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

by Neal Stephenson

  “Department of Demolishing Offices” was all I could say the next time I went to the building after our teatime strategy session at the Odas’ house. Less than twenty-four hours had passed, but Tristan appeared to have spent most of them walking freely through the building with a can of fluorescent green spray paint marking doors, walls, and other impedimenta with the word DEMO or, when he ran low on spray paint, with a simple X. In the center of the building was a large conference room, meant to be shared by all of the tenants. Tristan had hurled the conference table against the wall, Xed it, and then spray-painted a huge rectangle directly onto the industrial-carpeted floor and filled it in with the inevitable X. Young, lavishly bearded tech entrepreneurs were trudging forlornly down the hallways, laden with computers, printers, high-end coffeemakers, and foosball tables. Like digital Okies they loaded their stuff into their Scions or Ryder trucks and rumbled off into the unforgiving Boston commercial real estate market.

  “So you’re going to, uh, remove basically the entire floor of the conference room?” I inquired.

  “The conference room will cease to exist,” he said. “DODO is not about meetings. Not about PowerPoints.”

  “I never imagined otherwise,” I said.

  He had lost focus on me and was now looking over my shoulder at a wall, which currently supported a large flat-screen monitor. Something about the look on his face told me where this was going. “Not load-bearing?” I guessed, glancing back over my shoulder. He sidestepped by me, raised his can of acid green paint like the Statue of Liberty’s torch, stood up on tiptoe, and sprayed a dripping, diagonal slash across the entirety of the wall, passing directly across the monitor screen en route. As he completed the other leg of the X he explained, “Between the loading dock and here we need to clear a path for the tanks.”

  “You seem a little preoccupied,” I said, “and I don’t want to elbow in on your painting. I’ll just take all the translation notes back to my apartment before you paint them green.”

  “Remember to maintain—” he began.

  “—operational security,” I ended. “Not to worry.” I found my way to the part of the building where it had all started. Oda was there, perched on a large blue yoga ball before the largest computer monitor I had ever seen, peering intently at some tiny widget in the user interface of what I guessed was a computer-aided design program. Next to him was the cell phone Tristan had bought for him (his first) and a bowl of foamy green Japanese tea. Matcha. Still steaming and filling the room with a fresh but bitter fragrance. It had to have been made only seconds ago. A faucet gushed briefly down the hall, in the ladies’ room, and I guess Rebecca was here washing up. I snapped a couple of file folders marked UNCLASSIFIED: TRANSLATIONS out of a cabinet and went to find her. She had spread all of her matcha-making whisks and paraphernalia out on the counter.

  “Herbs,” I said.

  She looked up and gazed at me in the mirror.

  “Just a thought,” I added.

  “What about them?”

  “Witches were obsessed with them.”

  “It is a familiar stereotype,” she pointed out, and returned her attention to drying her matcha gear.

  “One based on reality. All of our research points to it.” I rattled the folders in the air, as if this would lend authority to my words. “I thought of it when the fragrance of that tea filled my nostrils. Powerful stuff, fragrances.”

  “Yes,” she said drily, “so perhaps you should be recruiting the descendants of famous perfumers, or incense-makers, rather than those of famous non-witches hanged in Salem.”

  Taking the hint, I used the facilities and moved on. As I was walking back to my apartment, folders tucked under my arm, I had time to ponder Tristan’s statement we need to clear a path for the tanks. Given his military background, my mind had immediately flashed up an image of a column of huge armored military vehicles thundering through the building. But of course he didn’t mean that kind of tank. He meant a large vessel for holding fluids. To be specific, for holding liquid helium.

  When I returned to the building the next day, my keycard didn’t work. This was due to the disappearance of the entire keycard-reading machine. In its stead was a contraption, apparently some kind of eyeball scanner. I went around back and pounded on the loading dock door until Tristan let me in. “New perimeter security,” he explained. “Max will get you squared away.”

  “Who’s Max?”

