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

by Neal Stephenson

  “Then you shall stay here and keep me company until you die. By then I will have found somebody else. I will be a freak of nature if I try to remain in one community for very long. They will grow suspicious. I will need companions. You must be my first companion.”

  “Erszebet,” I said, “I cannot do that. I must get home. I must warn my friends against some terrible things that are happening. If I do not warn them, even your sacrifice may ultimately be for nothing.”

  She looked very weary then, and rubbed her face with her hand. “This is far too much for me to think about all at once,” she said. “I need some time.”

  “There is no time,” I said with urgency. I glanced around and, with a sinking heart, saw her parents approaching us, her father with a scolding look on his face. “Please think about it,” I said, “and meet me again as soon as possible. Tomorrow?”

  “Tomorrow we go home to Budapest,” she said, looking down. “I cannot help you. And I will not extend my life to help you in the future, it is far too painful a calling.”

  “Please,” I said, “please, Erszebet, reconsider. If you do not do this, I am mired here forever.”

  “I would not be your jailor, but I cannot be your savior,” she said, almost apologetically. Then she rose, with a forced smile on her face, as her parents reached us.

  Her mother gave me a look that might shatter concrete, and then in a low voice began to interrogate Erszebet right in front of me in Hungarian. My Hungarian was weak but the sentences were fairly rudimentary: “Who Sent her? Where is she from? What does she know about magic dying? What can we do?”

  Perhaps Erszebet was not the witch I should have spoken to?

  “Tell your mother!” I said urgently to Erszebet, as her parents began to move her away from me. “Tell her everything!” And to the mother, in bumbling Magyar: “Erszebet can help the magic. I told her how. But I can do nothing. She must do it.”

  Her parents looked astonished. After a stunned moment, they both glanced at me and then back to her, and she seemed to wither under their gaze. To see Erszebet Karpathy cowed was even more disorienting than to see her joyful.

  Her father took her arm and very forcefully began to lead her through the crowd. I was certain—I am certain—never to see her again.

  In a daze, I wandered over to the reconstructed Medieval Court, which I alone of all those tens of thousands knew from personal experience to be a hack job abounding in solecisms. The good doctor and his wife collected me and brought me home, expressing great concern that I seemed so exhausted by the outing, and declaring that for the next week or two I must have bedrest or the equivalent. They do not perceive themselves as keeping me a prisoner. Indeed, they believe themselves to be nothing but my benefactors. They were very willing to bring me all the paper and ink I could ask for, although they had no idea I would ask for as much as all this.

  For when I returned from the meeting with Erszebet, I realized I must make an accounting of everything, as there shall never otherwise be any record of it. Tristan, I suspect, must also be lost now too, and he is not the sort who would stop to record a narrative like this. So this is all that will ever remain of us.

  I shall now take this sheaf of papers to the Fugger Bank on Threadneedle Street and deposit it in a safety deposit box. I have lost all hope of returning to my own time.

  And so, dear reader, with these words, as the ink dries, I disappear.

  Journal Entry of

  Rebecca East-Oda

  DECEMBER 6

  Nothing good to report. Yesterday—or was it the day before?—realized, while eating Chinese take-out, that a week had passed since the events in the Walmart. Frank, Tristan, Mortimer, and the others have scarcely ventured out of the house during that time, except to run to the hardware store for parts, or farther afield to collect obscure ODEC components from various scientific and industrial supply houses. These are being assembled into a contraption that has taken over half of the cellar. For a while it seemed that this was coming together quickly, and morale was high as the big components were being hammered and welded together with impressive speed. Meanwhile Julie (on her motorcycle) and Felix (in his SUV) kept making runs to the Amazon Locker over by MIT to collect packages of various sizes containing electronics that Mortimer has been incorporating into the “server rack” taking over my pantry. A bundle of cables as thick as my waist now snakes from there down the dumbwaiter shaft into the cellar where it is connected to various devices built into the walls of the ODEC.

