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

INCIDENT REPORT

AUTHOR: Rebecca East-Oda

SUBJECT: Rachel bat Avraham—unauthorized ODEC use

THEATER: C/COD

OPERATION: Ribbon-cutting ceremony

DTAP: Cambridge, MA, present day

FILED: Day 896 (early January, Year 3)

Summary: At 11:21:16 of Day 891, the subject, Rachel bat Avraham, a KCW from the circa-1200 Constantinople DTAP, was Sent from there to ODEC #3 and materialized in normal physical condition. She was issued clothing and placed under observation in the medical isolation facility adjoining ODEC Row. She was debriefed in Hebrew and in Greek by Dr. Stokes (head of DORC) and Dr. Lingas (in-house Byzantine Greek HOSMA) respectively. Initial briefing focused on two topics of immediate concern, namely (1) whether any more surprise visitors from 1200 Constantinople were to be expected, and (2) the importance of immediate medical procedures needed to protect subject from our diseases and vice versa. As precautions in the meantime, Dr. Oda had shut down all four operational ODECs, and ODEC Row had been placed under bio-containment lockdown.

Upon receipt of verbal consent from subject, medical staff began administration of inoculations required to protect subject from modern diseases to which she is not likely to have immunity, and collected samples (swabs, blood, urine, feces) for analysis of possible historical disease agents. Upon examination, subject had fully healed scars indicative of a past encounter with smallpox, suggesting that no active, virus-shedding infection was in progress. Subsequent laboratory analysis detected low levels of intestinal parasites and gut flora of a potentially contagious nature; these were eradicated through orally administered medications and the subject given a clean bill of health following four days of analysis and treatment. The inoculation protocols are scheduled to continue for another two weeks, whereupon subject will be cleared to emerge from bio-containment and mingle with the general population. Psychologically, subject appears normal, other than some natural disorientation.

Results of debriefing: Subject is a seventeen-year-old resident of Pera, the Jewish neighborhood lying across the Golden Horn from Constantinople proper. She is one of a small network of KCWs recruited by DODO and used extensively for DEDEs conducted during the last two years while laying the groundwork for full-scale diachronic operations slated to commence immediately. She is well known to our DOers, who from the very beginning have commented on her marked curiosity about our time and place and her frequently voiced desire to travel into the future and join us. She was able to reach ODEC #3 through the assistance of her mother, another KCW in Constantinople who agreed to carry out the Sending.

Until this incident occurred, we had not envisioned that a security breach of this nature was a realistic threat.

1. Sending by a historical witch into her own future was considered extremely difficult.

2. There was no place in the present day where magic worked, save in the confines of an “up and running” ODEC. Since we didn’t leave the ODECs up and running, the Sending witch had no fixed target to “aim at.”

Obviously, these two assumptions are no longer valid.

1. Our KCWs in 1200 Constantinople have had so much practice Homing our DOers that they seem to have developed a feel for how to access the modern Boston DTAP.

2. The policy just inaugurated of leaving the ODECs running 24/7 has given the Sending witch a much broader and more stable target to “aim at.”

During her debriefing, subject admitted that she had become aware of the new ODECs and the “always on” policy slated to go into force at the beginning of the new year. This leakage of information was not the result of one specific disclosure by one specific DOer, but rather a pattern of information that she had assembled through numerous conversations with various DOers. In addition, it appears that subject, along with many other witches, has the ability to extract information from nearby persons through non-verbal techniques. That combined with subject’s intense curiosity and drive to escape what she sees as the stifling confines of a traditional medieval Jewish household led to her devising the plan that led to her materializing in ODEC #3.

General remarks: Subject is beginning to learn modern English and is rapidly becoming familiar and comfortable with modern technology, conveniences, etc. It will be some time before she can move about freely in modern society without supervision, however, nothing in principle stands in the way of her doing so. It should go without saying that she carries in her head classified secrets that can never be divulged to the modern world at large. Likewise, if she were to return to her place of origin and divulge information about the future, or attempt to alter the reality of that DTAP in a heavy-handed manner, Diachronic Shear would likely result.

For her own protection, she will remain in biological isolation for another two weeks, but after that, top-level direction will be needed in order to determine her fate.

FROM LIEUTENANT GENERAL OCTAVIAN K. FRINK

TO DR. ROGER BLEVINS

DAY 900 (MID-JANUARY, YEAR 3)

Blev,

I was perusing Mrs. East-Oda’s report on the recent incident and came across something toward the end of it that, to put it mildly, startled me: Ms. bat Avraham “has the ability to extract information from nearby persons through non-verbal techniques.”

Am I to understand that she is a mind reader? And that other witches have the same ability? If so, then this document is an extraordinary example of what is referred to, in the journalism business, as “burying the lede.”

Yours in consternation and amusement,

Okie

FROM DR. ROGER BLEVINS

TO LIEUTENANT GENERAL OCTAVIAN K. FRINK

DAY 902

Okie,

I too noticed the passage you referred to in your letter, and was doing some investigation before reporting further. I would recommend against use of any such pulp-novel terminology as “mind reading” but, in short, it does appear that many witches have enhanced skills around sensing others’ mental states, and manipulating same. Of course, like any other magical technique, it can only be used in an ODEC, or in a pre-1851 DTAP.

In a larger sense, this is not a surprise. For reasons I needn’t belabor to you, DODO has focused on one, and only one, form of magic: Sending people to other DTAPs. But magic has many other possible uses. Making an analogy to electricity, it’s as if Thomas Edison devoted his entire career to the development of washing machines but never put any effort into light bulbs, elevators, or the myriad other applications that surround us today. We know perfectly well that witches could perform other kinds of magic; we just haven’t put any resources into it yet.

Blev

Post by LTG Octavian K. Frink to Dr. Roger Blevins on private ODIN channel

DAY 903

Blev, I’m moving this over to the secure messaging system for efficiency’s sake. I got your letter. To put it bluntly, exploitation of the Sending type of magic has ballooned into an enormously expensive and cumbersome operation. All worth it, I’m sure—not suggesting that the taxpayers’ money is in any way misspent on ODECs and so on. But now that we have all of that apparatus up and running we need to look for other opportunities to make the most of it.

It didn’t escape my notice that you mentioned the possibility of manipulating others’ mental states as something witches could do. Let’s drill down on that.

Reply from Dr. Blevins:

In a sense it’s almost common knowledge, Okie. Historically, witches were feared and mistrusted for just such abilities; where do you think the term “bewitched” originated from?

We haven’t put much effort into this because it only works in an ODEC, and it’s hard to imagine a practical application of such techniques, which depend on getting the subject into a cryogenically isolated telephone booth in a basement in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Also, we only have one witch.

From LTG Frink:

Now we have two, and we pretty much own Rachel bat Avraham; we can’t very well just let her wander around free. If she came forward, it means others can do likewise. Let’s get more witches, and let’s put ’em to work.

I take your point about the ODEC. Why can’t we make these things smaller? More portable? That would make their use for psy-ops far more feasible.

From Dr. Blevins:

As to your first point, we’ve been contemplating such a program for a long time—which is why we built so many ODECs. I’ll put my foot on the gas, and I’ll spread the word to the department heads.

As to your second, my understanding is that they are impossibly cumbersome because of the cryogenics. But Dr. Oda is now surplus personnel, since he finished the Chronotron. I’ll try to draw him out on the topic, without tipping our hand.

Follow-up from Dr. Blevins, a day later:

Okie, I had coffee with Dr. Oda, framed as a conversation about his future at DODO. We had contemplated moving him to “emeritus” status to get him out of the way without sending his troublesome wife into a rage. In that capacity he would have the freedom to explore independent research projects as long as they were relevant to DODO’s mission. Without any prompting from me, he mentioned that he had ideas on building an ODEC capable of working at non-cryogenic temperatures. The technical details are over my head but apparently it has to do with room-temperature superconductors and certain advances in computer processing power that he has been tracking. Sounds like this could possibly lead to a portable ODEC—and if so we could redirect resources from diachronic travel to psy-ops.

Unless you say otherwise before COB today, I’ll slide him over to the new role and encourage him to pursue the idea.

Blev

Post by Macy Stoll

on “All Employees” ODIN channel

DAY 905

Everyone, Dr. Blevins is extremely busy just now but has asked me to reach out in this forum and shine a light on some of the confusion and resulting rumors that have surrounded the recent arrival of Rachel bat Avraham.

To clarify, Rachel’s arrival was a PLANNED event—NOT a security breach.

