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

by Neal Stephenson

  RBA: No wonder she’s so grumpy. That must be very, very dull after a while.

  MS: It’s her work.

  RBA: I have never heard of a single witch in the history of the world who just had to do the exact same thing over and over and over again. That sounds terrible. The Lord would never subject anyone to such treatment. Even when we were slaves in Egypt we had more variety to our tasks than that.

  MS: Are you saying you do not wish to have the work?

  RBA: I want to have something else to do as well. I am an excellent witch but I am also skilled at many other things. I can bake bread, and I am a superb seamstress. Perhaps I can spend some time Sending people and some time baking challah.

  MS: I will talk to Dr. Blevins about your suggestion. I like it. Perhaps it would help Erszebet if she also had a pastime.

  RBA: No, not a pastime, something real, something useful. I have met many people in this fortress now but not a single baker.

  MS: We don’t have enough observant Jews on staff to require that we keep challah on hand.

  RBA: Forget challah, then, I wish to learn how to make those delicious sweet round things that Tristan has brought into the fortress, with the brightly colored bits on them. If I could spend some time baking those, then I would not mind if my magic work consists only of Sending.

  MS: I’ll talk to Dr. Blevins.

  Post by Dr. Roger Blevins

  on “Announcements” ODIN channel

  DAY 915 (LATE JANUARY, YEAR 3)

  Effective immediately, Dr. Frank Oda has been promoted to Scientist Emeritus. In this new role, Dr. Oda will be unburdened from the day-to-day responsibilities of running DODO’s R&D department, and will enjoy the freedom to pursue advanced research projects that have been back-burnered until now during his months of hard work on the Chronotron. Please congratulate him if you should encounter him around the facility.

  Macy Stoll has already tasked HR with recruiting or promoting a replacement for Dr. Oda as head of the R&D department. In the interim, Dr. Oda will remain in place as acting head and assign department staff to various tasks as appropriate.

  Journal Entry of

  Rebecca East-Oda

  JANUARY 30

  Temperature 29F, damp, slight NE breeze. Barometer steady.

  More firewood delivered and stacked (using area of garden that was dug up for Bay Psalm Book—eighteen months later soil has still not recovered). Expecting snowdrops soon.

  Yesterday afternoon Tristan, Melisande, and Erszebet drove to the house with the new witch, Rachel, who will be lodging with us until appropriate quarters can be determined for her. A tiny, wide-eyed thing, looking like a rag doll in a dress that Erszebet picked out for her during a raid on Newbury Street. Predictably, there was disagreement about logistics. Tristan wanted Erszebet to return to the office to continue to Send people—they have quite the schedule there now, and are working her almost to exhaustion. He argued that Melisande is the only one who speaks medieval Hebrew and therefore Mel should stay with Rachel.

  “We will both stay with her,” said Erszebet. “I was ‘on hold’ (with air quotes) for more than a century, you can be ‘on hold’ for overnight.”

  “Erszebet, you can’t even talk to her, what’s the good of your staying?”

  “I will talk to her through Melisande,” Erszebet said in her so-there tone. “Do you know how long it has been since I have had another witch to talk to?” Erszebet made a mock-surprise face. “Why, of course you do. You know exactly how long it has been. So you will give me this. If you refuse, I will understandably go on strike, which I would have done months ago if I were not so exceptionally generous and patient. I am giving you an opportunity not to force me to go on strike.” (Have been coaching her on her communication skills. Clearly mixed results.)

  Tristan nodded. “Fine,” he said. “You’ll return at 1300 hours tomorrow.”

  She rolled her eyes. “This is not an army barracks. I will return at one o’clock in the afternoon.”

  “Major Sloane has vectored a couple of DOSECOPS to the house, to keep an eye on things,” said Tristan, to me now. “They’re on their way here.”

  “Absolutely not,” I said. “She’s not a criminal or a fugitive.”

  “It’s about security,” said Tristan.

  “Felix,” Mel suggested quickly. “Rachel knows Felix from her native DTAP. He’s between DEDEs. He’s not technically a guard, but he’s qualified—in fact he’s overqualified. Surely you can arm him and have him bunk in the dining room.” A glance at me. “Would that be all right?”

