“Not you. Your számológép,” he said. “Except even better.”
Every so often, Frank said exactly the right thing. This was one of those times. Erszebet’s face softened. She reached out for the iPad. He handed it to her. She pulled it into her lap and gazed at it in fascination. Her fingers began to move across the glass, halting at first, but quickly gaining fluency.
“Dude, that’s sick,” said Mortimer reverently.
“That’s beautiful,” said Julie the Smart-ass Oboist, pausing at our table with a pitcher of red ale and a platter of onion rings. “That looks like my grandmother’s Yao Jìsuàn qì”—and before any of us could think to question her, she had moved on to deliver her burden to a table of bearded CS nerds scholars.
Oda-sensei went on: “If we’d had something like this in place, fully realized, for the Bay Psalm Book gambit, for instance, it might have predicted the possibility of the maple syrup boiler being there if we didn’t first go back to the earlier DTAP and deal with Sir Edward Greylock and his investment schemes. It might have predicted the danger of Christopher Marlowe being in the Tearsheet Brewery that day.”
“It would take forever to imagine all such possibilities!” I objected.
“It’s not just about imagining,” he replied. “We can integrate this with historical databases, and we can improve those databases as we go back in time and learned what actually happened.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “We have all just had a very sobering lesson as to why nobody should rely on diachronic travel, ever, and instead you respond by saying, ‘Oh, let’s find a way to rely on diachronic travel.’”
“I’m pretty beat up,” Tristan admitted. “But I’ll bet the first person to survive an airplane crash, a hundred years ago, was pretty beat up too. You can limp away from the crashed airplane saying, ‘Man wasn’t meant to fly, I am done with this,’ or you can be saying, ‘I just learned how to do it better next time.’”
“What’s the point of it? Why even bother?” I asked. “We went to all of that effort, and people died, so we could make fourteen million bucks. We’d have been money ahead if we’d just founded a tech start-up instead.”
“There are other powers in this game too,” Tristan said, “who can do what we can do, and who most definitely think there’s a point. We can’t let them have a monopoly on this kind of force.”
“So it’s back to the Magic Gap argument.”
“In a word, yes.”
Erszebet had been oblivious to the conversation ever since she had seized the iPad, but now she broke in with a question for Frank. “So many different colors and shapes of little blobs! What is this one? The little white cloud with the question mark?”
“That’s where the system is telling us it needs more input.”
“Input?”
“Information about something that happened in the past.”
“It knows about known unknowns?” Tristan asked. I gave a little snort, thinking he was making a joke at poor Les Holgate’s expense, but it seemed he was serious.
“Yes,” Oda-sensei responded, “this is a case where we would have to send a DOer back to collect information.”
“Holy crap,” Tristan said. “How much computational power—”
“More than can fit in an iPad,” Frank answered, cutting him off. “This is linked to a small cluster running in the cloud. But it’s still just a toy. It needs to be scaled up radically. To be really useful, it will take an immense amount of computing power.” With an almost impish smile, he added, “We’re gonna need a bigger quipu.”
PART
THREE
EXCERPTS FROM
SENATE INTELLIGENCE COMMITTEE HEARING
ON PROPOSED EXTENSION OF BLACK-BUDGET FUNDING
PROGRAM FOR DIACHRONIC OPERATIONS
DAYS 573–576 (LATE FEBRUARY, YEAR 2)
SENATOR HATCHER: Professor Oda, I draw your attention to this rather large document that was produced by DODO staff during the post-mortem analysis phase from the Les Holgate tragedy. Are you the author of the section of the report entitled “Diachronic Shear: A Layman’s Guide”?
FRANK ODA: Yes, I am.
HATCHER: To be frank, as a confirmed layman, I found that your explanations only made me more perplexed than I was to begin with. I have some questions about this.
ODA: I’ll try to be of service.
LIEUTENANT COLONEL LYONS: Senator Hatcher, if I may just insert a brief remark—
HATCHER: You may.
LYONS: This phenomenon isn’t well understood by anyone just yet. All we know is that it exists. We’ve seen it ourselves, and witches have attested to it. So any scientific hypothesis should be regarded as preliminary.
HATCHER: Thank you for that careful hedging, Lieutenant Colonel Lyons. I’m sure that your subordinates appreciate your paternal concern for their well-being. But I wish to address Professor Oda if that is fine with you.
LYONS: Of course. Thank you, Senator Hatcher.
HATCHER: Professor Oda, would you be so good as to explain the relationship of Jell-O to Diachronic Shear?
ODA: Excuse me, Senator. Jell-O?
HATCHER: Yes, it says here on page 793, third paragraph, that the properties of Jell-O, as in, Jell-O brand gelatin desserts, have something to tell us about the structure of the universe. And I found that to be a somewhat unusual statement from a man of science. I was wondering if you might elucidate it.
ODA: Yes, I remember that section. Traditionally we have tended to think of the past, present, and future as parts of a single continuous line—a thread, if you will.
HATCHER: And if I may just interrupt you there, Professor Oda, we have already been over this topic of quipus and so on ad infinitum, so we don’t need to belabor any more the idea that it’s not just a single thread but a whole network of them. I think that I understand it as well as any non-scientist can understand such a thing. Just as I felt I was achieving some level of comfort with that idea, you jumped to Jell-O. My great state happens to be home to no fewer than three different state-of-the-art industrial facilities that are part of the supply chain for Jell-O brand gelatin desserts and so naturally my interest was piqued. But I’ll be darned if I can follow your reasoning here.
ODA: If you have ever observed the properties of Jell-O, such as a molded dessert made of that substance—
HATCHER: I have, Professor Oda, on many occasions on the campaign trail.
ODA: You’ll know that it is flexible and deformable, up to a point. You can tap it with your spoon and it will jiggle. You can stretch it. But if you overdo it, the material will rupture. A crack will form, just like a crack in a block of stone. Later on, the crack may heal itself—the gelatin can knit itself back together.
HATCHER: Especially if you reheat it.
ODA: Exactly. Which is not true of cracks in granite and other brittle materials.
HATCHER: It is truly a marvelous property of Jell-O.
ODA: You could say so, yes.
HATCHER: But what is the relationship to this dreaded phenomenon of Diachronic Shear?