Supersymmetry (38 page)

Of course, Sandra had also seen the feed, though she was not strictly cleared for it. Ryan and Jacob sneaked her past security one day, using Alex's credentials. When she returned after six hours, she wrapped Alex in a hug and wouldn't let go.

That left only one person who had played a significant part in the Other Future but didn't know it. Sandra decided it would be too much—and too awkward—to tell him all at once. It would imply a relationship that they didn't actually have, making it hard to actually get to know him in real life. She was working a six-days-on, three-days-off cycle on patrol, but her days off happened to coincide with a robotics conference in Philadelphia. She checked the scheduled participants and bought herself a ticket.

When the synchronized quadcopter demonstration was over, Sandra walked up to the young, stocky, Hispanic man who had led the presentation. It was strange; he only looked familiar in a vague way, from seeing him on the feed. He wasn't very much to look at, though apparently they had become good friends in the Other Future. It seemed odd to use the past tense about something that would have happened in the future and now wouldn't, but, in a way, it was also in the past from her perspective. The Other Future was a cause that was producing effects in her life. In a very real sense, those events had actually happened, albeit in a kind of timeline loop that ended where it began. The past tense would do as well as any other.

She made a show of reading his nametag and held out her hand. “Angel Gutierrez?” she said.

He gave her a dazzling smile. “You pronounced it right,” he said. “Most of you gringos are hopeless at Mexican names.”

She smiled back. “I once knew someone named Angel.”

“Well, nice to meet you”—he glanced at her nametag—“Sandra.”

“Nice to meet you, too. I just wanted to tell you that your demonstration was remarkable. Those copters are pretty versatile, working together like that.”

“Thanks. We think they have a lot of promise.”

The moment stalled. Sandra didn't want to leave, but she didn't know what else to say.

“Well, it was good to meet you,” she managed, hating herself.

“Bye,” Angel said. He turned to go.

“Angel!” she called. He turned back. “Could we . . . that is . . . would you like to have a drink?”

“A drink? Right now?” It was eleven in the morning.

“No, I mean . . . sometime. Just . . .” This was ridiculous. “I'm sorry. It was a stupid idea.” She turned and walked away, her cheeks burning.

He came after her. “Wait.” He touched her shoulder, and she turned around. “I don't have any plans for lunch.”

She let out the breath she was holding. “Neither do I.”

He was obviously confused—she was pretty sure he wasn't accustomed to strange girls asking him out—but he took it in stride. “The hotel's restaurant is pretty awful, but they do serve food,” he said. “I have to clear my stuff out for the next demo. Meet you there at noon?”

She thought about offering to help him gather his things, but she thought that would be pushing it. “Noon it is.”

She was tempted not to tell him. It would have been easier to enjoy the lunch, to ask him questions about his work and completely avoid the inevitable awkwardness of telling him what she knew. But the longer she delayed, the more it would seem like she'd been deceiving him, and the more difficult it would be. Best to get it over with.

She took a deep breath. “Actually,” she said, “this isn't the first time I've seen you.”

“I knew it,” Angel said. “You've been stalking me. Pretty girls do that all the time.” He sighed theatrically. “Am I going to have to call security?”

She grinned. He was just like he seemed on the feed from the Other Future, never embarrassed, always making her feel at ease. “I've got something to tell you. It will be hard to believe—I didn't believe it at first.”

She was expecting another joke, but he was quiet now, looking at her curiously. There was nothing for it. She sent his eyejack system the first clip she had decided on—that of Angel himself flying his quadcopters at the wreckage of the baseball stadium. It was unquestionably him, complete with quadcopters and quirky sense of humor. It was also just as clearly at a disaster that had never occurred, in a scene that had never existed. She watched him watch it with growing astonishment.

Finally, his eyes refocused on hers. He was pale. His lips moved, but it took a few moments for him to say, “What is this? CGI?” But of course, it wasn't, and he knew it. No program, no matter how talented its designer, could capture a person so completely.

“It's from the future,” Sandra told him.

Over dinner, Alex sat with her father and Ryan and listened to them talk about how they had finally disconnected their universe from the wormhole.

“But, the varcolac is still out there, isn't it?” she said.

“I'm sure it is,” her father said. “I can't imagine how it could be killed. It must be distributed through the particles of a thousand worlds. Nothing we could do would be likely to harm it in any existential way.”

“But we've destroyed the technology that would give it access,” Ryan said. “The baby universe is gone, and my notes for how to create it are destroyed. There are only a few people who even know such a thing is possible.”