  “Only because Rachel knows him,” I said. “Being a den-mother to wayward witches is not in my job description, and I will not play along if it requires armed men in my living room.”

  Tristan’s jaw worked silently for a few moments. I knew what he was thinking: It’s not your living room anymore—it belongs to the East House Trust. But he had the good grace not to say this out loud. He called off the two guards, placed a call to Felix, and left.

  I confess I was surprised and touched by Erszebet’s cosseting young Rachel. Speaking to her through Melisande, she insisted Rachel spend the time giving vent to how very different and disorienting it is here. Melisande translating, most of the English-to-Hebrew being some form of “I know, isn’t it awful? I don’t know what’s worse, to have it happen all at once as with you, or to have it happen with gradual inevitability as with me.”

  Diachronicle

  DAY 1800 (SUMMER, YEAR 5)

  In which the zenith becomes our new normal

  I HAVE BUT EIGHTEEN DAYS left before the solar eclipse and there is far too much to cover in what time is left to me. I am more desperate than ever not to be stuck here for fucking ever. Therefore I shall resort to a compendious depiction of the next phase of DODO’s existence.

  Two and a half years passed. Every day I rose and went to work. Many times I was Sent back to various DTAPs to perform missions. A lot happened, in other words. And yet those two and a half years flew by so quickly that when it was over it felt as if some witch had Sent me into the future.

  The value of the Chronotron exceeded all expectations. With it at our disposal, we were close to gods in our omniscience. Over the course of those dazzling years, DODO expanded beyond anything even Tristan could have imagined that afternoon when he took me to coffee. We expanded both in our own DTAP and also throughout history. In the twenty-first century, we built training and research centers all over the globe, with ODEC-equipped facilities in Europe, the Middle East, and Japan. To guarantee the most authentic training, we lured experts in certain fields of importance to us forward through time. Our Fighters scrimmaged in top-secret dojos with Roman legionaries, Viking berserkers, and samurai. Their training gear was wrought by armorers of ages past, brought forward to toil in air-conditioned smithies. Per Tristan’s early joke to me years earlier, I did indeed have a chance, once, to practice my conversational Sumerian—with an actual Sumerian.

  We could not bring people forward from the past willy-nilly, of course. Strict principles around Anachrons were codified, with each one being personally approved by Blevins. Generally it was safer for a DOer to train in a DTAP and bring that knowledge back to us, than it was to bring somebody forward, which would then oblige us to spend time, energy, and medical and psychological resources on keeping them from losing their shit having a difficult time adjusting to modernity, however carefully we tried to shield them. Our epidemiology unit ran around the clock checking samples and improving our vaccination protocols.

  Most of the early Anachrons were witches. Erszebet, to our surprise, did not fly the coop once she had been made redundant. She rather adopted the air of Cleopatra, and made it clear—to them and to us—that she was now the Alpha Witch. None of the other witches could ever possibly know as much as she did, about the twenty-first century or about DODO’s real missions; likewise, none of us could possibly know how to behave appropriately with the new witches. She maintained all of her charis
matic narcissistic bitchiness prepossessing fierceness, but she became, in effect, the Den Mother of Weird Sisters. Frank and Rebecca’s home couldn’t hold them all, so DODO purchased a big old house elsewhere in Cambridge, rigged it up with all kinds of security hardware, and turned it into a kind of sorority for Erszebet and her brood. Vans with blacked-out windows shuttled back and forth between it and DODO headquarters, ferrying witches. They had come from all times and places, but they mostly followed Erszebet’s lead when it came to fashion choices.

  There was also a very small cohort of contemporary witches. Erszebet could smell them, and found it perfectly ordinary to approach strangers on Mass Ave and inform them of their latent abilities, to the despair of everyone who cared about security clearance. Those rare few who responded positively were immediately told it was a joke by me (or Rebecca, or whoever was Erszebet-minding that day); meanwhile the attendant DOSECOP (our version of the Secret Service) would capture an image of the woman’s face, and send it electronically for identification and background check. If the DOSECOP got a green light, they would signal the Erszebet-minder, who would backpedal on the “just a joke” line and surreptitiously invite the newfound witch to an interview near (not at, not at first) HQ. There were only three contemp witches at first (there are now about eight). One of these was Julie Lee, aka the Smart-ass Oboist with the tattooed eyebrows from the Apostolic Café. Apparently Erszebet had known her for a witch from day one but did not bother to mention it until the mood possessed her. Another was Tanya Wakessa Washington, a legal clerk in City Hall who was a regular at the café.

