Джон Чу: Hold-Time Violations

Ellie breaks off a shard from the plate to test the fish. The glazed fish’s crispy skin cracks against the deep-fried rice. She sniffs at this equivalence report. Then again, the egg tart smelled normal too.

“Is this going to taste icky sweet like or something?”

Now Daniel just looks annoyed. His brow furrows and his hands rest on his hips. “No, it’s going to taste like a deconstructed garlic fried rice paired with a soy and ginger glazed tilapia. The skunkworks one universe out is fine. Eat.”

She lances a piece of fish and tries it. The tilapia is mild. Its triumph is that it doesn’t sit like cotton in her mouth. The glaze is lovely. Garlic, shallots, and a little brown sugar round out the soy and ginger.

Daniel simply shakes his head when she offers to share. She hasn’t had dinner yet, and she doesn’t have time, so it all disappears quickly. The glaze never cloys even when it coats her mouth. The plate made of rice clears the glaze away in any case.

“Show off.” Ellie smiles before letting sparks flit from finger to finger on her left hand.

The air becomes gauze that scatters the pipes, valves, reservoirs, even Daniel into mathematical points that then recombine. The machinery that generates the universe shimmers. Unlike Daniel, Ellie doesn’t generate food. Instead, when the gauze coalesces, it becomes cool, metallic, and malleable, not coincidentally the stuff that thickens into pieces of the skunkworks.

Her right hand extrudes a gate out of the gauze. In time with the clacking of valves, her left hand strikes the pipe in front of her twice. Sparks fly. The pipe splits. Clean, parallel scars separate a ring from the pipe on either side. She installs the gate in place of the ring, her left hand sparking again to fuse the gate into place.

One by one, she inserts extra gates to slow the paths that have become too fast. Click. Insert. Clack. Insert. She can only repair the skunkworks in the moment when the pipes are settled. The skunkworks never halts. The one that lives in the innermost universe generates the outermost universe, whatever “innermost” and “outermost” mean when the universes are arranged in a loop. Stopping one skunkworks stops all of them. How you start them back up again is something she hopes she never has to figure out.

She dismisses the gauze and the skunkworks sharpen. The pipes grow and shrink in sync with the clacking of valves. Data no longer skids through paths causing pipes to expand or contract when they should be still.

“Ok, Daniel, show me where to go. We need to flush out speculative state before it’s committed and we’re stuck with the results of a faulty skunkworks.”

Of course, they’re already stuck. Some mistakes of a faulty skunkworks have already been committed, but there’s no point to letting those errors compound. The universe should be generated correctly from as early as possible.

Daniel shifts his T-shirt across his back and ties it around his neck. It might look like a cape except it’s way too short. He appraises her, his face pensive.

“Anyone else might just declare it close enough and leave before isolationists find them. You really are Aunt Vera’s child, aren’t you…”

Ellie rolls her eyes. Mom’s reputation precedes her. “Considering how long you lived with us, you might as well be, too.”

Daniel looks annoyed again. “No, I mean her attitude about the skunkworks and the generated universe … Never mind. You have to see it yourself. Come on. Follow me.”

He leaps to a thick pipe way overhead. From there, he swings to a swath of mesh, bounces, and off he goes.

“Hold up, you big lunk. You have at least half a foot of wing span on me.” Ellie sighs too loudly then follows him.

Whether or not it’s actually hotter, the skunkworks’ interior is definitely more humid. Rust covers every pipe. Sometimes, it flakes off as the pipes grow and shrink. The farther in Ellie and Daniel go, the faster the skunkworks expand and contract until it’s as though the skunkworks is breathing. The transparent mesh that spans pipes goes taut and slack. A faint hiss precedes the near-unison clack of reservoir valves.

Daniel points out which valves she needs to wedge open and for how long. That will cause the skunkworks to flush out its speculative state and then regenerate the universe anew from what has already been committed. By now, that’s not error-free. She’s already missed the train to South Station, but nothing left to do about that. He looks up for a moment, nods, then leaps for a pipe above him.

“Now that you’ve actually made changes to the skunkworks, you know the isolationists will really be after you.” Daniel swings around the pipe in a one-arm giant. “Guess I should have said something earlier.”

Isolationists don’t deal well with anyone trying to repair the skunkworks. Usually, they’ve shown up by now.

“Have I ever told you that when I was kid, Chris used to attack me in my sleep to see whether I’d wake up in time?” Ellie climbs onto a pipe and stops, for a moment, to get her bearings. “She didn’t use real knives back then, of course.”

“I’ve always been the black sheep.” Daniel releases the pipe, flips through the air in a layout position, then bounces off the mesh towards another pipe. “I’ll verify anything that’s well-specified and backward-compatible. Not just bug fixes.”

“The isolationists must really hate you.” She projects where Daniel is about to land and jumps after him. “It’s the pointlessly dangerous life, then. Isn’t it better in the long run if we just implement the correct physics correctly?”

“Hey, I have my standards. Change the laws of physics, no. Discover new laws or a more general formulation of what we already know, why not?” This time, it’s Daniel who stops. He’s rock steady as the pipe he landed on swells and contracts. “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 to make sure they don’t destroy the universe—all of the universes, actually—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, 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.” 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 too much softer than his normal quiet. “Just wanted to be sure you stood where I thought before I showed you this.”

His gaze shifts to the skunkworks. He points overhead. That 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, that choose from the speculative generation and render it permanent as the basis for further speculative generation.