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

by Neal Stephenson

  Top-level direction on DODO’s mission will be supplied during a meeting within the next few days at the Trapezoid.

  Best wishes to all of you and may God bless America.

  Gen. Octavian Frink

  ABOUT ME

  NAME: Mortimer Shore

  OFFICIAL TITLE: Systems Administrator

  UNOFFICIAL TITLES: What’s-his-name, the Tall Guy with the Beard, the Sword Geek, the IT Guy, Hey, What the F*** Happened to my Email?

  BIO: Hey all, as DODO keeps expanding there seems to be a lot of colorful rumor floating around about how I came to work here and so I thought I would tell the whole story.

  TL;DR: I got recruited out of a park to prevent Tristan from getting his ass kicked in a swordfight and they found out I was a CS major.

  EDIT: This is mostly about computers. If you are visiting this page because you are a DOer and you think you might be about to get into a swordfight, scroll to the end.

  So, as you can probably tell from my appearance and mannerisms, I am California born and bred, my father and his father before him (heh) worked in commercial building construction in SoCal, punching out Home Depots and parking garages and making enough money to put me in a private school when I turned out to be kind of a screw-up academically. Turned out I was just bored and over-medicated LOL so they cut off my Adderall and put me on the robotics team where I made the mistake of telling them I knew how to weld (because of my dad’s company) and so then I was just the welding slave for a long time until they finally let me start writing code. Long story short, I ended up at MIT doing both, which is to say, metal and code. The code part of it is pretty self explanatory: an MIT CS major can pretty much always get a job, a fact that was important to my dad who was paying a lot of money to put me through school.

  As you have probably noticed if you work at DODO, I hang out near the server room. During my first six months at DODO I spent most of my time setting up ODIN, the Operational DODO Intranet. If that sounds like a long time, let me just say that getting a full-featured wiki to run under Shiny Hat is no picnic! I still put out IT fires and help people with their email, etc. when not working with Dr. Oda on the Chronotron. We’re recruiting more IT staff to keep our systems stable and secure, so pretty soon I’ll hopefully be a full-time Chronotron geek.

  A word about metal. The substance, not the genre of music (though I like both!):

  This is the part of my story that seems to cause the maximum amount of confusion and rumor among new hires at DODO and so this is the part you’ll want to read if you are having trouble understanding why a newly minted MIT CS major is helping people with their email for a small gov’t agency instead of making a zillion dollars in a start-up LOL.

  My dad was a civil engineering major with a minor in metallurgy and so this runs in the family—a lot of commercial buildings are made out of steel, and in California where earthquakes are a problem there are a lot of rules around what kinds of steel to use, how to weld it properly, etc. I picked a lot of this up through osmosis when I was a kid, and when I was doing robotics in high school, and the smart kids wouldn’t let me write code, I ended up doing a lot of industrial art: robots with flame throwers, rotating blades, etc. So, I ended up doing a double major in Comp Sci and metallurgy.

  At this point I could say a lot about steel. A LOT. But I’m not going to. If you want to talk about steel FOR A LONG TIME, come by my desk with some beers LOL. Point is, I am a steel geek.

  When you are a steel geek you inevitably end up talking about swords. Sort of like when you are a climber you end up talking about Mt. Everest.

  I got interested in swords when I put some crappy homemade blades on one of my robots and they kept breaking/bending and I couldn’t understand why.

  My interest in swords led to an interest in swordfighting. Not modern fencing, which is cool and everything but totally different. I mean historical swordfighting with actual things that look like swords.

  As a freshman I joined a LARPing group that did foam fighting on the Esplanade, but that was just a gateway drug to a real HEMA (Historical European Martial Arts) group that fought with real steel blades (blunt obviously) using documented historical techniques.

  During one of our practices I was approached by Rebecca (East-Oda) who asked me a lot of questions. Not the usual dumb questions like “is that a real sword?” but like super nitty-gritty questions that clued me in something weird was going on. She took me back to her and Frank’s house and NDAed me, and like ten minutes later I was with Tristan teaching him the Four Grounds and the Four Governors of George Silver, the Elizabethan backsword master who hated Italian rapier fighters with an unquenchable fiery hate LOL.

