Supersymmetry (32 page)

Ryan couldn't find Alex anywhere. She wasn't in the room that had been assigned to her to sleep. She wasn't in the training center. A soldier said she had gone down the street with all of her old team members to a local pub, but she wasn't there, either. He supposed they could have left there and gone on to sample another pub, but he was starting to suspect something worse. She had left him behind. She had forced him to get on that plane so they could fight the varcolac together, but then she had abandoned him to go on by herself.

Fortunately, he still had access to the logs from his baby universe and associated programs back at the NJSC. Every Higgs projector still ultimately drew energy from there, and so any Higgs projector activity was still logged in that system. He couldn't track her if she was just walking around the city, but if she did any teleporting, he would be able to see exactly where she went.

When he looked at the log, he was astonished. She had left the country. She was behind enemy lines. Not only that, but she had made copies of the latest projector software—including the teleportation and invisibility modules—for her friends on the team from Lockheed Martin. Of course—she had taken them along, but not him. What were they doing?

Ryan looked up the coordinates with a mapping program and found the address: the Jozef Stefan Institute in Ljubljana. It was a physics institute, mostly, though they did some of the softer sciences as well. They had their own particle accelerator there. There weren't many of those in Eastern Europe; most of Europe's accelerators were in Germany, Switzerland, or the United Kingdom. In fact, it was probably the only one in all of Turkish-controlled territory.

Of course. It was obvious, now that he thought of it. The Institute was where Jean would be. The handful of projectors Ryan had given her wouldn't be enough; Jean—meaning the varcolac, of course—would want thousands of soldiers to have projectors. It would want men killing each other at an unprecedented rate. That meant the Turks would need to make a lot more.

Alex had gone to Ljubljana to stop her. She had taken her team along with her, but not him. She hadn't even told him she was going. Why? Because he was competition. She wanted the varcolac all to herself. He had thought her uninterested in such things, but why else would she have left him behind? She wanted to be the One.

But that was rightly him!
He
had made the baby universe.
He
had summoned the varcolac into the world.
He
had traded equations with it and learned its secrets. He had been born for this. But first Jean, and now Alex, wanted to steal it away from him.

He couldn't let that happen. But how could he stop them? Alex was one thing; she was just a human. But Jean had the varcolac on her side. If he teleported away after them without a plan, he was just going to get himself killed.

What he needed was a new weapon. Jean had taken out his Higgs projector as easily as thinking. He could theoretically make a new one, hardened against EMPs, but that would take time and materials, and he didn't have either. There were two options: either he had to have the strength to overpower her or he had to catch her unawares. The former was unlikely, not with the varcolac helping her, which just left the element of surprise.

But how could he surprise a creature who could see every quantum interaction, every electromagnetic wavelength, every particle emitted or absorbed? By itself, he could perhaps fool it. The varcolac had, after all, spent countless years completely unaware of human intelligence and only recently understood just how many humans there were. Particle interactions hadn't even given it a concept of matter, never mind individual human intelligence.

But with Jean, it was another story. Paired with Jean, it understood the significance of the particle interactions on a large scale. It could parse the meanings of interrupted beams of light and radiant energy sources and know that where there were signs of a human body there was a human intelligence.

The invisibility module wouldn't help. It was practically a toy, designed only to absorb and re-emit visible light according to Maxwell's equations. It didn't even stop the infrared signals of his body heat, never mind the countless interactions of radiation across the electromagnetic spectrum. Static electricity, friction, the Brownian movement of displaced air: all of these created a trail of evidence to eyes that knew how to look. He didn't know which of these effects might escape the varcolac's notice and which might be as obvious as a forest fire. His only option was get rid of them all. Instead of a module to hide him from visible light, he needed a module to hide him from reality itself.

In theory, it should be easy. The Higgs field already did the hard work of capturing particles and reconfiguring them according to his software's specifications. For the invisibility module, his software had to solve Maxwell's equations for each photon that came into the field and reproduce it properly on the other side. A reality module would work much the same way, but instead of Maxwell's equations, it would solve Schrödinger's equation for the probability of a particle being present in a region of space. It would reproduce
all
particles, not just photons, essentially rerouting reality itself around him. He would be completely undetectable by any means.

It was a concept he'd been playing with for years, a pet project of sorts. He had the software, fully tested in simulation. There had been nothing really stopping him from using it except the guts to actually try it. Now he had no choice. Unless he wanted to die in obscurity like the rest of humanity he had to challenge Jean and regain his place.

It took him an hour. The real challenge was performance. In daylight, there were roughly 10
²¹
photons that entered his space every second, but there could be as many as 10
⁵⁰
total particles passing through the same space, requiring many orders of magnitude more processing power. The sort of computer that could fit in a phone card was no longer sufficient. Ryan liberated a hardened supercomputer from the military training center and fit it into a backpack. It was oppressively heavy, but it could do the needed calculations fast enough to eliminate any noticeable delay. Of course, Ryan couldn't say for sure what would be noticeable to a varcolac, but it was the best chance he had. He stole an oxygen tank as well, and strapped it to his chest—after all, air molecules would be routed around him just like any other particle.

Now he was as ready as he'd ever be. He plugged the coordinates for Jozef Stefan Institute into his teleportation module. Jean wouldn't get away with this. Not if he could help it.

