Alex sat, taking deep breaths to calm her nerves. As Sandra, she had every right to be here. At the first hint of any trouble, she could teleport away. The guard ignored her. Alex regarded her: middle-aged, Hispanic, a solid strength and no-nonsense expression. She wondered what sorts of things the guard had seen and how it felt to come to work at such a place every day.
Ten minutes later, a light-skinned woman with African features and short-cropped hair bustled into the room and smiled at Alex. “You must be my visitor.”
Alex cocked her head. “Warden?”
“That’s what they tell me, hon. You can call me Aisha. You ready?”
“I guess so.” Alex stood up.
“It’s a bit of a walk, I’m afraid. The Charlies don’t get many visitors. Follow me.”
Alex followed her through a locked set of double doors, which the warden opened with a key card. A sharp smell hit her, institutional and antiseptic. “Charlies?” she asked.
The warden pointed. “A-block is that way, the Alphas; they’re in minimum. The Bravos are in B-block. Our maximum security ladies, they’re in C-block. Our Charlies.”
She navigated through a bewildering maze of corridors, through multiple gates and checkpoints, some of them electronic, and some of them with human guards. Alex noticed that the warden didn’t carry any weapons, but the guards, sitting in glass-enclosed booths, were holding automatic rifles in clear view. Alex assumed that the people who actually came in contact with prisoners were unarmed to avoid the possibility that a prisoner might take the weapon and use it against them, while the glassed-in guards, protected from easy assault, could fire on prisoners through the glass if needed. It was a simple, low-tech solution to the problem of arming guards without tempting prisoners.
They passed above an open mess hall, crossing on a balcony. Below them, rows of women in rust-colored jumpsuits ate at tables, served by other women in the same clothes. On seeing the warden, several called up to her with various complaints. “Hush now, ladies,” she called down to them without breaking stride. Alex followed, careful not to meet anyone’s eye.
“I apologize for this,” the warden said. “They didn’t think things through when they built the guest area for C-block. As I said, we don’t get many. The first year, sure, but when someone’s on the mile, or put away for life, it doesn’t take long for family and friends to write them off. What’s the point of visiting someone who’s never going to get out anyway? They think they will, and they promise to, but after a few months, maybe a year, they start to move on. Are you related to Jeannie?”
“She was a friend of my father’s.” Alex heard screaming, faintly, through one of the doors.
“Will you accept my signal?” the warden asked.
A ping told Alex of an incoming feed to her system. “Um, sure,” she said.
“Then here we are,” the warden said.
She unlocked a side door with her keycard. They entered what looked like a small conference room, with a central wooden table and several chairs. To Alex’s surprise, Jean Massey was already sitting in one of the chairs. She was dressed in one of the same rust-colored jumpsuits as the women in the mess hall, with a large D.O.C printed on it in white. She wore no handcuffs.
The warden squinted at Alex. “Can you see her?”
“Of course.”
“Good. You must have a modern kit; sometimes we have to adjust for older models, or lend people one of our own.”
Her response confused Alex momentarily, until she realized: Jean isn’t really here. The room was configured to project Jean’s image to her eyejack display, creating the illusion of a face-to-face meeting without actually putting people together. Jean was probably sitting in a similar room somewhere else in the prison, seeing Alex the same way.
It made sense. Without true physical contact, there was no fear of an inmate attacking a guest, or vice versa, nor any concern that a guest would try to smuggle contraband in to a family member. It did, however, put a wrinkle in Alex’s plans to teleport Jean away. She had to touch her to do it, and she didn’t even know where in the prison Jean was. Alex almost gave up and walked away right then, but she had come this far. She could at least talk to the woman. She pulled back a chair and sat down.
Fifteen years earlier, Jean Massey had been an amazing young woman. In her thirties, she had been a recognized expert in her field, published in top journals, and employed at the New Jersey Super Collider, the largest scientific instrument in the world. Together with her boss, Dr. Vanderhall, she had pioneered dramatic new processes and made discoveries that could have revolutionized human experience. She had been, in short, everything that Alex herself now aspired to be. That is, until she had killed Dr. Vanderhall and tried to kill her own daughter.
Jean had a daughter named Chance, who had Down Syndrome. Thanks to a twist of fate, the random dice roll of a pair of genes, Chance would never reach the heights of her mother’s brilliance and achievement. But who was Chance Massey, exactly? Was the Down Syndrome her identity? Jean hadn’t thought so. She had tried to use the Higgs projector to change the past, to alter the fall of the dice, and resolve her unborn daughter’s probability wave as a healthy, able child. She didn’t see it as murder, but as choosing a new life for her daughter. Alex and her father had seen it as the destruction of one person in order to create a different one.
It was confusing to Alex. How did morality work, when nonlinear time came into play? A birth was just the accident of a particular sperm implanting in an egg at a particular place and time, causing a particular set of genes to come together. At the time, it wouldn’t have been immoral to avoid that genetic combination, if the power existed to do so, or to choose not to allow that sperm and egg to combine at all. There was no human being created yet, and so no one to harm. But later, when the child was almost a year old, it seemed like murder to go back in time and make a different choice.
But what about the other version of Chance, the one that had never been given an opportunity to live? For that matter, what about the thousands of other possible Chances, the alternate combinations of genes that would have yielded different people? Why were they any less valid than the one who lived? Alex supposed that, morally speaking, there had to be a distinction between choosing not to create a life and killing one that already existed. But it wasn’t always so simple. What if Alex were to send a particle back in time to affect her own life? To, say, change a choice she had made yesterday? That would make her a different person, of sorts. Would that be the same as killing herself in favor of someone else?
Jean stared off into space, her eyes focused on some distant point far beyond the walls. Alex remembered her as a friend, a beautiful and energetic woman, always cheerful and kind, with a mind like a knife with an atom-thick blade. Now her face was gaunt and deeply lined, giving the appearance of a much greater age. Her face was loose and expressionless. She didn’t acknowledge Alex’s presence.
The warden left the room. “Knock when you’re finished, and I’ll escort you back,” she said before closing the door.
Alex turned back to Jean. “I’m Alex Kelley,” she said. “You knew my father, Jacob.”
Jean registered this information with a quick flick of her eyes toward Alex’s face, and then returned to her thousand-mile stare. Alex felt intimidated. She hadn’t anticipated the possibility that Jean would be completely uninterested. Surely after fifteen years in prison she would welcome a conversation about physics? Perhaps it was too painful a subject.