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 head.
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 a year or two old, but pipes twist and jag around each other. Builders have inserted subtle fix after subtle fix after subtle fix.
Those who designed, built, then kept tinkering with this 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.
Unfortunately, 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 is dynamite. 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. Days seem to pass before she can breathe again.
The mechanism will heal Mom eventually. Well, it needs some more tinkering first and she has some ideas. 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—undoubtedly isolationists—hitting mesh, the creak of pipes buckling and unbuckling surrounds them. Daniel spins around, his gaze pinpointing isolationists swinging through the skunkworks.
“Well, it’s about time they showed up.” His voice has reverted to merely quiet. “Look, everyone loves Aunt Vera. Constructing this pretty much violates everything anyone who can access the skunkworks stands for, but countless architects, verifiers, and builders all worked on it and no one has removed it. Chris sent you, in part, because she doesn’t want to face the choice. And who can blame her? So, here you are. 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 actually looks even bigger than normal. “I can drown them in boiling oil whenever I want. Cuz, you have arc welders for hands. I’m not worried about you, just buying you enough time for you 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.” He actually 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 is the result of 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 will 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.
It’s built to be dismantled. The pipes that commit state are the only bits of the skunkworks it is connected to. It can be removed at any time. She can wait. She can let this universe too haphazard to understand, much less document, be the new normal until Mom is cured. The tides will be wrong and the foundations of physics may crack, but Mom will live.
Valves clack and pipes shrink and swell in time. From end to end, they jog and twist around each other at wild angles. Data travels through pipes that are too long and too hard to trace. No builder would route them this way except to work around pipes already there, all the other possibilities being even longer or harder to trace. Or functionally wrong.
Once, when Mom was still overseeing Ellie’s work, Ellie had found a truly elegant fix. Just a few short pipes connected at right angles installed in an easily accessible place. Piece of cake. They’d be done in no time. She rushed to show Mom, who slowly shook her head then pointed out the one case in billions where data would not reach the reservoir before its valve closed.
Instead, as isolationists bore down on them, Mom and Ellie threaded pipes through the existing tangle. The fix was time-consuming and ugly. Isolationists nearly caught them. But the fix was also provably correct.
Ellie looks at the valves she needs to hold open to flush out speculative state and the mechanism she might dismantle. She knows what she has to do.
“Attention passengers: the next Red Line train to Alewife is now arriving” echoes off the walls. Ellie sprints and meets the oncoming torrent at the ticket gate. Even though the announcements are properly timed, she’s going to miss the train again. This will be the last time she makes the trip to see Mom and she wishes it weren’t.
About the Author
John Chu designs microprocessors by day and writes fiction by night. He is an alumnus of the Viable Paradise and Clarion workshops. His stories have been published in Boston Review, Bloody Fabulous, and Asimov’s Science Fiction. You can sign up for email updates here.
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