She falls face up onto the mesh and thinks horrible things about Chris. Her backpack bounces above her, then lands on her stomach.
Daniel seems to have disappeared. This completely tracks. Ellie was running bog-standard diagnostics. Three seconds of boredom and Daniel wanders off, sometimes to another universe. In this case, almost certainly back to their own, probably the instant she started doing her thing. It’s too bad because Ellie could use someone to talk through whatever is causing the skunkworks to fail like this.
Ellie knows the right thing to do. Chris probably has some idea of how to deal with this. Ellie should ask Chris for help. However, Ellie dismisses the idea almost before it crosses her mind. She can already hear exactly what Chris will say. Ellie doesn’t need a helping of “How can you be so useless? I ask you to do a simple bit of maintenance and you can’t even do that by yourself. And you wonder why I don’t want your help with Mom” before Chris finally deigns to offer a suggestion.
Instead, Ellie closes her eyes. Mentally, she ticks off entries on the checklist that builders follow when they troubleshoot. Mom walked her through it every time they were in the skunkworks together. Usually, though, they don’t make it as far as checking for design-rule violations before they have some clue of what’s going wrong.
There’s one entry on the checklist left, she realizes. Something happened that shouldn’t have in the skunkworks one universe out. That is, the skunkworks that generates the universe she is in now, which contains the skunkworks that generates her own universe. The recent change is there, not here.
In other words, she needs a verifier, say Daniel, to check out whether that skunkworks is working right. She keeps her eyes shut and listens to the valves around her clack open and closed with metronomic precision. Maybe a moment or three to clear her mind would be a good thing.
“I’m back.” Daniel’s rumbling voice shocks Ellie’s eyes open. “Did you miss me?”
Daniel looms over her, his hands behind his back. He smells like soy and ginger. An amused expression sits on his face.
“Egg tart?” He crouches, then places the pastry on the backpack. His other hand is still behind his back.
“I don’t need to study the equivalence report.” She pushes herself up by her elbows. “I trust your analysis.”
“I meant to eat. It’s a functional mismatch but still edible.” He nudges the backpack toward her head. “You haven’t had dinner yet, right? You’ll feel better with something in your stomach. Personally, I think that’s just a story my boyfriend tells me, but maybe eating really does clear the mind.”
She sits up. The backpack and egg tart slide to her lap. “Don’t you want your mind cleared?”
“Nyah. I don’t believe in emotions.” He notes her skeptical gaze and a grin lights his face. “I had a protein shake and a banana before I showed up.”
“I’ve checked everything else, so there’s only one thing left that can be wrong.” She takes a bite of the egg tart. It tastes sweet, sour, and… gamey. “Turkey and cranberries?”
“Hey, I said the report was a mismatch. I do what I can.” Daniel rolls his eyes. “So what’s wrong, cuz?”
“This entire universe.” She finishes the egg tart. It’s not bad if you know what’s coming. “It’s like someone secretly added lots of helium to the air and now we all squeak. Except less resistance rather than higher pitch. The skunkworks wasn’t designed for data to flow through pipes this easily. The properties of this universe can’t have changed much. Most of the skunkworks still works right or we’d be seeing—I don’t know—people diffracting through fences or something, but a few paths are now too fast.”
“Which is why we’re seeing functional failures even though what was built matches what was designed then functionally verified.” Daniel nods. “What next?”
“Check whether the skunkworks one universe out is working properly. I want to know whether just fixing the violating paths will solve the problem for good.”
“I popped out to check while you were assessing equivalence here. It’s fine.” From behind his back, he brings out a plate made of compressed, deep-fried rice that he must have been holding all this time. He puts it onto her backpack. Pieces of pan-fried fish coated in brown glaze sit on the plate. That’s why he smells of soy and ginger. “Also, I went to an archive and pulled a copy of the latest changes made to the skunkworks that generates the universe we’re in now.”
He digs a small, clear, iridescent dodecahedron out of the right, front pocket of his jeans and tosses it to her. Its facets are numbered. You could make an attack roll in an RPG with it. Fractures appear and disappear inside the die as Ellie rolls it around in her hand. She rotates the die from 20 to 1 and reads the shifting cracks. Her eyes widen at the sheer scope of some of the changes. These are not mere parts replacements or surgical bug fixes.
“So the maintainers of this universe intentionally changed their own physics? Why would anyone do that?” This goes against everything maintainers are supposed to stand for. “If you already knew that, why bother asking me what’s wrong?”
“I didn’t already know. Speculative generation.” He smiles. “You were busy and there was no reason not to check before you asked. I know what the builders’ checklist looks like, and it wasn’t impossible that you’d make it all the way down to the bottom. Sooner we get out of here, the less likely we’ll have to deal with any troublemakers. I saved us some time. And if it turned out you didn’t need me to do anything, no big deal.”
Ellie breaks off a shard from the plate to test the fish. The glazed fish’s crispy skin cracks against the deep-fried rice. She sniffs at this equivalence report. Then again, the egg tart smelled normal too.
“Is this going to taste icky sweet like???or something?”
Now Daniel looks annoyed. His gaze is sharp and his hands rest on his hips. “No, it’s going to taste like a deconstructed garlic fried rice paired with a soy-and-ginger-glazed tilapia. The skunkworks one universe out is fine. Eat.”
She lances a piece of fish and tries it. The tilapia is mild. Its triumph is that it doesn’t sit like cotton in her mouth. The glaze is lovely. Garlic, shallots, and a little brown sugar round out the soy and ginger.
Daniel simply shakes his head when she offers to share. She hasn’t had dinner yet, and she doesn’t have time, so it all disappears quickly. The glaze never cloys even when it coats her mouth. The plate made of rice clears the glaze away in any case.
“Show-off.” Ellie smiles before letting sparks flit from finger to finger on her left hand. She can show off, too.
The air becomes gauze that scatters the pipes, valves, reservoirs, even Daniel into mathematical points that then recombine. The machinery that generates the universe shimmers. When the gauze coalesces, it becomes cool, metallic, and malleable, not coincidentally the stuff that thickens into pieces of the skunkworks.
Her right hand extrudes a delay element out of the gauze. In time with the omnipresent clacking of valves, her left hand strikesthe pipe in front of her twice. Sparks fly. The pipe splits into three pieces. Clean, parallel scars separate a ring from the pipe on either side of it. She removes the ring and replaces it with the delay element, her left hand sparking again to fuse the delay element into place.
