Ellie infers the construct’s existence the same way she recognizes the table is here. The folds refract the surroundings. From where she’s sitting it is a portrait of Ahdi deconstructed into triangles from too many incompatible perspectives.
“Do you know when these changes were made to the skunkworks?” Ellie asks. “We need to find out who did this.”
Ahdi stands over the structure. Occasionally, he prods at a fold. It vibrates, emitting a noise that’s a cross between a squeak and a chime. He unfolds sections to expose deeper folds. The structure sings out not as much in agony as in counterpoint with itself. Its elegantly prepared dissonance resolves into glorious consonance again and again. Ahdi buries himself in its internals. It fragments the image of his head, scattering the pieces across the room. A nose turned at one angle juts up against an eye turned at another. Ellie has no idea what he is gleaning. Judging from Daniel’s expression, he’s not exactly keeping up either.
Ahdi’s analysis only takes a minute. When he’s done, he folds the structure back together. It sits on the table, looking exactly the way it did when Daniel first created it. Ahdi rubs his hands, as if he were trying to scrape some powder or residue from his palms.
“Well. That was interesting. It’s not going to be easy to work out who did this.” He sits down. “If all of these changes were put in specifically to create this behavior, your conspiracy would need to have been around for at least a hundred years.”
“Wait.” Ellie bobbles in her chair before it recovers herbalance. “Are you saying there is a real shadow cabal of maintainers working over the past century to sneak a covert channel into the universe piece by piece?”
“No. There’s nothing here to rule that out, but odds are we implemented quantum physics incorrectly over a century ago. Everything that creates the behavior we didn’t intend is also part of what creates the behavior we did intend.”
A cookie crumbles out of Daniel’s hands. Dribbles of oatmeal and raisins fall onto the table. Daniel, of course, didn’t have a cookie a second ago. He tamps down the grin on his face, shrugs innocently, and makes all evidence of the cookie go away as Ahdi gives him the mildest of reproving glares and presses on.
“Being able to grab fragments of highly probable realities that almost existed is a side effect of how we implemented quantum physics. It didn’t have to be this exact way, but no one could have foreseen all the ramifications back then or, for that matter, now. This unwanted behavior is much more likely to be an especially unfortunate bug than a deliberate attempt to subvert the universe.” Ahdi holds up a hand. “Listen, this will take a while and dinner is getting cold. We should eat while I explain.”
They eat as Ahdi goes through his analysis, Ahdi eventually having seconds and Daniel thirds. The way he keeps peering at his empty bowl, Daniel clearly wants fourths, but no amount of gentle encouragement can get him to fill his bowl or let Ahdi fill it for him. Daniel mutters something about maintaining an optimal strength-to-weight ratio.
Ahdi digs into the structure between swallows of soup and slurps of noodles. Thick, agile fingers pry folds apart to reveal yet more folds. Methodically, he works through every fold, explaining how the side channel co-opts the mechanisms that make the universe work. As he does, he complicates the model Daniel created. It sprouts extra spikes and facets that put the fold he’s explaining in context, to show how it participates in creating the universethey intended. Those spikes and facets go away and others take their place when he moves on to the next fold.
The model morphs from one configuration to another with the grace of a dancer’s muscles flexing under taut skin. Ahdi does this so easily that it doesn’t even occur to Ellie to be impressed until the bowls are empty, the analysis is complete, and the structure is restored to its original configuration. Now static, it reflects the walls, Ahdi, Daniel, Ellie herself, and the reflections of their reflections in scattered triangles. When the scope of what Ahdi has done with such ease finally hits her, her mouth works soundlessly for a few seconds before she gives up.
“That was a bit dry. I think we need a field trip to the skunkworks.” Ahdi meets Ellie’s and Daniel’s gazes. “Are you two up for that?”
They both nod, Daniel eagerly, Ellie less so. Ahdi nods back.
“Good.” He rubs his hands. “Leave the travel arrangements to me. It’s faster that way.”
CHAPTER 10
Ellie expects Ahdi to dissolve and to lay a trail for her and Daniel to follow. Instead, the world shatters around her into tiny flecks of light that scatter, leaving her hanging in a black void. In the next instant, the world coalesces again and the three of them are together in the skunkworks. She hadn’t realized being taken anywhere was even possible. Even when she was a child going to maintainer school, Mom led her there and back but Ellie still had to travel for herself.
The trip is so fast that Ellie slams into the syrupy air like a wall when she arrives. Ellie grabs on to Daniel for support. Daniel, who looks as though Ahdi takes him from place to place all the time, wraps an arm around Ellie in turn.
“How did you get all three of us here by yourself?” Ellie eases her grip on Daniel.
“I guess the processisa bit more involved than bringing just yourself.” Ahdi looks vaguely embarrassed. “Not right now, but I’d be happy to show you how.”
How Ahdi got them here does nothing to erase Ellie’s doubts. On the defense side of the balance, Daniel trusts Ahdi implicitly. On the prosecution side, if there is a maintainer who can change the skunkworks in a way everyone swears happened a century ago, Ahdi is blasting on all frequencies that he is that maintainer. No one who did, though, would be so open about it, she suspects.
The three of them are standing on a dais. Beneath them, tinyswitches form a grid that stretches out in all directions, farther than she can see. The switches click and clack in a way that feels like it ought to be a pattern. She can’t find it, though.
Or maybe she’s wrong. It’s not like she’s ever been in any of the skunkworks’ caches before. She only recognizes that it is a cache from her mom’s descriptions.
“What we store and where we store it is kind of a mess.” Ahdi gestures at the grid below them. “Even when everything works as it’s supposed to.”
“It looks like a well-formed array to me?” Ellie’s not sure what he’s referring to but, as the words leave her mouth, she realizes it isn’t this.
“Oh, sorry, I don’t mean the structure. Yes, caches themselves are perfectly regular. I mean their contents. See that possible traffic accident there?” He points down at a set of switches immediately below them. “Different outcomes for the same cars. Only one of them will make it into the committed state of the universe, but all of them are still here.”
She doesn’t see it until he points it out. Then she can’t miss it. What’s encoded into the vast field of switches below them is a hodgepodge with no rhyme or reason she can see.
Shards of discarded and potential futures litter the caches of the skunkworks. The graveyard of what almost happened and what may still happen is tossed in with what did happen, the state of the universe. Stars going nova lie jammed up next to coffee-splattered spoons, next to the vain struggle against the ennui of the one thousand thirty-seventh grilled cheese in a row, and a shower of sand that lands on a piece of particle board to form an exact re-creation of Hiroshi Sugimoto’s portrait of Voltaire. The graveyard is ever-shifting. A tea-stained cup in a sink is shuttled away, replaced by a positron and electron annihilating each other. A shifting of sand on some alien world is ruthlessly overwritten by a plume of smoke doing the jitterbug.
Ellie shakes her head and, for a moment, shuts her eyes. Maybe there is a pattern to the data, but where it is parked and when it’s retrieved, if it is at all, seems haphazard.
“And the skunkworks can find the data it needs in that mess?” Ellie looks up at Ahdi in blatant disbelief. “It can tell what might still happen from what it hasn’t gotten around to overwriting.”
