Supersymmetry (37 page)

Angel retreated into his eyejack environment, eyes flicking rapidly as he hurried to engage the help of software systems experts from around the world. Alessandra started to write some equations on the board, but quickly realized that it was the wrong approach. She couldn't do this by herself. It wasn't Alex's mathematical skills she needed right now; it was Sandra's ability to get answers from a web community. There were scientists in every country of the world who tracked the NJSC's experiments and studied the resulting data. Maybe not as many as computer geeks, but they were out there. She needed their help. As much as she could get.

Bogotá.

She pulled up her own eyejack display and started accessing the communities of physicists she had either met at conferences or heard of through her work. How many of them were now dead? Or fleeing for their lives out of whatever major cities they lived in? Physicists weren't generally found in rural settings; they needed the resources of a city to thrive.

She named her post “Need urgent help to stop nuclear attacks,” and started writing.

Ho Chi Minh City.

she wrote.

She waited. A response came quickly from Hyderabad, India.

she wrote back.

She waited. There was no reply.

Hyderabad
, her news feed said.

No! Alessandra shouted and pounded the table in front of her. She should have killed Ryan Oronzi when she had the chance, just thrown him out of the plane, or else just throttled his fat neck. Though she knew it wasn't ultimately Ryan who was doing this. If Ryan had died, the varcolac would have found another willing pawn. But that didn't mean she could forgive him.

A few more physicists and mathematicians responded to her call, from Munich, Boston, Kyoto, Berkley, Melbourne, Zurich, smaller cities that might outlast her. But none of them were up to the task. Few of them thought such a thing could be done in time, and those that did fell to arguing with each other over the best mathematical approach.

Lahore.

Time was ticking away. They might have a little more time than she did, but it wouldn't matter. Once they had the answer, they would have to use the NJSC to produce the effect. Not even CERN had the power to accelerate particles to the necessary speeds for this.

Tehran.

“I'm in,” Angel crowed. “I told you they could do it.” His face was alight, but just as quickly he sobered. “We lost quite a few along the way.”

Alessandra synced her eyejack system with the network and made a quick assessment. Angel had done it. She had access to everything. Now all she needed was the math.

She started spinning up the electromagnets and the field generators, even though she didn't yet have the parameters to use. A heated argument flared up between a researcher at Caltech and one from Zurich, disagreeing over the sign of a tensor in one of the equations. Even at the end of the world, professional rivalries clashed enough to strike sparks. Alessandra didn't have time to let them fight it out. This wasn't working.

Dongguan.

“Only eight cities to go,” Angel shouted. “How are we doing?”

“We're nowhere,” Alessandra said. “I've got nothing. It isn't possible.”

a message said. It had no routing source, in fact no metadata of any kind to say where it had come from.

Alessandra wrote.

Alessandra stared at the words, astonished. Angel said Ryan had killed her. If this was really her, it couldn't be good. she wrote.

The words had no inflection, but Alessandra could sense the bitterness in them.

Baghdad.

In other circumstances, Alessandra might have laughed. Jean had wanted an existence beyond her body, and she had achieved that. Instead of leaving humanity behind, however, she was trapped inside human machinery. The good part was, if anyone in the world could figure out the math needed to aim a Higgs singlet correctly, it was Jean Massey.

Alessandra wrote.

Wuhan.

But wait. Jean had to understand what she was doing. If this particle successfully went back in time, it would stop the varcolac, but at the cost of this entire timeline. She wouldn't need the world network anymore. She would be back in prison. Was that what she wanted? Alessandra supposed it was better than being dead, which was her only other alternative. Besides which, at this point, it didn't matter. Alessandra had to trust her.

Jean wrote. A rush of equations flew over the line. Alessandra reviewed them. The equations looked sound. More than that, they were brilliant. If there was anything wrong with them, it was more than she could see.

Hanoi.

Deep underground, the electromagnets powered and a particle stream started making the rounds, driving the thirty mile racetrack at nearly the speed of light. Alessandra loaded the equations into the computer.

“Just about ready,” she said.

“I hope so,” Angel said. “Only three cities left before New York.”

Alessandra paused. It would take only a single command to launch the sequence. Perhaps nothing at all would happen, but if it worked correctly . . . she would be gone. After all the time she had spent worrying about becoming one person again, she was now afraid to go back. If this worked, she would be two people again, neither of whom would remember any of this happening. They would never even meet Angel. They wouldn't know about the varcolac threat. Ryan Oronzi would go on building his baby universe, giving the varcolac access to the world. The varcolac might just find some other way to kill her father, and the same basic thing would happen all over again.

“Wait,” she said.

“There's no time to think,” Angel said. He took her hand and laced his fingers through hers. “I will miss you. Or at least, my life will be the less for not knowing you. But this must be done. Just close your eyes and do it.”

“He's right,” her mother said. “If you can really undo this slaughter, then do it.”

Rio de Janeiro.

“They need to know,” Alessandra said. “Our past selves, they need to know what we know, or the same thing will just happen again. They need to be warned.”