There was indeed some surprise and confusion around the exact timing, which is why some of you may have noticed startled expressions on the faces of LTC Lyons and Ms. Karpathy. Rachel was scheduled to be Sent forward to ODEC #3 on a different date in the near future as part of a planned program of activities for which Dr. Blevins has been laying the groundwork for some months now. Because of some understandable confusion around calendars (Julian vs. Gregorian), the Sending KCW in 1200 Constantinople did it on the wrong day and so Rachel showed up ahead of schedule.

Now that the cat’s out of the bag, Dr. Blevins has asked me to let everyone know that Rachel is just the first in a series of “Anachrons,” which is a term we will be applying to colleagues from earlier historical epochs who will be coming forward to present-day Boston and other DODO sites to collaborate with us. The exact policy is still being formulated, but we anticipate recruiting Anachrons in the following general categories:

– KCWs, such as Rachel, who can help Erszebet handle the anticipated uptick in demand for Sending personnel to various DTAPs.

– Subject matter authorities, such as people who know how to speak a particular dialect or fight in a particular martial arts system for which we don’t have modern-day expertise. These can serve as valuable adjuncts to the existing DORC staff.

– Evacuees who must be brought forward for tactical reasons, typically to avoid the possibility of Diachronic Shear. This might happen in the event of a security breach leading to a situation where someone knew too much about their future.

The above is not the definitive list—the full policy document is still being drawn up.

Soon Rachel will be cleared by our medical staff to mingle with the general population, and when that happens I know you’ll all join me in making her feel as welcome as possible in her new home and era.

EXCERPT FROM TRANSCRIPT OF INTERVIEW

BETWEEN DR. MELISANDE STOKES (MS)

AND RACHEL BAT AVRAHAM (RBA)

DAY 904 (DAY 13 OF RBA’S MEDICAL QUARANTINE)

NOTE: Conversation took place in Hebrew, translated into English.

MS: You’re looking stronger today. Dr. Srinavasan told me you ate all of the chicken soup.

RBA: My shoulder [vaccine injection site] is no longer hurting and the chills have stopped. Yes, I feel better, but still weak.

MS: Would you like me to tell Dr. Srinavasan about your feeling of weakness? Perhaps he should know about it.

RBA: No, he cannot help.

MS: Why do you say that? Modern medicine can do things that would surprise you.

RBA: This I understand. I have seen it with my own eyes. But my feeling of weakness is not the kind of thing that a doctor would understand, or know how to fix. If you let me go into the ODEC, I would feel strong again.

MS: Because you could do magic there?

RBA: Yes, of course. You [non-magical persons] don’t understand. You think that witches do magic only at certain times, when we perform a spell, such as Sending. Actually we are doing it a little bit every moment, even when we are sleeping.

MS: I have heard similar things from Erszebet. Only when she is in the ODEC does she feel completely herself.

RBA: I can’t wait to learn better English so that I can talk more to Erszebet.

MS: The computer can help you learn some basic parts of the language, and when you get out of quarantine you’ll learn faster.

RBA: I have been reading the computer.

MS: That’s what Mortimer told me.

RBA: Who is Mortimer?

MS: You haven’t met him, he is one of the people who helps make the computers work.

RBA: How does he know that I have been reading the computer?

MS: Do you remember our conversation the other day about how the computers are linked together in a network?

RBA: Yes, of course. A little bit like the network of Strands.

MS: A little bit, yes. Well, because of this, it’s possible for someone like Mortimer, who is on a different computer in a different place, to see what you have been reading. And he tells me that you have been looking at Wikipedia in both Hebrew and Greek.

RBA: The Hebrew hasn’t changed as much. There are many new words, of course, but I can learn those. The Greek has changed more. I can read both of them, anyway.

MS: What have you been reading?

RBA: The future of Constantinople.

MS: You mean, the history?

RBA: (laughs) To you, yes. But to me it is the future. I was reading about the Fourth Crusade.

MS: To you, that would be only a few weeks in the future.

RBA: You know about it?

MS: Yes, as you know we have been quite interested in that DTAP and so I have read many historical accounts.

RBA: Then perhaps you can tell me what happens to the Jews of Pera, after the Crusaders cross the Bosporus and attack Galata Tower? We live right in the shadow of the tower!

MS: There is no written documentation about that directly, but related documents point to the Jewish community having dispersed without incident, probably in response to the Catholic presence.

RBA: (agitated) In the Levant, Catholics slaughtered legions of us! Are they going to slaughter my family? I must go back and warn them and tell them to leave before the trouble starts!

MS: I’m sure they don’t slaughter your family, Rachel. Something else happened. Your family, and everyone else, they must have just chosen to leave—without incident, or it would be recorded somewhere, right? With the Jews, everything bad is always recorded.

RBA: So is everything good.

MS: No, just the miracles. So there are no miracles, but there’s no slaughter.

RBA: I should warn them.

MS: You chose to leave them, Rachel. You cannot leap back and forth between DTAPs.

RBA: Why not? From how you have described DODO that is the whole point, leaping back and forth.

MS: We follow instructions on what to do and not to do, and never for personal reasons. It is always in the interest of the work. Otherwise things get complicated. When we started speaking, two weeks ago, you had to agree to stay in this DTAP before I could tell you anything. You remember that, don’t you?

RBA: Oh, of course, and I’m very happy to be here, it is so much better even than the most exciting magic my grandmothers ever did. It is amazing. And all of you seem to take it in stride! Even Erszebet! It is all so wonderful, and everyone is kind to me, and it’s such fun to see how everyone is clothed and I cannot wait until I can try all the food, and this medicine is better than magic, if I were this sick at home I would never be so recovered in three days! All these, what are they called, innocuvations—

MS: Inoculations, and vaccinations. And that bag up there that’s attached to the tube that goes into your arm, that has some medicine that’s making you better faster.

RBA: Yes! Easier than magic! I do not like the hum of the electricity but Erszebet says I will get used to it, and so I cannot imagine even Heaven would be so wondrous as this.

MS: Then I hope you are at peace with staying here. And helping us. Please trust that your family will be safe without your assistance.

RBA: Very well. How can I help? Once I have adjusted to being here?

MS: The role of witches, here and now, is to Send agents back in time to different DTAPs.

RBa: I remember. I had no idea the world was so enormous!

MS: Yes, even for us, with all our knowledge, it is a remarkable thing to contemplate. So you Send us back in time, and we do things, very subtle little things, to prevent undesirable situations from happening. You don’t need to worry about what those are. That’s somebody else’s responsibility. You just need to perform the magic of Sending them back in time.

RBA: Very well, that’s easy enough. What else?

MS: That’s all.

RBA: That’s all?

MS: Yes.

RBA: You mean that’s all Erszebet does every day? She just Sends people? Why don’t you use her other magic?

MS: We have not found other useful applications for magic in today’s world.

RBA: What?! How is that possible? It’s magic! Magic is always useful! That is like saying you have no useful application for the sun because you found this electricity thing.

MS: You yourself noted how remarkable life is now, that in many ways it is even better than magic.

RBA: It’s better in a different way, it’s not better than not having magic at all.

MS: Because magic stopped in 1851, we became accustomed to living without it.

RBA: So Erszebet, all she ever does is Send people?

MS: Yes.

RBA: No wonder she’s so grumpy. That must be very, very dull after a while.

MS: It’s her work.

RBA: I have never heard of a single witch in the history of the world who just had to do the exact same thing over and over and over again. That sounds terrible. The Lord would never subject anyone to such treatment. Even when we were slaves in Egypt we had more variety to our tasks than that.

MS: Are you saying you do not wish to have the work?

RBA: I want to have something else to do as well. I am an excellent witch but I am also skilled at many other things. I can bake bread, and I am a superb seamstress. Perhaps I can spend some time Sending people and some time baking challah.

MS: I will talk to Dr. Blevins about your suggestion. I like it. Perhaps it would help Erszebet if she also had a pastime.

RBA: No, not a pastime, something real, something useful. I have met many people in this fortress now but not a single baker.

MS: We don’t have enough observant Jews on staff to require that we keep challah on hand.

RBA: Forget challah, then, I wish to learn how to make those delicious sweet round things that Tristan has brought into the fortress, with the brightly colored bits on them. If I could spend some time baking those, then I would not mind if my magic work consists only of Sending.

MS: I’ll talk to Dr. Blevins.

