Supersymmetry (25 page)

“I can help. I need a Higgs projector,” Alex said.

“No time,” Angel said. “Just stay here.” He strode across the field toward the prison, calling his quadcopters to him. He was nervous about sending a quadcopter after Sandra, because of the risk of killing her, but he settled for sending it in several feet above her last location, near the ceiling. It arrived and spun, and Angel saw her, lying on the floor, her head bright with blood. No!

He teleported into the cell just as the first explosion hit. It was like having his ears boxed by a giant. The concussion knocked him down, and he couldn't hear, couldn't tell for a moment which way was up. He thought at first he had made a mistake and materialized inside a wall, that this was what it was like to die. But no, his body was whole. Something had happened.

Ears ringing, he got his bearings and saw Sandra, unconscious. He was no doctor, but it looked bad. There was blood everywhere. It made his head spin and his vision narrow. He had to get her out of here. He put his arms around her and teleported, just as a second blast went off, throwing them through the air. They appeared back on the hillside just as another sound like an explosion went off behind him.

Angel looked back at the prison. It was as if a bomb had gone off. Large portions of the structure had collapsed, including one whole wall of the original limestone building. Police were rushing toward it, guns drawn, calling for backup.

Alex rushed over. “What did you do?”

“Nothing.” Angel didn't understand it. Oronzi had predicted a varcolac attack, but this destruction didn't seem anything like what had happened at the baseball stadium. There was no time to figure it out. Angel summoned the quadcopters back to their case. Two of them didn't return, presumably destroyed in the prison. Sandra needed to get to a hospital. He held out a hand to Alex. “We need to go.” She took his hand. He sat on the quadcopter case, gripping it with his knees, and grasped Sandra's with his other hand, hoping he could bring them all at once.

He closed his eyes and teleported. When he opened them, however, he was not back in his lab, as he had intended. He looked around in confusion. He was in a large open space: the central yard of the prison complex. The building and walls around them were demolished, and debris blocked any easy exit. “What did you do?” Alex shouted. “Get us away from here!”

Angel closed his eyes and tried again, double-checking the coordinates for his lab. They didn't move. He tried the top of Hawk Mountain; again with no result.

“Oh, no,” Alex said.

Angel looked. Out of the wreckage, a jumpsuited figure was crawling. She hauled herself to her feet and walked unsteadily toward them. She had no eyes.

“Get us out of here!” Alex shouted.

“I can't. It's not working.”

They backed away from the approaching varcolac, but more prisoners were coming from the other direction, all of them without eyes. Some of them were clearly injured, blood streaming from injuries, or with an arm hanging limply. They pressed on, closing in from all directions. There was no escape.

“You'd better fix it quick,” Alex said.

“I think the varcolac is blocking it somehow.”

Angel flipped open the box, and his quadcopters lifted buzzing into the air. He controlled them through his eyejack interface, indicating places in space where they should hover, forming a circle around the humans. The varcolac-controlled prisoners raised their hands, sending out pulses of heart-stopping energy, but the quadcopters reflexively shielded against it, causing flashes of silver light.

The prisoners, now several dozen strong, bellowed at the same instant, shouting the varcolac's frustration. It attacked again and again, but the quadcopters swerved and blocked. Fortunately, the energy to create the shield was being drawn from the fabric of the universe itself, but the energy to keep each copter flying was a standard chemical battery. And Angel knew they couldn't have much power left.

Not only that, but the clock display in the corner of his vision read 05:43, only three minutes before the time Oronzi had predicted the varcolac would completely obliterate the prison. Whatever they did, they would have to do it fast.

“Give me control,” Alex said.

“What? No.”

“I won't be able to explain in time. Just give me some eyejacks.”

Angel had never met this woman before, and now she wanted him to hand over his only possible weapon? But she was on his side, and she apparently knew more about how all this crazy physics worked than he did. Besides, she looked like Sandra. Angel dug out the extra pair of contacts they had brought for Alex and handed them over. The copters flashed again as the prisoners drew closer. Two of them were starting to sag in the air, their movements growing sluggish. Angel handed over his phone and sent the signal to synch it to the second pair of contacts.

“Two and a half minutes,” he said.

“Just hold on to both of us and keep trying to teleport,” Alex said.

Suddenly, instead of ten quadcopters, there were twenty. Then forty. The air was full of them, their buzzing grown to a roar. The copters surged forward, light flashing around them like a lightning storm. “This worked in the funeral home,” she said. “Let's hope it works here.”

Angel held Alex and Sandra's hands and closed his eyes. It was better not to look. He could still see all of his eyejack controls, and so he tried to teleport to the lab, just like she said. Nothing. Their coordinates didn't change. Two minutes left.

A loud crash made him open his eyes despite himself, and he saw one of his copters burning on the ground. Several of the prisoners were motionless on the ground, however. The copters were everywhere at once, reacting to any attack by splitting and covering all possibilities. That didn't stop a number of them from being destroyed. But when they managed to surround a varcolac-controlled individual with their energy shields, it would drive the varcolac out, leaving the human shell lifeless.

The copters were effectively holding back the prisoners, but that didn't help them teleport out of there. “What now?” Angel shouted over the buzz. “We need to get out of here!”

“You have any ideas?” Alex shouted back.

He didn't. Running was out of the question, not with Sandra unconscious on the ground next to him. Alex was improving her technique, knocking them down faster, but it didn't matter if the varcolac was just going to destroy the whole prison complex.