  Later I found out I had passed a background check, and after I had peed in a jar and all the other stuff I was sworn in and have been working for DODO ever since—I guess seven or eight months now. I am responsible for having set up most of DODO’s basic IT infrastructure such as the intranet, the wiki, etc. but don’t hate on me because it was all supposed to be temporary LOL.

  Dr. Frank Oda was also kind enough to take me under his wing and get me in on the ground floor of the Chronotron project. DISCLAIMER RE THAT: I am not a physicist and so all of the quantum mechanics underlying the chipset of the QUIPUs (the Quantum Information Processing Units) is totally incomprehensible to me. All I know about it is that it runs really, really fast and solves problems that would take forever using traditional non-quantum computation.

  Fortunately for dumbass computer scientists like me, at one end of each QUIPU unit there’s a connector where you can jack in a plain old Ethernet cable, and from that point onwards it just looks like a traditional computer, albeit a really fast and weird one, to the outside world. All of the cables from all of the QUIPUs (as of this writing, 128 of them—soon to be 256) feed into the Chronotron itself which, never mind what people say about it, is JUST A BIG OLD COMPUTING CLUSTER that happens to be tied in to a lot of historical databases, etc. Which is more my speed.

  In layperson’s terms: if it has to be dunked in liquid helium to work, I don’t understand it. If it’s in a rack with fans blowing on it, that’s a different story.

  —IF YOU ARE ABOUT TO BE IN A SWORDFIGHT—

  This comes up a lot and I am working on upgrading the relevant wiki pages, but people seem to end up here anyway LOL.

  My basic advice: DON’T DO IT! It is ridiculously, fantastically dangerous. Modern people are calibrated for a whole different level of danger acceptance.

  Admittedly, an unfortunate precedent was set by Tristan’s getting into a rapier-vs.-backsword duel in DTAP 1601 LONDON. This is fully documented in the relevant after-action reports, which, as our roster of DOers has expanded to include others in the “Fighter” class, have achieved somewhat legendary status within DODO. But this IN NO WAY suggests that swordfighting works as a standard operating procedure.

  If you’re in the process of getting “trained up” to carry out a specific DEDE (Direct Engagement for Diachronic Effect), you’ll know that each DTAP has a highly localized weapons environment. What is true in one DTAP might not be the case in another that is fifty years or fifty miles away from it.

  So, you have to start by knowing exactly what weapon type(s) can be carried by an individual of your assumed social class in your DTAP without freaking people out.

  Since you’re going back naked, you’ll have to score weapons after arriving. If you’re fortunate enough to be visiting a well-established node in DODO’s witch network, there may be some weapons waiting for you there. In my copious spare time LOL I plan to visit those DTAPs to inspect the available weapons with the modern eye of a trained metallurgist and to check them for fatal flaws. But, never mind what you’ve seen on the History Channel, these people really didn’t know dick about steel and so most of it is crap, and likely to break at the worst possible time.

  If you are “breaking trail” in a new DTAP, then once you have evaded pursuit and stolen some clothes, you’ll have to acquire y
our weapons in whatever way you can (“proceeding adaptively” LOL). This means evaluating them through visual inspection and, if possible, by subjecting them to certain simple tests which I can explain to you—eventually I’ll document these on the wiki.

  Assuming you have a good sword, you’ll have to know how to fight with it. Which starts by defending yourself from the other guy. Which means you have to know how he fights. Which means learning the martial arts techniques prevailing in your DTAP. One day, I hope we’ll have a vast library of every known historical swordfighting system, but as with so many other things at DODO we are just getting started—just scratching the surface. Here’s what we are currently sort of good at:

  - Late medieval backsword (a personal fave)

  - Italian rapier

  - Medieval longsword

  Come and talk to me if you really think you need training/instruction in these. In the meantime, it helps if you’re in some kind of decent physical condition and you know where your body is in space—we’ve had good luck with wrestlers, circus acrobats, gymnasts, and dancers. People who spend all day looking at pixels, not so good.