Post by Dr. Roger Blevins

on “Announcements” ODIN channel

DAY 915 (LATE JANUARY, YEAR 3)

Effective immediately, Dr. Frank Oda has been promoted to Scientist Emeritus. In this new role, Dr. Oda will be unburdened from the day-to-day responsibilities of running DODO’s R&D department, and will enjoy the freedom to pursue advanced research projects that have been back-burnered until now during his months of hard work on the Chronotron. Please congratulate him if you should encounter him around the facility.

Macy Stoll has already tasked HR with recruiting or promoting a replacement for Dr. Oda as head of the R&D department. In the interim, Dr. Oda will remain in place as acting head and assign department staff to various tasks as appropriate.

Journal Entry of

Rebecca East-Oda

JANUARY 30

Temperature 29F, damp, slight NE breeze. Barometer steady.

More firewood delivered and stacked (using area of garden that was dug up for Bay Psalm Book—eighteen months later soil has still not recovered). Expecting snowdrops soon.

Yesterday afternoon Tristan, Melisande, and Erszebet drove to the house with the new witch, Rachel, who will be lodging with us until appropriate quarters can be determined for her. A tiny, wide-eyed thing, looking like a rag doll in a dress that Erszebet picked out for her during a raid on Newbury Street. Predictably, there was disagreement about logistics. Tristan wanted Erszebet to return to the office to continue to Send people—they have quite the schedule there now, and are working her almost to exhaustion. He argued that Melisande is the only one who speaks medieval Hebrew and therefore Mel should stay with Rachel.

“We will both stay with her,” said Erszebet. “I was ‘on hold’ (with air quotes) for more than a century, you can be ‘on hold’ for overnight.”

“Erszebet, you can’t even talk to her, what’s the good of your staying?”

“I will talk to her through Melisande,” Erszebet said in her so-there tone. “Do you know how long it has been since I have had another witch to talk to?” Erszebet made a mock-surprise face. “Why, of course you do. You know exactly how long it has been. So you will give me this. If you refuse, I will understandably go on strike, which I would have done months ago if I were not so exceptionally generous and patient. I am giving you an opportunity not to force me to go on strike.” (Have been coaching her on her communication skills. Clearly mixed results.)

Tristan nodded. “Fine,” he said. “You’ll return at 1300 hours tomorrow.”

She rolled her eyes. “This is not an army barracks. I will return at one o’clock in the afternoon.”

“Major Sloane has vectored a couple of DOSECOPS to the house, to keep an eye on things,” said Tristan, to me now. “They’re on their way here.”

“Absolutely not,” I said. “She’s not a criminal or a fugitive.”

“It’s about security,” said Tristan.

“Felix,” Mel suggested quickly. “Rachel knows Felix from her native DTAP. He’s between DEDEs. He’s not technically a guard, but he’s qualified—in fact he’s overqualified. Surely you can arm him and have him bunk in the dining room.” A glance at me. “Would that be all right?”

“Only because Rachel knows him,” I said. “Being a den-mother to wayward witches is not in my job description, and I will not play along if it requires armed men in my living room.”

Tristan’s jaw worked silently for a few moments. I knew what he was thinking: It’s not your living room anymore—it belongs to the East House Trust. But he had the good grace not to say this out loud. He called off the two guards, placed a call to Felix, and left.

I confess I was surprised and touched by Erszebet’s cosseting young Rachel. Speaking to her through Melisande, she insisted Rachel spend the time giving vent to how very different and disorienting it is here. Melisande translating, most of the English-to-Hebrew being some form of “I know, isn’t it awful? I don’t know what’s worse, to have it happen all at once as with you, or to have it happen with gradual inevitability as with me.”

Diachronicle

DAY 1800 (SUMMER, YEAR 5)

In which the zenith becomes our new normal

I HAVE BUT EIGHTEEN DAYS left before the solar eclipse and there is far too much to cover in what time is left to me. I am more desperate than ever not to be stuck here for fucking ever. Therefore I shall resort to a compendious depiction of the next phase of DODO’s existence.

Two and a half years passed. Every day I rose and went to work. Many times I was Sent back to various DTAPs to perform missions. A lot happened, in other words. And yet those two and a half years flew by so quickly that when it was over it felt as if some witch had Sent me into the future.

The value of the Chronotron exceeded all expectations. With it at our disposal, we were close to gods in our omniscience. Over the course of those dazzling years, DODO expanded beyond anything even Tristan could have imagined that afternoon when he took me to coffee. We expanded both in our own DTAP and also throughout history. In the twenty-first century, we built training and research centers all over the globe, with ODEC-equipped facilities in Europe, the Middle East, and Japan. To guarantee the most authentic training, we lured experts in certain fields of importance to us forward through time. Our Fighters scrimmaged in top-secret dojos with Roman legionaries, Viking berserkers, and samurai. Their training gear was wrought by armorers of ages past, brought forward to toil in air-conditioned smithies. Per Tristan’s early joke to me years earlier, I did indeed have a chance, once, to practice my conversational Sumerian—with an actual Sumerian.

We could not bring people forward from the past willy-nilly, of course. Strict principles around Anachrons were codified, with each one being personally approved by Blevins. Generally it was safer for a DOer to train in a DTAP and bring that knowledge back to us, than it was to bring somebody forward, which would then oblige us to spend time, energy, and medical and psychological resources on keeping them from losing their shit having a difficult time adjusting to modernity, however carefully we tried to shield them. Our epidemiology unit ran around the clock checking samples and improving our vaccination protocols.

Most of the early Anachrons were witches. Erszebet, to our surprise, did not fly the coop once she had been made redundant. She rather adopted the air of Cleopatra, and made it clear—to them and to us—that she was now the Alpha Witch. None of the other witches could ever possibly know as much as she did, about the twenty-first century or about DODO’s real missions; likewise, none of us could possibly know how to behave appropriately with the new witches. She maintained all of her charismatic narcissistic bitchiness prepossessing fierceness, but she became, in effect, the Den Mother of Weird Sisters. Frank and Rebecca’s home couldn’t hold them all, so DODO purchased a big old house elsewhere in Cambridge, rigged it up with all kinds of security hardware, and turned it into a kind of sorority for Erszebet and her brood. Vans with blacked-out windows shuttled back and forth between it and DODO headquarters, ferrying witches. They had come from all times and places, but they mostly followed Erszebet’s lead when it came to fashion choices.

There was also a very small cohort of contemporary witches. Erszebet could smell them, and found it perfectly ordinary to approach strangers on Mass Ave and inform them of their latent abilities, to the despair of everyone who cared about security clearance. Those rare few who responded positively were immediately told it was a joke by me (or Rebecca, or whoever was Erszebet-minding that day); meanwhile the attendant DOSECOP (our version of the Secret Service) would capture an image of the woman’s face, and send it electronically for identification and background check. If the DOSECOP got a green light, they would signal the Erszebet-minder, who would backpedal on the “just a joke” line and surreptitiously invite the newfound witch to an interview near (not at, not at first) HQ. There were only three contemp witches at first (there are now about eight). One of these was Julie Lee, aka the Smart-ass Oboist with the tattooed eyebrows from the Apostolic Café. Apparently Erszebet had known her for a witch from day one but did not bother to mention it until the mood possessed her. Another was Tanya Wakessa Washington, a legal clerk in City Hall who was a regular at the café.

The third was Rebecca East-Oda.

She was a grudging convert. I think she agreed to be recruited more for the sake of supporting an endeavor Frank loved than out of any eagerness of her own. That said, she was quite chuffed with herself the first time she turned an apple into an orange. And, with her Congregationalist studiousness, she was apt. Erszebet worked with them every day in one of the ODECs, displaying a patience and good humor she revealed nowhere else, teaching them basic magical spells, but it was slow going. Raised in a civilization from which magic had been eradicated for a century and a half, they all suffered a kind of atrophy of the faculties needed to perform it. Erszebet had told me in private that even Julie—the best of them—was probably years away from being able to Send a DOer with any degree of spatiotemporal accuracy.

Our budget seemed limitless at that time, in no small part because there were multiple variations of the Bay Psalm Book gambit—famous works of art, rare artifacts and antiques, treasure troves of all sorts . . . we made them ours and sold them all for cash. Tristan and I had ethical qualms about this, but Blevins was in charge. The Fugger Bank became our frenemy was neither friend nor foe to us; at some times they checked our strategems, at other times abetted us, according to some larger plan of their own that eluded our understanding. It became increasingly obvious that Dr. Cornelius Rudge, who’d been in on the project from the beginning, had deep connections to the Fuggers, and was basically serving as their man on the inside.

