The air in the skunkworks feels spackled onto her skin. It burns into her lungs like hot fudge, slow and slick, its aftertaste at once sickly sweet, bitter, and sour. It takes effort to force back out.
The skunkworks looks like the masterpiece of some mad plumber who failed perspectives class in art school. The labyrinth of pipes surrounding her make her dizzy at first. Standing on one of the broad swaths of transparent mesh stretched between pipes, she bobbles until she gets her bearings.
Fat pipes pass overhead. They form a de facto canopy hiding the rest of the skunkworks, which stretches for miles above her. In actuality, it stretches for miles in all directions. Fixes have piled on top of so-called improvements have piled on top of emergency repairs forever. Rust covers the gates and reservoirs at the intersection of pipes. Most pipes block each other’s way and have to zigzag around each other. No pipes are unscarred from dead welds of stubs where pipes used to join together.
Data pulses through the pipes in all directions. The pipes ripple, but stabilize in time for the clacking of valves and the burbling of reservoirs. Probably because she already knows which ones they are, the pipes that violate the hold-time requirement look out of sync even to the naked eye. Pipes are supposed to be stable from a little before reservoir valves clack shut until a little after. The pipes that violate the hold-time requirement start to ripple again too soon, corrupting the reservoirs they feed.
Someone stands on a mesh below her. Daniel. He’s a verifier,not an isolationist. None of the latter have found her yet. Ellie lets go of the breath she didn’t realize she was holding.
Even though Mom always pulled Ellie into the skunkworks with her, she never admitted, at least not to Ellie, to the existence of isolationists. She had to learn who they are from Chris. They believe whatever universe a skunkworks generates is by definition correct, even as a skunkworks inevitably decays. Any change introduces error instead of removing it. They’re what Chris used to scare Ellie into doing what Chris wanted when Ellie was a kid.Be good or the isolationists will get you.
Mom only ever talked about maintainers. They fall into three rough groups, with some overlaps. Architects design the configuration of gates and pipes that generate the next universe in. Builders, like Ellie and Chris, install those gates and pipes, translating the architects’ designs into reality. Verifiers, like Daniel, check whether architects have designed the right thing and whether they have designed the thing right. They understand the skunkworks better than anyone, to the extent that anyone really understands the workings of any universe. The first one to show up when the skunkworks has gone wrong is almost always a verifier. Or a generalist, who’s skilled at all three jobs.
Even looking down from above, no one can mistake Daniel. His long legs are proportionately too short for his torso, and his shoulders are too wide. He manages to be both lithe and stocky at the same time, as though he were the runt of a family of impossibly elegant giants. He was voluntold to play football in high school and, even now, he does not look like someone you want to tackle you. A black T-shirt is draped over his left shoulder.
The pipes beyond his gaze blur as though a giant thumb has smeared a broad swath of petroleum jelly on the air. He holds his hand out. The blurred air twists and swirls into a ball on his palm. It coalesces into an egg tart. Bright yellow custard sits inside apale, blond serrated crust. The perfume of eggs and sugar hangs in the thick air.
Every verifier Ellie has met except Daniel generates equivalence reports as sheafs of something crystalline. Daniel’s, for reasons best known to Daniel, are always edible.
He studies the egg tart from every angle. His neck cranes and his hand twists. Crumbs fall when he lifts the tart to look at the crust’s bottom. He brings it to his nose to sniff. The custard jiggles slightly when he shakes the tart. He frowns.
Ellie bounces from mesh to mesh, swinging around pipes and ducking under reservoirs, landing next to Daniel. This mesh, already taut from his weight, barely registers her.
“Cousin! Your first time solo.” Daniel’s voice, despite being practically subsonic, is never the thunder she expects from an elegant giant. He speaks with the rustle of leaves and the rush of water as it smooths rock. “Congrats.”
“Chris mentioned hold-time violations, probably valves gone faulty. Should be an easy fix. Otherwise, she wouldn’t have sent me instead of coming herself.” Ellie’s arms wave in slow-motion semaphore as she steadies herself. “Your egg tart shows a mismatch between how the skunkworks that was built functions and how the skunkworks that was designed functions, right?”
