David Walton: Supersymmetry

“But just enough?”

“Just enough. Theoretically.”

Dhaka.

The stress was getting to her. “Where are we?”

“What do you mean?”

“The cities!”

He checked. “Fifteen destroyed from the list. That leaves twenty, until he reaches New York.”

Cairo.

“Nineteen now. Keep talking.”

Alessandra took a deep breath. “Okay. What we would need—if we were actually going to do this—was access to the super collider. We’d have to repeat an experiment that was done last year, in which a collision was made with sufficient energy to send Higgs singlets back in time. Only, we’d have to do it under our own special parameters, so that it precisely interfered with the particle the varcolac sent back to destroy the stadium.”

Tianjin.

“Great,” Angel said. “Let’s do it.”

Alessandra threw her arms in the air, exasperated. “We can’t do it. We don’t have access to the super collider, and we don’t know anything about the particle the varcolac sent back. Even if we did have both of those things—along with a team of mathematicians—we’re talking a lot of very complicated math to send the particle back in time with that kind of precise aim. It’s impossible.”

“If I can get you access, can you do the math?”

She stared at him. “Aren’t you listening to me?”

Bangkok.

He spun, pointing at the machines around him. “Look at where we are. The access and the data is all right here. We can control the collider, and we can pull all the data we need from the logs.”

“But it’s a classified government lab! It’ll have state-of-the-art security, encryption, the works. I don’t have a password. Do you? We would need Ryan or Nicole to get us in. Nicole is almost certainly dead, and if you haven’t noticed, Ryan isn’t being too helpful at the moment.”

Bangalore.

“Remember how many discussion board responses you got when you started querying about the stadium data? We bring the problem to the community. There are people out there who would give their right arms for a chance to help us access this system,” Angel said.

“They live in the cities. They’re dying. They have bigger problems.”

“Exactly. And they know this is happening, but they don’t know why. We’ll tell them we can stop it, and they’ll help, I promise you. No system is invincible. Especially one with so much reliance on physical security to deny access.”

Lagos.

“But we can’t stop it. Those people are going to die, no matter what!”

“There’s no time to explain the particulars to them. We need their help. So I’m asking you again. If I can get you access, can you do the math?”

Hong Kong.

She paused, trying to stay calm and think clearly. What choice did she have? “No, I can’t do the math,” she said. “Certainly not in this much time, and maybe not ever. But I’ll try.”

Angel retreated into his eyejack environment, eyes flicking rapidly as he hurried to engage the help of software systems experts from around the world. Alessandra started to write some equations on the board, but quickly realized that it was the wrong approach. She couldn’t do this by herself. It wasn’t Alex’s mathematical skills she needed right now; it was Sandra’s ability to get answers from a web community. There were scientists in every country of the world who tracked the NJSC’s experiments and studied the resulting data. Maybe not as many as computer geeks, but they were out there. She needed their help. As much as she could get.

Bogotá.

She pulled up her own eyejack display and started accessing the communities of physicists she had either met at conferences or heard of through her work. How many of them were now dead? Or fleeing for their lives out of whatever major cities they lived in? Physicists weren’t generally found in rural settings; they needed the resources of a city to thrive.

She named her post “Need urgent help to stop nuclear attacks,” and started writing.

Ho Chi Minh City.

she wrote.

She waited. A response came quickly from Hyderabad, India.

she wrote back.

She waited. There was no reply.

Hyderabad , her news feed said.

No! Alessandra shouted and pounded the table in front of her. She should have killed Ryan Oronzi when she had the chance, just thrown him out of the plane, or else just throttled his fat neck. Though she knew it wasn’t ultimately Ryan who was doing this. If Ryan had died, the varcolac would have found another willing pawn. But that didn’t mean she could forgive him.

A few more physicists and mathematicians responded to her call, from Munich, Boston, Kyoto, Berkley, Melbourne, Zurich, smaller cities that might outlast her. But none of them were up to the task. Few of them thought such a thing could be done in time, and those that did fell to arguing with each other over the best mathematical approach.

Lahore.

Time was ticking away. They might have a little more time than she did, but it wouldn’t matter. Once they had the answer, they would have to use the NJSC to produce the effect. Not even CERN had the power to accelerate particles to the necessary speeds for this.

Tehran.

“I’m in,” Angel crowed. “I told you they could do it.” His face was alight, but just as quickly he sobered. “We lost quite a few along the way.”

Alessandra synced her eyejack system with the network and made a quick assessment. Angel had done it. She had access to everything. Now all she needed was the math.

She started spinning up the electromagnets and the field generators, even though she didn’t yet have the parameters to use. A heated argument flared up between a researcher at Caltech and one from Zurich, disagreeing over the sign of a tensor in one of the equations. Even at the end of the world, professional rivalries clashed enough to strike sparks. Alessandra didn’t have time to let them fight it out. This wasn’t working.

Dongguan.

“Only eight cities to go,” Angel shouted. “How are we doing?”

“We’re nowhere,” Alessandra said. “I’ve got nothing. It isn’t possible.”

a message said. It had no routing source, in fact no metadata of any kind to say where it had come from.

Alessandra wrote.

Alessandra stared at the words, astonished. Angel said Ryan had killed her. If this was really her, it couldn’t be good. she wrote.

The words had no inflection, but Alessandra could sense the bitterness in them.

Baghdad.

In other circumstances, Alessandra might have laughed. Jean had wanted an existence beyond her body, and she had achieved that. Instead of leaving humanity behind, however, she was trapped inside human machinery. The good part was, if anyone in the world could figure out the math needed to aim a Higgs singlet correctly, it was Jean Massey.

Alessandra wrote.

Wuhan.

But wait. Jean had to understand what she was doing. If this particle successfully went back in time, it would stop the varcolac, but at the cost of this entire timeline. She wouldn’t need the world network anymore. She would be back in prison. Was that what she wanted? Alessandra supposed it was better than being dead, which was her only other alternative. Besides which, at this point, it didn’t matter. Alessandra had to trust her.

Jean wrote. A rush of equations flew over the line. Alessandra reviewed them. The equations looked sound. More than that, they were brilliant. If there was anything wrong with them, it was more than she could see.

Hanoi.

Deep underground, the electromagnets powered and a particle stream started making the rounds, driving the thirty mile racetrack at nearly the speed of light. Alessandra loaded the equations into the computer.