Chapter Text
It only a matter of time, really, before her mum caught her sneaking out the back door after midnight with binoculars in her hands.
“Hallie, dearest,” her mother said, in a quavering voice not yet sure whether to be frightened or angry, “what are you doing up so late?”
It was only 1:34 am. The moon had just set. It was time for stargazing, and she was sullen that she’d gotten caught, which meant no more stargazing tonight or possibly ever. “I was just going out to the yard, mummy, I wasn’t going anywhere.”
Her mum eyed the binoculars in her hands. “Are you looking for planes? You – you don’t have to, you know, the Germans have mostly stopped their air attacks. And the government, they have the best defence systems already, radar and such. You should be sleeping. They don’t need you keeping a lookout, the government and the RAF, they do that already.”
“I wasn’t looking for aeroplanes,” she said, almost insulted. She wasn’t some schoolboy, loudly jeering the Jerrys as if he had any ability to do anything about them. She was eight years old; she knew the government didn’t need her help. This wasn’t for them. Wasn’t for anyone else but herself. “I was looking at the stars.”
“The stars –” Her mum pressed her lips together, looking tense and sad. She knew how much her little daughter loved the stars, and maybe even had some idea of what a refuge the cold vastness of outer space was. Certainly understood the desire to be outside at night. But at the same time, said, “We can go stargazing together some other time, darling. It isn’t safe to be outside at night by yourself.”
You just said the Germans weren’t attacking at night anymore, she wanted to say, but knew her mother would get cross at her for talking back, so instead said, “When?”
“When it’s safe,” her mum said. “In the summer, or – after the war is over. Mr. Churchill, you know, he said just this morning that the war is going well, that we’re going to win soon. Soon, Hallie, I promise.”
Her mum used the tone of voice adults always used when they tried to tell soothing lies they thought children were too stupid to notice. Things like, “The boys at school don’t really hate you, Hallie dear,” or, “The doctors are working on it, they have all sorts of medicines and salves and such, they’ll find something for you.” The war had been going on for nearly her entire life’s memory; she didn’t fully believe it would ever end.
“But right now,” she said, trying to win with logic, “the city is all dark. To protect from the Germans. After the war the lights will all go on again, and we won’t be able to see anything.”
Her mother sighed in frustration now, and said “Hallie…” in a tone that clearly meant this conversation was over and she had to go to bed, like it or not.
She made a face as she marched back upstairs. Hallie. Her name was Harriet, but her parents, who gave her that name, had at some point decided that even that had too many sharp sounds and hard edges, so they called her Hallie.
It wasn’t what she wanted or would have chosen, but then, what was? Her body was thin and delicate, ghostlike in her white skin and white hair and inability to go out in the sun. That wasn’t what she would have chosen either, but it was the kind of thing that is given, not chosen. Her name, wilty and girlish, seemed to follow suit. Her parents covered up her sensitive skin with a heavy coat and her weak eyes with dark shades and her name, full of hard r’s and curt t’s, with something light and soft and gentle. Protect her from herself.
(She would have even preferred Harry – it had a boyish charm that appealed to her greatly, long before she could even guess why – but she knew full well no one would switch to calling her that, so she never bothered to ask.)
Life during the war was about making do with less, after all. Keep calm, carry on. It would be uncouth to complain about what one wanted but couldn’t have. Everyone was living with what they wanted but couldn’t have. Even as a child, she understood.
She didn’t really play with the other children in her neighborhood. Many got sent off to the countryside, or to America, when the bombings started; most of the rest who stayed behind were full of fear and anger and helplessness they weren’t allowed to voice in the name of Keeping Up The Nation’s Morale. They took it out on one of the few targets they had any power over, bullying her for her differences, her weird skin and hair and glasses, and then for her quietness and her coldness when she refused to engage.
She didn’t want their friendship, anyway. They were fools, shallow-minded and brash, incurious and cruel. Since she was six years old, old enough to think and pay attention, the days had been tedious to slog through. But then, that was life during War, wasn’t it?
The days were short and unpleasant for multiple reasons, but the nights were her friend. The harsh sunlight burned her skin, but the night air was cold and comforting, the light from the moon gentle on her face. She could take off her dark glasses and look up at the sky.
Unlike people, the stars were soft and familiar, and most importantly, understandable. Every child finds their obsession, and for her it became space, the night sky, the stars. Maths could explain where the stars would be every night; science could explain why they were there and what they were doing. Everything neat and orderly – and beautiful. People were stupid and messy, and the War was distant and strange and constantly shifting, and the reports about it made no sense to her. But space was just maths, just physics. There were books, that she checked out from the library with far more delight than she ever showed for interacting with her peers, that explained everything. That made sense.
