David Walton - Supersymmetry

The Falk creature waved its hand, but the girl was unaffected. Instead, she used the projector to teleport a chunk of rubble from the floor to a position directly over the creature’s head, where it fell, knocking it to the stage floor. The audience members were frozen, afraid to move. Ryan kept walking backward. He reached the edge of the stage and backed down the stairs.

The rubble exploded, and the creature rose again, its suit jacket white with concrete dust, an inhuman growl coming from its throat. Ryan decided to abandon subtlety. He turned and ran.

At the end of the room, his tablet beeped and the screen came to life. He gritted his teeth as it cycled through its boot-up sequence. Out on the floor, the girl sent one of the Secret Service agent’s pistols flipping out of his lifeless hands in a graceful arc toward her. She caught it and turned it toward the creature, firing live rounds now instead of rubber. The creature blurred, but the bullets struck home anyway, ripping into its chest and out of its back. It growled, apparently unfazed, although blood streamed down its body, red tracks coursing through the white dust. It lifted its hands, and the Altay battle tank, still parked on the demonstration floor, lifted into the air and flew toward the girl.

Ryan frantically stabbed at his tablet, injecting a fresh protocol into the system controlling his baby universe. The tank lurched and fell back to the ground, shattering the floor and sending dust and debris flying, though none of it reached the girl or the crowd. The eyeless creature shuddered, and its face cleared. Secretary Falk, his eyes suddenly normal, stood amid the carnage, looking down in shock at his bloody chest. He blinked once before collapsing to the floor.

Alex stood in the shooting stance Sean had taught her years before, the Secret Service agent’s Sig Sauer P229 still locked in her two-handed grip. The varcolac was gone. She didn’t think she’d killed it, but at least it hadn’t killed her, and most of the people in the warehouse were still alive.

Then it occurred to her how this scene would look to others. The demo area was brightly lit, but the lights over the audience were dim. She doubted very many people could have made out Falk’s missing eyes. They would have seen an exchange of gunfire, after which she was still standing with a gun in her hand, and the Secretary of Defense was dead on the floor, lying with his security detail in the growing puddle of his blood. Alex caught Tequila’s gaze from the control booth. Her face was frozen in shock.

The demo was being recorded, but what would the video show? The cameras were angled to cover the stage. Who would believe that she had been firing not at Secretary Falk but at a quantum intelligence that had taken over his body? It wasn’t credible. No one would understand. All they would know was that Falk was dead, and she had pulled the trigger.

She threw the gun on the floor and ran.

“You were dead,” Sandra said. “I saw your body.”

She sat with both of her parents in their living room. The two of them sat on the sofa together, her father leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, her mother pressed close to him and holding him possessively. “I’m here now,” he said. He opened his hands as if to demonstrate his presence. “I was tired, so I left in the eighth inning to beat the traffic.”

“Show me your wallet,” she said. He raised an eyebrow, but he pulled it out of his pocket. It was black, leather, and absolutely identical to the one that Sandra produced from her bag. She shouldn’t have taken it from the scene, but this situation went beyond normal police procedure. She opened it and produced his driver’s license. Her father pulled its duplicate out of his own wallet. Her mother took them both and held them next to each other, comparing.

“This happened once before,” Sandra said. “You know what that means.”

He shrugged. “Maybe. A quantum event, at the very least. A probability wave left unresolved.”

Her mother gripped his arm. “Which means it could resolve again, right?”

“At some point,” her father said. “Or maybe not, as Sandra knows well enough.”

“You’ll forgive me if I don’t find that very comforting.”

“There’s nothing we can do,” her father said. He was acting very calm, but Sandra could tell he was rattled. He was putting a brave face on it for her and her mother. “I don’t know what the future will bring, and that’s as much as any of us can say.” He stood. “And now, Sandra needs to get some rest.”

“I’m fine,” Sandra said. Though even as she said it, she felt the weariness of the night overtaking her, both the long hours without sleep and the emotional strain.

“Nonsense; you’re asleep on your feet.” Her father wrapped her in a ferocious hug. He’d been a boxer in his youth and still had the size and strength, though he was softer than he must have been years ago. She relaxed into his embrace, feeling some of the worry and stress slip away. With no other cops to see her, she let the tears come. Her mother joined them, pressing a kiss into Sandra’s cheek.

Her parents led her upstairs to her old bedroom.

“If it is like fifteen years ago…” she began, but her father put a finger to his lips. “Sleep,” he said. “Then we can talk.”

She lay on the bed, blue uniform and all, and let him close the door. She was so tired. From down the hall, she could hear her parents in hushed argument, her mother’s tones of fear and worry, her father’s of reassurance. Their voices faded away as she drifted off to sleep.

She woke, terrified, with explosions ringing in her ears. A dream of blood and gunfire, barely remembered, that faded quickly. She focused on the pink sheets, the Delia Sharp poster on the far wall, the smell of home. Her parents’ house. Her old bedroom. She was safe.

A moment later, the memory of the shattered stadium and the thousands dead hit her consciousness, and she knew that no one was really safe, not ever. What time was it? How long had she slept? A Miss Kitty alarm clock on the bedside table read 11:37, but she didn’t know if she could trust it. She doubted anyone had used it in years.

Her phone said 2:45 PM. She checked her mail, and found a message from her sergeant, detailing a new shift schedule for the next several days. All officers except for a tiny contingent were to report to the stadium site in a twelve-hours-on, twelve-hours-off rotation. She was due back again at 6:00 PM.

There was another message, this one from Angel Gutierrez. He had completed his survey and forwarded her a link to the raw data. She sat up in bed and started paging through it, trying to make sense of it. There was way too much to look at on the phone’s tiny screen, so she shifted the output to her eyejack lenses. Her entire field of view became her output screen, as if she were sitting in a large, empty room with the data projected on all the walls.

Math had never been her strong suit—that was Alex’s forte—but she had grown up with a physicist for a father. He’d insisted they both take calculus in high school, although by that time Sandra had known she was heading for a career in law enforcement. Not much call for math in her field, unless you were a forensics egghead, which she most decidedly wasn’t.

What she wanted most was to make detective and work homicide, but that possibility was many years away. She would have to do her stints on patrol first, learning the ropes and proving herself smart enough—and hard enough—for the job. She’d made the mistake of voicing her goal out loud at the academy, prompting knowing smiles from her teachers. “Everybody thinks that as a cadet,” they said. “Give it a few years on the force, and see if it changes your mind.”