  The third was Rebecca East-Oda.

  She was a grudging convert. I think she agreed to be recruited more for the sake of supporting an endeavor Frank loved than out of any eagerness of her own. That said, she was quite chuffed with herself the first time she turned an apple into an orange. And, with her Congregationalist studiousness, she was apt. Erszebet worked with them every day in one of the ODECs, displaying a patience and good humor she revealed nowhere else, teaching them basic magical spells, but it was slow going. Raised in a civilization from which magic had been eradicated for a century and a half, they all suffered a kind of atrophy of the faculties needed to perform it. Erszebet had told me in private that even Julie—the best of them—was probably years away from being able to Send a DOer with any degree of spatiotemporal accuracy.

  Our budget seemed limitless at that time, in no small part because there were multiple variations of the Bay Psalm Book gambit—famous works of art, rare artifacts and antiques, treasure troves of all sorts . . . we made them ours and sold them all for cash. Tristan and I had ethical qualms about this, but Blevins was in charge. The Fugger Bank became our frenemy was neither friend nor foe to us; at some times they checked our strategems, at other times abetted us, according to some larger plan of their own that eluded our understanding. It became increasingly obvious that Dr. Cornelius Rudge, who’d been in on the project from the beginning, had deep connections to the Fuggers, and was basically serving as their man on the inside.

  But acquiring treasure was no longer DODO’s primary goal. Oh no, reader, do not think it.

  Frink and Blevins had an uber-mission (I wonder, shall it seem antiquated or inconceivable, if these words are ever brought to light?). I can only guess at what this might have been, and at when they conceived it: at the very beginning of the project, or at some point during the years when DODO was growing to the zenith of its power? Only in the last few weeks have I gained an inkling of their true motives. I shall say what I know of these as quickly as I can, because my hand is cramping up like a motherfucker most pitiably; but en route I must explain what happened in the Constantinople Theater.

  Yes, DODO had several distinct theatres of operations, of which Constantinople, circa 1200, was the first, the biggest, and the one that most concerned Tristan and myself.

  The official rationale for what we were doing there was as follows:

  At the time of our great thriving, there were amongst the powers of the globe multiple entities that caused our government concern. These included China, Russia, and certain nefarious elements in the Middle East.

  DODO was tasked with discouraging China and Russia from becoming geopolitical BFFs close allies. We were to do this by subtly, retroactively shifting the historical soul of Russia away from the Eastern Orthodox Church and toward the Roman Catholic one, starting just after the Fourth Crusade.

  The Fourth Crusade was

  an epic clusterfuck

  a comic-opera misadventure

  a tragic saga with farcical elements. It never even reached its intended target in the Holy Land. Instead the Crusaders—Catholics from Western Europe—invaded the Byzantine Empire, which was a Christian land, and sacked Constantinople.

  Its domino effect throughout history is a remarkable lesson in cause and effect that I will return to at another time, if writer’s cramp and leisure time allow it. What matters here is to note the consequences. With the help of the Chronotron and of various Spies and Sages we Sent back to serve as its eyes and ears, we planned out a long interrelated series of DEDEs. Any one of these would seem innocuous unto itself—stealing a pitchfork in some small town in the Urals, digging a trench in the city of Zara, moving a sleeping dog from a hut in a back alley in Budapest to another hut fifty feet away. Collectively, these slight alterations pushed our agenda, shifted the quantum tendencies of reality to allow us to form what we ultimately desired: that Catholicism would spread its wings over more of Christendom, and the Orthodox Church over less of it.

