“This skunkworks model used to be in that drawer.” Ellie is absolutely certain of this. “You created it thirty years ago. It was your first.”
Architects generally build them to see their bug fixes work in context. They hand them off to verifiers to check their work. Builders take them and figure out how to turn this ideal into working machinery. Ellie can’t shake the sense, though, that Mary did not build this for a bug fix.
“Do you know anything else about it?” Mary prompts as she heads toward the drawer.
“You created it to try out a novel ‘toy’ physics for a class project years ago. It generates a physics that’s incomplete and somewhat inconsistent. You didn’t have to simulate the creation of a universe, so this physics doesn’t deal with singularities at all, only steady state or near steady state. But the model already has a universe in steady state preloaded into it.”
Ellie feels for a switch on the edge of the disk. It clicks when she touches it. An orb materializes above the wireframe, a toy universe generated by a toy skunkworks. Individual atoms, visibleas tiny dots, crash into each other at great velocity for this universe, like pearls sinking into clear sludge for anyone watching.
The Chief Architect unlocks the drawer. She pulls it open. Ellie and Daniel peer inside. It’s empty, except for a thin layer of dust. There’s a hole in the dust the size and shape of the disk in Ellie’s hand.
“How did I know why you created it?” Ellie turns back to the Chief Architect and Daniel, showing them the toy skunkworks.
“Well,” Daniel says. “Picking the left fist again and again biased which future the skunkworks speculated—”
“But the key was in her right hand, so I never took it.” Ellie shakes the toy skunkworks at Daniel. “The speculated future where I took the key from her left hand and unlocked the drawer got flushed out. It never happened. There shouldn’t be any vestige of that in this universe. I shouldn’t know anything about what was in that drawer, much less have this model in my hand or understand why she created it.”
“Yes, that would be the bug.” Daniel’s gaze is as narrow as his tone is dry. “Obviously, picking her left hand over and over again and the key being there all those times biased the skunkworks toward guessing you will take the key so much that when it didn’t happen, its recovery was incomplete. Not everything from that incorrect future got eliminated.”
Daniel has his own annoying definition of “obviously.” Either it’s so broad that it’s useless or the word is its own antonym. Ellie has long since given up trying to get him to find a better one.
“The consequences of that would be awful.” Ellie turns off the toy skunkworks and the orb vanishes. “You don’t need to know anything about maintenance to exploit this, so literally anybody can make anything happen, at least in part, by making it seem plausible enough for long enough. Why is the skunkworks behaving like that?”
“How should I know?” Daniel looks incredulously at her. “That’s why I need you two to do it again. I need more data.”
Ellie offers the Chief Architect the ceramic disk. The Chief Architect studies Daniel, sizing him up. The man is an avalanche waiting to crash down a range. Daniel straightens to his full height. Surprisingly, at least to Ellie, there is still a little clearance between his head and ceiling. His gaze suddenly wide and his mouth open, he’s just realized he’s ordering around the Chief Architect, someone who has probably resolved more problems with this universe than Daniel will ever find.
The Chief Architect smiles. Ultimately, the urge to be helpful always beats out any attempt, intentional or not, for Daniel to play dumb.
She takes the disk from Ellie and locks it up in the drawer. The two play their not-a-trick again and again. As they do, Daniel samples through a banquet, one bite of everything before it disappears. Steamed fish appears. It rests on a plate composed of fried rice in his hand. The scent of ginger perfumes the room. He savors the broth, prods at it to test its texture, then makes it disappear. He slurps a bevy of noodles: thin, thick, stir-fried, floating in a rich beef broth, cold and tossed in a chili sauce that makes everybody’s eyes tear up. Crispy slivers of pork tossed with thin strips of oil-slicked carrots and celery appear on a bed of steamed rice. He digs through with chopsticks that he didn’t have a second ago, then makes it all go away.
Ellie’s mouth can’t help watering. Everything smells as perfect as Daniel can make it when he’s just doing it for fun. That doesn’t say anything about what is going wrong with the universe, at least not to her. Daniel only hums and makes odd grunting noises. The Chief Architect’s eyes look ready to jump out of their sockets. Her mouth stays open, always about to interrupt Daniel’s work except she never does. For all her experience, she’s clearly never seen Daniel when he’s determined to figure something out.
Finally, after a few iterations of a ceramic disk mysteriously appearing in Ellie’s left hand, he gestures at them to stop their not-a-trick. The air in the room becomes crisper and sharper. For a moment, the first sting of winter bites them. A fluffy, white ice coalesces inside a wafer cone he’s suddenly holding. He breaks off a bit of the cone and scoops a bit of the ice. He savors it, his head slowly nodding.
“Here, try this.” He offers it to both of them.
“Are you kidding?” Ellie’s hands remain resolutely by her side. “You want me to taste something you made while working out the root cause of something, in your words, dangerously wrong?”
“Would I ask you to taste something truly inedible?”
“Yes.”
“No. Come on, just try it.” He pulls the Chief Architect into his gaze. “I’m making a point.”
Ellie sighs. She stretches her exhale like some sort of contortionist of breath. With a twist of her wrist that radiates “against my better judgment,” she digs out a little ice with a fragment of wafer cone. The Chief Architect scoops out her taste of ice with far less petulance.
It tastes like the cold respite from a blistering summer day she’s been craving ever since coming down to metro DC. The pucker from the lemon is pleasant, rounded out by a hint of sweetness and a little bitter pith. Ellie involuntarily reaches for another taste but stops herself. The Chief Architect simply takes a taste then levels her gaze at Daniel, waiting for him to make his point.
“I don’t get it.” Ellie chews and swallows the bit of wafer cone. “It tastes exactly like what it is, a lemon ice.”
“That’s my point.” He clasps his hands and the cone of lemon ice disappears. “If any subsystem isn’t behaving the way it’s intended, it’s beyond me.”
“It’s not just you.” The Chief Architect finishes off her wafer cone. “So you don’t understand the problem—”
“Oh, I can sketch out for you the sequence of events that lets anyone get access to shards of unrealized futures left lying around in the skunkworks. That’s what I’ve been spending the past who knows how long working out.” He stops for a moment in concentration. “It’s kind of involved and subtle. I can’t talk at the same time. Gimme a sec.”
He spreads his hands and cleaves a plane of air from the room. His face contorts, as if a twisted mouth and scrunched eyes would make the air more compliant. Ellie can’t tell whether he’s back on his “I’m not that competent, really” game or whether this is genuinely hard for him. A metallic shriek echoes with each fold. His chest and arms bulge as he wrenches the plane into shape, bending and twisting in directions that otherwise don’t exist. Sweat drips down his face and his tongue peeks out of his distorted mouth. All sorts of food manifests on a whim, but these planes of air apparently need to be wrestled with. Both Ellie and the Chief Architect stare as Daniel studiously ignores them.
