion, scrutinizing the data for anything he had previously missed, looking for some indication that it had been an attempt by the varcolac to communicate. How would a quantum creature know what destruction it had caused from a human perspective? Did it understand the concept of human life and death?