Supersymmetry (33 page)

Jean's smile never wavered. “Humanity took my years away,” she said. “Now I am taking theirs.”

“You're crazy,” Tequila said. “You're completely out of your mind. You think this will make you happy?”

“This conversation bores me,” Jean said. “It's time for you to die.” She turned away and snapped her fingers. Tequila's mouth opened in shock. Her chest made a small popping noise, and she rocked back. She looked at Alex and tried to speak, but a trickle of blood dribbled out of her mouth. Her head lolled to one side, and she collapsed to the floor.

“Tequila!” Alex rushed to her side. Her friend was motionless, her eyes rolled back. She had no pulse.

Alex looked back up at Jean. “I will kill you,” she said, her voice wrenched out through the tears that closed her throat. “I will destroy you.”

“Really,” Jean said. “I'm impressed you located me so quickly, but come now. I have you thoroughly beaten. Now go home before I kill you all.” She smiled. “Oh that's right, no Higgs projector. You can't go home, can you? Too bad for you, I suppose.” She snapped her fingers again, and the marine team leader staggered back. He fell to the floor and died, just like Tequila.

Alex screamed in frustration. She cast about for anything she could throw, anything she could use at all to try to hurt this woman. “And where's the varcolac now?” she shouted. “Are you so certain you can trust it? Or is it just using you to get its way? What if, when all the rest of humanity is dead, it just discards you, too?”

Jean laughed. “You don't understand, do you? I
am
the varcolac. Do you think humanity is the first race it has assimilated? It barely understood humanity before, but now, with its mind entwined with mine, it understands everything.” Another snap of her fingers, and Cash and Wilson collapsed as well. Rod turned and ran for the doors to the stairway. He reached them and yanked on them as hard as he could, but they didn't open. Jean snapped her fingers, and he fell where he stood. Alex, Sean, and Lisa were the only ones left. Sean stepped in front of them, shielding them with his body, as if that would do any good.

“Stop it!” Alex yelled. The tears ran down her face in earnest now. “Please! I beg of you. You have all the power. Show some compassion.”

Jean's lips curled and her face twitched. “That's the thing about prison,” she said. “It beats all the compassion out of you.”

CHAPTER 25

R
yan teleported to the Jozef Stefan Institute and found it in chaos. The complex was surrounded by Turkish military trucks and at least one armored personnel carrier. The soldiers, however, were running to and fro through smoke and shouting, firing their weapons on each other. Ryan didn't understand what was happening, until he saw that some of the Turks had blank skin where their eyes ought to have been.

A helicopter flew overhead, shining a giant spotlight down onto the grounds, but Ryan cast no shadow. The bullets passed through his body without harm, and a soldier even ran straight through him, never seeing him and never slowing down. It was incredible. Ryan's software had just taken that man apart and reassembled him on the other side in less than a second, and he was none the wiser.

In fact, Ryan was not standing on the ground, strictly speaking. He couldn't feel it through his feet, and it didn't support his weight—it would pass right through him like everything else. To maintain his position, he was continuously teleporting to the same coordinates.

He couldn't walk, either—no friction—but he could shift his teleport coordinates slightly and thus hover through space. Ignoring the battle raging around him, he passed through the walls and into the main building. The carnage was even worse here, with blood and brain matter spattered across the floor. He wondered if any of it belonged to Alex.

The accelerator had to be in the basement. Instead of finding the stairwell, he simply sank down through the floor. He was surrounded by concrete. Buried in it. He envisioned the reality module failing at just that moment, leaving him entombed, and he began to hyperventilate. He took a deep breath from the oxygen tank and tried to relax. The supercomputer pulled at his shoulders, rubbing them raw. If he had taken more time to plan, he would have strapped himself to a chair. The pack could have hung on the back of the chair while he sat on it, saving him the trouble of supporting the weight.

He burst out of the concrete into a huge open space, and there she was. Jean Massey stood on the floor below him, facing down Alex Kelley, her research team, and a squad of American marines, although most of them seemed to be dead. The linear accelerator hummed and vibrated.

