The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O.

by Neal Stephenson

  “What’s DARPA?” I asked.

  Tristan looked appalled. “Wow,” he said, almost thoughtfully. “Wow. You really aren’t up to speed, are you?”

  “I study dead languages for a living,” I said. “That’s why you hired me. Why should I be up to speed on your line of work? How’s your Serbo-Croatian? What’s your position on the relationship between Oscan and Marrucinian?”

  He gave me an amused look. “Wouldn’t have pegged you as pissy, Stokes,” he said. “Okay. DARPA. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.”

  “Ah. The stealth bomber guys. The ones who develop clever ways to kill people.”

  “They’ve developed all kinds of things,” said Tristan breezily. “Not just weapons. Night-vision technology, GPS satellites. Surely somebody living in Boston can appreciate GPS.”

  “I bike everywhere,” I said in a superior tone. “I read maps. I don’t rely on Big Brother to tell me where to go.”

  Abruptly, he sobered. “If you’re going to get anti-establishment on me, this won’t work. The first thing you learned about me was that I work for the government, and the second thing you learned was that I went to West Point. Eighty-six the attitude.”

  Taken aback by this sudden intensity, I held my hands up briefly. “Fine,” I said in a conciliatory tone. “DARPA.”

  “And even after his forced retirement from MIT, he kept on doing work—serious work—for them.”

  “Did it involve cats?”

  “Classified. But my point is that the accusation of senile dementia is reckless, unfounded. He turned in good work as recently as”—he paged to the bottom of a screen—“four years ago.”

  “The patent application said something about jamming foreign surveillance devices.”

  “When DARPA signs your paychecks,” he said, “everything you do relates to national defense. Frank Oda was trying to create a defensive technology involving the sort of science we’re interested in. But . . . the patent application was rejected.”

  “What do you think he meant by this line . . .” I scrolled back in the Howler article. “The test subject must contain living, active brain tissue?”

  “Something to do with how the ODEC works, I guess.”

  “I find it mildly unsettling.”

  “Maybe we should just ask him.” Tristan typed something into the computer. As he read the result, his eyes went wide, as they usually did when he was pleasantly surprised by something.

  “Stokes,” he said. “He’s still around. Right here in Cambridge.”

  “That’s convenient,” I said. “What address?”

  By way of an answer, he swiveled his screen around so I could see the map he’d Googled up.

  I almost choked on my saag paneer. “It’s right down Mass Ave from where I live!” I said. “We could walk there from here in less than half an hour.”

  Tristan grinned and reached for his pocket. “We can call even faster than that.” He punched a number into his phone, reading off the computer screen. As it connected and began to ring on the other end, he gave me a sideways grin, like a child about to be awarded a prize for solving a riddle. I smiled back.

  But the moment wore on and his smile faded until finally he hung up. “Huh. No answer.” He looked at his phone as if it had insulted him. “Not even an answering machine. That’s weird. Nobody does that these days.”

  “Maybe he’s a Luddite,” I said.

  “An MIT physics professor who tried to patent groundbreaking technological inventions is a Luddite?”

  “He was rebuffed,” I pointed out. “He overreacted and now he’s a Luddite.”

  “Lunchtime’s over,” said Tristan, standing and reaching for his Yankees sweatshirt. “We’re going for a visit.”

  THE ODAS LIVED on a street of grand houses, most of which, judging by appearance, had been built in the late 1800s. But theirs stuck out like a pilgrim at a White House dinner. A plain, gable-roofed three-story, it was older than the others by well over a hundred years. Its garden outshone every other yard on the street. It was full of flowers and herbs and ornamental shrubbery, with the efficient use of space associated with Japanese gardening.

  We rang the bell. The door was answered by an older woman. Caucasian, not Japanese. In fact, downright WASPy, including her reception of us.

  “Rebecca East, I presume,” Tristan said, holding out his hand.