But acquiring treasure was no longer DODO’s primary goal. Oh no, reader, do not think it.

Frink and Blevins had an uber-mission (I wonder, shall it seem antiquated or inconceivable, if these words are ever brought to light?). I can only guess at what this might have been, and at when they conceived it: at the very beginning of the project, or at some point during the years when DODO was growing to the zenith of its power? Only in the last few weeks have I gained an inkling of their true motives. I shall say what I know of these as quickly as I can, because my hand is cramping up like a motherfucker most pitiably; but en route I must explain what happened in the Constantinople Theater.

Yes, DODO had several distinct theatres of operations, of which Constantinople, circa 1200, was the first, the biggest, and the one that most concerned Tristan and myself.

The official rationale for what we were doing there was as follows:

At the time of our great thriving, there were amongst the powers of the globe multiple entities that caused our government concern. These included China, Russia, and certain nefarious elements in the Middle East.

DODO was tasked with discouraging China and Russia from becoming geopolitical BFFs close allies. We were to do this by subtly, retroactively shifting the historical soul of Russia away from the Eastern Orthodox Church and toward the Roman Catholic one, starting just after the Fourth Crusade.

The Fourth Crusade was

an epic clusterfuck

a comic-opera misadventure

a tragic saga with farcical elements. It never even reached its intended target in the Holy Land. Instead the Crusaders—Catholics from Western Europe—invaded the Byzantine Empire, which was a Christian land, and sacked Constantinople.

Its domino effect throughout history is a remarkable lesson in cause and effect that I will return to at another time, if writer’s cramp and leisure time allow it. What matters here is to note the consequences. With the help of the Chronotron and of various Spies and Sages we Sent back to serve as its eyes and ears, we planned out a long interrelated series of DEDEs. Any one of these would seem innocuous unto itself—stealing a pitchfork in some small town in the Urals, digging a trench in the city of Zara, moving a sleeping dog from a hut in a back alley in Budapest to another hut fifty feet away. Collectively, these slight alterations pushed our agenda, shifted the quantum tendencies of reality to allow us to form what we ultimately desired: that Catholicism would spread its wings over more of Christendom, and the Orthodox Church over less of it.

Catholicism unchecked would mean disaster for both the colonizing of North America and the development of science, and so every bit of strengthening that happened on the church’s eastern flank had to be offset on its northwestern one, to maintain within Europe the tensions and conflicts that would lead to a successful Protestant Reformation. That too is a story for another day, but it is important to note here that it involved the collusion of influential bankers, in particular the Fuggers. Gráinne had indirect connections to that family owing to her post-Shear circumstances, and in sundry ways, she greatly assisted us in bringing her generation of Fuggers into the fold, in such manner that subsequent generations were raised to be our natural allies. As I have recently and painfully learned, she had her own reasons for becoming cozy with the Fuggers, but now I am getting ahead of myself.

Back to the uber-mission—or, to be precise, what Frink and Blevins claimed was the uber-mission.

Because the 1204 fall of Constantinople is what brought Catholicism so far east, most of our DEDEs set off little chain reactions, quiet little tributaries that met up in the central artery of the Fourth Crusade.

This meant several things: first, that young Rachel was invaluable to us, not only as a witch, but as a source of information far exceeding all our documented knowledge. Furthermore, we could rely on her to Send a DOer to that DTAP with uncanny specificity. It also meant that most of our Fighters had to be trained to have at least a basic grasp of Greek (spoken by the native Orthodox Christians of Constantinople), Latin (spoken by the crusading Catholics who were besieging them), and Anglo-Saxon (the most common tongue of the Varangian Guards). They also learned to fight in both the eastern style employed by the conscripted army and the northern style of the Varangians, as well as the various continental styles employed by the wide variety of soldiers from Flanders down to Sicily. There were few actual battles over the two-year course of the Fourth Crusade, but every one of them had been quite the mishmash of styles. I speak from listening to Tristan, who was one of our frontline Fourth Crusade DOers.

While we were growing and thriving in the twenty-first century, the witch network was being built out with astonishing rapidity in many DTAPs. Gráinne, who had taken up with an acquaintance of Francis Bacon (and of the Fuggers, per above), was worth her weight in diamonds, as (rather like Constantinople) late Elizabethan London is, within the time-space continuum of recorded human history, akin to Grand Central Station, especially given that we needed to have KCWs of both Catholic and Protestant backgrounds. Within eighteen months, every DTAP we’d targeted had a Known Compliant Witch who knew Gráinne, or a witch who knew a witch who knew a witch who knew Gráinne. We could safely move DOers from DTAP to DTAP in ways unthinkable before the Chronotron came online. Gráinne—whom I had never met—seemed to enjoy her position of prominence. Unlike most of the other witches working with DODO (whom, it must be said, we spent a not inconsiderable amount of time placating), she asked nothing of us. She was generous and earnest. Our one great blindness, our tragic flaw, is that we never questioned that.

But again, I am getting far ahead of myself.

INCIDENT REPORT

AUTHOR: LTC Tristan Lyons

SUBJECT: Chira Lajani

THEATER: Constantinople

DTAP: Blachernae Palace, 1203

FILED: Day 1787 (June, Year 5)

Sexual assault and repercussions (weregild)

Chira Lajani was on assignment in 1203 Constantinople. Her DEDE put her in the royal wing of Blachernae Palace after sunset. This wing is guarded mostly by the mercenary Varangian Guards of which I (LTC Tristan Lyons) was one, being there for a separate DEDE. Under normal circumstances our paths would not cross.

Chira reports that having accomplished her DEDE she was returning to Basina’s quarters so that Basina would Home her, when she was accosted by a Varangian Guard speaking Greek to her with an accent she has come to recognize as Norman/French. He propositioned her as she was descending a flight of steps leading down from a raised terrace toward the bathhouse entrance in a courtyard below. She turned him down. She is used to being propositioned, especially by the Guard, who consider themselves outside the normal social constraints of the local culture. However, she is also used to being respected when she says no. This VG did not accept her no. He grabbed her as she reached a landing in the stairway and pinned her against a stone balustrade. She resisted. He ripped her robe off of her shoulder so that it fell to the sash at her waist. Although he was stronger than she was and did not require a weapon to overpower her, he reached down with his right hand and drew a seax (long knife) from a sheath on his belt, presumably considering this the easiest way to terrorize her into silence.

Her assailant was suddenly holding her with his left hand only. In the period combat training that is a requirement for all DOers, we are taught to be extremely conscious of when the opponent makes a move for his knife, since that is the single most dangerous moment in hand-to-hand combat. Chira reacted with a wrist-lock technique that forced her assailant to drop the knife. He reached down for it, giving her the opportunity to spin away from the stone balustrade. Now furious and no longer content with merely terrorizing her, the assailant aimed a wild slash at her that produced a shallow but bloody wound on the outside of her right thigh. In so doing he became imbalanced. Chira stepped in and took advantage of this to throw him, planting her left hip under his buttock and shoving hard on his chin. Spinning away from her, he sprawled over the balustrade, balanced for a moment, then fell, plunging approximately five meters onto a wrought iron fence which impaled him. As this was happening he screamed in a way that drew attention all over the courtyard.

Various other Varangian Guards came to investigate, then, seeing the wound on her leg, summoned female servants to come and attend to her. The incident was singular enough that word of it spread through the royal wing of the palace within a quarter hour, and through the entire palace compound in an hour. I heard of it from fellow guards, who were reconstructing what move Chira must have used to get him to drop the knife. On the excuse of needing to relieve myself, I made my way to where she was being comforted.

This was a small antechamber outside the bathhouse. One of Basina’s attendants was there, holding Chira’s torn and blood-soaked dress. Chira was by this time in a fresh robe. She had been washed clean of the blood and her thigh had been bandaged. She appeared shaken. (Although when I spoke to her later, she said she just wanted to get on with her DEDE in hopes of preventing a repeat of the assault in another Strand.)

A contingent of four Varangian Guards appeared in the doorway. Naturally, given what had just happened, I assumed their intent was hostile. I interposed myself between them and the women and placed my right hand on the handle of my seax.

