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

by Neal Stephenson

  “I do not want to do this anymore,” she continued, sounding almost plaintive, which if you’ve ever heard Erszebet speak is a hard thing to imagine. “I am quitting. I will leave and do something el—”

  Tristan had closed his hand around her wrist and was trembling with the effort of not shaking her. “What’s happened to Mel? What is Gráinne doing? Explain yourself!”

  She looked cowed—or at least, as close to cowed as Erszebet Karpathy could ever look. “She wants to take over DODO and use it for her purposes,” she said in a strangely small voice. “From San Francisco, she has already Sent Mel somewhere else, someplace Mel will not be able to come back from.”

  “Where? When?”

  She avoided his gaze. “We agreed not to tell each other what we were doing. Like the French Resistance—it is safer not to know.”

  “How the fuck is this like the French Resistance?” Tristan growled, looking angrier than I’ve ever seen him. He let go of her and walked away, muttering to himself.

  Erszebet’s face had flushed such a bright shade of red that she was almost unrecognizable. I’d never known until this moment that she was capable of being embarrassed. “I know, of course.” She looked at Tristan. “And, if you think about it, so do you. You have always known where Mel would end up.”

  Tristan turned and looked at her, his anger suddenly replaced by a look that said, Of course. I get it. “London,” he said, “1851.”

  “Yes. We can speak more of it later. But today . . . Gráinne will be back from 1850 San Francisco,” said Erszebet. “She has Blevins wrapped around her pinkie finger. Frink too. She also has the affection of Mr. Shiny-face Gordon Healey. She tried to seduce Mortimer but she says he is too much of a nerd.”

  “Geek,” I corrected. “I’m a geek. If I were a nerd she’d have me in bed by now.”

  “There are other people,” said Erszebet. “I do not know all of them.”

  Tristan’s face still showed blank astonishment. “But what’s her goal? What does she want?”

  “She wants magic not to go away,” said Erszebet. “That is not the same thing as letting it go away and then bringing it back.”

  “Holy shit,” said Tristan under his breath. And then, as the full implication of this hit him, he repeated it much louder: “Holy shit!”

  “I will leave,” said Erszebet, with nervous decisiveness. “It is best if you leave too, Tristan Lyons.”

  “You’re not going anywhere without me,” said Tristan. “Not until you’ve told me everything you know.”

  Erszebet’s breathing suddenly seemed labored, as if it were dawning on her that she couldn’t casually walk away from her aborted mission. “I have already told you almost everything. But I will stay with you until we figure out how to help Melisande.”

  “Damn right you will,” said Tristan.

  “That is my choice,” she informed him, rebounding back to the fierce and scornful witch around whom we all love to walk on eggshells. “Do not treat me like I do not have a choice in this. It was my choice right now not to send you back to the Ice Age. I could have done it like that”—she snapped her fingers for emphasis. “Do not treat me like I have done something wrong. I have done something right. You will appreciate that or I will walk away.”

  Tristan collected himself. “Okay,” he said. “You’re right. Thank you for not annihilating me when you had the chance, I realize that maybe wasn’t easy for you.” A brief pause as he considered options. “We’ll go to Frank Oda’s house and bring him up to date.” He turned to me. “You’re logged in as being here with us right now. If we disappear they’ll want to know what you know. You should probably get out of here with us.”

  “We have an hour,” I pointed out.

  “What do you mean?” Tristan asked.

  I’d already punched in the commands to power down the ODEC. “Gráinne can’t come back until at least one of the ODECs is turned on for her.” I was checking out the day’s schedule on a monitor. “Earliest that could happen is an hour from now. During that time, I’ll get as much intel as I can and get it out of the building.” And because Tristan hesitated: “I’m on Team Oda. I don’t care about the rest of it.”

  “We should go,” said Erszebet to Tristan, heading back into the bio-containment ward, which was the only way out. “Everyone arrives soon. Let’s be far away.”

