David Walton - Supersymmetry

“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.

Sandra 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.”