The entire ordeal takes a few minutes or so. A spiky, mirror-like structure with faintly glowing folds bobbles right above Daniel’s palms. He runs his hands over the imaginary sphere that surrounds the structure. It rotates slowly in sync with his hands. Deconstructed faces and furniture shift from one facet to another. The structure settles down, and Daniel looks positively smug.
“So this is what is happening: Each sub-subsystem is behaving exactly as you’d expect it to but—” The smugness fades when Daniel spots a structure under a table. “Oh, you’re already working on a fix.”
The Chief Architect plucks the structure from Daniel’s hands and sets it under a table next to the one he noticed. Her gaze sweeps Daniel’s structure up and down before she turns to face Ellie and Daniel again.
“And I thought I shouldn’t take the rumors about you too seriously. It took us weeks to work out why this was happening.” She folds her hands across her chest. “Now I’m wondering whether everything else they say about you is also true.”
Daniel’s face is a mask of panic and horror. He waves his hands in front of him as if to ward off an oncoming steamroller.
“Who is ‘they’ and what else do ‘they’ say about me?” His words rush out oddly high-pitched and loud relative to his usual rumble. He takes a deep breath. His voice drops to its normal octave, volume, and pace. “It’s so much easier when the bug is so obviously reproducible like that.”
“Oh, please, Daniel.” The Chief Architect’s grin is far too wide. “You made more progress in the past hour than two teams of verifiers have in several weeks. You really can’t help yourself.”
“No.” Daniel scrunches up his face. “I am just a completely harmless, moderately competent verifier.”
Ellie’s gaze darts back and forth between the two of them. It’s absolutely possible that Daniel believes this the same way he believes that he’s not that much stronger than anyone else. The Chief Architect is pretty clearly needling him. Ellie doesn’t see the point. He’s not usually particularly needled.
“There’s a vast infrastructure of maintainers who find and fix bugs. It seems to have a handle on this one.” Ellie gestures at the work under the table. “Why did you ask us here?”
“Because I need a favor.” The Chief Architect takes a deep breath. “As bugs go, this one seems suspiciously exploitable. It’s a side, or worse, covert channel that lets anyone who knows how to use it funnel out whatever they want—”
“Well, not whatever they want. Technically, it’s only stuff from an alternate present that almost but not quite happened,” Daniel says as he raises a hand. “Ellie couldn’t have learned anything or gotten anything from the hypothetical present where you had putgardening shears or a rabid ferret in the drawer three years ago, for example.”
“Thank you, Captain Pedantic.” The Chief Architect’s tone is dry. “My point is that not only is it suspiciously useful, it also leaves the physics of this universe basically intact. If you don’t search for it, you’re unlikely to stumble across it. I’m not saying that it isn’t just an extremely unfortunate bug. I’ve seen my share. However, this is also the sort of thing that, if it were deliberately installed into the universe, would require a team of expert maintainers with sufficiently dubious ethics.”
A side channel is unintentional. Someone opens their refrigerator and cold air comes out. It does whether anyone wants it to or not. To steal the cold, a hypothetical cold thief only has to know how to open the door. A covert channel is intentional. It’s as if the cold thief has surreptitiously drilled into the refrigerator and added a camouflaged system of pipes and pumps to sneak the cold out. Ultimately, the only real difference between a side channel and a covert channel is whether whoever built the thing that lets the cold air out meant for the cold air to escape.
Ellie bristles at the idea of a covert channel in the universe. That goes against everything anyone has been taught about being a maintainer.
“So there’s some secret cabal of maintainers?” Ellie lets her arms fall.
“We’repart of a secret cabal of maintainers.” Daniel raises his hand again. “That each universe is generated by machinery in the surrounding universe is common knowledge—at least among some physicists—but who maintains that machinery or even that the machinery needs maintenance doesn’t exactly make the evening news.”
“You know what I mean.” Ellie punches him in the arm and it’s like punching stone. Pain shoots up her arm. “Secret even to us. Maintainers willing to change the physics of this universe for personal gain.”
“Exactly.” The Chief Architect shoots Daniel another look. “Exploiting this is straightforward. Anyone who knows about it, including those who don’t even know that maintenance is a thing, can take advantage of it. Some secret cabal sneaking covert channels into the universe will wreak havoc in ways I can’t even begin to fathom. That’s why I need you to make sure there isn’t a cabal. And if there is, find out who they are.”
“No, no.” Ellie holds her hands up. “I have to be back in Boston by Monday if I want to keep my grant funding.”
It’s bad enough that she’s stuck here until the Sunday-night train. Being forced to talk to a bunch of people who already hate her is the only way it can be worse.
“That gives us today and tomorrow.” Daniel’s rumble is aggressively good-natured. “With the both of us, that seems doable.”
Ellie shoots him an exasperated look. Daniel ignores it. He pulls chairs over for the three of them. As he sits, he stretches his back.
Once in a while, rather than being his usual agreeable self, she wants Daniel to shout “Fuck you and the horse you fucking rode in on!” instead. That the only way either one of them can refuse is to offer an extremely respectful excuse makes the thought all the more satisfying.
“Why me?” Ellie lets her hands fall. “There have to be any number of more experienced maintainers you can ask.”
The Chief Architect takes another deep breath. Slowly, the air escapes, her cheeks puffed out, in an exaggerated sigh.
“I didn’t know about the mechanism keeping your mother alive until the uproar after you dismantled it.” The Chief Architect sits and gestures for Ellie to sit, too. “What do you think that means?”
Daniel’s eyes widen and his jaw drops. It’s a bit curious considering he did know about the mechanism.
“There wasn’t a ruckus when it was installed so I assumed everybody above my pay grade knew and approved. Then it kept gettingmodified and no one seemed to care.” His composure restored, Daniel’s voice regains its usual sand-shifting-on-a-desolate-beach demeanor. “Someone who is not me had to have noticed. How do you hide something like that? The blot on the design of the skunkworks and the generated universe was so blatant.”
“Did you notice, Ellie?” The Chief Architect’s voice is as pointed as her gaze.