As she trudged back up the stairs to bed, she tried to forgive her mother. Her mum just didn’t understand, not really. Her mum was worried about her, just wanted her to like the other children and be like the other children. Normal children played during the day and slept during the night. Normal children didn’t spend the afternoons inside, paging through large reference books or slim months-old science fiction magazines, filling up notebooks with mathematical equations or dreams about space. Her mum could try to take Hallie away from the stars, but she couldn’t take the stars away from Hallie. She had the stars out her window, and the big books and the Astoundings creating an uncomfortable but comforting lump under her pillow. She had her own slide rule now, her notebook – her name. If she couldn’t change it (and she couldn’t, and it would be discourteous to ask) she had decided, at least, she could make it hers anyway. She could be Halley, couldn’t she? No one had to know, except her. If she knew her name meant a comet, meant a scientist, meant space – well, then space was a part of her. Then it meant something grand instead of something stunted. Then she could quietly claim it for herself.
The War did end, not even too long later, and it was a strange feeling. There wasn’t the lightness that she’d expected, and the rationing didn’t go away, but there was a kind of relaxing, a sense of pride, Britain battered but able to come back and do anything. The city turned all the lights on, and drowned out the distant stars.
Her mother even relented when she was eleven and allowed her to apply for a new and highly selective secondary-school programme for ‘accelerated learners in mathematics’ across London.
“It’s like a grammar school,” Halley said. “It’s ‘Secondary Education in Mathematics and Computing’. Instead of Latin, the focus is maths.”
Her mother needed convincing. She knew Halley was brilliant, of course, it was obvious to everyone, and had probably had her heart set on her attending a prestigious grammar school with a long, important history. “Why not take maths along with Latin in a grammar school, then?”
Halley sighed pointedly. “Because they don’t bother to teach Latin at this one. They teach how computers work. They used a lot of computers during the War, you know.” No one was sure how, exactly, because it was classified, but computers had been crucial in ending the war. “So they started this programme during the education reform because they want more children to learn and understand computers. They’re important.” For the next war. There would inevitably be a next war.
Halley didn’t say that, though. She knew it would upset her mother that she knew it.
“You should learn Latin, Halley,” her mother said. “The War is over. You don’t need to worry about it anymore. And you’re very clever, you know. You would be good at Latin.”
Halley shook her head and fidgeted with her glasses. She didn’t want to learn Latin. She wanted to learn the language of the stars, and that was mathematics. And computers could do complicated maths more quickly and easily than any human. It was fascinating to her in a way Latin could never be. She had read von Neumann’s famous paper last year, about the EDVAC, had even stolen it from the Cambridge University library and now kept it under her bed. She didn’t understand all of it, but she so desperately wanted to.
Her mother gave her a long look. “Is this what you want? Is it truly?”
“Yes,” she said, with no hesitation at all.
Halley was accepted, of course, she’d had no doubts. She didn’t get along well with many of the other children in the SEMC, either, but it didn’t matter as much. There were fewer of them, and all actually interested in the schoolwork. (Well, most of it. They still had to learn Latin.) Bonding over dreams of computers came much more naturally than running and yelling in the schoolyard. And as there were only three other girls in this programme, and fourteen boys, the four of them ended up all friends by circumstance anyway.
She introduced herself as Harriet here. She was away from home (even if not very far); she was growing up now, and she could make her own choices.
The work was interesting, the maths finally at a level that could keep up with her, the problems she solved in class meaningful rather than repetitive drudgery intended to explain concepts she grasped almost without effort.
“The mathematical framework for all modern computing – and certainly what you have to understand before you can even touch a computer – is the a-machine model,” Professor Thomas said, once the class had all proven satisfactorily that they could be capable of learning computing theory. “That’s for ‘automatic machine,’ although if you start to spend time with mathematicians and computicians you should probably get used to hearing it called ‘Turing machine,’ because it was all Alan’s idea, really.” He chuckled, like it was some sort of joke. “I highly advise you read his 1936 paper on computable numbers from the London Mathematical Society, if you don’t want to be hopelessly lost.”
She and the other girls stayed up late for days afterward, working together through the language and the mathematics of “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem”. There was a brilliance in it, an elegance Halley could almost touch. If a single strip of tape with binary symbols on it could, in theory, direct a machine to compute any number and solve any problem… what couldn’t be solved, with a program complex enough? What worth caring about wasn’t in essence a complex mathematical problem?
