The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O.: A Novel

by Neal Stephenson

  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.

  “Wow,” she said. “Oh, shit.”

  “You’ve been missing for a week,” I said.

  She nodded. “I’ve been missing for a week. I need to call my mom. And my boss. And the cops.”

  “Do you remember DODO now?” I asked her. “And DOSECOPS.”

  “Yeah. Sure.”

  “Well, they’re all down there, staring at the ass of that big ship as it cruises out of the harbor,” I said. “And I can take you down there if you want. But maybe you could show me the shipping company on the way?”

  “Sure. Yeah, I need to get down there,” she said, and by that point she was fully back to normal. The Isobel Sloane we are accustomed to. She stood up and kind of patted herself down, but she didn’t have her phone or any of her DOSECOPS electronic gear, just the Walmart togs she’d been given.

  So we went down and got on my motorcycle and she had me drive along the north side of the shipping channel, which is just one long, long row of warehouses with little shipping companies all over the place. It’s hard to tell one from the next, and Isobel’s memories were fuzzy, so my expectations were pretty low. But as we were getting near the end, where the road terminates with a view of the harbor and the airport, I was sorta hit over the head with an incredibly focused and powerful sense of GLAAMR. And it quite obviously emanated from behind the door of one company, which was unmarked except for a suite number (2739) and a little piece of paper about the size of a business card with a drawing on it, a pattern of circles, wide at the top and tapering to the bottom, with a stem and a leaf at the top. Like a bunch of grapes. It was locked, and through the frosted glass window I could kind of make out a filing cabinet and a water cooler. Normal office stuff. Isobel seemed pretty sure that this was the place she’d been hanging out for the last week. It smelled like paint. But I didn’t need her help anymore to know that this was it. I’m a witch. I can tell. The GLAAMR behind that door was almost enough to knock me down.

  I dropped her off on the other side of the channel, near the gates to the container port, and then came back to the hotel, where I’m now safely locked in my suite. As long as I paid for the damn thing I intend to get the most out of it!

  From Tristan Lyons, 15:39:

  Fantastic stuff, Julie. Glad to hear Isobel is fine. Stay safe.

  From Mortimer Shore, 16:42:

  BOG Container Lines Inc. is the survival into modern times of Bunch of Grapes, which is an extremely old presence in the shipping industry. I mean, it’s named after a tavern in Boston from the 1600s that was named after a tavern in London that dates back to at least the 1200s. Suite 2739 is a registered business address for them. One of many. I’m still waiting for some query results to come back so that we can discover their inevitable connection to the Fuggers. I don’t even know why I bother.

  From Tristan Lyons, 17:03:

  Mortimer, Julie, you are flying to London tomorrow. Pack.

  From Mortimer Shore, 17:05:

  My man, that is fascinating and I’m totally packing, but I just wanted to point out that Paris is closer to Le Havre. Assuming that is where you are trying to get.

  From Tristan Lyons, 17:07:

  Yeah, I have Google Maps too. Marginally harder for the bad guys to track your going into France if you’re arriving from a nearby country via ferry, vs. arriving in a commercial airliner from Boston.

  From Mortimer Shore, 17:44:

  Tristan? You around? I can’t find you anywhere in the house.

  From Rebecca East-Oda, 18:19:

  Tristan and Felix a
re incommunicado. I am giving them a lift to a helicopter charter service at Logan Airport. They have a lot of cash and a lot of equipment.

  ENTRIES FROM PERSONAL JOURNAL OF

  Karpathy Erszebet

  ON THE TRAIN HOME TO BUDAPEST, 14 JULY 1851

  Dear Diary,

  Mother has been working upon me, or rather trying to, with her ever-weakening abilities, for I can feel her inside my very skull at times over the past few days, trying to convince me to put the spell upon myself willingly. I will not. I considered it, but I know I lack the fortitude to survive the endless decades to come.

  BUDAPEST, 23 JULY 1851

  Dear Diary,

  I have resigned myself to learning a skill, to earn a proper living when magic is no more. With each passing day, I feel a diminishing of power and clarity of mind, an almost physical heaviness. I push through it. I have decided I might learn to be a seamstress, for at least then I shall spend my life around beautiful gowns (which I am fond of) even if I soon lack the means to own them.