  They left, and I did some deep-breathing exercises to lower my heart rate back to normal, and then went about my morning as if it were just another day. Except that I also quietly plugged my biggest flash drive into my desktop computer, and began to download as much of ODIN as possible. The whole ODIN system—all of the message threads, NDAs, HR records, DEDE reports, security camera video, and other bureaucratic junk that had piled up on our servers during the five years that DODO had been in existence—would have filled my flash drive a thousand times over, so I tried to be selective, searching for documents that referenced Mel, Tristan, Blevins, and other key names, and focusing on certain ranges of dates when it seemed like a lot of important shit had gone down—like Halloween. Even so I ended up accidentally grabbing a lot of stuff like the sexual harassment policy that I didn’t really want or need, but I didn’t have time to be more selective. Now that it’s all up on GRIMNIR I can maybe go through and prune it later.

  I kept my head down as people came in and the office filled up as on any other day, except that head count was low because a lot of people were taking vacation. My cube is on the edge of the R&D group area, so I saw Dr. Oda come in and do a stand-up meeting with the crew that was going to be taking the ATTO out on the road—a driver, obviously, plus a MUON and two technicians who were going to be in the back, operating the equipment and running tests. Nothing too fancy—they just wanted to verify that the ATTO’s onboard power supply and comms features would operate nominally while the thing was bouncing around in real-world traffic conditions.

  My cube is also in earshot of the big open stairwell that runs up the middle of the building and so eventually I heard Gráinne’s voice—she had returned from the San Francisco DTAP, without Mel. I heard her go up to the floor above me and enter Blevins’s office. The door closed, and there were a few minutes of calm-before-the-storm before voices were raised and people up there started looking stressed out. A couple of DOSECOPS personnel came up the stairs double-time and blew past Blevins’s receptionist into his office and there was a lot more jawing. I was sitting there trying to be cool, watching the progress bar on my screen, wondering whether I should just yank the thumb drive and get out of there.

  Then the decision was made for me by a DOSECOP who had approached me from behind, a little bit sneaky-like, and told me I was wanted in Blevins’s office immediately. I made a glance toward the stairwell and saw another DOSECOP loitering there, keeping me in the corner of his eye, so I figured they had orders not to let me just bolt. So I got up and went up the stairs into Blevins’s office. He and Gráinne were in there with two of the higher-ranking DOSECOPS officers, including Major Isobel Sloane, who I kinda wondered if Gráinne had a bit of an influence over. Blevins was in his big leather swivel chair and Gráinne was standing behind him, sort of hovering, and both of them were glancing between me and a monitor on Blevins’s desk.

  “Where be they, then?” Gráinne demanded, eyes fixed on me in a way that made me feel like a prey animal.

  “Who?” I asked, trying to look stupid, which is actually something I’m pretty good at when I have to be.

  “Where’s Colonel Lyons?” demanded Blevins. “We know he and Erszebet came into the building early this morning within moments of your arrival, and that they both left a short time later.”

  And then Blevins pivoted the monitor around and let me see some security camera footage from earlier that morning: yours truly talking to Tristan and Erszebet.

  I have no idea what kind of look was on my face at that moment, but I can tell you how they looked: Blevins was sort of blank-faced and unnerved, while Gráinne was trying
to kill me with her eyes.

  “Yeah, I saw them, but they had a fight about something and they both stormed out. I wasn’t really paying attention because I’m a little hungover and anyhow those two are always bickering. I think Erszebet said she was going home.”

  “It’s a lying bit of treachery, is this one,” Gráinne declared.

  And then I glanced down at Blevins and saw a change come over his face. I know magic can’t work outside of an ODEC or an ATTO and that Blevins’s office was neither of those, but I swear it was like seeing a Jedi mind trick in action. Whatever Gráinne had done to Blevins during all of that time they’d spent together in ATTOs conducting psy-ops “research,” it still worked on him somehow. Maybe it wasn’t magic at all. Maybe it was just plain old psychological influence. But it was clear to me in that moment that Blevins had been reduced to a marionette.

  But not a very precisely controlled one, apparently.

  “You,” announced Blevins, with a flip of his manicured gray mane, “are fired.”

  “Don’t be firing him now!” Gráinne objected. “You want to be interrogating him, you’re not allowed to do that if he’s not yours anymore.”