  So the physical changes are impressive. This had gulled me into thinking that actual progress was being made toward getting Mel back home. But last night, just before he turned in, Frank broke the news to me that the entire project is futile unless he can get his hands on a larger quantity of high-temperature superconductors. He already had some samples on hand, which have been incorporated into the device, but he needs ten times as much of the stuff in order to make an ODEC large enough to accommodate a person.

  All of the work that the crew have been doing since Black Friday has been in the hope that these materials could be obtained. Only two companies in the world manufacture them. One is in China and has been slow to deal with. Julie, who is fluent in Mandarin, has spent many hours on the phone with them trying to cajole them into overnight-shipping some samples, but they see us as too small a customer to be worth bothering with. The other possible source is right here in the Boston area—they are on Route 128 in Waltham, so only a few miles away—and Frank had high hopes that they would supply what he needs until yesterday, when his order ran afoul of some kind of internal roadblock within the company. I suspect some kind of meddling by Blevins.

  Post by Mortimer Shore on

  “New ODEC” GRIMNIR channel

  DAY 1957 (7 DECEMBER, YEAR 5)

  Hey all, I could just walk upstairs and deliver this news in person but I’m too tired to stand up and I know people are sleeping.

  Breaking news: if you check out a couple of these links from this morning’s Wall Street Journal and some other biz sites you will see that we have just been Pearl Harbored as far as getting what we need to finish the new ODEC. TC Materials Science Group—our erstwhile friends out in Waltham—have just been purchased lock, stock, and barrel by a hedge fund operating out of lower Manhattan. This explains why they suddenly clammed up a couple of days ago and stopped processing our order.

  So as you might expect I have been learning whatever I can about said hedge fund.

  We have all been assuming that Blevins had something to do with our recent difficulties in getting these supercons. That might be the case with the company in Shenzhen, which is a big DODO supplier, but what’s happening today seems unrelated. There is another player, apparently.

  This hedge fund has also recently taken big positions in a number of mining companies operating in Mongolia, Congo, and Bolivia, which are the only places to get the rare earths and other unusual minerals needed to manufacture the high-temp superconductors we need.

  So it would appear that someone with a lot of money is making a concerted effort to corner the world market on exactly the stuff we need in order to conduct diachronic operations, or for that matter magic of any kind.

  I have a few feelers out to friends of mine in the “gray hat” world who I was not allowed to have contact with when I was a U.S. government employee. They might be able to dig up more.

  Follow-up from Mortimer Shore, four hours later:

  I have heard back from a friend of mine who got scared straight a couple of years ago and ended up working as a programmer for a Wall Street quant fund. He knows his way around the financial systems.

  It’s a big data dump, but the bottom line seems to be that our adversary in this case is not Blevins or DODO.

  It’s the Fugger Bank.

  Reply from Tristan Lyons:

  Makes me wonder about the disappearance of the ATTO from the Walmart. We assumed that was Magnus’s work . . . but who knows?

  ENTRY FRO
M PERSONAL JOURNAL OF

  Karpathy Erszebet

  written in Magyar in a leather-bound diary on linen paper

  London, 13 July 1851

  Dear Diary,

  Today I was at the Great Exhibition in London, with my parents, when I was approached by a woman who, while not a witch, knew much about magic and why it has been waning. She warned me that magic will soon die and requested me to participate in its resuscitation. This required two things of me: first, that I cast a spell upon myself to extend my life out by more than a century, and second, that I Home her back to the future time from where she comes. Overwhelmed by the enormity of her request, I refused.

  However, Mother, seeing the distress on my face, demanded to know what it was we spoke of, and when I told her, she said that of course we must prevent this Mr. Berkowski from taking his accursed photograph and ending magic (this is the event that completely destroys magic). As soon as we were back in our room at the inn, she began to scry in an attempt to find a sister-witch in the area of Koenigsbourg, Prussia, who might be able to deter Mr. Berkowski.

