Variation on a Theme, Book 6
Copyright© 2024 by Grey Wolf
Chapter 153: Unexpected Discussions
Saturday, June 14, 1986
It was hardly any surprise that everyone slept late. Even Laura did, and she didn’t have the excuse of a bedmate. Or bedmates, in Jas, Angie, and Paige’s case. Half of our group had traveled yesterday, after all.
For the others? Bedmates.
We were up and eating breakfast at the hotel by ten, though. The hotel restaurant was surprisingly empty. Either other people had gotten up and out, or were sleeping in. I was pretty sure Michael and Christopher were out (not together, though), but who knew about anyone else?
It was probably good that the restaurant was mostly empty, since we kept getting onto subjects that might have seemed odd. The opening conversation was one of those.
Angie said, “Guess what happened when we got to the room last night?”
“Um ... is this something to talk about in the restaurant?” Laura said, deadpan.
Angie giggled.
“Maybe,” she said, stretching the word out. “It’s not risqué. That was later.”
Everyone chuckled at that.
“I give up,” Laura said.
“Me, too,” Cammie said.
The others nodded. Well, Paige and Jas didn’t, but they presumably knew.
“We had a message,” Angie said. “From Gordon.”
She said ‘Gordon’ in a rather weak British accent.
“You mean Gordon?” Jess said, with it all coming out in a very solid British accent. Well, as far as I knew. I wasn’t sure if it would fool an actual Englishman, but I gave it reasonable odds. Jess had been good before, and was clearly still practicing.
“I do!” Angie said, giggling. “He said he’ll arrive mid-day. While he expects to be busy, he’s very happy we’re here and would love to talk to us briefly. He left his room number and suggested ‘popping in’ around eight to nine.”
Cammie snorted.
“This is ... it’s ... surreal. You do know that, right?” she said.
“We know!” Paige said, chuckling a bit. “We really do! But what can you do?”
“Apparently nothing,” Cammie said. “Mind you — I think this is a really good thing. It’s just ... if, prior to April 1986, I’d had to give the odds that I would have met either a major movie star or a major recording artist within three years of high school graduation, I would not have given it much of a chance.”
“Two movie stars just on this trip,” Jess said. “Not counting me! Which is perfectly fine, since I don’t count.”
“Yet,” Laura said.
“I didn’t say that!” Jess said, grinning.
We all chuckled. Everyone pretty much agreed that Laura was right. And that Jess was also right not to say it.
The conversation moved on to the plan for today. It was pretty simple: hang out until about twelve-thirty, change, and then head off to ‘Cats’. Leaving at one would get us to the theater with plenty of time to spare.
Jess, Cammie, and Mel were the only ones who would be new to ‘Cats’, though Laura had last seen it about twenty-five years ago. On the other hand, none of us had seen it on Broadway, and that mattered.
There was more than one joking comment during breakfast about one day seeing Jess performing on Broadway. I doubted she would be here for an extended run, but I could see her doing a show for months, at least. There was that EGOT (Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony) to be considered, of course. But there was also her genuine love of live theater.
Jess said, “I certainly won’t rule it out. It feels like it would be a lot of work, but ... I mean, heck. Michael nearly killed himself making ‘Back to the Future’ while keeping ‘Family Ties’ going. It was all worth it, but...”
She paused, then said, “Eh. It’s complicated. I think some of the movie is better because he wasn’t sure where he was. Some of his cluelessness in the movie is completely genuine, from what he says, and he says it probably was a good thing. It works for the performance he’s giving. Anyway ... in general, making movies can be a lot of work for months at a time, too, just like Broadway. Sure, you’re only on screen for, what, an hour or two at most, but getting that hour or two on film can be a long, slow process.”
“You’d be great at it!” Angie said.
“The thing is...” Jess said. “You would, too. Jas would, Paige would, and Steve would. All of you really brought something to your roles. There’s a reason we kicked so much ass. I would regret only having one year of drama at Memorial, except I’m also absolutely thrilled that I had that year, so it’s fine. But it doesn’t make any sense for any of you to pursue a career as an actor. You have your things, and they’re great things.”
“I’m probably the closest,” Jas said. “But it would mean we had to live in New York, probably, and that would affect other things. It’s not ... well ... I just don’t have the passion to do that.”
“Which is a perfectly good reason not to!” Mel said.
“It is,” Jess said, nodding. “The good part is that we’re not alone, not even me.”
“Or me!” Laura said. “You all had each other in high school! If it wasn’t for a couple of really lucky decisions — Northwestern being the biggest of them, by far, but that comes on the back of many more, for all of us — we never would have met. And I’ve thought about it. I think what would have happened is that Steve would have blown up, just like before. And I would have run into his name in a newspaper or something. Maybe then, maybe in a year or two. When I did, I would assume he was the guy I knew, and that would really fuck with my head. If we assume I still get my stuff going, though, eventually — years later — I would blow up, and Steve would at least recognize me. He might not think I was the woman he’d known, but he would think I was close to her. He might try to make friends, and I’d bite his head off. Which ... I kinda did. But there was a path back from it. There might not have been, if it happened later.”
