Supersymmetry (13 page)

“Yes,” Sandra said.

Ryan cleared his throat. “Not possible. The creature broke out for the first time at 11:08 this morning.”

“Are you sure of that?”

“Absolutely. I've been tracking its progress for weeks. I have alarms set to tell me when it solves another equation and breaks through another layer. This morning was the first time, and it lasted only six minutes before I got it back under control.”

“In that case, I have some data for you to look at,” Sandra said.

Alex heard a ping, indicating Sandra was trying to share a viewfeed to her eyejack. She accepted it automatically, but her head was spinning. Was this all their father's death meant to Sandra? Data? She knew Sandra had never been as close to Dad as she was, but she wouldn't have expected this coldness from her.

“This is force vector data from the stadium site, connecting known objects to their final positions,” Sandra said. “And here is an overlay using an equation Dad suggested before . . .” She swallowed. “I mean, when I was with him this morning. The pattern only makes sense using a ten-dimensional construct.”

Ryan stood up from the bed and spun in place, examining the data through his own eyejack. “Extraordinary.”

“Parabolic solutions didn't work,” Sandra said. “We couldn't figure out what kind of single or even multiple force would have caused the objects to end up where they did. It wasn't until Dad suggested trying a ten-dimensional equation that we could nail down a single point of origin.”

“This was definitely not accomplished by any human being,” Ryan said.

“Why not?” Alex asked.

“Because
I
couldn't have done it.”

“I told you,” Sandra said. “The varcolac destroyed the stadium.”

Alex couldn't believe it. Sandra was trying to blame their father's death on
her
. After all that had happened in the last twenty-four hours, all she could think of was assigning blame. “It wasn't the varcolac. Ryan just told you it didn't even break out until this morning.”

“I don't know what to say, then,” Sandra said. “Is somebody
else
out there releasing multidimensional quantum creatures into the world?”

“Hang on,” Ryan said. “Think about it.” He stretched his pudgy fingers back, cracking them loudly. “I think we need to consider the possibility that the varcolac, while free in our universe from 11:08 to 11:14 this morning, initiated the destruction of the stadium at 9:35 last night.”

Alex knew exactly what he meant, but it was ridiculous. Impossible. “Time travel?” she said, letting the scorn drip from her voice. “That's pure fantasy. I can't believe you would even suggest it.”

“Actually, it explains the nature of this data,” Ryan said. “It could have used a reverse-time Higgs singlet. The time parameter would require this kind of dimensional complexity . . .”

“No. Absolutely not.” Alex felt angry at him for even suggesting it. “There is no way we caused that stadium to blow. It happened
the night before
.”

“It's not your fault,” Sandra said.

“You'd better believe it's not my fault! I was just doing my job. I didn't know there was a varcolac involved. I didn't let it get free. That was him!” She jabbed an accusing finger at Ryan. “And I certainly didn't send it back in time to kill my father and thousands of other people!”

Sandra stood and held out a tentative hand as if to pat Alex on the shoulder. “You couldn't have known.”

Alex didn't want to cry, but once she started, she couldn't stop. “Yes, I could,” she said, the tears running freely. “I could have known. You were right. I should have said something. I didn't want to believe it.”

Sandra slowly wrapped her arms around her. “It's not your fault,” she said. “But we'll make it right.” Alex sank her head against her sister's shoulders. She didn't say anything, but she knew that Sandra was wrong. Thousands were dead, her father among them. It could never be made right again.

CHAPTER 13

S
andra wanted to disapprove of teleporting, but she just couldn't manage it. The thrill of choosing a new location with her eyejacks and then just
being
there was so electrifying, she couldn't hide her enthusiasm.

“I told you you'd like it,” Alex said.

The three of them stood on an outcropping at Hawk Mountain Sanctuary in Kempton, Pennsylvania, watching red-tails ride the thermals in search of prey far below. The mountain had been recently surveyed, its location data verified via GPS, making it an ideally safe teleport location.

