David Walton - Supersymmetry

Sandra left the house and closed the door behind her, then spoke into her phone again. “Is there anyone else there at the lab with you?”

“No. Why?” Angel said.

“Send me the GPS data from your phone.”

“Um, okay. Done.” She could hear the confusion in his voice. “Does that mean you’re coming?”

“Yeah. One more thing. Can you clear away anything within about five meters of where you’re standing?”

“Um, it’s pretty clear already.”

“Pretty clear?”

“Nothing but a folding chair, which I just slid out of the way.”

“Great. Now walk five meters away yourself, and don’t move.”

“This is really weird, Sandra. Are you watching me or something?”

“Did you do it?”

“Yes. How long do I have to stand here?”

Sandra smiled. “Not long at all.”

Sandra materialized in the University of Pennsylvania robotics lab. Angel, standing five meters away, leaped back with a shriek and crashed to the floor, knocking over a folding chair with a clatter. Sandra shrugged. “Sorry,” she said. “Did I startle you?”

He looked up at her from the ground with an expression of utter astonishment. “Where did you come from?”

“My parents’ house. It’s about twenty miles west of here, in Media.”

“No, I mean, just now. Were you hiding in here?” He looked up, examining the ceiling tiles above her.

She laughed. “Nope. I just teleported right in. That’s why I needed the coordinates. And why I asked you to stand aside.”

“You…”

“Teleported.” Sandra was enjoying this, despite the seriousness of the situation—or maybe even because of it. “I’ll tell you all about it. But you wanted to tell me something, too, right? Which should we do first?”

Angel stood shakily to his feet. “I think we’d better start with you explaining how you just did black magic in my science lab.”

The lab’s interior was two stories high, and most of the space was taken up by a central cage, no more than a wooden framework wrapped with tightly stretched mosquito netting. The inside of the cage was entirely empty, except for a series of cameras and motion sensors affixed at regular intervals. Outside of the cage, the room was cluttered with metal folding chairs, ladders, scraps of wood and piping, tablets, wiring, and card tables piled with random electronics. Sandra saw a few surprising items as well: hula-hoops, brightly colored beach balls, and marching-band batons.

“Okay, fine. Watch. This is the technology my sister was working on.” It was supposed to be super-classified, Sandra knew, but she wasn’t a government employee. No one had sworn her to secrecy. If she wanted to show off for Angel and tell him all about it, she’d do as she pleased. Sandra looked inside the wood-and-mesh cage and estimated the distance. Teleporting this close, she wasn’t too worried about making a mistake. She disappeared and reappeared in the middle of the empty cage. To her, it seemed as though the entire room had suddenly shifted. Angel was still staring at the spot she had been standing a moment earlier. “Hey,” she said. “Over here.”

Angel turned and saw her, his face incredulous and a little frightened. “Is this really happening?”

“There’s more. Soldiers with this technology can walk through walls, dodge bullets, even rip an enemy’s gun out of his hands from across a field. They’ll be practically invincible.”

“What’s the catch?”

Sandra teleported back so she was standing right next to him again. “The occasional massacre of a stadium full of people.” She kept her tone light, but she felt a pain in her throat like she was swallowing a rock. “You asked if it was a quantum weapon that destroyed the stadium. You weren’t too far off. Only it wasn’t a person who pulled the trigger.”

She told him the whole story. She hadn’t intended to go into her whole childhood and the events of fifteen years ago, but he was such an intent listener that she just kept talking. Besides, he seemed at least somewhat familiar with her father’s murder case and the public claim made in court that there had been two versions of him. And he nodded at everything she said, no matter how outlandish.

“You’re really taking this in stride,” she said.

He laughed, a little nervously. “This isn’t the first crazy thing to happen to me today.”

She wrapped up her story with an explanation of how she had split into two, and the probability wave had never resolved. “So, my sister is really me,” she concluded. “There are two of me.”

Angel shook his head, dismissive. “That’s ridiculous.”

“Ridiculous, but true,” she said.

“No. Ridiculous and false.”

“Angel, I—”

“I’m not talking about your story. I’m talking about your claim that your sister is really you. That’s observably false, and to claim otherwise is just semantics. Even identical twins of the normal stripe start out as a single zygote. No one says they’re really the same person. As soon as you split, you became two people. Different.”

“But we share the same memories of growing up. I’m one possibility of how I turned out; she’s another. She’s what I would have been if just the slightest things had been different. And… well, there’s always the possibility that the probability wave could resolve, and we would become one person again.” She said it lightly, but the dread of considering that possibility gave her a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach.

“Yeah, well, that’s really odd,” Angel said. “I admit it: you’re a weirdo. You’re not the only one, though. I have six toes on my left foot. That’s like one in three thousand. Very odd, but I’ve learned to cope. Want to see?” He reached down as if to untie his shoe.

She laughed in spite of herself. “I’ll pass.”

“You’re different people,” he said again. “It’s who you are now. The past doesn’t matter.”

She was quiet for a moment. “You had something you wanted to tell me,” she said.

“Right,” he said. “Well, it’s kind of less impressive than teleporting around the lab.”

“Let me hear it.”

“I’ll have to show you instead.”

Angel scooped up a tablet and tapped a series of commands. The lab filled with a whirring noise like a swarm of bees, the same as Sandra had heard from Angel’s cases in the stadium parking lot. “Come with me,” he said.

She followed him through a gate in the mesh wall into the cage. He opened a black case, and six quad-copters rose out of it in eerie precision. “These weren’t at the stadium,” he said, raising his voice to be heard over the hum. “I’ll show you these first, so you can see the difference.”

At commands from his tablet, the copters snapped into various formations: a horizontal line of six, a two-by-three stack, a rotating ring. They moved to their new positions quickly and precisely, often only inches apart, with no collisions, or even last-minute swerves. Each seemed to know exactly where the others were going to move, which she supposed made sense, since it was surely the same software controlling all of them.

“Now watch this,” Angel said. He went out of the cage and returned with a handful of hula-hoops, batons, and tennis balls. He tossed a hula-hoop in the air, and all six copters flew through it, quick as lightning, before it fell back into his hand. He threw two at once, and they did the same. Then he tossed a baton in the air, end over end, and one of the copters caught it, balanced vertically on top of a portion of its frame that extended up between the rotors. It hovered there, adjusting its position back and forth slightly to keep the baton balanced, for all the world like a vaudeville performer with a push broom on his nose.