None of this is a surprise. Ahdi said as much in Daniel’s apartment.
Ellie needs to work out how Neeson’s cabal plan to alter the universe the skunkworks lives in. That’s the only way to build a model of the skunkworks accurate enough to see what effect the changes will have on her universe. Ideally, she figures all this out before the physics that the skunkworks operates under changes. Once she understands what the cabal is doing, its changes may be easy enough to remove for now. Making changes to a skunkworks without thoroughly understanding the physics of the universe it lives in, though, is too dangerous to consider. Ellie tamps down her rising sense of panic. If she can’t derive the physics that makes the cabal’s changes take effect before both universes change, it may be too late for even Ahdi to do anything for either universe.
Scratched-out equations fill dozens of pages of her pad. She turns it over to a fresh sheet and starts scribbling again. She flips back a few pages, rereads what she wrote, flips ahead, and continues her scribbling. The physics the cabal’s builders expect for the skunkworks’ universe can’t be too different from what it is now. The parameters for a universe that can sustain life as we know it are pretty narrow. Ellie hopes they aren’t trying to kill all life, including themselves.
Ellie stares at the dense block of equations she’s written, checking it over for anything stupid. It’s probably her imagination, but she can still smell the acrid heat of attempt number five. A sign error made the physics she applied to the model unstable. Shattered fragments covered the table. Daniel pointedly continued his prowl around the librarians as though nothing happened. Her embarrassment cut deeper than if he’d made a fuss instead. At least the archivists only turned their heads for a second before returning to their work.
She applies the physics she’s scribbled out to her model. Somefolds straighten while new ones form. It teeters and totters and it writhes and twists. Folds that rested against the table migrate deep into the structure as new folds take their place. The model squeals. Its high-pitched whines are simultaneously faint and immediately present. Ellie stares oddly at the ever-shifting plane of air. Not that she’s had a lot of experience with this, but she’s never had a model behave like this before.
The room is suddenly silent. The model looks both radically changed, with sharp spikes striking out in all directions, and as though it had never moved in the first place. If the physics she came up with isn’t the physics they’re targeting, it must be close enough. The cabal’s changes to the skunkworks have taken effect. She tries out the test patterns and all refract into unerringly parallel lines. At first glance, the physics they want is compatible with the physics they have.
Daniel sprints toward Ellie. An archivist heading toward the pneumatic-tube station is between the two. She’s large, crystalline, and moves in slow, liquid steps. An unstoppable force is about to slam into an immovable object, and Ellie is dead curious about how it comes out. She starts to warn him and immediately feels stupid. It’s not as if Daniel can’t see the archivist in the way.
The roundoff back handspring takes Ellie by surprise. In retrospect, maybe she should have seen it coming. At first, it looks like maybe Daniel tripped, but no one trips that precisely, not even Daniel. That sets him up for the half twist and layout over the archivist. She’s remarkably calm, all things considered. As Daniel sprints through his landing, she continues toward the station. Daniel’s stunt blurred by so quickly, she didn’t even break her cadence.
“Was that really necessary?” Ellie side-eyes Daniel as he stops at her table.
“We’re in a hurry.” Daniel is not out of breath. “Ahdi needs to know what they’re up to.”
Daniel gestures at the now-spiky plane of air, and Ellie takes a closer look. She was so relieved to find a plausible physics for the universe the skunkworks lives in that she never noticed which physics the model of the skunkworks generates. Large chunks of the machinery could have been ripped from the monstrosity Ellie dismantled. Not only did they trap Mom between life and death to exploit various side channels, they were also using her to try out the machinery they planned for the universe as a whole.
Ellie pushes all that away. There will have to be time for that later.
The new physics would work differently for different people. Her model isn’t detailed enough to work out all the ramifications, but what Ellie sees is disturbing. Only certain people would get to be maintainers. It’s not clear from her model who those certain people are. It would be a very tidy way for Neeson to disarm his enemies, though.
What maintainers do would only work for some people and not others no matter how hard they strove for it or how much they practiced. It’d be as though a light turned on when one person flipped the switch but never when another person flipped the same switch. Some people—no, some maintainers—would always get that favorable bounce or dodge that bullet. The universe would simply work better for them. The realization is a punch in the gut and Ellie has to catch her breath.
“This is all wrong. The systems within our universe are already unfair. We should be fixing them. Corrupting the universe makes just systems impossible. Why would you do that?”
“World domination.” Daniel is utterly sober. “Bending the world to your will has to be easier if the universe itself is on your side.”
“Wait, what?”
“This is overkill if your master plan is just to disrupt shoelaces as well as aglets. There are easier ways.”
“They want to install themselves as a permanent overclass.”
“There’s more. We’re going to screw over the universe our universe generates. Its skunkworks wasn’t designed to function under the new physics. That’s going to affect not only that universe but also the skunkworks within it and the universe it generates and so on.” Daniel holds up a hand. “Changes still being filed away allow causality violations, breaking the speed of light—”
“How do you know all this?”
“Oh, I read the changes as the archivists were processing them.”
Ellie stares at Daniel oddly. Daniel stares right back.
“You know how to parse schematic change records?” Ellie is annoyed Daniel never mentioned that. “I thought you were pacing in circles to stop yourself from browbeating the archivists into explaining every aspect of their work to you.”
“Well, yeah. That, too.” Daniel looks a little hurt. “I can multitask.”
Daniel has this way of explaining things without actually explaining anything. Like how he managed to read a change record from a few dozen feet away or how he kept them all straight. Ellie doesn’t bother asking. The answer is going to be some exercise Ahdi put him through.
“But you need to know the physics to understand how the machinery functions—”
“There are only so many physics families their new physics could belong to. I just tracked all the possible behaviors. Then when you figured out which physics—”
“Which you recognized from the other side of the room.”
“The room’s not that big. I’ve seen—for that matter, you’ve seen—Ahdi sense things from farther away. Anyway, since youfigured out the physics, I knew what their changes do. Enough talk. We have to get going.”