Sandra wanted to protest that just using the technology at all was daring the varcolac to reappear, but she had enjoyed the experience too much to want to object. “Where does the power come from?” she asked instead.

“The power?” Ryan asked.

“The energy, I mean. We're transporting mass across a distance, instantaneously. It has to take a tremendous amount of energy to accomplish that, doesn't it? Where does the energy come from?”

“Through the wormhole,” Ryan said. “There's a whole universe full of energy that we're tapping.”

“But the universe is—”

“In my lab? No. You can't keep a universe in a lab. My baby universe is outside of our universe entirely. Parallel to it, if you will. Think of it like this: the other universe is rotating with respect to ours. That's not exactly accurate, because there are more dimensions involved, but it's close enough. When we teleport, we're slipping out of our normal dimensional space and using the spin of the other universe to shift position. Which means every time we teleport, we're slowing down its rotation with respect to us by a tiny, fractional amount. Stealing its energy.”

“What happens if it stops rotating?”

Ryan snorted. “Not going to happen. The moon has been robbing Earth's rotational energy for years, but none of us feel the difference. Your tiny mass is nothing to a universe. The effect is just too small.”

“It seems wrong,” Sandra said. “It seems like it shouldn't be possible.”

Ryan shrugged. “Ever seen an airplane take off? That seems impossible, too.”

“But there's already mass in the spot we teleport to. Air can just move out of the way, I guess, but what happens if you teleport to a place where something already is?”

“I'll show you,” Ryan said. He picked up a small rock from the ground and hefted it. He looked out toward the view, then walked to the other side of the outcropping and looked out again.

“What are you doing?” Sandra asked.

“I have a rangefinder on my eyejack system,” Ryan said. “It needs two points to triangulate.”

“What are you triangulating on?”

He pointed. “See that hawk?”

Alex spoke up. “No. Don't you dare.”

“Your sister wants to see what will happen.”

“It's a beautiful creature. It's probably endangered. Don't—”

Ryan held the rock up between two fingers. “Bye-bye,” he said. The rock disappeared. Out over the valley, high above them, the hawk he had indicated puffed outward suddenly, like a bag of popcorn in the microwave. The bird plummeted, wings spinning free, until it fell out of sight among the trees far below.

Sandra watched in silence, horrified.

“It didn't explode,” Ryan said. He sounded disappointed. “The skin is pretty strong, I guess.”

Sandra didn't say anything. She stared at Ryan. The casual cruelty with which he had killed the hawk made a chill run down her spine. The media presented him as charmingly neurotic, the caricature of an eccentric scientist, but this was something different. It didn't even seem to occur to him that the hawk's life mattered, or that anyone else might find the action upsetting.

“I can't believe you did that!” Alex said. “You just killed it, for no reason.”

“I was demonstrating the principle,” Ryan said. “When you teleport something, it reenters our space at a single point, then rapidly expands outward until it reaches a pressure equilibrium. If I teleported you into a haystack, you'd be fine. The hay would shift. But if I sent you into, say, a block of granite, you would be crushed. The granite wouldn't expand to accommodate you. If I teleported the block of granite into you, however, you would expand just fine to accommodate it.”

“You're a monster,” Alex said. “You could have used another rock instead of a living thing. You just wanted to see it blow apart, didn't you?”

“Wasn't it you I saw demonstrating this technology on people?” Ryan said.

“They were actors. It wasn't real.”

“You work for Lockheed Martin,” he said, annoyed now. “What, you think the military is paying you billions so they can put on stage performances? This technology is meant to kill people—quickly, efficiently, and from a distance. It's made to make our soldiers invincible. So don't get all high and mighty on me.”

“The bird didn't have to die.”