  Tristan was leading me down a broad open corridor that had been sledgehammered through the building overnight. It terminated in the ruins of the conference room. A huge square hole, perhaps fifteen feet on a side, had been cut through the floor, and yellow caution tape strung up around it to prevent people from falling through into the cellar. Hard at work down there were what appeared to be the offspring of a Benetton ad and a UPS commercial: four attractive, buff young men in nondescript brown uniforms, one African-American, one Asian (Korean?), one Hispanic, one with a Persian aspect, all impeccably kitted out with eye and ear protection. Two of them were framing in a wall with steel studs, and the other two were wrestling with cables. Tristan hailed them and they paused in their labors to greet me briefly. To a man, each identified himself as Max.

  “What, do they row for the DODO crew team?” I asked, when they had returned to their work.

  “Classified,” Tristan said. When I made a face, he added quietly, “Don’t talk shop in front of them. They know it’s a physics experiment but they don’t know about the magic.” Then he nodded at a work party of Hispanic men busy heaving shattered drywall and rolls of nasty old carpet into huge rolling bins for disposal. “And those guys are from the sidewalk in front of Home Depot. If my higher-ups knew . . .” He shook his head.

  I was busy gazing at my colleague in a somewhat new light. Until I saw him in command of people and a place, there had been, truth be told, no evidence that Tristan Lyons wasn’t merely a convincing psychopath renting a tawdry room in an obsolete office building for unsavory purposes that could have endangered my life. The possibility had never entered my mind, but in retrospect, it really should have. I’d been a sucker for both the smile and the paycheck. I still consider it pure dumb luck that my trust had been well placed.

  Journal Entry of

  Rebecca East-Oda

  MARCH 29

  Temperature 49F, sunny, mild, very still. Barometer steady.

  Lettuce coming along nicely; yesterday, planted peppers, Swiss chard, radishes. Weathervane needs fixing.

  Working on the native-herb garden in the front corner of the yard. Already thriving: thyme, hyssop, spearmint, lemon balm, fennel, chamomile, marjoram. Must add: lavender, ambrosia, valerian, mugwort, pennyroyal, gillyflower, and (when it’s warmer) sweet basil. Might take out the Japanese moss to make room, and bring Mei’s bonsai indoors, now that Frank has lost interest.

  They are continuing with the ODEC, on a magnitude I can barely fathom. Frank is happily preoccupied with something I cannot believe will actually ever come to anything, but it is good to see him absorbed in work.

  Diachronicle

  DAYS 245–290 (SPRING, YEAR 1)

  In which constructive developments continue

  I BEGAN TO HELP THE Maxes and Tristan complete construction of the ODEC under Oda-sensei’s guidance. The memory, now, of such tomboyishness, freedom of movement, the liberty of a day innocently alone with unmarried young men, and above all, the virtue of labor—these things make me almost pant with longing today, as I sit here breathing the fumes from this stinking whale oil lamp in my whale-bone corset (very difficult to believe Victoria Regina is about to rule over half the planet dressed like this. Just saying.).

  As I had guessed, the “tanks” Tristan had referred to were industrial vessels made to contain thousands of gallons within their fiberglass walls. There were two of them, an inner nested within an outer, with a few inches’ separation between them. We had to cover both of them with insulation to keep the liquid helium from boiling away. This was a co
mbination of four-by-eight-foot slabs of pink foam from Home Depot, and some kind of weird brew that you would mix up in a bucket by stirring two different chemicals together. Then it would expand enormously as it foamed up and stick to everything like Krazy Glue before it hardened.

  After it had been clad in its insulating jacket, the outer tank just fit through the hole cut through the floor of the former conference room, and rested on the cellar floor below, its upper part projecting up into the ground floor. Here the Maxes cut a rectangular hatch through it, and a matching one through the inner tank several inches away. They fiberglassed the two rectangles together to form a hollow door capable of being filled with liquid helium, and likewise sealed the jambs. Meanwhile, expensive-looking stuff kept showing up at the loading dock. I didn’t need a West Point physics degree to understand that this was cryogenics equipment.