“Just think,” Doreen said, as one of their group study sessions ticked past midnight, and June and Shirley had already fallen asleep, “if we can have multiple computers, all solving equations enough for multiple people… they could run the wars for us. Unbreakable codes, perfect positions, ideal decisions, all of it. No more human error.”
“Hm,” Halley said, as she hacked away at a draft of a Turing string that would allow a computer to run the equations to calculate the gravitational pull between two bodies. “There are so many more interesting uses for a fleet of computers than just another war.”
“Can you think of any better ones?” Doreen asked, with an edge to her voice, and Halley looked up in the belated realization that she’d insulted her, somehow. “That’s how the computers won the war, you know. Breaking the enemy’s codes, and creating unbreakable ones for ourselves, the better we get at it, it would save – thousands of lives, probably!”
“Probably,” Halley agreed, “but it seems like a waste to spend the time we’re not at war just preparing for the next one. It’s so boring and unpleasant.”
Doreen glowered at her. “My father was in the war,” she said. “He died. He died because information his commander sent out got intercepted by the Germans. If he’d had a computer, that wouldn’t have happened. How is it not worthwhile to make war better? Isn’t that why we’re here? Computers aren’t just there to be curiosities, you know.”
Halley made noncommittal agreement-adjacent noises until Doreen sighed, her anger dissipated, and they went back to work on their assignment.
She knew full well what they were here for, of course. Computers were fascinating, but the government hadn’t started this programme to allow little misfit girls a place to come feel fascinated. It just seemed to her that only applying the vast potential power of computational machines to the same old uses they already had was neither imaginative nor productive. She didn’t care about making better ciphers, better codebreakers, more successful wars. The next war would come whenever it did, and the same old people would run it, and that would be that, and she had no interest in getting involved. She had ideas. She had dreams.
Computers, if given the right sequence, could open up outer space.
Three of the boys and one of the girls didn’t return to the programme for the second term. Two more boys left after the end of the first year. (Harriet was only re-admitted with the stern warning that she would be expelled from the programme if she failed Latin again.) The ones who made it through to the second year got to put the theory, all the maths and models they’d learned, into practice.
They didn’t get to work with the Colossus. Its existence was hinted at, its name slipped out in a moment of adult carelessness, but its security restrictions were far too high to allow to thirteen-year-olds. It won the war, you know. But they did get to work with the brand-new ENIAC, a huge shiny thing that filled up a whole room, with cables like nesting snakes slithering up and down the walls. The first time Halley set her eyes on it, she felt as she thought she was always supposed to feel when walking through the aisle of a cathedral. She’d read about it in the paper, but seeing it, getting to touch it, knowing she would someday soon command it, was something close to awe.
The class spent weeks in group projects learning the ins and outs of the machine, how it worked, what it could do if asked right. “It can calculate the trajectory of a missile in fifteen seconds,” a technician and associate professor, Johnson, said, his eyes glittering in delight. “And that’s only the beginning.” The class learned to compose programs on paper, how to account for different inputs for different speeds and weights and angles, and then manipulate the cables and switches to send the metaphorical strip of tape into the correct configuration. The class then spent more weeks combing over their computations and switch settings to find and fix the bugs.
“We could have just done the trajectory maths by hand ourselves by this point,” June grumbled, as they checked every line of their missile-calculation formula in their third round of debugs. “The next step in computing: invent an ENIAC that can tell us what the bugs actually are right away.”
“Build another ENIAC right next to this one that can double-check the code to spot the bugs before we run it,” Doreen said with a laugh.
“Why not go all the way?” said Halley. “Build an ENIAC that can think for itself and do all the debugging for us.”
June smiled longingly at the thought; Doreen snorted, but in a commiserating way.
It was camaraderie. Halley had never really had it before. It was nice.
Year three, after they’d gotten a solid grasp on how to use the ENIAC and could calculate any missile launched from anywhere to anywhere and could use the computer to determine an ideal launch given a weight, wind speed, and destination (which had real uses), after Harriet had only gotten in trouble once for asking if the same equations could be modified for launching a device (she didn’t say human, not yet, but she thought it) into space, Professor Thomas greeted the new term by saying, “Right, boys, they’ve gone and done it, those fellows up in Manchester, they’ve built what we all really wanted this whole time. The modern era of computing is here. We’re moving up north.”