  Catholicism unchecked would mean disaster for both the colonizing of North America and the development of science, and so every bit of strengthening that happened on the church’s eastern flank had to be offset on its northwestern one, to maintain within Europe the tensions and conflicts that would lead to a successful Protestant Reformation. That too is a story for another day, but it is important to note here that it involved the collusion of influential bankers, in particular the Fuggers. Gráinne had indirect connections to that family owing to her post-Shear circumstances, and in sundry ways, she greatly assisted us in bringing her generation of Fuggers into the fold, in such manner that subsequent generations were raised to be our natural allies. As I have recently and painfully learned, she had her own reasons for becoming cozy with the Fuggers, but now I am getting ahead of myself.

  Back to the uber-mission—or, to be precise, what Frink and Blevins claimed was the uber-mission.

  Because the 1204 fall of Constantinople is what brought Catholicism so far east, most of our DEDEs set off little chain reactions, quiet little tributaries that met up in the central artery of the Fourth Crusade.

  This meant several things: first, that young Rachel was invaluable to us, not only as a witch, but as a source of information far exceeding all our documented knowledge. Furthermore, we could rely on her to Send a DOer to that DTAP with uncanny specificity. It also meant that most of our Fighters had to be trained to have at least a basic grasp of Greek (spoken by the native Orthodox Christians of Constantinople), Latin (spoken by the crusading Catholics who were besieging them), and Anglo-Saxon (the most common tongue of the Varangian Guards). They also learned to fight in both the eastern style employed by the conscripted army and the northern style of the Varangians, as well as the various continental styles employed by the wide variety of soldiers from Flanders down to Sicily. There were few actual battles over the two-year course of the Fourth Crusade, but every one of them had been quite the mishmash of styles. I speak from listening to Tristan, who was one of our frontline Fourth Crusade DOers.

  While we were growing and thriving in the twenty-first century, the witch network was being built out with astonishing rapidity in many DTAPs. Gráinne, who had taken up with an acquaintance of Francis Bacon (and of the Fuggers, per above), was worth her weight in diamonds, as (rather like Constantinople) late Elizabethan London is, within the time-space continuum of recorded human history, akin to Grand C
entral Station, especially given that we needed to have KCWs of both Catholic and Protestant backgrounds. Within eighteen months, every DTAP we’d targeted had a Known Compliant Witch who knew Gráinne, or a witch who knew a witch who knew a witch who knew Gráinne. We could safely move DOers from DTAP to DTAP in ways unthinkable before the Chronotron came online. Gráinne—whom I had never met—seemed to enjoy her position of prominence. Unlike most of the other witches working with DODO (whom, it must be said, we spent a not inconsiderable amount of time placating), she asked nothing of us. She was generous and earnest. Our one great blindness, our tragic flaw, is that we never questioned that.

  But again, I am getting far ahead of myself.

  INCIDENT REPORT

  AUTHOR: LTC Tristan Lyons

  SUBJECT: Chira Lajani

  THEATER: Constantinople

  DTAP: Blachernae Palace, 1203

  FILED: Day 1787 (June, Year 5)

  Sexual assault and repercussions (weregild)

  Chira Lajani was on assignment in 1203 Constantinople. Her DEDE put her in the royal wing of Blachernae Palace after sunset. This wing is guarded mostly by the mercenary Varangian Guards of which I (LTC Tristan Lyons) was one, being there for a separate DEDE. Under normal circumstances our paths would not cross.

  Chira reports that having accomplished her DEDE she was returning to Basina’s quarters so that Basina would Home her, when she was accosted by a Varangian Guard speaking Greek to her with an accent she has come to recognize as Norman/French. He propositioned her as she was descending a flight of steps leading down from a raised terrace toward the bathhouse entrance in a courtyard below. She turned him down. She is used to being propositioned, especially by the Guard, who consider themselves outside the normal social constraints of the local culture. However, she is also used to being respected when she says no. This VG did not accept her no. He grabbed her as she reached a landing in the stairway and pinned her against a stone balustrade. She resisted. He ripped her robe off of her shoulder so that it fell to the sash at her waist. Although he was stronger than she was and did not require a weapon to overpower her, he reached down with his right hand and drew a seax (long knife) from a sheath on his belt, presumably considering this the easiest way to terrorize her into silence.