David Walton - Superposition

She considered that for a moment. “Okay,” she said.

“Okay? That’s it?”

“I don’t love Mom more than I love you, either,” she said. I glanced at her sidelong, but she was smiling. “I’m good, Dad. Thanks.”

We met Jean at Einstein’s Brain, a classic American restaurant near the NJSC, which featured cheap food, red vinyl seating, and more pictures and paraphernalia from the great physicist than I had seen anywhere else, even at the Einstein Museum on Nassau Street. They didn’t actually have a piece of Einstein’s brain at the restaurant, though I knew there was one on display at the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia, about ten blocks from the court building where I was on trial.

Jean had dark circles under her eyes, and her hair looked like it hadn’t been brushed, but she put a hand on my shoulder and gave me a compassionate smile.

“How are you holding up?” she asked.

I shrugged. “We’re getting through. How are you? You look tired.”

“I’ve been up late working on your trial,” she said.

“Thanks,” I said. “I hope it’s not taking you away from your family too much.”

She grimaced. “To tell you the truth, Nick and I aren’t doing so well.”

“Oh, Jean. I’m sorry to hear that,” I said. “I hope it’s not because of the trial.”

“No, nothing like that. We just don’t see eye to eye anymore.” She waved a hand dismissively. “It’s an old story. But look at you!” Jean hugged Alessandra and exclaimed over how tall she had grown. “I hope my daughter grows up to be as lovely as you,” she said.

I remembered Chance and what Nick had said at their house, and I wondered how much of the tension between Jean and Nick was due to their daughter’s condition. “I’m sure she will,” I said.

We settled down at a table. Jean bought a “Relativity Reuben,” and Alessandra and I both chose the “Black Hole Burger.”

“What about the trial?” I asked. “What secret strategies have you and my double been planning together?”

Jean seemed a bit relieved at the change in subject. She related the difficulty of explaining quantum physics to a lawyer—“like teaching knitting to a sea turtle”—and her concerns about getting a jury to understand it, much less believe it.

“You can convince them,” I said. “What about the footage from Alessandra’s viewfeed I sent to Sheppard. Is he going to use it?”

Jean shook her head. “No, he’s not planning to.”

Alessandra looked up from her burger. “Why not? Then they could actually see the varcolac; they’d know that Dad’s story is true.”

“He doesn’t want to bring up the varcolac in testimony at all. He says the science is hard enough to swallow,” Jean said.

“But it’s part of what happened,” Alessandra said.

“It has nothing to do with Brian’s death, that we know of,” Jean said. “And Terry’s afraid that if we show it, we’d lose the jury entirely. They might just refuse to believe it, and dismiss everything the defense has to say after that. It’s like people’s home videos of alien abductions. Would you believe it, if you were on the jury?”

“Well, what’s the strategy, then?” I asked.

“Terry says the best way to win a murder trial is to have an alternate theory. A way that someone else could have done the crime that fits the evidence just as well as the story the prosecution is telling. If you can do that, then there must be a reasonable doubt that the defendant is guilty, because it’s equally possible that the alternate person is guilty.”

“So who’s the other person?” I asked.

“Brian himself.”

I made a face. “He didn’t commit suicide,” I said.

“Actually, I think it’s the best explanation,” Jean said. “He split, and there were two of him. Brian’s always been pretty self-centered. So one of him figured the only way to guarantee his own survival was by killing the other.”

I was skeptical. The version of Brian in my car had seemed honestly surprised that his double was dead. In fact, he didn’t seem to realize that he even had a double. Brian was an accomplished liar, however—all those years of trying to juggle multiple relationships with women had taught him that—so I supposed I couldn’t be sure.

“Listen,” Jean said. “I knew Brian, well enough anyway. He was egotistical, self-absorbed, vain. He was in love with himself.” I thought that was a bit harsh, but I let it slide. “He would have done anything to save himself,” she continued. “Even shoot someone else. Even if that someone else was himself.”

“So you think you could stand in front of yourself—the same face you see in the mirror every day—and pull the trigger?”

“It’s not unreasonable. Trust me, people will go to any length to secure their own survival, or the survival of someone they love. Things they don’t want to do, things they would never normally do. They’ll do whatever it takes.”

Alessandra stood with a sudden scrape of her chair. Her face was mottled red.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“I’m just going to the bathroom,” Alessandra said.

“Alessandra, she didn’t mean…”

She walked away without listening. When she was out of earshot, Jean said, “Is she okay? Did I say something wrong?”

I sighed. “When the varcolac attacked, Alessandra saw it kill her mother, and she ran away, straight out of the house, without warning Claire or Sean,” I said. “She thinks she’s a coward. It probably saved her life, but she thinks it makes her a terrible person.”

Jean looked stricken. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean…”

“It’s okay. You weren’t even talking about her.”

I ate the last bite of my burger, which was actually pretty good, black hole or no. A poster on the wall advertised the restaurant’s coffee while explaining Brownian Motion. I had tried their coffee before, however, and knew better than to try it again.

“There is one more alternate theory Terry has, in case the one with Brian doesn’t fly,” Jean said.

“Who’s the murderer in that one?”

Jean shrugged. “You are.”

I almost spilled my soda. “What?”

“Think about it,” she said. “It’s all about reasonable doubt. If you killed Brian, then the version of you on trial couldn’t have done it. How can the prosecution prove that it was him and not you?”

“But we’re the same person,” I said. “We will be the same person again. Besides, I didn’t do it.”

“When do you think your split with the other Jacob started?” Jean asked.

“Don’t go there. It wasn’t until I left the house after my family was killed. The day after Brian died,” I said.

Jean was implying that maybe I had killed Brian—that the split had occurred much earlier than I thought and my double had killed him while I was home with my family—but I dismissed the thought. What reason would even a different version of me have for doing such a thing?

“The question is, what can I do now?” I asked. “I want to understand what happened, but I don’t know where to start. Have you seen any more of Brian’s research notes? Anything that would explain more about the varcolac or what Brian discovered before he died?”

Jean shook her head. “I’ve been all through his things,” she said. “Terry insisted on getting all Brian’s smartpads back from the police in the discovery process, and I’ve been going through them all with a fine-toothed comb. There’s nothing of significance. What we need is the Higgs projector. Brian’s letter that had all the programming circuitry on it.”

“They were both destroyed,” I said. “The varcolac took one version from Brian and the other from Alessandra and disintegrated them. Though…” A thought struck me with a surge of adrenaline.