“Gimme a minute. Meet me in the living room.”
Daniel washes out the bottle, then puts his gym stuff away. Ellie cleans up after herself. When she’s done, she heads to the living room. Daniel is sitting on the sofa, crouched over. He’s studying a tiny piece of intricately folded air. It floats between his hands, wobbling as its rotation changes axes. His cell phone rings, and he manages to shut it off without dropping what he’s studying. When he notices Ellie, the piece of folded air disappears.
“Ahdi’s still trying to teach me how he whisks people around like that.” Daniel stands as he rubs his hands. “Just follow me to the archives, OK? I promise I’ve gotten much better at being followable.”
Ellie nods. She’s never been to any of the archives before.
Daniel dissolves into the air. Individual particles of him go into solution and an ever more translucent Daniel is smeared around the living room. It isn’t a second before he’s entirely gone. The living room dissolves around Ellie as she follows him. It becomes an impressionist painting that is then smudged into swaths of color. She’s following a complex set of equations implying a machine she senses in the void between universes. She’s pretty sure it’s Daniel.
The colors deepen and darken. Faint clicking in a quasi-periodic pattern surrounds her. Dark browns resolve into two columns of rectangular hardwood tables and chairs, separated by an aisle running parallel to the long sides of a very rectangular room. Each table is parallel to the short sides. Two green-shaded lamps hang over each table. People scattered around the reading room sit hunched, poring over tomes and jotting down notes. A couple of them are bipedal humanoids. The rest are from universes Ellie only knows about from her mom.
The ceiling is a clockwork sky. She senses the mainsprings and movements more than she can see them. Shelves line the walls. Vast windows lie above them. Beams of light spill through, splashing the tiled floor with shadow.
Ellie is about five feet off the ground. Daniel’s standing in the aisle between the two columns of tables. He turns and catches her at her waist as she falls. A couple of people look up from their books at them.
“Yeah, we need to work on that.” He gently sets her down. “First time I followed Ahdi here, I crashed through a bunch of lamps and a table. Splinters of wood and broken glass all over. Everyone gawked at the clumsy brute. It was great. Not awkward at all.”
Daniel is so deadpan that Ellie just stands there puzzled as he saunters past her toward a counter at the end of the room. By the time she realizes where Daniel is, she has to rush to catch up. When she does, she stares for an instant until she realizes whatshe’s doing. Whether the archivist behind the counter is from this universe, Ellie certainly isn’t. She’s the odd one here.
“Xu, this is my cousin, Ellie.” Daniel presents Ellie to the archivist. “Ellie, this is Xu. He’s been an archivist for ages.”
Myriad tiny insects with iridescent wings form the archivist’s body. They flutter in place, glinting like tiny dots as they angle in and out of the light. Daniel opens his arms for a hug and the archivist swarms around him. He arranges his wings into rings of intricate patterns that rotate in alternating directions around Daniel. After he flows back to his side of the counter, his body settles into a standing bipedal form.
“Hi, Ellie.” The archivist extends a shimmering hand toward her. “My condolences on your mother.”
Tiny wings vibrate against Ellie’s skin. The archivist’s grasp is firm, though, and when she squeezes back she feels both the heft of his grip and the fluttering of his wings.
“You know me?”
“Oh, please.” Xu scoffs, or at least that’s how it seems from the way his wings swirl across his body. “I’ve worked with both your cousin and your mother for years. They both talked, you know.”
Chris is curiously missing from that list. She’s about to ask when Daniel speaks instead.
“We did?” Daniel looks vaguely appalled. “We said good things, I hope.”
“Of course.” A row of wings streams from his body, circles Daniel, then goes back again. “I’m sorry there’s nothing in the archive about the mechanism installed to hold off your mother’s death.”
“That’s not why we’re here.” Ellie’s words come out a little too quickly.
“No, we’re here to investigate a covert channel in our universe.” Daniel blanches at Ellie’s glare. “What?”
Shock, or surprise, ripples through Xu. The insects of his bodyscatter and gather from bottom to top. It takes him a second to pull himself back together.
“A covert channel in your universe?” Xu expands to Daniel-like proportions. “Are you sure? Do you know what you’re suggesting?”
Ellie and Daniel exchange glances. Daniel shrugs. He is as puzzled as she is.
“What are we suggesting?” Ellie tries but fails to avoid sounding like she’s setting Xu up for a punch line.
“Disarray. Secret hardware makes keeping a universe functional harder. Some maintenance work may interact with the secret hardware in a bad way and how would the maintainer ever know?” He shrinks down to a more compact size, his vibrating wings almost touching each other. “Keeping secrets doesn’t speak well of the maintainers in your universe.”
Daniel looks smug. Unfortunately, it’s a wholesome self-satisfaction that reads much more “Hey, it turns out I’ve been doing the right thing all along” than “I rebuke your baseless glare with the grin of righteousness.” Ellie is not nearly as annoyed as she wants to be. That, ironically, annoys her a lot.
“It’s bad enough that maintenance isn’t part of the standard curriculum in your schools, but the utter apathy about your skunkworks is palpable. It’s a miracle there are enough maintainers to keep your universe functioning properly.” Xu orients a cluster of insects at Daniel. “Maintainers designing and installing hardware that other maintainers don’t know about is beyond the pale.”
“That’s why we’re here,” Daniel says simply. “To determine whether it’s a covert channel or a side channel. Whether there are maintainers deliberately corrupting the universe is more important than this one exploit.”
“And you think the archive will have documents about a mechanism that no one is supposed to know about?”
