The QUIPUs (Quantum Information Processing Units) that make up the Chronotron are capable of dealing with the infinite-pasts-as-weighted-by-plausibility calculations in SLIT (Something Less Than Infinite Time). They know how to “renormalize” per plausibility quotients, so that irrelevant pasts can be ignored and high-leverage pasts can be zeroed in on. Thanks to all the input from our fine team of in-house historians, it can sort out what leads to what (and what DOESN’T lead to what) with more accuracy than Google directing you to NSFW porn sites.
Diachronicle
DAY 891 (EARLY JANUARY, YEAR 3)
In which the manifestly obvious takes us by surprise
THE CHRONOTRON WAS READY TO be turned on and used for the first time.
During the year and a half that DODO’s R&D division, under Frank Oda, had been developing and testing the Chronotron, the rest of us had been slowly building out the witch network through many DTAPs, and recruiting HOSMAs (Historical Operations Subject Matter Authorities—what any normal person would call professors) for DORC. We hadn’t been conducting full-blown diachronic operations per se, but we’d been laying the groundwork, recruiting new DOers with painstaking care, training them in languages and other skills, Sending them on dry runs to various DTAPs just to break them in.
The ODEC had gone through two complete redesigns. Four copies of that design had been constructed in the basement, with two others roughed in and ready to be finished as soon as there was a need for them. But there was no need, for we still only had a single witch—or, in the jargon of the agency, MUON.
The exact numbers have flown from my memory, but on the day that we booted up the Chronotron, our head count looked something like this:
DORC (of which I was in charge, and, reader, how often does one have the opportunity to say one works for the DORC of DODO?) comprised about twenty full-time HOSMAs, five support staff, and one hundred part-time consultants, all security-checked and sworn to secrecy, not to mention five full-time DORCCAD technicians (this being our Cartographic and Architectural Database). One of the more colorful and active sub-departments was DoVE, the Department of Violence(s) Ethnology, which was responsible for instructing DOers in historical martial arts as well as related skills such as riding, armor, and making improvised weapons. This had expanded far beyond Mortimer Shore’s early training sessions in the park. Under the leadership of Dr. Hilton Fuller, an Ivy League academic with a passion for historical martial arts, it now operated an in-house dojo as well as a larger training and riding center outside of Boston.
C/COD (headed up by Macy Stoll) had a head count of nearly a hundred, many of whom seemed to be busy setting up other DODO facilities around the world. The department had five full-time medical professionals, as well as the usual complement of janitors, HR people, finance, IT, and the like. Its largest single sub-department was the redundantly named Diachronic Operations Security Operations, under Major Isobel Sloane, who had been recruited “sideways” from a military police unit based in the Middle East. People in the know pronounced it “doe-seck-ops,” but its acronym, DOSECOPS, inevitably led to new hires pronouncing it “dose cops” and referring to individual members—who did actually resemble police officers—by the same name.
R&D (in Frank Oda’s purview) was the smallest department, some dozen computer scientists and physicists, a few programmers, and an administrator. Until this point it had worked on the Chronotron to the exclusion of all else, but Frank had some other ideas he was itching to work on.
Finally there was Diachronic Operations, under Tristan. This was the unit that employed all of the actual DOers and Sent them on missions. By this point I think we had about twenty DOers who were “good to go”—fully trained and checked out—plus a dozen more in the pipeline. More than half of them were Fighters or Striders. Those classes were easier to recruit, in a sense, because the military’s Special Forces units had already done the work for us of combing through the entire population and picking out the ones who were suited for the job. We just had to sift through their personnel records looking for ones with the right combination of good teeth and unusual language aptitude. Lovers, Closers, Spies, Sages, and the rest were under-represented simply because finding them was harder. But we had a few of them in each category—enough, we felt, to “make a dent in the universe” once the Chronotron came online and started telling us what we should actually do with them.