“‘All is for the best,’” Angie, Paige, and Jas said, nearly in unison.
That got a bit of giggling, along with a somewhat puzzled look from Laura.
Angie said, “It’s from ‘Candide’.”
“It’s been ... um ... forty-ish years since I read ‘Candide’,” Laura said.
Angie said, “Just ... um ... six? Five? For us. Anyway, the full quote is ‘All is for the best, in the best of all possible worlds.’ ‘Candide’ is really just parodying Leibniz, who came up with the phrase.”
Paige and Jas exchanged looks.
“You haven’t mentioned Leibniz before,” Paige said.
“Eh. Not important,” Angie said, waving a hand. “Anyway! The story is about looking at all of the terrible things that happen in the world and having a character — Doctor Pangloss — say it’s all for the best, because they’re living in the best of all possible worlds. We kinda partly flip it on its head. We want to be living in a good world. Better for us being in it, but good. If it’s the best of all possible worlds, though, that sucks, since it makes us wonder whether anything we do matters. Whenever it feels like there’s some set of coincidences that work out hugely in our favor, we kinda squint and say, ‘Is that reasonable, or is the universe tipping its hand?’ So far, we think not, but it’s always questionable.”
“And everyone being in the right place at the right time to meet in the right way is one of those ‘Hey, universe, was that a helpful nudge?’ sort of things,” Jas said.
“Maybe especially for me,” Jess said. “It’s big for them, but life-changing for me.”
“It’s huge for me!” Laura said. “I really was resigned to just keeping this a secret until I died. Now, I can talk about it, and I have some hope that I can share it if I find someone worth sharing it with.”
“It was kinda life-changing for me,” Jas said. “Just ... timing-wise. At the time, I really thought Steve could have waited. Now? Yeah. I mean, he could have, but not after you.”
“And her knowing sets the stage for me knowing...” Paige said.
“Which sets the stage for me knowing,” Jess said.
“And me...” Cammie said.
“And me!” Mel said, grinning. “If anyone wasn’t going to know, it’d be me.”
“Except making Cammie keep that secret would have been wrong,” I said.
Mel nodded quickly.
“Oh, I agree. She would have, though.”
“I would have, but ... yeah. This is way better,” Cammie said.
“So ... hell if I know,” Laura said. “Maybe it is ‘All is for the best.’ I’m nominally okay with that. Though I agree, I want my decisions to matter. But...”
“You wanted everyone to get what they deserve, and maybe we all are,” Angie said, nodding. “It’s seriously as good a guess as anything else we have as to why.”
Laura nodded and said, “It works. Sort of. If you squint. I didn’t mean some other Steve or some other Angie. But, still, in a way...”
She paused, then said, “Okay, fine. I really was pretty damn spiteful at the time. But, still, I had tried to become a better person, and ... maybe ... maybe what I really wanted was for Steve and Angie to be the people they could have been. And maybe that’s you two. Maybe not the ‘all is for the best’ perfect Steve and Angie, but the good version.”
“Works for me!” Angie said.
“And me!” I said.
“I’ll reconsider if you go wrong,” Laura said, suddenly smirking.
“We’ll smack them!” Mel said.
“And not in a good way!” Paige added.
Angie blushed just a bit. Not badly, but enough.
After breakfast, we headed upstairs and settled into Laura and Jess’s room to hang out and talk. Jess’s bed was undisturbed, of course. It probably would get used tonight.
Probably. Who knew? I had no idea if Laura knew about Jess being involved with anyone beyond me, but I tended to assume she did.
Cammie and Mel opted out of this conversation, which surprised no one. They generally wanted to be at least somewhat at arm’s length about certain things.
Laura bit her lip for a second and then said, “So ... I’m ... like I said, I’ve had a long time to think. Two years, nearly!”
“Which is good,” Angie said, “But don’t rush it. We’re very patient.”
“I truly appreciate that,” Laura said, nodding. “By the end of Northwestern, I trusted you guys about ninety-nine percent of the way, really. That last percent, though, has been a slog. It still might be ... ninety-nine point ninety-nine?”
“One hundred percent is basically impossible,” Angie said. “We — Paige and I — have talked about that a bit.”
“We trust each other implicitly,” Paige said, nodding. “But we’re easily imaginative enough to invent scenarios where that trust would get breached. Will it happen? Hell, no! But it’s like Steve and Angie both said about the proposals. The odds of a ‘no’ were ridiculously small, but the impact would have been enormous.”