Their leader was Magnus, who was known to me by reputation, being one of the most senior and respected of all the Varangian Guards in the city despite his relative youth (early thirties?) and outlier status as a Norman (most of the VG are Anglo-Saxons, and in this era the Normans and Anglo-Saxons are frenemies at best). He may have recognized my face, but we had never conversed. Magnus is a tall, lean, broad-shouldered bearded man with long brown hair and blue eyes. He entered first, displaying both hands, palms out, in a gesture of peace. Behind him were three other men, I would guess of the same kinship group. They muttered together in what I recognized as Norman French. One carried a pile of men’s clothes; one carried an ornate wooden box; the third carried a small leather bag. All four were unarmed; they must have checked their weapons outside.

“It’s all right, brother, I am here to make this right, as best I can,” Magnus said, speaking in Anglo-Saxon. I nodded and stepped out of his way.

Magnus stopped just in front of Chira. The other three approached, went down on their knees, bowed their heads, and held up the objects they were carrying.

“I am Magnus of Normandy,” began Magnus in stilted, accented Greek. “The man who assaulted you is my distant kinsman. He has no other family and so it falls to me to offer you the weregild for his offense. He did not have much but now it is all yours. There are clothes, ornamentation, and money. You will receive it, please.” He gestured and the men held the items closer to her.

Chira could not hide her surprise. She glanced at me briefly, and I nodded, so she accepted the offering with thanks. Basina’s attendant and a young servant woman relieved the men of their load—and then gave them a look suggesting they should leave now. Magnus saluted Chira with a fist to his chest. His men rose, turned on their heels, and marched out.

Since I had seen for myself that Chira was safe, and it would have been awkward for me to remain as the sole male, I left with Magnus’s group.

As soon as we were outside the bathhouse, Magnus turned to me to ask my cause for being here.

Seeing an opportunity to forge a connection, I said, “This woman has done me a kindness in the past and I am concerned for her well-being”—and I said it in Magnus’s own dialect of Norman.

He was pleasantly surprised to hear his mother tongue spoken. “What is your name?” he asked. “You have a familiar accent.”

“My name is Tristan of Dintagel,” I said. “I spent a year of my youth in Normandy seeking my fortune, before coming east to join the Varangian Guard.”

He gave me a peculiar look. “Tristan of Dintagel?” He glanced over his shoulder at one of his men, who was simultaneously exchanging looks with the other two men. “Are you a man of great exploits?”

“You must ask the Emperor his opinion on the subject,” I said, “as his is the only opinion that matters to my salary.”

Magnus stared at me a moment longer and then laughed along with his men. “It is a pleasure to meet someone who speaks as we do,” he said, and held out a hand to exchange peace with me. I returned to my post having agreed with him that we would break bread together the next time our duties allowed it.

Later that day I found access to Chira again, to find her resolute to finish her DEDE on this Strand, and as I had finished my own DEDE I returned here while she was still in Constantinople. She should be home within a day. The wound on her thigh will probably require modern medical treatment and leave a permanent scar, but seems unlikely to cause permanent disability.

Respectfully submitted,

Lieutenant Colonel Tristan Lyons

Exchange of posts by DODO staff

on “Constantinople Theater” ODIN channel

DAYS 1790–1797 (LATE JUNE, YEAR 5)

Post from LTC Tristan Lyons:

Gang, I wanted to raise a topic of interest in case anyone else being Sent to C’ople can confirm what I just saw, or gather more info.

Long story short is that I was hanging out there with Magnus of Normandy, whom many of you will have heard of as one of the more senior Varangians. Not so much in terms of formal rank as the respect in which he’s held by the other VGs, which is saying something given he’s a Norman. I had crossed paths with him a couple of days earlier and he had taken an interest in me and suggested we dine together.

As everyone knows, it’s against SOP to make casual social connections with historicals, since only bad things can come of it (unless you’re a Lover or a Closer, in which case it’s part of your job description). So I was hesitant to accept Magnus’s invitation. But as I said, he’s a respected leader in the VG ranks, and I’m pretty junior. So the invitation was an honor, and it would only have raised more questions and suspicions if I had just blown him off.

Further complicating the scenario is that Magnus (who, for all his status in the Guard, has a vaguely manic “ah, WTF” aspect) decided we should dine not in the VG mess hall, nor even in the taverns the Guard tended toward, but that we should head down to the Venetian neighborhood because he “liked the smell of maritime industry” or something.

I went with him, just the two of us, and we got a lot of freaked-out looks from the Venetian traders and their families because we were, you know, the Emperor’s Guards, coming into a Venetian neighborhood while the Venetian navy was parked across the Bosporus threatening to attack the Emperor . . . but obviously nobody was going to mess with us. We sat down at an outdoor table overlooking the harbor, and had a conversation that on the surface seemed like just polite “get to know you” stuff. My cover story was designed to stand up under exactly this kind of testing. It is that I came from a pretty obscure location in England, that I had family connections in Normandy, and had spent some time there when younger, which was how I came to speak the dialect. He probed me a little on that. This made me a little nervous since I’d been in that part of the world (Collinet, specifically) 150 years earlier and so I couldn’t cite specific names or incidents to back up my story. But “my” village and his are some fifty kilometers apart, which is enough separation to blur things quite a bit, and he had left when fairly young, so there weren’t any smoking guns. Basically, the cover story seemed to pass muster and we moved on to other chitchat about the day-to-day workings of the VG and rumors about the Crusaders and what they were up to.

After we’d had a few drinks and a good dinner we stood up and began to head back to the barracks. But we’d only gone about a hundred strides when he turned to me and said, “Would you like to go see your namesake?”

Having no idea what he was talking about, I agreed. We were near the border of the Venetian quarter, but now he led me back into the heart of it. We walked for about a hundred yards through winding streets. The sun was setting (time of year was midsummer, sunset was late). We came to a Roman Catholic church where vespers were under way. This is the Church of St. Bartholomew for those of you who would care to visit it. Later it was destroyed on all of the Strands I’m aware of, so it doesn’t exist in our present. Point being, for purposes of this story, its west entrance was lit up by the sunset when we arrived.

He led me into the church, both of us crossing ourselves in the traditional manner as we entered (I doubt Magnus is a practicing Christian of any stripe, and when the VG guards the Empress at religious services, it’s an Orthodox church, so he must have vestigial muscle memory from childhood re: how to behave in a church).

We went inside just far enough that we could turn around and look at the stained glass windows in the west front without drawing the attention of the congregants or the priest. There’s a big round window in the middle and some smaller ones to the sides. As is typical of churches like this, the big one depicts scenes from the life of Jesus, with emphasis on St. Bartholomew (one of the twelve Apostles), and the peripheral ones depict various other saints.

One of the stained glass windows depicted a knight with yellow hair holding what appeared to be a boat oar. Scattered around him on the ground were the supine forms of what I took to be defeated enemies. Behind him was a crude rendering of a church. A scroll above his head identified him as St. Tristan of Dintagel.

As you can all imagine, I was astonished and speechless for a minute. I became conscious of the fact that Magnus was studying my face intently. When I finally came to my senses, I said, “I had no idea that my saintly namesake had been commemorated in a church so far from home!” and thanked him for making me aware of it. I fell to my knees in a show of piety, offered up a prayer to St. Tristan, and purchased a candle, which I lit and placed beneath the window in question.

Magnus and I then walked back up to the barracks without further discussion of this incident. As far as I can tell, he accepts my story, which is that I was named after a saint who dwelled in my part of the world 150 years ago.

But until this incident I had no idea that there was such a thing as a St. Tristan of Dintagel recognized by the Catholic Church. Since I came back I’ve found traces of him on the Internet, but it’s all pretty sketchy and obscured by GLAAMR. I’m guessing that St. Tristan became a thing on certain Strands but not others. Any ideas, people?

Reply from Dr. Melisande Stokes:

On it. Will get back to you with any findings.

It kinda sounds like Magnus set you up. Any worries on that front?

From LTC Lyons:

He didn’t call me out. But I won’t BS you, Stokes, it’s worrisome and I think he senses something’s weird about me. On the other hand, it’s only two weeks until the Crusaders storm Galata Tower and then we’ll be going our separate ways, so I intend to go back to the DTAP on schedule tomorrow. For me to just disappear would confirm any suspicions he might be harboring.

From Dr. Stokes:

Can you delay your return to C’ople? A bunch of us are working this and coming up with spotty/fluctuating results. There is heavy GLAAMR around St. Tristan of Dintagel and so we’re seeing entire Wikipedia articles warping in and out of existence. Some risk that merely Googling the name is tending to make it more real.

From LTC Lyons:

So what is the point of my delaying return to C’ople? Shizzle’s about to go down, you know this. We’ve been working toward it for three years.

