“Fast-paced, mind-bending, super-scientific yet fully accessible and very understandable to the layman reader. Full of new possibilities and probabilities, Supersymmetry gives readers a peek into what the future may hold and the cost that comes with it. This is a science fiction novel full of humanity and all its inherent beauty and ugliness. FANTASTIC - KEEPER”
“With a confident, deft touch...David Walton explores concepts of quantum physics while expertly weaving the narrative perspectives of two young women.... An engaging science fiction novel about an ultra-dimensional intelligence bent on destroying reality.”
“Propelled by high-speed action and digestible science that makes you feel smarter just by reading about it, Supersymmetry is among the best in near-future science fiction.”
“A high-octane, high-tech romp through time and space, with lots of family drama and complex characters to root for…. Fast paced, with cool futuristic science and complex characters and relationships, this is must-read series for science fiction fans.”
“A story with cool science and a good heart. All in all, I was completely entertained by this smart, imaginative quantum thriller.”
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CHAPTER
1
It would be the disaster of their
generation, like the fall of the Twin Towers or Kennedy’s assassination. Sandra
Kelley was one of the early responders, one of the first to see the stadium
lying crushed, torn apart as if by an angry giant. She was less than two years
out of police academy, a junior officer still doing patrol on the night shift.
She had seen victims of traffic accidents, so she wasn’t entirely green, but
nothing could have prepared her for this.
It seemed
as if every police car, ambulance, and fire truck in the city had been routed
to Broad and Pattison, but it wasn’t nearly enough. There had been a Wasted
Euth concert at Lincoln Financial Field that night, so there were crowds of
gawkers to control, and the number of injured in the parking lot alone was more
than they could handle. Debris lay scattered everywhere.
Most of the light poles in the
parking lot were still intact, but the stadium wreckage itself was dark, an
unexpected hole where once 2000-watt lights had blazed out into the night. The
sky was overcast, a brooding bank of clouds that hid the stars and seemed to
press down on the city.
Sandra dialed her dad’s phone for what must have been the
tenth time. The call went straight to voice mail, just like every other
attempt. Her voice was shaking badly. “Dad, please call. Please get this. Tell
me you weren’t at the game.”
She called her mom’s phone next.
No answer. She had left three messages already, but she left another one
anyway. “Mom, it’s Sandra. Please call. Dad was there, wasn’t he? He had
tickets. I don’t remember when, but I think it was tonight. He invited me, but
I was on duty . . .” She choked on the words and clicked off.
She weaved
her way around battered blue plastic seats, strewn across the parking lot
alongside unrecognizable pieces of mangled metal and concrete. There were
bodies, dozens of them. Some of them were whole. Others were not. She stopped,
doubled over, and vomited on her shoes.
Her sergeant took one look at her face and pointed her
toward crowd control. Facing away from the stadium as much as possible, she and
a dozen other cops shouted people back and strung police tape to cordon off the
whole area. The first moment she could, she pulled her phone out of her pocket
and called her parents again. Nothing.
“Here.” Another cop pushed a water bottle into her hands.
It was Nathan, from her class at the academy. She took the bottle gratefully,
swished some water in her mouth, and spat it onto the pavement. It cleared some
of the taste of vomit from her mouth, but not the acid taste of fear. She felt
jittery and light-headed, like she was on some kind of uppers or a massive dose
of caffeine.
“Thanks,” she said, handing back the bottle.
“Keep it,” Nathan said. He was
blond and tall, with athletic good looks. The uniform fit him well. She had had
a bit of a crush on him back in the day, but he had fallen for a cadet named
Danielle instead, and they’d married a week after graduation.
Sandra tried her phone again, but with no result. Nathan
studied her face. “You know somebody who was here?”
She nodded, swallowing hard. “My
dad. He used to take us all the time, when we were . . .” Her voice cracked,
and she pressed her lips together, holding back tears.
“They’ll find him,” Nathan said.
“Don’t give up hope.”
She smiled as best she could and
nodded her thanks. Heavy earth-moving and construction equipment rolled in,
bulldozers and front-end loaders and cranes. Her sergeant pulled her back to
help with search and rescue. There were people trapped under eighty-ton blocks
of concrete, but no one seemed to agree about the best way to move them safely.
She found herself in crews of strangers, moving what rubble could be moved by
hand. She was tired, bone tired, but she knew she couldn’t stop. Peo-ple’s
lives depended on the work she was doing. And one of them just might be her
father.
