Superposition (5 page)

I didn't want to get dragged down that rabbit hole. “Time for bed, Alessandra.”

She crossed her arms and gave me a belligerent look.

“Good night,” I said, and turned off the lights.

Elena had finished her shower. I brushed my teeth in the bathroom, thinking about Brian's endlessly spinning gyroscope and the bullet that had apparently passed through—or diffracted around—Elena. In the quantum world—among particles smaller than an atom—such oddities were commonplace. Spinning particles had a ground state energy, a rate of spin that couldn't go any slower. And all particles, whether they had mass or not, had a wavelength and could diffract like light. But such things only worked on the subatomic scale, not with gyroscopes and bullets.

The subatomic world was a weird and wonderful one, a world where common sense broke down. It took me until my second year at MIT to really come to terms with it, to realize that the beautiful world of cause and effect I had fallen in love with in my high school physics class was a sham. Lurking deep inside the stable laws of Newtonian physics was the ambiguous world of the subatomic, where probability reigned. Not the probability of ignorance, like a coin flip, where if you knew enough about the force of the flip and the rotation and the wind and the air pressure and the scars on the referee's finger, you could predict the outcome. No, at the bottom of everything was a
fundamental
probability, an unknowable, unpredictable creation and an annihilation of particles with no rhyme or reason to it. The real world, the quantum world, was dark and terrifying and didn't make any sense at all.

Here's the problem: Every particle in the universe is also a wave. It's not like a marble or a stone, with a clearly defined position, diameter, and velocity. It might be either here or there. It might be moving slow or fast. It might have a lot of energy or a little. It isn't just that you don't know. The particle itself hasn't decided. It's in an indeterminate state, smeared out over a region of space. Since even the smallest everyday objects are composed of billions of particles, the uncertainty usually averages itself out in the larger world. But it's there.

I resisted it for a while. Like most physicists, I went through a phase where I believed we just didn't understand enough. That behind the exploding chaos of trillions of particles spontaneously transforming into other particles was a set of rules to predict it. Einstein himself had clung to that view until he died. Eventually, though, I came not just to accept the truth, but to love it. The world might be chaotic and unpredictable at its root, but it could be controlled. The random firing of particles could be mastered and made to keep order, to follow Newton's laws in aggregate, to bend to the will of mathematics and technology. In the end, the chaos didn't win.

Which was why what Brian had showed us was so disturbing to me. He had found a way to let the chaos out. I believed him when he said it would change the world. Whether it would change the world for the better, however, was harder to predict.

A sharp knock on the wall snapped my attention back to the present. “What are you doing in there?” Elena called from the bedroom.

I realized I'd been brushing my teeth for far longer than was practically necessary. I spit and rinsed my mouth, then headed back into our bedroom, but no one was there.

“Elena?” I said.

The door shut with a bang behind me, revealing Elena hiding behind the door, wearing one of my T-shirts. It was long enough on her to serve as a nightgown, but only just. She wrapped her arms around my neck and planted a long kiss on my mouth. I returned the kiss eagerly, delighted but surprised. Elena was a morning person, generally, and it had been a long day.

“Seriously?” I asked. “You're not tired?”

“Mmm,” she said. “I've been wanting to do this ever since you punched Brian in the face.”

“That's me, your big protector,” I said.

She reached an exploratory hand up the inside of my thigh, and her eyes sparkled. “Yeah, you could say that.” She took a few steps back and made sure I was looking. She has this thing she does where she crosses her arms, takes hold of the bottom of her shirt, and pulls it over her head in one lightning-fast move. She knows I like it, and it's gotten to be a thing with us, kind of a secret signal, where she'll catch my eye—in, say, a crowded room—and she'll subtly cross her arms and finger the hem of her shirt. She did it now, and I grinned at her.

“You are so hot,” I said.

“How hot?” she asked, still toying with the hem of the shirt.

“Ionizing radiation hot,” I said. “Neutral pion decay hot.”

Elena snorted. “You're such a romantic,” she said. Then she pulled off the T-shirt, and we both stopped talking for a while.

Afterward, Elena settled in with a computer on her lap to work on our finances a little before bed. Despite my background in math, I'm no good with a budget, and she's always managed the money side of things. I lay on my back, staring at the ceiling, tired but wide awake, still unable to put the day's events out of my mind.

Brian's research at NJSC had to do with quantum computing, a concept that was getting close enough to reality that large manufacturers were starting to invest heavily in it. It was just the sort of thing the NJSC was willing to prioritize: promises of breakthroughs right around the corner that would benefit everybody, with significant grant money available to be claimed. What was lacking to make it a reality was the ability to connect quantum effects to large mechanical objects (large in this context meaning at least ten micrometers across) without storing those objects at near absolute zero. Any warmer and the natural vibrations of the atoms in the material tended to drown out any quantum effects.

We knew it was possible, because birds did it. When photons struck their eyes, entangled electrons were scattered and forced to spin in different ways depending on the Earth's magnetic field. The change in electron spin subtly changed the chemical state of the molecules, which in turn altered the flow of cellular signals through the bird's eye. The result was that the bird could actually see the magnetic field, and thus know which way was north, regardless of where it was or what the weather was like. The bird's eyes weren't cryogenic, though. So we knew it could be done.