Jas nodded and said, “Besides, saying we trust each other completely is saying we’re not watching each other’s backs, and that’s part of our relationship fundamentals.”
“Oh, hell, yes!” Angie said, nodding. “I don’t trust myself one hundred percent. Having them watching my back matters.”
“At this point, I’m ready to get into things a bit more. Having someone watch my back is partly why I’m ready,” Laura said. “You don’t know what to watch for, and...”
She hesitated, then said, “You grew up together, so being more connected makes total sense. It also makes me jealous. It’s irrational, but ... it’s what it is. Having this secret for three years sucked! I mean, it’s magical, but ... it sucked.”
Angie and I both nodded.
“I had a bit over a year, and it sucked,” Angie said. “Three feels like it would be so much worse.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Even less time for me, and still lousy.”
“So...” Laura said, nodding. “I think ... maybe ... um. So. I know I phrased things at Northwestern like stuff just happened to me. Asshole Steve and Bitch Angie stealing my invention, Asshole Steve dumping me at the altar, all of that. And that’s kinda fair. Except ... yeah. I screwed up my life, too. You two have been really open about things you did wrong in your first life. Right now, I’m just going to say I made bad choices. I was ... controlling. You probably see that a bit in me this time. It’s hard to open up. I thought I could control Steve. That’s why we were together. If the other Jess hadn’t snatched him up, I probably could have controlled him. Mostly ... a combination of benign neglect — I couldn’t have cared less if he had affairs, for instance — and manipulation. The idea was always for him to mastermind the business. It just wasn’t for him to mastermind it without me benefiting.”
“That makes sense,” Angie said, nodding. “And we hardly need details beyond that.”
“It makes sense to me, too,” I said.
“The thing is...” Laura said, then bit her lip.
After another little pause, she said, “I have to say this now, because our getting involved is a bit like that. Both my sharing the business side and also my trusting that it won’t backfire on me. If I come at it the way I’d naturally come at it, it would turn into trying to manipulate you two, and ... well, that would crash and burn. You’re way too smart for that, plus Paige and Jasmine would spot it.”
All four of us nodded.
“I think maybe it matters that we have our own ways to get rich,” Angie said.
“Eh...” Laura said. “It does, and it doesn’t. One of the constants in the world seems to be that rich people want to get richer, and a lot of them aren’t all that concerned with how it happens. Once you get wealthy enough to buy judges and courts, a big barrier to not screwing people over goes away.”
Angie started to say something, but Laura waved her hand and said, “I know that’s not you. At least ... I know it in that ninety-nine-percent-plus sort of way. You both actually inspired me, a bit. I spent three years paranoid about my secret getting out, so I restrained myself a lot, but there were plenty of things I considered just ‘inventing’ along the way. Then I met you two and realized you were not only not doing that, you’d explicitly rejected the idea. Maybe it’s the juxtaposition with the totally unethical other versions of you, but that made an impact. Any of us could make a mint just from weird stuff we know, after all.”
“Maybe, and maybe not,” I said. “Who knows what hurdles the real inventor solved that would flummox us?”
“Still...” Laura said, “The point is, I’m where I think I can partner with you. I spent a lot of the last two years focused on myself and trying to work through what I did wrong in my first life. There’s a lot. I’m a better person now, I think. Jess has helped quite a bit.”
Jess blushed a tiny bit, but also chuckled.
“If there’s anyone who understands having a layered personality and being good at lying to yourself, it’s probably me,” Jess said. “I try to use it for good, but it would be so easy to use it the wrong way.”
“Another place where we watch each other’s backs,” I said.
“I’m not sure who’ll follow where I’m going with my work,” Laura said. “I have this feeling Steve might. It really depends on whether anyone followed the same path in his first life.”
“We’ll see,” I said, nodding.
“So...” Laura said. “The basic idea isn’t new. IBM, years ago, had a system called VM/370 that gave each user a virtual system that looked like it was their own, even though the hardware was shared.”
“So far, so good,” I said.
“I have no idea,” Angie said.
Jas and Paige both shook their heads, giggling a bit.
“Greek to me!” Jas said.
“Anyway...” Laura said. “The thing is ... well, it languished. Microcomputers and personal computers took over. Time sharing became the norm for larger systems. Vendors didn’t support virtualization in processors. Things like that.”
“Still following,” I said.
“Still not,” Angie said.
“I wanted to check with Steve first before explaining,” Laura said. “The idea is that you have one computer that pretends to be more than one. The processor is designed so it can wall off parts of itself from other parts. So, you give some of the memory, some of the processor, and so forth to each virtual computer. Each one looks like a full computer from the point of view of anything running on it.”
“So...” Angie said. “For a big enough computer, you maybe get more use out of things than you would otherwise.”
“Exactly!” Laura said. “That’s not the only use, but it’s a big use.”
“What’s another use?” Angie said.
