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

by Neal Stephenson

  “So,” she said, “magic will end in seventeen days no matter what I do, but in the next seventeen days, if I put this spell on myself, I will bring it back someday.”

  “Yes.”

  “What do I do for all the many long years that I am alive? How do I make my way? I am trained only to do magic.”

  “I don’t know,” I said, taken aback. “But I know that you land on your feet. When we meet, more than a century from now, you have been staying somewhere for many years where all your needs are taken care of, so somehow you must stumble across money. Perhaps you marry a wealthy man and inherit his fortune. Perhaps you become a schoolteacher or scientist or take up with the Fuggers—remember that name, Erszebet, and ODEC, and Facebook, and—” My mind whirled: What else was I supposed to tell her? What else had the ancient Erszebet claimed I’d told her? “I don’t know, Erszebet. I wish I did. All I know is that if you had not agreed to do this, I would not be here right now.”

  “I Sent you back?”

  “Not this time. But most of the times that I have been Sent places, you Send me.”

  She frowned. “Why do you want to be Sent so often?”

  “We work for the government of the United States. It requires us to move around through time.”

  Her eyes brightened for a moment. “Will I do that too? Move around in time?”

  “You never expressed an interest, but I suppose you could. We can discuss it—but only if you agree to put the spell on yourself and Send me forward to my own time.”

  She pursed her lips. “Why does magic end in seventeen days?”

  “It’s very complicated,” I said. “Technology—like everything you see here in the Crystal Palace—it interferes with magic. In just over a fortnight, an extremely significant technological achievement will occur and that will end magic.”

  “Why not just prevent the technological achievement?” asked Erszebet.

  “It’s too important to the rest of the world.”

  “More important than magic?”

  “Yes,” I said, and she looked displeased in a way that made it clear this would be harder than I’d anticipated.

  “Technology should not be more important than magic,” she said earnestly. Very earnestly, and naively, because she was actually only nineteen years old. Not one hundred and eighty appearing to be nineteen. “I will interfere with this technology. What is it?”

  “It’s too far away,” I said. “It’s something that happens in Prussia.”

  “I have friends in Prussia,” she said immediately. “I can communicate with them and tell them to sabotage whatever it is.”

  “That will cause diakrónikus nyírás,” I said.

  She looked terribly deflated. “I wish I did not know this,” she said.

  “There is no other way,” I said. I had never believed much in fate, but I was shaken by how remarkable it was, that I had been sent to this DTAP as an act of Gráinne’s treachery, and yet being here—it turned out—was unavoidable. Perhaps on other Strands I got here by different methods.

  “I need to think about this,” she said. “This is so much, so very much, to ask of anyone. Do you understand?”

  “I do. I wouldn’t ask if it was not incredibly important. Please let me give you the information that you need in case we are separated.” Out of my reticule I took my journal and a pencil, and wrote down ODEC, Facebook, the approximate date we were to connect in the future, Tristan Lyons, and Fuggers (Bank). Then, remembering that she had impressed Tristan with her understanding of the ODEC’s mechanics, I scribbled what fractured physics-engineering babble I could remember from five years earlier, when Tristan and Oda-sensei were first bonding over developing the ODEC. I tore the leaf from my journal and handed it to her. She hesitantly took it, looked at it, grimly tucked it into her own reticule. I felt faint with gratitude. “So you will say yes?” I said.

  “It would be easier if somebody else aged with me.” She looked relieved. “Perhaps my lover!”

  “That’s a bad idea,” I said. “Do you know the saying, three may keep a secret if two of them are dead? It will be hard enough for you to pass undetected.”

  “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 compone
nts 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 FROM 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.