David Walton - Superposition

“But you never found their bodies.”

“No.”

“Did it ever occur to you that what my client told you about them might be true?”

“What, that he found the bodies in his house, and then they vanished into thin air before anyone else saw them? I don’t know where you’re living, sir, but on this planet, bodies don’t just up and disappear.”

“We’ll see about that,” Terry said. “No further questions.”

“Mr. Haviland?” the judge said.

“Your Honor, I am finished with this witness as well,” Haviland said with a self-satisfied smile. “In fact, I have no more witnesses to bring. The prosecution rests.”

I found Terry Sheppard’s office a few blocks from the courtroom in a row of townhouses that had been almost completely renovated as lawyers’ offices. You could hardly walk down the street without banging your head on a shingle. I wondered how anyone chose a single lawyer from the crowd. I had no trouble picking because, apparently, I already had. I’d never met Terry Sheppard before, but according to the news stream, he was my lawyer.

Several of the adjoining offices shared a secretary, a heavy woman with curly gray hair and a large flower pin. I told her I didn’t have an appointment, but that I was pretty sure Mr. Sheppard would see me right away. Her expression said she’d heard it all before, and she invited me to take a seat, but she made the call. Moments later, a man with a huge mustache opened a back door with a worried expression.

“Jacob?”

I stood. “Mr. Sheppard.”

“What on Earth? You’re supposed to be in prison. Has there been… some change? Were you released?”

“Not released,” I said.

With a furtive look around the waiting room, he motioned for me to follow him, which I did. His office was very nice, with leather-upholstered chairs and cherrywood bookshelves stacked with law texts. A childishly painted porcelain mouse, half-hidden on his desk, gave a personal touch to an otherwise professional room. A framed photograph showed a round, smiling woman and a little girl, perhaps six years old, who I guessed was the source of the mouse.

“How did you get out of prison?” he asked.

“I was never there.”

He narrowed his eyes. “I met you there for the first time yesterday. You paid a retainer’s fee and hired me to defend you. A job that will be made much more difficult if you have somehow slipped away unnoticed.”

I chose a leather chair and settled myself into it. “Don’t worry. If you call the prison right now, you’ll find that they still have custody of Jacob Kelley.”

He stared at me, trying to make sense of this. I had pity on him. “Think of me as Jacob’s twin brother. That’s not quite right, but it will do for now.”

Sheppard’s eyes flicked right and left, and he blinked several times. I realized he was eyejacked. In a few moments, he said, “It looks like Jacob Kelley has no siblings at all. Mother and father deceased, closest relative an uncle, living in South Philadelphia.” His eyes focused on me again. “No twin brothers. So, I think I’ll go ahead and make that phone call.”

A few more eye blinks and a pause, and he said, “Yes, this is Terry Sheppard. I’d like to inquire about the status of an inmate. Yes. Could you transfer me to the officer in charge of the ward? Thank you.” Another wait, during which Sheppard drummed his fingers on the desk. “Yes, thank you, I heard a report that my client, Jacob Kelley, received a black eye in a fight in the yard, and I’m concerned it may affect his scheduled court date. Well, if you can see him, could you just confirm that his face is not injured in any way? No? Glad to hear it. I appreciate it, Officer. Thank you for your time.”

Sheppard squinted at me and rubbed at his mustache.

“Clever ruse,” I said. “You made sure they could see him without giving the idea that you thought he might have escaped.”

“And unless the guard is blind or lying, Jacob Kelley is still in prison. Which means that, despite the evidence of my eyes, you are not Jacob Kelley.”

“On the contrary,” I said. “I am Jacob Kelley.”

“I don’t appreciate being jerked around,” Sheppard said. “What do you want?”

“I want to meet him. I want to meet the other Jacob.”

Sheppard popped the lenses out of an old pair of glasses and lent me a New York Yankees baseball hat as a crude attempt at disguise. I wasn’t terribly worried—I didn’t think the prison guards probably paid too much attention to visitors’ faces—but Sheppard seemed agitated. I told him to relax. They couldn’t very well arrest another man as Jacob Kelley when they already had one behind bars.

The truth was, I was more nervous about meeting a duplicate of myself than I was about the guards. The idea had grown on me for several days, but for the other me, it would be an immediate shock. I wasn’t sure how I felt about there being another me sharing space in the universe. Would I even like myself?

The version of myself that I was about to meet saw the man with no eyes in the CATHIE bunker, found Elena and Claire and Sean dead just as I did, fought with the man in our living room, but didn’t run from the police. He hadn’t been to see Colin, and he almost certainly did not know there were two of us.

The guards made no comment about my appearance and ushered us into a glass cage with a silver table and six yellow chairs. After a few minutes of finger drumming and foot tapping, they brought in a man in handcuffs and an orange jumpsuit with a strained, worn look around his eyes. It was me.

The guard unlocked the handcuffs and left the room, closing the transparent door behind him. The other Jacob was staring at me, mouth open.

“Do you know this man?” Sheppard asked.

“Looks like he could be my twin brother,” Jacob said.

“You were caught in the varcolac’s probability wave,” I said.

His mouth opened even wider. “Superposition,” he said. “Just like Brian.”

I nodded. I held up my left hand. “See the wedding ring?”

“Why is it on your right hand?”

“It’s not,” I said.

“We’re on opposite sides of the Bloch sphere.”

“Exactly,” I said.

“This is weird.”

“You’re telling me.”

We both laughed in uncanny echo.

“Will someone please tell me what’s going on here?” Sheppard asked.

“A Bloch sphere is a concept in quantum mechanics,” Jacob said. “It’s a geometrical representation of the uncertain state of a particle—say an electron—that’s spinning both up and down at the same time.”

“How can something spin up?” Sheppard asked.

“It’s the right-hand rule,” Jacob said. “Take your right hand and curl it in the direction of the spin.” He held out his hand in a loose, thumbs-up gesture. “The direction your thumb is pointing is the direction of the spin vector.”

“Only his is backward, from my perspective, because to me, that’s his left hand,” I said. I held out my right hand and curved the fingers the same way, causing my thumb to point down instead. “See? We represent both states at the same time.”

“Which of you is the real one?” Terry asked.

“Neither,” I said.

“At least not yet,” Jacob added.

I eyed him warily and caught him returning the look. It was oddly thrilling for another person to understand me so quickly and so completely. The problem was, it wasn’t another person. It was me, and when all this was over, only one version of me could survive. Was this what had happened to Brian? Had he killed himself to make sure his version was the one that lived?