If you're new here, here's the link to the first part of the story. Now shoo, go enjoy, here be spoilers. (Unless you want to read spoilers. You do you, I’m not your mom.)
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This basically started out as a joke ("Wouldn't it be wiiillld if an early-aughts War on Terror-era American bumped into Tineye, thanks to, I dunno, a time travel accident? Thanks, I'll be here all week! Don't forget to tip your waitresses!") but it ended up with me trying to understand shift registers and flip-flop cascades and learning to count in base two and I think I sprained something in my brain so I guess if this is a joke, it's on me.
So uh yeah, basically everything in this is real. Except the time travel, sorry(?). The physics is basically tiny bits of real stuff glued together with Wildly Making Stuff Up, Roger Penrose don't @ me. (Actually, please @ me, I would be flattered to be @'d by you.) And it turns out the University of Wisconsin LaCrosse didn't even have a physics department in 2005, oh well. (At least in this timeline!!!!1ONE!)
Also, if you want to know what a wormhole would look like (among other awesome weird physics stuff) check out this amazing website, you can be as ignorant as me and still enjoy it. (Thanks for making and putting this stuff online, Professor Zahn!) (No, I don't know him, and the screwups in this hot mess of a story are mine and mine alone.)
But anyhow, aside from how Mateo got there, it's all real. Locking up mega-creeps in a fancy mansion and bugging it is real, running computer simulations on a bank of vacuum tubes is real, the thing with the teacups is real, the Curta calculator is real, busting literally every spy (except this one Belgian guy who stuck to the job for a few months and then shot himself, ouch) is real.
It’s debated what kind of a guy Tineye was, if he was this scary-looking and jerkish but basically expert ace type, or if he did ok mostly because of the terrible spy hiring policies and his policy of not treating people really bad and then even reversed that one just postwar. (Uh, might wanna leave that link unclicked if you’ve just eaten. No pictures but still.) There’s a lot of serious debate among serious historians and I’M sure not going to be the one to resolve it. My feel is that he didn’t really spend any much time thinking about what was right or whatever, but he was serious about getting his job done, and he was bright enough to realize a human being is NP and can’t be brute-forced. (Apparently one failure mode for beating up detainees is them just clamming up, who knew. I assumed that was a Navy Seal thing, but apparently regular people do it too sometimes. People are weird.)
Richard is sort of half-real, he's based on the time a dope got in and beat up a spy before getting kicked out and banned. (Which led to a kind of funny story with the BBC screwing up bigtime in the 70s, remind me to tell you it sometime. I love ya, BBC, but you goofed on that one.)
Nigel and Nia aren't real, but there were lots of people like them. (Nigel's a little unusual in that he's a dude in that job, but hey, go him.) Captains Goodacre and Short were real, Newman was real, Tommy Flowers was real (real awesome), and Turing you've already heard of. (I mean, you're reading this on a computer.)
If you want some, here's some pretty pictures/cool stuff/buckwild sources:
Project Mastodon (Clifford Simak's story about Driftless guys who have a time travel accident and get stuck even further in the past)
Agent Zigzag — book about one of ol' Three-Eye's double agents, including nuts and bolts of 020, plus proof that I am not making up Tineye's writing style (compare and contrast some of the army reports, my gosh)
The Road to Transistors (podcast episode about the very earliest bleeding edge electronic computing)
Atanasoff tells the story of that one time he got so mad he built a vacuum tube calculator (audio, complete version, funnier than it sounds)
A computer built completely (and delightfully) out of dominoes by Matt* Parker of Stand Up Maths, which operates on the exact same principles as the thing you're reading this on right now. It really all is "just" information, code and run it on whatever you can find.
*genuine coincidence
And just because it made me smile, an end-to-end encrypted email service with its roots in CERN. (Where they have a big ol’ particle accelerator! It all fits!)
Ahem.
Anyhow, that’s it, I hope it ate your brain a bit like it ate mine.
