The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O.

EXCERPTS FROM

SENATE INTELLIGENCE COMMITTEE HEARING

ON PROPOSED EXTENSION OF BLACK-BUDGET FUNDING

PROGRAM FOR DIACHRONIC OPERATIONS

DAYS 573–576 (LATE FEBRUARY, YEAR 2)

SENATOR HATCHER: Professor Oda, I draw your attention to this rather large document that was produced by DODO staff during the post-mortem analysis phase from the Les Holgate tragedy. Are you the author of the section of the report entitled “Diachronic Shear: A Layman’s Guide”?

FRANK ODA: Yes, I am.

HATCHER: To be frank, as a confirmed layman, I found that your explanations only made me more perplexed than I was to begin with. I have some questions about this.

ODA: I’ll try to be of service.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL LYONS: Senator Hatcher, if I may just insert a brief remark—

HATCHER: You may.

LYONS: This phenomenon isn’t well understood by anyone just yet. All we know is that it exists. We’ve seen it ourselves, and witches have attested to it. So any scientific hypothesis should be regarded as preliminary.

HATCHER: Thank you for that careful hedging, Lieutenant Colonel Lyons. I’m sure that your subordinates appreciate your paternal concern for their well-being. But I wish to address Professor Oda if that is fine with you.

LYONS: Of course. Thank you, Senator Hatcher.

HATCHER: Professor Oda, would you be so good as to explain the relationship of Jell-O to Diachronic Shear?

ODA: Excuse me, Senator. Jell-O?

HATCHER: Yes, it says here on page 793, third paragraph, that the properties of Jell-O, as in, Jell-O brand gelatin desserts, have something to tell us about the structure of the universe. And I found that to be a somewhat unusual statement from a man of science. I was wondering if you might elucidate it.

ODA: Yes, I remember that section. Traditionally we have tended to think of the past, present, and future as parts of a single continuous line—a thread, if you will.

HATCHER: And if I may just interrupt you there, Professor Oda, we have already been over this topic of quipus and so on ad infinitum, so we don’t need to belabor any more the idea that it’s not just a single thread but a whole network of them. I think that I understand it as well as any non-scientist can understand such a thing. Just as I felt I was achieving some level of comfort with that idea, you jumped to Jell-O. My great state happens to be home to no fewer than three different state-of-the-art industrial facilities that are part of the supply chain for Jell-O brand gelatin desserts and so naturally my interest was piqued. But I’ll be darned if I can follow your reasoning here.

ODA: If you have ever observed the properties of Jell-O, such as a molded dessert made of that substance—

HATCHER: I have, Professor Oda, on many occasions on the campaign trail.

ODA: You’ll know that it is flexible and deformable, up to a point. You can tap it with your spoon and it will jiggle. You can stretch it. But if you overdo it, the material will rupture. A crack will form, just like a crack in a block of stone. Later on, the crack may heal itself—the gelatin can knit itself back together.

HATCHER: Especially if you reheat it.

ODA: Exactly. Which is not true of cracks in granite and other brittle materials.

HATCHER: It is truly a marvelous property of Jell-O.

ODA: You could say so, yes.

HATCHER: But what is the relationship to this dreaded phenomenon of Diachronic Shear?

ODA: Viewed from the standpoint of the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, you could think of the past as being not a single thread but—

HATCHER: A quipu, yes, we’ve been over that.

ODA: When the quipu becomes sufficiently vast, it becomes instructive to transition, in our thinking, to a different mode, a continuous as opposed to discrete model, in which all of the threads effectively merge into a block of stuff that I am likening to Jell-O. When we send DOers back in time to carry out DEDEs, it’s like tapping the Jell-O with a spoon and making it jiggle a little bit. It creates internal stresses that the material is capable of withstanding. But if we try to change too much, too fast—

HATCHER: It cracks?

ODA: Yes.

HATCHER: It just splits wide open.

ODA: Just for a moment. But unlike a Jell-O dessert on your plate, the space-time continuum cannot simply fall apart. It is self-healing. The cracks must be sealed immediately. If you are far away from the crack, then you are safe—it’s like being far away from an earthquake. But if you are unlucky enough to be right along the crack boundary, then you are in for a bad time. The universe needs to decide whether you are going to go on existing or not.

HATCHER: You’re referring here to the so-called Tearsheet Brewery. What happened in that scenario?

ODA: You might think of the Tearsheet Brewery as like a lettuce leaf embedded in a Jell-O molded salad. Because of the unfortunate chain of events, this piece of lettuce was yanked out of the Jell-O and ceased to exist. A vacancy was left in its wake, which self-healed with the most terrible consequences for those unlucky enough to be near it.

HATCHER: Terrible consequences, indeed. Thank you, Dr. Oda. Madame Chair, I yield my time.

CHAIRMAN ATKINSON: Are there any further questions for Dr. Oda at this time? No? Very well, you may step down, Dr. Oda.

SENATOR COLE: Madame Chair, in light of Dr. Oda’s remarks I would like to call Lieutenant Colonel Lyons back.

[REDACTED]

SENATOR COLE: . . . the descriptions of the Tearsheet Brewery event are, in sum, so bloodcurdling, and the benefits of this mission so trivial in comparison—the recovery of an old book from a cask in Dr. Oda’s backyard!—that it must call into question why we are being asked to spend the taxpayers’ money on this sort of undertaking at any level, to say nothing of the exorbitant requests embodied in this proposed budget.

CHAIRWOMAN ATKINSON: I would like to thank my distinguished colleague for that impassioned, eloquent, and thorough statement. Was there a question for Lieutenant Colonel Lyons?

COLE: Why should we spend the taxpayers’ money on building a device that will only expose this great nation to additional risk?

LIEUTENANT COLONEL LYONS: Thank you, Senator Cole. For high-level strategic questions I might refer you to General Frink, but I’m happy to address your question on a more nuts-and-bolts level. As you point out, we need to keep the costs as low as possible while minimizing risk and maximizing benefits. From a cost point of view, I’ll remind the committee that the only work being actively funded right now, and for the next few months, is CRONE: Chronodynamic Research for Optimizing Next Engagement. We have cut back the number of DEDEs to the bare minimum needed to sustain progress and we have limited those to missions of an exploratory or experimental nature. Most of our current budget is devoted to pathfinding work on the Chronotron, a device whose entire purpose will be to minimize risk.

COLE: To minimize risk, you say.

LYONS: Yes, Senator. That is its purpose.

COLE: Both Dr. Oda and General Frink in their earlier testimony praised the Chronotron as a tool that would enable DODO to plan future missions. Would you concur?

LYONS: Yes, it duplicates the functionality of the quipus or other similar devices used by witches to navigate the different Strands of history, and combines that with a colossal database of historical facts. If we’d had it earlier, we’d have planned our first DEDEs differently and gotten results more quickly and more safely.

COLE: Or perhaps chosen some different DEDE altogether?

LYONS: Yes, it’s quite possible that with a functioning Chronotron we might have been able to identify something both easier and more profitable than recovering a Bay Psalm Book.

COLE: This is precisely what concerns me about building the Chronotron.

LYONS: I’m sorry, Senator Cole. Why would you be concerned about DODO having a tool that would enable us to make more informed choices? As opposed to just winging it?

COLE: When you just wing it, you are aware of the risk and the uncertainty, and inclined to be more cautious. When you have a high-tech tool giving you an illusion of omniscience, I am concerned that it will lead to greater risk-taking.

LYONS: I would argue that more information is always better. I would make an analogy to using computers to predict the weather. Back in the days when all we had was a weathervane and a barometer, a ship’s captain had to make his best judgment about what the weather was going to do, and trust his gut. Now that we have weather satellites and computerized forecasts, the captain can make informed decisions.

COLE: It is an attractive analogy, but it’s self-serving, since we all know that those satellites and computers actually work most of the time. You’re likening the Chronotron to familiar technology that we trust. How close is the Chronotron, really, to deserving that trust?

LYONS: As of today, about halfway through the CRONE phase, we have the individual processing units—the QUIPUs, or Quantum Information Processing Units—running according to spec, and we’re developing the manufacturing capability to produce them in larger numbers. By linking just a few of them together we’ve been able to achieve more accurate results than the quipu-like item Erszebet was using—

ERSZEBET KARPATHY: My számológép, which has now been lost because of the incompetencies and manipulations of this government.

ATKINSON: Ms. Karpathy, you are out of order.

COLE: Yes, thank you, Ms. Karpathy, we have already noted your remarks on this topic several times.

KARPATHY: My comments have not yielded results.

ATKINSON: Order! Order!

[REDACTED]

(NEXT DAY)

SENATOR EFFINGHAM: . . . moving on to Line 539 of the proposed budget, unless my eyes deceive me, you wish to allocate twelve full-time positions to historians?

MELISANDE STOKES: In order for the Chronotron to do its job it has to have a vast database of historical facts in memory. Going back to the weather analogy from yesterday, you can build a computer that’s really good at performing the mathematical calculations needed to predict weather, but it’s going to be totally useless unless you can feed it real-time information about actual weather conditions. Which is why we need weather balloons and satellites and so on—to supply that data. In the case of the Chronotron, we have these QUIPUs that know how to do the math, but they’re useless without historical data.

EFFINGHAM: I believe we covered this in Lines 420 through 487, which describe a program to extract this information directly from digitized history books already in the Library of Congress.

STOKES: Yes, that covers ninety percent of it, but some books contain ambiguous material that confuses our natural language processing algorithms. When that happens, the offending passage can be sent up the line to a human reader who can try to parse it. For obvious reasons we think that historians will do the best job.

EFFINGHAM: Very well, but it appears that their cost is being split with another subprogram called . . . DORC?

STOKES: We should probably come up with a different name for it, but DORC is the Diachronic Operative Resource Center. Colonel Lyons and I had to improvise our own training program when we learned how to speak, dress, and behave in colonial Boston and Elizabethan England. As DODO’s scope of operations expands to other DTAPs . . .

EFFINGHAM: Ah, yes, thank you for jogging my memory, Ms. Stokes. DORC is like the Starfleet Academy, if I may indulge myself with a reference to Star Trek.

STOKES: The Hogwarts.

EFFINGHAM: Yes, the training ground where DOers will acquire the requisite skills.

STOKES: Those budget entries begin around Line 950.

EFFINGHAM: Yes, my aide has found it for me.

STOKES: It makes sense to split the historians’ time so that they can help out with DORC activities.

EFFINGHAM: This is quite a large section of the budget and I may need additional time to go through it . . .

[REDACTED]

SENATOR EFFINGHAM: Line 1162 jumps out at me. Why do you need to spend so much money on swords?

LIEUTENANT COLONEL LYONS: It turns out that they are more expensive than you might think. They have to be hand-made from special kinds of steel.

EFFINGHAM: You are missing the point of my question, Colonel Lyons. Let me rephrase: this seems to imply that you are assembling a squad of warriors and assassins.

LYONS: Probably not assassins per se because of the risk of Diachronic Shear.

EFFINGHAM: You can’t just go back and kill Napoleon.

LYONS: It would be a terrible idea.

EFFINGHAM: Renewing my question . . .

LYONS: People back then—people of the upper classes—carried swords and other edged weapons all the time. And they knew how to use them. Any DOer, at least any male DOer, who went back pretending to be such a person, but who had no skill with using a sword, would be as conspicuous as someone who couldn’t mount a horse or speak the language.

EFFINGHAM: Are you expecting some of your DOers to engage in swordfights?

LYONS: I had to do it several times during my DEDE in London.

EFFINGHAM: But that was before you had the Chronotron—it was an improvised DEDE.

LYONS: Wars, battles, and duels are important events. In some cases, depending on what the Chronotron tells us, we may need DOers who are capable of effecting that kind of change—or at a minimum, staying alive in such environments.

EFFINGHAM: It sounds dangerous.

LYONS: It is, by definition. Only a small minority of DOers will be fighters. They make a big splashy impression in the budget because we have to buy them training equipment.

EFFINGHAM: But the majority will have other specializations?

LYONS: Yes. As an example, during the current CRONE phase, our efforts are focused on making discreet insertions into certain DTAPS, trying to develop and nurture our relationships with KCWs—

EFFINGHAM: With what?

LYONS: Known Compliant Witches.

EFFINGHAM: Ah. Yes. This takes us back to, er, Line 345 or thereabouts. Developing the witch network. The subway map.

LYONS: Yes, like the subway map that tells us how we can route our DOers from one DTAP to another and eventually get them home safe. Obviously, this relies on having friendly relationships with witches.

EFFINGHAM: Who tend to be, shall we say, peculiar individuals.

ERSZEBET KARPATHY: I find your tone offensive, Senator.

CHAIRWOMAN ATKINSON: Order!

EFFINGHAM: Go on, Colonel Lyons.

KARPATHY: Are you ignoring me? I said I find your tone offensive. I do not even want to be here, I am here only out of the goodness of my heart, but all of you, all of these millions of dollars and plans to rule the planet and all that, do you understand that all of it depends on me? And yet you use that tone with me? Who do you think you are?

EFFINGHAM: It’s all right, Madame Chair. Now, Ms. Karpathy—

KARPATHY: Don’t “Ms. Karpathy” me. Apologize for your tone.

EFFINGHAM: I apologize, Ms. Karpathy.

KARPATHY: I do not accept your apology.

EFFINGHAM: Why not?

KARPATHY: You do not sound at all sincere about it. It does not count if it is not sincere. I am going to leave this room and I want you to think about what happens if I do not return. Then when I do return, I expect you will apologize appropriately.

MELISANDE STOKES: Tristan, shall I—?

LYONS: Yeah.

ATKINSON: Let the record show that Ms. Erszebet Karpathy has left the hearing room without authorization at 1723 hours accompanied by Dr. Melisande Stokes.

EFFINGHAM: Colonel Lyons, you were saying?

LYONS: Erszebet has just given you an excellent example of why we require very specialized agents to win over witches. They don’t want money. They’re not the sort to join us on behalf of Truth, Justice, and the American Way. Every witch has her own agenda for why she might or might not help us. So we need to be able to find witches, but then also to win them over. Sometimes that can be a complicated undertaking, involving a series of actions that require various sets of skills.

EFFINGHAM: I suspect I’m not the only one in the room who would appreciate an example of what you mean.

LYONS: Okay, recently we wanted to establish a foothold in the Balkans for reasons that General Frink can explain if you need to know, so we did research to anticipate where a witch was, and then we Sent back one of our agents to find the witch. Well, he found her, and she did agree to Send him back here, but she wasn’t interested in being on call for us, so to speak, unless we made it worth her while. Her husband was imprisoned, so she told our DOer that if he could get the husband out of prison, she’d work with us.

EFFINGHAM: Why didn’t she just, you know, use magic to get him out?

LYONS: With respect, magic isn’t the same thing as omnipotence, Senator. It’s a hereditary skill set, really, that’s all. Anyhow, our fellow who we Sent back there, his language skills are first-rate and he’s a tremendous athlete and good at problem-solving, but he’s not much of a schmoozer and he doesn’t have the skills that would assist in a jailbreak. So the witch Sent him back here, but said she didn’t want to hear from DODO again unless we could get her husband out of jail. If we’d had somebody who specialized in picking locks or was a general escape artist or whatever, we could have Sent that person back. We didn’t have anyone like that, so we had to try bribing the prison guard, but we did not succeed.

EFFINGHAM: Bribe them with what? According to this document, you can’t take anything back in time with you.

LYONS: That’s correct.

EFFINGHAM: So what did you try to bribe him with?

LYONS: Um. Mel—Dr. Stokes—she went back because. She was willing to try. Bribing him with. What she brought with her.

EFFINGHAM: Her body?

LYONS: Yes.