“Suppose you do this on a personal computer,” Laura said. “If you run the user’s code inside of a virtual machine, you can monitor it and see if it’s doing anything malicious.”
“Oh!” Angie said. “That’s cool.”
“I get it, vaguely,” Paige said.
“Not even,” Jas said, giggling. “I can run programs on a Mac. That’s about it. But I can think of it like one Mac pretending to be two slower Macs.”
“Really, Macs or PCs are too slow now,” Laura said. “Everything I can get my hands on is too slow. But those are particularly too slow. We’re years away from when this will make a lot of sense for anything but mainframes.”
I nodded and said, “I have some observations, but let’s continue first.”
So far, Laura had the framework for something like VMWare. Since VMWare had become a multi-billion dollar business in my first life, the whole thing felt entirely plausible. Patenting a lot of core innovations years early would be huge, and Laura had a perfectly legitimate right to them.
Well, either that or she was lying through her teeth and had stolen the whole thing from VMWare or her universe’s equivalent. I was doubting that, though. It just felt like that wasn’t her.
Laura said, “There’s a second part. It’s maybe more important. I’m not sure. I actually got to that part of it almost backward the first time. My graduate work was on compilers, not operating systems.”
“I know about those,” Angie said. “More or less, anyway.”
“Not a clue,” Paige and Jas said together.
“A compiler is a program that translates user-written software from a high-level language — BASIC, FORTRAN, Pascal, whatever — to machine code,” I said. “A lot of PC software hasn’t been compiled, historically, but that’s quickly changing.”
Laura nodded and said, “We’re moving from interpreted languages and assembly language to compiled languages for personal computers. Bigger systems have relied more on compilers for years.”
Paige and Jas just nodded along. She wasn’t losing them, so much as they were ignoring things they didn’t need to understand just yet. If she were losing them, they would speak up.
“So...” Laura said. “There really wasn’t much work done on compiling machine code prior to me.”
I had to think about it, but then I realized where she was going.
“Do you mean taking compiled code and translating it to another instruction set?”
“Um ... yeah,” Laura said. “I approached it as a compiler problem, though.”
“That’s ... interesting,” I said.
“Put the whole thing together, and ... well. By the time things got big, our system could give you a virtual machine hosted on one architecture and run code from another on it with high performance. The performance depended on the operating system, though. Unless the operating system was ported, we had to interpret it, which is slow. But IBM played ball, and the others followed.”
“Really interesting,” I said. “Maybe it’s time for me to jump in.”
“I’m incredibly curious!” Laura said.
“And I have little to add,” Angie said. “This all sounds beyond the state of the art in 1997. Or, at least, the state of the art they taught me about.”
I nodded.
“Besides one exception, it would be in my first life. I mean ... beyond the state of the art.”
“Exception?” Laura said.
“We’ll start with recompiling. Or whatever we call it,” I said.
“Works for me,” Laura said.
“So ... in my universe, Apple hit a brick wall on performance with the 68000 instruction set in the 1990s,” I said.
“Mine, too,” Laura said.
“They had a few breakthroughs and announced a system called ‘Rosetta.’ Rosetta translated 68K instructions to PowerPC instructions. PowerPC was a version of IBM’s POWER instruction set downsized for personal computers.”
“We didn’t have PowerPC, but ... well, heck. We probably did,” Laura said. “It just had a different name. And my Apple couldn’t do that. They licensed our code. Our first really big client, in fact.”
“Fascinating,” I said.
“Heck ... we probably hired the people Apple had in your world,” Laura said, shrugging. “This is before things hit full stride, so I’m still saying ‘we.’ I’d already lost control of things for the most part, though. But it’s before the whole left-at-the-altar debacle.”
I nodded, then said, “That’s half. The other piece is ... we had a company called VMWare. Somewhere around 2000 — I’m not sure exactly when — they came out with virtualization software for the 8086 family. Meaning the follow-ons, which were far beyond the architecture the way it is now.”
“The 8086 architecture was mostly dead in my universe,” Laura said. “It was IBM, MIPS, Sun, and ARM. There were some viable systems to really run my code by the mid-1990s. Not well, but it was enough. And enough to get some greedy people interested in prying control of it away from me.”
“There might have been in mine, but I’m not sure,” I said. “As for processors, PowerPC kept Apple going for many years, but they eventually jumped to ARM. Pretty much, ARM just hung around until they finally got pretty big. MIPS was around, but not big. SPARC started out good, but fizzled. There were some other processors that stumbled pretty badly, too. Anyway, the 64-bit x86 architecture was the 800-pound gorilla in much of the market.”
“Ugly!” Laura said, shaking her head.
“It was, but it worked,” I said, nodding. “Anyway, VMware never did instruction set translation or the like. Still, they were easily a multi-billion dollar company.”
“On the x86?” Laura said. “How?”
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