  Father pointed out with some impatience that this would merely delay, by some small time, the actual snuffing-out of magic, and that if Miss Stokes was so determined, that surely I should follow her resolve and put a spell on myself to lengthen my life. I said I could not bear to do this. When Mother agreed with Father, I told her, “You are free to use such a spell on yourself if you like, then.”

  “I am already too old for such a spell to work well,” she said. “I had you too late in life and I am already an old woman and my health wanes with my power. It has to be you.”

  I dared her then to set the spell on me. She said it would be bad magic to use such a spell against an unwilling witch—especially her own daughter.

  Exchange of posts on

  “General” GRIMNIR channel

  DAY 1959 (9 DECEMBER, YEAR 5)

  Post from Frank Oda, 11:17:

  Has anyone seen or heard from Julie? She went off on her bike two hours ago to pick up some parts and should have been back a while ago. It’s not like her to not report in.

  Reply from Tristan Lyons, 11:20:

  Good catch, Frank, we have been a little distracted by the sudden disappearance of the DOSECOPS SUVs from the street. They all took a powder about forty-five minutes ago.

  From Rebecca East-Oda, 11:25:

  Good riddance. The neighbors will be pleased too.

  From Julie Lee, 14:30:

  Sorry for the mysterious absence, everyone. I’m fine and I’m hanging out in a top-floor hotel room at the waterfront Westin with none other than Major Isobel Sloane.

  From Tristan Lyons, 14:31:

  WHAT!? Glad you are okay but please explain.

  From Julie Lee, 14:45:

  I was on my way back to the house with the delivery, just a couple of blocks out, when I noticed that all three of the DOSECOPS SUVs were blasting down the street, headed for the main drag. So, on the spur of the moment, I decided to follow them. Couldn’t have kept up with them on the highway but of course they were in Boston traffic and so it was pretty easy to keep pace. I had to make a few illegal sidewalk runs and cut through some parking lots but was able to track them across the Mass Ave Bridge and across the South End into Southie where they ended up passing through a guarded gate into the container terminal. There’s a big slip there lined with cranes where they load and unload the container ships. Thousands of containers stacked all over the place, trains, trucks, etc.

  I couldn’t get through the gate, so I was kind of stymied at that point. I looked around for a tall building and noticed the Westin a few blocks away—it’s like twenty stories high and I could see its top floors, so I knew it had a view of the area. So I gunned it over there. The neighborhood is kinda forbidding, lots of big industrial-type buildings but no place to come in off the street. I left my motorcycle with the parking attendants and went into the lobby and asked the lady at the front desk whether there was a bar or coffee shop on the top floor where I could have a drink and look out over the harbor and she was like no, all of our dining establishments are down low and the top floors are all rooms and suites for our guests. I asked if any of those was available and she said she could get me one with a view of the harbor so I plunked down my credit card and said I would take it.

  While I’m there filling out the paperwork, I see a woman approaching in my peripheral vision. She’s coming from the direction of the coffee shop in the lobby, holding a latte cup. I figured she wanted to talk to the front-desk lady but instead she approached me and said, “Excuse me, this might sound very weird and I’m sorry if this makes you uncomfortable but I have the strongest feeling that I know you from somewhere and I was wondering if I could chat with you for a minute.” So I look up at her and holy shit it’s Isobel Sloane from DOSECOPS! She’s dressed in a sweatshirt and sweatpants and some Crocs that I’m going to take a wild guess were looted from Walmart and she basically looks fine, but a little spacey and disoriented. As evidenced by the fact that she didn’t know my name. We’ve had coffee together lots of times at the DODO cafeteria and she totally knows me.

  Obviously something weird was going on so I said, “Sure, I would totally love to chat with you, hang on a sec and we can go up to my suite and get some room service and just chill out for a little bit.” Which she was fine with.