All told—once General Frink’s entourage from DC had been bundled in—some two hundred people were present at the ceremony where we booted up the Chronotron. And, by extension, the Department of Diachronic Operations in its fully operational form. It was An Event—the sort of thing Macy Stoll excelled at organizing. Erszebet persuaded me to get a haircut and borrow one of her skirts. Tristan wore his dress uniform. Frank Oda put on a suit, then threw a white lab coat over it to conceal some moth holes that he didn’t notice until he put it on. Even Mortimer found a necktie and a pair of leather shoes.
Merely getting all of those people into the building without causing a public spectacle required some planning. We were still operating out of the same dingy, nondescript industrial building in Cambridge. Outwardly this hadn’t changed at all; it still sported the same graffiti tags and vinyl window shades as when I’d first seen it two and a half years ago. People in the neighborhood, when they noticed it at all, shook their heads and wondered when some real estate developer would snap it up and turn it into a high-tech office building. To hide the fact that more than a hundred people were going in and out of it every day, Macy’s facilities team had built half a dozen secret entrances connected to neighboring structures by tunnels. We were about a block away from the river and so we also made use of some utility passages connecting to public works facilities in the green belt. When General Frink arrived, he was in the backseat of a small SUV that was completely nondescript save for the fact that its rear windows were darkened, lest some pedestrian at a stoplight look in and recognize the face of the Director of National Intelligence.
The Chronotron itself was not physically that large, but the space in which Frank and his team had built it was obstructed and complicated by the requirements of ventilation and power. Between the ODECs in the basement, which still had to be jacketed in liquid helium, and the QUIPUs on the second floor, which also ran at super-cold temperatures, this building was one of the largest cryogenic facilities in New England. A large fraction of its interior volume was set aside for tankage, insulation, ducting, and safety equipment.
Consequently, we didn’t have anything like enough room for two hundred people in the actual Chronotron room, which was up on the second floor. The only people physically present were General Frink, Dr. Rudge, a few of their top aides, Blevins, the department heads—including yours truly, as the head of DORC—and some of Frank’s senior geeks. Everyone else watched it from their offices or the cafeteria via live stream.
We’d actually had a small celebration of our own at the Odas’ beforehand—just the original quintet, plus Mortimer Shore, of whom both Odas were very fond. By unspoken agreement we had always shielded Mortimer from too much information about DODO’s high-level political dysfunction, though I often wondered if he used his sysadmin privileges to eavesdrop on some of our internal disputes. On this particular morning, as I looked at his beaming face, it didn’t seem likely. Mortimer just thought it was cool that the big kids had invited him into the sandbox.
Then we’d all piled into Frank’s Volvo and gone to the office. General Frink showed up twenty minutes later, right on schedule, and toured the facility with Blevins at his elbow, ending up in the Chronotron control room where there was a great deal of fuss over the powering-on and the booting-up of the machine. As we had actually been beta-testing it for several weeks, this was largely ceremonial, but Oda-sensei still looked flushed with pleasure and I did not begrudge him the moment. He “switched on” the Chronotron. Actually it had been on more often than it had been off over the past several weeks. And it was in fact
already running, so all he was really doing was turning on a fancy workstation that was connected to it. But that’s ceremony for you. As a grid of flat-panel screens came alive with scrolling text windows and dancing infographics, everyone clapped and some of the coders hooted. Frink congratulated Oda-sensei heartily, Blevins almost as heartily, and then Tristan, Erszebet, and myself with little more than civil courtesy. We were getting used to this, although in truth it pissed me off saddened me.
Adjacent to the control room proper was a secure conference room, equipped with all manner of screens and VR and AR displays, where the results of its analyses could be reviewed and cross-correlated with maps, historical timelines, and diagrams of DODO’s network of safe houses and KCWs. We filed into it once the Chronotron had been turned on, and received a briefing from Blevins on the projected first few months of DODO’s operations. These focused on what we were calling the Constantinople Theater.