EFFINGHAM: You’re saying she

[REDACTED]

LIEUTENANT COLONEL LYONS: The utter failure of this effort led us to conclude we needed an actual sex worker, or at least somebody capable of passing as one.

SENATOR EFFINGHAM: I yield, Madame Chairwoman.

CHAIRWOMAN ATKINSON: I recognize Senator Villesca.

SENATOR VILLESCA: Colonel Lyons, I hope you appreciate that prostitution is illegal in this great country of ours, except in certain rural parts of Nevada.

LYONS: The prostitute would be plying her trade in sixteenth-century Balkan territory, sir. Or possibly his trade, based on Dr. Stokes’s reception. Anyhow, we haven’t found one yet.

VILLESCA: You’re saying you want to use taxpayer money to recruit prostitutes.

LYONS: That’s not a typical example, sir. We need people with specific skill sets like masons and soldiers and people with specific athletic abilities, and we need people who can blend in—like I said, schmoozers. Actors. Whatever it takes.

GENERAL FRINK: Madame Chairwoman, if I may?

ATKINSON: Proceed.

FRINK: With all due respect, Senator Villesca, it’s not like taxpayer money has never been used to hire prostitutes before. I know you’re aware of that.

[REDACTED]

(NEXT DAY)

GENERAL FRINK: . . . an ongoing theme in the last few days’ deliberations has been the need for wisdom and discretion in future DODO operations. Senator Hatcher has reminded us of the need to avoid any future incidents such as the one in which Les Holgate sacrificed his life for his country. Senator Cole has expressed concern that a fully functional Chronotron may lead us into taking risks we might not otherwise consider. With Senator Effingham, we’ve had an illuminating discussion of the importance of learning from the wisdom of experienced professional historians. Finally, Senator Villesca has spoken with great passion and eloquence of the need to maintain moral standards that we can all be proud of. It is for all these reasons that I am pleased to introduce Dr. Blevins of Harvard University as the new acting head of the Department of Diachronic Operations. He replaces Lieutenant Colonel Lyons, who is being reassigned to command of DODO’s “boots on the ground” operational unit, and who will henceforth report to Dr. Blevins. Though the academic world knows Roger Blevins as a peerless scholar, those of us with security clearances are aware of his long service to his country as

[REDACTED]

SENATOR HATCHER: . . . even for one of your distinguished credentials, this is an important career transition, Dr. Blevins, and so I would like to be the first to congratulate you. Frankly, I am pleased to see that you are being moved off of the Advisory Board. I myself am on more advisory boards than I can even remember, and not one of them ever asks me for advice.

DR. BLEVINS: I’ve had similar experiences, Senator, and this is why I took the unusual step of establishing an office within DODO headquarters in Cambridge, and spending time there on a regular basis. I’ll now hand that off to Dr. Rudge, who I most certainly will be asking for advice on a regular basis.

HATCHER: How do you see that facility developing as we transition out of the CRONE phase? What does it look like in a year? Two years?

BLEVINS: As a very special hybrid of tech start-up, liberal arts college, and Special Forces base. Our present thinking suggests we’ll need about a dozen kinds of specialists, divided into classes, such as tracker, fighter, entertainer, and so on. All of them will need immersive training in the language and ethos of whatever DTAP they go to. Meaning we also need to hire people to train them in those things—manners, customs, how to put on and take off clothes, fighting styles. All of that falls under the heading of the Diachronic Operative Resource Center, whose acting director will be my student, Dr. Melisande Stokes.

SENATOR EFFINGHAM: The budget and head count envisioned for DORC are impressive.

BLEVINS: The personnel expenses add up as quickly as the technical expenses. That’s why the budget is as large as it is. We obviously can’t outsource any of these services, given that there is evidence that the governments of [REDACTED] and [REDACTED] are already engaged in this kind of training program. Whoever works for us has to be kept very close to the mothership, as it were, and that kind of loyalty doesn’t come cheap.

EFFINGHAM: How do you know that [REDACTED] and [REDACTED] are ahead of us in this?

BLEVINS: That’s classified, Senator, even for the purposes of this hearing.

EFFINGHAM: Be that as it may, I question whether a linguistics student with no management experience is equipped to manage a department of that size.

BLEVINS: Yes. Most of the day-to-day burden of HR, facilities, and so on will fall under the Conventional/Contemporary Operations Department for which we have been fortunate to recruit a very able manager in Macy Stoll. With those managerial and administrative tasks out of the way, Dr. Stokes will be free to concentrate on the historical and linguistic research that is her specialty.

HATCHER: Well, I’m in no position to assess the technical requirements and their associated costs—I’ll leave that to my honored colleagues on this hearing committee with more expertise in this field, such as Senator Effingham—but having compiled different staffs, for different purposes, over the years, I certainly feel capable of assessing your personnel hiring goals. So I will be submitting my opinion that the budget you seek is tied into your laying down very clear goals for who exactly you wish to hire, and why. That includes reports on all potential witches you’d be working with in other DTAPs. Can you do that for me?

BLEVINS: I’ll see to it that Dr. Stokes writes up something specific, as soon as she has calmed Ms. Karpathy.

HATCHER: Out of curiosity—a curiosity I suspect is shared by other members of this panel—how exactly does one calm Ms. Karpathy?

BLEVINS: It always seems to help to listen to her spend a few uninterrupted minutes besmirching the reputations of certain people, with Colonel Lyons being a particularly frequent target of abuse.

HATCHER: Is it accurate to describe her, then, as a truculent and abusive team member?

LIEUTENANT COLONEL LYONS: If I may, Madame Chair, it is accurate to describe her as the only witch available to us at the present moment. That pretty much trumps any other description.

GENERAL FRINK: What Colonel Lyons is trying to say, Senator, is that unlike politicians, her job security does not depend on other people’s approval.

BLEVINS: Not that General Frink is suggesting there’s anything inappropriate about politicians having that dependency.

FRINK: Yeah, that’s right. Thank you for clarifying that, Dr. Blevins.

BLEVINS: So to get back to the point, you’re asking us to create two things. First, a personnel profile of our most desired hires. We’re happy to do that. I can create a template as soon as this hearing is adjourned. Colonel Lyons and Dr. Stokes can help me out as their schedules allow. Second, a template for recording how we determine who to approach as a potential KCW.

HATCHER: That works for me. I yield the floor to my colleagues for further questions.

FROM LIEUTENANT GENERAL OCTAVIAN K. FRINK

TO ALL DODO DEPARTMENT HEADS

DAY 581 (MARCH, YEAR 2)

After several grueling days of congressional hearings, I am pleased to announce that DODO’s budget has been approved and sent on to POTUS for signature. All DODO staff are to be thanked for their hard work over the difficult months since the tragic and heroic demise of our friend and colleague Les Holgate. During that span of time DODO has been stripped down to the bare metal, as it were, and rebuilt into a new kind of organization that we can all be proud of.

New resources and responsibilities naturally bring organizational changes in their wake. Effective immediately, Dr. Roger Blevins is the overall head of the Department of Diachronic Operations, reporting directly to me, with a dotted line to Dr. Constantine Rudge at IARPA. To him will be reporting the heads of various subdepartments, as bulleted below:

- Dr. Melisande Stokes, acting head of the Diachronic Operative Resource Center.

- Macy Stoll, head of C/COD (Conventional/Contemporary Operations Department).

- Dr. Frank Oda, head of Research.

- Lieutenant Colonel Tristan Lyons, head of Diachronic Operations, which for obvious reasons will be organized and run along the lines of a military unit.

With Dr. Blevins’s change in status, the Advisory Board is reduced, at least temporarily, to one member, that being Dr. Constantine Rudge.

I hope that the rest of you will join me in welcoming Ms. Stoll to the organization. Her long experience managing operational matters in various civilian and military environments will no doubt prove of enormous value to DODO during the coming era of rapid expansion.

Top-level direction on DODO’s mission will be supplied during a meeting within the next few days at the Trapezoid.

Best wishes to all of you and may God bless America.

Gen. Octavian Frink

ABOUT ME

NAME: Mortimer Shore

OFFICIAL TITLE: Systems Administrator

UNOFFICIAL TITLES: What’s-his-name, the Tall Guy with the Beard, the Sword Geek, the IT Guy, Hey, What the F*** Happened to my Email?

BIO: Hey all, as DODO keeps expanding there seems to be a lot of colorful rumor floating around about how I came to work here and so I thought I would tell the whole story.

TL;DR: I got recruited out of a park to prevent Tristan from getting his ass kicked in a swordfight and they found out I was a CS major.

EDIT: This is mostly about computers. If you are visiting this page because you are a DOer and you think you might be about to get into a swordfight, scroll to the end.

So, as you can probably tell from my appearance and mannerisms, I am California born and bred, my father and his father before him (heh) worked in commercial building construction in SoCal, punching out Home Depots and parking garages and making enough money to put me in a private school when I turned out to be kind of a screw-up academically. Turned out I was just bored and over-medicated LOL so they cut off my Adderall and put me on the robotics team where I made the mistake of telling them I knew how to weld (because of my dad’s company) and so then I was just the welding slave for a long time until they finally let me start writing code. Long story short, I ended up at MIT doing both, which is to say, metal and code. The code part of it is pretty self explanatory: an MIT CS major can pretty much always get a job, a fact that was important to my dad who was paying a lot of money to put me through school.

As you have probably noticed if you work at DODO, I hang out near the server room. During my first six months at DODO I spent most of my time setting up ODIN, the Operational DODO Intranet. If that sounds like a long time, let me just say that getting a full-featured wiki to run under Shiny Hat is no picnic! I still put out IT fires and help people with their email, etc. when not working with Dr. Oda on the Chronotron. We’re recruiting more IT staff to keep our systems stable and secure, so pretty soon I’ll hopefully be a full-time Chronotron geek.

A word about metal. The substance, not the genre of music (though I like both!):

This is the part of my story that seems to cause the maximum amount of confusion and rumor among new hires at DODO and so this is the part you’ll want to read if you are having trouble understanding why a newly minted MIT CS major is helping people with their email for a small gov’t agency instead of making a zillion dollars in a start-up LOL.

My dad was a civil engineering major with a minor in metallurgy and so this runs in the family—a lot of commercial buildings are made out of steel, and in California where earthquakes are a problem there are a lot of rules around what kinds of steel to use, how to weld it properly, etc. I picked a lot of this up through osmosis when I was a kid, and when I was doing robotics in high school, and the smart kids wouldn’t let me write code, I ended up doing a lot of industrial art: robots with flame throwers, rotating blades, etc. So, I ended up doing a double major in Comp Sci and metallurgy.

At this point I could say a lot about steel. A LOT. But I’m not going to. If you want to talk about steel FOR A LONG TIME, come by my desk with some beers LOL. Point is, I am a steel geek.

When you are a steel geek you inevitably end up talking about swords. Sort of like when you are a climber you end up talking about Mt. Everest.

I got interested in swords when I put some crappy homemade blades on one of my robots and they kept breaking/bending and I couldn’t understand why.

My interest in swords led to an interest in swordfighting. Not modern fencing, which is cool and everything but totally different. I mean historical swordfighting with actual things that look like swords.

As a freshman I joined a LARPing group that did foam fighting on the Esplanade, but that was just a gateway drug to a real HEMA (Historical European Martial Arts) group that fought with real steel blades (blunt obviously) using documented historical techniques.

During one of our practices I was approached by Rebecca (East-Oda) who asked me a lot of questions. Not the usual dumb questions like “is that a real sword?” but like super nitty-gritty questions that clued me in something weird was going on. She took me back to her and Frank’s house and NDAed me, and like ten minutes later I was with Tristan teaching him the Four Grounds and the Four Governors of George Silver, the Elizabethan backsword master who hated Italian rapier fighters with an unquenchable fiery hate LOL.

Later I found out I had passed a background check, and after I had peed in a jar and all the other stuff I was sworn in and have been working for DODO ever since—I guess seven or eight months now. I am responsible for having set up most of DODO’s basic IT infrastructure such as the intranet, the wiki, etc. but don’t hate on me because it was all supposed to be temporary LOL.

Dr. Frank Oda was also kind enough to take me under his wing and get me in on the ground floor of the Chronotron project. DISCLAIMER RE THAT: I am not a physicist and so all of the quantum mechanics underlying the chipset of the QUIPUs (the Quantum Information Processing Units) is totally incomprehensible to me. All I know about it is that it runs really, really fast and solves problems that would take forever using traditional non-quantum computation.

Fortunately for dumbass computer scientists like me, at one end of each QUIPU unit there’s a connector where you can jack in a plain old Ethernet cable, and from that point onwards it just looks like a traditional computer, albeit a really fast and weird one, to the outside world. All of the cables from all of the QUIPUs (as of this writing, 128 of them—soon to be 256) feed into the Chronotron itself which, never mind what people say about it, is JUST A BIG OLD COMPUTING CLUSTER that happens to be tied in to a lot of historical databases, etc. Which is more my speed.

In layperson’s terms: if it has to be dunked in liquid helium to work, I don’t understand it. If it’s in a rack with fans blowing on it, that’s a different story.

—IF YOU ARE ABOUT TO BE IN A SWORDFIGHT—

This comes up a lot and I am working on upgrading the relevant wiki pages, but people seem to end up here anyway LOL.

My basic advice: DON’T DO IT! It is ridiculously, fantastically dangerous. Modern people are calibrated for a whole different level of danger acceptance.

Admittedly, an unfortunate precedent was set by Tristan’s getting into a rapier-vs.-backsword duel in DTAP 1601 LONDON. This is fully documented in the relevant after-action reports, which, as our roster of DOers has expanded to include others in the “Fighter” class, have achieved somewhat legendary status within DODO. But this IN NO WAY suggests that swordfighting works as a standard operating procedure.

If you’re in the process of getting “trained up” to carry out a specific DEDE (Direct Engagement for Diachronic Effect), you’ll know that each DTAP has a highly localized weapons environment. What is true in one DTAP might not be the case in another that is fifty years or fifty miles away from it.

So, you have to start by knowing exactly what weapon type(s) can be carried by an individual of your assumed social class in your DTAP without freaking people out.

Since you’re going back naked, you’ll have to score weapons after arriving. If you’re fortunate enough to be visiting a well-established node in DODO’s witch network, there may be some weapons waiting for you there. In my copious spare time LOL I plan to visit those DTAPs to inspect the available weapons with the modern eye of a trained metallurgist and to check them for fatal flaws. But, never mind what you’ve seen on the History Channel, these people really didn’t know dick about steel and so most of it is crap, and likely to break at the worst possible time.

If you are “breaking trail” in a new DTAP, then once you have evaded pursuit and stolen some clothes, you’ll have to acquire your weapons in whatever way you can (“proceeding adaptively” LOL). This means evaluating them through visual inspection and, if possible, by subjecting them to certain simple tests which I can explain to you—eventually I’ll document these on the wiki.

Assuming you have a good sword, you’ll have to know how to fight with it. Which starts by defending yourself from the other guy. Which means you have to know how he fights. Which means learning the martial arts techniques prevailing in your DTAP. One day, I hope we’ll have a vast library of every known historical swordfighting system, but as with so many other things at DODO we are just getting started—just scratching the surface. Here’s what we are currently sort of good at:

- Late medieval backsword (a personal fave)

- Italian rapier

- Medieval longsword

Come and talk to me if you really think you need training/instruction in these. In the meantime, it helps if you’re in some kind of decent physical condition and you know where your body is in space—we’ve had good luck with wrestlers, circus acrobats, gymnasts, and dancers. People who spend all day looking at pixels, not so good.

Stay tuned on ODIN for more relevant pages as I have time to write ’em!