The FBI rolled in and added to the
confusion, waving their badges and trying to preserve the crime scene at the
same time rescue workers were tearing it apart. No one seemed to know quite who
was in charge. Without direct orders, Sandra did whatever she could, directing
EMTs with stretchers, soothing panicked family members, and checking press
badges for the reporters that swarmed the site like flies.
While she
did all this, she recorded everything she saw. Like most police officers,
Sandra wore eyejack lenses, the raw footage feeding into a huge database that
could be merged into a single, time-tagged, three-dimensional image of the
site. The detectives and bomb experts would study the data for clues as to what
had happened. Was it a terrorist attack? Or just a catastrophic engineering
failure? Feedback to her lenses told her which views and angles were
under-represented, encouraging her to aim her vision in directions that would
help fill in the holes.
The news she was getting through her
phone told her the media was already pointing fingers at the Turks. With
American forces in Poland and Germany blocking the Turkish advance, and the
Turkish navy controlling access to the Mediterranean, this was hardly a
surprise. The talking heads called it a Turkish attack on American soil,
comparing it to Pearl Harbor and calling for war. The Turkish president
officially denied it, and it was hard for Sandra to see what they would gain
from such a move. Though she supposed terrorists operated under a different set
of assumptions than most people.
She hadn’t
seen her sergeant in hours, so she just wandered the site, joining gangs of
workers where she saw a need. She queried the central database to see what
views had not yet been covered and headed in those directions, trying to
provide as much data as possible to the professionals whose job it was to make
sense of it all. All around her, there was the horror of death, so much death
that she could hardly take it in. She felt emotionally detached, floating in a
protective bubble her mind had formed around the experience. Her awareness
collapsed to simple tasks.
Step over the twisted metal. Help
lift the concrete slab. Check GPS and shift viewing angle to forty degrees.
Her father still didn’t return her calls.
“Hey! Officer! Could you give me a hand?”
Sandra turned to see a young man in a black Robson
Forensic cap waving to her. He was struggling to haul two black hard cases on
wheels over the debris-strewn ground.
“Finally,” he said. “What’s a guy got to do to get a girl
to pay him some attention?”
She narrowed her eyes, not in the mood for
humor. “What do you want?” “Could you take one of these? This
is really a
two-person job.”
One of the cases was the size of a large suitcase; the
other was big enough to hold a bass fiddle. Sandra took the smaller one. “What
is all this stuff?”
“ID equipment,” the forensic tech
said, puffing as he hauled on the larger case.
Sandra imagined a lab on wheels, blood testing and DNA,
taking samples from the thousands of bodies and determining their identities.
“You can do that in the field?”
The tech
didn’t answer. They had reached a flat area with a minimum of debris. “This
will do,” he said. “Open that one up, will you?”
Inside she found telescoping poles, wires, and what
looked like a large security camera. “What kind of ID kit is this?” she asked.
“The best kind, I hope,” the tech said. He opened the
larger case. Sandra didn’t understand at first what she was looking at. The
case seemed to be stacked with dozens of small electric fans.
The tech
circled around to the smaller case and pulled out lengths of pipe, assembling
them with ease. In short order, he constructed a ten-foot tripod stand with the
camera device on top. From the bottom of the case, he extracted a box with
levers and a long antenna, like a remote control. “Stand back,” he said.
He flipped a switch, and the larger case started
rumbling. It vibrated visibly, chattering against the concrete.
“What—” Sandra started to say, but
she was interrupted by a sound like the buzzing of a hundred angry bees. Out of
the case rose a formation of two dozen quad-rotored helicopters, each the size
of a dinner plate. They dipped in unison, shearing off to the right just as a
second formation rose up to take their place. Each formation was a perfect
rectangle, six copters by four, flying inches apart and moving as if locked
together. At a cue from the tech, they left their places and flowed into a new
formation, twenty-four wide by two deep.
He pressed another button, and the
quadcopters shot off toward the ruined stadium, doing twenty or thirty miles an
hour, eight feet above the ground. Several people shouted or leapt away, but
the copters veered effortlessly to miss all obstacles, breaking out of
formation or angling their flight as necessary. Sandra looked after them in
awe. In the darkness, their LED lights swirled like a swarm of fireflies. Above
her head, the device that looked like a camera came alive, smoothly slewing
back and forth as if aiming at each of the receding quadcopters in rapid
succession.
Some of the people nearby threw
dirty looks their way. A few picked themselves off the ground after diving to
avoid the copter brigade.
Sandra
forgot her astonishment and wondered if she’d just been tricked. She had no
idea what this guy was doing, but it wasn’t forensics. Was he a reporter? Or
was he a terrorist, out to destroy evidence or make a secondary attack?