  “Rebecca East-Oda,” she corrected him. She was in her seventies, with a salt-and-pepper bob and Laura Ashley sweater, and she was the epitome of a particular New England Congregationalist bloodline that manages to simultaneously suggest cool, contained patrician and indefatigable peasant stock. The kind of woman who could pleasantly instruct you to fuck off, dear, and you immediately would because you’d just hate to disappoint her.

  Luckily she did not explicitly request us to do so. Tristan explained that we were here to talk to the professor about an old project of his from his MIT days. She pursed her lips uncertainly. “It’s important,” said Tristan.

  “Frank does not like to talk shop much in his retirement,” she said.

  “We won’t take long, and he’ll be glad we came,” said Tristan.

  She gave him a wary look. “He’s napping at present, why don’t you come back tomorrow.”

  Tristan opened his mouth again, but I clutched his arm, dug my fingernails into his wrist, and spoke over him:

  “Please pardon our rudeness, but we would be deeply indebted to you if Oda-sensei would consider giving us a moment of his time.”

  She studied me with guarded amusement. Then her eyes flicked meaningfully at Tristan—as if making sure he noticed that I was the one she was responding to—before looking at me again to say, “I will see if he’s awake.”

  When she was gone I glanced up at Tristan. “When speaking Japanese,” I said, “it is impossible to grovel too much or too often.”

  “She’s not Japanese,” he grunted dismissively.

  “I just demonstrated to her that I understand her husband’s culture,” I said. Goodness how I appreciated being the more informed one, for a change. “Which suggests we will be respectful, which is obviously important to her or she wouldn’t have deflected you to start with.”

  “Women make everything so complicated,” Tristan said in mock dismay.

  “If you’re going to get sexist on me, this won’t work,” I said. “The first thing you learned about me is that I am a woman. Eighty-six that attitude.”

  “You’re all right, Stokes,” he said, and roughed up my hair as if I were his kid sister. I smacked his hand away. Before the roughhousing could progress any further, we heard Rebecca East-Oda’s clogs clunking back down the stairway.

  Diachronicle

  DAY 221 (EARLY MARCH, YEAR 1)

  In which we meet Dr. Oda. And his wife.

  SHE LET US INTO THE house, which had the subtle smell of old wood and old wool—as I used to imagine Victorian homes smelled in Victorian times, before I was recently alerted to the painful truth that actually, at least here in London, they stink of whale oil, patchouli (woven into shawls to keep worms from eating the fabric in transit), and backed-up sewers. I am now convinced everyone here goes to church for the incense.

  But to our story: Rebecca diverted us immediately to the front room on the right, which had been a formal dining room back in the day but was now her husband’s study. The double-hung windows let in plenty of light; the two inner walls were lined with bookshelves (except where the fireplace was), most of them packed with piles of papers, journals, and folders in no discernible order. Dr. Frank Oda, seated at a desk that faced toward the street, was a slender, cheerful, absentminded-looking Japanese-American gentleman. Rebecca introduced us and offered to serve us tea, in a tone suggesting she’d be perfectly happy if we weren’t staying long enough to drink it. Tristan, socially tone-deaf, accepted her offer.

  The professor, smiling, invited us to sit on a couple of Harvard chairs that faced his desk, hastening to remove ta
ttered copies of Anna Karenina and Geometric Perspectives on Gauge Theories (Dr. Frank Oda, ed.) from one of them. We sat, and Tristan immediately launched into an explanation of what we were trying to do (although not why we were trying to do it) and how we had encountered his rejected patent application online. Professor Oda’s expression settled into thoughtfulness.

  “Rather than inventing the wheel, we thought we’d ask you if you could explain your work to us, and why it did or didn’t work,” said Tristan.

  Oda gave him a considering look. “You’re not with DARPA, are you?”

  “No,” I said quickly, reassuringly. “This is a different kind of project altogether. I’m a linguist,” I offered, as proof of how benign we were.

  He shook his head, frowning. “I do not understand the point of your research, then,” he said.

  Tristan smiled that Boy Scout smile of his. “I’d need you to sign a nondisclosure agreement before I can tell you any more about what we’re doing. I was hoping this could just be a casual conversation about what you were doing.”