Peace out

Mortimer

DODO WHITE PAPER

BRIEF NOTES ON “WENDING”

(formerly, “super-witches”)

BY REBECCA EAST-ODA

Submitted to ODIN archive, Day 580

(Note to readers: Please consider this a temporary placeholder in lieu of a more thoroughly researched document to follow. I am feeling an urgency to head off the increasing use of the term “super-witch” and replace it with a more reasoned approach. —REO)

KCWs Fitch (colonial Boston) and Gráinne (Elizabethan London), while employing similar techniques in most respects, exhibited a marked difference in their understanding and utilization of Strands.

As best as we can make out, Goody Fitch had a general knowledge that multiple Strands existed, sufficient for her to conduct practical magical operations.

Gráinne, by contrast, appears to have had an additional ability that Goody Fitch didn’t (and perhaps couldn’t even have imagined). Namely, she had the ability to shift her stream of consciousness from one Strand to another, effectively inhabiting different versions of her body on different Strands. Gráinne jumped “sideways” from one to another as it suited her purposes. In this manner she was able to encounter and re-encounter Tristan on different Strands and thereby to collaborate more mindfully and effectively with him as he repeated the same DEDE.

“Wending” is a term used by Gráinne to describe this behavior.

Erszebet seems to be somewhere in between Fitch and Gráinne. She understands the concept of Wending and can speak about it, but seems to consider it a little beyond the pale of normal magical practice. Further conversations will be needed to better understand her misgivings on the topic. I can think of two possible explanations: (1) it is somehow dangerous or disagreeable, so Erszebet doesn’t want to do it, or (2) Erszebet simply lacks the required degree of magical power and skill; understandable given she came of age as magic was waning.

The second hypothesis has led some within DODO to posit the idea that Gráinne is a “super-witch” with a degree of magical power that places her head and shoulders above other witches.

The “super-witch” concept is now beginning to influence DODO’s planning process, as some members of the staff have begun looking for others of this type. It is supposed, for example, that Winnifred Dutton (1562 Antwerp) may be another “super-witch.”

The purpose of this document is to discourage further use of the “super-witch” idea for which we really have no firm evidence yet, and instead request that DODO staff use the terminology “Wending” to describe the specific behavior we want. The ability to Wend will undoubtedly make a Known Compliant Witch (KCW) a more effective collaborator, and so let us seek out KCWs who know how to do it, rather than making the “super-witch” distinction which is not supported by evidence and which is pejorative to Erszebet Karpathy—the one witch we actually have to work with in the present day.

Diachronicle

DAY 584 (EARLY MARCH, YEAR 2)

In which everything expands

AS DODO EXPANDED, THE ORGANIZATIONAL hierarchy, and its attendant bureaucracy, evolved accordingly. It was both electric and irritating to witness a corporation blooming around us, leaving us sometimes marooned in the middle of it. I was grateful for Mortimer, the IT geek specialist, who brought a touch of whimsy to the chunks of that bureaucracy he managed. Even more grateful than I was Rebecca, whom DODO decided to hire given that she was frequently underfoot anyhow, not only asking lots of intelligent questions but frequently answering them. She was also very good with Erszebet, and that could be said about nobody else except myself, who was increasingly beleaguered with procedural developments. Once Mortimer got the intranet (ODIN) up and running it began to take up too much fucking bandwidth a lot of my time.

It also altered how we did things. Within a matter of months Tristan and I went from being almost Siamese twins to actually seeing each other in person only at the (snazzy new) snack bar or the occasional lunch out; most of our engagement was via ODIN channels. This had an odd effect on our friendship: after the electricity of first meeting, there had been a frisson between us that we never acknowledged (although it was strong enough for others to comment upon)—but we certainly enjoyed it. (Or at least, I confess to enjoying it, and to perceiving within him clues that he did as well.) Then, spending so much time together, we grew accustomed to our closeness, so that we went from not-quite-first-date to old-married-couple almost seamlessly.

Until ODIN came along.

Once Tristan became just an icon on the nearest screen, I often forgot that he was a living, breathing, winsome Male, and so when we would encounter each other—in the copy room, grabbing a handful of grapes, waiting for a meeting with Blevins . . . that initial electricity, that exquisitely repressed well-hello-there energy, erupted all over again, and never quite settled because we were never in each other’s presence continuously for quite long enough.

THE ONE EXCEPTION was in early March of the second year. Tristan and I flew to DC for a meeting with General Frink and Dr. Rudge at the Trapezoid. I will only detail the mental take-away, but the emotional and visceral takeaway was that I got to spend two entire plane rides alone in a private plane with a hot bad-ass dude handsome gentleman, who crossed his legs carefully when I looked at him too long and who could make me grin inwardly (only inwardly, I assure you) merely by uttering my surname in a particular tone. Now that I know there will never be such plane rides again, I wish to state that despite the violation of DODO’s baroque sexual harassment policy, it really is a fucking shame regrettable that we did not make better use of that privacy.

But I digress. Back to the mental takeaway:

Based on Oda-sensei’s most recent estimates, the goal became to have a fully functioning Chronotron by the end of the year, at which point we would be able to undertake formally planned DEDEs—DODO’s chartered purpose. Meanwhile, we would postpone any outcome-oriented missions. No more moneymaking gambits, etc. After the Chronotron was online, we would be able to run such missions far more safely and efficiently.

In the meantime, those of us on the payroll would not be idle. Do not think it, reader! As well as the office-speak mumbo-jumbo to become familiar with, there were still certain diachronic jaunts it was deemed safe to undergo, those being:

First and above all, to seek out and convert witches and other abettors, thus creating a network of Known Compliant Witches (KCWs) and safe houses.

Second, to fill in the data gaps the Chronotron noted as it was uploading digitized information from primary and secondary historical material—in other words, factoid-finding missions (what did a particular intersection in Rome look like in 44 BC; how large were daikon in pre-modern Japan; where did George Washington sleep the night of 11 January, 1779, etc.). Not only was this useful for the Chronotron data workers, but it would also help us to break in new recruits with low-stakes missions.

Third (in a similar vein), to make reconnaissance missions to DTAPs we knew would be important for future work. Chief amongst these was Constantinople circa 1203 (more on that in a moment) and Renaissance London, both of which would be major hubs within the KCW network.

Fourth, we were free to rove for the purposes of counterintelligence: to keep an eye on potential diachronic activities of our strategic rivals. Not that the identity of those rivals had been shared with us.

As to Constantinople. That jewel in the crown of the Byzantine Empire. That continent-straddling stronghold of the Eastern Orthodox Church. That famously inviolable walled city ruled by generations of interbred usurping nut-jobs a pantheon of families so tortuously intertwined as to be the basis of our modern adjective byzantine. This was a fantastically complex city with a wide range of languages and cultures, so it was required to build up a large database including not just linguistics but maps, etiquette, cultural practices, weapons, and other things that our DOers would need to know in order to function in that time and place—the time being circa 1203, the Fourth Crusade (not, for the history buffs among you, the siege a few days later, or the occupation, or the final shitstorm destruction of the city, but Galata Tower). A lot of that research fell into my lap, in my role as head of the amusingly named Diachronic Operative Resource Center.

The DNI (that would be Frink) wished to stabilize certain national and ethnic frontiers in Eastern Europe, the Balkans, and Turkey that had begun to show considerable GLAAMR—an indication that Someone Else might be conducting diachronic operations in an effort to shift them. Between Erszebet’s iPad Quipu (her IQ, as it were) and Frank Oda tapping into the elemental quipus of the Chronotron, we were able to calculate backwards that our best counter-action was to move a particular Orthodox relic from one tent to another in the Byzantine Emperor’s army camp when his army fled from the Crusaders after the siege of Galata Tower.

Regarding the developments of the witch network: as well as Constantinople 1203, we also sought KCWs in a range of intermediate eras and locations where we perceived it would be easier for us to conduct operations (or, as I might have said before I learned to talk the talk, “do things”). New ODECs were being built, but as we had only one witch—who was temperamental on the best of days—we had to “leverage” (General Frink’s term) Erszebet by having her Send DOers to familiar locations: pre-1851 safe houses where we had KCWs who could then forward our agents onward through the network.

The “trunk line” of the network, so to speak, was to be anchored at one end in 1203 Constantinople and on the other in 1602 London, where we had re-established connections with Gráinne and her friend Rose. Thanks to Rose’s intercession, we now had access to a secure safe house on the outskirts of the city, equipped with clothes, weapons, and other DOer resources. The other major stop on the line needed to be Antwerp circa 1560, for reasons beyond the scope of this narrative. I had attempted to cultivate a relationship there with one Winnifred Dutton, an English witch resident in that DTAP. Knowing her own worth (she had admirably influential family relations and appeared capable of Wending), she was standoffish toward my initial queries; eventually she decided she would assist us in exchange for a certain hard-to-find herb known as kalonji.

Rather conveniently for us, kalonji grew in profusion in the palace garden of Blachernae . . . in thirteenth-century Constantinople.

Post by Dr. Roger Blevins to Dr. Melisande Stokes

on private ODIN channel, 15:32:37

DAY 584 (EARLY MARCH, YEAR 2)

Dr. Stokes:

...

Post by Dr. Roger Blevins to Dr. Melisande Stokes

on private ODIN channel, 15:32:59

DAY 584 (EARLY MARCH, YEAR 2)

Dr. Stokes:

...

Post by Dr. Roger Blevins to Dr. Melisande Stokes

on private ODIN channel, 15:33:07

DAY 584 (EARLY MARCH, YEAR 2)

Dr. Stokes:

...

Post by Dr. Roger Blevins to Dr. Melisande Stokes

on private ODIN channel, 15:52:34

DAY 584 (EARLY MARCH, YEAR 2)

Dr. Stokes:

Disregard previous posts. I had to find Mortimer Shore (on the roof of the building engaging in what appeared to be a sword duel) and get him to explain to me the proper usage, in the modern world, of what I call the “return,” and he denominates the “enter,” key.

I’m losing track of the different types of DOers. Could I trouble you or Lieutenant Colonel Lyons to post a canonical taxonomy?

Cordially,

Roger

DODO MEMORANDUM

CANONICAL TAXONOMY OF DIACHRONIC OPERATIVE TYPES

BY LTC TRISTAN LYONS

POSTED Day 585

For clarity in internal communication and record-keeping, please employ these terms, and these terms ONLY, when referring to different types or categories of DOers. If you think of some other new category that needs to be added, please see me or Dr. Stokes before editing this list.

FORERUNNER

(deprecated synonyms: SUICIDE BOMBER, DEAD MAN RUNNING, SCHNEIDER)

One who is Sent to a DTAP in which DODO has no Known Compliant Witch, safe house, or other contacts/infrastructure whatsoever. Considered the most elite and difficult-to-recruit subclass of DOer, Forerunners must possess all the skills of a STRIDER (see below) combined with those of a FIGHTER, LOVER, or CLOSER.

FIGHTER

(deprecated synonyms: CONAN, WARRIOR)

One who specializes in missions where, to put it politely, martial attributes are of the essence. Since every DTAP has a unique environment surrounding weapons, fighting styles, and martial culture, competence in fighting is only a part of the skill set required to be a successful Fighter. It is equally important to know how and when to fight.

LOVER

(deprecated synonyms: REDACTED)

Seems self-explanatory. But to counter some misconceptions, actually having sex is not part of the job description. We prefer to focus on the unique combination of personal charm, appearance, and social skills needed to influence historical decision makers who have been identified as “libido-motivated.”

CLOSER

A new category best described as LOVER without the carnal element. One who is highly skilled at changing someone’s mind without hurting or seducing them.

STRIDER

(deprecated synonyms: SNAKE EATER)

Wilderness survival expert.

SPY

Specialist in stealthy, unobtrusive observation and (since we can’t bring notes/sketches home with us) memorization.

SAGE

Subject matter expert, such as a historian or linguist, sent to a DTAP to investigate a specific question of interest to DODO.

MACGYVER

Typically a biologist, chemist, materials scientist, or engineer with exceptional aptitude for building devices, concocting medicines, etc., using natural and man-made substances available in a given DTAP.

MEDIC

Medical professional with additional training required for practice in pre-modern conditions.

A final note: the above are not mutually exclusive. More often than not, a given DOer will fit into more than one of these categories.

Post by LTC Tristan Lyons on

“Recruiting” ODIN channel

DAY 620 (EARLY APRIL, YEAR 2)

As has been noted repeatedly by Dr. Blevins and others higher up the chain of command, recruitment of DOers has proceeded more slowly than we would like. Finding people with the right combination of security clearance, skill set, and physical attributes is a very demanding challenge. I’ve lost track of the number of promising candidates we’ve had to reject because of dental work alone.

As DORC continues to staff up new HOSMAs (Historical Operations Subject Matter Authorities) and trainers, we’ll increasingly be able to “grow our own” DOers by selecting promising candidates and training them in the requisite languages and skills. We’ve already seen progress in that area with new HOSMAs coming online almost daily, specializing in the languages and cultures of late medieval Europe and the Byzantine Empire. But a DOer can only learn a language so fast.

In the meantime, we are therefore going to have to rely on a small number of extremely exceptional people who just happen to walk in the door with all the capabilities we need—needles in a very large haystack. Fortunately, General Frink and Dr. Rudge have been active in connecting us to the existing recruitment networks that the United States Government and its allies have established in the military and intelligence sectors, giving us broader access to the aforementioned haystack and enabling us to search through it more efficiently.

I’m pleased to announce that today we have signed our first two DOer recruits: Chira Lajani and Felix Dorn. Both were recruited specifically with an eye towards the upcoming kalonji DEDEs, which as you all know is the linchpin of our plan for establishing a really solid safe house in 1562 Antwerp. Because of her unusual linguistic skill set, we also believe that Chira will be DODO’s pathfinder in 1200 Constantinople, which is projected to be the focal point of many diachronic operations in the first year or two of DODO’s operations.

Chira and Felix came to us through very different recruitment pathways. Chira first came to the attention of U.S. Intelligence talent scouts active in the Syrian refugee community. Considered too physically conspicuous for conventional intelligence work, she was brought to our attention as someone fitting the “Lover” profile. Felix, by contrast, is an old friend and mentor of mine whom I recruited over a beer. Their dossiers are available on the ODIN system for those of you curious to know more about our newest colleagues. Please join me in making Chira and Felix feel welcome in the Department of Diachronic Operations!

—Tristan

DODO HUMAN RESOURCES

PERSONNEL DOSSIER

FAMILY NAME: Lajani

GIVEN NAME(S): Chira Yasin

ALIAS(ES): Cyl

AGE: 24

CLASS: Lover

HEIGHT: 5′3″

EYES: Brown

HAIR: Brown

COMPLEXION: Medium/olive

DISTINCTIVE FEATURES: Mole near left clavicle

ETHNICITY: Kurd

NATIONALITY: Syrian

LANGUAGE FLUENCY RATINGS:

Kurdish: 5

English, Zaza-Gorani, Turkish: 4

Farsi, Syrian, and Iranian Arabic: 3

Bulgarian, Greek: 2

NOTE: Following immersive training in medieval Hebrew as preparation for kalonji DEDE, subject scored 2.5 fluency rating in that language, however the score is at best speculative given our uncertain knowledge base.