She undid the snap that held her pistol in its holster.
“Put the remote down,” she said.
He looked bewildered. “But—”
“Now!”
He dropped the remote and held up his hands. “You don’t
understand—” “What kind of stunt are you trying to pull? You said this was ID
equipment.” She reached for her radio to call him in.
“It is!” he said. “The copters have RFID readers on board.
I told you the truth.”
She paused. She would make a fool of herself if she called in a
real CSI. “Let me see your ID,” she snapped.
“Honest,” he said.
“ID.” She held out her hand.
Sheepish, he dug around in a pocket and handed up a
laminated card. It was a University of Pennsylvania student ID.
“You’re a student?”
He looked offended. “I’m an engineering doctoral
candidate in robotics and sensory perception.”
“Put your hands down.”
He put them down. “I’m allowed to be here.”
“What about the cap?”
He took it off and looked at the logo. “Oh,” he said.
“Some of the forensic outfits hire us sometimes.”
“And who gave you permission to loose a fleet of
helicopters in a crowded search and rescue scene?” she said.
“It’s a swarm, not a fleet,” he
said. “Look, most of the people who died out there have cards in their wallets
with RFIDs in them. Credit cards, gas cards, SEPTA cards. They work with
magnetic resonance; illuminate them with a burst of radio energy, and they
fire back a signal with a number on it. With the right databases, those numbers
can be turned into people’s names. The quadcopters tag the number and the GPS
coordinates, and boom: we have a map of the positions and IDs of every person
on the site. Well, nearly. A lot of them anyway.”
Sandra was cooling down now that
he seemed to be legit. She holstered her weapon. “What’s the camera for?”
“This?” he said, pointing up at the
device on the tripod. “That’s the radio transmitter. I have to use a pretty
narrow beam to get a strong enough return signal through the rubble. The
copters can’t carry one, so I mount it here and coordinate them. Most RFID readers are
two-way, but I had to split it up: the transmitter here to pulse the energy at
each spot on the ground, and the copters at the right spot at just the right
time to detect any returns.”
“And you had permission to do this?”
He winced. “Sort of.”
“What does ‘sort of’ mean?”
“The chief told me I could do whatever harebrained
experiment I wanted as long as I got out of her way.” He gave an awkward smile.
“I guess I charmed her with my rugged good looks.”
Sandra smiled in spite of
herself. The tech wasn’t rugged or good-looking, not by anybody’s definition.
He was short and soft, with a thick face, glasses, and a hint of a mustache.
His skin was a light, mottled brown, and his hair could have used a trim months
ago.
“Oh, fine,” he said. “I see how it is. You like them tall
and blond.
Blue eyes, probably. Flawless skin,
Swedish accent—I know the type.” “I’m just doing my job. You’d better not be
lying about the chief, because
I’m going to check.” She glanced
back at his ID card. “Your name is Angel?” “An-HEL. The g is pronounced with an
h sound.” He rolled his eyes. Her smile vanished. “What?”
“I know what you’re thinking. Who would name a boy
‘Angel’? Typical American. I’ll have you know Angel was the fifth most popular
name for boys born in Mexico last year.”
“Is that where you’re from?” she
asked. “Mexico?”
“Born and bred.” He lifted his
chin high. “Spent my whole life in San Antonio, until last year.”
Sandra paused. “Isn’t San Antonio
in the United States?”
“There you go again, with your prejudicial comments,”
Angel said. “Only Americans think it’s in the United States.”
This time she caught the sparkle in
his eyes. “Are you serious?”
He grinned, breaking the tension.
“I’d say about twenty percent of the time.”
She wanted to punch him. She
couldn’t tell when he meant what he was saying and when he was just messing
with her. In her current state of high tension, she didn’t find that funny. On
the other hand, she was having a conversation, and having a conversation meant
not looking at the scene around her, expecting to stumble over her father’s
body at any moment.
The angry buzzing sound grew
louder, and she turned just in time to see the swarm of quadcopters bearing
down on her. She gasped and ducked, but the copters reined up short, breaking
off into groups of four. Each group of four wheeled up to Angel, hovering
around him for a few moments before banking away again. He snapped open a laptop
and typed rapidly.
“It’s working!” he said, the astonishment evident in his voice.
“You’re surprised? Haven’t you tried this before?”
“In the lab, sure, but not in real life.”
“You covered the whole site already?”