From Dr. Stokes:

We can get better answers by sending some Sages back to other Strands where we think that the St. Tristan legend is more firmly entrenched. We need to know more before Sending you into a potentially messed-up situation.

And by “messed-up situation” I mean “alternate universe in which you are a two-hundred-year-old warrior saint.”

From LTC Lyons:

No research needed. St. Tristan is damn well entrenched in the Strand I’m working—I already told you he has at least one stained glass window. So we have to stick with the story I told Magnus, which is that I’m simply named after him. Stokes, this is ubiquitous—almost everyone back then is named after a saint.

LETTER ON PARCHMENT, HANDWRITTEN IN LATIN BY PROFESSIONAL SCRIBE, CONSTANTINOPLE

JUNE 1203

Brother Ando:

May the Lord find you and our mother well. Upon receiving this letter please respond as swiftly as you may. I have met a valiant warrior here in Byzantium, a Varangian Guard like myself, but of a name too familiar, that is Tristan of Dintagel, which lies in England. The rantings of the Frankish priests are gibberish to me, so I care not for their saints. Nor was I ever one to listen to the songs around the hearth, but I know you were. Do you not recall a song about a great hero who hailed from a remote part of England and who had appeared suddenly in our region and fended off a tribe with whom we feuded? He was credited with saving the village and made a saint by the Christians. It strikes me as a remarkable coincidence to meet another man with such a name. There is some quality to this man that I cannot quite describe, but he seems like a man apart, as belonging to some other race.

I wonder if there be miracles and if so, how may I make use of this one—that a hero of legend has seen fit to manifest himself within my ken, just at the moment when we are under siege by the Franks! Please respond to tell me if my memory is correct, and say as much as you can of the old legends concerning this hero. Also send news of our mother and the village if there is any.

YOUR BROTHER,

Magnus

Exchange of posts by DODO staff

on “Constantinople Theater” ODIN channel

DAYS 1798–1805 (EARLY JULY, YEAR 5)

Post from Historical Operations Subject Matter Authority (HOSMA) Dr. Eloise LeBrun:

I’m just back from 1232 Paris with some results concerning “St. Tristan of Dintagel,” which I will post on this channel as I’ve time to write them up, but the executive summary is that I don’t think LTC Lyons should go back to C’ople. Has he been Sent yet? I can’t make heads or tails of the DEDE scheduling app.

Reply from Dr. Melisande Stokes:

He was Sent eight hours ago, and isn’t expected back for two weeks—this is where we complete the DEDE, during the Crusaders’ attack on Galata Tower @ Constantinople. What did you find?

From Dr. LeBrun:

Ugh, I just missed him:(

Well, it’s all academic now, I guess.

What I found is that on some of these Strands an oral tradition developed in the vicinity of Collinet in which the story of Tristan got inflated into a bigger and bigger yarn and eventually turned into a chanson de geste sung by various troubadours. Apparently it was popular enough that the church decided to capitalize on it by trumping him up enough to canonize him (even though there are no miracles or martyrdom attributed to him)—which is how he found his way into a stained glass window.

From Dr. Stokes:

On multiple Strands? But he only hit the burglar with the boat oar on one Strand!

From Dr. LeBrun:

Crosstalk between Strands apparently.

From Dr. Stokes:

Is that a thing!? Would one of our magic experts please enlighten me?

From Rebecca East-Oda:

We’ve seen it before in creative arts settings, especially storytelling. If you think about what is going on in a storyteller’s mind when he or she spins a fictional yarn, what they are trying to do is to come up with a story that did not actually happen, but that seems as if it might have happened. In other words, it has to make sense and to be plausible. Typically such a story makes use of real places, historical events, characters, etc. but the events of the story itself seem to take place in an alternate version of reality.

The conventionally accepted explanation for this is that storytellers have a power of imagination that makes them good at inventing counterfactual narratives. In the light of everything we’ve learned about Strands at DODO, however, we can now see an alternate explanation, which is that storytellers are doing a kind of low-level magic. Their “superpower” isn’t imagining counterfactuals, but rather seeing across parallel Strands and perceiving things that actually did (or might) happen in alternate versions of reality.

I think you can see where this is going, Mel. Even if Tristan smacked the burglar with the oar on only a single Strand, it’s possible that storytellers in other, nearby Strands were able to sense it or perceive it and tell the story in a compelling, convincing way. From there, the story could propagate to other Strands—including ours, where just this morning I found an entry on St. Tristan of Dintagel in Alban Butler’s original (1759) edition of Lives of the Saints, which is in our library.

From Dr. Stokes:

Holy crap he’s on Wikipedia now too.

NVM he’s gone now.

From Dr. LeBrun:

I don’t have time to translate all of the documents from Latin and medieval French into English, but I’ll post a few snippets.

From Dr. Roger Blevins:

Just became aware of this thread and am skimming it.

Am I to understand that changes have occurred, recently, on the pages of a 250-year-old book in our library!?

From Dr. Stokes:

Yes. There are faint traces of GLAAMR around it, according to Erszebet.

From Dr. Blevins:

I see. That is troubling. Not the first time diachronic magic has been troubling.

From Dr. Stokes:

How so, Dr. Blevins? The entire point of DODO is to change the present by doing things in the past. History books and Wikipedia entries are naturally going to change accordingly.

From Dr. Blevins:

Dr. Stokes, I am taking this offline, as the expression goes. Please see me in my office.

From Dr. LeBrun:

Here for example is a translation of a letter in clerical Latin from a village priest in Normandy to his bishop, dated 1063:

The struggle against pagan beliefs and practices in this parish is never-ending, and tests my faith every hour of every day. Of late some of the village wives have been filling their children’s ears with a story that has spread like a grass fire from one household to the next. It is nothing more than an old saga of the Vikings, so far as I can discern. Its hero is one Tristan, a roaming Anglo-Saxon warrior of enormous strength and stature who comes to sojourn in a Norman village for a time. Peaceable by nature, he is roused to action when the village is raided by brigands, and makes an heroic stand on the shore, laying about him with a boat oar until all of the attackers have been slain. Then after accepting the gratitude of the villagers he wanders away to pursue other adventures. As you can see it is just the sort of lay that appeals to the simple minds of the common people and as such is nearly impossible to eradicate.

There is a response from the bishop in which he says that he has heard the same story from other villages in the area, but that in some versions Tristan is a Christian man who is defending the parish church from pagans who have come to defile it and steal its reliquary. He goes on to suggest that rather than trying to stamp out this popular story, the priest should instead co-opt it by re-telling it to his flock as a tale about Christian virtues.

Jumping forward a hundred years I found a fragment of an obscure chanson de geste. I’m dating it by its form, which fluctuates between the early style (ten-syllable assonant rhyme, in this case on short “i”) and the later one (twelve-syllable monorhyme, in this case long “i”). Here’s a few stanzas just to convey the flavor of it, although of course I’m translating for meaning not nuance. Stanzas are of variable length and most of them too water-damaged to make out. Can go back and do a more careful translation if required, including seeking possible encoded messages/references, not unheard of in this tradition:

By the banks of the peaceful Dives Tristan reclines,

Broad-shouldered with noble carriage and proud spirit,

Flaxen-haired knight of Tintagel, new-pledged to Charlemagne.

He’s come to serve our king, the servant of Jesus Christ . . .

(about six stanzas illegible)

Look! From the loins of his enchanting mistress at dawn he leaps

To the alarms of the invading baleful-eyed heathens

Who come to steal the village’s beloved relics of St. Septimus

To dishonor its Christian spirit, a woe much worse than sin . . .

(two dozen unreadable stanzas)

. . . And now does noble Tristan, Charlemagne’s new paladin,

Clap hand on oar and calling upon Our Lady’s virtues

Use the humble oar as staff, to smite the unsanctified chins

Of seven pagan warriors in buckram suits,

While their gleaming wicked swords no target hit

On Tristan’s manly, bold, courageous side . . .

There’s about another nine hundred verses, but most are too water-damaged, and at a glance, the rest seem to be about Tristan’s service at Charlemagne’s court and later his adventures against the Moors, which presumably would justify his canonization. Will now peruse that section and let you know if anything leaps out that might click for Magnus.

From Dr. Stephen Moore:

Sorry to be a johnny-come-lately to this thread, but the Bodleian Library was closed yesterday and so I’ve only just been able to visit the rare books room. I was able to find traces of the Tristan legend in a letter written in 1071 to William the Conqueror. The original is, of course, in Latin but I have supplied a hasty translation, copy/pasted below, with apologies for infelicities in language.