RELIGION: Non-observant Muslim

CITIZENSHIP: Stateless, being fast-tracked for U.S. citizenship

BIOGRAPHY: Upper-middle class secular Muslim from Kobani (Ayn al-Arab). At the age of 16, lived in United States (Issaquah, Washington) for 9 months as part of a foreign exchange program. Attended Cornell University. Psychology major, Dance minor. Dropped out in sophomore year when parents publicly decapitated by IS forces. Pretended to be ISIS sympathizer on social media, flew to Istanbul, traveled overland to border region with intention of crossing Syrian border. En route, fell in with and entered into sexual relationship with male MI6 agent also masquerading as ISIS recruit. With him, crossed border into Syria and returned to Kobani to protect younger sister (15) and brother (13). During subsequent military operations, escaped from Kobani with her siblings and crossed back into Turkey, made way overland to Bodrum, crossed over to Greek island of Kos in inflatable boat, joined refugee community on Kos. There recognized the body language of American DODO recruiter who was posing as a refugee. Approached him. Her story cross-checked with accounts on file from the MI6 agent. Agreed to work for DODO in exchange for her and her siblings being fast-tracked for American citizenship.

SKILL SET: Besides languages (above) and keen assessment of body language (above), extremely fit, hardy, able to stay calm in high-stress and physically challenging circumstances; dancer (modern, jazz, bellydance); history and affect suggests aptitude for emotional/psychological persuasiveness and manipulation. Well-spoken with broad Western-style liberal arts education. Appealing face and figure by most cultures’ metrics.

LIMITATIONS: Minimal self-defense or martial arts experience. Incapable of being inconspicuous or subtle, even when wearing burka. Do not send on missions requiring stealth or delicate negotiations. Comfortable in cosmopolitan and suburban settings; rural and slum settings not so good.

DODO HUMAN RESOURCES

PERSONNEL DOSSIER

FAMILY NAME: Dorn

GIVEN NAME(S): Felix John

ALIAS(ES): N/A

AGE: 31

CLASS: Strider

HEIGHT: 5′9″

EYES: Hazel

HAIR: Brown

COMPLEXION: Light

DISTINCTIVE FEATURES: Appears to squint (actually has 20/15 vision); slight stutter on the letter L

ETHNICITY: American of Austrian/German/Dutch heritage

NATIONALITY: U.S.

LANGUAGE FLUENCY RATINGS:

American English: 5

German: 4

French, Spanish: 3

NOTE: As part of preparation for kalonji DEDE, underwent immersive training in medieval Hebrew (fluency rating 1.5), Byzantine Greek (2), and medieval Dutch (2).

RELIGION: Non-observant Lutheran

CITIZENSHIP: American

BIOGRAPHY: Raised in middle-class home in CT, father owned auto shop, mother a nurse, formerly for Médecins Sans Frontières. Dyslexic. Majored in PhysEd at UConn, emphasis on cross-country and wilderness survival skills. Former USA Olympic track & field team, took bronze in Marathon. Worked at Outward Bound, involved in various “extreme sports” activities including cliff jumping, rock climbing, Parkour.

RECRUITMENT: Personal contact by LTC Tristan Lyons, whom he met while leading a rock-climbing expedition (Lyons 14 at the time). They became friends, and continued to engage in wilderness-oriented athletic activities together.

SKILL SET: Extremely fit, hardy, capable of functioning under punishing physical circumstances (natural or man-made). Physically nondescript enough to “blend into crowd” in most Caucasian populations. Decent MacGyver-like capabilities. Loyalty unshakable.

LIMITATIONS: Dyslexic, not comfortable in conversationally dependent situations. More comfortable in rural than urban/suburban surroundings.

Post by Mortimer Shore on

“General” ODIN channel

DAY 622

Hey all,

In the wake of yesterday’s incident in the cafeteria line, Macy Stoll has asked me to post a few safety tips that y’all should keep in mind until such time as we can print up posters, establish training programs, etc.

Just as background, the requirement for Fighter-class Diachronic Operatives (DOers) to achieve and maintain proficiency in various historical martial arts styles entails wearing, transporting, storing, and using a wide range of historical weapons and weapon simulators on premises. No single, blanket policy can cover all such cases, but here are some general rules:

- Scabbards are trip hazards! Glance down before stepping behind a swordfighter.

- Assume all blades are razor sharp.

- If you see something falling out of a scabbard, don’t try to catch it.

DODO WHITE PAPER

UDET: OR, DIACHRONIC MISSION DURATION

BY REBECCA EAST-ODA

Submitted to ODIN archive, Day 622

The recent influx of funding and new personnel has led DODO staff to look more deeply into certain aspects of how diachronic operations are conducted that hitherto we had just taken for granted. In particular, the need to schedule complex missions, such as the upcoming kalonji-related DEDEs, has forced us to think in greater detail about the duration of missions and how many can be scheduled in a given span of time.

Most of DODO’s experience has centered on the colonial Boston and Elizabethan London DEDEs conducted last year by Dr. Stokes and LTC Lyons respectively. Both of these were of relatively brief duration. Dr. Stokes was able to accomplish her tasks in the course of a single day. With the exception of the first repetition, LTC Lyons’s DEDE was a “sleepover” in which he had to spend one night at the DTAP. In all of these cases, the responsible witches (KCWs Karpathy, Fitch, and Gráinne) acted in a way that preserved “Unity of DOer-Experienced Time,” hereinafter UDET. The idea of UDET is simple and can be quickly explained: if Dr. Stokes experienced eight hours of elapsed time during her mission in colonial Boston, then the same span of time separated her being Sent by Karpathy from the ODEC to the DTAP and her reappearance in the ODEC upon being returned home by KCW Fitch. Likewise, when LTC Lyons spent approximately twenty-four hours in the 1601 London DTAP, the same amount of elapsed time occurred between his being Sent there and his being “Homed” by KCW Gráinne. UDET means that from the point of view of the DOer as well as observers in the facility, it is as if the DOer walked through a door into another room, spent eight or twenty-four hours there, and then walked back through the same door.

This does not pose a serious inconvenience for short missions. By contrast, however, the nature of the kalonji DEDE is such that it cannot be accomplished in less than approximately two months. For those unfamiliar with the premise of this DEDE, a short explanation follows: we are attempting to recruit Winnifred Dutton, a potential KCW in Antwerp circa 1560. The only way we have found to motivate her is by supplying her with samples of an herb called kalonji, which is rare and nearly unobtainable in her time and place. We have found a source for kalonji seeds in Constantinople circa 1200, which is a DTAP of interest to us anyway. The current plan of record is to send one DOer to 1200 Constantinople to obtain the seeds. She will then hand them off to a wilderness survival expert (Strider class) who will carry them overland to Belgium and sow them in a known location where we think that they will thrive. It should then be possible to visit that location circa 1560 and harvest the herb in the wild. The plan’s primary drawback is that the overland journey from Constantinople to Belgium is projected to take two months, and it will have to be repeated on at least three Strands in order for it to “take.” Our Strider will therefore have to experience a total of at least six months of (our) elapsed time in that DTAP.

If the mission is performed in a way that preserves UDET, then the Strider will indeed be absent for a total of six months.

If, on the other hand, we can arrange for the Strider to be “Homed” from 1200 Belgium only a few minutes after he is Sent to 1200 Constantinople, then the entire series of missions could be conducted in less than a day, as time is perceived by those of us here in modern-day Boston. The Strider would still be six months older at the end of it, and would have six months’ worth of memories from his journeys, but the clock, as far as DODO is concerned, would only have advanced a few hours.

The latter procedure is obviously a more efficient use of time as far as DODO is concerned. Moreover, to the extent DODO is engaged in a competition versus the diachronic operations agencies of foreign powers, we must assume that our adversaries are making use of such optimization wherever possible and are getting their jobs done that much more quickly.

This is a topic that has been on several people’s minds for some months now and that has been brought to the front burner, as it were, by the kalonji DEDE planning process. Initial attempts to raise the question with KCW Erszebet Karpathy proved unavailing, as the very idea of it made very little sense to her and could seemingly gain no purchase on her mind; she could not make heads or tails of what it was that we were asking her to do, much less express an opinion on it, and repeatedly accused us of being de-mented or insane. As the overall emotional tone was becoming counterproductive, I was asked to work with her on the topic, since I have known her for longer than most DODO employees, and she trusts me on the basis of the belief that I am descended from witches and that I have some latent magical ability. The results of my inquiry are detailed below. A top-level summary is that DEDE time compression does not appear to be a practical option, largely because witches have great difficulty even understanding the idea, and consider it to be reckless, far-fetched, and childish. The best analogy I can think of is how a modern physicist would react if you approached him and proposed to travel at greater than the speed of light. Mixed with this is a little bit of how Chopin would react if you proposed to play a piano by striking it with a sledgehammer.

Detailed Analysis

Witches’ objections to DEDE time compression (to the extent they can even fathom the idea) can apparently be broken down into two general categories: one, the asymmetry between Sending and Homing a time traveler, and two, the risk of something akin to present-day Diachronic Shear.

1. SENDING/HOMING ASYMMETRY:

Non-witches are apt to think of “Sending” (moving a DOer from an ODEC back in time to a DTAP) and “Homing” (the reverse process) as the same thing, but it turns out that from the witch’s point of view they are entirely different spells. The contrasts are explained in the following table.

SENDING

HOMING

Back in time

Forward in time

Once Sent to the past, the DOer can take actions that might affect the present-day reality of the Sending witch, the DOer him/herself, etc.

Once Homed back to the present day, the DOer’s actions cannot affect the past reality of the Homing witch, etc.

The DTAP is terra incognita to both the Sending witch and the DOer, must be extensively researched beforehand from historical documents, maps, and scrying.

The destination is perfectly familiar to the DOer but unknown, and nearly unimaginable, to the Homing witch, for whom it is in the distant future.

The DOer is moving from their natural time and place to one where they are an unnatural intrusion.

The DOer is moving from a place where they fundamentally do not belong, back to their natural time and place.

For these reasons, witches think of Sending and Homing as asymmetrical, and fundamentally different, spells. Sending is much more difficult, first of all because it entails more advance prep work if it is not to produce a random result, and secondly because it means working against the natural flow of time.

An analogy might be made to a rubber band connecting the DOer to their natural time and place. When the DOer is Sent to a past DTAP, the rubber band is stretched, which requires more effort and more focus on the witch’s part if the DOer is not to end up in the wrong place. When the same DOer is Homed, it is as if their connection to the DTAP is simply severed by the Homing witch. The “rubber band” yanks the DOer unerringly back to the ODEC from which they were Sent. Indeed, if this were not the case, diachronic operations would not be possible at all. In the case of Dr. Stokes’s colonial Boston DEDE, how could KCW Fitch possibly have returned Dr. Stokes to the ODEC in modern-day Boston—a time, place, and environment beyond her imagining—if not for this “snap-back” effect?

The “rubber band” feature of Homing is therefore fundamental to DODO’s ability to do anything at all. But there is a catch: if the DOer has experienced eight hours, or seventeen days, in the DTAP, the “rubber band” yanks them back to the ODEC eight hours or seventeen days after they departed.

Compressing mission time by returning the DOer to an earlier moment is, therefore, not simply a matter of using the Homing spell in a different way—turning the knobs to different settings, as it were. It would require a different spell altogether. And the witch performing it would have to have some prior familiarity with the future DTAP in order to “aim” the DOer in the correct “direction.”

2. SHEAR RISK:

Witches appear to have a nose for situations apt to produce Diachronic Shear. Mission duration compression seems to be one of those. If a homebound DOer can be Homed back to the “wrong” time (i.e., earlier than the natural snap-back time) then they could just as well be sent home before they departed, which would lead to a situation in which two copies of the same DOer were existing in the same time and place.

Other absurd or paradoxical situations could be imagined. Let us say that a twenty-year-old DOer were Sent back to a DTAP where they lived for sixty years, then Homed to a point in time only a fraction of a second after their departure. From the point of view of an observer in the ODEC, it would be as if the twenty-year-old were instantaneously replaced by an eighty-year-old.

Such possibilities are deeply distressing to witches, who seem to see in them a kind of moral and aesthetic abomination.

To sum up, it appears that the idea of compressing mission duration is a non-starter. From the witches’ point of view, it requires getting a compliant witch in the distant past to undertake an unfamiliar spell of extreme difficulty, all to achieve an end result that is viewed as both insanely risky and viscerally repugnant.

We are, therefore, stuck with UDET for the foreseeable future, and it seems safe to say that our adversaries are in the same boat. DODO personnel planning the kalonji seed DEDE, or other time-consuming missions, will have to take that reality into account. Fortunately, we have the luxury of time at the moment since we are awaiting the completion of the Chronotron.

DODO MEMORANDUM

POLICY ON OFFICIAL JARGON AND ACRONYM COINAGE

BY MACY STOLL, MBA

POSTED Day 623

Now that I’ve had time to settle in to my new role as head of C/COD (that is DODO’s Conventional/Contemporary Operations Department, for those of you who have been tucked away in exotic DTAPs during the recent organizational upgrades), I’m beginning to see opportunities for optimizing and perfecting the way DODO operates on a day-to-day basis. In coming weeks we’re going to be challenging ourselves to implement new procedures and policies that will help ensure that the taxpayers get the most for their hard-earned dollars, even though hopefully none of them will ever know of DODO’s existence.

Communications becomes all-important in a large organization. Informal practices that worked well when it was just a few friends sitting around a table at the Apostolic Café may no longer be well adapted to a large agency that spans not only the globe, but most of recorded history as well.

In that spirit I would like to take up the subject of jargon and acronyms.

Now, before any of you old DODO hands beats me to it, I’ll stipulate that jargon and acronyms are a staple of many large modern organizations, especially in the military and intelligence sectors, where documents sometimes look like a bowl of alphabet soup. I know that perfectly well from my twenty years of experience in such environments.

Even so, I was taken aback when I first came to the Department of Diachronic Operations and began to experience a whole new world of exotic terminology and funny strings of letters. Diachronic Shear, Strands, ODECs, QUIPUs, DOers, and more! Now, some of these I think are clear and good terms to use, such as DOer, which is self-explanatory, and DEDE, which I now understand is just an alternate spelling of “deed.” But in some cases I do sort of get the idea that a very clever person, perhaps someone from an advanced academic background where wordplay is a kind of sport, is trying to have a teeny little joke at my expense. And maybe also trying to poke fun, in a sly way, at the military world that has brought us so many brave defenders of our freedoms such as LTC Lyons and the late General Schneider. For example, lately we have begun to see DORC for Diachronic Operative Resource Center and DOOSH for Diachronic Operative Occupational Safety and Health. Perhaps those of you who have been putting so much of your creative energies into dreaming up these hilarious acronyms might consider putting yourselves into the shoes of Dr. Blevins when he has to give a tour of the facility to a senator or a general, or a foreign visitor from one of our allies, and finds himself having to explain why such terms are stenciled on doors and bandied about on official letterhead. It certainly doesn’t send the message that all the brainpower we’ve gathered together under this roof is being applied in the most productive manner, does it?

To impose a little order on all of this creative chaos, and to ensure that none of the taxpayers’ money is wasted as the result of inefficient communications, I’m putting into place a new Policy on Official Jargon and Acronym Coinage. You’ll find full details and procedures in the attached PowerPoint deck, which I encourage you all to peruse at your leisure. Existing acronyms, where widely adopted, can of course be “grandfathered in,” but those of you seeking to add new terms to DODO’s specialized lexicon will need to abide by the procedures spelled out in the deck.

Exchange of posts between Dr. Melisande Stokes

and LTC Tristan Lyons on private ODIN channel

AFTERNOON AND EVENING, DAY 623

Post from Dr. Stokes:

Re: POOJAC (Policy on Official Jargon etc. . . .)

Tristan—do you want to break the news to her, or should I?

Reply from LTC Lyons:

Stokes, I know. Everyone’s talking about it. Shut up. The first one who calls it POOJAC to her face is going to come off either as a malcontent or a snitch. If it’s the former, you’re going to end up on a PEP.

From Dr. Stokes:

PEP?

From LTC Lyons:

Try to keep up, Stokes. PEP = Performance Enhancement Plan. It’s what you get assigned to when you are in trouble.