“The thing about science,” Alex said, “is that if something can be done, someone will eventually discover how to do it. You can't just put a lid on it and make it go away. Somebody will eventually do it again.”

Her father nodded gravely and wrapped his arm around her. “Let's just hope that it doesn't happen any time soon.”

A knock on the door interrupted them. Alex was suddenly reminded of a knock on that same door that had started everything fifteen years ago, when Brian Vanderhall had come in out of the snow, babbling about an intelligent quantum creature.

Her father opened the door. Sandra stood there, smiling, drawing a young man in by the hand. He was short, Hispanic, a little pudgy, with dark glasses. She recognized him at once.

“Angel,” she said. “Welcome.”

He came in nervously and shook hands all around. “You must be Alex. Dr. Kelley. And Dr. Oronzi, a pleasure.” He gave an awkward smile. “This is a bit strange, I must tell you.”

“I've shown him the highlights and summarized the rest,” Sandra said. “He was supposed to be on a panel at the conference in the afternoon, but he skipped it. We've been talking pretty much nonstop since lunch.”

“Welcome to the inner circle,” Alex's father said with a smile. “It's been a real shock for all of us, I can tell you.”

They sat together in the living room and made polite small talk for a few minutes, but inevitably, their conversation returned to the Other Future.

“There's one thing I don't understand,” Angel said.

Ryan laughed. “Only one?”

“I get that the Other Future is an alternate set of events,” he said. “Events that
would
have happened, only now they won't. What I don't understand is, does that alternate timeline still exist? Is it still going on out there, with most of the people dead, while we're in an alternate universe right here?”

“It can't be,” Ryan said. “As soon as you sent that particle back in time and stopped the varcolac from destroying the stadium, it ceased to exist.”

“But if it ceased to exist, how could it have stopped the varcolac? Isn't that a paradox?”

Ryan smiled. “I didn't say it had never existed. I said it
ceased
existing. The Other Future is effectively in our past, a loop tied into the string of our timeline.”

“We've been talking about this,” Alex said. “Think about the chain of cause and effect. The varcolac destroyed the stadium, which caused you to send a particle back, which caused the varcolac
not
to destroy the stadium, which caused us to be sitting here talking about it. The chain of cause and effect is unbroken. It always moves in one direction, even when it jumps backward in standard time. Nothing we do now can ever change the events of the Other Future—that's already happened. All we can affect is our own future.”

Sandra shook her head. “It's enough to make my head swim.”

“There's still a problem,” Angel said. “What about the quadcopters?”

“What about them?” Alex asked.

“How did they gain the power to act as if they were programmed with Higgs projectors? There's no reasonable explanation. As I apparently told Sandra in the Other Future, it makes no sense.”

“They must have picked it up at the scene somehow,” Sandra said. “All that quantum stuff going on . . .” She trailed off.

“I don't see how. Yes, they were reading data from hundreds of ID cards around the stadium. Yes, someone could conceivably have designed a virus to affect the copters' programming and left it there for the copters to read. But it would require very precise knowledge of the flight control software to patch it in that way, not to mention knowledge of the operating system and its vulnerabilities. I'm the only one in the world who knows their software that well.”

A chill went down Alex's spine. “Wait,” she said. “What if you did write it?”

Angel shook his head. “I had never heard of Higgs projectors at the time, much less knew how to program one.”

“I don't mean that you programmed it
then
.”

She looked around the circle. Everyone else was staring at her blankly.

“Who's to say that the Other Future is the only time this has happened?” she asked.

It was all she had to say. Dawning realization crossed each of their faces.

“Angel says the only person with the knowledge to write a virus to insert that software, and to hide it on a chip at the stadium, is him,” she went on. “What if, in a
prior
future to the one we've been watching, the varcolac killed Sandra and me at the prison? What if Angel—with the help of Ryan, presumably—figured out a way to send that chip back in time, where the copters would pick it up?”

“Only they didn't think of storing the eyejack data in the baby universe,” her father said. “So none of you ever knew.”

Angel's eyes were wide. “How many times do you think this has happened?”

They talked for hours. When Alex slipped out to the kitchen to pour herself a glass of water, Sandra followed her and wrapped her arms around her in a tight hug. It was amazing. A few weeks earlier, Sandra would never have done such a thing, and if she had, Alex would have pulled away. But the Other Future had brought them together in a way that simply being the same person never had. Somehow the experience of having saved the world together—even though they only remembered doing so through an eyejack recording—superseded the fears and insecurities about their identities that they'd built over time.

“So what do you think of him?” Alex asked.

“It's weird,” Sandra said. “I know all this stuff about him, but we only just met.”