It seemed that Brian must somehow have succeeded, far beyond anyone's expectations, and found a way to have quantum properties affect the everyday world. An electron never stops spinning; it's a perpetual motion machine, moving endlessly without any loss of energy. A particle fired at an atom might have a wavelength larger than an atom; it has a pretty good chance of passing right through it without hitting it. To apply these principles to gyroscopes and bullets was crazy, though. A bullet is made up of
trillions
of atoms, and although it did technically have a wavelength, it was something like ten to the minus thirty-four meters long, so it shouldn't be able to diffract around anything.

“It's eating you up inside, isn't it?” Elena said.

I sighed and nodded. “It bothers me. It shouldn't be possible, and if it is possible . . .”

Elena finished my thought. “Then the world isn't as stable as you want it to be.”

She was right. To Elena, it didn't make any difference if the world was made of quarks or superstrings or tiny elves. She cared about her children and her husband and exercise and eating well and whether Penn State beat Purdue. But it made a difference to me. I needed to know if the world was inherently predictable or chaotic, whether the random outcome of trillions of probabilistic encounters ultimately resulted in order that I could control.

Elena sighed. “I think you should take Marek with you.”

“What?”

“When you go out to the NJSC tomorrow. Take Marek with you.”

I pushed up on one elbow. “Who says I'm going to the NJSC?”

Elena gave me a look. “What have we just been talking about? Go find out what Brian was researching; get it settled it in your mind.”

“I can't leave you alone here. What if Brian comes back?”

“There are police swarming around this whole neighborhood.” As if to emphasize her words, we heard a helicopter chattering overhead. “He's no secret agent. They'll find him soon enough.”

“Since I left Philly, I've only punched another person three times. Two of those times, it was Brian,” I said.

“I'll be fine,” she said. “I don't need you hovering around protecting me. He's not going to come back and shoot me again.” I leaned over and kissed her on the mouth. She punched me good-naturedly. “We already did that, you great brute. Go to sleep.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“I know how it is with you,” she said. “You get something stuck in your mind, and you can't let it go. Better just to go get it settled.”

I fell back onto my pillows, feeling suddenly exhausted.

“And Jacob?” she said.

“Mmm . . . yes?”

“Don't do anything stupid.”

CHAPTER 6

DOWN-SPIN

The wooden spectator benches in courtroom five were hard and low and looked like they dated from Colonial times. Despite this, the crowds who gathered to see me humiliated had not abated, though they did tend to fidget in the uncomfortable seats as the afternoon wore on.

“Officer Lin, what is your profession?” Haviland asked, in a ringing voice that suggested that her profession would be the key to the whole case.

Brittany Lin was a pretty, dark-haired, Asian policewoman in a smart jacket and skirt and glasses like flat ovals. She was fit and athletic, and I guessed her age at about forty. “I'm a senior forensic analyst with the New Jersey State Police,” she said. Her voice was low pitched and no-nonsense.

“And your time in that position?”

“I've been a police officer for fourteen years and a forensic specialist for ten of those years.”

“Then it's safe to say you are an expert in your field.”

“I know my business, Mr. Haviland.”

Haviland went on to establish her certifications as an investigator and the status granted her as an expert witness in various other courts. She had led the forensic team that had processed the crime scene in the underground bunker.

“At the time you were called to the scene, were you aware that police had been searching for Mr. Vanderhall?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Why didn't the police find him?”

“The bunker was two hundred feet underground, in a supposedly abandoned experiment room. No one even knew to look for him there.”

“Except for Jacob Kelley?”

“Objection,” Terry said. “Assumes facts not in evidence.”

“Sustained,” Judge Roswell said. “Mr. Haviland, please limit your questions to those about which the witness can have knowledge.”

“I apologize, Your Honor,” Haviland said. “Ms. Lin, what did you find when you entered the bunker?”

“I found a dead male, mid to late thirties, with a gunshot wound to the chest as the apparent cause of death. The victim had been dead approximately twelve hours,” Lin said.

Haviland made a note on his legal pad, as if this was a new piece of information he needed to write down. “How was time of death established?”

“The level of decomposition, given the warm temperature in the bunker and the mass of the victim, limits the time to no more than twelve hours, while the presence of firmly established livor mortis suggests at least that long.”

“What time was this analysis made?”

“At four o'clock in the afternoon on December third, placing the death at approximately four o'clock in the morning.”

Haviland held up his giant whiteboard timeline. “Permission to approach the witness, Your Honor?”

“Granted,” the judge said.

Haviland handed a huge red marker to the witness. “Ms. Lin, can you indicate for us on this timeline, using a red X, when the victim died?”

She complied, vigorously marking the spot as if she were etching it in blood. Haviland held it up again so the jury could see, then rotated it to include the audience. “Four AM on December third. Is that correct?” he said.

“Yes.”

“So, approximately eight hours after Mr. Vanderhall ran away from the Kelley residence, and five hours after the police finished questioning the family?”

“Objection,” Terry said. “Asked and answered.”

“Sustained, Mr. Haviland. Let's move along.” Judge Roswell said.

“Yes, Your Honor.” Haviland flipped to another page in his notes. “Was any suicide note found on the premises?” he asked.

“No sir, there was not,” Lin said.

“Were Mr. Vanderhall's injuries consistent with a theory of suicide?”

“No sir. Suicide was not a serious consideration.”

“Why not?”

Lin smiled condescendingly. “Mr. Vanderhall was shot in the middle of the chest from a distance of at least three feet. The insubstantial amount of gunshot residue found on his skin and clothing rules out the possibility that he was any nearer to the gun when it was fired. Besides which, he was then shot two more times while he was lying on the floor.”