From Dr. Stokes:

First I’ve heard of it. Has “PEP” gone through POOJAC?

From LTC Lyons:

What you’re not getting is that THIS IS ALL PUBLIC. It doesn’t matter how secure the Shiny Hat operating system is, Stokes, when the subpoena comes through from the Inspector General, all of what you’re writing ends up in public.

From Dr. Stokes:

Just making an observation.

Post by Macy Stoll, Head of C/COD,

on “General” ODIN channel

DAY 623

All, there seems to be some confusion brewing in the wake of my memorandum concerning the Policy on Official Jargon and Acronym Coinage. While I am aware that the letters spell out POOJAC (a nonsense word—don’t waste your time Googling it!), this is not an approved substitute for the full name of the aforementioned Policy. Remember, the entire point of the Policy is to establish an approved procedure for coining new terminology, and so to refer to the Policy as POOJAC is in and of itself a violation of the Policy.

You can easily spell out the full name of the Policy, or copy-paste if you are in that much of a hurry.

I realize that it’s something of a mouthful to use in conversation. Around the office, we have taken to calling it the Jargon and Acronym Policy, and I encourage the rest of you to follow suit.

Follow-up from Stoll, two hours later:

In the wake of a very respectful and sensitive exchange of feelings with Dr. Oda, I would like to amend the above to “Acronym and Jargon Policy.” Please refer to DODO’s Diversity Policy for more on these matters, which we take extremely seriously.

Follow-up from Stoll, one hour later:

I have been made aware that our Diversity Policy is still being drafted. I assumed we had one in place already, but the unusual operational environment of DODO apparently makes it more complicated. In the meantime let’s all just use common sense, please.

AFTER ACTION REPORT

DEBRIEFER: Dr. Melisande Stokes

DOER: Chira Yasin Lajani

THEATER: Constantinople

OPERATION: Antwerp witch recruitment

DEDE: Obtain/secure viable kalonji seeds for later p/u

DTAP: Blachernae Palace, Constantinople, August 1202

STRAND: Fourth and last repetition of this DEDE

Note: Will avoid undue repetition of physical details, etc. from previous three Strands.

Erszebet Sent Chira via ODEC #2 at 11:15 of Day 626, without incident.

Chira materialized in the unlit brick bathhouse of the women’s apartments of Blachernae Palace. We had already confirmed a witch in Blachernae on previous Strands: Basina, illegitimate granddaughter of Empress Irene (née Bertha).

Chira arrived in the dark hours of the morning but moonlight shone in to give illumination to the room. (She has drawn detailed diagram of bathhouse, scanned and converted to 3-D renderings; refer to DORC Cartographic and Architectural Database.) General setting: large striated-brick hall with marble baths heated from below, running water available via lead pipes.

From prep research combined with past Strand experience, she knew that for efficiency in plumbing, the laundry was beside the bathhouses, and a connecting room between the two held cabinets with clean shmatas/drab shifts to be worn by women working in either chamber. After waiting in the shadows to ensure that the coast was clear, she moved quietly to this cabinet and donned one; it would pass as a servant’s nightdress.

Chira found a small amphora, filled it with water, and carried it from the bathhouse to the stairs for the Empress’s apartments. Nearing the foot of the stairs, she encountered two armed Varangian Guards (for more on what we know of the arms and armor of this class of fighter, refer to Mortimer Shore’s MARS [Martial Arts Research Summary] #12). She approached them carrying the amphora. They challenged her in accented Greek; she identified herself as a new servant of Basina’s, sent to fetch her mistress scented water for a headache. The taller guard was about to let her go, but the shorter one expressed skepticism and proposed accompanying her back upstairs.

Speaking in what might have been a Norman dialect, the taller Varangian rebuked the shorter one. Chira cannot understand circa 1200 Norman, beyond some ability to pick out French and Anglo-Saxon loan words. Having been on this DEDE several times now, she is fairly certain that the topic of conversation was a woman named Candida. Body language, facial expression, tone of voice, and one unmistakable Anglo-Saxon word all suggested that the short Varangian was seeking an excuse to visit Candida in the middle of the night for the purposes of sexual intercourse, and that the taller Varangian disapproved of it.

The short, horny Varangian disagreed with this assessment and, as proof of its inaccuracy, suggested he remain below while the tall one accompany Chira upstairs to Basina. Tall one agreed to this and marched Chira up three broad, shallow flights of marble steps, finally arriving at tall, decorated double doors, visible as a tangerine-colored sunrise was coming in through windows overlooking the stairwell.

At this point, more Varangian Guards challenged them, speaking in Anglo-Saxon, which Chira also does not speak. After a brief conversation, during which Chira’s physical endowments were obviously being closely assessed, she and the tall Varangian were allowed into the antechamber of the apartments, made of marble with serpentine inlaid heavily in patterns on the floor; high ceilings; eunuchs in abundance. Chira was handed over to one of them, and tall Varangian was dismissed. The eunuch took her into a chamber with windows overlooking a courtyard.

This room had golden-tiled ceilings and smelled of incense. A woman in her early thirties (Basina) was in the central, extremely ornate bed; there were smaller beds along the walls, and four younger women dressed in long silk gowns were preparing Basina’s jewelry and wardrobe for her. They looked startled by the early morning intrusion. The eunuch presented Chira to Basina saying, “Your Ladyship, this woman was found by guards at the bottom of the stairs, claiming she was your handmaiden.”

Basina stared at Chira with a slightly mocking air, as if she could not believe an assassin had been stupid enough to approach from such a direct route. Chira met the look calmly, held out the amphora, and said, “The scented water for your headache, m’lady.” She spoke with a small reassuring smile, and then winked at Basina.

Basina showed no reaction at all to the wink. After a few more heartbeats, she instructed the eunuch, “Leave her here and wait outside.” The eunuch released her and left.

Before the door had closed, the four young women had surrounded Chira at a distance of perhaps a yard, each with a hand on the eating-knife at her belt (see Mortimer Shore’s MARS #19 for more on these; they are short blades, nominally for cutting food during meals, not considered weapons, but obviously capable of being used as such).

“What are you wearing under that?” asked Basina of the shift. “That’s from the bathhouse. I would never dress my servants so poorly.” She had a low voice and spoke slowly, sounding sardonically amused.

Chira set down the amphora and in one smooth gesture pulled the shift over her head; it dropped to the ground at her feet, leaving her nude. Basina continued to stare at her, now a little appraisingly. “I see,” she said. Her attendants sniggered slightly but she made a harsh, wordless noise of disapproval and they all instantly went silent. Finally Basina asked, “Are you a gift? Who sent you?”

“Someone who would be your friend,” said Chira.

Basina smiled, then chuckled like a contented hen. “Everyone wants to be my friend,” she said. “Most of them bore me.”

“I am sent from someone who will not bore you,” Chira said. “But I am under instructions to reveal more only when we are alone together.”

“We’re alone,” said Basina comfortably. “My women are nothing but an extension of me.”

Adopting a very gentle tone of voice—almost sympathetic—Chira said, “I have reason to believe that might not be true.” Basina frowned and sat up, throwing the sheets off of herself. The clutch of attendants stepped in closer and brandished their eating-knives.

“Who says so?” demanded Basina. Chira met her gaze and said nothing. After a long moment, Basina ordered her women, “Check her.”

Chira then submitted to a body cavity search, which was unpleasant but brief. Once they found nothing on/in her, Basina ordered the four of them out of the room. They protested, shocked and angry, but she grunted at them and they left.

When Basina and Chira were alone, there was a long pause. “I detect some glamour,” said Basina at length. “Who has Sent you?”

“Nobody you know, milady,” said Chira. “A company of good men and women who seek your aid. We are from far away, in every possible sense.”

Basina listened, took a moment—in general her movements and words were slow and languid—and then said, in a bored and long-suffering tone, “What is desired of me?”

“A clandestine introduction to a member of the court.”

“It is a rather large court, girl, can you be more specific?”

“There is a court apothecary who is also responsible for the maintenance of the herb gardens.”

“Let me guess,” Basina said with a throaty laugh. “Somebody wants kalonji. It’s always kalonji.”

Chira suppressed surprise and asked, “Who else wants kalonji?”

“Everyone. Every witch I’ve ever met, especially Franks, since nobody can seem to make it thrive in the north. Cyril Arcadius—the apothecary—would be a very wealthy man if he sold it. Then he could buy himself as many ladies’ favors as he liked.”

“He prefers the barter method,” guessed Chira.

“He finds it romantic.” Basina laughed.

“I’m prepared to barter,” said Chira. “This should be simple.”

“Honey-bee,” Basina said in a knowing voice, “nothing is ever simple.”

Although she was already fairly certain of what was coming, from her experiences on the first three Strands, Chira kept a blank look of innocence on her face and asked, “What isn’t simple about Cyril Arcadius?”

“He likes a witch to be performing magic—any little spell, nothing dramatic—while he is taking her. Makes him feel like he’s somehow part of the magic-making. It’s pathetic.”

This is not what Chira had expected, as on previous Strands Basina had simply alerted her to various peccadillos of the apothecary’s, none of which fazed her. This variation posed a serious problem, however:

“I am not a witch,” said Chira. “I can’t offer that.”

Basina shrugged. “Well,” she said after a moment, “I suppose I could be your proxy. If you will be my proxy for another matter.”

“Meaning?”

“I am expected in His Majesty’s chamber this evening,” said Basina.

Chira knew from DORC-prep that the Emperor—Alexios III Angelos—was married to Euphrosyne Doukaina Kamatera, a first-class Alpha Bitch who, despite being famously adulterous herself, would eviscerate anyone found fiddling with her wussy husband’s tackle-box, especially since she’d only given him daughters. That is not what surprised Chira about the news of this dalliance. Rather it was this: “Aren’t you . . . a kinswoman . . . of his?”

“Honey-bee,” said Basina, “it’s the imperial court, we’re all each other’s blood-cousins. Why do you think everyone fights so dirty? I would prefer to be in someone else’s bed tonight, that’s all, so I need somebody to distract His Majesty, and I need it to be a stranger so she can vanish before Euphrosyne hunts her down and gouges her eyes out.”

“Is the Emperor expecting you?”

“I was summoned by his cupbearer, so somebody is expecting me,” she said. “But it might be his wife trying to entrap me.”

“Ah,” said Chira.

“Yes,” said Basina. “If you open that wooden cabinet over there, you’ll find my summer gowns. Help yourself to any but the purple one. I’ll have the maids oil and dress your hair to resemble mine, but I will not trust you with my jewelry.”

“Very well,” said Chira, wishing DORC’s curriculum included a mandatory anti-assassin workshop.

“Spend the day in here. You’d be underfoot anywhere else.”

Chira dressed herself in the most modest of the several gowns—all garish by modern standards, with tremendous amounts of small garnets and turquoise sewn onto the fronts, as well as decorative stitching in silver and gold thread. She then received (grudging and ungentle) ministrations from Basina’s attendants, who attempted to goad her into revealing her identity until Basina told them to shut it. Chira was left alone in the chamber for approximately five hours, until Basina and her entourage returned, the entourage tittering, Basina looking pleased with herself. In her hand Basina held a black silk drawstring bag, half the size of a human fist.

“That was painless. Here are your kalonji seeds,” she said, and tossed them onto Chira’s lap. “Keep them tied to your belt, or better yet, your wrist.”

“When am I to go to the Emperor’s chambers?” Chira asked.

“After nightfall,” said Basina. “One of his eunuchs will come with a summons. Have you eaten today?”

When Chira said that she had not, Basina sent two of her retinue down to the kitchens to bring up fruit and nuts and cheese, further cementing the attendants’ resentment. A mediocre lute-playing eunuch came in to entertain them, until Basina got tired of him and sent him away, and finally after the sun had set, Basina excused herself to go to her other lover’s bed.

“Do not abuse her,” she ordered her sulking retinue. “If I hear of any bad behavior on your part, I’ll have you flayed by that Genoan His Majesty keeps in the cellars.”

She departed, leaving Chira alone with the seething attendants. All efforts on her part to gather intelligence from them met with complete failure as they were barely able to contain themselves from tearing her garments off her à la Cinderella’s stepsisters.

Finally the Emperor’s eunuch came in search of Basina. When the attendants presented Chira in her stead, he blinked a moment, then sighed, then rolled his eyes, shook his head, and lugubriously gestured her to follow him. The attendants were pleased by this response, and one of them whispered, “Surely he is leading you straight to what should have been Basina’s death. Ha!” Followed by a Greek term with no perfect translation but meant in essence, “Sucker!”

The eunuch led her through such a maze of torch-and-lamp-lit stairwells, corridors, halls, and yards that she became disoriented and is not able to reconstruct the route for us (shown as, literally, a gray area on the DORCCAD rendering). But eventually, she was brought to a grand set of copper-faced double doors with intricate gold chase-work as decoration. The eunuch rapped on one of these with a particular staccato rhythm, and in response the doors swung outward toward them. Ahead of them was a very small vestibule, candlelit, with one door to the right and one to the left. (We know from old maps—digitized and cleaned up in DORCCAD—that these led to the Emperor’s and Empress’s respective bedchambers.) The eunuch, giving her a mournful look, literally shoved her into the vestibule and turned his back. As the door began to swing shut, a smooth, strong hand grabbed Chira’s arm and she felt a slender blade press against her carotid artery. As her self-defense skill set is of the flight-not-fight variety, she froze.

“Finally, Basina,” said a woman’s voice, harshly happy. “Finally I have caught you in the act.”

“I am not Basina, Your Majesty,” said Chira. “I am simply an entertainer obeying a command from my Emperor.”

There was some cursing, the knife blade was removed, the hand loosened its grip, and she turned so that her back was to the wall and she could face her assailant in the candlelight. The Empress Euphrosyne was considerably older than her but still, in a ravaged, cougar-esque sort of way, definitely pretty hot.

“Who are you? You can’t go in there,” said Euphrosyne. “I know what happens when a whore gives an emperor a son. If he doesn’t get one from me, he doesn’t get one from anyone. Nobody is going to rob my daughters of the throne.”

“I’m Jewish,” Chira said. “No son of mine would ever be allowed on the throne, no matter who his father is.”

Euphrosyne looked surprised. “He would never bed a Jewess,” she said.

“He saw me dance at a feast a fortnight back and made inquiries. We’ve never spoken in person, but he has already paid a great deal and I am tardy. Given I am no threat to Your Majesty, may I attend to my Emperor’s wishes?”

Everything about Euphrosyne’s demeanor changed as this sank in. She gestured to the door that led to the imperial bedchamber. “Go on, then,” she said. “I don’t care if you fuck him. In fact, fuck him thoroughly so I don’t have to worry about his fucking anyone else tonight.”

With these words of encouragement she opened the door herself. It was a very large room, marble floors, and panels of marble for walls, ceiling of glassed gold-leaf tile looking burnished in the flickering light from a dozen beeswax candles. One entire wall opened on to a balcony that overlooked a garden.

In the middle of the room was the single piece of furniture: a large bed that appeared to be carved out of solid turquoise, and on this sat a sickly pale, dark-haired man who did not look at all what Chira expected of an emperor. He was wearing a nightshirt, which was thick white silk with gold thread sewn into the collar, cuffs, and hems. He looked up expectantly when he saw her, and then pulled his head back like a surprised turtle.

“Where’s Basina?” he demanded, standing nervously.

“Basina was ill tonight, Your Majesty,” said Chira, with a reassuring smile. “She sent me to entertain you in her absence.”

“You’re an assassin,” said His Majesty.

“Of course not, Your Majesty,” said Chira pleasantly. “I am here entirely for your pleasure.”

“No, you’re an assassin, you must be an assassin, I’ve never seen you before and you came in here without my eunuch.”