  So, ten minutes later we’re up in this fancy suite. Pricey, but the only room I could get with a view of the harbor. I was super nervous that we’d be followed, but nothing of the sort happened, and as soon as we got inside I locked and security-bolted the door. I got Isobel settled down on a comfy chair in the living room area of the suite and then looked out the window and down into the container port area.

  DOSECOPS has a fleet of half a dozen black SUVs, as you know, and all six of them were down there, clustered together like cockroaches along the side of the big slip where the container ships tie up to be loaded and unloaded. I could see people standing around them but it was too far away to make out faces. Some of them were looking out into the harbor. And right there, just a mile or two out, south of the airport, was a big container ship steaming away. Piled with hundreds of containers, of course. And everything about the body language of the people around the SUVs was “goddamn it we just literally missed the boat.”

  More in a few minutes but I’m gonna hit “send” on this so you get the update.

  From Mortimer Shore, 14:59:

  I checked the shipping records. That’s the Alexandre Dumas. She’s owned by a French shipping company. They name all of their ships after writers, I guess.

  From Tristan Lyons, 15:03:

  Where’s she headed?

  From Mortimer Shore, 15:06:

  Le Havre apparently.

  From Julie Lee, 15:12:

  CONTINUED

  So when I saw how it was down along the waterfront I turned to Isobel who was just chilling, sipping her latte and looking out the window, and I said, “So, Isobel, it’s good to see you!”

  “Isobel. Right. That’s me,” she said. Like she’d forgotten her own name.

  “We have been worried,” I said.

  “Who has been worried?” she asked.

  “People who work with you and who knew you had gone missing,” I told her. “You have been missing for over a week.”

  “Oh, I wasn’t missing,” she said, and kind of nodded down toward the harborfront area below us. She seemed completely unconcerned.

  “You were down there?” I prompted her.

  “Yes, there’s a shipping company, with an office, and a lot of shipping containers that they look after.”

  “Might one of those containers be green, with some rust spots and some equipment inside?” I asked.

  “You mean the ATTO?” she asked without skipping a beat.

  “Yeah, the ATTO.”

  “That’s mostly where I was. It was in the warehouse. It’s not green anymore, though. We painted it red.”

 
; “We? So, you were involved in this painting project?”

  “Yeah, I didn’t have anything else to do, so I helped out a little. It was fun.”

  “Where is the ATTO now with its shiny new coat of red paint?”

  “They just loaded it onto the ship a little while ago. Then I found myself out on the street and so I decided to go get some coffee. That’s when I saw you.”

  “Were you being held prisoner?” I asked.

  “No.”

  “Was there another woman in the ATTO part of the time?”

  “Yes. She was always there.”

  “Was it Gráinne?” I asked. “Irish accent?”

  “Oh, no,” she said, as if that would be preposterous.

  So then I thought about what kind of witch Magnus would probably have with him and asked, “Did she look or sound, like, Scandinavian maybe?”

  And she said, “Nope.”

  “Do you remember what she looked like?”

  She shrugged. “Maybe like Italian or Spanish?”

  I couldn’t think of any Italian or Spanish witches on our payroll so I let that go and asked, “And is she in the ATTO right now?”

  “Oh, no. They shut it down and locked it before they put it on the ship.”

  “So where did the woman go?”

  “I don’t know. She went away in a car with the shipping company guys.”

  “So all of them—all of the shipping company guys—they all left?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And pretty much left you where you were standing.”

  “Yeah.”

  “But it looks like they didn’t hurt you or anything.”

  “Oh, no. Why would they do that?”

  “Just asking, Isobel.”

  And at about this point a change started coming over Isobel’s face. Until then she’d been super relaxed, like she’d been sitting on a beach washing down Xanax with strawberry margaritas and listening to global chill music, but now it was like the circuit breakers in her brain were flipping back on. She seemed preoccupied, and sort of embarrassed. I felt a little bad for her and I didn’t want to, like, jump down her throat or anything. So I just sat there quietly and let her work it all out.