They kept arguing, but Sandra wasn't looking at them. She was still staring at the empty space where the hawk used to be. No wonder the military was so interested. Ryan had basically just snapped his fingers and the bird had died. He could have done the same to
her
. For that matter, she now had the same power, to kill or destroy at a distance and then disappear from the scene. What would happen if this ability went public? If anyone could kill with a thought and then escape the consequences? It could tear the whole fabric of society apart. Never mind the varcolac—it was this technology they should fear.

“Shut up, both of you,” she said.

Alex and Ryan stopped arguing and looked at her. Sandra was surprised; she hadn't expected that to work.

“Well?” Alex said. “What do you want?”

“Arguing won't get us anywhere. We're supposed to be talking about how to defeat the varcolac. Or at the least, discussing what we think it's capable of.”

“Right,” Ryan said. “Time travel.”

“So you keep telling us,” Alex said. “Though I don't know how we're supposed to defeat it if it can just go back in time and change anything we do.”

“How does that even work?” Sandra said. “I thought time travel was impossible.”

“Einstein was the first to suggest that it might really be possible,” Ryan said. “We always say that Einstein's theory of general relativity sets the speed of light as a limit for travel, but that's not exactly true. His equations do allow for velocities faster than the speed of light, but only if you use negative values for time. Einstein himself recognized that, at least in theory, relativity meant time-travel was possible. But it wasn't until more than a century later that M-theory was experimentally proven and gravity was successfully incorporated into quantum mechanics.”

Sandra sighed. “I knew this was how this conversation was going to go. What's M-theory? Though really, I'm afraid to ask.”

“It stands for Membrane Theory,” Alex said. “Think membranes in multiple dimensions.”

Ryan frowned. “That's not what it stands for.”

“What, then?”

“I don't think it stands for anything. I know it doesn't stand for membrane, though.”

“Matrix?” Alex said.

“Look, I don't care,” Sandra said. “Just tell me what the Muffin Theory says, and why I should care.”

Ryan laughed. “Okay, here's how it works. You normally live in four dimensions, right?”

“The fourth being time?”

“Yes. But space-time is actually composed of eleven dimensions. There's the four you usually think about, and seven more that are all curled up where you can't see them. The four dimensions we generally experience are what we call a ‘brane'—they're roughly fixed in reference to each other, and they float around in the other dimensions, which we call the ‘bulk.' Most particles, and thus most matter, are confined to the standard four dimensions, but there are some exceptions.”

“Like gravity,” Sandra said.

Ryan raised an eyebrow and whistled.

“I did grow up with a physicist as a father,” Sandra said. “I picked up a few things.”

“Well, you're right.” Ryan threw a pebble over the edge of the ridge and watched it fall into the wooded valley below. “Gravity—meaning, of course, the gravitons that communicate the force of gravity—bleeds out into the other dimensions. It's what makes gravity the weakest of all the standard forces.”

“And the varcolac lives out among those other dimensions,” Sandra said.

“That's what we think,” Alex said.

“So, I'm losing the thread a little. What does this have to do with time travel?”

Ryan scooped up a handful of pebbles and started throwing them over the edge, one at a time. “It has to do with a very special particle called the Higgs singlet.”

“The God Particle,” Sandra said.

“Nope,” Alex said. “That's the Higgs boson. This is a different one.”

“The Higgs singlet's remarkable, special property is that it is affected only by gravity, and not by any of the other forces,” Ryan said.

Sandra wrinkled her forehead. “So . . . it can travel into those other dimensions?”

“Exactly. If there's a sufficiently high velocity collision of protons in the super collider, then Higgs singlets will also be created that travel backward in time, through those other dimensions. That is, their decay paths appear in our universe before they're created in the first place.”

Sandra sat down on a rock, enjoying the fresh breeze blowing her hair back. A large golden eagle caught a thermal and emerged over a ridge, dwarfing the smaller red-tailed hawks circling below it. “Why does going into other dimensions mean going back in time?”

Ryan stood on the edge of the cliff. “You see that eagle out there?”

“Don't kill it,” Alex said.