The Escapement Mechanism, Part 22
Seven nights and as many mice, and they hadn’t made any progress. Utsab hadn’t picked up the mechanism in over a day, instead working on a paper for a grad student. The bags under his eyes testified he had pulled an all-nighter to make whatever deadline loomed. It could only be for Ada. His dalliances had never overlapped with Wemly’s work before, so she had no frame of reference, but things were moving fast. He was sporting a new watch from his new lover, who hadn’t been in the lab for the last two days, apparently trading whatever she did in private for a finished paper.
“Is Ada in today?” Wemly asked.
“No,” said Utsab. “She won’t be in all week.”
“Sick?”
“Recovering,” he said through a poorly concealed smile.
“Whatever.” Wemly shook her head, glad she hadn’t been privy to the inner workings of any of his previous relationships. “I’m going to go see what I can do with the transfer.”
The server room felt best with a single occupant; the low hum of the fans and chemical smell of hot electronics somehow appropriate company only in solitude. There was no mouse. No new experiment to try with a non-human intermediary. The solution teased and irritated Wemly in equal measure, like a flap of skin in her mouth that she couldn’t stop tonguing but could not dislodge.
There were still wood chips that had fallen behind the desk. Mice were something Gertrude had never talked about. She had mentioned trials that weren’t strictly on the record, and some tales were so far-fetched that Wemly knew they could only be true, and only possible within the military lab she operated within. The university was restricted to humane alternatives. Wemly repeatedly tried and failed to connect the device through non-sentient means.
If she could just get the transfer worked out, the model specifications and optimizations would essentially take care of themselves. The computational power at her disposal was nearly unthinkable when Gertrude was developing the device.
Two hours later she was sick of trying and mindlessly browsing the file system out of habit. On most systems, each user had their own directory, but they were guests on a server operated by a genomics lab, and rather than creating a separate directory for both Wemly and Utsab, they had just made one for the Warner lab.
The directory was littered with folders and random files created by Utsab in service to grad students that couldn’t be trusted or taught to use the high-performance computers. Utsab likely saved time having the mess that Wemly was trying to decipher, but if you didn’t know what you needed, it would be hard to find in the mess.
Wemly sorted by modification date. A temporary file auto-created by one of the genomics programs caught her eye. It was a fallback to ensure long-running analyses weren’t completely lost. But also not part of the folder generated by a successful run of the program. Digital detritus that could easily be neglected. This wasn’t odd, but it had been created by Utsab three days ago, which was impossible, because he hadn’t been working on anything except the escapement mechanism and the paper he had recently pledged devotion to. On a detailed listing, the file was actually a soft link into a folder for a graduate student Wemly had never met, but based on the naming scheme was known as “Stacey”.
She followed the link and found herself in a folder with file names she vaguely recognized as human cell lines or bacterial species. The size of one of the recently modified files caught Wemly’s eye.
It was 11 TB.
It stood out from the rest, which were at most a few GB in size.
The size was burned into her memory. It was that of the model on the device. She logged out and slapped the escapement mechanism on. The model had been updated three days ago. The server room grew cold, and all thoughts dissolved into the hum of the cooling fans; the obvious conclusion not even needing to be drawn.
Utsab had solved it. And he hadn’t told her. The device worked. Wemly activated a new loop. She needed to experience what the properly functioning device was capable of.