  Though the new ODEC (the Mark II) was much bigger than Professor Oda’s cat-sized Mark I, it was recognizably the same machine. Instead of an inner plywood box with a cat bed and a cream saucer, this one had that inner tank, which was just large enough for one person to sit in a chair, or two to stand upright. Much of its volume was spoken for by what Tristan referred to, somewhat unnervingly, as “life support stuff.” I made a mental note to ask him about that later. Its walls, for the time being, were just bare fiberglass, as it had come from the factory. If the Mark I was any guide, however, those walls would soon be lined with circuit boards. I had overheard enough snatches of conversation between Oda and Tristan to know that these were being produced offsite and that some were already inbound, plastered with tracking numbers that Rebecca was checking several times a day. When they showed up, and when the Maxes installed them, they would be connected to the inevitable web of cables, which would be routed under the floor and then up into the server room. This was being bolted together and brought online by a trio of bearded men who all politely introduced themselves as Vladimir.

  Once the Vladimirs had bolted the vertical racks into the floor, they devoted whole days to opening cardboard boxes, which had been piling up in ziggurats on the loading docks, and extricating black slabs, approximately the size and shape of pizza boxes, and slamming them into rails on those racks. Each of them, I was assured, contained sixteen computers, each of which was a bazillion times more powerful than the single, forlorn Indigo that had served as the brains of the Mark I. The Vladimirs were nothing if not friendly. I got the sense that this would be my last opportunity to have anything like a normal conversation with them. Once all of these pizza box servers were up and running, they would revert to their natural behavior patterns. For now, working on their knees with screwdrivers, performing tasks well below their pay grade, they were just happy to have someone to talk to. And talk they did, with a kind of messianic zeal, about the awesomeness of the cluster they were assembling. One of them, whom I’d mentally renamed Longbeard, actually did have an Eastern European accent. I got the impression from stray remarks dropped here and there that he’d had a hand in the creation of the uber-paranoid Shiny Hat operating system that had been the bane of my existence these six months. Perhaps he was the ur-Vlad.

  I was drawn into the mindless but satisfying activity of flattening boxes and stuffing plastic packing material into garbage bags. On a trip to the Dumpsters, I noted that it was dark. Perhaps we would knock off soon. But the Vladimirs had just ordered another round of quadruple-shot espresso drinks from the Apostolic Café, and Tristan announced that he and the Maxes were going to pull an all-nighter and leak-check the entire chamber so that it could be test-filled in the morning. Frank Oda kindly gave me a lift home. I wondered what Rebecca made of all this, but suspected this was perhaps a delicate subject, so refrained from asking.

  It was strange spending an evening in my own apartment. I’d anticipated a sense of relief, but the solitude was almost disorienting. I heated up some leftovers, settled down with my laptop, and checked my email for the first time in days. I had three notifications from Facebook.

  I usually forgot about Facebook; I checked in about once a month. I logged in now, to see that my account had three “friend requests.” One was from my mother, one was a nearly pornographic image of an attractive young Chinese man whose name translated to “Jade Dagger,” and one was a woman named Erszebet Karpathy whose picture appeared to be a state-issued ID of an octogenarian drag queen. I accepted my mother’s request, disregarded the other two as spam, sent my mother a perfunctory “Welcome to the Twenty-First Century” post, and checked my wall.

  There was a message posted on it from Erszebet Karpathy, dated three days earlier. “I am still waiting! Let me know when you are ready to begin.”

  Odd.

  I scrolled down. The next most recent post on my page was also from this Erszebet Karpathy, ten days earlier: “I am waiting for all to be placed in readiness.”

  Next was a request from one of my former students to play some kind of dumb social media game.

  Then another post from Erszebet Karpathy, this one from nearly a month earlier: “Melisande, is it time yet? You said April or May of this year.”