He had to do something. It seemed futile, but Angel wasn't going to spend the last minute of his life feeling sorry for himself. He brought up the teleportation module and opened the source code. There were thousands of lines of software, none of them familiar. He hadn't written this code. But he didn't need to read it all. Instead, he tried to teleport again, executing the module in a debugging mode, which allowed him to see each line of software as it executed. It was a common strategy for finding a coding bug, since it sometimes demonstrated that the software was executing different lines, or with different values, than the programmer expected.

With only one minute left before annihilation, Angel didn't expect to find anything, but he did. He saw it almost immediately. There was a line in there, an impossible line. It was a simple if-check that had no earthly business in this piece of code. And it wasn't a bug. The line couldn't have been put there by mistake. It was sabotage.

He removed the line and recompiled the module. Thirty seconds to go. It was time for goodbye, one way or another. Angel closed his eyes and focused on his lab.

CHAPTER 21

A
lex knew they weren't going to make it. Her skill with the quadcopters was improving as she fought, holding the prisoners back, but it didn't matter. If Ryan's timeline was right—which she had no doubt it was—they had only seconds until the whole place was destroyed. Even if she killed all the prisoners, there was no reason to believe that would allow them to teleport again.

Not only that, but she was increasingly distracted by the presence of Sandra so near to her. With so many probability waves forming and collapsing in the near vicinity, many of them under her control, she could feel the tenuousness of the standing wave between them. They were just an unresolved quantum state, a single person with two possible futures. It was becoming increasingly clear to her that the wave stayed unresolved simply through their desire to keep it that way. Which meant that, just as she had reincorporated her own doubles back into herself at the funeral home, she could reincorporate Sandra into herself just as easily. They could become one person again, become Alessandra Kelley, in a heartbeat.

But she couldn't think about that now. If they both died here, as seemed likely, it wouldn't make any difference whether their probability wave resolved or not. And if by some miracle they lived, she was pretty sure they both wanted to keep on living separately instead of risking losing themselves in a combined whole.

The prisoners kept coming. It felt almost like a video game, in which she killed over and over again without thought. But of course, they were already dead, weren't they? The varcolac was killing them, not her. And when, in less than a minute, the whole prison went up in multidimensional smoke, it wasn't going to matter who had killed whom. They would all be dead.

She was about to apologize to Angel for failing, when he made a cry of astonishment.

“What is it?” she asked, but his eyes were closed, and he made no answer. A moment later, the wreckage of the prison vanished, to be replaced with a cluttered robotics lab.

Alex stared at him. “You fixed it! How—”

“Sandra first,” he said.

Sandra still hadn't regained consciousness, and her hair was matted with blood. “Teleport us to an ER,” Alex said.

“I don't have precise coordinates. We could be dropping her from several feet off the ground, never mind the risk of intersecting a car or another person.”

“Call 911, then!”

“I already did.”

Angel's lab was in West Philadelphia, only blocks from three different university hospitals. An ambulance was there in minutes, and she was in the Jefferson emergency room minutes after that. Alex worried that there would be trouble, that someone at the hospital would recognize Sandra from the news bulletins about Alex, and call the police.

“There's nothing we can do about that,” Angel said. “She's not the sister who's wanted for murder, and she has friends in the police department. She should be okay. What she needs most is medical care.”

The ER waiting room looked newly refurbished, with plush green chairs, racks of neatly organized magazines, and a play station for kids with toys, puzzles, and books. The screens mounted high on the walls showed news images of the demolished prison with the words, “Second terrorist action in two weeks.”

The prison now looked like Citizens Bank Park, the pieces scattered in a complex spiral, none of which were bigger than a chair. The image being shown was from above, from a news helicopter, and the similarity was obvious.

“So . . . how did you get us out of there?” she asked.

Angel shook his head in wonder. “There was a specific line of code in the module. I can't imagine who would have put it there or why, but it was no accident. It instructed the software to stop working at 05:40 today.”

“What?” Alex thought she must have heard him wrong.

“Yep. Hardcoded into the software was a downtime coordinated with the varcolac's destruction of the prison.”

“We were sabotaged? Someone tried to get us killed?”

Angel shrugged. “Looks that way.”

“But who would do that?” Even as she asked, Alex knew there was only one real answer to that question. This was Ryan's software. And he was the one who had known what time the varcolac's attack would come.

“So Ryan tried to kill us?” Angel asked.

“I don't know. But we need to pay him a visit,” Alex said.

Angel took his Higgs projector out of his pocket and held it out to her. “Go ahead,” he said. “I'm going to stay here.”

“But you won't have a projector,” Alex said. They were down to only one, since Jean had stolen Sandra's. “The police are going to be here, you know. Sooner or later, they'll make the connection to Muncy. Probably sooner.”

“All the more reason not to leave Sandra on her own.”

Alex tried to smile, but she was pretty sure it came out wrong. Was he scolding her? Sandra was her sister, after all. Another version of herself. That meant Alex should be the one worrying about her, the one ready to camp out in the waiting room as long as it took. On the other hand, where did Angel get off telling her how to take care of her own sister?

“I have to do this,” she said. “I have to understand this, so next time it doesn't kill her.”

“It's okay,” Angel said. “You've got every cop in the country looking for you. I'll watch her for you.”

Alex relaxed. She could see why Sandra liked this guy. He had an innocent, disarming way about him that meant you couldn't take him too seriously. He was hard to stay mad at. “You're sure?”

“I've got this. You go do the physics stuff.”

Alex smiled for real this time. “Okay. See you soon.”