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

by Neal Stephenson

  “Every task I gave you was a beta test for something else that would have obvious military use. They want you to turn a person inside out. Obviously I have to test that on a sweater and not a person, or even on a lab rat. And of course I’ll fulfill their agenda, but ideally I’d like to exceed it. I’ve got more scruples than they do, so I’d like to present you to them—brand you, so to speak—as being useful for something other than turning a person inside out.”

  “Such as?”

  “Turning lead into gold would be pretty awesome,” he said, sounding wistful.

  She shook her head.

  “Why don’t you suggest something, then,” he said to her. “Given that you can only work your magic inside the ODEC, you’re a little limited, you realize that?”

  “She can turn rats into newts,” I reminded him.

  “So can your average kids’-birthday-party magician.”

  “Not for real. Anyhow, what about a person?” I said. “What if I let her turn me into a newt?”

  “I would not turn a person inside out, probably,” Erszebet informed Tristan. “That would be tasteless. You Americans are so tasteless.”

  “Turn me into a newt,” I insisted. “The bosses will like that.”

  And that, as I recall, was the moment when Tristan’s phone began playing the “Liberty Bell March.”

  He pulled it out of his pocket and double-taked, then used his finger to scroll down. “Snap inspection!” he announced, looking up to make eye contact with me and Erszebet. “Shine your shoes and polish your belt buckles!”

  Diachronicle

  DAY 304

  In which General Schneider is impressed

  NO MORE THAN FIVE MINUTES later we were joined by a broad-chested gentleman in uniform, trailed by a younger man, similarly attired, whose sole purpose in life seemed to be to open doors for, and to hold the hat of, the boss.

  At the time, I knew nothing of uniforms, rank, or insignia. A few years later, having spent a lot of time around active-duty military, I’d have been able to recognize this man as a brigadier general (one star) and his aide as a lieutenant colonel. Both were wearing dress uniforms—the military-world equivalent of business suits. Conveniently, they were wearing name plates on their right breast pockets, and so I knew that their last names were Schneider and Ramirez even before Tristan made introductions, which he did with even more than his accustomed level of military crispness.

  General Schneider moved about the room in an asymmetrical gait, shaking first my hand, then Erszebet’s. His manner was extraordinarily grim and formal. He paid only cursory attention to me. Then his gaze settled on Erszebet, taking her in head to foot, and for a fleeting moment he looked impressed. But then he frowned and turned his attention to Tristan.

  “I assume that’s the Asset,” he said, pointing.

  “Pointing is very rude,” said Erszebet.

  Tristan hastily said, “General Schneider, yes. Miss Karpathy is the one I told you about.”

  “This must be the one who wishes me to turn people inside out,” said Erszebet, looking away with wounded dignity. “Very tasteless.”

  Schneider gave her a strange look, but then returned his attention to Tristan, who said quickly, “You came at a great time, sir. We were just in the middle of a very productive conversation.”

  “You said a couple of weeks, Major Lyons. In my dictionary, ‘a couple’ means ‘two.’ It has been two.”

  “General Schneider—”

  “You’re not doing what we discussed, Major Lyons. You’re going off script. You’re giving us a science project.”

  “Sir, I explained in my report—” Tristan began, but Erszebet talked over him:

  “My powers are so little to a man who requires an assistant just to walk into a room?”

  “She was just about to turn me into a newt,” I offered urgently.

  General Schneider gave me a look and then turned condescendingly to her. “Yeah, I’ve been hearing about the newt thing all week. That might have been impressive a thousand years ago—”

  “I was born in 1832, I was not alive a thousand years ago,” she retorted. “If you cannot grasp simple arithmetic, then you will never have any idea what Mr. Tristan Lyons is trying to accomplish here.”

  Schneider continued speaking over her: “Those kinds of tricks are nothing in a world with drones, cruise missiles, and assault rifles. And according to Major Lyons’s reports, it takes you all day to pull it off. By the time you get that spell half out of your mouth, I can rack a round into my sidearm and put it between your eyes.”

