58. Down to the Wires

Nigel arrived back to pandemonium among the post office chaps with Flowers. Mateo was in the middle of it, having a spirited discussion about something called a flip-flop cascade. Nigel pulled him aside to try and get some clarification.

“They want TWELVE,” Mateo said. His eyes were plate-sized. “By JUNE.” He looked drunk, or like he had been lifting amphetamines from the airmen.

“Twelve whats? Who wants twelve?” Nigel said, trying to get some sense out of him.

“Fancy bigshot in uniform turned up from the war, uh, cabinet, and said they need twelve colossus...es by June first! Some kind of hardcore deadline based on ... something.”

“Can they build twelve in, what, four months?” Nigel said, staggered and trying to do math. “I’m assuming they’re getting more resources now, but...”

“Well, uh, no,” Mateo admitted. “I mean yeah we’re getting a ton more resources, but no, we can’t build twelve that fast. We’re shooting for one or maybe two if we really luck out. Flowers took me on, I’m going to be on the build team!”

...maybe further investigation of the wormhole would have to be put on hold. Should he tell him now, or wait? He didn’t know!

“What’s wrong, man?”

Nigel forced a smile. It came out nervous, but that wasn’t a surprise. “Just … the timing. They obviously need this machine working very quickly.”

“Hey, it is working,” Mateo objected. “It’s working so good they want twelve and they want ‘em yesterday. It broke a real code, not a test, in thirty minutes.”

That staggered Nigel enough to temporarily drive all the thoughts of time travel and the conflicting duties to friends and nations right out of his head.

“Thirty minutes? Half an hour?”

Mateo nodded like he was trying to shake his own head off. “That’s fast enough you could use it in a battle!”

***

Mateo hadn’t been sure how they could even build one in a few months. The second part of a project was always faster, sure, but geez. Then he got his answer.

No-joke sixteen hour days. They got four hours off one day a week, and that was your weekend. Three-Eyes hours right there. No wonder Nigel — working full-time on Colossus too now — was living on cigarettes. Nia got roped in too, thanks to her experience building Heath Robinson.

In the about ten minutes they could line up to talk in private, he apologized preemptively for being a crummy boyfriend. Sixteen hour days kind of knocked out hiking together and stuff. This basically was a company-and-fun kind of relationship — they didn’t really worry about if there was life after codebreaking or anything, but still. Basic girlfriend rules applied. Spend time with her, don’t cheat, ask her about her day ... and working here he had to be really careful doing that so he didn’t ask about classified info, so he wanted to be really serious about the first two. She’d just laughed, though, and told him that they were both married to Colossus now, and she’d rather have brownshirt codes than red roses. She was working sixteen hours too, on a different shift, so they were both going to be pretty bad at this for a while. Hey, both hating paper tapes and liking vacuum tubes could really bring a couple together.

His four-hour weekend — eight to noon on a Tuesday this week — was prime time for getting some laundry and a haircut done, but that left him with two hours to kill. Nia was on the clock until Friday. He probably should have gotten some extra sleep but he was dying of cabin fever. Hike time! An hour out, an hour back — that sounded great.

He was just lacing up his boots in the dorm when Nigel came in.

“Going walking?”

“Uh huh.”

“Mind if I join you?”

“Yeah sure, no problem.”

Time travel stuff. Future stuff. What now? Colossus had happened, and it was going great. If they could get another one built in three months, now, anyway. But it had to be getting to Nigel, being the only person from now who was handling this whole crazy time travel mess without being able to talk to anybody about it. And honestly, sometimes Mateo got sick of pretending it wasn’t his crazy setup all the time too.

They left Bletchley Park and headed southwest — probably, it was seriously overcast today — up what Nigel called a bridle path. Good a name as any, it was too smooth to be a trail and too narrow to be a country road. It had the same dense hedges and slightly short trees he was used to by now. The land around Bletchley was dead flat, but that was ok. It was outside.

Nigel found a plowed field about two miles in and turned off through a gap in the hedge.

“High tech security, man.”

“If it works, it works. If Hitler and Rommel were able to go stand in a field, not even your memory computer could crack the code they wouldn’t need.”

“Airgap again, hah. And it’s not my memory computer, it’s Flowers.’ What’s bugging you?”

He could swear Nigel looked guilty for a sec.

“What’s going to happen in June? Why are they so hung up on that date?”

“I don’t know, maybe it’s just government contracts. They’re always weird, bad as big companies.”

Nigel nodded. “Fair enough. Could it be that you’ve changed this time enough that it’s no longer the history you remember?”

“...it’d help if I could remember more. And I’m pretty sure Flowers would’ve come up with this stuff without me, I did a couple paragraphs of stuff on him for that high school contest.”