It was, to say the least, unexpected.
“Manchester?” Halley’s mother asked, when she was informed of this development. “Why are they moving the programme all the way to Manchester?”
“That’s where the new computer is,” Halley said, as if it should be obvious. “At the University of Manchester.”
“Doesn’t the NPL have a perfectly nice computer?” her mother asked, a bit desperately, as if reasoning with her thirteen-year-old daughter would somehow convince the men at the Ministry overseeing the programme to change their minds.
“Sure,” Halley said, “but the University of Manchester has a newer one. They just finished it. It’s better than our ENIAC. It’s got random-access memory.”
Halley’s mother pressed her lips in a thin, worried line, which mostly just made Halley annoyed. She was thirteen now; she knew how to take care of her eyes and skin, she knew how to get along with – well, the other girls at least; she could live off at school properly, not just across the city. She could.
Her mother eventually sighed. “You will come home for the summer, Halley, won’t you?”
“Of course,” she said, but it barely mattered, in the pride and thrill of, at least in a sense, going to university.
The twelve students of her class, half a dozen more from the year above her and nearly twenty from the year below, filed onto the Victoria University of Manchester campus in the cool early autumn. They spent their first day in the main administration building, filling out the necessary paperwork to be allowed to live and study on campus, to access the fledgling Computing Machine Laboratory, and to pledge nondisclosure of any state secrets they learned or developed in the meantime.
Harriet allowed herself to grin, on her way in that morning, at the University’s motto engraved in the stone frieze above the door. Arduus ad solem. She knew enough Latin now to hope so.
“Marshall,” her professor said as they walked down the hall, on this theme more and more frequently as the year went on, “yours is very good work – nearly impeccable work – you’re the first to get your program running, and it’s certainly not for lack of complexity – but must your situations always be so… fanciful?”
“I don’t believe it’s fanciful at all,” Harriet said, framing her words at least somewhat diplomatically. Leaving her sunglasses on always helped with that; they allowed her an appearance of impassivity that the professors responded well to. “My work shows that it could be very practical, given a payload of a sufficiently reduced size.”
The professor sighed and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “You know what I mean, Marshall. We don’t need to meet moon men, not right now.”
“This isn’t about moon men,” Harriet said, defensiveness creeping into her voice despite herself. “It’s about scientific research into the universe. A computer that can take scans and readings from a position outside the atmosphere, and run calculations before we even retrieve it.”
“If we could even retrieve it. You provided algorithms that can explain how to get any payload under your threshold up into orbit… but haven’t included anything about how to get it back down.”
“I’m working on it,” Harriet said. Oh, she definitely sounded testy now. She should probably dial that back, but didn’t really want to. “Besides, I followed the assignment, which was about learning to solve a multi-step maths problem by using the Williams tube array to store multiple program instructions to recall and execute in sequence. Which I did. You said the suggested problems were just suggestions, and we were free to invent our own of equal complexity.”
“Well, yes, but – everything builds on everything else, Marshall, and other students are working on projects related to encryption, or anti-ballistic systems, or even atomic weight and ratio calculations. Things they’re going to be pursuing in the future. Just –” He stopped in front of the lab door and shook his head. “Mr. Turing wanted to see you on the strength of your practical ideas, so keep the space stuff out of the conversation, yeah? The Ministry of Defence won’t keep funding this programme if they think we’re out here looking for little green men.”
Harriet wanted to retort – this isn’t about aliens! This is about scientific advancement! Have you been listening to anything I’ve said? – but bit it back because she knew full well if Professor Thomas hadn’t listened to her before, he wouldn’t bother now.
She clenched her teeth and was already working on the creative phrases to accurately convey her frustration that she’d use when she told this story to Doreen and June this evening when Professor Thomas knocked on the lab door. “Alan?” he called. “Can I have a moment? The student who wrote that paper is here.”
The door opened. The man who stepped out looked tired but well-put-together, his dark hair in a neat side part. He looked at them and didn’t say anything.
“Alan,” Professor Thomas said, “a moment?”
“You clearly have my attention,” said the man whom Harriet had never seen before, but had wanted to meet for years. “This is another request to teach at your school, isn’t it?”
“Please,” Professor Thomas said. “This is just a… conversation with the student whose paper you thought so highly of.”
“Ah,” Alan Turing said. “Of course, of course.” He turned to Harriet for the first time, as if only just parsing her presence. “So you’re the mystery author of ‘An Exploration of the Feasibility Of Delivering a Computer for Extraterrestrial Observation’? It was my favorite of this unit’s collection, good work.”