  Oda smiled back. “I should share information with somebody who won’t share information with me?”

  Tristan upped his smile to Eagle Scout. “You’re not willing to talk physics with a fellow physicist in the name of science?”

  “If it is applied physics, he would like to know what it’s being applied to,” said Rebecca East-Oda from the study door.

  The professor smiled at her. It was such a sweet smile. “It’s all right, Rebecca,” he said. “They’re kids. They’re curious. I like curious. And if you’re here to ask, let’s make it Darjeeling.” She nodded and left; he returned his gaze to Tristan. “As you must have read in the patent application, I was trying to interrupt the collapse of the wave function—specifically in living neurological tissue.”

  “Brains,” Tristan translated.

  “Cat brains,” I added.

  Oda got a here we go again look, and drew breath.

  “We’re not from PETA,” I assured him.

  Tristan threw me a look.

  “We totally get it that you weren’t killing the cats,” I went on.

  “The cats that you saved from the kill shelter,” Tristan concluded.

  Right on cue, a black cat jumped up into Oda’s lap and settled in for a long purr.

  “I was wondering,” I ventured, “why cats? Could you have done the experiment on worm brains, for example?”

  “Yes,” Oda said, “but it would have been difficult to gauge the outcome, because it’s hard to know what a worm is thinking. With a cat, you are rarely in doubt.”

  “Ah. Well, in that case, why not just use a human subject?”

  “Because of the Helsinki Declaration!” Tristan scoffed.

  Oda nodded. “Partly that. But even if there were no regulations on use of human subjects, I would have been stymied by physical limitations.”

  For the first time since Tristan had become energized about the solar eclipse photographs, he looked a little deflated. “The ODEC won’t work on a human?” he asked almost plaintively.

  “Oh, it would work,” Oda said, “if you could fit a human into it.”

  The relief in Tristan’s voice was obvious. “So you would just need to make a bigger one.”

  Oda held back before answering, giving Tristan’s face a careful study, with occasional glances at me. “If you wanted to use it on a human,” he said, “then yes. But this was impossible at the time.”

  “Your lab space wasn’t big enough?” I asked.

  “It was plenty big,” Oda returned, “but that wasn’t the problem.”

  My colleague was back to being Sad Tristan. “What was the problem, Dr. Oda?”

  “Maybe it’s easy if I just show you,” Oda said, standing up abruptly and spilling the cat onto the rug. He was a slight man, hardly taller than I. “I have it in the basement.”

  “You have what in the basement?” I asked.

  “The ODEC. Rebecca wanted me to throw it out, but I have a . . . bittersweet sentimental attachment to it, and it doesn’t take up much space.”

  He began leading us toward a narrow door beneath the stairway. “Rebecca,” he called out. “I’m taking them down to see the ODEC.”

  No answer, just some indistinct clacking of dishware. He gave us a rueful smile. “She doesn’t approve,” he said in a conspiratorial voice. “But she’s making us tea all the same.”

  The cramped wooden steps down to the basement were nestled underneath the hall stairs to the second floor. He switched on a light, and the three of us slowly descended.

  The basement was wonderful: low ceiling, thick stone walls with small transom windows, and a pounded-earth floor, very musty in a way that said this is an authentic old house (although of course I now know most houses smell that way almost as soon as they’re built, in any time period but the modern). Near the hatch stairs to the yard lay a tangle of wood and wicker lawn furniture, with satellite baskets of sandbox toys, suggesting grandchildren. To the other side of the steps was the furnace, and other systems-viscera of the house. Along almost every wall were shelving units on which were neatly stacked old apple crates, labeled and color-coded. Tristan at once began to read these, muttering his findings aloud. There was a very orderly garden worktable and grow lights in the corner nearest to the hatch. “Rebecca’s the gardener,” the professor said in an affectionate voice. He gestured around. “This house is architecturally interesting because it has an unusually deep cellar for its time.”

  “Is that so?” I asked politely, while Tristan kept scanning the crates for the ODEC.