  BUDAPEST, 26 JULY 1851

  Dear Diary,

  As the days go by, Mother keeps to her chambers, and Father, when I see him, mostly scowls at me. The day after tomorrow is when this horrible eclipse will happen and then it will all be over.

  MISSION LOG OF TRISTAN LYONS

  Written in ballpoint pen on pocket notebook

  DAY 1960 (10 DECEMBER, YEAR 5)

  General intro: I have no idea whether the finder of this notebook is going to consider me a hero, a traitor, or a nobody, but I want to go on record stating I firmly believe my actions are (a) important and (b) based on a good-faith reading of my service oath, as well as a larger commitment to the principles of the United States Constitution and the post-Enlightenment worldview from which it sprang.

  (Here’s where Mel would make some crack about how I take myself too seriously, but she’s stuck in 1851 at the moment.)

  Furthermore, I don’t know whether the reader will have access to digital electronic devices, or for that matter any post-medieval technology whatsoever, and so I’m writing this in ink on paper so that you don’t need gadgets to read it.

  Hell, it could be that by the time we reach France the whole continent will be nothing but smoking ruins . . .

  I’m in a steel box on a big boat. I came here with my friends Felix Dorn and Rebecca East-Oda. I talked them into this adventure. Not to say they’re not grown-ups or anything (for the record, Rebecca is a grandmother), but I take responsibility for this, and if there are legal proceedings to follow, they should be exonerated, because this whole thing was my call.

  As general background, just to help the reader calibrate the level of weird that’s going on, I believe that the building we all know as the Pentagon was called the Trapezoid when it was first built, circa World War II, and that it remained the Trapezoid all through the Cold War and the decades that followed. It only became the Pentagon a few months ago. But when it did, it wasn’t only the building itself that changed, but everyone’s memories of it as well. So everyone, including me, thinks it has been the Pentagon from the moment its cornerstone (vertexstone? whatever) was laid, and has memories consistent with that, and it’s what you’ll read in old documents and see on old maps. I have memories of the Trapezoid but they have the same surreal and suspect vibe about them as things seen in dreams, or hallucinated during LSD trips.

  It was converted into the Pentagon on Halloween, just about two months ago, when a significant chunk of the United States military-industrial complex was taken over by witches in a carefully premeditated coup d’état. They remain in power—well, one does. If you, the reader of this document, are a Special Forces operative who just finished taking me and Felix down in a raid, or a Military Intelligence analyst at the Pentagon, then you actually work for her. The witch, that is. Sorry to break it to you.

  The witches’ goal is to roll back scientific and technical progress to roughly the late medieval period. I think they are probably okay with a Leonardo da Vinci level of tech, but once we get into Galileo or even Francis Bacon, these witches get the heebie-jeebies and want to put a stop to it. Cf. my earlier remarks about the Enlightenment.

  Okay, so Felix read the above while I was peeing into an empty water bottle (we are saving it in case we end up having to drink our own urine in a few days), and he has advised me to get on with some more concrete details of what’s happening. Thanks, buddy.

  But I’ve done some stuff here that from a narrow-minded point of view looks just incredibly batshit illegal, and I need to explain that.

  In retrospect, we should never have built the ATTO.

  The whole diachronic operations thing was never perfect—actually we had some pretty hairy misadventures from day one—but at least it was under some kind of control as long as we just had a few ODECs that were totally locked down in secure facilities, with necessary bio-containment procedures in place, etc. We used them for one thing and one thing only: time travel, according to a clear set of rules and procedures.

  Our critical mistake was the recent policy shift toward using ATTOs (portable ODECs) for psy-ops in the present day. (Note: Melisande Stokes was always iffy about the psy-ops tack, not that she had a say in policy, but given the impact this has had on her fate, she at least deserves her opinion to go on the record.) On the face of it the psy-ops redirection seemed reasonable, or at least no crazier than diachronic operations, but we didn’t reckon on Gráinne and the fact that she would immediately begin using those very techniques to influence DODO’s top leadership.

