CHAPTER 15

Ryan was ready for the drop when he and Alex materialized on the top floor of the High Energy Lab. Alex wasn’t. She yelped and nearly fell over as they dropped six inches to the floor.

He laughed, and she glared at him. “What was that? We just teleported in here yesterday, and we didn’t fall then. I thought you had a pretty good lock on this place.”

“There’s some error drift with the distance you travel,” Ryan said. “Yesterday we teleported from the parking lot.”

“Error drift? So we could have ended up two inches under the floor instead of over it?”

Ryan found his favorite chair—a tattered recliner they had lugged up here at his request, and sat down. “Nope. The drift is always up. The module uses a tangent plane to shortcut some of the math.”

“So if I had tried to teleport to California . . . ?”

Ryan shook his head. “Disaster.”

Alex’s face soured. “That’s a bit dangerous, isn’t it? Shouldn’t you adjust for the curvature of the Earth?”

“I did. That’s why we came in so close.”

“I mean adjust in the software, not in your head. I thought everything you designed was supposed to be oh-so-safe.”

“Not safe for you. Safe for me.” That was the whole point, after all. He had written the software, so he knew exactly what it would do and how far to trust it. If he hadn’t written it, he wouldn’t be using it at all.

Alex stared at the glowing universe in its laser-light display. She muttered something under her breath. He caught the word “hubris.”

He didn’t bother asking her to repeat herself. Sooner or later, everyone he got to know started treating him like he was either stupid or crazy. He liked to think it was because his intelligence was so much greater than theirs. He should call it Oronzi’s Law: Any sufficiently-advanced intelligence will be indistinguishable from insanity. But he knew that wasn’t all there was to it. The truth was, he didn’t like other people very much, and they could probably tell.

“So, you don’t think I should teleport, because I didn’t personally write the code,” Alex said.

“I didn’t say that. I just said that I wouldn’t, if I were in your place.”

“What kind of world would that be, if nobody trusted anything they didn’t make themselves? No one could build on anyone else’s work. No one could even ride in the same car together. It would be ridiculous.”

“You’re hardly the first person to call me that.”

She looked at him with an odd expression, making Ryan think he had probably let a little too much of his bitterness leak into his tone of voice. To cover his embarrassment, he took a tablet from a nearby desk and started manipulating it. “Take a look,” he said.

He sent a link to her viewfeed, which she accepted. Their shared vision was overlaid with stacks of log data organized in a traditional filesystem display, like a rotating carousel of file folders.

“Did you write your own operating system, too?” she asked.

Ryan ignored her. Of course he hadn’t, but then, an operating system wasn’t likely to kill him, either. He cycled through the files until he found what he was looking for. “Here’s the log data from the morning of the demo. I’m going to graph the Higgs particle count over time.” A graph appeared in the air, showing a high quantity of Higgs activity, peaking suddenly from 11:08 to 11:14. The rest was empty except for a little random noise near the bottom, like a sandy beach with a mountain peak suddenly jutting out of it. “This matches the time that the varcolac was loose. Just as we would expect.”

“What about the previous night?”

Ryan found the appropriate log and updated the graph. The peak disappeared, leaving a nearly empty graph.

“No activity at all?” Alex asked.

“Just background radiation. Nothing out of the ordinary,” Ryan said. “But look at this.”

Ryan stabbed the tablet, and the graph changed. He filtered out the peak from the morning of the demo, and graphed just the background radiation over the whole time interval, between the stadium explosion and the demo the next morning. He zoomed in on the bottom of the graph, taking a closer look at what had previously appeared to be random. From this perspective, there were two clearly-defined spikes. One was at 11:14 in the morning, in the last moment before the varcolac disappeared. The other was at 9:35 the night before, when the stadium had imploded.

Alex whistled. “I see it. That’s consistent with a singlet sent back in time from the demo on Monday morning to the stadium the previous night. You were right.” She cast a fearful look at the spinning universe display. “Are you sure that thing’s still contained?”

“Of course I’m not. I’ve been telling Babington for weeks that I can’t keep it contained indefinitely.”

The reminder turned Ryan’s attention back to the tablet with a sudden stab of fear. He had been checking on it frequently, at least once an hour, but it didn’t make him feel safe. He had updated his alarms to detect the kind of subtle strategy the varcolac had used to escape last time, but it was clever. What if it had breached the barrier so subtly that it had escaped without him even knowing it?

He reviewed the latest logs. Everything seemed to be in order. His protocols were still in place, with no indication that any of the values he was measuring from the wormhole had so much as hiccupped. It didn’t make him relax, exactly, but there was no immediate reason for alarm.

“It’s still contained,” he said. “For now.”

“Can I see?” Alex asked.

Ryan regarded her, suspicious. She was asking to see the foundation of all his research; the equations and concepts behind his control over the baby universe. How well did he know her, really? She didn’t have clearance even to be in this room, never mind to look at the technical basis of his work.

“Why do you want to see it?” he asked.

She raised an eyebrow slightly. “I just want to understand what we’re dealing with. I want to help, and the more I know, the better I can help.”

