“They have a point,” Ellie follows up, having been beaten to the punch.
“Then you two had better get started. You get access to the change records once you see what you need to see about the abomination. There is a trail outside my office for you to follow.” Their branches reach for and gently pat Ellie and Daniel. “Good luck. I hope that I’ll see you both again. And under happier circumstances.”
With that the meeting is over. Ellie and Daniel exchange glances, then set out on the trail.
CHAPTER 19
The study room is a giant wooden crate. And, apparently, alive. The floor, walls, and ceiling form one seamless rectangular bubble of wood with suspiciously flat sides and rounded corners. The room has no windows or doors. When Ellie concentrates, she feels the respiration in the wood. A slight current scatters oxygen throughout.
The monstrosity floats in the middle of the room. Not the real thing, not even a thing really. Built out of air and light, it’s an artifact of the very real waist-high rectangular ring of machinery hunkered on the floor. Levers, dials, keyboards, and displays cover its beveled surface.
Daniel practically hovers over it, his eyes wide and mouth agape. He flits from one set of controls to another, twisting one and pulling at another. One might think sheer momentum would make him overshoot or trip over himself, but one would be wrong. The monstrosity breaks apart into an exploded view. Several internal switches are highlighted. One of the displays fills with text. Daniel stands in front of it and vibrates, his jaw stretched so low that his mouth could hold a hamster or medium-sized songbird.
“I’ve always wanted to use one of these.” Daniel claps. “It’s supposed to make sifting through design changes tractable.”
Daniel stares intently at a display. His hand nudges a lever. Text scrolls up the display and he nods slowly. He looks dismayed and nudges the lever again.
Ellie slumps. Every second she spent dismantling that monstrosity was agony. It felt as though Mom died with every gate she removed and pipe she sealed. If she never laid eyes on it again, it would still be too soon. Daniel, however, scurries around the ring, oblivious of Ellie. They are clearly not leaving until Daniel has exercised all the bells and whistles.
Daniel’s hands fly over a keyboard. The clack of keys blurs into a hum. The sections of the monstrosity fly away, leaving only one hanging in midair. It grows to fill the ring. Its switches and pumps are the sort of precise and pristine that you never see in the real skunkworks. Reservoirs fill in zero time. All the flaps open and close simultaneously and in less than an instant.
“Ellie.” Daniel hits one final key and the section rearranges itself and flattens into a schematic. “Why would you build it like this?”
Out of context, what’s floating in front of her could be any network of switches and reservoirs. It’s also a mess. Thin pipes jogging this way and that around each other become a tangle of crisscrossing lines. Even though all the elements are idealized, the block of equations that would describe the network might take pages. These wouldn’t be the most elegant equations, but give her enough time and she could write them out. Then again, so could Daniel.
“I don’t know. Are you asking why it can’t be coherently decomposed into reasonable-sized chunks?” Ellie’s gaze passes over the schematic. “What am I looking at, anyway?”
Daniel looks pensive. He stares down at the ground for a moment. A sliver of ice appears in his hand and flips over and over as it melts.
“I think they tried to contain the changes so that they only affected Aunt Vera.” He punishes his now-wet hand with an “I’m a dumbass” glare and rubs it against his jeans. “Not saying that it worked, of course.”
Ellie studies the schematic again. Text around the edges annotates the input and output signals. Whoever made the annotations either has a sense of humor or thinks that names like “This almost means ‘It happened on Earth’”and “State change is inside a human body or, oddly, various types of swallows” are good signal names.
“Are the annotations accurate?” Ellie walks up to a screen and keyboard. “Do we even squirrel away where things happen?”
The rules of the universe don’t change based on location. Or at least they haven’t. In theory, anything is possible as long as you can build the machinery for it into the skunkworks.
“Not explicitly. But it’s not like stuff happens in the universe at no place in particular.” He types something, runs around the ring twisting knobs and adjusting levers as he speaks. “I think this is what they tried to recover the location. Back their way into it, as it were.”
The schematic dissolves, replaced by yet another mess of intertwined pipes, pumps, and reservoirs. Ellie eyes the screen next to her and nudges a lever. The mess pitches down, exposing interconnections that other pipes had hidden. It doesn’t look any more elegant from this angle. She searches through the help screens and pieces together which commands she needs to type and which knobs she needs to adjust. Multiple versions of the mess now stand side by side. The differences between adjacent versions are outlined with a golden glow.
“Heh.” Ellie sighs. “They were just throwing in changes, weren’t they.…”
“Yeah. I’d like to think they did some verification first, but yeah. The thing I don’t get, though.” He stares at the controls in front of him, then flits from one section of the ring to another, twisting a knob here, nudging a lever there, tapping keys everywhere as he speaks. “It seems to me like this version might have kind of worked. But then the design starts to get wacky.”
Ellie’s gaze follows Daniel around the room. A giddy grin is plastered on his face as he races around the ring.
“Can’t you control this thing standing in one place?”
“This is faster,” he says as he whizzes past her.
This may even be true, if only for him. He may also be enjoying this way too much.
The multiple versions of the mess disappear, replaced by the exploded view of the most complicated version. Pipes and reservoirs disentangled and scattered across the room make the mess look simpler than it is in reality.
Ellie experiments with the levers, nudging them up and down to see what happens to the mess. The exploded view pitches, yaw, and rolls. At the same time, it zooms in and out. A switch grows to fill the room one instant and the whole mess is a sparkling dot in another. It settles down as she masters the controls. Ellie studies the mess from various perspectives, inspecting how the switches are placed and how the pipes entwine around each other.
“I’d have to work through it to be sure, but I’d be shocked if— Hold on, how do you do this?” She taps a few keys, the mess spins, she taps a few more, and the mess is flattened into a schematic with one glowing path. “I’d be shocked if, for example, we could get from this reservoir to that reservoir before its gate closes.”