  And Gráinne, in turn, didn’t reckon on Magnus.

  Who didn’t reckon on the Fuggers (see below).

  So lots of people are surprised.

  I won’t re-tell the whole story here because it can be gleaned from documents on GRIMNIR, especially Julie Lee’s entry, but I do want to record (a) what’s happened since then and (b) what I’m pretty sure is the behind-the-curtain truth to What’s Going On. Which I will do first. I’m leaving out an enormous amount here—I’m not “showing my work” as my grade-school math teacher would complain, because I don’t know how much ink is left in this ballpoint.

  After Magnus finished getting what he wanted out of the Walmart (treasure maps, basically) and made his getaway, there must have been one witch remaining in the ATTO, since a witch can’t Send herself. (I see empty cold cut wrappers and a whole lot of used water bottles, so somebody was hanging out here for a while.)

  After the siege, when DOSECOPS showed up and Major Isobel Sloane went in to check the (still-operating) ATTO, the witch clearly used some kind of mind-influencing technique on Sloane.

  The tractor-trailer containing said witch was then shanghaied to Conley Terminal, given a false identity, and sent off to France. Major Sloane was maintained in an altered mental state for a full week while that happened; eventually she turned up unharmed in Julie’s hotel lobby, and I’m guessing the truck driver has turned up somewhere with a similar story.

  BUT: after hashing this out ad nauseam, I need to change/add one detail:

  The warehouse and all that’s happened since is clearly a Fugger operation—which means it must have been a (new-to-us) Fugger witch, not Magnus’s witch, who was controlling Major Sloane.

  This in turn means that Magnus’s witch got “jumped” by some other (Fugger) witch who manifested in the ATTO at some point post–Walmart siege and Homed Magnus’s witch back to Viking-era Norway or wherever, with or without her consent.

  No idea why the Fuggers stole the ATTO from DODO, or why they are getting it not just out of the country but specifically to France, which happens to have old, secret laws governing the use of magic for diachronic operations.

  If this all seems even beyond the scope of the Fuggers, remember—DODO’s own Dr. Cornelius Rudge is a Fugger agent (hi, Dr. Rudge!), meaning the Fuggers know whatever DODO knows. And always have. Also: they are obviously waiting to collect ATTO #1 in Le Havre.

  So we decided to beat them to i
t, so that we have a way to get Mel home.

  Felix and I packed duffel bags with all the gear we could carry and found a chopper pilot who was willing to fly us and Rebecca out to the Alexandre Dumas. We circled the ship a couple of times and identified the ATTO. Even though it has a new paint job, it has some identifying characteristics, such as the side door, that make it stand out clearly if you know what to look for.

  We hailed the ship on VHF. I gave the captain the same story we’d been telling the helicopter pilot, which was that this was an “enforcement operation” related to a “sensitive national security situation” and that it would be best if he just clammed up and didn’t make a fuss until I could come and talk to him. And then I requested permission to come aboard, which is the polite thing to do.

  We landed on the top of the container stack and set a rope, which I used to let myself down to the door. I cut off the padlock with a battery-powered grinder and got it open. We let down a rope ladder and helped Rebecca and the chopper pilot get down and inside. I went back up onto the top of the container stack and walked forward to the ship’s superstructure, which projects up above the level of the containers. The captain was waiting for me. I was in full quasi-military tactical gear, and I guess I looked convincing. The captain is Spanish, the crew is Filipino, and, at the end of the day, none of them wants any trouble. They just want to drive this thing to Le Havre and cash their paychecks. I explained to the captain that there was a situation in the red container that he needed to see with his own eyes. It took a little social engineering, which Mel always says I’m not very good at, but after a few minutes he sort of rolled his eyes and agreed to come back and have a look.

  So now it’s me and Rebecca and the chopper pilot and the ship’s captain all together in the red container, and I can tell that the ATTO system has been turned on. The first few times I experienced the inside of a running ODEC, I came out of it deeply confused, like a kid who’d been roofied at a frat party, but over the years I’ve become accustomed to it. I can maintain some level of conscious awareness and come out of it a little spacey, but basically intact.