David Walton - Superposition

She did a double take when she saw me. “Aren’t you supposed to be in jail?”

“They let me out on good behavior,” I said. “We just need to see Jean.”

“I don’t think she’s here,” Carolyn said. Her desk was right in front of the entranceway. “I would have seen her come through.”

“We’ll check anyway,” I said.

We didn’t knock. I held the door handle down, quietly counted to three, and we rushed in. I had the gun out, but I kept it pointed at the floor. Jean was standing behind her desk, looking down at Chance, who was lying on her desk on top of papers and writing implements. Jean had the Higgs projector and she was manipulating circuitry symbols on its surface. Chance watched the smartpaper, transfixed, occasionally batting at it with a chubby hand.

Nick started walking toward them, but I held up a hand. I didn’t know for sure what Jean could or couldn’t do, but the situation required careful handling.

“You can’t stop me,” Jean said. “Just leave me alone.”

“What are you doing?” Nick asked. “If you don’t want Chance, just leave her with me. I’ll take care of her. You don’t have to have any part of her.”

“I do want her,” Jean said. “That’s what you never understood. You love her defect, her extra chromosome. I love her . I want her to be whole.”

“She is whole, Jeannie. She’s her. She’s Chance.”

“Would you want to have the problems she will have?” Jean asked. “Do you want to trade places with her? You’re being emotional, Nick, not practical.”

Nick took a step forward, pleading. “She needs our emotions. She needs our love.”

Jean’s eyes blazed. “Don’t you dare tell me I don’t love our child. You have no idea the things I’ve done for her.”

“Like Brian?” I asked.

Spots of color bloomed in her cheeks. “Brian betrayed me. He deserved everything he got.”

“You were his new girlfriend, weren’t you? The one he dumped Lily Lin to be with,” I said.

Nick’s head jerked at me, then back to Jean. “Brian Vanderhall? That’s who you were sleeping with?”

“For all the good it did me,” Jean said bitterly. “Yes, I slept with him, Nick. I did it for us, for Chance. I was everything he wanted: sexy, compliant, the female assistant to the brilliant scientist. Only I was different, because I understood the research, understood its implications—sometimes faster than he did. I swallowed my pride, accepted that he would overlook my contributions when he published, because I knew what this discovery could do.

“I knew it could change the past. Just a quirk of luck, that extra chromosome, like the random collisions and emissions of particles that happen a trillion trillion times a second. It didn’t have to happen. It shouldn’t have happened. We could undo it, choose a different path, a different random possibility. And we did it, Brian and I. We found the quantum intelligences, spoke to them, learned from them. Out of their knowledge and our own experimentation, a technology was born, more powerful even than I had been expecting.”

“But then Brian wanted to destroy it,” I said. “He took it away from you, without telling you what he was doing.”

“He was afraid.” Jean’s voice oozed contempt. “He thought it was too powerful, that the intelligences would demand it back. I told him that power was the only way to keep them under control.”

“He came to my house to show me and ask my advice,” I said. “You followed him to my house. You’re the ghost Officer Peyton saw in the snow outside. Then you followed him back to the bunker and killed him there, not realizing there was another version of him still alive.”

“He betrayed me,” Jean repeated. “I gave him my body, and I gave him my mind, and he didn’t give me anything in return.”

Nick was looking back and forth between us in growing consternation. “But you defended him,” he said. “You spoke out in his favor at his trial.”

“She had to get close enough to me to find the projector,” I said. “She didn’t know where it was.”

“I didn’t want to hurt you or your family,” Jean said. “I didn’t know Brian would mail the projector to you, or that you would end up accused of the crime. I was honestly trying to help.” She pressed a button on the pager several times. On the table, Chance blurred and became a montage of babies, some happy, some crying, some kicking, some reaching, some clapping hands.

I slowly lifted my gun and pointed it at Jean’s head. I wasn’t going to shoot with Chance so close, but I hoped Jean wouldn’t know that. “Step away from her,” I said.

Jean made a guttural sound, like an animal’s growl. “I told you, I’m not going to kill her. I love her.” She looked back down at Chance, whose image started shifting through the medley of different possible Chances. Some of them became a little more solid, a little more real, while others faded into smoke.

“Last chance,” I said. “Step back.”

“Leave me alone,” Jean said. “You can’t win this.” She flicked her eyes, and the gun was yanked out of my hands and clattered uselessly into the corner. She had the Higgs projector synched to her eyejack lenses, and she was much more adept at using it than I was.

But she wasn’t the only one with a Higgs projector. The one I had used to escape from prison was in my pocket, synched to the lenses I had borrowed from Nick. I didn’t know how to do much with it, and I had a feeling Jean had some custom subroutines in her version that she had written herself, but I had to try.

My mind raced. I remembered how I had tunneled the flour canister into the decorative table in my house when we found the projector… and a wave of dizziness hit me. That had been my double, not me. Once again, I was remembering something that I, the Jacob in prison, had never done.

I remembered how the table had exploded. I could tunnel a bullet or even a paper clip into Jean’s brain, and she could do the same to me. I didn’t want to kill her, though. I wanted to get the projector away from her. The problem was, she might have no such reservations about killing me.

One of the possible Chances became clear, a new version with a beautiful face, slimmer, with clear, round eyes and a closed mouth. “There she is!” Jean cried, exultant, her eyes wet with tears. “There’s my child!”

“Why doesn’t the varcolac have any eyes?” Elena asked.

“I have no idea.” It didn’t seem like a very pressing question. I was pacing again, angry, intent on finding a way to escape. “We barely understand who or what it is. It’s utterly alien—just not the kind from outer space. Though, for all I know, maybe it travels in space, too.”

“Is its body real? Can it be hurt or destroyed?” Elena asked.

I considered it. So far, we had seen no evidence of weakness, though the body seemed physical enough. I wasn’t sure that, even if we could destroy the body, it would have any effect on the creature itself. “It must have fabricated its body in imitation of humans. Maybe it just doesn’t realize that eyes are an important feature.”

“Or they were too difficult,” Alex said. Alex and Alessandra’s voices were so identical that I had to look to see which of them was speaking. Alex still cradled her broken arm. It filled me with fury to see her hurt and not be able to help her, so much so that it was a moment before I realized what she had said.

“Too difficult to make eyes?” I said. “A creature who can jump between universes and who plays with reality like clay?”

“Could be. He hasn’t mastered facial expressions, that’s clear. Eyes are expressive,” Alex said. She shrugged, which jostled her broken arm and she gave a little moan.