  Stay tuned on ODIN for more relevant pages as I have time to write ’em!

  Peace out

  Mortimer

  DODO WHITE PAPER

  BRIEF NOTES ON “WENDING”

  (formerly, “super-witches”)

  BY REBECCA EAST-ODA

  Submitted to ODIN archive, Day 580

  (Note to readers: Please consider this a temporary placeholder in lieu of a more thoroughly researched document to follow. I am feeling an urgency to head off the increasing use of the term “super-witch” and replace it with a more reasoned approach. —REO)

  KCWs Fitch (colonial Boston) and Gráinne (Elizabethan London), while employing similar techniques in most respects, exhibited a marked difference in their understanding and utilization of Strands.

  As best as we can make out, Goody Fitch had a general knowledge that multiple Strands existed, sufficient for her to conduct practical magical operations.

  Gráinne, by contrast, appears to have had an additional ability that Goody Fitch didn’t (and perhaps couldn’t even have imagined). Namely, she had the ability to shift her stream of consciousness from one Strand to another, effectively inhabiting different versions of her body on different Strands. Gráinne jumped “sideways” from one to another as it suited her purposes. In this manner she was able to encounter and re-encounter Tristan on different Strands and thereby to collaborate more mindfully and effectively with him as he repeated the same DEDE.

  “Wending” is a term used by Gráinne to describe this behavior.

  Erszebet seems to be somewhere in between Fitch and Gráinne. She understands the concept of Wending and can speak about it, but seems to consider it a little beyond the pale of normal magical practice. Further conversations will be needed to better understand her misgivings on the topic. I can think of two possible explanations: (1) it is somehow dangerous or disagreeable, so Erszebet doesn’t want to do it, or (2) Erszebet simply lacks the required degree of magical power and skill; understandable given she came of age as magic was waning.

  The second hypothesis has led some within DODO to posit the idea that Gráinne is a “super-witch” with a degree of magical power that places her head and shoulders above other witches.

  The “super-witch” concept is now beginning to influence DODO’s planning process, as some members of the staff have begun looking for others of this type. It is supposed, for example, that Winnifred Dutton (1562 Antwerp) may be another “super-witch.”

  The purpose of this document is to discourage further use of the “super-witch” idea for which we really have no firm evidence yet, and instead request that DODO staff use the terminology “Wending” to describe the specific behavior we want. The ability to Wend will undoubtedly make a Known Compliant Witch (KCW) a more effective collaborator, and so let us seek out KCWs who know how to do it, rather than making the “super-witch” distinction which is not supported by evidence and which is pejorative to Erszebet Karpathy—the one witch we actually have to work with in the present day.

  Diachronicle

  DAY 584 (EARLY MARCH, YEAR 2)

  In which everything expands

  AS DODO EXPANDED, THE ORGANIZATIONAL hierarchy, and its attendant bureaucracy, evolved accordingly. It was both electric and irritating to witness a corporation blooming around us, leaving us sometimes marooned in the middle of it. I was grateful for Mortimer, the IT geek specialist, who brought a touch of whimsy to the chunks of that bureaucracy he managed. Even more grateful than I was Rebecca, whom DODO decided to hire given that she was frequently underfoot anyhow, not only asking lots of intelligent questions but frequently answering them. She was also very good with Erszebet, and that could be said about nobody else except myself, who was increasingly beleaguered with procedural developments. Once Mortimer got the intranet (ODIN) up and running it began to take up too much fucking bandwidth a lot of my time.

  It also altered how we did things. Within a matter of months Tristan and I went from being almost Siamese twins to actually seeing each other in person only at the (snazzy new) snack bar or the occasional lunch out; most of our engagement was via ODIN channels. This had an odd effect on our friendship: after the electricity of first meeting, there had been a frisson between us that we never acknowledged (although it was strong enough for others to comment upon)—but we certainly enjoyed it. (Or at least, I confess to enjoying it, and to perceiving within him clues that he did as well.) Then, spending so much time together, we grew accustomed to our closeness, so that we went from not-quite-first-date to old-married-couple almost seamlessly.