The Constantinople Theater was a broad canvas of safe houses and planned DEDEs, all having to do with limiting Russia’s power in the Balkans and the Black Sea. This was not to be done in an invasive manner that would alter any of that area’s endlessly turbulent history, but in a subtle way to ensure a lack of Russian hegemony in the future. This included, of course, massaging the boundaries of the East/West schism of the church. But there was far more to it than that. Hundreds of discrete DEDEs were encompassed in this plan. We did not yet have all the resources required to accomplish them. But we knew what the first four or five gambits were supposed to be, and so today, we would move en masse directly from the Chronotron down to ODEC Row to send Tristan off on the first one.
I say “supposed to be” because Robert Burns was right on the money about best-laid plans.
As if in a medieval street festival, our clutch of officials, aides, geeks, and department heads followed Blevins, Rudge, and Frink down the hallway and staircase to the basement, and were joined along the way by additional historians, DOers, office workers, and techies emerging from the spaces where they had been watching the live stream. The basement level had room to accommodate a few more spectators. Erszebet, decked out as only she could deck herself out, awaited us.
ODEC Row looked more like a medical facility than a magical teleportation center. This was because of the need to preserve strict epidemiological precautions. We’d improvised a working decontamination suite around the first ODEC, of course, but the more recent influx of funding and expertise had given us the resources to do it right.
The entire basement was cut in half by a wall of glass. On the other side of it, as we came in, was the bio-containment zone, subdivided into discrete isolation zones for each of the ODECs. They all shared some plumbing in the form of the sterilizing showers—“human car washes” in Tristan’s description—that all DOers passed through en route to and from the ODECs, and the air filtration systems that ensured not even a virus could pass across the barrier. A fully equipped medical suite—sort of a compact trauma center—was tucked away in one corner. It was equipped with x-ray machines and an operating room so that injured DOers could be treated on-site, immediately and secretly. Next to that was a two-bed recovery ward. Compared to all of that, the ODECs themselves—the four that were up and running, and the two that were only roughed in—occupied only a small footprint. They were cylindrical rooms, just big enough on the inside for the Sending witch and the DOer, larger on the outside because of the thickness of the cryogenic jackets and electronic systems.
Tristan—who was en route to 1203 Constantinople on Varangian Guard duty—had slipped out of the conference room early, come downstairs, and passed through the airlock into the bio-containment zone. By the time we arrived, he had gone through the showers and was undergoing other decontamination procedures that my current Victorian sensibilities forbid me from discussing on the page.
The crowd of dignitaries and support staff tumbled like unmilled corn into the space on the “dirty” side of the glass wall. General Frink was positioned in direct view of ODEC #3 and the pre- and post-DEDE bio equipment surrounding it. Oda-sensei was just off to Frink’s side, checking the ODEC’s status through a touch-screen interface.
We’d used all four of the finished ODECs sporadically, just to make sure they all worked. It was expensive to keep them running because of the need for liquid helium and electrical power. Until today, DODO hadn’t had the budget, and we hadn’t needed them frequently enough to justify leaving them on. With the new year and the powering-on of the Chronotron, this had all changed. Over the holiday weekend the technicians had been chilling the whole system down to just above absolute zero and running tests on the electronics. From now on, it would stay on 24/7. This meant keeping the doors shut to limit heat loss and the excess usage of energy and cryogenic fluids. When we arrived that morning, the door to ODEC #3 was decorated with a red ribbon tied into a bow. For the schedule called for us to kill time with another ribbon-cutting ceremony as Tristan completed his preparations. Blevins droned on while Erszebet went through the airlock and changed into a disposable bunny suit and surgical mask—these were standard procedures, needed to prevent re-contaminating Tristan during the moments that they would be standing together in the ODEC. She emerged in the space between the glass wall and the door to ODEC #3 and picked up a sword that was waiting for her on a table. It was a sharp one—a Hungarian saber. Mortimer had sourced it from eBay and honed it until it could slice through a handkerchief in midair. Erszebet had been training with it, enough that she could swing it without killing herself. At a signal from Frank, she raised it above her head and drew it down through the ribbon, severing it in one quick motion. At the same moment, Frank whacked the “enter” key on his keyboard, executing a command that made all the lights come on.
