David Walton - Superposition

I looked at Sean, noting that this living version of my son had his short arm on the left side, just like I remembered. This was my Sean. I tried to put a confident tone in my voice. “How are you doing, Sean?” I asked. “Are you holding up?”

He gave me a brave smile. “I’m okay, Dad.”

“Claire? How are you? Did those creatures hurt you?”

Claire started to cry. “I’m fine, Daddy,” she said. “Just scared.”

“I’m here, too,” Alex said. I turned my attention to her, surprised by the bitterness in her tone.

“Of course, you are,” I said, and then I realized that this was Alessandra, not the Alex I’d spent the last few months with. This was the Alessandra I’d always dismissed as a lost cause, preferring her more stable, smarter, and prettier older sister. I realized now that the alienation in that relationship had been mostly my doing. I looked at Alex, who Jean was just now bringing out of unconsciousness.

Alex pulled herself to her feet and saw the rest of us. “The wires are electrified,” I said quickly, before she could find out the hard way. “Don’t try to step over them.”

Alessandra looked Alex up and down. “Who on Earth is that?” she asked.

It was tough to explain, but Alessandra took it better than I expected. Of course she did—she was Alex, too, only I hadn’t taken the time to really know her. Once introductions were made, the two girls couldn’t stop talking, both with a kind of awe that they were talking to someone who was, in essence, themselves.

They seemed to be able to forget, for the moment, that we were trapped underground as the prisoners of a monster. It wasn’t so easy for Elena. She looked at me, horrified. “Which one is the real her?”

“Both of them are real. Both of them are Alessandra.”

“How is that possible?”

“It’s what Alessandra would have been if she’d been kidnapped, and what Alessandra would have been if she hadn’t been kidnapped. Either one could have happened, only in this case, they both did.” I prayed she wouldn’t ask why there was no second Claire or Sean. We would have to cover that eventually, but I didn’t want to have to tell her now.

“But… they can’t both just keep on being Alessandra, can they?”

I shook my head. “No, they can’t. Eventually they’ll converge back into one person again.”

The fear in Elena’s eyes sparked into anger. “Did Brian do this?”

“Indirectly.”

“The man who kidnapped us, then?”

I sighed. “It’s actually not a man. It’s a quantum intelligence, a member of another intelligent race that we’ve been calling varcolacs.”

“An alien?”

“Of sorts.”

“What does it want?”

“I don’t know. It has a vastly different experience of life than we have. I don’t know what it understands or thinks of us, and I have no idea what it wants.”

There was a disturbance in the air. We all felt it. Claire cringed and covered her face. A moment later, the varcolac stood over Alex, regarding her with its sightless face. Alex froze, staring up at it, her body rigid. It smiled. It was the first time it had made a facial expression of any kind, and it was hideous, stretching back its lips and showing far too much of its teeth.

“We don’t have anything you want,” I said. “Please let us go.”

The varcolac didn’t reply. It reached down, lifted Alex by her upper arm, and twisted. The move was casual, but Alex screamed, and we heard bone snapping.

“Leave her alone!” I shouted. I hurled myself toward her, thinking that with enough momentum I might break through the electrical fence and reach them, but it exploded in sparks and threw me back again. I tried to get up again, but my muscles twitched with the pain, and I slipped back down. I cast about for something to throw, anything that could get past the wires, but there was nothing.

“Please let her go,” Elena said. She stood at the edge of the wires, pleading with the varcolac. “What do you want from us?” she asked. “This is my daughter. Please.”

“Jean!” I said. “Do something.”

“I’m sorry,” Jean said. “I was just trying to help you. I didn’t mean for it to end this way.”

“It doesn’t have to end,” I said. “You can fight it, can’t you? Hurry!”

Jean shook her head sadly. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I never meant to hurt you. But I have to think of my own family, too.”

This wasn’t making sense. “What are you talking about?”

“I have to think of my daughter,” she said. She gripped the smartpaper, turned just like the varcolacs had done, and disappeared.

I stared after Jean in open-mouthed astonishment, but I didn’t have time to think about it. The varcolac dropped Alex on the floor and walked across the wires toward Elena.

“No!” I shouted at it. “Come on, fight me! I’m right here!”

Elena cowered away, but the varcolac advanced on her with inhuman speed and grabbed her by the throat. It lifted her as if she weighed nothing and thrust her in range of the bundle of wires separating my square from hers. An arc of lightning shot up from the wires into her body. She screamed and arched her back, her arms and legs jerking uncontrollably while the lightning danced and crackled. She kept screaming and screaming, the sound wrenched out of her body with barely a chance for her to take a breath.

I shouted, too, a bellow of helpless rage, as I tried to reach her, casting about for some weapon, desperate to find a way through, although I knew that even if I could get through, there was nothing I could do against such an enemy. Finally, I dropped to my knees, crying, begging the varcolac to let her go. Why was it doing this? What did it want?

The varcolac opened its hand. Elena’s scream died and she fell motionless to the floor. I shouted her name, but I could see her chest rise and fall. She wasn’t dead.

The varcolac was intelligent; I knew that. It must have a motive, though it was possible we would all die without ever knowing what it was. Was it experimenting with matter-based life forms just to see what would happen? Was it punishing us for destroying its time bubbles? Was it looking for the Higgs projector? Maybe such a surge of power would be beneficial for one of its kind and it was trying to help Elena by giving her more energy instead of trying to kill her.

I couldn’t think straight. I felt dizzy, perhaps from the electric shock, and I thought I might fall over. For a brief moment, I had a vision of driving through a pine forest in a tiny car that was not my own. Where did that come from? Was I succumbing to fear and exhaustion? I shook my head. I couldn’t check out now; my family needed me. I didn’t know what to do, but I couldn’t just do nothing.

Elena still didn’t move. Alex rocked back and forth slightly, her eyes unfocused. The others huddled in their squares, frozen or crying softly.

As suddenly as it had come, the varcolac disappeared.

My house was more than twelve miles away from the prison, and Swarthmore College, where I worked, a few miles beyond that. It was too far. I needed somewhere I could go quickly to change my clothes, somewhere that wouldn’t be the first place the police would look for me.

The Granite Run Health and Fitness Club was located on Pennell Road in Lima, about five miles from the prison in Thornton. It was close enough. Before my arrest, I had run two and a half miles every morning—the distance from my home to the college—and I frequently ran in the five kilometer races that local municipalities held. I wasn’t built for speed, but I could cover five miles in a little more than half an hour. I decided that I was better off racing the police than sneaking around trying to avoid them, so I took off running as fast as I could.