It occurred to Ryan just how young and pretty she was. He had never much liked pretty women; he always felt like they were laughing at him behind his back. She was manipulating him, trying to make him give up his data. “It’s classified,” he said.

She took a step back and gave him a sideways look, the one people gave him when they thought he was acting crazy. “You brought me in here.”

He shook his head to clear it. What was wrong with him? “You’re right,” he said. “I’m sorry. I’m just not used to working too closely with other people.”

“You run a lab full of people.”

“Well . . . when it comes down to it, Nicole runs the lab. I like to concentrate on the math. I get my best work done here at night, when no one else is around.”

“I have to go now,” Alex said. Her pretty face showed confusion and pity rather than anger. He hated her for that.

“Okay,” he said.

“I’ll see you tomorrow.” She disappeared.

Ryan collapsed back on his chair and held his head in his hands. What was wrong with him? Alex wasn’t trying to steal anything from him. He had followed her in his car and practically insisted she come with him. It wasn’t her fault the varcolac had broken out while she was on stage. Or was it? Could she have planned it that way, so as to kill Secretary Falk?

Ridiculous. He shoved his fists into his eyes and rubbed them. He wasn’t thinking clearly. He wasn’t getting enough sleep. To distract himself, he brought up the logs again. They were quiet; barely any movement in the measured values at all. Had the varcolac given up? That didn’t seem likely.

Ryan tried to put himself into the varcolac’s perspective. What did it want? Why was it trying to break into their world? Just to kill people? Or was it trying to learn something? He knew the varcolac was intelligent, incredibly so. He knew now that it had been manipulating him even as he kept it contained, influencing him through the equations it solved for him. But had it really been manipulating him, or simply communicating to him? What if it had recognized him as the one human truly capable of communicating at its level of intelligence?

His mind returned again to his childhood dream, that he was in fact the progeny of a superior alien race, planted here in this human body. He had always known it was a ludicrous fantasy, but it seemed to explain so much—not just his intelligence, which was so far beyond anyone else’s, but also how awkward and isolated he felt, and how incomprehensible human social interaction so often seemed. Only in lecture mode, when he was explaining his ideas to others, did he feel remotely comfortable.

But what if it wasn’t so ludicrous? What if Ryan’s mind was in fact not a human mind, but a varcolac’s? He had never belonged with the people surrounding him; he was something different, something greater. Maybe he was destined for something far beyond the simple fame of a smarter-than-average scientist.

The varcolac wasn’t evil, after all. It was just intelligent. Now that he thought about it, it had been the Secret Service agents that had attacked first, not the varcolac. It had only defended itself. When Alex started firing, it fought back, but it wasn’t the aggressor. It had just been trying to communicate. Though there was the baseball stadium. If the varcolac really had destroyed that, as seemed to be the case, it could hardly be considered self-defense.

He returned to the logs surrounding the time of the stadium explosion, scrutinizing the data for anything he had previously missed, looking for some indication that it had been an attempt by the varcolac to communicate. How would a quantum creature know what destruction it had caused from a human perspective? Did it understand the concept of human life and death?

Ryan grew lost in the work, drinking Cokes from his fridge and eating potato chips when he got hungry, barely aware of the taste as they slid down his throat. He studied the times right around the Higgs singlet spikes, filtering by frequency. And then he found it: a barely discernible pattern at the edge of the EHF band.

But it wasn’t quite what he was expecting. Two hours before the Higgs singlet spike that had destroyed the baseball stadium, the wormhole had registered a burst of EHF energy. The more he looked at it, the more he was sure that it wasn’t just a random fluctuation. It looked purposeful. He couldn’t say why, exactly, but he trusted his intuitions where mathematical patterns were concerned. To be certain, he ran it through a Shannon entropy plot to measure its randomness. No question. It wasn’t just some natural phenomenon; there was information encoded there. It meant something.

He worked all night, and by the morning, he had the answer. Encapsulated in the tiny burst of data was a representation of the location of the blast and its exact time. Direction, distance, and time were encoded in terms of Higgs particle wavelength, amplitude, and frequency, and measured from the wormhole and the time of the varcolac’s escape the next morning. It hadn’t been easy to crack the code, but once he had worked it out, it was irrefutable. It was a signal, or possibly just a measure of the varcolac’s own thought process, but it was there. If he had known all this ahead of time, he could have actually predicted the place and time of the stadium blast two hours before it had happened.

Ryan searched the rest of the data that had been gathered from the wormhole in the days since, looking for similar patterns. He found only one. It had appeared in the logs an hour earlier, just a tiny packet of energy at the same EM frequency as the first signal. He decoded it using the same method, and came up with a location, sixty-two miles away, and a time, 11:26 AM. He checked his watch. It was already past 11:00.

Ryan’s body surged with adrenaline. Did this mean what he thought it did? He identified the location using an online mapping program: Chelsey Funeral Parlor, in Media, Pennsylvania. He didn’t recognize it. He had been expecting another large population gathering, like a skyscraper or a sporting event. A funeral parlor? Why would the varcolac target that?

Whatever its significance, it wasn’t going to be there for much longer.