She is a rock in a river, the two of us cutting around her. So Allyn shrugs and circles the desk, coming for me. “Let’s take a walk,” he says. I glance over at Ruby in its power station, and I’m about to tell it to follow, but it seems to be depowered, so I leave it.
I hold the door for Allyn and we exit the room, making our way through the lobby. I want a quiet space to talk. We reach Fairbanks’s office, which is clear. The book is still missing from the shelf. I sit at the desk, and let Allyn take the guest chair. As he gets settled in the seat he raises his watch and says, “Come over to the Fairbanks office.”
“Who was that?” I ask.
“We’ll get to that in a second. First…”
“First,” I tell him, “time to put cards on the table. There’s shit you’re not telling me and there’s shit I’m not telling you. What’s a jabberwocky?”
Every ounce of blood drains from his face. It’s not like he ever had a good poker face, but this is certainly a look. He composes himself and says, “I have no idea what you’re talking about.” But the reek of fear says different.
“Allyn,” I say. “It’s me. I’ll tell you what you want to know, but you have to be straight with me. I know it’s something about not being able to change past events.”
“Did your little robot tell you?”
I say no. Which is only technically a lie? Either way I have a better poker face.
Allyn lets out a long sigh and sinks back in the chair. “This is like, top security clearance. It’s something else Simms developed. Something that never made it to market. The government kept it for itself.”
“And what’s that?”
“Time cloaking.”
“Oh, yes,” I say, adding on a pile of sarcasm. “I know exactly what that is.”
Allyn sighs again. “I don’t totally understand it. Popa can explain it. It’s a way to hide stuff from time. Sort of speeding up and slowing down light. Like, on a highway, cars speed up and slow down, right? If cars slow down enough and the gaps between them get big enough, a person can cross, and then when traffic speeds up the people who didn’t see it wouldn’t have known it happened. So. The fact that the person crossed the street is hidden from time.”
“That’s the best you’ve got?” I ask him. “That doesn’t help. Like, even a little bit.”
“I’m not explaining it right,” he says. “The way Popa explains it is better. But basically, we have a secure data collection unit that sits outside the timestream. It’s a record of human history. Culture, entertainment, news, stock markets. And we can check against it, so if someone were to change something, we would know. It’s a failsafe in case something big slips past the TEA.”
“So like a black box. Because if something changed…would we even know?”
“Here’s where we get into brain-bending territory,” he says. “A few years ago, the TEA ran an experiment. They recruited a volunteer who agreed to let us change one small detail about his past. They went back and, before his family moved into the house where he grew up, they had his bedroom wall repainted from beige to green. The experiment was twofold—to see if the timestream could tolerate small ripples, and to see how it would alter his perception of the room.”
“And?”
“After the room was painted, they asked him a long series of questions about his childhood. When they asked him the color of his bedroom wall growing up, he said green.”
“Well that’s…I don’t even know what that is.”
“Yeah,” Allyn says, leaning back. “So we learned a few interesting things there. The timestream can handle minor fluctuations. The color of his wall didn’t affect anything about his life going forward, so it was a pretty small ripple. We also learned that changes in the past will alter the collective unconscious. Because his family members? His friends? They all said they remembered the room as being green. Hence the Jabberwocky. That’s what Simms called it. It sucks up information all day long, and the thing is just huge. Several exabytes, which is like a quintillion bytes each or something. And before you ask, the thing makes Fort Knox look like a corner bodega. It’s designed to ping me directly if anything changes, or if anyone tries to tamper with it.”
“You and who else?”
“The president. Secretary of Defense. Drucker, since she’s on the time committee. Jim Henderson at the TEA. That’s actually his main job, handling the Jabberwocky. We call him digital ops, but a lot of the details about what he does are kept vague to prevent”—Allyn waves at me—“exactly this.”
It makes me wonder about Westin. The kill that looks fresh, hours and hours later. “What exactly can you hide outside of time with this thing?”
“Looking to take a little vacation?” Allyn asks, smiling. “Someplace no one will bother you?”
“I’m serious.”
“It’s a computer,” he says. “Just data.”
“Where is this thing located?”
“It’s a little complicated. The main unit is in a TEA facility nearby, on the other side of Einstein. But with the amount of data that’s being processed, a lot of it is encrypted and stored in government servers around the world. Essentially, the main processing mechanism is in one place, but we rent out storage units to put the information, with top-level encryption.”
“I’m not a computer person but that doesn’t sound terribly secure.”
Allyn shrugs. “The way they tell me, it’s the most secure option we had given the amount of processing power we needed.”
“And what makes you think none of the bidders know about this?”
Allyn shakes his head. “No one knows this exists. No one’s brought it up.”
“Good thing we’re dealing with a trustworthy group of people. Henderson runs the day-to-day. Where is he on all this?”
“He’s still over at Einstein. So far, no problems. Now,” he says, “your turn. I showed you mine. What are you keeping from me?”
Before I can say anything, there’s movement from around the corner. Chris, the facilities manager. He’s wearing his usual gray polo and jeans and a look on his face like the path ahead of him is littered with land mines. He comes up to the desk, and Allyn waves his hand. “Tell her what you told me.”
He looks back and forth between us a few times, then says, “Well, remember we talked about the electrical? We’re getting those surges…”
As if on cue, the lights flicker.
Chris points a finger in the air. “That. So I’ve been checking the wiring and boxes, making sure everything is up to snuff, right? And I’m finding a couple of things that are, uh…raising questions.”
“Like?” I ask.
“Well, for one, I found what looks like cabling buried deep in the wall of Atwood that’s unaccounted for,” he says. “And then, I ran some data from around the surges and checked it against the meters, and we’re not getting any readings there. So…”
He takes out a tablet and puts it down on the desk, the proudest he’s ever been of anything. We both lean over and look at a mess of numbers that don’t make any sense.