  I caught the eye of Major Sloane, the ranking DOSECOPS officer, and I thought maybe she was taken aback a little too, so I was maybe mistaken about thinking she was Gráinne’s minion. I pointed out, “You’re not allowed to do it anyway because this is a free country and we don’t just interrogate people here. Maybe Major Sloane could explain some of the legalities.”

  Blevins thought about it for a moment, which was fine with me—I just needed time to download as much of the ODIN database as possible. Major Sloane looked back at me like she was taking the point I was making.

  Then Blevins called out to his admin that he wanted General Frink on the line as soon as possible, to discuss a matter of national security.

  “Where’s Mel?” I asked Gráinne.

  “Detained in San Francisco,” she answered, sort of indignant, like how dare I even.

  Getting Frink on the line happened incredibly quickly, apparently he was taking the day off with family and so he just answered his phone. The admin patched him through on voice and Blevins went off on a rambling, bizarro version of the last couple of days’ events, talking about how Mel was AWOL and now Tristan and Erszebet were up to no good and assumed to be on the lam with important national security secrets, and I, Mortimer, was in cahoots with them. And he couldn’t just call the cops because national security this and classified that, and so he wanted to invoke special powers and procedures and basically send out a DOSECOPS squad to round up Tristan and Erszebet and just let the chips fall where they may in terms of lawyers and arrest warrants and all of those other minor technicalities. Every so often he’d pause for breath and General Frink would grunt into the phone like, Yeah, I’m still here, I’m with you, bro. Finally Blevins didn’t so much finish up as wind down for lack of anything more to say and Frink says, “I am authorizing you to mobilize the DOSECOPS Extra-Facility Ops Team and get this done as surgically as you can.”

  Now, I’d never even heard of the EFOT before, so its existence must have been a pretty closely guarded secret, but everyone else in the room seemed to know exactly what it was. Major Sloane nodded and said, “Already mobilized, General Frink. When I got word earlier this morning that trouble was brewing, I sent out the call. We have two squads in the ready room fully armed and armored, deployable on short notice.” As if reassuring herself this was the case, she unlocked her phone and scanned her eyes over some information.

  “Well done,” Frink said over the phone.

  “And what is the word from our surveillance team at the East-Oda residence?” Blevins asked. I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised they’d already covered that angle.

  “Sir, Professor Oda is still on the premises here, of course,” said Sloane, “but Colonel Lyons and Erszebet were just reported at the residence with Mrs. East-Oda. Somehow they got in without being spotted, but they got careless once they were in there, and surveillance saw them in the kitchen.”

  “What are the odds that if we go in quickly, EFOT can take them into custody without it becoming a cause célèbre in the neighborhood?” Blevins asked.

  “Depends on whether Tristan puts up a fight,” said Major Sloane, “but I don’t imagine he would.”

  “Very well,” said Blevins. “Major Sloane, I am ordering you to deploy the EFOT squads to the East-Oda residence and—”

  He stopped in midsentence, a little surprised because every phone in the room had started ringing. Even mine. And there was a bit of a funny moment, just then—not “ha-ha” funny—when Gráinne clearly didn’t know what to do. Because Gráinne didn’t have a phone. And it was clear from the look on her face that she hadn’t been expecting this interruption—whatever it was.

  Everyone else was looking at their phones, so I did too, and what I saw was a text from one of the R&D crew saying, “OMG is that the ATTO on Channel 5?” And for a second I didn’t even catch the reference. I thought he was referring to some internal top-secret communications channel. It took a minute to realize he was talking about the local television network news station.

  Meanwhile there’s all kinds of confusion and consternation from others in the room, everyone shouting into their phones with their fingers plugged into the other ear, Gráinne looking around with kind of a wild desperate expression. “Dr. Blevins, can that thing stream live television?” I asked, nodding at his computer.

  “I haven’t the faintest idea,” he said. “You’re the sysadmin.”