ODECs #1 through #4 had been officially powered up. A round of applause swept through the crowd on the “dirty” side. At the same moment Tristan finally emerged, wrapped in a sterile paper jumpsuit. This created the amusing impression that he was a character in a sitcom who had just made his entrance on the set and was getting a round of applause from the audience. He saluted General Frink through the glass wall. Frink saluted back. Tristan and Erszebet moved toward the ODEC door. The crowd on the “dirty” side pressed forward, trying to find space along the glass wall. For many of these people, it would be the first time they saw the ODEC actually in use. There’d be nothing really to see, of course, except that two people would go in and only one would come out.
Frank had switched on an audio link so that he could talk to Erszebet and Tristan. Standing near him, I could hear their voices through the tinny little speakers built into the monitor.
Tristan turned toward ODEC #3 and reached for the button that would cause it to open its door.
Just before his hand touched it, there was a pounding from within, and a muffled scream.
Tristan and Erszebet glanced at each other with concern. “Open it,” I said urgently, but Tristan was already mashing the button.
As the door hissed open, a naked young woman tumbled out of the ODEC, clutching her head and wailing with fear. As she curled up protectively, her wordless hysteria was interspersed with a few hyperventilated phrases of medieval-era Hebrew.
Tristan sidestepped and pulled a hospital gown from a rack of them hanging nearby. He tossed the gown on top of the hysterical girl, like a man throwing a blanket on a fire. Erszebet elbowed him away and adjusted the gown for modesty.
Nudging Frank away from the control panel, I spoke firmly in Hebrew: “You’re safe. You are among friends. There is no need to be frightened.”
Relief at hearing her own language made her catch her breath. Pulling the gown around her body, she rose to a kneeling position and stared about the place, wide-eyed. Tristan dropped to one knee and pointed toward me. I waved to her and caught her eye. “You are safe,” I repeated, and then, rifling through my mental roster, maintaining eye contact: “Are you Rachel? From Pera? Constantinople? Daughter of Avraham? Is that who you are?”<
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Clutching the gown to her front, she rose to her feet and padded over toward me. For a moment I was afraid she’d walk straight into the glass wall, but Erszebet put a restraining hand on her shoulder, and Tristan darted ahead and rapped on the glass with his knuckles. She slowed as she approached, and stopped with her face only inches from mine.
“Yes . . .” She turned her head and glanced around the space—not to the ODEC itself, the open door of which was just behind her, but around at the control panel and the scores of curious faces, in what must have been extremely curious forms of dress. She gasped. Electric cables, fluorescent lights, plastic chairs . . . every single thing in that room, other than the biological reality of other human beings, was utterly alien to her. Her eyes opened so wide I could see the whites all around the iris. I thought for a moment she would faint.
Instead, she erupted into giggles.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” Tristan announced, “looks like we’ve got ourselves another witch.”
PART
FOUR
INCIDENT REPORT
AUTHOR: Rebecca East-Oda
SUBJECT: Rachel bat Avraham—unauthorized ODEC use
THEATER: C/COD
OPERATION: Ribbon-cutting ceremony
DTAP: Cambridge, MA, present day
FILED: Day 896 (early January, Year 3)
Summary: At 11:21:16 of Day 891, the subject, Rachel bat Avraham, a KCW from the circa-1200 Constantinople DTAP, was Sent from there to ODEC #3 and materialized in normal physical condition. She was issued clothing and placed under observation in the medical isolation facility adjoining ODEC Row. She was debriefed in Hebrew and in Greek by Dr. Stokes (head of DORC) and Dr. Lingas (in-house Byzantine Greek HOSMA) respectively. Initial briefing focused on two topics of immediate concern, namely (1) whether any more surprise visitors from 1200 Constantinople were to be expected, and (2) the importance of immediate medical procedures needed to protect subject from our diseases and vice versa. As precautions in the meantime, Dr. Oda had shut down all four operational ODECs, and ODEC Row had been placed under bio-containment lockdown.
The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. Page 42