David Walton - Superposition

I raised an eyebrow. “The truth isn’t important?”

“Look,” Terry said, running a hand through his hair. “I’ve been a defense attorney most of my career. People hate me. They think I don’t care about truth, that I just try to set criminals free because the money is good. They don’t understand when I say that the truth is irrelevant to my work, just like it’s irrelevant to the prosecutor’s work. My job is to present all the evidence and arguments that may demonstrate your innocence. The prosecutor’s job is to present all the evidence and arguments that may demonstrate your guilt. The judge makes sure we play fair, according to the rules. But ultimately, it’s the jury who decides what really happened.

“It doesn’t matter to me, as far as my job is concerned, whether you killed Vanderhall or not. It also doesn’t matter to me if he killed himself. But the fact that there’s another explanation that fits the facts; that is important. Maybe you killed him. Maybe somebody else did it. The point is, there’s more than one workable explanation, and that means the case against you isn’t proven. It doesn’t mean you’re innocent, but it does mean that, under our law, you can’t be convicted.”

I thought about it. “I see your point. It still seems wrong to try to convince the jury of something we know isn’t true.”

“I’m trying to get you out of jail,” Terry said, exasperated. “I’ll use every trick I can.”

“Why don’t you use my double as the scapegoat?” I asked. “Show him to the jury, take his fingerprints, show that the physical evidence that matches me could match him just as well.”

“It won’t work,” Terry said.

“Why not?”

“For one thing, you’re the same person. If I understand all this, you’re just momentarily following different paths. You’re not twins. He’s you.”

“But what if he killed someone, and I didn’t? Should I be held responsible?”

“For another thing,” Terry said, “you’re going to resolve again, right? Eventually? What then?”

“We should at least bring him out,” I said. “Let everyone see that there really are two of me. It would make Jean and Marek’s testimony much more believable.”

“We’ll bring him out. Trust me on this,” Terry said. “Testimony is like a fireworks display. You can’t use up all your explosions at the beginning. You have to orchestrate it, slowly gain momentum until all your points come together at the end, in a huge finish. You have to save your biggest surprises for the end. It gives the other side the least opportunity to knock your argument down or distract the jury. We’ll put your double on the stand, but not until the last minute. You’ll go first, to tell your story, and we’ll give Haviland all the rope in the world to hang himself. Then, we bring out your double. The proof that it’s all really possible.”

“As long as my probability wave doesn’t resolve before then.”

Terry yawned hugely. “True enough,” he said. “If that happens, there’s nothing I can do.”

“Court is now in session for the People versus Jacob Kelley, the honorable Ann Roswell presiding,” the court officer bellowed.

Alessandra and I sat in Colin’s house, watching on the stream as my trial finally began. I had begged Sheppard to let me come and sit in the courthouse, but he had flatly refused. I told him I could disguise myself, that no one would ever know, but he wouldn’t hear of it. All it took was one person to recognize me, and the game would be up. I argued that we should let the world know right away—hold a press conference and tell the truth—but Sheppard said that was a sure way to lose. Roswell hated to have the course of her trials manipulated by the media, and she was likely to sequester the jury and ban me from the courtroom.

So I sat and watched and tried not to let the talking heads drive me into a rage. They all seemed to assume my guilt, and they reveled in the bloody drama of a man murdering his friend. They speculated endlessly about my missing family as well, mostly to wonder where I had buried the bodies. The cameras zoomed in close on my double as he sat at the defendant’s table in stony silence.

We heard the opening statements, and then Officer Peyton described coming to our house after Brian fired at Elena. When I heard my wife’s voice on the 911 call, I clutched the arms of my chair nearly hard enough to snap them. It brought an unwelcome memory of Elena holding on to me while we waited for the police to arrive, how she felt in my arms, how she smelled. I wasn’t sure I could keep watching, but I remembered that the other Jacob didn’t have a choice. If he could do it, I could do it. I stayed in my seat.

To distract myself, I studied Brian’s code. It really was incredible that he could have written so much of it by himself, but I figured that once he realized what it could do he probably worked on the software day and night. The varcolac had destroyed the other versions I knew about, and since nothing like this had been found in Brian’s office, I was probably holding the only existing copy. To be safe, I replicated the whole thing onto a fresh sheet of smartpaper.

After the trial finished for the day, Alessandra and I went to the movies and watched two films in a row, drowning our stress in giant Cokes and buckets of buttered popcorn. I slept fitfully, dreaming of Haviland’s pointing finger and of a pitiless jury announcing a guilty sentence. The next morning I was exhausted, but we turned the trial on again anyway and heard Officer McBride testify about matching the gun with the bullets in the bunker. Despite the importance of the outcome, the pace of the trial itself was tedious, and I caught myself drifting off a few times. That is, until the testimony of Sheila Singer.

The camera caught my double’s obvious shock, and I felt the same way. Singer had seen Elena and the kids—three kids, even Alessandra—alive! After all the searching and wondering, here was actual proof that they had split. At least an hour after I had seen them dead, they had still been alive.

Alessandra gripped my hand.

“It might not mean anything,” I said, though my heart was pounding against my chest. “They’ve been missing for months. They might just have resolved shortly after this woman saw them.” In fact, as I said it, my excitement started to fade. Of course, they must have resolved. They couldn’t possibly have been driving around New Jersey for these past several months, looking for me. Their probability wave had collapsed, Alessandra’s to the version of her sitting next to me, and the others into their dead bodies.

“That doesn’t make sense,” Alessandra said, when I voiced my doubts. “Their bodies disappeared. They couldn’t have resolved to those versions.”

“Then where are they now?” I asked.

Her eyes searched mine, looking for hope. “I don’t know. But there’s a chance, isn’t there?”

I stood. “Come on.”

“Where are we going?”

“To the NJSC. To find out for sure.”

As I drove across the bridge to New Jersey, Alessandra said, “Even if they are alive, they’re not my family, are they? They’re hers . My double’s.”

“It doesn’t work that way,” I said. “Your double is you. You are your double. If she’s really out there, then when the probability wave collapses, you’ll resolve into a single entity again.”

“Meaning either her or me.”

“No, mathematically speaking, the probability wave includes all possibilities between you and her. The two of you represent the opposite vectors of the Bloch sphere, the edges of the spectrum. So you could resolve into a mixture of both of you. Are likely to, in fact.”