Alex could tell that Sean was not happy to see her. At first he stared at her with eyes gone wide, as if she were a ghost. Then his eyes turned hard, and she could see the anger growing. “What are you doing here?” he asked, with barely suppressed rage. Alex knew the rage was because he loved her, and he assumed that her presence here meant she was doing something incredibly stupid. And maybe she was. But she also knew things he didn't. And could do things he couldn't.

Instead of answering, she teleported to the far end of the hallway and then back again. He stared at her, his anger dissolving again into astonishment and confusion.

“Let's assume I'm here for a good reason,” she said. “We don't have much time, so listen up. The varcolac is here.”

Sean had personal experience with the varcolac. He had been only five years old when it had kidnapped him, along with their mother and sisters, but she was sure he remembered the experience. He had almost died.

“How do you know?” Sean whispered.

“For one thing, the soldiers pouring into the building have no eyes.”

He cringed. It was like a childhood nightmare come to life. Just as quickly, however, the hard look of an elite marine returned.

The marine who had originally found them, apparently the team leader, asked, “Kelley, what's this about?”

Alex explained as best she could in a few terse sentences.

“It doesn't change anything,” he said. “We do the job, we get out.”

Alex indicated her team. “Let us stay close,” she said. “When you're done, we can teleport you out of here.”

The team leader looked like he was going to object, but then he shook his head. “Fine. We don't have time to argue.” He eyed the wall. “This looks load bearing.” He slapped an explosive onto it and twisted something on its surface. It stuck fast and emitted a tiny whine.

“This way,” he said. Alex followed him, trusting the rest of her team to do the same. “Kelley, is this floor cleared?” he asked.

“Yes, sir,” Sean said.

“Okay. Johnny is dead. Wilson and Cash are holding the stairs. The first floor is overrun. We need to get down to the cellar.

They reached the stairs. Two Marines were holding position there, one behind the other, shooting at any Turkish soldier that turned the corner. The bullets passed right through the Turks, impacting the floor on the other side of them, yet they showed no inclination to climb the stairs.

“Why won't they die, sergeant?” one of them called back, his voice stressed.

“Do you have any spare magazines?” Alex asked.

Sean gave her an odd look, but handed one over. Alex thumbed a bullet out of the top, and then waited for another Turkish soldier to come into view at the bottom of the stairs. As soon as it did, she teleported the bullet into its brain. Its head exploded, raining blood and gray matter all over the floor. Its body fell and didn't get up.

“You did that with the Higgs projector?” Sean asked.

“Newer version. I can copy it for you, but not here.”

“Hand over your spares to Sean's sister and her unit, then follow me,” the team leader said, apparently taking the oddness of the situation in stride.

Wilson, Cash, and Sean all handed over fresh magazines to Alex and her teammates. The team leader charged down the stairs, shouting incoherently, and his men followed him. “Come on!” Alex said.

They hit the first floor on the heels of the Special Ops crew. The puppet soldiers advanced, blasting them with pulses of energy. The Higgs projectors protected them, shielding them with flashes of blinding light.

One at a time, Alex put bullets into the soldiers' heads. It was gruesome, horrible work, spattering all of them with gore, but it was better than dying. “Downstairs!” Sean shouted. “This way!”

They descended into the cellar, a long concrete stairwell three times as deep as any normal basement. When they reached the bottom, they entered a room as large as any gymnasium. The linear accelerator was there, a fat, steel cylinder that spanned the length of the room, connected to a host of machines and computers via a tangle of wires. The cylinder was the vacuum chamber through which the particles flew. At the far end, a giant Van de Graaff generator hummed in its own, larger compartment. A dozen scientists in white lab coats attended the machines.

And there was Jean. Alex didn't wait to see what she would do. She dropped a bullet into her hand and teleported it into Jean's head.

Or at least she tried. The bullet didn't move. Alex tried to send it into the Van de Graaff generator instead, but it sat resolutely in her palm. This wasn't good. She tried teleporting a few feet to her left, but once again, nothing happened. Afraid, she yanked the projector itself out of her pocket. It sat inert, dead, the tiny lights on its surface gone dark.

“Easy to do, once you think about it,” Jean said pleasantly. “A Higgs projector is just solid state electronics, a computer operating a program. It has electrical circuits to fry, just like anything else. A focused EMP will do it. Just a tiny one, right in your pocket.” She snapped her fingers. “Easy. The power of the quantum world is still there, of course. Only you can't access it.”

The door to the stairway behind them slammed shut. “Why are you doing this?” Alex asked. “The varcolac doesn't care about helping the Turks.”

“No, you're right about that. I'm afraid it's not going to help anyone but me.”

“But you're
human
,” Alex said. “Why would you want to throw in with this alien creature? Do you really want to be the only person left in the universe? To have all that blood on your hands? You might live forever, sure, but will that really be worth it?”

Jean's face grew hard. “What did humanity ever do for me? Took my daughter from me. Put me in a cage. Took my life, the few decades that I have allotted to me, and forced me to spend them shut up in a box. Do you know what that does to a person? Watching my precious time tick away, wasted? I have a mind with the imagination to create worlds, and humanity put me in a cage.” Sean reached for a grenade, but she flung it away from him with a gesture. “The varcolac, as you call it, won't put me in any kind of cage at all. It will give me the universe.”

“What about the billions of people who don't even know you? They didn't lock you in a cage. And what about your husband and daughter? Have you even seen them since you escaped? Would you kill them with all the rest?”