Gates only open for a short time but they do so on a regular cadence. It’s as if the skunkworks were a rat maze with gates at the entrance and exit. The builder’s goal is to design paths through the maze where a rat can enter the maze when the entrance gate opens and reach the exit by the time that gate opens. If the timing’s off and the rat shows up too late, the skunkworks doesn’t behave as designed. The more paths that fail timing, the less predictable the behavior.
“Why would anyone go through the trouble of building something that they have to know doesn’t make timing?”
“Maybe they were counting on the rules of the universe theskunkworks lives in changing—” Ellie’s gaze falls on a screen. “There’s a list of builders who put in these changes.”
“Oh, right.” Daniel’s voice rises. “When they can see who is working on the skunkworks, they annotate that, too.”
“One of them is Chris.” Ellie feels empty and the words tumble from her lips. “She’s responsible for some of what doesn’t make sense given the physics of the skunkworks.”
“Surprised” is not up to the task of describing how she feels. Even if you’ve suspected all along but refused to admit it to yourself, being confronted with the fact is still a shock. Part of her still doesn’t want to believe Chris would torture her own mother. The rest of her can’t deny it anymore.
It’s one thing to owe Chris some love because she is kin. It’s another thing to ignore the agony that Chris put Mom through, that Chris prolonged. Ellie can’t do it. All she can see is Mom struggling to take a step, Mom doubling over in pain, Mom lying comatose on her bed.
None of this changes what Mom wanted for them. She tried so hard to keep the peace between them, but Ellie can’t care what Mom wants anymore. Keeping the peace trapped Mom in a living death and exploited her as a source of speculated existences. Chris did that. She can’t come back from that.
Daniel’s gaze is still focused on a nearby screen. He taps a few keys and a diagram fills the screen.
“Oh. Just so.” His syllables are utterly anticlimactic. “Hm. We probably should have thought to look this up before.”
Ellie stares at Daniel, tears streaming. Daniel gasps when he notices. Immediately, he wraps Ellie in a hug. For a few moments, the only sound in the room is the faint whir of respiration, exchanging the air in the room.
“I’m so sorry, cuz.” He slowly strokes Ellie’s back. “I know you wanted to patch things up with Chris, but she’s content with whoshe is. She’s never going to admit she’s wrong, she’s never going to apologize, and she’s never going to change.”
“You’re not surprised?” Ellie gently pushes him away, and wipes away her tears.
“I didn’t say that.” Daniel shrugs. “It’s just Chris always made sure everyone knew she was doing everything possible to save Aunt Vera’s life. That apparently included trying to rewrite the rules of the universe, not to mention the universe surrounding ours, if necessary. If she’s involved in all of this, there’s nothing like morals or norms stopping Neeson’s cabal from doing whatever they want to the universe.”
A piece of paper drifts down from the ceiling. Daniel’s gaze follows it down as it teeters toward Ellie. She grabs it as it bobbles overhead. It’s from the Head Archivist. Now that they have seen what they needed to see about Chris, Ellie and Daniel get to leave now. The Head Archivist has laid a trail to the incoming change records.
“I would have believed it if you’d just told me instead,” Ellie shouts at the ceiling, but really at the Head Archivist, shaking the paper at them. “I mean, why would you lie?”
“Believe what?”
She hands Daniel the note. He mumbles to himself as he reads, then smirks.
“Didn’t this knock the wind out of you like thirty seconds ago? Life moves fast.” He folds the paper and stuffs it in a pocket. “Anyway, anything else about this monstrosity you wanted to study before we head off to look at change records?”
“I didn’t want to study it in the first place.”
She shoots him a look. He shrugs as they both dissolve.
CHAPTER 20
Pneumatic tubes fill the space above Ellie. They are an organized chaos, making the ceiling a cascade of frozen, rumpled waves. Overlapping high-pitched whines fade in and out. Whenever Ellie’s attention wanders, the transfer station nestled among the tubes insinuates its way into Ellie’s mind. Canisters rush in and are switched from one tube to another. One tube goes down into a station against the far wall. A couple of canisters wait in the queue.
A grid of desks fills the floor. An unlatched canister or two litter every desk. Each canister holds a change record, a tiny crystal that sparkles against each desk’s slate-gray surface. Archivists sit or stand at each desk. Some of them are bipedal. A few might even commute from Ellie’s universe. Assuming where anyone comes from is a bad idea. Each one pores over a change record, fills out a catalog entry, and places the change record back into the canister with the paperwork. Perversely, from here, each change record goes into an archive and a copy is immediately bounced back for Ellie and Daniel to study.
Daniel paces in a ring around the grid. As he does, he pointedly gives the archivists a wide berth. One archivist or another is always walking or rolling to the station. He never changes direction and his gait is so smooth, he might as well be gliding. Whenever an archivist approaches the station, though, Daniel always manages to be somewhere else.
Reverse-engineering a model of the cabal’s revised physicsfrom schematics is really Daniel’s bailiwick. Unfortunately, they don’t have schematics. What they have is a pile of change records Ellie can compile into schematics. Parsing schematic change records is not something verifiers generally do. If she’s going to do that, she might as well go straight to a model they can both analyze. So, Daniel gets to do what Daniel loves the least: nothing.
Ellie sits at a table tinkering with a folded plane of air and scribbling on a pad of paper instead of rolling her eyes at Daniel, not that she doesn’t want to. Daniel on the prowl is Daniel dying to understand exactly what the archivists are doing, and it’s taking every bit of restraint he can muster not to charge into the grid of desks and interrogate each and every one of them. The only way it could be more obvious is if fireworks lit “I’M DYING TO UNDERSTAND WHAT YOU DO” in bright, bold letters in the air.
A canister lands in the station against the far wall. An archivist rolls over. Daniel lengthens his stride so fluidly it doesn’t look like he’s sped up at all. Daniel is on the opposite side of the room by the time the archivist intersects the ring Daniel is wearing into the floor.
The archivist looks at the label on the canister and brings it to Ellie. She thanks him as she takes it. He nods with a shrug before he rolls away.
A shimmer ripples across her model as Ellie applies the change record. Her model crinkles in a way that’s both subtle and disconcerting. She started her folded plane of air as an accurate enough model of the skunkworks as she knows it. After changes the cabal have made, it’s fallen into the uncanny valley. Nothing lines up quite the way she expects. None of the angles are true. The way it refracts light, it unscrambles the test patterns into lines that are almost but not quite parallel. It generates almost but not quite the correct physics. The differences are so tiny that the vast majority of the time, no one would notice.