  Until ODIN came along.

  Once Tristan became just an icon on the nearest screen, I often forgot that he was a living, breathing, winsome Male, and so when we would encounter each other—in the copy room, grabbing a handful of grapes, waiting for a meeting with Blevins . . . that initial electricity, that exquisitely repressed well-hello-there energy, erupted all over again, and never quite settled because we were never in each other’s presence continuously for quite long enough.

  THE ONE EXCEPTION was in early March of the second year. Tristan and I flew to DC for a meeting with General Frink and Dr. Rudge at the Trapezoid. I will only detail the mental take-away, but the emotional and visceral takeaway was that I got to spend two entire plane rides alone in a private plane with a hot bad-ass dude handsome gentleman, who crossed his legs carefully when I looked at him too long and who could make me grin inwardly (only inwardly, I assure you) merely by uttering my surname in a particular tone. Now that I know there will never be such plane rides again, I wish to state that despite the violation of DODO’s baroque sexual harassment policy, it really is a fucking shame regrettable that we did not make better use of that privacy.

  But I digress. Back to the mental takeaway:

  Based on Oda-sensei’s most recent estimates, the goal became to have a fully functioning Chronotron by the end of the year, at which point we would be able to undertake formally planned DEDEs—DODO’s chartered purpose. Meanwhile, we would postpone any outcome-oriented missions. No more moneymaking gambits, etc. After the Chronotron was online, we would be able to run such missions far more safely and efficiently.

  In the meantime, those of us on the payroll would not be idle. Do not think it, reader! As well as the office-speak mumbo-jumbo to become familiar with, there were still certain diachronic jaunts it was deemed safe to undergo, those being:

  First and above all, to seek out and convert witches and other abettors, thus creating a network of Known Compliant Witches (KCWs) and safe houses.

  Second, to fill in the data gaps the Chronotron noted as it was uploading digitized information from primary and secondary historical material—in other words, factoid-finding missions (what did a particular intersection in Rome look like in 44 BC; how large were daikon in pre-modern Japan; where did George Washington sleep the night of 1
1 January, 1779, etc.). Not only was this useful for the Chronotron data workers, but it would also help us to break in new recruits with low-stakes missions.

  Third (in a similar vein), to make reconnaissance missions to DTAPs we knew would be important for future work. Chief amongst these was Constantinople circa 1203 (more on that in a moment) and Renaissance London, both of which would be major hubs within the KCW network.

  Fourth, we were free to rove for the purposes of counterintelligence: to keep an eye on potential diachronic activities of our strategic rivals. Not that the identity of those rivals had been shared with us.

  As to Constantinople. That jewel in the crown of the Byzantine Empire. That continent-straddling stronghold of the Eastern Orthodox Church. That famously inviolable walled city ruled by generations of interbred usurping nut-jobs a pantheon of families so tortuously intertwined as to be the basis of our modern adjective byzantine. This was a fantastically complex city with a wide range of languages and cultures, so it was required to build up a large database including not just linguistics but maps, etiquette, cultural practices, weapons, and other things that our DOers would need to know in order to function in that time and place—the time being circa 1203, the Fourth Crusade (not, for the history buffs among you, the siege a few days later, or the occupation, or the final shitstorm destruction of the city, but Galata Tower). A lot of that research fell into my lap, in my role as head of the amusingly named Diachronic Operative Resource Center.

  The DNI (that would be Frink) wished to stabilize certain national and ethnic frontiers in Eastern Europe, the Balkans, and Turkey that had begun to show considerable GLAAMR—an indication that Someone Else might be conducting diachronic operations in an effort to shift them. Between Erszebet’s iPad Quipu (her IQ, as it were) and Frank Oda tapping into the elemental quipus of the Chronotron, we were able to calculate backwards that our best counter-action was to move a particular Orthodox relic from one tent to another in the Byzantine Emperor’s army camp when his army fled from the Crusaders after the siege of Galata Tower.