  “Do you need your minion to help you with that too?” she asked.

  He looked back over his shoulder at Lieutenant Colonel Ramirez. “Have a look around the facility,” he said. Ramirez departed wordlessly.

  “I liked the Maxes better,” Erszebet announced.

  “Do you get my point?” General Schneider demanded. “If you want the taxpayers of the United States to go on subsidizing your beauty treatments, you had better impress me. Now. Today. Right now.”

  “Very well, then,” purred Erszebet, so immediately cheerful that my skin prickled. I glanced at Tristan; he was looking at her keenly, and not in the usual slack-jawed way that men would look at such a woman.

  Erszebet stood and gestured to the open door of the ODEC, smiling like a 1950s housewife on a television advertisement. “If you would like to step inside, General, I will demonstrate the kind of magic you desire. In fact I would be delighted to give you what you’re asking for.”

  “General—” said Tristan tentatively.

  “Good,” said General Schneider, all too obviously charmed by Erszebet’s physical endowments. I got the clear sense that in his world he dealt with a lot of submissive women who thought of nothing but pleasing him. “That’s what I was after, Major Lyons. Why did it take me coming all the way up here to get that kind of compliance? Where’s the whatever-it-is I have to wear?”

  “In that corner,” I said, gesturing toward the rack of snowmobile suits.

  Tristan respectfully asked to speak in private with Schneider. They stepped into the server room for a moment, and I could hear Tristan’s voice trying to explain something and the general’s interrupting him. The door opened suddenly and Schneider limped back in, rolling his eyes. I handed him the snowsuit, and then gestured with my head for Erszebet to step aside with me. She joined me by the console panel and—an occasional habit of hers, like a nervous tic—reached into her bag and riffled through it without looking at what she was doing.

  “Don’t turn him inside out,” I said.

  She looked insulted. “Of course not. Blood—body fluids—all over my dress.”

  “You know what I mean. Don’t hurt him. You said you owed me a debt of gratitude—I’ll consider it fulfilled if you promise me that.”

  She smiled innocently, which filled me with a sense of dread. “I promise, I am not going to hurt him.” And then, grinning as broadly as she had her first day with us, she stopped fidgeting with the things in her bag, marched into the ODEC with her dress flouncing about her, and waited for Schneider.

  Meanwhile Schneider zipped and velcroed himself into the largest of our snowmobile suits. Schneider was hefty and the suit was tight. I noticed something that explained his rolling, asymmetrical style of walking: he had one artificial leg.

  “Give us fifteen minutes, please,” Erszebet called out to Tristan as Schneider squeezed into the ODEC with her. “To impress the general will require some effort.”

  We closed the door, and Tristan walked to the control console to turn on the ODEC.

  There was, of course, no way we could know what was going on inside the ODEC—that was an unavoidable part of the whole Schrödinger’s cat thing. But after eleven minutes we heard the thump on the door that told us Erszebet was finished.

  Tristan went to the console and powered down the ODEC. I slipped on the oven mitts that we used whenever we wanted to touch the dangerously cold door latche
s, and opened the door.

  “And so,” said Erszebet, radiant and fresh-faced, her tone sparkling, “I have shown your master a magic trick.” She walked out into the room, leaving the coast clear for us to see inside. And what we saw—or thought we saw—was the motionless body of General Schneider, crumpled on the floor.

  “General Schneider!” Tristan exclaimed, and stepped in through the door. There wasn’t enough room in there for me to join him, so I contented myself with sticking my head in for a look.

  Schneider wasn’t actually there. Collapsed on the floor, apparently empty, was the snowmobile suit. An empty oxygen mask was still lodged in its hood. “Where is he?” Tristan demanded, horrified.

  “Did you turn him into a newt?” I asked.

  She examined her fingernails. “Oh, no! It takes me all day to pull that off.”

  Tristan picked up the suit and held it upright; one of the legs fell straight down as if weighted with something, and clanked onto the floor of the ODEC.

