David Walton - Superposition

When they finally subsided, Marek gave me a hand and hauled me to my feet.

I dropped back into the pew, still breathing hard, and looked at Marek and Colin. Neither man said anything.

“What do I do now?” I asked finally. “My wife and children are dead. I can’t go home. I can’t go back to work. If I turned myself in, I’d never be able to explain my actions to the police.”

“Not all of your children are dead,” Colin said.

Any response I might have made was cut short by a scream from the basement.

I jumped up so fast I bashed my hip against the pew in front of me, but I still beat Colin down the stairs. Alessandra was sitting up in bed, clutching the old blanket, her face white.

“What happened? What did you see?”

“A face,” she said. “In the mirror.”

I swiveled and saw a battered shaving mirror hanging from a nail in the wall. “Whose face?”

“It was him. That man.”

“No eyes?” I asked.

She nodded. I put my arm around her, but she remained stiff, her muscles tensed for flight.

“It’s okay,” I said, although I knew it wasn’t.

“Miss Alessandra,” Colin said formally. “Can I get you a Coke?”

“No.”

Marek quietly turned the mirror around to face the wall.

“Can you tell us what you saw at your house?” Colin asked.

Alessandra pulled her knees up under her chin.

“I know you saw your mother and sister and brother die,” he persisted. “It’s hard to talk about. But we want to protect you, and we want to protect ourselves, and the best way for us to do that is to know exactly what happened.”

She didn’t answer.

“Let it go,” I said.

Colin shrugged. “There are two kinds of people. Those who get up and fight, and those who just lie down and accept whatever happens to them.”

I stood at that, ready to throw another punch, but Colin held up a hand, palm raised, and shook his head.

Alessandra glared at him. “I can hear you, you know.”

“So what?” Colin said. “You won’t do anything about it. You’re the lying down kind; I can see that.”

“My mother just died. You’re supposed to be nice to me.”

“Why?”

She made a noise of disgust. “I thought you were a priest.”

“I’m not. I don’t hear confessions, and I don’t preach sermons. I’m more of a missionary to my own tribe.”

“I don’t need your help.”

Colin sat at the foot of the bed. “If my mother was murdered, I’d be angry. I’d make sure the person who did it didn’t escape. I’d find him and…” He trailed off and looked at her expectantly.

She couldn’t help herself. “And what?”

“Turn him over to the police, probably. Or maybe kill him; I don’t know. It depends. But I wouldn’t leave it alone. I wouldn’t say, hey, it doesn’t matter, these things just happen. I’d do something about it.”

“I’m fourteen years old!”

Colin crossed his fingers on his lap. “I killed a person for the first time when I was fourteen.”

She gaped at him. I gaped, too. I had never heard that before. Was it true? Or was he saying it just to get a reaction?

“You did not,” Alessandra said.

“I did.” Colin smiled sadly. “It was a terrible thing. But you listen to me.” His smile disappeared and he bored into her with his clear, blue eyes. “You’re only a victim if you believe you are. You can do anything at fourteen.”

“What do you know?” she screamed at him. She lashed out with her feet, kicking him in the side. “Shut up, just shut up!”

“I know that you can tell your father what you saw. I know you can remember every detail of how this creature moved and reacted. You know what it said, or what it seemed to be after, or what it could do and couldn’t do, and you can tell your father, and he can figure out what this thing is and how to stop it before it kills again. I know you can do that.”

She stood, shaking with rage, her lower lip trembling. “How do you know? You don’t know me.”

“Because you’re a fighter. Unlike your sister Claire, who had everything she ever wanted, you had to make your own place. You fight, just like your father, just like me. I know. I can see it in your eyes. So tell us what happened.”

“I ran,” she said, her voice on the edge of tears. “I ran away and left them all, okay? They needed me, and all I thought about was myself.” She bit her bottom lip.

“Keep going,” Colin said. “Why did you run? What did you see? You can tell us.”

“I can do better than that,” she said. She yanked her phone from her pocket and hurled it at me. I caught it, by reflex, before it hit me in the face. “It’s all there,” she said, and began to cry. “Everything.”

To my surprise, Colin had a pair of eyejack lenses, which he popped out and washed and let me borrow. I wasn’t used to them, and they made my eyes water, but with some copious blinking I could stand to look around. After a few more minutes of fiddling, I even managed to get them synched to Alessandra’s phone, and a menu appeared in thin air, like a scroll unrolling two feet in front of me and hovering there. I turned, and the menu moved as well, a bit disconcertingly, since there was no other indication that it wasn’t a real, physical object. I reached out, almost expecting to feel real paper, but my hand passed through it.

“It’s a bit easier if you sit down,” Colin advised.

I did so, and only then realized how dizzy I was. Besides keeping teenagers connected to their friends, this technology was frequently used in business circles for virtual meetings that appeared to be face-to-face. The lenses might project the image of a coworker or customer into an empty chair at my table, as if he had come to visit, when in fact he was in San Francisco or Seoul or Jakarta. I actually had a pair of lenses at home that had come with my phone, but I had only tried them once before. I found the experience of seeing something that wasn’t there a bit unnerving.

With a little practice, I could navigate the menu by centering my focus on a selection and blinking, though I had a tendency to blink unintentionally and choose the wrong option. I accessed the history of what Alessandra had seen—there were quite a large number of files available, but she kept them well organized, and I cycled through the video until I found the time in question. At first, it started playing in a two-dimensional rectangle about two feet in front of me, as if I were watching the stream. I selected full-screen mode instead, and I was suddenly immersed.

I was back in my house, in the living room, looking at a fashion magazine. It wasn’t like watching a movie on the stream. The picture flicked around as Alessandra moved her eyes. My instinct was to turn my head and look around, but of course, that did nothing but make me feel lightheaded. What was recorded was only what Alessandra herself had seen. I couldn’t change the viewing angle. Colin fitted earbuds into my ears, and I could hear as well.

“Alessandra! Put that down, and go tell your sister and brother to come get their shoes and coats on.” It was Elena’s voice.

The view changed as Alessandra looked up, and there was Elena, vibrant and beautiful and alive. She was just pulling the brown suede coat on over her green sweater. Her forehead was tight with worry and stress. I wanted to reach out and hold her hand, to whisk her away from there and protect her this time. A hard ball formed in my throat and my eyes stung. I coughed violently and shook my head to clear it.

“Where are we going?” Alessandra asked.

“You know that man who was here last night? The police just called and said they found him dead at the NJSC.”