He didn’t seem mocking, and didn’t put any undue emphasis on “extraterrestrial” the way Professor Thomas did when she turned it in (“It just means ‘outside the Earth,’” she’d tried to explain when he began to lecture her on if you aren’t going to take this programme seriously you should not be attending; she’d given up trying to explain, now). She wasn’t sure quite how to respond. It felt silly to be starstruck, but, well, he was the most brilliant man working in the world right now and he liked her work and it was certainly not her fault to feel at a loss for what to say. In her on-the-spot need to come up with something, she jumped to the odd turn of phrase – “Mystery author?”
“Oh, yes,” Alan Turing said, with a side glance back at Professor Thomas. “The professors take all the students’ names off the papers before presenting the work within them to the Ministry and the Lab. It’s about fairness, of course.”
“It’s to protect the identities of the minor children under our care,” Thomas said, his calm professionalism turning just a bit sharper.
“Is it? I thought it was because the Ministry kept undervaluing the ideas presented by the female students,” Alan Turing said, ignoring Thomas’s tone. “It’s enlightening to see the changes in the work they choose to pursue once the names are removed. So often the girls are the ones presenting the most interesting ideas.” He tipped his head to Harriet. “So really, I should’ve guessed. Is this why you applied to this programme? To learn more about the universe?”
He probably couldn’t see it behind her glasses, but Harriet could feel her face lighting up. She suddenly didn’t care at all about Professor Thomas’s advice. “Yes! Ah – yes. From everything that I have learned so far about computers, I think there is so much more towards an understanding of space – I mean, the universe, all of it – if we can apply computers and automatic computation to the data we can collect. Sir.”
She could feel Professor Thomas’s disapproval, but she didn’t care, and apparently Alan Turing didn’t either, because he said, “It’s a cause I hadn’t put much thought to, but I can certainly see lots of potential in a computer’s ability to make the many large-scale calculations that astronomy needs. And I’m especially interested in one idea you put forth in service to that goal – the idea of a computer that can sort through data and make judgments for itself. What made you think of that?”
“Well,” said Harriet, “If the idea of an a-machine is that a computer can read its inputs and write an output based on that – with the developments of RAM, why couldn’t one piece of code tell a computer how to react to different types of data, and those outputs are new lines of code telling a computer how to alter its functions based on what it found and what it might find… well, why couldn’t a complicated enough code allow a computer to make its own judgments independently?”
“That would be a great help,” Alan Turing said. “A computer with enough iterative programs that it mimics a human’s own judgment?”
“Exactly!” Of course a lot of her ideas were based on papers of his, but it was exciting to meet someone who got it. Even June, who was interested, didn’t really believe it was possible, and Doreen only wanted to apply the idea to her codebreaking programs anyway.
“I’ve been working on a very similar problem myself,” Alan Turing said. “I believe artificial machine intelligence is possible. We just need to develop machinery powerful enough, and instructions complex enough.”
“And it seems like you’ve found yourself a kindred spirit!” Professor Thomas broke in. He sounded impatient; his joviality was very forced. “And in the SEMC programme, no less! This adorable little girl has a pure and non-military interest in the beauty of computing as a scientific field, ripe for creativity and advancement. How could you possibly deny her and her classmates the chance to study the cutting edge?”
“How could I say no to such a subtle and moving manipulation attempt?” Alan Turing responded mildly. Then, to Harriet, like he really meant it: “Is that something you would be interested in pursuing?”
Studying with Alan Turing? She couldn’t hide her grin. She didn’t care about Professor Thomas’s angle. This would be a dream come true. “Yes! I would, and I can handle the maths involved, too.”
“I have no doubts.” Alan Turing nodded to Professor Thomas. It wasn’t exactly good-natured, but it was as good as any deal between colleagues. “Well, Dick, you’ve worn me down. I’ll teach a course at your programme. I can count on at least Miss –” He broke off and turned back to Harriet. “I’m sorry, forgive my awful manners, I never even learned your name.”
She was a little bit dizzy with awe. She held out her hand a little too quickly, and stumbled out the words before she could think, “Halley!” She felt stupid immediately, but too late to take it back. She shook his hand with as much seriousness as she could regain. “Halley Marshall.”
“Ah,” he said with a small smile. “Halley. Like Halley’s comet? I shouldn’t be surprised your interest is in discoveries in space.”
And she beamed, because he understood.