Greetings to my beloved monarch and cherished brother William, by the grace of God King of the English and Duke of the Normans.

As I circuit the many manors you have seen fit to bestow upon me for my assistance at Hastings, I remain profoundly grateful for your beneficence and generosity. All are bountiful with crops and livestock, the serfs healthy and none excessively aggrieved. In all, I receive it as a tremendous boon.

However I am sorrowful to inform you that my search for the hero-colony of Dintagel has come to naught. Dintagel, from which sprang that most renowned and admired knight Tristan, who is featured so valiantly in the Song of Collinet in its defense of the holy reliquary of the martyr St. Septimus of Pontchardon against the incursions of the heretics of Lisieux that enthralled us in our youth, has proven to be nothing but a spit of land with a ruined Roman fortress. In the nearby village of Bossiney (Boskyny), my men have asked after the fellowship of knights from which Tristan sprang, and are met universally with stupid looks from the villagers.

There is however an abundance of sheep, which may be exploited to the profit of your majesty and the greater glory of God.

Yours in great love and all homage,

Robert, Count of Mortain and Earl of Cornwall

Post by Dr. Roger Blevins to LTG Octavian K. Frink on private ODIN channel

DAY 1805 (JULY, YEAR 5)

Okie, this is just to give you a heads-up on a possible situation that is developing. You’ll recall a bit of unpleasantness two and a half years ago when Lieutenant Colonel Lyons went off half-cocked during a DEDE in 1045 Normandy and got into a brawl with the locals. I said at the time, and I still maintain, that this was a serious error in judgment that called his qualifications for the job into question. Well, now it looks like the chickens are coming home to roost. LTC Lyons has gone back to 1203 Constantinople to finish out the big DEDE we have been working for the last three years. That’s fine as far as it goes. Unfortunately his actions in Normandy, 160 years earlier, have had incalculable reverberations, with the result that he is now revered as some combination of a romantic folk hero and Christian saint by people all over the Nordic and Christian worlds. One of the Varangian Guards at the Constantinople DTAP seems dangerously close to putting two and two together.

No action needed or requested at this time, but I wanted to put this up on your radar just in case it blows up in our faces in a few days or weeks.

I just finished a rather unpleasant meeting with Dr. Stokes who is reflexively defensive of LTC Lyons and doesn’t seem to appreciate the magnitude of the problem.

Reply from LTG Frink:

Blev, I’ve read this a couple of times and don’t see why you are so excited. I’ve spent my career running operations in places like Fallujah and Jalalabad and I’ve never seen anything go off without glitches. But you have a better grasp of these diachronic operations than I do and so I’ll take it under advisement.

Are you doing anything to mitigate the problem?

From Dr. Blevins:

We have a young MUON here who I am sure you will remember since she is the one who crashed the ribbon-cutting party by materializing in the ODEC. Rachel is her name. She is now one of our most experienced witches, and is obviously an expert on 1203 Constantinople since it’s where she was born and raised. I have a meeting scheduled with her in which I will explore some options for cleaning up the mess that LTC Lyons has left in his wake.

From LTG Frink:

How’s it going with the portable ODEC and so on? Knowing how your mind works, Blev, I can see where all of this is leading: a de-emphasis on diachronic operations per se, in favor of C/COD psy-ops centered on witches in mobile units.

From Dr. Blevins:

You know me well, Okie. Yes. The ATTO, as we call the portable ODEC, is shaping up quite well. To develop the psy-ops wing of the organization, we are getting ready to bring forward Gráinne, who is, after all is said and done, still the most powerful witch we have ever encountered.

From LTG Frink:

The Irish super-witch?

From Dr. Blevins:

That terminology is deprecated. We have been calling them Wenders for their superior ability to navigate between Strands while maintaining an unbroken thread of consciousness. In the entire history of DODO we have only encountered three of them. Gráinne has been by far the most loyal and it’s time we rewarded her with a promotion.

LETTER FROM

GRÁINNE to GRACE O’MALLEY

A Tuesday of High Summer, 1602

Auspiciousness and prosperity to you, milady!

It’s a brief but timely warning I’m writing you with, Your Grace, and no action does it require on your part, but only alertness. Sir Francis Bacon, the gentleman whose demeanor does command this fleet of thinkers and doers of the age, including Monsieur Cardigan my benefactor . . . he urges the nobles of the court to redouble their efforts in Ireland. He would have the crown take over our entire island as a means to “honor.” Therefore if any courtier from England do come courting you, it’s wise to be testing the waters of their acquaintanceship with Sir Francis. If they are even indirectly under his sway or in his circles, then surely it’s disingenuous they’re being.

And meanwhile merely to keep you apprised of my circumstances, they continue apace with some fascinating developments (more fascinating to myself than to you, I warrant). It’s Norwich we’re spending the summer in, and here I’ve come to know three witches, something older than myself, and sisters to each other . . . all of them half-nieces of Sir Francis Bacon himself! For isn’t their father Nathaniel his half-brother. But this isn’t the only peculiar thing about them, there being three other facts of note:

First, being that they know of Tristan’s guild and likewise work to abet them on occasion (not so oft as I do). Of course I knew that there are many other witches working for them (their term for us, collective, is KCW), but I had not realized I had contemporaries.

A second and stranger fact of note being that they were never recruited, but rather raised in a tradition of service to Tristan’s crew, for sure their mother Anne and before that her mother Winnifred worked with Tristan’s people, although there is nothing in the family history of working with Tristan himself. ’Twas Winnifred was won over to the work by an agent named Esme, forty years ago. Here again, a minor detail Tristan’s not telling me about how his guild be doing their business.

But here’s the final and most interesting note, and might even be of direct interest to Your Grace: besides their connection to Sir Francis, these weird sisters are the granddaughters of none other than Sir Thomas Gresham, who as you know was an associate of the Fugger banking family . . . who, despite their unholy religion, have long financed your resistance on occasion, for the sheer joy of causing headaches to Queen Bess. I’m thinking it must be no coincidence that all of these particular lineages and associations twine together through time in some way that Tristan sees more clearly than I do, and surely it’s use he’s getting out of it in ways that I’m not seeing yet. But I will. Oh yes, Your Grace, it’s soon enough I’ll see as clear as he does.

Whether I be near or far, may I hear only good things of you, My Lady Gráinne! Your Gráinne now of Norwich

TRANSCRIPT (EXCERPT)

INTERVIEW CONDUCTED BY DR. ROGER BLEVINS (RB)

WITH MUON RACHEL BAT AVRAHAM (RA)

11:00, DAY 1807 (10 JULY, YEAR 5)

NOTES: Video recording was made automatically by a motion-activated security camera system in Conference Room #2 at DODO HQ, Cambridge, MA. In the wake of subsequent events, the file was salvaged from a secure server by DODO personnel and transferred to the ad hoc GRIMNIR backup system, where it was later transcribed. Excerpt below begins at approximately 11:15 local time.

RB: In preparing for this meeting, I took the routine step of reviewing your file. I see you have once again started asking the DOers you Send back to your native DTAP to get word to your family that you’re safe.

RA: Yes, I am sure they are worried about me. It has been nearly three years. I want to reassure them.

RB: You signed a nondisclosure agreement. That means nothing can be disclosed. To anyone.

RA: Except God, you mean. You cannot tell me to keep anything from God.

RB: Ask God to tell your family how you’re doing.

RA: I do, of course. But I am a good daughter, and so I must make the effort as well.

RB: No, you mustn’t. In fact, you signed a paper swearing you would not.

RA: The commandments come before any pledge I make to a worldly regime, and the commandments say honor your father and—

RB: You ran off. You abandoned them.

RA: No, my mother is the one who Sent me! [weeping] I had her blessing! She said she would make it all right with my father. I am the fastest Sender of all the witches, and the most precise. I am a benefit to you because my mother sent me here. It is okay that I send reassurances to her.

RB: You can’t. If you insist on attempting it, we will assign you to other DEDEs and you will never Send anyone back to Constantinople.

RA: Will you lame yourselves out of spite? I am the best witch for Constantinople.

RB: Security is our first priority. If you will not cooperate with us, then we cannot cooperate with you. I will have to reassign you to the Antwerp and London DTAPs. We will need additional help there when we bring Gráinne forward.

RA: But I am Tristan’s preferred Sender for Constantinople.