Nigel looked like he’d blown a circuit. Time travel did that to you.

“So who invented — what did you call it, computer memory? You or Flowers? Or neither?”

Mateo shook his head. “Nah, nah, it could be Flowers used it on Colossus, right? Before I came back here or whatever. And I learned about him using it on Colossus back in, uh, 1998, then I came back to this time and nudged him so he was able to nail down his own idea early.”

“God. At least we’re not stuck with an uncaused cause.”

“I mean if the universe was going to turn inside out it would have by now.”

“What’s ‘now’ mean?”

“Hey, don’t start, man.”

Nigel snorted, then sighed.

“So you don’t know why June 1st?”

“Sorry, it’s not ringing any bells.”

“Maybe ... maybe it’s just as well. Need-to-know basis and all. If I don’t know I can’t let it slip.”

“Yeah. More airgap. People airgap. Sounds like a great excuse to zone out in your history classes to me.”

“Fair enough, I wish I’d thought of it at the time. Should we head back?”

“Yeah, shift starts in an hour fifteen.”

***

It was so hot in there that Mateo worked in his t-shirt. What these people needed was an HVAC guy. Oh wait.

In terms of skill at his tiny slice of building the thing, the HVAC background was the saving of him, even if it couldn’t be put to normal use. He at least knew how to wire, and basic circuit diagrams. At least the symbols were the same back now. And so he worked like a dog, trying to get Colossus 2.0 done before June. And whatever happened in June.

Everything except the one wire and the soldering iron in front of his nose right now was a blur, though. His schedule was so weird that he wasn’t sure if he’d eaten breakfast today or lunch yesterday. There wasn’t any past or any future. There was just that blob of solder that wouldn’t quite stick. There it went. Next one.

“We’re on track,” said Nia.

“Geez! Do they not have jinxes in Wales?”

“Station X is the jinx. On the enemy. Pass me the needle-nose pliers?”

“Don’t lose them. They’re the good pair.”

“I won’t.”

The jinx didn’t seem to do anything. Nobody got sick, or at least not so sick they couldn’t come into work. Colossus 2.0 came together so fast it was honestly kind of spooky, like they were just wrapping metal and wire and tape around something that was already there.

It was done by May 31st.

“I want to touch the valves,” Nigel whispered.

“No you don’t, they’re seriously hot.”

“In your dialect they certainly are.”

“Buy them a drink first, wow.”

“Ah, darn,” said one of the Wrens from the guts of the thing. “Mr. Flowers, we have a problem.”

“What kind of a problem?” he said, hurrying over.

“It’s an intermittent electrical fault.”

“Where?”

“Who knows? It could be anywhere.” She jerked a thumb at the two thousand-plus valves and the probably hundred miles of wire and plugs.

There were dismayed noises from prettymuch everybody there, Mateo included. It was hot, it was late, they’d all just come off a sixteen-hour shift, and the drop-dead deadline was in like ten hours.

“Well, let’s try and find it,” Flowers said, rolling up his sleeves some more.

They did, too. They went over the thing like drug-sniffing dogs and got sweaty and zapped a few times and, by midnight, really freaking tired. Like, not making sense anymore tired.

Flowers wasn’t an idiot.

“All right, all right, let’s knock off for the night and meet back at eight tomorrow morning. We’ll find it then.” Nobody argued. Mateo wanted a cool shower more than he’d ever wanted one before. And some REM, not the band. He was probably hungry, but he was too tired to tell. He stumbled back to the dorm with Nigel, yawning so bad his jaw kept making weird popping noises, got cleaned up, and hit the sack. It was cool and dark and he was too wiped to worry about electrical faults.

He woke up at around ... well, who knew, he didn’t have a handy cellphone with a glowy screen these days. It was still dark and felt really late/early. Turned out he was still worrying about that fault. Screw it. He rolled over and went back to sleep.

That was the plan, anyway. No dice. He’d never been more awake in his life. Well screw you, sleep, I never liked you anyway.

Colossus 2.0 was on (like it always was) and humming when he walked in.

“Hi,” he whispered to it, closing the door. “Heard you’ve got problems. Don’t we all.”

This didn’t need a super genius or a hardcore Navy chick or even a real engineer, if he was lucky. Maybe it just needed a repairman with a voltmeter. Maybe. He wouldn’t do anything that could make things worse...

He was napping on the floor when Flowers and the gang came back at eight that morning, snoozing in the warm hum of the computer like a puppy in a person’s lap. The sunlight and cool air woke him up.

“Hey guys,” he said, yawning. “I think it might work now. I put in a couple resistors. Maybe give it a try? I don’t know how to run it solo and I don’t wanna bork it somehow.”

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