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

by Neal Stephenson

  I came back with a tweaked shoulder. Dr. Srinavasan checked me out and suggested I consult a physical therapist to get it worked on. The PT doc did some myofascial work and sent me home with some exercises. Everything is fine now. To the extent that this is relevant to budget and staffing, we might benefit from having a physical therapist in the medical section.

  From Macy Stoll:

  Thank you for the explanation. I still need to know whether the shoulder injury was contracted in the workplace.

  From LTC Lyons:

  If by “workplace” you mean Normandy a thousand years ago, yes.

  From Macy Stoll:

  Thank you for that additional clarification. Given the unusual nature of DODO, that does indeed constitute a workplace injury. As such, you are required to file an Incident Report crosslinked to Dr. Srinavasan’s outside medical specialist referral paperwork.

  FROM DR. ROGER BLEVINS TO LTC TRISTAN LYONS

  CC: LIEUTENANT GENERAL OCTAVIAN K. FRINK

  DAY 874

  Lieutenant Colonel Lyons:

  I am in receipt of an Incident Report, filed yesterday, describing events that took place during one of your DEDEs in Normandy in 1045. The account is sketchy and appears to have been written in haste, or perhaps you are simply accustomed to taking a casual attitude toward such matters. In any case, if this document is to be believed, you voluntarily engaged one or more “historicals” in potentially lethal combat during this DEDE. For the benefit of LTG Frink (CCed for the record) this DEDE was strictly for the purpose of gaining fluency in the local language. It did not call for a Fighter-class DOer, and engaging in combat was not part of the mission scope. During the unscheduled and unauthorized tussle, you sustained injuries that later required expenditure of DODO funds on an outside medical specialist lacking security clearance, with possible risk of exposure of top-secret information.

  Please consider this a formal reprimand. As the head of the operational wing of DODO, you set an example for the ever-expanding staff of DOers who serve under you, and as such you must be held to a higher standard of professionalism and conduct than you exhibited in this case.

  While this is technically grounds for being placed on a Performance Enhancement Plan, or even outright dismissal, I am willing to make an exception just this once. Please consider yourself on notice, however, that further such lapses in judgment will be treated with the utmost gravity.

  With that disagreeable task out of the way, I would like to consider the matter closed, and wish you the best returns of the season.

  Sincerely,

  Roger Blevins, Ph.D.

  Director, Department of Diachronic Operations

  FROM LTC TRISTAN LYONS TO DR. ROGER BLEVINS

  CC: LIEUTENANT GENERAL OCTAVIAN K. FRINK

  DAY 875

  Dear Dr. Blevins:

  Concerning yesterday’s letter of reprimand, I would like to point out the following circumstances that may help clarify matters for you and General Frink.

  - The “injuries” that I sustained consisted of a sore shoulder. The “outside medical specialist” is a local physical therapist. I told her that I had sustained the injury while practicing jiu-jitsu. She accepted the story. There is no risk of leakage of classified information.

  - The “potentially lethal combat” consisted of swinging a boat oar into the stomach of a drunk and disorderly Norman who was about to chop off a man’s fingers. To describe this as potentially lethal is about like saying that I got up this morning in Boston and took a potentially lethal train ride in to work.

  - When we go on these DEDEs, we have to blend in, and behave as the locals expect us to behave. I was the biggest and strongest man in the village and had been practicing stick-fighting with the locals for weeks. For me to have stood by passively during this disturbance would have raised more questions than taking the minimal action that I did.

  Merry Christmas,

  LTC Tristan Lyons

  Annotation, handwritten by General Frink at the bottom of above letter, scanned and delivered digitally

  DAY 876

  Gentlemen,

  Xmas is four days away and we should be focused on (a) brotherly love and (b) turning on the Chronotron at the beginning of the new year. Please consider this matter closed with no further repercussions, and trouble me with it no more.

  Happy Holidays

  O. K. Frink

  Exchange of posts between

  Dr. Melisande Stokes and LTC Tristan Lyons

  on private ODIN channel

  DAY 879 (CHRISTMAS EVE, YEAR 2)

  Post from Dr. Stokes:

  Subject: Chinese take-out?

  My turn to pay, but can you get the usual and I’ll reimburse? Meet at my place. (Trying to get Erszebet out of here before she goes nuclear on Blevins again.)

  I know you’re on the outs with Blevins, but we should talk to him about fast-tracking another resident witch. E has stayed far longer than she agreed to; she’s being a good sport (by her standards), but I’m tired of running interference every time Blevins is a jackass to her. There’s three or four who expressed interest (Rachel in Constantinople, etc.) and they’re all in DTAPs with multiple KCWs. Talk about it over dinner?

  —MS

  PS: Merry Christmas.

  Reply from LTC Lyons:

  STOKES!

  1. Bad form to call your boss a jackass on a company messaging system.

  2. Merry Christmas.

  3. I thought you were heading out of town to spend time with family.

  4. We’ve never brought a historical forward in time before. Can we even do that?

  From Dr. Stokes:

  Tristan,

  1. If we get to the point where said jackass is reading my personal messages to you, then we have bigger issues and we’re all done here.

  2. And Happy New Year.

  3. Canceled the trip. Mom’s showing up late tonight, we’ll hang out at my place. Too much going on here, and Erszebet gets a little nutty around the holidays.

  4. You’re right that Sending a historical forward is different from Homing a DOer back to their “natural” time and place, but Erszebet says it can be done. Especially if the Sending witch has developed familiarity with the ODEC by Homing a lot of people there. We have, as of today, run fifty-five DEDEs in 1200 Constantinople. We have used three different KCWs to Home all of our DOers. One of them (Rachel) has done it thirty-two times and Erszebet feels she has our ODEC strongly dialed in. We should consider it.

  —MS

  From LTC Lyons:

  OMW with the usual. Break out your finest chopsticks!

  From Dr. Stokes:

  OK but setting a knife and fork for E. She won’t eat otherwise.

  —MS

  Post by Mortimer Shore on

  “General” ODIN channel

  DAY 887 (NEW YEAR’S DAY, YEAR 3)

  Happy New Year, everyone! I’m still a little buzzed (heh) from the festivities at Oda-sensei and Rebecca’s, but now that we are almost FOUR WHOLE HOURS into the new year I wanted to buckle down to work and send this out.

  As we prepare to power up the Chronotron for real (T-minus four days and counting, huzzah), Dr. Oda recommended that I send out some informal layman’s language on What Exactly Is a Chronotron. I’m pretty amped about this (so to speak) and really grateful that I’ve been able to move away from the SysAdmin role (a big hand to the staff who’s running all the stuff I used to manage, especially Gordon Healey, another MIT CS’ist who now gets asked all the questions about email servers, but hey, Gordie, I’m proof this place is all about job growth LOL).

  So just a reminder, I’m not qualified to explain WHY this works, because that’s the physics part where I’m a bonehead, but here’s a simplified take on HOW it works:

  The Chronotron is based on a theoretical model, which proposes that for the present-day universe that we all live in, there’s not just one past, and not just several alternate pasts, but an infinite number of them. Similarly, thi
s one single present also has an infinite number of possible futures. But our relationship to these infinite pasts and futures isn’t random—plausibility throws its weight around, per some freaky quantum mechanics stuff that Dr. Oda calls Feynman Diagram History Pachinko. If you’re really interested in the details of that, check in with him in his spare time (heh) and he will be happy to expound.

  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 t
here 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.