Джон Чу: Hold-Time Violations

“Attention passengers: the next Red Line train to Alewife is now approaching” echoes off the walls. Not only has the next Red Line train to Alewife arrived but its passengers have already flooded the station, a torrent rushing up the escalators, through the turnstiles, then down the concourse to spill out the doors to Cambridge. The flood coming as the PA system squawks catches Ellie off-guard. It’s rush hour. When a train arrives on one side of the platform, the one on the other side leaves seconds later. She sprints, a veritable salmon racing against the current of bodies. Her pack sloshes between her shoulder blades, a sloppy fin batting the waves of people that surround her.

No one has tried to kill her yet today. Occasionally, skunkworks isolationists try. Also, her sister, Chris, arranges something pretty much every day to keep her sharp. Maybe the mistimed announcement is part of the attempt. She’ll be caught in the rip current of bodies, a wave will overwhelm her, and the knives of a shark hiding in the swell will tear her to pieces. Compared to the attempt with the Mylar balloons, jar of Marmite, and the US men’s Greco-Roman wrestling team, an ill-timed flood at Alewife Station is downright practical and likely.

None of that happens, though. The crowd flows around her as she plunges down the stairs toward the platform.

The car doors shut just as she reaches them. While the PA system blasts, “Attention passengers: the next Red Line train to Alewife is now arriving,” the train clatters away. The train supposedly now arriving sits already emptied on the opposite side of the platform. It beeps as its doors slide shut.

Some guy wearing shorts that stretch across his thighs, no shirt, and more self-possession than Ellie thought possible hovers in front of one of the doors. Someone else sits on a bench, staring at her e-reader. A thin woman reaches for Ellie like someone drowning reaching for a buoy. Her luggage crashes to the floor. She asks in rapid Mandarin whether Ellie knows how to get to the Best Western. Her oboe-like voice skips through her words.

Ellie blinks. She doesn’t really speak Mandarin, at least not to anyone she doesn’t know. The Best Western is just a short walk away. With luggage, though, the woman will want a taxi but there’s almost always one dropping someone off right outside the station. All the woman needs to do is go up the escalator and cross the concourse. The response Ellie stitches together doesn’t draw laughs. In fact, the woman thanks her. Ellie decides she is not today’s assassin.

The woman doesn’t turn to the escalator. Instead, she freezes for a moment then glares at Ellie.

“If you’d quit your job after Mom’s diagnosis like I’d asked, you could move to D.C.,” the woman says in fluent English, her voice now husky. “You wouldn’t have to worry about missing the Amtrak.”

The woman looks nothing like Chris, but she now sounds exactly like her. A childhood in Taipei clashed with an adolescence in Buffalo to give Chris an accent that is incongruously Brooklyn.

People randomly start sounding like her sister all the time. Some people text. Her sister waylays convenient strangers. The frequency never makes it less disconcerting.

“Do we have to have this discussion right now?” Ellie furrows her brow. “If I don’t get to South Station in time, the next Amtrak is tonight. I’ll be there before the afternoon.”

The woman only comes up to Ellie’s neck. She glares down at Ellie anyway.

“Too late.” The woman folds her arms across her chest. “If I have to stay at home to watch over Mom, you have to go to the skunkworks and repair the physics of this universe.”

“What’s the hurry?”

“Everyone’s wrong about why International Prototype Kilogram is losing mass relative to its official copies. We’d see divergences between copies even if the kilogram were defined by something more fundamental than a cylinder of platinum alloy. The notion of the kilogram, itself—”

“Has become unstable.” Ellie frowned. “Fundamental physical constants are changing—”

“Yes. Now the good news—”

“There’s good news?”

“—is we’ve found some hold-time violations in the skunkworks. Probably caused by some leaking valves. They must be why the kilogram’s unstable. Fix them and I promise I won’t judge you when you don’t get here until tomorrow afternoon. First time for everything, sis.”

By “first time,” Ellie isn’t sure if Chris is talking about being sent to repair the skunkworks or not judging her for being late. Probably the former. Nothing in the matryoshka doll that is the set of universes can prevent Chris from judging her. Ellie would ask, but Chris has already gone.

The woman turns around as though she hasn’t said a thing. She goes to the escalator, trundling her luggage behind her.

At least someone gets to go where she wants to. Ellie doesn’t because Mom lies comatose on a bed in Chris’s den. Mom needs constant attention from Chris the way dolphins need tax advice. However, taking care of your parents is a filial obligation and no one is more Chinese than someone who no longer lives in the motherland. Even though Chris wants Ellie in the same house as Mom, she doesn’t actually let Ellie do anything for Mom. Chris would rather do it herself.

Ellie visits every weekend anyway. She only needs one reason: Once in a while, Mom shifts in bed. She yawns. Her eyes open a crack and, for a moment, she stares right at Ellie. She’s about to wake from her long nap, or so it seems for that moment. Then her eyes close again and she slumps back into bed. She probably never moved in the first place. Still, this seems like much more than random firing of neurons in a brain about to die. Ellie, even though she knows better, can’t help thinking that the next time might be the time.

The train beeps. Its doors slide open. Passengers stream onto the train. Ellie shakes her head clear then joins them.

The skunkworks that generates a universe lives within the surrounding universe. There are an infinite number of skunkworks and universes. Everyone else is headed toward Davis Square. Ellie, on the other hand, is headed to the universe that surrounds this one.

The air in the skunkworks feels spackled onto her skin. It burns into her lungs like hot fudge, slow and slick, its aftertaste at once sickly sweet, bitter, and sour. It takes effort to force back out.

The skunkworks looks like the masterpiece of some mad plumber who failed perspectives class in art school. The labyrinth of pipes that surrounds her make her dizzy at first. Broad swathes of transparent mesh stretch between pipes and she bobbles until she gets her bearings.

Fat pipes pass overhead. They form a de facto canopy hiding the skunkworks, which stretches for miles above her. In actuality, it stretches for miles in all directions. Fixes have piled on top of so-called improvements have piled on top of emergency repairs forever. Rust covers the gates and reservoirs at the intersection of pipes. Most pipes block each other’s way and have to zigzag around each other. No pipes unscarred from dead welds of stubs where pipes used to join together.

Data pulses through the pipes in all directions. The pipes ripple, but stabilize in time for clacking of valves and the burbling of reservoirs. Probably because she already knows which ones they are, the pipes that violate the hold-time requirement look out-of-sync even to the naked eye. Pipes are supposed to be stable a little before reservoir valves clack until a little after. The pipes that violate the hold-time requirement start to ripple again too soon, corrupting the reservoirs they feed.