  “Point taken,” I said. “Let’s all trot downstairs to my workstation and I’ll pull up the stream.” And before any orders could be issued to the contrary I ducked out the door and headed down the stairs. Frankly I didn’t care whether they followed me or not, but when I reached my cubicle and looked back over my shoulder I saw them all traipsing along behind me, on their phones or whatever, and all around the whole office was in pandemonium. I sat down and plucked the flash drive out of my workstation and slipped it into the little cargo pocket down on the calf section of my tactical pants, and then cleared my screen and brought up the live news feed from the local network TV station.

  And what we were seeing was the front of a Walmart, and the caption on the screen said it was in Lexington, Massachusetts. The same store where Magnus had hightailed it to a few weeks ago, before he’d coerced Constance Billy into Sending him back to Viking Paradise or wherever.

  The entire front of the store—the glass entryway where they keep the shopping carts—had been punched in by a huge impact, all the windows destroyed.

  Embedded in the middle of all that destruction we could see the rear of a tractor-trailer rig that had obviously just been driven straight into the front of the building at high speed, and come to rest just inside the store. Looked like it had obliterated some checkout lanes en route.

  The rig was a common type seen around port facilities: a steel shipping container resting on the bed of a trailer. The shipping container was green, with rust spots.

  We had all seen it before.

  It was the ATTO.

  Before I could ask the question, Major Sloane—who’d been on the phone—looked up at Blevins and said, “Confirmed. We lost contact with it immediately after it left the facility. Obviously, it was hijacked.”

  “Police radio transmissions report several large naked Caucasian males have emerged from the shipping container and are taking hostages,” said the TV reporter.

  Gráinne was the first to put it together. “Magnus!” she hissed, and then let fly with a torrent of rage in what I assumed was Gaelic. She’s always been pretty emotional, but I’d never seen her just completely lose it before. She’d have torn Magnus apart with her fingernails if he’d been in the room.

  “Major Sloane,” Blevins said, “get the EFOT squads and everything else you have to that Walmart immediately.”

  Everyone split up. I trotted downstairs and
walked out the front door and around the corner. And then I ran like a motherfucker. I just had a feeling it would be for the best.

  So that was the moment I went from being a geek with the coolest job a recent CS grad from MIT could ever in a thousand years hope to find . . . to being a renegade. A serious renegade. Anonymous has got nothing on me.

  That’s how we ended up here at the Odas’ place. I’m not even sure how Frank himself got back here. I mean, there’s an argument we should just GTF out of here and try to disappear, but (1) disappearing is hard and (2) we can’t just ditch the Odas and (3) we haven’t violated any laws and so there’s no reason the Cambridge PD should give a crap one way or the other.

  Rebecca is (natch) making us some tea. I’m not sure when she will relax her jaw muscles enough to ever open her mouth again, but that doesn’t mean she wants to throw us out.

  We’re sort of expecting Blevins will be sending someone to assassinate us, at least figuratively, very soon. Which is why I wanted to get this whole story written and uploaded.

  Journal Entry of

  Rebecca East-Oda

  FRIDAY AFTER THANKSGIVING

  Temperature 38F, and never mind about the rest of it.

  Extraordinary development: Tristan, Erszebet, and Mortimer have taken up residence in the basement and we presume Frank is no longer an employee of DODO, but it’s all rather disordered at the moment. The local news is airing the most remarkable story about a raid at the Lexington Walmart. Mel is stuck in 1851 London, thanks to the machinations of Gráinne. Tristan and Frank immediately preoccupied with sorting out how to build a homemade ODEC in the basement so that if Mel can find a KCW, she will have a safe re-entry point to the modern day (although since she wouldn’t know we had it, how would she know to be Sent there? Never mind. Better than taking no action.). Frank suggested shanghaiing one of the new ATTOs, toward which he has a wounded proprietary pride—ATTO #1 seems to be embedded in the aforementioned Walmart with naked berserkers pouring out of it, but three others have been constructed and six more are nearly complete. Mortimer is trying to set up a secure mini-intranet in our basement, as he has a flash drive called GRIMNIR with an enormous amount of ODIN material on it and he wants to upload it someplace stable so that it can’t fall out of one of the pockets of his ludicrous trousers. The cats have disappeared in the chaos.