  “Give it to me,” I suggested, and reached through the doorway. He thrust the shoulders of the suit at me. I grabbed them and pulled the whole thing out through the door and into the room, where I laid it out flat on the floor. Left behind in the ODEC was an articulated contraption consisting of a stump cup, some straps, and a carbon-fiber strut terminating in a man’s dress shoe. Schneider’s artificial leg.

  I unzipped the front of the snowmobile suit with some care. I had an idea as to what had happened. Somewhere inside of this bulky garment was a living, breathing newt. I needed to find it, catch it, and return it safely to the ODEC where Erszebet could reverse the spell. No harm done. Point made.

  Inside the suit was an empty suit of clothes—shirt buttoned, tie knotted, sleeves of the shirt fitted into the sleeves of the jacket. But no person. Tristan had emerged from the ODEC, carrying the artificial leg in one hand and Schneider’s remaining shoe—sock dangling from it—in the other.

  I grabbed the oxygen mask and pulled it carefully away from the snowsuit’s hood. A little gleaming cascade of glinting objects fell out of it, followed by a pair of fake teeth held together by a bridge of pink plastic. That gave me a clue as to the little gleaming things. They were tiny bits of curiously shaped metal.

  They were fillings from Schneider’s teeth.

  Groping carefully through Schneider’s jacket and shirt, Tristan’s hand found something. He unbuttoned the garments and spread them apart. Exposed in the middle, resting neatly on the back of the white shirt, was a small smooth object with a couple of wires coming out of it.

  “That,” Tristan said, “is a pacemaker.”

  I couldn’t even speak properly, so I held out my hand with the fillings and the false teeth for Tristan to look at.

  Tristan was squatting on his haunches. He looked at these exhibits for a while, thoughtfully. Acting on some kind of military-guy autopilot, he rummaged in Schneider’s clothes until he came out with a small pistol, which Schneider had evidently been packing in a holster on the back of his belt. Tristan ejected its magazine and then worked the slide once to eject a round. Having rendered the weapon safe, he set it back down again, then climbed to his feet and turned to face Erszebet.

  “What have you done to him?” Tristan demanded, very calm.

  “Google it,” said Erszebet breezily.

  “Google what?”

  She put her index finger to her chin and looked up at the ceiling. “Mmm, Hungary, Nagybörzsöny, 1564, one-legged man, naked. Perhaps taltos. You might discover something interesting.”

  “Stokes!” said Tristan irritably. I grabbed my laptop, brought up Google, and typed in the words. Nothing useful came up.

  “Well?” demanded Tristan. I shook my head.

  “Try refreshing,” said Erszebet. “Perhaps it takes a moment for it to catch up.”

  “Catch up with what?” Tristan demanded.

  “With me,” she said, and began humming Liszt to herself.

  I opened another window and tried Googling the Hungarian words she’d used. Nagybörzsöny turned out to be the name of a village. Taltos I already knew, it meant something like “warlock.”

  I went back to the first window and clicked the refresh button. Tristan came around to my side of the table and stared over my shoulder. Erszebet preened. I refreshed the page a second time.

  “Nothing,” I said.

  “Try variations,” she suggested, turning away as if in a reverie. “Amputee. Gibberish.”

  “Where is he?” Tristan demanded again.

  I refreshed the page again. One search result came up.

  “There’s a Wikipedia entry,” I said.

  “What the—” Tristan muttered, as I clicked on the link.

  “I made it into Wikipedia,” sang Erszebet. “I’ll bet none of my enemies ever made it into Wikipedia.”

  The page came up, entitled “Nagybörzsöny ‘Warlock’ incident,” containing a short paragraph, with one notification saying the entry was a stub and encouraging us to help them supplement it, and a second saying the article needed additional citations for verification. The paragraph itself read:

  In 1564, in the small village of Nagybörzsöny, a naked one-legged man is recorded as having materialized in the middle of a small lane, babbling in an unknown tongue. The townspeople were weary from a recent outbreak of typhus and on edge from years caught between the warring armies of the Ottoman Empire and Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian II. Once they recovered from their astonishment, the villagers bound the man and dragged him to the town square with the intent of burning him at the stake. This was prevented by the local priest of Szent István, who instead caused him to be taken to the dungeon of the Inquisition. The priest examined and interrogated him for several hours, but was unable to make sense of a word of the man’s foreign gibberish. The local mob, by now in a frenzy, finally broke in, dragged the man out, and burned him to death.