  That was unnerving. Who was Erszebet Karpathy? I went to her “About” page, to find it blank. Occasionally I accepted private students, usually interested in Bible studies, who wished to parse something in Aramaic. But it had been at least a year since I’d fielded any requests. Tired from a long day, I closed the laptop and went to sleep without even finishing dinner.

  The next morning, when I opened my laptop again to check the New York Times headlines, I was still logged in to Facebook, and there was a new message from the Karpathy chick: “Melisande. I see that you have been active on Facebook within the past 12 hours, so I KNOW you are receiving these messages. Contact me and I will tell you where to collect me.” She had changed her profile picture: now it was a “vintage”-looking, sepia-toned portrait of a matron in Edwardian costume, the kind of photo you dress for at Ye Olde County Faire.

  If life had not become so exceptionally peculiar over the past month, I would simply have blocked her. Instead, chewing on my lower lip, I sent her a private message: “Who are you and what do you want?”

  Before I could even log out, I received a response: “Come and get me. Elm House, 420 Common Street, Belmont. Do not make me wait any longer. Do you have any idea how much I have suffered?”

  I stared at this statement, flummoxed.

  “I know you are online,” came a new message. “There is a little green light next to your name. Come at once. I shall be waiting near the front desk with my luggage.”

  After an unsettled moment, I typed back, “What are you expecting of me?”

  “That you will help me to do magic once again. As you promised.”

  Thirty seconds later, laptop under my arm, I was dashing out the door to get to Tristan.

  Diachronicle

  DAY 290

  In which adjustments are made

  I SPRINTED INTO THE BASEMENT office ready to thrust my Facebook page at Tristan. But he and the assembled Maxes, all bleary-eyed yet full of pep, were cheering the results of the overnight test, which had apparently found no leaks. Frank Oda (radiant) and his wife, Rebecca (stoic), were also present, creating yet another mound of empty boxes and packing material as they uncrated the newly arrived circuit boards.

  “Tristan, I found—!” I began, but he was moving so quickly as to resemble an animated character, without the least interest in anything I had to say. He seemed to be headed for the server room, so I darted past him, executed a 180, and blocked his path. “I found a woman who says she can do magic. That is, she found me,” I clarified, seeing his eyes go wide with wonder. “On Facebook. We haven’t met in person.”

  Tristan frowned. “Oh God, not some social media thing, Stokes. Please tell me you didn’t put out a call for witches.”

  “Of course not,” I snapped. “I signed a nondisclosure form, I know what that means. Give me some credit, Lyons. She sent me a message out of the blue, sayin
g she was waiting for me so she could do magic.”

  He blinked. “Strange.”

  I reached for my messenger bag. “I’ve got it right—”

  He held up a hand, shook his head. “Stokes. I forbid you to communicate with this person, whoever she is, over social media channels. It is totally insecure. You have got to go about this systematically—not by sitting around your apartment waiting to get friended by supernatural trolls.”

  “Well, now that we’ve ruled out the use of the Internet and all other modern communications devices,” I said, “what systematic approach do you recommend for responding to the only lead we have?”

  “Don’t do anything till we have a chance to hack into Facebook and get this person’s real identity for a background check. Leave your laptop with the Vladimirs.”

  “And what do I systematically do in the meanwhile?”

  “Go to Salem.”

  “We’ve been over this. There never were any actual witches in Salem. Even the Puritans ended up admitting as much.”

  “Back in the day, yes. That’s true,” Tristan said agreeably. “But now, because of its reputation as a witchy place, it is a magnet for people like that.”

  “And you know this how?”

  “I drove through it once. There was witch shit all over the place.”

  “Good. Now I understand what you mean by systematic.”

  “Try to see it through the eyes of my higher-ups,” he suggested. “Salem. Witches. Go. Get on it. See if you can find a witch, or a witch’s descendant, or a witch’s DNA or something, just so I can tell them it’s being worked on. I’ve got to work my contacts at Lawrence Livermore, they’re hoarding helium.”

  “Of course,” I said, and wished for a brief, exhausted moment that he had asked me to translate Tartessian, or something simple like that.