The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. by Neal Stephenson
“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 are 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’v
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 it, 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.
The same was not true of the ship’s captain and the chopper pilot, who just became listless and generally out of it as soon as I shut the ATTO door. Felix, for his part, was smart enough to just hang out on top of the stack until this part of it was over.
Witches have no problem in ODECs/ATTOs, and Rebecca had been practicing enough with Erszebet so that she could give the captain and the chopper pilot a mild talking-to, there in the ATTO. Outwardly it just looked like a school librarian lecturing a couple of schoolboys who brought their books back a day overdue, but I could feel the GLAAMR all over the place as she made sure their memories of all this would be seriously muddled. Go Rebecca.
Then we opened the door and shut off the ATTO. The captain went back to his business without a word. The pilot climbed into his chopper and took off, headed back to Boston, taking Rebecca back with him (not that she isn’t game for an adventure at this point, but she’s exhausted after her first successful psy-ops mission and Frank will probably forget to eat if she’s not around).
As for the ship’s crew, all they know is that they saw some weird stuff happen, but it’s not in their interest to talk.
Felix and I went back into the ATTO, removed all of our ropes and carabiners from the outside, and locked the door behind us.
TL;DR Magnus hijacked the ATTO, the Fuggers hijacked it from Magnus, and now we have hijacked it from the Fuggers. As long as Felix and I keep it powered down, people can’t be Sent to it.
Now we wait.
ENTRY FROM PERSONAL JOURNAL OF
Karpathy Erszebet
BUDAPEST, TRAIN STATION, 28 JULY 1851
Dear Diary,
Today has been the most horrifying of my young life, although I fear it is only the beginning of many days, and weeks, and decades of woe.
This morning, Mother suddenly emerged from her room, descended the stairs, and called me into the great room, with a fierce determination on her face, but otherwise so wan as to look waxen, and so haggard as to be almost unrecognizable. “Erszebet,” she said, and seemed about to say more—
—so I stood there in a wholly receptive state awaiting her words. But she did not continue to speak to me directly. Rather she uttered ugly incantations I had never heard before, and a terrible feeling came over my body, as if I were bound with hot iron, while being frozen on the inside. I sc
—and then suddenly, it stopped. And I found myself lying prone across the ottoman. My skin felt unnaturally tight on me and I felt somehow heavier. Mother was lying prostrate near me, in the doorway, as pale as death.
“I’ve done it,” she said grimly. “Better bad magic than no magic at all. Now you will be here for Melisande Stokes.”
“I will undo it,” I said between clenched teeth, fighting off panic.
“I do not think so,” she said. She turned away from me and tried to raise herself up but lacked the strength.
“Give me an hour to regain my spirit, and I’ll undo the spell,” I insisted. “And then I will leave here and you shall never see my face again.”
“In an hour, there will be no more magic, anywhere upon this earth,” said Mother hoarsely, sinking back onto the carpet and covering her pale face with one pale hand. “The solar eclipse has already begun. Somewhere in Prussia, this Mr. Berkowski has set up his photography equipment. In mere minutes it will all be over.”
I have no words, dear diary, to express the feeling that came over me. I have refuted any connection to my parents; immediately I packed a small suitcase and left the house with no idea of where to go. Then I went to the train station and bought a ticket to Praha to stay with my paternal cousin, Dagmar, as I know a little bit of Czech.
Now even if I wished to help Miss Melisande Stokes to return to her time, I would be unable to. She is in part to blame for my predicament, for if she had not come, I would not have heard her remedy and then neither would Mother, and now I would be like Mother, or any other witch—a normal mortal woman. Such simplicity is to be denied me. It is a very bitter fate.
In the absence of any other remedy I suppose I must rely—as my foremothers have in the worst of their years—upon the mercy of the Fuggers.