A burning desire filled him to fire a nuclear missile at Krakow.
No. Ryan resisted. This was not the plan. He had killed soldiers who were trying to kill him, sure. But he had planned to raise humanity to a new evolutionary plane, not murder millions. He wanted to fire the missile, like a starving man wanted food, but he would not do it. This was not his desire. It was false, placed there by the varcolac to control him. He would not be a slave. He planted his feet and clenched his eyes shut. He would not do it.
Then the pain hit him. Pure, unimaginable pain. His whole body was on fire. He screamed and writhed and fell to the ground. He didn’t know such pain was possible. It was like every nerve was being touched directly with a red hot iron.
The pain stopped. Then once again, the desire, hot and radiant with promised pleasure, to fire the missile. Just one. None of those people cared about him anyway. They were all going to die, one way or another. And he wanted to fire the missile. He needed to.
The varcolac had learned the inner workings of his mind. It knew how to apply pleasure and pain. It knew what motivated him and where he was weak.
The pain came back, and this time it didn’t stop. It rolled over his body in waves. The body was where humans were weak, and the varcolac knew it now. Ryan collapsed to the ground, helpless, unable to think of anything but continuous, unendurable pain. He wanted to die. Anything to stop it. But he knew the varcolac would not let him die until he did what it wanted.
As soon as he thought that, the pain stopped. Desire. Like a glass of water after three days with none. Fire the missile.
He couldn’t win. Not against this. He was the varcolac’s slave, as surely as any poor soul whipped and beaten by his own kind. Ryan stumbled to the control panel. With the varcolac’s intelligence and powers, he didn’t have to worry about passwords or special keys. All that security was just layers wrapped around a simple electrical current applied to a wire. He reached straight through it all to the firing mechanism and induced the needed current.
The missile roared as engines engaged. Alarms sounded, vying with the mechanical groan of the silo doors opening. The entire silo rose on an elevator, lifting out of its underground hiding place. Ryan could see stars through the gap above.
A surge of pleasure ran through him as the missile ignited and leapt off of its platform and into the sky, leaving a cloud of fire and black smoke. He doubted anyone was supposed to be standing in the silo when the missile was fired, but it couldn’t harm him. The heat rushed around him, intensifying the sense of pleasure and goodness he felt. He knew that it wasn’t right, that the varcolac was just making him feel that way, but he had no strength left to resist.
He heard the varcolac’s voice as clearly as if it had been spoken in his ear. Another. Again.
“Alessandra,” she said. “Use the full name. I’m not simply Alex or Sandra. I’m Alessandra again.”
Angel looked unsettled, as if he didn’t know whether to hug her or run away. Her mother, on the other hand, took the change in stride. She gave Alessandra’s head a quick kiss. “What happened out there?”
Alessandra’s head was still pounding. Apparently resolving the long-standing probability wave that separated them didn’t remove the results of her concussion. Angel had teleported out and brought back some Ibuprofen earlier, but it wasn’t cutting the pain nearly enough. She was tempted to ask him to go steal some Vicodin.
“Ryan Oronzi is working for the varcolac,” Alessandra said. “Or it’s possessing him, or something. He has powers he shouldn’t have, and he’s using them to do what the varcolac wants. He tried to kill me—to kill Alex—just to please it. I should have known, the way he talked about it before, as if he admired it or wanted to be just like it.”
“What about Sean?” her mother asked. She used a businesslike tone, but Alessandra could see the desperation in her eyes.
“The last I saw, he was still alive. He’s smart and strong, Mom. He’ll find a way.” She tried to sound like she meant it, though all she could think of was the casual way Jean had killed her friends. Could he really survive against a varcolac?
“What about you?” Angel asked. “How do you feel?”
“Okay, I guess. My head is about to explode, but besides that…”
“Not physically—I mean, about what just happened. You and your sister… I mean… you…”
Alessandra shook her head. “I’m not thinking about that right now. I haven’t had time to process what it means.” She didn’t want to think too hard about it. Who was she now? What had she lost? She remembered not wanting this to happen, both as Alex and as Sandra, each of whom had feared they would lose their identities. Now that it had happened, now that she was just her, Alessandra, she wasn’t sure it was such a bad thing. But did that mean that it wasn’t? Would her prior selves have agreed? Or were they dead, leaving only her… whoever she was?
She couldn’t think about it, not now.
“What’s that thing in the middle of the room?” Angel said. He pointed to the 3D display of Ryan’s universe.
Alessandra raised an eyebrow, wondering at the question. “It’s a photoionization microscopy display, used to visualize quantum n-dimensional data in an intuitive, three-dimensional arrangement.”
His eyebrows went up. “Wow. It’s really true.”
“What?”
“Sandra didn’t know that. A few hours ago, she said she didn’t know what that thing was.”
He was right. She could remember saying she didn’t know. She could even remember not knowing. But now she knew now exactly what it was and how it worked.
“My father knew this would happen,” she said. “At least, he knew the probability field was weakening, making it more likely that… we… would come together.” She had started to say, “Alex and I,” or else, “Sandra and I,” but neither seemed right. Although, neither did referring to either of her previous selves as “she.” The pronouns were confusing.
“And his data seemed to suggest that Oronzi’s work was the cause,” Angel said. “But how could that be? After all this time, what could have made a difference?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe his work just shook things up.” It wasn’t an answer the physicist part of her was satisfied with, but at this point she really didn’t have a better one.
Angel stroked his chin. “It must have been essentially the same technology that you used fifteen years ago, right? The wave didn’t resolve then. The technology was still there. But the varcolac wasn’t.”
“What do you mean?”
“According to your story, you split at exactly the same time that the varcolac was shut out of our universe. The standing probability wave was created at that moment.”
“You’re saying the varcolac had something to do with it?”
“I’m saying, what if it was your probability wave that kept the varcolac from returning? For years and years, you two are completely separate, and there’s no sign of the varcolac. Then as soon as the wave starts to lose strength, the varcolac starts interacting in the world again. It can’t be a coincidence. I’m wondering if one is the cause of the other.”
“Or if both have the same cause,” she said. Then she sat up, ignoring the sudden throb of pain in her head. “That’s it!”