David Walton - Superposition

“Though what?” Alessandra asked, coming back to the table. Her eyes were red, and I guessed she had been crying in the bathroom.

“The letter,” I said gently. “There was a letter from Brian that came to the house the day the varcolac came. When I was at the house, I saw the varcolac take it from you and destroy it. But that wasn’t in your viewfeed.”

“I don’t understand,” Jean said.

“Alessandra split briefly,” I said. “One of her left the house; the other stayed. I saw the version of her that stayed, and I saw the varcolac take the letter from her. But this Alessandra was never there.” I turned back to Alessandra, trying to keep my voice calm. “So what happened to the letter? Did you have it when you left the house?”

“You mean, after it killed Mom, and I ran away?” Alessandra’s voice caught, and I thought she might start crying again.

“I don’t blame you for that,” I said. “But I need to know. What happened to the letter?”

Alessandra was very still, remembering. “I saw it on the coffee table, and I opened it. Nobody was explaining anything to me, and I thought maybe I could find out for myself. When Mom came in to tell me we needed to go, I shoved the letter into my pocket and pretended to be reading a fashion magazine.”

“So then, when the varcolac arrived…”

“The letter was still in my pocket,” she said. “I didn’t know it was important.”

My heart was racing. “So it split with you,” I said. “That means there was a third version.”

“Wait a minute,” Jean said. “If the varcolac could sense the existence of this letter from miles away and go teleporting to your house just to destroy it, how could it not know that there was another version of it out there?”

“I don’t think it did sense it,” I said. “When it killed Brian, it assimilated him. It drew him into itself, and then its face looked a little bit like Brian’s, as if it had incorporated Brian into itself. I think after that, it knew everything Brian knew. Brian knew a copy of the letter had gone to my house and where my house was, so the varcolac knew, too. But it didn’t know everything.”

“Well, what happened to the third version?” Jean asked. She leaned forward. “Where is it now?”

Alessandra shrugged. “I don’t know. When I remembered about it later, I looked, and it was gone.”

I let out a breath, disappointed. “It resolved,” I said. “It split, and then it resolved again.”

Jean shook her head. “It shouldn’t have. Alessandra resolved with her other version because their paths became close again. But the letters followed different paths. One was burned; the other got away. It’s still out there somewhere.”

“You mean, it just fell out of her pocket? That’s just as bad. We’ll never find a letter that fell out of her pocket somewhere in the neighborhood a month and a half ago.”

“We’ll never find it if we don’t look,” Jean said.

I hadn’t been back to our house since the day I found Elena and Claire and Sean dead, and it felt surreal to pull into the driveway now, just as I had done a thousand times before. It was a bit of a risk to be here. We didn’t know our neighbors well, but there could be trouble if anyone saw and recognized me. I could have let Jean come by herself, but I was up and doing things now; I didn’t want to go back to waiting for someone else to do something for me.

I stepped over the threshold, feeling a strange sense of displacement. Elena’s body had lain right there, empty and broken, but there was no sign of her now. I walked through the house in a daze, seeing familiar objects as if they were unfamiliar, remembering laughter and life along with the still agony of death. Which was true? When all this was over, what would remain?

While we were here, there were some personal effects I wanted to collect from upstairs. I prowled through the rooms, which looked as cluttered and normal as if we had never left. Alessandra went into her bedroom and emerged with a battered stuffed rabbit, given her the day she was born. In Sean’s room, I saw the Legos and the army men and remembered the half-finished spaceship and how his shortened arm had been on the wrong side.

In my room, I saw the bed where Elena and I had slept and made love, and I remembered Claire lying there with her mirrored T-shirt. Were my children truly dead? Or were they prisoners of the varcolac? Was there a difference? I sifted through the accumulation of things on our dressers, but I found nothing but painful reminders of our old life.

Back downstairs, we all met up again. “So where should we look?” I asked.

“Why don’t we just take it in order?” Jean suggested.

We walked through the events of that day from Alessandra’s perspective, choreographing her movements from the moment she picked up the letter from Brian. We moved from the living room into the kitchen. I remembered sitting there with Elena, watching Brian’s gyroscope spin. Anything left in that room would already have been found by the police, but we looked anyway. The trashcan was empty. I traced my hand along the countertops and browsed halfheartedly through the cabinets. It was odd to see a variety of canned goods and boxed cereals and snacks there, as if the tenants were out for the day and would soon return.

“Where to now?” Jean asked.

“Outside,” Alessandra said. Something in her voice made me look back. Her teeth were clenched.

“You did the right thing,” I said. “You couldn’t have done anything if you’d stayed.”

She relaxed slightly. “You can’t know that,” she said.

“Actually, I can know it. Because the other version of you did stay and didn’t do anything except give up the letter to the varcolac. Because you ran, we have a chance here.” I opened the back door and held it open for her. “Lead the way.”

Alessandra stepped out ahead of me, and Jean and I followed. We spread out across the backyard, searching the ground for signs of paper. There had still been snow on the ground that day, but the yard was dry and brown now. If the letter had been dropped out here, it would have blown away long ago.

We reached the fence. “You climbed over here?” I asked.

Alessandra nodded. I ran my eyes along the base of the fence. A stunted bush grew right against the chain link, and some vines twisted their way up. Under the bush, I saw a scrap of white. A piece of paper, dirt-encrusted and half-buried. I bent over and picked it up, shaking it to knock loose the dirt. My name was written on the front.

“This is it,” I said. It had been lying out here for weeks, however, soaked with rain and snow, and then drying out in the sun. “I’m not sure what’s left of it.”

Back inside, at the kitchen table, the three of us crowded around it. In most cases, a piece of smartpaper could withstand a little water, but this had been exposed to the elements for months. I smoothed it out against the table, and then entered the password. The letter came up on the screen, still legible, although dark lines crisscrossed the paper along the fold lines, where the paper had been the most damaged. I entered the second password, and the programming circuits sprang into view.

I took some time familiarizing myself with them, with suggestions and questions from Jean. Alessandra, unfamiliar with coding principles, lost interest in the conversation and started raiding the cabinets for something to eat. I discovered that there were core, indecipherable modules that must represent the equations provided to Brian by the varcolacs. Built around those modules, however, was a great deal of code I could understand, presumably added by Brian to interact with and control the core modules.