“No, not
even close.” As the last foursome left him, the copters slid into formation and
shot away toward the wreckage again. “It’ll take hours to cover everything. But
that’s a lot better than days, maybe weeks, of dozens of techs with handheld
readers doing the same thing. The information won’t be conclusive; people will
still have to confirm each identification, actually look at each body. But as a
preliminary map, it should save a lot of effort and let family members know
about their loved ones more quickly.”
He rotated the laptop to show her the screen. It was an
aerial map of the site, flanked by Pattison Avenue and Hartranft Street. One
corner was peppered with yellow dots. Angel zoomed in on that corner, and the
dots bloomed out into numbers.
“Each of those points is a
person. Probably,” he said. “There are RFIDs in other things, too.”
“And from that you know who they
are?”
“Well, I don’t,” he said. “I
don’t have access to those databases. But the police do, you can be certain,
and if there are any they don’t have, the feds can get them.”
Sandra studied the design the dots made on the screen,
swooping in zigzagging curves. It didn’t look random. “Why does it make a
pattern?” Angel shrugged. “I don’t know.”
She thought about what her dad would say, seeing a
pattern like that. “It might be important,” she said. “If things were thrown
around in a recognizable pattern, we might be able to determine what caused
this, maybe even track down the source.”
Another shrug. “I work in a robotics lab, but I’ll tell
you one thing; this was no bomb.”
She cocked her head at him. “What do you
mean?”
“There was no fire,” he said.
“Nothing’s burned. And look at how the stadium collapsed—it looks more like it
fell in on itself than like it was blown out. Most of the rubble is piled up
inside, on the playing field. More like an earthquake. Or a sinkhole.”
He was right. It was obvious, now
that she thought about it. There was plenty of debris in the parking lot, but
it looked more like it had been pushed by the force of the falling stadium
walls, not like the walls themselves had been blown out. But there had been no
earthquake; at least not that anyone was reporting in the news. “Maybe there
were a lot of smaller charges placed at key spots,” she said. “Arranged so that
the walls would fall in and kill as many people as possible.”
Angel nodded, thoughtful. “Hey,” he said, “if we know
where the people are now, and where they were originally sitting, maybe we
could draw lines from their starting point to where they ended up. We could
track the vectors of force.”
He was getting excited, but all she could think about was
the image of her father’s body being blown out of his seat. She felt sick and
put her hand over her mouth.
A female cop ran up to her, dark hair blown back in the
wind. It was Danielle, Nathan’s wife. “Sandra,” she said, “you’ve got to come
now.” “What is it?”
“I think it’s your father.”
Sandra’s mind rebelled at the
words. She wanted to punch Danielle in her pretty mouth for daring to say such
a thing. “Dead?”
Danielle didn’t answer, but her eyes told Sandra
everything.
Sandra followed her at a run to where Nathan stood over a
body on the ground. His shoulders were hunched, his eyes dead. He was holding a
black leather wallet, worn and familiar. Sandra looked at the wallet, refusing
to look down, terror gripping her throat.
She took the
wallet and flipped it open. Her father’s face stared up at her from his
Pennsylvania driver’s license, but she checked the name anyway. Jacob Kelley.
She shook her head, trying to process what she was seeing, the information
somehow failing to sink in, even though she’d been expecting it now for hours.
She shook her head, trying to push the evidence away, wishing for a return to
uncertainty, when it was still possible that he hadn’t been here.
Finally, she looked down. Her father lay on the pavement
as naturally as if he’d fallen asleep there.
“I’m sorry,”
Nathan began. She waved her hand to fend off his words, and he trailed off. He
stood there, awkward, not knowing what to say. Danielle put a hand on her arm.
Sandra turned and buried her face into the coarse, blue fabric of Danielle’s
shoulder. She felt like she ought to cry, but the tears didn’t come. Danielle
stroked her hair, while Sandra took in big gulps of air, like she was drowning.
Her phone rang.
The noise
startled her. She reached for it automatically, and then nearly threw it away.
She’d been waiting for it to ring all night, and now, when it finally did, it
was too late. The automatic movement brought the screen up to her eyes,
however, and she saw the number. It was her father’s number.
She answered.
“Sandra?” Her father’s voice was
warm and strong and sweet and utterly recognizable.
“Dad?”
--------------------------------------------------------------
In just five days (less than a week!) the second and final installment in Brenda Cooper's Glittering Edge duology, Spear of Light, hits shelves! Long ago, an advanced human society banished a group of near-AIs to the darkest corners of the galaxy. Now they've returned to build a new home for themselves next to the very race that tried to destroy them.