  I leapt to my feet. We stared in horror at the entry.

  “What have you done?” Tristan cried, practically leaping toward her. He grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her. “You killed him!”

  She struggled against him. “Unhand me. I did not kill him, the mob did. It says so right in Wikipedia. I’ll bite you if you don’t let me go.”

  “What did you do?” he demanded, his voice sounding strangled, but then released her.

  She shrugged, adjusting her dress. “I Sent him back to 1564. This is all I did. What happens once I Send him is his responsibility.”

  “Time travel,” I said hesitantly. “You can send people back in time.”

  “People can be moved to other Strands,” she corrected me. “It is usually just a parlor trick, but sometimes it is useful to get somebody’s attention.”

  “How much control do you have over it?” Tristan demanded, thinking fast. “Can you bring him back here before the crowd gets to him?”

  She shook her head. “No, because I am not there with him. If he had asked a witch in Nagybörzsöny, politely, then she could have Sent him back here.”

  “Why didn’t you mention you could do this?” I asked, trying pathetically to reap some useful research out of the situation. In truth, we should have known—it was in a couple of the translated documents, but always dismissed as being of minor significance.

  She shrugged her dismissive shrug. “It is not a practical skill, there are so many . . . variables to contend with that it is of no practical use. It is seldom worth the bother.”

  “You just murdered someone,” Tristan said.

  “I just Sent him away,” she protested. “He was very rude to me.”

  “That’s bullshit. You sent him there knowing he could die. You had control over a situation that resulted in a man’s death, how is that not murder?”

  “There is never control when magic is involved,” she replied philosophically.

  Tristan was nearly hyperventilating. “Moments ago he was in this room and now he’s dead. How is that not at least manslaughter?”
>
  “He was going to shut the ODEC down,” she said. “I had to stop him.”

  “You could have just turned him into a newt or something,” I said.

  “You already know I can do that,” said Erszebet, preening again. “I wanted to show you something new.” To Tristan : “Isn’t that what you asked for? Something unexpected? To, what was your phrase? To ‘brand’ me?”

  “This is a fucking catastrophe,” Tristan shouted, and kicked a chair. It tumbled across the room to the far wall, where the seat busted apart from the legs. “Fuck!”

  “He was so disagreeable,” said Erszebet.

  Tristan put his hands on his face and shuddered. “How the fuck am I ever going to explain this to . . . oh, Jesus Christ, you’ve ruined everything. Your own life. Do you understand that? That’s it, it’s over. You’re done. We’re done here.” He was pacing wildly and kept making the same anxious gesture of throwing his hands to either side as if he’d just walked into a spiderweb and were trying to free himself of the gossamer.

  “I mean it,” he said, after a moment of silence. “Leave. Stokes, get out of here before you get embroiled in all of this. Leave her here.”

  “I am no coward, I would not flee,” said Erszebet haughtily.

  “That’s right. You’re going to prison,” he said flatly.

  “That will be more interesting than the nursing home,” she replied, unfazed.

  “Or I might just shoot you myself,” he said, suddenly weary. He uprighted the chair he’d destroyed, discovered it was broken, sat down on the floor.

  Erszebet, perversely, looked delighted with this declaration. “Now you are speaking like a man of action. I have not seen such a side of you before. I approve of it.”

  “I mean it, Stokes,” he said. His voice was husky. “Just get out of here. I’ve got to tell them what happened.” He put his hands over his face and began to mutter the phrases he would soon be typing into a report. “Diachronic effects confirmed . . . results unpredictable . . . Casualties . . . one KIA.”

  Diachronic. Meaning “through time.”

  Department of Diachronic . . . something?