“Yeah, no point calling in an architect. The design itself is fine. The problem is in the implementation. It’s all yours.”
She sets her backpack down, then walks around Daniel to a knot of intertwined pipes. Reservoir valves clack, and the pipes they feed ripple too soon. Data races through those pipes, corrupting the reservoir they feed in turn. All of the valves, however, are fine. Their actuators swing smoothly. Their seals fit perfectly against the pipes and reservoirs. Nothing leaks.
She could add some delays to satisfy the hold-time requirement, to make the data take longer to reach the reservoir they feed. That’s almost as simple as the leaky-valve repair Chris expected. That,however, would merely get rid of the symptom. Mom taught her better than that. She has to find the cause of the hold-time violation first.
The skunkworks predate humanity and, if she’s guessed the age of the hardware right, no human has ever made any changes to this section. Any mismatch in construction should have been found eons ago. She checks anyway, working through the checklist her mom taught her, hoping that’s what the problem is. If the design is fine and the hardware is correctly constructed, the remaining alternatives are all unthinkable.
She draws a large rectangle in front of her with her hand the way Mom taught her. A plane of air detaches and folds itself into an origami Black Forest cuckoo clock. The transparent, crystalline structure floats before her eyes. Its pendulum swings back and forth and the skunkworks fills with the sting of an offstage chorus whenever the pendulum stops at the peak of its arc. Light diffracts through leaves lining its sides. Color sprays across the pipes and Daniel. The egg tart still sits in his outstretched hand and he looks sillier than Ellie would have thought possible given his “I am deadly if you come within five paces” body.
The clock unfolds itself back into a rectangle, marked with creases where it had been folded. They divide the plane of air into facets that refract pipes behind them into something Syncretic Cubist. She grabs the newly retrieved blueprint. Its hard edges dig into her palms. She warps it, at first, into a dome, then into a sphere that seals her in.
Daniel splinters into “Man with an Egg Tart,” a Braque that Braque never painted. He’s all shards of black, gray, and brown flecked with grains of yellow. This piece of the skunkworks, however, resolves into something uniform and regular.
The multiple perspectives merge into one. Pipes straighten and meet at right angles. Ellie spins along three axes inside the sphere. Her hands and feet work their way up, down, and around thehard, cold sphere for support. Dense knots of machinery explode, laying bare their pipes and gates. The labyrinth of pipes has become now a regular matrix. The hardware matches the blueprints then.
That’s one possible issue eliminated. She’s not shocked. No problem as straightforward as a mismatch goes undiscovered for days, much less millennia. The sort of things that take forever to discover tend to be subtle. Fundamental constants shifting, even slightly, is not subtle. That implies a recent change. What she has to do now is find it.
The dataflow through the machinery is now perfectly straightforward. Pulses of data bulge from one pipe to another. They sweep in waves across the matrix, each wave a straight line traveling from one side of the matrix to the other. Whoever built this hardware followed the design rules derived from the physics for this universe.
That’s another possible issue ruled out. Again, a design-rule violation that makes the kilogram unstable was unlikely to stay undiscovered for millennia. So far, the lack of any mistakes in construction suggests that none of this hardware has changed for the longest time.
The waves propagate, however, faster than she expects. They should be regularly spaced. Each wave should be swallowed by a set of reservoirs that, a moment later, sends out a wave of its own. Instead, waves crash into each other. That’s bad. In fact, that’s not possible. It does, at least, highlight which paths are violating the hold-time constraint.
Daniel has verified that the design is correct. The hardware matches the design. It follows the design rules derived from the physics of this universe. It’s in good shape. There shouldn’t be any hold-time violations. It’s supposed to work, exactly as it has for millennia.
But it doesn’t.
While the skunkworks match the blueprint in construction, they don’t match the blueprint in function. She’s tempted to give up and just fix the symptom. A few buffers inserted into the relevant paths and the violation would be gone. Anyone with any training as a builder could do that. But she wants to know why a repair is necessary in the first place. Otherwise, she’s not really solving the problem.
“Fuck me.” She slams a foot against the sphere. It shatters with a chord from the offstage chorus. “The valves are fine. The design is fine. Everything is fine.”