“Your honored wife sent the eunuch away in the antechamber,” said Chira. “She wanted to speak to me in private before I came in to you.”

“Did she tell you to assassinate me?”

“Your Majesty,” said Chira, looking graciously shocked. “Of course not. She herself is so solicitous of your safety that she would not allow me in until she had reassured herself of my benign intentions. She has deigned to allow me to enter your bedchamber.”

“Prove that you are not an assassin,” he said, not moving from his defensive stance by the side of the bed.

Chira continued to smile at him, adjusting the tone of the smile to try to reassure and calm him. She shimmied easily out of Basina’s long royal-blue robe, which she had not fully secured specifically so that she could remove it easily. Because of all the jewels and stiff metallic thread, it landed inelegantly, but she stepped out of it with a sinuous grace, presenting as much of herself as possible directly to him. She slipped the drawstring of the kalonji-seed bag over her wrist and palmed it. Entirely unclothed, she smiled invitingly at him, crossed to him, and took his hand with her free one. He stared at his hand in hers as if this was an experience he had never had before. She examined his face. He seemed on the verge of a panic attack.

“Would Your Majesty like to examine my person himself, to see that I have no weapons?”

She ran his hand across her breasts, and then down her belly and between her legs. “Please inspect as carefully as you would like,” she whispered into his ear, and closed her lips over his earlobe. He began to tremble.

“If you’re not an assassin, you must be a spy,” he said, pulling his head away. “You are from that navy of so-called Pilgrims that are wintering in Zara, aren’t you?”

“I do not know what you speak of, Your Majesty,” she said, and squeezed his hand between her thighs. He made a confused moaning sound but tried to pull his hand away.

“You’re from Montferrat, aren’t you?”

“I have never heard of Montferrat, Your Majesty,” she whispered, and again closed her lips upon his earlobe. Then she licked the back of his ear.

A moment later he was naked atop her, bucking away, and a few moments after that, with a loud sob of relief, he finished and lay panting on top of her.

Immediately the door to the chamber pushed open, and Empress Euphrosyne stormed in with two large Varangian Guards behind her. The Emperor did not bother to raise his head.

“Thank you,” said Euphrosyne briskly. “Alexios, get off of her, we’re sending her home.”

Without further acknowledging Chira, the Emperor rolled over on the bed and lay staring up at the gold-tiled ceiling with a morose expression. The Empress picked up Basina’s blue gown and Chira held her hand out for it. “I don’t think so,” Euphrosyne said with a laugh, and tossed it into a corner. “Alexios, I’m giving her your nightshirt to wear.”

The Emperor was already asleep.

Euphrosyne picked up the garment and tossed it to Chira. “Put that on quickly, Jewess. These men are taking you back to Pera.”

This was convenient enough, as the second part of Chira’s task was to get across the Golden Horn to Pera, to leave the kalonji seeds with another witch (KCW from previous Strands, but still a stranger in this one) in the Jewish section of the city. Getting an armed imperial escort was not how she had done it in previous Strands, but this would take less effort on her part.

One of the guards offered her a woolen cloak and she wrapped it round her shoulders. She allowed them to take her down various flights of stairs and across yards and gardens and halls and down corridors, until she was once again disoriented. Eventually the smell of briny water began to waft past her nostrils, so she was not surprised when they came to an enormous wooden gate that opened onto a street at the edge of the water. There was a boat with two oarsmen who wordlessly rowed them across the Golden Horn—the deep protected harbor, less than two bowshots wide, that led to the hilly northern suburb of Pera, in the shadow of Galata Tower.

Upon landing at the foot of the steep hill (not an official dock, although there were several in either direction), the oarsmen secured the boat, and the two guards got out and then hoisted her directly to the shore. Throughout this she had maintained her firm hold on the kalonji-seed bag and now was mindful not to let the harbor water touch it.

“Where’s your home?” asked one of the guards, with the clumsy, angry-sounding accent of the Britons who made up such a large percentage of the Varangian force.

Suppressing a mischievous urge to address him in modern English, she responded in Greek. “It is directly behind the synagogue,” she said. “My father is Avraham ben Moises. I will show you.”

The three of them marched up the steep hill along the street, which was not very broad but paved with stones and well maintained. About halfway up was the synagogue, a large building with a fenced garden. Chira directed them to the rows of neat wooden homes behind this, all dark as it was now about midnight. In the middle row of houses, set on leveled-off stone foundations, Chira pointed to one house in particular.

One of the guards took her by the shoulder and the other pounded on the door.

After a confused moment, there were voices within both this house and the surrounding homes, and candlelight appeared in windows. Eventually the door opened and a man barely old enough to be Chira’s father opened the door. He sported a long beard, longish hair covered by a felt cap, and dark robes. A woman, obviously his wife, stood behind him, and behind her were the shadowy forms of several children ranging in age from approximately seven to full-grown.

“What do you want?” asked the man in Greek, fearful, staring up at the Varangian Guard.

“We’ve brought your daughter back,” said the guard, sounding bored.

“Our what?” the man said, amazed.

“Your daughter,” repeated the guard, in a warning voice.

“All of our daughters are here with us already,” the man said, looking alarmed and confused.

The guard took a step forward to tower over him in the doorway. “To disown your daughter because she has been with the Emperor is to disown the Emperor himself,” he said warningly. “Either you receive her into your home or I will bring you back to answer to His Majesty for the insult directly.”

Looking mystified, and a bit spooked, the man stepped back into the house and somewhat robotically held his arm out in a gesture of welcome. The other guard pushed Chira through the doorway.

“Abba,” said Chira in a happy voice, throwing her arms around him. And then turning to his equally mystified wife, “Eema!” The woman very woodenly put her arms around her.

Then Rachel, the oldest of their daughters (late teens?), and Chira’s connection, gasped as if remembering or realizing something, and said, “Oh, my dearest sister, I’m so glad to see you safely home!” She threw her arms around Chira with a bear hug. To her younger siblings, she said emphatically, “Is it not wonderful to have our sister home again?”

They gave her strange looks.

“Pretend you know her, and welcome her home,” Rachel whispered fiercely in Hebrew.

The children immediately surrounded Chira and hugged her with feigned enthusiasm.

“The Emperor thanks you,” said the senior guard to the father. “But the Empress requests that you keep your daughters closer to home from now on.”

“Yes, of course, sir,” stammered the father.

The other guard added, “I’d marry this one off as soon as possible. If nobody in Pera wants her, I’ve got some connections in town who would be happy to take her off your hands. Get a great price with those tits.”

“I . . . I’ll take that into consideration, thank you,” said the father.

This man pulled back his helmet to give Avraham a clear view of his face. “Name’s Bruno. Bruno of Hamlin,” he said agreeably. “You can ask for me via the imperial kitchens, the head cook’s a kinsman through marriage.” He winked at Chira and then turned his attention back to the father. “I’ll take fifteen percent commission. Think about it.”

The guards left.

As soon as the door was closed, the younger children pulled away from her and scurried behind their mother, as Chira turned to face the family. Rachel looked delighted, but the father and mother were frowning unhappily and the younger children took their cues from this.

“Thank you,” said Chira in Hebrew, in her most winsome smile. “I apologize profusely for the alarm and confusion I’ve just caused you. Please allow me to explain the peculiar circumstances of our meeting.”

She then revealed herself as working with a witch network. She shared as much as she safely could, and requested their permission to leave the kalonji seeds with them until her associate came to collect them, which she anticipated would be within a day or two. Persuasive narrative is one of her specialties; due to her innate charisma and agreeable demeanor, by the time she’d finished, the entire household had relaxed and adopted a more welcoming air. The family (as we knew from previous Strands) has a commitment to protecting fellow witches, and agreed readily to assist her. In fact, the daughter Rachel pressed her for more information about the witch network she was working with, and expressed a desire to go adventuring with Chira in other times and places, despite Moises’s quiet disapproval.

“When my associate Felix comes to collect the bag, you may speak more with him about it,” Chira suggested. “In the meantime, please be kind enough to send me back to my own home.”

“I shall do that,” said the mother.

“Oh, eema, please let me try,” said Rachel. “I would love to know I can help such interesting people to have such marvelous adventures out in the world.”

The mother was about to agree but Moises interrupted. “Your mother will do it,” he said. “You are too eager.”

Chira smiled at Rachel. “I was like you at your age,” she said. “Except I did not have the powers you have. You will certainly be a remarkable force for good in the world if you make your mind up to be so.” Rachel looked rapturous.

“You are welcome to invade our home but not our daughter’s mind,” said Moises curtly. “Sarah, send this woman back where she came from, before I decide to follow Bruno’s advice and sell her off.”

At 05:10 the morning after her departure, Chira was Homed to ODEC #2 uninjured.

Post by Dr. Roger Blevins to Dr. Melisande Stokes

on private ODIN channel

DAY 627 (MID-APRIL, YEAR 2)

Have reviewed your After Action Reports on Chira Yasin’s series of DEDEs in the Blachernae Palace. All are too long, editorialized, and frankly tawdry. Revise to reflect the professional standards of DODO, and see to it all future reports remain within department guidelines (brief, containing salient facts only).

Allowing a chatty tone, personal timbre, etc. to seep into your reports is unprofessional, Dr. Stokes. As such it is, by the letter of DODO policy, grounds for being placed on a Performance Enhancement Plan, which I need not remind you may culminate in demotion or dismissal.

It might behoove you to review the transcripts of the recent congressional hearings during which we were raked over the coals by various Red State senators for even suggesting that sexual activity might be involved in diachronic operations. In the future, any DOer actions of this nature are to be downplayed to the greatest extent possible that is consistent with accurate record-keeping. This is not a Nora Roberts novel.

—RB

AFTER ACTION REPORT

DEBRIEFER: Dr. Melisande Stokes

DOER: Felix Dorn

THEATER: Constantinople/Late Medieval Europe

OPERATION: Antwerp witch recruitment

DEDE: Retrieve and carry viable kalonji seeds across Europe for sowing

DTAP: Pera, Constantinople, September 1202; Peerdsbos Forest (Antwerp), Belgium, November 1202

STRAND: First (out of a projected three) repetition of this DEDE

Erszebet Sent DOer Felix Dorn from ODEC #2 at 08:10 of Day 627. DOer landed safely in Pera, retrieved kalonji seeds without incident, traveled for two months by foot, river, and stolen horse from Constantinople to Belgium. Many adventures. Did not die. Arrived in Peerdsbos Forest, sowed kalonji seeds, was Homed by Goedele, our KCW of that DTAP.

Note: Witch Rachel in Pera volunteered for diachronic engagement but father disapproved.

Dutifully submitted,

Dr. Melisande “Reads Less Nora Roberts Than Dr. Blevins Does” Stokes

INTERNAL MEMO

From: Dr. Roger Blevins

To: General Octavian Frink

Re: Melisande Stokes

Day 688, 14:12

General Frink—

[REDACTED]

…

INTERNAL MEMO

From: LTC Tristan Lyons

To: General Octavian Frink

Re: Dr. Blevins’s recent statements re: Melisande Stokes

Day 688, 15:02

Dear General Frink:

[REDACTED]

…

INTERNAL MEMO

From: Dr. Roger Blevins

To: General Octavian Frink

Re: LTC Lyons’s response to my (somehow leaked) memo re: Dr. Stokes

Day 688, 15:39

Okie—

[REDACTED]

…

INTERNAL MEMO/EMAIL

From: General Octavian Frink

To: Dr. Roger Blevins and Lieutenant Colonel Tristan Lyons

Re: Leaked memos, etc.

Day 689, 10:19

[REDACTED]

. . . Coming from an academic background, Dr. Blevins, you should know better than to consign anything to writing. I will have to redact most of this correspondence not due to security concerns but from sheer embarrassment.

So you will let it rest there, gentlemen.

General O. K. Frink

Post by Felix Dorn

on “Recreation” ODIN channel

DAY 617

As some of you have noticed, I am not much of a talker, but I just wanted to mention that if anyone wants to join a barefoot running group, meet me at 0430 tomorrow at the Harvard Bridge, on the Cambridge side.

Reply from LTC Tristan Lyons, Day 619:

Well, everyone, maybe this isn’t much of a surprise, but response has been muted to Felix’s “dawn barefoot running” group. Heavy spring rains, darkness, and muddy conditions have been cited as an excuse. I just wanted to remind everyone that when you are Sent, you arrive naked—which means barefoot. Your feet are probably larger than average for the DTAP, so stealing shoes isn’t as easy as people make it sound. And we do prefer nighttime arrivals because there’s less chance of being noticed. Participation in Felix’s dawn barefoot running group is a breeze by comparison, and will help you develop skills, grow calluses, and build up a tolerance to pain that will serve you well when sprinting away from an unsecured DTAP (or, worse yet, getting clear of a possible Diachronic Shear event). Cardio: it’s not just for knights!

DODO MEMORANDUM

CRITICAL UPGRADE TO JOB TITLES

BY MACY STOLL, MBA

POSTED Day 629

As those of you in management positions are already aware, it is essential that we move over to ISO 9000 compliant job titles for all current and future DODO staff. It is beyond the scope of this memo to enumerate all of the benefits that will accrue to DODO (and, by extension, the taxpayers) as a result of organization-wide ISO 9000 compliance, but those of you who are curious can find plenty of information about it on the non-classified Internet.

Making this especially urgent is that we are getting pushback from concerned parties in the Trapezoid about having a staff member whose job title is “witch.” The word simply looks bad when it shows up in a spreadsheet or official report. Moreover, since it is gender-specific, it is a violation of our Diversity Policy (or at least it will be when that policy is written!).

It’s time to nip this in the bud, since it will only become that much worse when/if we recruit more staff to perform the same function.

After lengthy consultations with Dr. Oda and others, we have settled on a new job title, which has been fast-tracked through the Policy on Official Jargon and Acronym Coinage. That title is . . . (drum roll) . . . MUON, for Multiple-Universe Operations Navigator. We believe that this acronym encapsulates the essential functions and duties of this all-important role without any of the backward and sexist connotations that have raised hackles within the Trapezoid.

Later on we may establish additional gradations such as Junior MUON, Senior MUON, etc. but for now this is unnecessary as we only have one of them on payroll.

This title applies only to paid staff members living in our timeline. Terms such as KCW may still be employed when referring to individuals in past or alternate timelines.

Exchange of posts by DODO staff on

“Recruiting” ODIN channel

Post from LTC Tristan Lyons, Day 630:

I’ve been reading Stokes’s After Action Reports on Chira’s Blachernae Palace DEDE, and I want to start a conversation about Varangian Guards. For those of you who might not be up to speed on context, these are fighting men from Scandinavian or other Northern European countries who were recruited to serve as palace guards and elite troops by the Byzantine Empire. I had read of them in history books, so I knew of their existence, but reading these After Action Reports really drives home how pervasive their presence was in Constantinople circa 1200. Best of all, they tend to show up in important places like the Imperial Palace and key fortifications like the Galata Tower, city gates, etc.

Why is this of interest to DODO? Well, it’s no secret that we are having difficulty recruiting DOers capable of blending in in 1200 Constantinople. The required combination of physical appearance, cultural literacy, and language fluency needed to “pass” in that DTAP is difficult to pull off—occasional miracle recruits like Chira notwithstanding.

The ubiquitous presence of Varangian Guards suggests a different strategy, at least for male DOers: don’t worry about trying to pass as a native Byzantine. Instead, hide in plain sight. We can recruit DOers who can pass for Northern Europeans, then Send them back and look for ways to infiltrate them into Varangian Guard units. Their lack of fluency in the Greek language, ignorance of contemporary customs and etiquette, etc. then becomes a natural fit with their cover story.