  Oda nodded, looking almost tickled. “Becca is the one officially qualified to give the tour, but after fifty years I guess I know the spiel. The whole area, for blocks around, was a farm back in the colonial era. The farmhouse was torn down a few decades ago, there’s a gas station in its place now down at the corner of Mass Ave. This house we’re in was built for the farm manager’s family, when the estate was large and prosperous, and we think he dug the cellar so deep to hide extra food, all the end-of-year gleanings from the field. It was a stop on the Underground Railroad. Rebecca’s family were abolitionists—but the farm owner, in the big house, was not.”

  “Her family’s been in the house since before the Civil War?” I asked, surprised. Tristan continued to eye the neat storage stacks, looking for the ODEC.

  Oda nodded. “It was built for her ancestor, Jeremiah East, that very farm manager. And Jeremiah’s great-something-grandmother was—”

  “Is that it?” asked Tristan, pointing to the far corner beyond the furnace. God he could be rude.

  “Yes,” said Oda, not minding, and led us toward it.

  In the corner, under a heavy canvas tarp peppered with mouse droppings, was a large rectangular object. Oda dragged the tarp aside and it folded stiffly onto itself as it fell to the floor.

  The ODEC was a little larger than I’d expected; as advertised, the interior volume could just accommodate a cat, but the apparatus constructed around it made it as big as a clothes washer. The cat box itself—plywood, and covered with slabs of pink insulation foam from the home improvement store—was suspended by a web of thin, taut cords inside of a somewhat larger fiberglass tub. This was in turn surrounded by more pink foam insulation. All of it was hung from, and supported by, a sort of exoskeleton of slotted angle irons. Wires were coming out of it all over the place: thick, round black cables like the ones that the cable guy staples to your house, hair-thin copper wires coiled millions of times around hidden cores to make what I guessed were electromagnets, medium-sized wires with colored insulation, flat rainbow ribbons, tubular braids, bare copper that had gone greenish-brown with age, and power cords with two-prong plugs at the end, their plastic insulation now stiff and cracked.

  On a shelf beneath the cat enclosure rested a plastic box that looked like the CPU of an old desktop computer, except that instead of beige it was an intense purple color.

  “Silicon Graphic
s Indigo,” Tristan said, reading the logos on its front.

  “An awesome machine,” Oda said, “before you were born. Fastest thing I could get at the time.”

  The entire thing was mounted on rubber-wheeled casters. When Oda tried to pull it away from the wall, these made noises suggesting they hadn’t moved in a long time. “May I, sir?” Tristan offered, and then put his considerably broader back into it. The ODEC creaked and squeaked its way out into the middle of the room, leaving a trail of mouse turds, dust bunnies, and dead spiders across the floor. I was now looking at the back of it. From here it was obvious that Oda had opened up the back of the Silicon Graphics workstation and routed a number of cables into it.

  A miniature Manhattan of electrical stuff covered the top. Oda pushed, and this chittered out of the way on ball-bearing drawer slides, revealing the foam-clad lid of the fiberglass tub. Oda picked this up and handed it to Tristan, who found a patch of bare stone wall to lean it against. Exposed in the middle was the lid of the inner plywood box. Oda reverentially unhooked the simple clasp holding it down. He paused a moment, smiling to himself. I wondered how long it had been since he’d last opened it.

  Then he lifted the lid, hinged on the far side. A pair of little chains kept it from flopping back. I don’t know what I had been anticipating, but it was no clumsy contraption. The box itself was plywood, but it was lined on the inside with thin sheets of green plastic, scribed all over with fine copper traces that I recognized as circuit boards. In some places, little electronic components had been soldered to these, projecting out into the airspace within the box, but in others, the copper tracery itself seemed to be what mattered. The linguist in me couldn’t help fancying a connection between these fine whorls of metal and the interlaced figures in old Irish manuscripts. Neat holes had been drilled through the plywood in many places to allow wires to pass through and make connections with these circuit boards. In many cases, these coincided with the massive coils of copper wire mounted outside the box. I now began to see these as being aimed inward, like science-fiction weapons.