David Walton - Supersymmetry

The body of a dead marine lay at his feet. His gun was under his body and tied with a strap. Inaccessible. But on his belt there was a KA-BAR combat knife, sharp and made for killing. Ryan knelt and slid it out of its sheath. Alex stood with her back to him, distracted by the oncoming scientists.

She wouldn’t laugh at him anymore.

“Sandra,” Angel said. “You should take a look at this.” He was watching the feed from the module her father had planted on Alex’s phone.

“I can’t,” she said. “It puts me too close to her. Next time, I might merge with her and not come back.”

“They’ve found Jean,” he said. “At least, I’m pretty sure it’s Jean. She’s glowing—I don’t know if she’s really glowing, or if there’s something different about her that the quantum field monitor… oh no.”

“What is it?”

“She just killed someone. She waved her hand, and somebody just fell over.”

Sandra stood and gripped his arm, wanting to see, but not wanting to see. “Was it Alex? Or Sean?”

“I don’t think so.” He clenched his fists, his face pale. “She just killed another one. They can’t hurt her at all. She’s just murdering them.”

“We have to teleport there,” she said. “We have to stop her.”

“We can’t do that.”

“Yes, we can! If we have her phone, then we have her coordinates.”

“It’s too far! The error term at this distance would be on the order of half a mile. We could end up on the other side of the city, or a thousand feet in the air, or buried in rock. The one place we won’t end up is in that room.”

Sandra was crying. “It’s going to kill Alex and Sean. We have to try!”

“And even if we miraculously showed up right next to her, what would we do?” He said it gently, sadly.

“We could teleport them out of there.”

“They have Higgs projectors. If that would work, they could do it themselves.”

“Turn it off, then,” she said.

“What?”

“Turn it off. If we can’t do anything about it, I don’t want to know. I don’t want you to watch her die.”

“Wait.” His eyes were intense, watching the scene unfold. “There’s somebody else there.”

“Who?”

“He… he killed her.”

“Killed who? Killed Alex?”

“No, killed Jean. I think. That or she teleported away just as he appeared there. She’s gone, at any rate.”

Sandra couldn’t stand it anymore. She plugged back in to Angel’s viewfeed and immersed herself in the scene. The picture was grainy and gray and incomplete, the faces a blur, but she knew immediately who each person was. Tequila and Wilson and Cash and Rod were dead. She had never met any of them, but she knew their names. She knew Tequila’s sister was getting married this fall, and that Rod’s wife was six months pregnant. Alex knew them, and so Sandra did, too.

She saw Ryan Oronzi, their savior, standing in triumph where Jean had once stood. And she saw the scientists, their eyes erased, advancing. They had to get out of there. Why didn’t they just teleport away? Though she could immediately answer her own question from Alex’s knowledge: their projectors were no longer working. Besides, they had come there for a purpose. Jean was nothing, just a tool. It was the varcolac that had to be stopped.

She saw Ryan kneel at a marine’s side and pull at his belt. What was he doing? CPR? But then he stood again, and Sandra saw the knife in his hand. The metal of it glared brightly in the quantum display, standing out over the dullness of other materials. Alex didn’t see it. Her attention was caught by the approaching scientists. Sean was standing in front of her, ready to fight them. Sandra silently called to them, look, look, look! Alex did look, then, but it was too late. All she had time to see was Ryan’s mad, deranged eyes just as he swung the knife up and into her heart.

Sandra screamed. She shouted Alex’s name. There was blood everywhere, soaking Alex’s shirt and pants, flooding onto the floor. Alex collapsed. She raised no hand to stop her fall. She lay where she fell, her face on the concrete, her eyes staring wide. Sean was at her side in a moment, calling her name, but there was nothing he could do. He tried to put pressure on the wound, but with every breath, more blood poured out of her.

She was dying quickly. Alex was dying in front of her, and Sandra couldn’t even hold her hand. It was impossible, unreal. It was a grainy, gray-on-black image with no soul, utterly distant from events in Slovenia. At the same time, it was as starkly real to her as if it had been projected on fifty-foot screens in living color. It couldn’t be happening. Alex couldn’t die. She was her other self.

Sandra screamed and cried to her, though of course Alex couldn’t hear. Or maybe she could. Their eyes seemed to connect, and Alex mouthed something Sandra couldn’t understand.

A memory came, unbidden, of a party, fifteen years earlier, when Alex had first returned from the hospital. She had been in a wheelchair then, still lame from the effects of her electrocuted spine, and at the time they didn’t know if she would ever be able to walk again. They had loved each other so much then. They could finish each other’s sentences, finish each other’s thoughts almost. They were two halves of the same whole. When had the idea that they might be forced back together become so unbearable?

What had gone wrong? How had such resentment built up between them? Of all the people for her to avoid, why had she chosen her other self? And now Alex was dead, or nearly so. Sandra had never even said goodbye. She had never said she was sorry for unfair words, for time together cast aside. Now it would just be… her. Just Sandra. It did not seem possible.

She would not allow it. Sandra closed her eyes. She felt Angel’s hand on her back, but she didn’t acknowledge his presence. She knew what she had to do.

She reached out, hesitantly at first, less familiar with the concept than Alex had been. She tried to remember what it had felt like in the funeral home, when multiple versions of Alex were collapsing back together, and she had felt the same pull. She tried to recreate it.

Together again. She was Alex, and Alex was her. She was Alex and Sandra, Sandra and Alex. They were one person.

It wasn’t working. She felt a surge of panic. She didn’t know how to do this. Alex was bleeding out on the floor, and she didn’t know how to make this work.

Alex , she thought. My name is Alex. And then: Alessandra . My name is Alessandra Kelley. I am a police officer and also a physicist. I love investigating crimes, and I love science. I love to seek out, to hunt down, to discover the truth. I am two sides of the same coin. I am Alessandra.

And then it happened. There was no flash, no fireworks, no rush of energy or sense of invasion. It was so subtle she almost missed it.

She opened her eyes.

“What happened?” her mother asked. “Is Alex okay?”

Alessandra smiled, a little sadly. “Yes,” she said. “I’ll be just fine.”

Ryan stood over Alex’s dead body and grinned. He had done it. He had killed both Jean and Alex, and now he was the only one left who could warrant the varcolac’s attention. He could feel it now, entering his mind, giving him that growing sense of clarity and intellect. It had accepted his sacrifice. It had found him worthy once more.

He and the varcolac were one now, in purpose and power. Nothing could stand in his way. Barely anyone was left alive in the world who even understood what was happening, never mind who had the power to stop him. He sensed something else, too; the varcolac was stronger. It was breaking free, breaking more fully into this world. There was no stopping it now.