This time, it’s Daniel who stops, to Ellie’s relief. It’s going to take a moment for her to catch up to him. He’s rock steady as the pipe he landed on swells and contracts. Ellie spots the look on his face. He’s about to expound on something, strutting and waving his arms like some tent-revival preacher. Daniel has to physically restrain himself from explaining literally anything in excessive detail to strangers or casual acquaintances. Ellie, unless she stops him or he realizes what he’s doing, tends to get the full show.
“Look, there will always be architects with clever ideas of how to generate the universe more efficiently so that it can be more detailed or more expansive. There will always be builders who enable them, if nothing else, because they have cool ideas themselves for new valves or better ways to connect pipes. Someone has tomake sure they don’t destroy the universe—all of the universes, in fact—in the process. So that, on occasion, someone can tell them ‘no’ and they’ll listen. Of course, even then, there’s still the occasional unauthorized change.”
Ellie finally catches up to Daniel. Her lungs burn. Daniel’s probably do too. His breath is calm, though, but metronomically steady.
“That’s a nice speech, but I’m my mom’s child, remember? How much convincing can I possibly need to remove something that generates incorrect physics?”
Daniel glares. His expression screams “That’s fucking flippant” and she wonders whether she’s made him angry. Daniel, though, doesn’t scream. He’s so soft-spoken, Ellie isn’t sure he can. In any case, the angrier he gets, the quieter he becomes.
“Cuz, I’ve known you since before you could walk.” To her relief, his voice isn’t any softer than his normal quiet. “Just wanted to confirm where you stood before I showed you this.”
His gaze shifts to the skunkworks as he points overhead. The tangle of pipes looks like any other in the skunkworks. It expands and contracts, however, to a beat slightly skewed from the surrounding pipes. Rather than clack, its reservoir valves hiss when they shut. Otherwise, the skew would be obvious to anyone listening. The miniature skunkworks within the skunkworks is tied directly into the pipes that commit state, the machinery that declares, out of all the possible things that might happen, the one that actually does. The skunkworks may speculate that a plume of smoke billows across a room, that the plume of smoke rushes underneath a table in that room, that it coalesces into a panting Rottweiler happily wagging its tail, but only one of these things is committed and happens in reality. This miniature skunkworks is connected directly to the machinery that decides that the plume of smoke billows across the room.
“What does it do?”
“You need to see for yourself before I tell you.” Daniel holds his hands palms-out, toward her. “Won’t make sense otherwise.”
Ellie looks up and focuses, but the plane of air above her doesn’t fold into anything. Blueprints don’t exist for the mechanism Daniel pointed out. Ellie looks puzzled. Blueprints always exist. Otherwise, what did the architect work on? What did the verifier simulate? What did the builder work off of?
She jumps, catching the mechanism’s lowest pipes, then flips herself inside. Shadows fall across shadows. The chiaroscuro drains everything of depth. She contorts from pipe to pipe, tracing out paths to build a blueprint in her mind.
Cool, smooth pipes breathe in her grasp. Rust doesn’t sand her palms. The air feels thick but doesn’t smell metallic. Nothing here can be more than a year or two old, but pipes twist and jag around each other. Builders have inserted subtle fix after subtle fix after subtle fix. She writhes around the pipes and reservoirs, studying the joins, working out the order in which they must have applied each change. Pipe by pipe, reservoir by reservoir, she works out what this contraption does.
Those who designed, built, then kept tinkering with this must have tracked Mom’s treatment history. A set of pipes tweak electron orbitals, changing the shapes of chemical compounds, specifically those pumped into Mom. To make them more effective against Mom’s tumors, Ellie guesses.
She’s stunned, the breath knocked out of her lungs. Mom would be appalled, as should the community of maintainers as a whole. No one should make changes to physics for personal benefit.
A skunkworks generates an entire universe. Physical laws don’t apply to only three specific chemical compounds. This mechanism changes the universe she lives in so much more than they intended. It’s like making mashed potatoes when all you have isdynamite. They wanted mashed potatoes so much they blew the potatoes up.
The newest bits try to pull a similar electron orbital trick, but on the chemicals inside Mom’s brain. Ellie crawls through those paths three times before she can convince herself she’s right. This is why, every once in a while, Mom seems to wake up. Ellie gasps. Days seem to pass before she can breathe again.
The mechanism might heal Mom eventually. Well, it needs some more tinkering first and she has some ideas. If she understands things right, it may also, bizarrely, cause a species of migratory bird to go extinct and any of a number of other things that are also not supposed to happen. She has no idea how to avoid any of that. This mechanism wasn’t designed to be subtle. It was designed to save Mom’s life.
She doesn’t have the time to work out everything else it will also do. The isolationists will find her and Daniel soon.
“This causes a lot of collateral damage.” Ellie hangs by the mechanism’s lowest pipes, then drops onto the pipe Daniel’s standing on. “No wonder you want me to get rid of it.”
“My feelings about it are complicated.” His voice blends into the hiss and Ellie strains to separate it out. “Aunt Vera took me in when no one else would.”
“Of course.” She fixes her gaze hard at Daniel. “Then why even show me this?”
The thud of bodies—isolationists, she assumes—hitting mesh, the creak of pipes buckling and unbuckling surrounds them. Daniel spins around, his gaze pinpointing their swinging through the skunkworks.
“OK, apparently just coming here with a builder causes the troublemakers to show up.” His voice has reverted to merely quiet. “Look, everyone loves Aunt Vera. Constructing this violates pretty much everything anyone who can access the skunkworks stands for, but some number of architects, verifiers, and buildersall worked on it and no one has removed it. I’ll buy you time to do whatever you decide to do. And whatever you decide, we won’t speak of this again.”
“Do you need any help with them?”
“You’re joking, right?” Daniel puffs himself up. His chest expands, his back spreads and, scarily, he manages to look even bigger. “I can drown them in boiling oil whenever I want. Cuz, you have arc welders for hands. I’m not worried about you. I’m buying you enough time to do your thing before more of them show up.”
“You really get off on this whole service and protection thing, don’t you?”
“Hey, don’t judge me.” Surprisingly, he looks a little wounded. “At least I’m taking care of the skunkworks, even if it’s for the wrong reason. Plant you now, dig you later, cuz.”
Daniel bounds away. The smile on his face is scarier than any weapon.
All Ellie can think of is Mom lying in bed. Mom’s head lurches up, staring at Ellie in a simulacrum of life that one day may be the real thing. Hope flares through Ellie, leaving her both empty and wishing it would flare again.
Mom needs her own universe in order to heal without trashing the one Ellie lives in. Of course, a new universe would need too many people over too much time to create a skunkworks that takes up too much space. That’s why they kludged this mechanism instead. It may work eventually, even if it also causes birds to migrate at the wrong times to the wrong places. Even if it has other countless side effects that will take lifetimes to map out.
