Folded planes of air fill the tables. They refract the walls behind them, chopping and warping wood grain and scattering it throughout the room. The patterns rotate and twist as the structures on the table flow from one impossible shape to another. When Ellie focuses on one of them, she can work out the machine, the chunk of physics, it is meant to represent.
Daniel taps Ellie’s shoulder. He lowers his head next to hers.
“Close your mouth, Ellie.” His voice is a gentle wave lapping a beach. “You know you’ve seen this sort of thing before, right?”
“Yes, but not in someone’s basement.”
“Architects have to work somewhere.”
The Chief Architect pointedly clears her throat. Ellie snaps upright. Daniel subtly shifts his gaze upward, and becomes extremely aware of the basement ceiling. He straightens, gingerly, not quite to his full height, leaving a few inches of clearance.
“This is not a magic trick.” The Chief Architect puts a key in her left fist and holds both fists out to Ellie. “Which fist has the key?”
“Seriously?” Ellie ignores the wince on Daniel’s face.
“Hey, I’m in charge of maintaining the machinery that generates the universe.” The Chief Architect flashes a quick smile. “Humor me.”
Daniel nudges Ellie. Obligingly, she points to the Chief Architect’s left fist.
“You should get used to this.” The Chief Architect reveals the key lying on her left palm before closing her hand into a fist again.“We’ll be doing a total of thirty trials before you take the key and open that drawer over there.”
It isn’t even the fifth trial before Ellie starts pointing to the Chief Architect’s left fist out of reflex. As advertised, this is not a magic trick. Each time, the Chief Architect reveals the key in her left fist before hiding it again. Ellie’s mind drifts to thoughts of asking what this is all about. Instead, she keeps her mouth shut and iterates through trial after trial on the slim hope that, eventually, there will be a point. Anything else would be disrespectful.
Daniel, of course, has checked out of the “not a trick” completely. He’s working his way around the room, examining the planes of air one by one, turning and prodding them. His face contorts in a symphony of downturned lips, widened eyes, and extended tongues. He moves from one to the next like some chess master winning against several dozen players at once. Not that doing this doesn’t take effort, but he is both making a show of how hard this is for him and breezing from one to the next. Tiny jewels of folded air emerge between his gesturing hands. They’re counterexamples, cases where the mechanism in question would fail. He attaches them to the planes, occasionally digging inside them to balance them against the right fold. Every once in a while, between trials, the Chief Architect throws a glance Daniel’s way. It’s invariably impressed or dismayed. Daniel’s oblivious to her reactions, even when the glance becomes a glare.
“That’s an obscure corner case,” the Chief Architect says, referring to the counterexample Daniel is delicately attaching to some hidden, inner fold.
“But I’m not wrong.” Daniel, focused intently on his self-imposed task, steps back to inspect the plane of air.
“No, you’re not.” The Chief Architect nods. “That’s going to be annoying to fix.”
On the thirtieth trial, Ellie reaches for the key. When the Chief Architect opens her left fist, though, the key isn’t there.
“Whoa.” Daniel shivers and the floor vibrates in sympathy. “Something’s very wrong. Dangerously wrong.”
A boule materializes in his hands. The crust is dark and ragged with coarse flecks of wheat germ. He taps it. His brow furrows at the muddy sound.
“Wow, that’s not even enough time to blink.” The Chief Architect reveals the key is actually in her right hand. “Your scan dump, however, is a loaf of bread? Seriously?”
“Sometimes, it’s soy-braised oxtails or Brussels sprouts with a ginger-balsamic reduction glaze.” Daniel’s tone is deadpan but with an undercurrent of annoyance that Ellie is positive the Chief Architect doesn’t notice.
“I’ve never seen anyone else do that,” the Chief Architect says.
“I’m not anyone else.” Daniel sounds ever so slightly self-defensive. “Maybe other verifiers could, too, if they wanted. I dunno. This works for me.”
Daniel pops a pinch of bread into his mouth. He chews slowly, nodding as he savors the flavor.
“Can you two do that again?” He’s ripping open the boule and examining its crumb. “The failure caught me by surprise. I only caught vestiges of it.”
“What are you on about, Daniel?” Ellie’s gaze shifts from the Chief Architect to Daniel. “It’s just sleight of hand.”
“Yes, I know that. Her manual dexterity is not the sign of a bug in the skunkworks.” Daniel turns to face them, then rolls his eyes. The boule disappears as he clasps his hands. “Have you looked at what’s in your hand?”
Ellie looks down and gasps. A white ceramic disk is now in her left hand. It wasn’t there before. When she holds it level to the floor, a complex wireframe structure emerges from the disk and levitates about a centimeter above it. It is both physically substantial and weightless. It looks like a 3D image but is unquestionably material. The iridescent wires are both lines in the geometricsense and thin, laser-like struts. They are both evanescent and absolutely sturdy.
The structure is a model of a skunkworks. Mom showed her one of them when she was a kid.
These models are the direct reification of complex systems of mathematical equations. They operate billions of times slower than reality, but they also don’t have any of the limitations of actual machinery. You don’t have to worry about how long it takes for information to travel from one point to another. Gates open and close in zero time. Information never leaches away from the reservoirs. The deviations from the ideal, the physical realities that any implementation of a skunkworks must engage with, are all abstracted away.