“That's the thing about prison,” Jean said. “It beats all the compassion out of you.”

She couldn't see him. The varcolac couldn't sense him. There was nothing to sense. Ryan walked through her, and for a moment she existed only as a trillion trillion virtual particles passing through his module and out the other side, leaving her unharmed as he came out. But what if . . . ?

Ryan stepped into her again, enclosing her body within the field, and just stayed there. Anyone else looking at this patch of space could see Jean, detect her body heat, even reach in and touch her. She still cast a shadow. But she was only a virtual Jean, a simulation of the particles that made up her and everything else within the field. Which meant, if he deactivated the field at just this moment . . .

It was surprisingly easy. When Ryan deactivated the field, Jean was just . . . gone. The supercomputer stopped simulating those particles. That patch of space was replaced by Ryan, his air, his hardened computer backpack. There was no mess, no blood. Just no more Jean. The thought did occur to Ryan to wonder where those particles had actually gone. After all, it shouldn't be possible to actually
destroy
a trillion trillion particles. Matter and energy were never actually
lost
. The particles must have been repurposed somehow, diffused as heat energy through the packet of air around him, or converted into much smaller exchange particles . . . or something. He would have to ponder the problem at some later date. The important thing was, Jean was gone.

“Ryan!” Alex shouted. She threw her arms around him. “You did this? You destroyed her?”

It felt good. Her arms were light and feminine. She was crying openly, her face red and streaked with tears. Ryan felt a surge of pride.

But no. This is what pretty girls always did. They made him feel happy just to be in their presence, but they didn't care about him, not really. They manipulated and took what they wanted. Alex didn't like him. She just thought she could control him. But she couldn't. “You can't have it,” he told her. “Go home. It's mine.”

She took a step back. “What's yours?”

“Don't play with me. I'm the one who deserves this, not you.”

She was giving him that look again now. “Deserves what?”

“To be the One. To live forever. To be humanity as it should be, until the universe cools and dies.”

“You're . . . taking her place?” Alex said. The horror on her face was evident. He felt it as a physical loss, this change from appreciation to revulsion, but it was for the best. The mask was off now. She was just showing what she really thought of him.

“There's only one person getting out of this alive, and that's me,” he said. Where was the varcolac? He had only imagined this as far as killing Jean. He assumed that once he killed her, the varcolac would naturally gravitate to him again. Wasn't he the one who had freed it? Wasn't he, among all humans on Earth, its intellectual equal? He deserved this.

As one, the white-coated scientists at the accelerator turned to look at him. They had no eyes. They dropped their equipment and advanced, moving in lockstep.

“I'm here!” Ryan shouted. “I'm yours. I'm ready!”

They walked on, slowly but inexorably.

Ryan started to tremble. What if the varcolac was angry that he had killed Jean? “I had to,” he said. “It was the only way to be with you.”

The scientist puppets came closer. Ryan engaged the reality module. At least, he thought he did. But he could still feel the floor beneath his feet, could still sense the circulation of air from the room's big fans. He tried to teleport and failed. His Higgs projector had been compromised. He was helpless. And the varcolac was coming.

Ryan wracked his brains, trying to think. He remembered the short, beautiful time when he had shared the varcolac's mind, known its thoughts, understood its beautiful vision for the universe. How could he prove that he was worthy?

His eyes slid to Alex. Her gaze was intent, her expression set. Her tears were dry. And suddenly Ryan knew what to do. The varcolac had been trying to kill this girl ever since it first entered the world, and somehow, time and again, she had eluded it. It was impossible. She was just a girl in her twenties, a fragile human, with a common sort of intelligence. At least, that's how she appeared. And yet she had so far defeated a power that commanded the very structure of space and time. There was only one explanation: Alex was not who she pretended to be.

He could see it now. She had manipulated him from the very beginning. She had pretended to be frightened and out of her depth, yet she had lured him into following her and then tricked him into inviting her to his lab, where she had stolen his work. He had known it was folly to trust a beautiful woman, and yet she had seduced him all the same. Oh, she was good.