This strategy presents two main challenges that I can think of:

1. We don’t know much about how the Varangian Guards were actually recruited. If we’re lucky, there’s a sort of labor market in this DTAP, such that big, healthy-looking Northern European males who show up in town with no past history or connections can get recruited into these units without going through the Byzantine equivalent of a background check. Now that Chira is finished with the kalonji-seed DEDEs and has established some familiarity with Constantinople, maybe we can Send her on some scouting missions to learn more about how this works.

2. Even if it works for a DOer to show up in Constantinople from parts unknown, with no connections or background, he’s not going to be able to pass for a Varangian Guard unless he speaks the language. Leading to the question: What is the language that these guys speak, and where can we learn it? Stokes?

Reply from Dr. Melisande Stokes, Day 630:

Tristan, the Varangian Guards were drawn from all over Scandinavia, Northern Europe, and Britain over a span of centuries, so it depends. In our era (1203) the majority were speaking Anglo-Saxon. But some of the ones Chira encountered were apparently speaking Norman, which is a transitional dialect, not a stable language as we normally think of it. As you probably know, the Vikings invaded France, were bought off with Normandy, settled there, then used it as a base for invading Britain and many other places. The most bad-ass Normans crossed the Channel with William the Conqueror; the ones that stayed behind in Normandy spawned the generations who mostly enjoyed jousting and courtly love, etc. . . . This + Normans and Anglo-Saxons obviously detesting each other = surprising to find Normans in the 1203 Anglo-Saxon-centric Varangian Guards. But actually, we can use it to our advantage:

If we train DOers to speak Anglo-Saxon, they will probably blend in just fine no matter their accent, but they do run some risk of being called out—Anglo-Saxon had a limited geographical spread and thus a limited number of dialects, most of which are probably represented in the 1203 VG cohort. Someone speaking an eccentric variation might arouse curiosity. Small chance, but a chance.

However: Variations of “Norman” were spoken from Greenland to the Volga and from Sicily to the Arctic Circle. If Normans were accepted into the VG, then a DOer could learn any kind of mash-up passing as some variant of Norman, and never run the risk of being called out for lack of fluency—they can just claim they’re from some other clan over the mountain. There would be too many variations of the language, and too few native speakers in residence, for anyone to get wise.

From Dr. Roger Blevins, Day 631:

I have been monitoring this exchange with some interest. LTC Lyons’s idea seems to merit further development.

LTC Lyons: please see me about deploying Chira Yasin on scouting missions to Constantinople so that we can better understand procedures for recruiting Varangian Guards. I only wish that she were less conspicuous. Can we put her in a burka? There must have been some Muslim presence in the city in that era.

Dr. Stokes: the obvious failure mode in your linguistic analysis—for Norman or Anglo-Saxon—is that our DOer, claiming to be a native of some specific region, might happen to cross paths with another Varangian Guard who actually was from the exact same location, and who would detect faults in our DOer’s accent, knowledge base, etc. and become suspicious. Agreed: less likely with Norman than with A/S, but not impossible. We can minimize the chances of that happening by developing a cover story according to which our DOer is from an exceptionally remote and obscure part of the Norman world. Please move this to the top of your priority list.

DODO REPORT

POTENTIAL KCWs, NORMANDY, 12th Century

BY MELISANDE STOKES, PH.D.

Submitted to ODIN archive, Day 645

OBJECTIVE: Identify potential Known Compliant Witches (KCWs) in remote settlements in Normandy during the approximate span 1050–1200, as a preliminary step toward establishing a DTAP there/then. Proposed function of that DTAP: to serve as “Language Camp” for Fighter-class DOers, giving them linguistic and cultural proficiency needed to pass as (Norman) Varangian Guards in the 1200 Constantinople DTAP.

GENERAL BACKGROUND: Normandy in this era had been colonized by transplants from both Scandinavia and Anglo-Saxon-Danish-influenced regions of Britain for well over a century. It had not yet been incorporated into France but had been expanding its borders at France’s expense for some time. The linguistic environment was accordingly complicated and fluid. The population was largely Christianized, at least in name (nobility very much so by 1200). Since most were illiterate, essentially all of the available records fall into three categories. The first two are (1) legal records and (2) chronicles/accountings kept by the feudal lords’ stewards, but these rarely refer to women independently of their marital status. The more fruitful source therefore is (3) church documents, typically written by priests, friars, etc. in Latin or, less frequently, medieval French.

METHODOLOGY: Review medieval church documents for points of convergence per following criteria: (A) references to heretical leanings per church fathers; (B) family trees featuring illegitimate but non-ostracized daughters over the course of several generations; (C) recorded activity suggestive of magic, particularly pertaining to crops, livestock, weather, and ease of pillaging nearby adversaries; and (D) perceived non-conformity in local female individuals, especially those as found in (B) above.

RESULT: POTENTIAL KCW THYRA OF COLLINET

A: “And in June of this year (1027) was Thyra delivered of a girl-child of no known sire, as Thyra herself had been twenty-two summers earlier, and her mother Wilmetta before her, and yet was Emma the aunt of Thyra joyful to receive Thyra and her bastard child to her hearth, and the child was christened Beatrice.” (ref 2876)

B: “And in April of this year (1046) was Thyra again deprived of those villainous and Satanic objects with which she adorns her cousin’s chamber, and scorned to replace them with an image of Our Lord. For this she was given a penance of ten Hail Marys which she was loath to perform, but said she would rather receive a lash, at which the priest hastily did declare her free of all sin.” (ref 3486)

C: “And in this month (August 1050) did Thyra of Herb-lore cause great sorrow upon the (mayor?) of the village of Collinet and the (lord?) of (? Illegible) for her scolding at their crossing her when she wished to forage upon their lands for select herbs.”

D: “And in this month (January 1061) died Thyra of Herb-lore, and the valley wept at her passing for fear of the famine returning that they credited her for keeping at bay.” (ref 6584)

Further research recommended, as incidental accounts in 1002, and throughout the 1100s, suggest an uninterrupted lineage of witches in Thyra’s family, all with strong local and familial authority. (Rec search words: 1137 Collinet:Maneld, 1191, 1192, and 1195 Collinet:Rikilde, and 1193 and 1197 Collinet:Imblen)

Exchange of posts between

Dr. Roger Blevins and Dr. Melisande Stokes

on private ODIN channel

DAY 650 (MID-MAY, YEAR 2)

Post from Dr. Blevins:

Dr. Stokes, I am hereby directing you to proceed with the recruitment of the potential KCW known as Thyra, circa 1045.

As much as we need your energies behind the expansion of the Diachronic Operative Resource Center, it is clear that you are the best qualified of our existing roster of DOers to undertake this mission, and so I suggest that you delegate some of your present responsibilities to others as you undertake the necessary training. Macy Stoll is an obvious candidate to shoulder routine administrative and managerial tasks and has expressed a willingness to do so.

Reply from Dr. Stokes:

Understood. As busy as I am here, I can’t dispute that I would be the best person to act as Forerunner in this DTAP, barring some recruiting breakthrough in the next couple of weeks.

I anticipate that getting up to speed on local languages and customs will occupy me for most of the summer, with the actual DEDE slated for August. Meanwhile Erszebet can be putting in the usual research needed to Send me to that DTAP with reasonable temporal and positional accuracy.

One thing about your message surprised me, and so I wanted to double check to make sure there was no misunderstanding. You specified Thyra, 1045, as the target of the operation. This means that our DOers would be learning a dialect of Norman, and a set of customs, that would be 150 years out of date by the time they show up in Constantinople circa 1200.

My research indicates that Thyra’s descendant Imblen is also a witch. I propose we have a higher chance of success in this endeavor if we send our “Varangian Guards” to 1190s Collinet to study with Imblen. They will stand a better chance of both comprehending and being comprehended if they’ve got 1200 Norman French.

From Dr. Blevins:

Thanks for your illuminating feedback. For classified reasons, 1045 works better for us than the 1190s do. Assuming language immersion will indeed work for Tristan, let’s send him back there ASAP.

From Dr. Stokes:

What are “classified reasons”? How could they be so classified that neither Tristan (the probable DOer in question) nor myself (the linguistic historian expressly in charge of determining these matters) is being told about them?

Can we CC in General Frink and Dr. Oda to this thread in case they can shed light on either Chronotropic or top-level-strategic reasons for not doing the sensible thing here?

From Dr. Blevins:

Mel, thank you as always for your spirited commentary. There is no need to trouble either General Frink or Dr. Oda in this case. The answer is straightforward: training our “Varangian Guard” candidates close to the time of the Constantinople DTAP is dangerous because, however remote their “hometown,” they could still be recognized. That is why to choose a spot not only temporally but also geographically isolated from 1200 Constantinople.

Other issues in this decision are above your pay grade so you don’t need to know.

DODO MEMORANDUM

CLARIFICATION TO DRESS CODE

BY MACY STOLL, MBA

POSTED Day 653

The distribution of DODO’s newly minted dress code has brought in a flood of requests for clarification. Until such time as this document can be reworded, here is a useful rule of thumb: DOers on active missions are exempt from all dress code provisions, including the requirement to wear anything at all.

LETTER FROM

GRÁINNE to GRACE O’MALLEY

Winter Solstice, 1601

Auspiciousness and prosperity to you, milady!

I pray Your Grace will forgive my few months of silence, for wasn’t it in a terrible way I found myself, trying to secure safety and security after the disaster of the lomadh. Rose it was sent Tristan Lyons back to his era, and wasn’t I glad to see the back of him for a while.

But only for a while, Your Majesty. For I’ve landed on my feet, and determined I am to learn the truth behind what Tristan be up to. When he “told me everything,” truly ’twasn’t everything at all, or else why would that right arse Les Holgate appear and make such a muck of everything? There are things going on in the future, and it’s to do with magic, and ’tis the least Tristan Lyons can do but be fully honest with me at last, now that he and his like have robbed me of all I cherish in London.

But as I said, it’s safety I’ve found for myself, and at the merest cost. I’ve told Your Majesty in years past of Francis Bacon’s society of Good Pens (’tis a pun on the male member, is what I’m thinking, given what I know of Sir Francis). This group meets at Gray’s Inn, and composed of the brightest of menfolk it is, them being intelligencers and counterfeiters, not to mention secretaries, physicians, poets, theologians, apothecaries, and the occasional natural philosopher, and of these last few, doesn’t Sir Francis love to debate with the nature of the universe, in ways that seem like conversations witches might have with each other, if witches were wont to waste their time putting into words things which go without saying. There are no witches in their discourses and indeed no women at all! Like a bunch of turtles trying to discuss flight, they remind me of, and not getting all of it correct, neither.

But sure it’s entertainment enough. Don’t I keep my mouth shut when I’m near them and pour the ale; they are the best minds in London, and one of them natural philosophers with a mystical bent, one Jacques Cardigan (a mad enough fellow with a mad enough name!) has taken me in as a servant, and Your Ladyship will understand that I warm his bed when he asks for me, but it’s an easier life than posing as a bawd, so it is. Himself is a wealthy enough fella, although an obvious Catholic (what with a French name and his surname coming from a Catholic shire in Wales, he can hardly hide it, can he?), so he keeps out of politics and that may in the end mean I must move on to other quarters, for to be of use to Your Grace. But for now it’s safety and security and no questions asked—sure he thinks he’s landed in it, here’s a pretty Irish refugee who will give him pleasure in exchange for room and board, and not be questioning his religion neither!

He’s a summer house in Surrey, in Norwich, and we’ll be retiring there come spring, if I’m still under his roof then, but through winter we’re near enough to Gray’s Inn. Rose knows my circumstances and conveyed them to Tristan, so I’ve let him know I’m pleased to continue to help him knot his net-work of witches, and it seems to have grown with breathtaking speed, so it has. I’ve stopped asking him questions directly, though, and it’s trying to learn a bit by observation I am now. For it seems to me that he knows precisely what it is that brought magic to its knees, and it seems to me that if I might know it too, I might hoist him by his own petard (to quote that poxy playwright)—I could be using his own strategy of moving around through time and space, not to bring back magic but to prevent its cessation in the first place. I’ve no idea how to make that so, and it’s cagey enough he’s being with his information, but I’ve naught else to do with my time now that I’m away from Whitehall circles, so I mean to figure it out.

The one thing I’m knowing for certain is that in his ever-expanding fellowship of witches, Tristan occasionally runs into an ornery one who needs to be coaxed into the congregation (and sure why shouldn’t they? I would have been demanding some coaxing, if I didn’t foolishly think I could benefit from him as much as him from me.). At this moment of time, himself and some other DOers are romping about the universe trying to please some Wending woman in Antwerp who lived some fifty years back (and who had some connection to that banker fellow, Gresham—and therefore somehow-or-other to my new friend Bacon, for didn’t Sir Thomas Gresham’s bastard daughter marry Sir Francis’s half-brother? Is right she did. And of course I’m sure the Fuggers are involved in all of this somehow, they always are.).

Truth be told, I don’t even know if I should be taking the side of Tristan. What does he need do in Antwerp fifty years back? Especially requiring magic? Was there something about that time and place that contributed to the corruption of magic? And why make use of a witch who knew the forebears of the menfolk I now brush elbows with? A pure coincidence is it, or with his future-knowledge does Tristan plan to make use of me somehow, and my new friends? So many questions, Your Grace!

So it’s learning about all that I intend to do, but not so’s Tristan would notice my efforts. In fact, I intend to make myself excessively useful to him, in the hopes that he includes me in his confidences. (Perhaps even finds cause to have me Sent to his own time! Then I can see for myself what’s what.) He’s a grand lad, when he’s not scheming on behalf of his overlords, and I’ve a fondness for him, so I do.

With all good wishes to ye, milady, Gráinne formerly of London

DODO HUMAN RESOURCES

PERSONNEL DOSSIER

FAMILY NAME: Overkleeft

GIVEN NAME(S): Esme Claire

TITLE: Doctor (Ph.D., Bioinformatics)

AGE: 34

CLASS: Closer/MacGyver

HEIGHT: 5′10″

EYES: Blue

HAIR: Chestnut

COMPLEXION: Light, freckled

DISTINCTIVE FEATURES: Crooked nose, bent left clavicle (results of sports injuries)

ETHNICITY: Northern European

NATIONALITY: Belgian

LANGUAGE FLUENCY RATINGS:

Dutch, French: 5

English, Walloon: 4

German: 3

RELIGION: Atheist, from historically Catholic family on mother’s side, historically Dutch Reformed Church on father’s

CITIZENSHIP: Belgian (EU)

BIOGRAPHY: From an academic family that moved among various university towns (mostly Low Countries) while she was growing up. States that this nomadic lifestyle forced her to acquire social skills she might otherwise have neglected given a generally introverted/intellectual personality. Participated in various sports, with emphasis in field hockey and track & field. Hobby: sewing and textiles. Attended University of Antwerp, majored in biology. While at school, became involved in local chapter of Society for Creative Anachronism with emphasis on making period-correct clothing. Later obtained Ph.D. in bioinformatics, focusing on plant biology, from Leiden. Obtained security clearance, and thereby found her way into Defense Dept. personnel databases, as result of a NATO project to design upgraded military camouflage patterns in response to projected botanical shifts resulting from climate change. When approached by DODO, was in London seeking investors in an apparel start-up that was a spinout of the camouflage project. Agreed to put that project on ice in order to accept the DODO job.

SKILL SET: Athletic, hardy, uncomplaining, with a winning personality and ability to adapt to various social milieus. Keen eye for clothing, textiles, needlework of the late medieval/early Renaissance era. Exceptionally strong knowledge of botanical matters, especially in Northern/Western Europe.

LIMITATIONS: Her unusual height will make her conspicuous, particularly in medieval populations.