“How could you possibly warn them?” Angel asked.

“We'll send them a message.”

“But they're before us. They're in our past. We can't leave anything for them to find, can we? You said our whole universe from that point onward is going to disappear.”

“That's right,” Alessandra said. “
Our
universe is going to disappear. But there's another one.” She pointed to the laser-light display. “There's another whole universe that won't change at all.”

Angel's face was white, and he gripped her hand tight enough to hurt. “Only two cities left. We don't have time to write a note.”

“Not a note—my eyejack stream! Everything I've seen and heard since this all started, it's all saved in my account. We can upload it into that universe.”

Santiago.

She was already doing it as she was talking. Ryan already had the system in place to encode digital information in the pattern of the wormhole; all she had to do was feed the right stream into it. The problem was, it was an incredible amount of data. It would take some time.

“How will they know to look for it?” her mother asked.

“They won't. They'll just have to discover it and recognize it for what it is.”

The bandwidth was limited by the field generators Ryan had in place and how quickly those generators could manipulate patterns into the wormhole. There was nothing she could do to speed it up, but she willed the transfer to go faster.

It was easier than thinking about the fact that these were likely her last moments of existence as herself, as Alessandra, with her unique memories and experiences and thoughts.

Riyadh.

“That's it,” Angel said. “That's the last city before New York. It's got to be now, Alessandra.”

He was right. The entire stream wasn't transferred yet, but it would have to be enough. She squeezed Angel's hand, and then pulled her mother close for an embrace.

She started the command sequence. “Goodbye,” she said.

CHAPTER 28

“I
s that him?” Alex Kelley said. She had only been at the NJSC for a week now, and it was her first glimpse of the famed Ryan Oronzi.

Tequila Williams looked where she was pointing and nodded. “In the flesh. Smartest guy in the world, so they say. They also say he's cracked.”

Oronzi was at least a hundred pounds overweight, his hair askew, dressed in a T-shirt and a pair of worn jeans that would have benefitted from a belt. “He looks like a plumber,” Alex said. It was hard to believe he was the genius behind all the technology they were about to demonstrate that day.

Tequila giggled. “I guess if you're smart enough, you can do and say what you like, and people just call you eccentric. It's like being old.”

“Or rich,” Alex said.

Oronzi's arrival quickly attracted the attention of the generals and executives gathered near the stage, who tried to shake his hand, but Oronzi just pushed past them without a civil word. It took Alex a moment to realize that he was heading straight for them. For
her
.

He didn't stop until he was standing directly in front of her. “Alex Kelley?”

Alex traded glances with Tequila, startled and not sure what was going on. Was this related to the demo? Was he hitting on her? “That's me,” she said. She held out a hand. “Very glad to meet you, sir.”

His eyes were wild, like he had seen a ghost. “I have something to show you.”

There was no way to keep it a secret. Ryan told her the basics of what he had found encoded in the pattern of his baby universe, and once he had shown her enough of the eyejack visuals to convince her, there was nothing for it but to cancel the demo. The only way to do that, however, was to explain what had happened to their superiors and to
their
superiors, until enough of them believed what was going on. A message from the future. And not just a message, but a semi-complete eyejack feed covering weeks of the most extraordinary and terrifying events.

Once Nicole heard what they had, the CIA got involved. The feed was classified at the highest level of national security, but it was too late to keep it contained. By that time, too many people knew, and the story was too amazing, too outlandish to keep quiet. The media got wind of it, and a series of speculative stories drew the attention of an international audience. The tantalizing ambiguities dropped by Ryan Oronzi, along with the flat denials by Secretary of Defense Jared Falk and his staff, only served to fan the flames.

The media had few details, and Alex didn't come forward with more, not wanting the notoriety of the press nor the attention of the American national security machine. She spent a fair amount of time in Ryan's lab, however, reviewing the contents of the feeds and drawing out the highlights. Ryan himself was blown away by what he saw. The sight of himself destroying the world as a slave to the varcolac shocked him out of the worst of his egomania. The best thing that happened to him, however, was when Alex introduced him to her father.

In some ways, the two men had little in common. Jacob Kelley was outgoing, athletic, and charming, while Ryan Oronzi was awkward both physically and socially. In the world of high-energy physics, however, their interests collided. They could talk for hours about Lorentz invariance and whether a tachyonic anti-telephone could practically be built. But the real reason for their friendship was a mutual commitment to keeping the events of the Other Future, as they had taken to calling it, from ever coming true.

Jacob had, in fact, discovered a method to enhance and sustain the probability field that kept Alex and Sandra separate and kept the varcolac from interacting in the material world. Ryan insisted on getting Jacob a security clearance, and once it came through, Jacob spent more and more time at Ryan's lab, the two of them eventually succeeding in cutting the ties to the baby universe and setting it adrift in the quantum froth. The CIA never released the recordings of the Other Future, but they did increase funding to the NJSC's High Energy Lab to “investigate and protect against the possibility of anti-timeward weapons systems.”