Now that he saw the truth, he wondered that he had ever missed it. She had known the varcolac fifteen years ago, had known what it could do and what it wanted. She had been preparing for its return all her life. She was cunning and manipulative, and she had played him for a fool. He felt a hot flush in his cheeks. She had been laughing at him all this time. Laughing at his silly fears, laughing at his fat body, laughing at how easy it was to trick him with a pretty smile. She had dragged him onto that plane just to laugh at his distress. They were all laughing at him, weren't they? When they thought he wasn't looking. All of her friends. Everyone, all of his life. Laughing, laughing, laughing.

The body of a dead marine lay at his feet. His gun was under his body and tied with a strap. Inaccessible. But on his belt there was a KA-BAR combat knife, sharp and made for killing. Ryan knelt and slid it out of its sheath. Alex stood with her back to him, distracted by the oncoming scientists.

She wouldn't laugh at him anymore.

CHAPTER 26

“S
andra,” Angel said. “You should take a look at this.” He was watching the feed from the module her father had planted on Alex's phone.

“I can't,” she said. “It puts me too close to her. Next time, I might merge with her and not come back.”

“They've found Jean,” he said. “At least, I'm pretty sure it's Jean. She's glowing—I don't know if she's really glowing, or if there's something different about her that the quantum field monitor . . . oh no.”

“What is it?”

“She just killed someone. She waved her hand, and somebody just fell over.”

Sandra stood and gripped his arm, wanting to see, but not wanting to see. “Was it Alex? Or Sean?”

“I don't think so.” He clenched his fists, his face pale. “She just killed another one. They can't hurt her at all. She's just murdering them.”

“We have to teleport there,” she said. “We have to stop her.”

“We can't do that.”

“Yes, we can! If we have her phone, then we have her coordinates.”

“It's too far! The error term at this distance would be on the order of half a mile. We could end up on the other side of the city, or a thousand feet in the air, or buried in rock. The one place we won't end up is in that room.”

Sandra was crying. “It's going to kill Alex and Sean. We have to try!”

“And even if we miraculously showed up right next to her, what would we do?” He said it gently, sadly.

“We could teleport them out of there.”

“They have Higgs projectors. If that would work, they could do it themselves.”

“Turn it off, then,” she said.

“What?”

“Turn it off. If we can't do anything about it, I don't want to know. I don't want you to watch her die.”

“Wait.” His eyes were intense, watching the scene unfold. “There's somebody else there.”

“Who?”

“He . . . he killed her.”

“Killed who? Killed Alex?”

“No, killed Jean. I think. That or she teleported away just as he appeared there. She's gone, at any rate.”

Sandra couldn't stand it anymore. She plugged back in to Angel's viewfeed and immersed herself in the scene. The picture was grainy and gray and incomplete, the faces a blur, but she knew immediately who each person was. Tequila and Wilson and Cash and Rod were dead. She had never met any of them, but she knew their names. She knew Tequila's sister was getting married this fall, and that Rod's wife was six months pregnant. Alex knew them, and so Sandra did, too.

She saw Ryan Oronzi, their savior, standing in triumph where Jean had once stood. And she saw the scientists, their eyes erased, advancing. They had to get out of there. Why didn't they just teleport away? Though she could immediately answer her own question from Alex's knowledge: their projectors were no longer working. Besides, they had come there for a purpose. Jean was nothing, just a tool. It was the varcolac that had to be stopped.

She saw Ryan kneel at a marine's side and pull at his belt. What was he doing? CPR? But then he stood again, and Sandra saw the knife in his hand. The metal of it glared brightly in the quantum display, standing out over the dullness of other materials. Alex didn't see it. Her attention was caught by the approaching scientists. Sean was standing in front of her, ready to fight them. Sandra silently called to them,
look, look, look!
Alex did look, then, but it was too late. All she had time to see was Ryan's mad, deranged eyes just as he swung the knife up and into her heart.