David Walton - Supersymmetry

She rounded a corner and felt a gun at her head. A man grabbed her by the back of the neck and shoved her face against a wall, but not before she got a glimpse of his blackened face and gray fatigues.

“I’m an American,” she said. The soldier turned her around and held her at arm’s length, taking in her appearance, processing the sound of her voice. “I’m Sean Kelley’s sister,” she added. The expression on the soldier’s face would have been comical in any other situation.

“Team Alpha,” the soldier murmured. “We have a situation at entry point one.”

“Copy that,” a familiar voice replied. “Do you need help?”

Alex grabbed the radio. “Sean,” she said. “It’s me.”

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 21photons that entered his space every second, but there could be as many as 10 50total 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.