David Walton - Superposition

He waited again for a reaction, but I didn’t give him the satisfaction.

“The ghost just disappeared,” Peyton went on. “But it was like turning more than disappearing, you know? Like going around a corner, but there was no corner there. Have you ever seen anything like that?” He sounded desperate for me to validate his experience, to confirm he wasn’t crazy.

“You didn’t think this was important to mention in your report?”

“No, of course not. What would I say, that I saw a ghost in your back yard? I wasn’t even certain I saw it.”

“Don’t give me that. You were certain. But in your testimony in court, you told the jury that your search turned up nothing, no evidence of any other person besides Elena and me who could have fired that gun. You lied to save yourself from ridicule. At my expense.”

“How would it have helped you if I admitted to seeing a ghost? They wouldn’t even have let me testify.”

“What you saw was what we have been calling a varcolac ,” I said. “And maybe the prosecution wouldn’t have called you as a witness, but the defense might have. You want me to tell you that you aren’t crazy. Why weren’t you willing to return the favor?”

“Look, I was just doing my job. I came; I took your statements; I filled out my report. When it comes down to it, I don’t know that you didn’t shoot your friend. Or that your twin didn’t.”

“Neither of us did. I hadn’t been near the NJSC in years when Brian died. If he’d bothered to take my name off his lock when I stopped working there, the police never would have come looking for me. They would never have connected me to this crime at all.”

“That’s not true. They had a tip that put them on your trail before forensics ever deciphered the lock.”

“A tip? You mean somebody actually called the New Jersey State Police and gave them my name in connection with Brian’s murder?”

Peyton nodded. “McBride made it seem in the trial like it was his smart police work that made the connection between you and the weapon and the murder, but that wasn’t really the case. An anonymous caller made the connection, and then Media and New Jersey started talking and matched the gun with the bullets. It was only afterward that they connected your name with the lock, and it seemed pretty cut and dried from there. The evidence was fitting together.”

“Except that I didn’t do it.”

“The jury’s supposed to decide that. That’s how the system works. We just try to collect enough evidence to be confident enough to make an arrest.”

“And then you only testify in court to the parts that make me look bad.”

Peyton stood up. “I’m done here. I’m sorry I came. If you really didn’t kill him, I hope the jury finds you innocent.”

He stood and motioned at the guard to unlock the door. The guard came in, but just as Peyton was about to leave, I cleared my throat.

“Listen,” I said, “the man you saw: it wasn’t really a man. It was a different kind of being, a creature made up of quantum entanglement. If you ever see it again, just run.”

“Man? What man?”

“The ghost you saw in my back yard.”

“It wasn’t a man.”

“What? I thought you said—”

“The ghost I saw was a woman.”

Jean, Alex, Marek, and I found a dirt path leading from the highway into the pine forest that must have been used by construction vehicles when the accelerator tunnel had first been dug. I moved the chain while Jean drove the car through, then I reattached the chain on the other side. This allowed us to park in a less conspicuous place, off the main road, where passing troopers were less likely to spot an abandoned car. I draped a few fallen pine branches over it, just to make sure.

This was the emergency exit that Marek and I had come through before, but I still needed GPS to find it. The ground was covered with needles, and the pine trees all looked the same. I had hoped to take the freight elevator down, but it needed a key to start, so we were stuck with the stairs, all twenty stories of them. Marek and I were fine, but Jean was panting when we reached the bottom, and Alex was breathing hard, though she hid it well. It wasn’t going to be easy to get everyone back up top again.

I led the way toward the CATHIE bunker itself, listening for any unexpected sounds. The door to the bunker was taped off with yellow crime scene banners, which I tore away. Inside, the trash and broken instruments and glass shards had been cleared away, tagged and stored as evidence. Most of the surfaces had been dusted with aluminum powder in the search for fingerprints. I took a step inside. Nothing happened.

The others followed me in. There was nothing left to find here. There was still some equipment and most of the tables and wires, but the resonator experiment had been destroyed, and the police had certainly already found anything of interest. Against a table leaned two push brooms that the police must have left behind. Certainly Brian had never swept the floor, but it was clean now. Marek picked up one of the brooms and started sweeping it through the dust on the floor, but I doubted he’d find anything.

The mirror was still on the wall. I peered into it. It showed me my reflection. I studied the eyes, but they were just my eyes.

“This is where Brian first made contact with them, using the resonators as a kind of quantum radio,” I said. “At first, they were helpful, providing him with the information for the Higgs projector, but at some point he must have harmed or betrayed them.”

“Why do you say that?” Jean asked.

“Well, the varcolac has been pretty hostile. The first thing it did when it came out of the mirror was to destroy the resonator equipment. Maybe that was random destruction—even exploratory destruction, like a toddler dropping a glass to see what will happen—but maybe not. Maybe Brian had previously trapped it and forced it to do what he wanted.”

“What, by drawing a pentagram on the ground and burning candles?” Jean asked.

“I’m just theorizing.” A sudden surge of frustration made me pound both my fists on the tabletop and yell.

Both Jean and Alex jumped. “What?” Jean asked.

“I have no idea what to do here. We’re just spinning our wheels. We can’t recreate Brian’s work, because it’s destroyed. We can’t summon a varcolac, and even if we could, we wouldn’t know how to learn anything from it. We don’t know anything at all.”

“Let me see the Higgs projector,” Jean said.

“What are you going to do?”

She pulled a folded sheet of smartpaper out of her pocket. “I’ve been dabbling with some code,” she said. “Diagnostic only—it might help us understand how Brian used the projector to summon the varcolac and keep it at bay.”

I hesitated. The potential dangers of fooling around with the projector were serious, but it wasn’t reasonable for me to keep it solely to myself. Jean had been a faithful friend through all this, and there was no questioning her quick intelligence. If she thought she knew a way to use it to find out more than we knew now, I trusted her. I handed her the projector.

She synched the data on her smartpaper to the projector, and I could tell by the way her eyes flicked back and forth that she was interacting with it through her lenses. I was amazed that, given the brief look she had gotten at the programming before, she could have remembered enough of the interface to write subroutines of her own.

I felt the now-familiar tugging sensation in my chest, and I knew the projector had been turned on. “What are you doing, Jeannie?” I asked. I hoped she had more of a clue than I did. The device held incredible power, perhaps even the ability to summon and control a varcolac. But what was it doing, right now, to the integrity of my DNA, or my cellular structure, or my identity? To the basic laws of our universe? We just didn’t know.