AFTER ACTION REPORT

DEBRIEFER: Dr. Melisande Stokes

DOER: Dr. Esme Overkleeft (Closer)

THEATER: NEER (Northern Europe Early Renaissance)

OPERATION: Antwerp witch recruitment, Part C: Harvest kalonji as incentive to potential KCW Winnifred Dutton

DEDE: Recruit Dutton as KCW

DTAP: Peerdsbos Forest (Antwerp), Belgium, 1562

Note: A previous unsuccessful recruitment attempt had been made by Dr. Stokes circa Day 500. The encounter ended awkwardly. Dutton had demanded kalonji, which Stokes knew nothing about, so recruitment was abandoned until a new gambit could be established for obtaining some. The series of DEDEs conducted by Chira Yasin and Felix Dorn circa 1200 had the effect of sowing kalonji in known locations in the Peerdsbos Forest where conditions were right for it to thrive and remain available centuries in the future.

Thanks to the earlier DEDEs by Dr. Stokes, Winnifred Dutton was already aware of us, and Overkleeft knew how to obtain clothes, make contact with Dutton, etc.

MUON Erszebet Karpathy sent Dr. Overkleeft from ODEC #3 at 08:21 of Day 818.

Having retrieved clothes stashed from Stokes’s previous efforts, Overkleeft went without incident to fortress at which DOer Felix Dorn had sowed seeds in 1202. Discovered that 360 years later, a small but hardy patch of kalonji had survived in one south-facing exposed courtyard. Esme uprooted one plant and took samples of leaves, removing viable roots and seed-buds so that Dutton could not simply establish her own patch of kalonji. Carried these to the home of Winnifred, wife of Thomas Dutton (Thomas Gresham’s Antwerp factor).

It is now known, and was an open secret even then, that Winnifred had been married off to Dutton only to get her out of England, where she had been Thomas Gresham’s lover and had borne him a natural daughter, Anne (twelve years old at time of this DEDE).

Consequently Dutton was living in a comfortable home with a disinterested “spouse,” in a foreign country, deprived of her lover, and except for the task of raising her daughter was very restless. She allowed the servants to bring Esme into the home at once and was delighted to receive the kalonji plant, the merits of which she immediately began to describe to both Esme and young Anne. Without further obstinacy, she pledged herself to being a KCW and made her residence available as a safe house. Furthermore she encouraged her daughter to do so as well, which Anne agreed to eagerly.

Esme Overkleeft returned without incident at 18:45.

Note: It is already marked in DODO archives, but for ease of reference, here is additional historical context (not told to Winnifred or Anne, of course): Anne Gresham/Dutton will go on to marry Nathaniel Bacon (half brother of Sir Francis), with whom she will live in Norwich, England. Her three daughters, all witches, are roughly contemporaneous with Gráinne in London. Accordingly, our next DEDE will be to reach out to them for recruitment.

Diachronicle

(CIRCA DECEMBER, YEAR 2)

In which Tristan has a working vacation

THE VILLAGE OF COLLINET STRADDLES a tributary of the river Dives, which empties into the English Channel a few miles downstream. The actual DTAP was a copse of trees both leafless and evergreen, some half-mile from the center of the village proper.

DODO now had a small operational group called TAST: the Tactical Archaeological Strike Team. As the name implied, they combined the skill set of traditional archaeologists (digging holes and finding stuff) with those of covert intelligence operatives—they knew how to get in and out of potentially hostile locations without drawing attention, and how to find what they were looking for in a hurry. You might not think of Normandy as a hostile location. But because of France’s ancient and secret laws banning diachronic operations, it was hostile to us. Anyway, TAST, zeroing in on a powerful GLAAMR centered on this copse of trees, had been able to carry out a couple of midnight digs and verify that it had been the homesite of the lineage of presumed witches we’d seen mentioned in various church documents. It was classic witch real estate: close enough to the village to allow commerce and social contacts but sufficiently remote to afford separation and privacy.

Erszebet was admirably on the mark: I materialized unobserved right at the copse, where the ground was mercifully dry, and after recovering from the usual disorientation, I followed the scent of woodsmoke to a hut some fifty very chilly strides away: the home of our potential KCW, Thyra of Collinet. I had landed, by design, in late afternoon in midwinter; in spite of the risk of hypothermia, I elected to arrive now because Thyra would likely be holed up in front of her fire.

As we’d come to expect, Thyra—a handsome woman of some forty years, brown hair gently greying—was not surprised by the arrival of a naked stranger, although I cannot say she was particularly pleased by it either. She grudgingly allowed me to enter her hut and warm myself by the fire. She muttered to herself.

“Pardon? Please repeat,” I said politely in Latin—the educated traveler’s language of the time.

Thyra appraised me a moment, then turned back to the fire. “I said”—now in slightly stiff Latin—“I sensed a glamour in recent days. But I did not expect somebody Sent. I cannot imagine why anyone wants to visit such a remote location.”

“Would this language be easier?” I asked in Anglo-Saxon; she gave me a confused look. “Let it be Latin, then,” I hastily amended. “Are you fluent?”

“Too fluent for the priest’s liking,” she said with a reluctant little chuckle. “If you speak slowly I can probably understand.”

I was able to convey to Thyra our proposal: namely that young men, apparent warriors, would come and stay with her from time to time, with no other purpose than to become familiar with the local language and customs. They would be disciplined and well-behaved. After a few weeks she would Home them.

“Pah,” she said, turning her attention back into the fire. “I do not like young men. Why not Send young women?”

“The men could be your house-help while they are here,” I said, looking around. “Chop firewood and bring it in. Fetch water. Fix that leak,” I added, pointing. “Is that roof-beam rotting? Do you think it’s safe to wait until spring? What kind of snow-load do you get here?”

With a dismissive wave of her hand, she grunted. “I have magic for all of that.”

“Magic can be tiring,” I said. “If the young men were here, you could rest all the time. Order them around.”

Thyra made an exaggerated expression of hmm-maybe-I-should-think-about-this-after-all, and after a moment nodded her head. “You say they are warriors?”

I nodded.

“I have no weapons for them, only some small knives and an axe for the chopping of wood.”

“They are not here to act as warriors,” I clarified. “They are here only to learn the language.”

“What if we require them to act as warriors?”

That brought me up short. “Why?” I asked. “Are you at war?”

She shook her head. “No, but there has been some concern in the village about maybe raids from boat-thugs who have been using the Dives estuary to get to the interior from the seacoast. If these young men could protect the village, this would make them more attractive guests.”

“I can’t promise protection,” I said, “since there is no guarantee they’ll be here if such an attack happens. But you must surely agree that having a strong young man around is better than not.”

Thyra shrugged. “It’s not bad,” she said. “Not as good as a strong young woman, though.”

Over the course of the next few minutes, I could see her warming to the idea, and eventually, without actually having said yes, it was clear she was amenable.

“How might you vouch for these visitors?” I asked. “Their presence will be noticed in the village.”

Thyra shrugged and gave a dismissive wave of her hand (a sort of early medieval variant of Erszebet’s body language, now I think of it) and said, “That is easy. Much trade across the Channel, there is nothing strange about cousins, friends of friends, and that sort, showing up from Britain and Ireland. I shall say my guests are such people, from such places.”

A few minutes more conversation, and she was willing to actually speak the words, “Yes, I will take them” (which put my fledgling Inner Bureaucrat at ease). She even invited me to share her meal of rabbit stew with root vegetables, and to stay the night before she Homed me the following morning.

Back at DODO HQ, I delivered my good news. Tristan and I sat at the same computer (be still my heart, I suppose) to pore over the feudal, judicial, and church chronicles of the area, seeking references to raids circa 1045. We found nothing, except one possible indirect reference to villagers who perished during altercations with bandits. It did not match Thyra’s description, nor was it chronicled officially anywhere—it was an ancillary comment in testimony given during a property dispute.

“Well, that’s good, anyhow,” said Tristan. “Probably means I won’t encounter anything while I’m there.”

I entered notes about Thyra’s dialect into the relevant linguistic databases, and sat with DORCCAD personnel, giving them sketches of the area for entry into their systems.

There was some chatter about timing, conducted over ODIN—and occasionally in person, since we tried to dine with the Odas every couple of weeks. To make a long logistical issue short, it was determined that Tristan would go back to stay with Thyra four different times, for a fortnight each time (rather than going back twice for a month each—Frank Oda determined this to be stabler with Chronotron calculations, and Erszebet agreed with him).

Tristan already knew Anglo-Saxon, and I’d been prepping him on Latin almost since we met (how can anyone with Western language interests not know Latin, FFS?). So he needed very little prep. Erszebet Sent him. Thyra had secured clothes in anticipation of his coming (he was Sent in spring).

Thyra had also already communicated to curious villagers, priests, etc. that Tristan (her supposed kinsman) would be sojourning with her for a fortnight so they might exchange news, and that he was of mixed Danish/Anglo-Saxon descent originating from a remote part of England (Tintagel—or as they called it then, Dintagel), journeying to Normandy to seek his fortune on the tourney field. This would explain why his accent was unfamiliar and why he tended to use Britannic, Cornish, and Anglo-Saxon vocabulary. Since no one in the settlement had been to that part of England, they accepted the cover story.

I KNOW THAT in the bowels of ODIN, there is an official DEDE report of Tristan’s time there, for I wrote it myself; I know also that there is an “incident report” that the well-intentioned but insufferably officious Macy Stoll required him to write as well. But I have just come into an extra measure of whale oil, and there is ink enough, and I cannot sleep from my growing anxiety, so it pleases me to recall Tristan’s telling me of his time there, and one element in particular.

When he arrived, he was made welcome by the settlement at large, and all manner of gifts and entertainment pressed upon him. Once a level of trust was established, he asked to learn their combat styles, and the men of the settlement were pleased to show off and practice with him. It was generally limited to stick-fighting arts, as the locals were rural villagers. These sessions also allowed him to work on language immersion more fluidly, imitating not only the vocabulary but the cadence and pitch of able-bodied young males. He was not in danger of “talking like a girl,” which would have been the case if he’d mostly stayed under Thyra’s roof.

He was Homed after two weeks (yes, it was dreadfully good to see him, and yes, I did try to catch a peek of him before he disappeared into the decontamination shower). After about ten days of downtime, he went back; another two weeks, another ten days; a third fortnight, a third rest period. During the rest periods, he was fully debriefed (usually by me) and all lessons learned were inserted into DORC’s linguistic database, so that future “Varangian Guard” candidates could bone up on their Norman prior to visiting Thyra, and learn the language that much more quickly.

Then came the fourth and final repetition. This is the part I most like to remember him describing.

One morning, shortly before dawn, Tristan and Thyra were awakened by suspicious noises. Tristan arose, went outside, and saw a longboat moving up the tributary toward the village center, with six men in it. He grabbed a peeled tree branch, at least an inch thick and about his own height, which he had been intending to use to build Thyra a drying rack. He ran to the village, entered the church through its narthex, and rang the bell urgently to alert the villagers. And then he stayed in the church, realizing the strangers must be coming there to steal the only thing of value in the area: a reliquary of a wrought silver cross, about a handspan across. Embedded in a decorative gold rosette in the center was a flake of white enamel, alleged by local clerics to be a fragment of a molar formerly belonging to St. Septimus of Pontchardon, an early missionary who had been martyred by the Gauls. Obviously this was of value to the would-be thieves for the metal, not the relic. They were startled by the bell as they approached the church entrance, more so because they found themselves unexpectedly face-to-face with a large man brandishing a stick.

Three of the men, armed with an axe, a steel-tipped lance, and a seax (knife)—held Tristan at bay in the narthex while the other three ran up the aisle of the church to nab the reliquary, which lived on the altar. While there, they snatched up a few other odds and ends that had caught their eye—the candelabrum, the communion cup, etc. These booty-carriers emerged from the church first, only to find some villagers—alerted by Tristan’s ringing of the bell—waiting for them with shovels, rakes, pitchforks, and knives.

These first intruders were lightly armed but their hands were full of loot, and they were obliged to drop the valuables in order to defend themselves. The more heavily armed men, who had been menacing Tristan, came out to join the fray. The last of these was the one with the lance. He backed toward the exit of the building while keeping the weapon leveled at Tristan . . . then pivoted toward the open door to make a fast departure.

However, the lance got hung up in the tiny doorway, in a manner reminiscent of an early-twentieth-century slapstick film comedy, or so it always seems when Tristan is acting it out for new recruits. Seeing an opening, Tristan advanced and delivered a “pool cue” style shot to the head of the lance-man, catching him by his ear with the butt of his staff. The man sagged toward the floor and dropped his weapon. Tristan grabbed the lance, but he himself was the next person to fall victim to the cramped dimensions of the doorway, as he tripped over its high threshold on the way out and sprawled across the pavement outside (it is a hoot to see him re-enact this moment). The lance was lost (it was still dark, the sun not having risen yet), but in groping for it Tristan found himself grasping a boat oar that had apparently been carried up to the site by one of the intruders, perhaps to use as a weapon.

The melee was moving in the general direction of the riverbank. This was a long stone’s throw from the church; the intruders struggled to fight their way through the mob of a dozen or so villagers who were haphazardly beating at them with farm implements, as though not sure if the point was to prevent them from getting back into the church or to prevent them from escaping.

Tristan collected himself from his unintentional vaudeville routine, and caught up with the intruders as they were attempting to board the boat to make their getaway. By now, they had dropped all their booty, but nobody could see that in the dark yet. A villager grabbed the gunwale of the boat with both hands in a bid to prevent them from getting away (presumably with the reliquary). The axe-wielding intruder raised his weapon high, clearly with an eye toward cutting the villager’s fingers off.

Tristan lunged toward them, swung his oar in a wide arc, and caught the axe-man in the gut, knocking the wind out of him and sending him sprawling back into the boat. At the same moment, the villager holding the gunwale did a belly-flop into the river. (I am trembling with suppressed mirth even now as I write this, recalling the many times I’ve seen it all acted out at office parties when Tristan’s had a few.)

The intruders got away in their longboat. Five of the villagers sustained very superficial wounds (Thyra healed them in an hour), and Tristan strained ligaments in his shoulder when he slammed the oar into the axe-man. It was nothing serious, but as I said, Macy Stoll ordered him to write an incident report about it. (And this was before DODO’s bureaucracy had bloated up out of control. I wonder what would happen if he did that now . . . Well, I’ll never know. Get used to it, Stokes.)

Once the sun rose, all of the artifacts were recovered, cleaned, and restored to the church, and the village had a shared breakfast, during which the children imitated the more absurd physical moments of the brief raid. What could have been a tragedy was transformed into a playful morning.

But if I told you the consequences of this minor skirmish, reader, you would absolutely not believe me.

Post by Macy Stoll to LTC Tristan Lyons

on private ODIN channel

DAY 872 (MID-DECEMBER, YEAR 2)

LTC Lyons, as a rule I don’t keep tabs on all of the After Action Reports on the various DEDEs, since Diachronic Operations is your department and not mine. Medical benefits, however, ARE my department. In that vein, I note that you consulted an external physician upon the conclusion of your most recent visit to the 1045 Normandy DTAP. In order for this expense to be approved, I’ll need details on the nature of the injury, whether it was sustained on the job, and why DODO medical staff were unable to deal with the problem in-house.

Reply from LTC Lyons:

NVM I will just eat the expense.

From Macy Stoll:

Your selflessness sets a brave example, but it’s not just about the money. By tracking these incidents and expenditures, we are able to optimize the planning and budgeting process, unlocking the ability to hire additional medical staff to meet the needs of our growing organization. Also, for legal reasons we need thorough documentation of all on-the-job injuries.

From LTC Lyons:

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, this 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 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?”

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.”