RB: Lieutenant Colonel Lyons is subordinate to me and all of his decisions are subject to my review.

RA: I understand.

RB: In any case, his habit of disappearing into remote DTAPs for weeks at a time leaves an operational void, obliging colleagues to fill in for him.

RA: Constantinople is not remote, it is the most cosmopolitan city in the world!

RB: Not for long.

RA: What does that mean?

RB: After what happens next, everything looks so different that it doesn’t matter how well you know the city, it’ll be completely rebuilt.

RA: What do you mean by these words, “what happens next”?

RB: I have reason to believe that by going back to 1203 Constantinople, Tristan has blundered into a trap of his own devising. Unwittingly, of course. But he is still culpable, because of his arrogance, his lack of accountability.

RA: What sort of trap?

RB: The details are complicated. There’s not time to explain them here. The point is that he needs to be evacuated. If he were a commando on some kind of raid, we’d be sending in the helicopters right now, the SEAL team, to extract him from the mess he has made. But since he’s a DOer and he’s been deployed to a DTAP, instead we need to Send someone who knows the territory and who can get to him and Home him with extreme prejudice, as the saying goes.

RA: You want me to Send another DOer to rescue him?

RB: You’re not listening, Rachel. The person we Send back on this rescue mission can’t just be any ordinary DOer. It must be a MUON, a witch who has the capability of Homing him as soon as he is found. One who is intimately familiar with every byway of the city, every nuance of its languages.

RA: You’re asking . . . me to be Sent back?

RB: ODEC #4 has been made ready for action. One of our other MUONs is there waiting for you. I have provided her with cover—with plausible deniability. You can be back home in ten minutes, if that is what you really want. But you can never come back. You must decide now.

URGENT BULLETIN

MISSING: RACHEL BAT AVRAHAM

MISSING SINCE: TODAY, 11:25, July 10

MISSING FROM: Conference Room #2, top floor

DETAILS: During interview with Dr. Blevins, became combative, removed pepper spray device from purse, discharged it toward Dr. Blevins, fled the room; when he had finished washing the residue from his eyes, she was gone. Security reports she has not exited the building, however, her whereabouts are unknown.

APPEARANCE: Long dark hair, pale skin, dark eyes. Dressed in gray sweater-dress and jodhpur boots, lots of eye makeup and bangles. Late teens. Speaks heavily accented English.

Security is currently searching the building, which is in lockdown. Rachel lives in the MUON residence. We have contacted or left word with the off-shift MUONs there. Also sending word to local precincts and hospitals. Likeliest that she is hiding in the building somewhere waiting for somebody else to leave so that she can sneak out.

Journal Entry of

Rebecca East-Oda

JULY 10

Temperature 79F, dry, still. Barometer steady.

Faring well: cucumber, squash, chard. Starting to harvest basil leaves. Re-seeding salad greens.

Frank called from the DODO offices to say he will not be home for dinner: the building is in lockdown because the witch Rachel assaulted Blevins (how very satisfying that must have been) and disappeared. Surprised it took this long for somebody to snap.

Exchange of posts between

Dr. Melisande Stokes and Mortimer Shore

on private ODIN channel

DAY 1807

Mel: Where’s Rachel?

Mortimer: idk. Checking her calendar . . .

Mel: NVM. Calling her. 1 sec.

Mortimer: looks like she had an 11:00 with Blev.

Mel: Went to vm.

Mortimer: Conf rm 2

Mel: I know but something crazy happened, Blev called security—medics are there. No Rachel.

Mortimer: Where r u?

Mel: OMW down to ODECs. WHT Rachel?

Mortimer: CU down there.

Mel: Bio breach!

Mortimer: ?

Mel: Rachel ran through decon area, didn’t follow protocol.

Mortimer: ICU through glass wall now.

Mel: FUCK. Whole place will have to be scrubbed. Going in to check ODECs.

Mortimer: Someone’s in #4. Check that first.

Mel: OK

Mortimer: Not on calendar.

Mel: It’s Nadja.

Mortimer: ?

Mel: New MUON.

Mortimer: Rachel?

Mel: Gone.

Mortimer: Never there? Or . . .

Mel: Nadja’s confused, says she just Homed Rachel.

URGENT BULLETIN: UPDATE

OK, everyone, Mortimer here, there’s a lot of confusion and so I’ve been asked to post a temporary status update:

– Rachel bat Avraham was Homed back to 1203 Constantinople from ODEC #4 at about 11:25.

– This was an unauthorized operation. The MUON who performed the Homing was using the ODEC for routine training when Rachel showed up and demanded to be let in to the ODEC. Once inside, Rachel employed psy-ops [magical] techniques to induce the other MUON to effect the Homing spell.

– Unless you hear otherwise, RIP Rachel bat Avraham.

– There’s going to be a lot of wiki confusion over the next hour or so. Please just stay away from all Constantinople-related entries until end of day tomorrow or you’ll get even more confused. Tomorrow you may find references to a conflagration or explosion or firestorm around Galata Tower in Constantinople July 1203. If you are one of the Byzantine DOers or historians, it might not match your memories of the battle for Galata Tower. Those memories are now out of date.

– Lieutenant Colonel Tristan Lyons remains on active DEDE in that DTAP.

Meanwhile I’ve also been asked to share a little bit of information about Diachronic Shear since most of us weren’t on the scene yet the last time it happened. What I’ve got below is a helpful mnemonic to bide you over, until one of the real pros has time to write up something more detailed. Feel free to print this out and post it in break rooms, etc. More TK soon.

Peace out, Mortimer

DIACHRONIC SHEAR

YOU CRINGE, YOU SINGE!

RAFSTIQUORDOT!

Run

A common mistake at the onset of a Diachronic Shear event is to reflexively shield oneself from eruptions of bodily fluids and flaming gobbets, thus losing precious moments that could be spent putting distance between yourself and the epicenter. A rift between universes is no place to be fussy—you can always clean up later.

Amputate

Body parts that unfortunately found themselves on the wrong side of the rift may seem to remain attached. Intense GLAAMR and general disorientation may hide their misshapen form. Many victims will be unwilling to believe in the reality of what has happened to them. The temptation may be strong to leave these attached and hope for the best. Don’t do it! Think of it as being like gangrene, except faster.

Fires (extinguish)

Most Diachronic Shear events are recorded in the history books as epic fires of unknown origin. That’s because, after the Shear itself is over and done with, fires remain, and find plentiful fuel in destroyed structures. Nipping these in the bud may prevent enormous loss of life in the coming hours.

Shore up crumbling structures

Buildings may have lost primary structural members during the Shear. Ones that haven’t collapsed already may be prevented from doing so with stopgap measures. When in doubt, get out!

Tourniquets (apply as needed)

This is an elementary first-aid procedure that may save the lives of some who were caught along the boundary of the Shear.

Intimidate witnesses

Rumors spawned by a Shear event may trigger a cascade of aftershocks, as well as compromising your cover story. Do whatever it takes to discourage witnesses from saying anything to their friends and loved ones about what they have seen. Given the nature of what goes on during a Shear, this will commonly involve some sort of appeal to whatever gods, demons, or other supernatural forces figure in to the locals’ belief system.

Quell civil disturbances

Panicked bystanders may react in a way that will only inflict further human suffering—as well as making it difficult for you to get Homed.

Use your pre-established alibi

As part of Standard Operating Procedures, DOers should always have alibis and explanations handy for any discrepancies that may be called to their attention by curious and meddlesome locals. Anything you can do to place yourself far from the scene of the Shear will help you get home.

Observe

This one’s far down the list because it’s a lower priority. But it’s still a priority! DODO is always eager to gather more data on what happens during a Diachronic Shear, and so any observations that can be committed to memory will be welcome once you get home.

Return to the twenty-first century

This is self-explanatory! Find your KCW and get Homed as soon as possible—if a Shear has occurred in your DTAP, it means that your operation has been “blown” and there is no point in your staying around.

Document

Get to a debriefing room as quickly as possible and record everything you remember while it’s fresh in your mind.

Opiates

Medical research conducted during the Iraq War has confirmed that immediate administration of morphine following a traumatic event can prevent post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Our medicine cabinet is well stocked and we have personnel standing by trained in the prompt and proper administration of this therapy.

Therapy

As all DOers will be aware from their HR portfolios, the benefits package includes state-of-the-art health care, with no arbitrary distinctions made between physical and mental health. These benefits are your right—don’t hesitate to use them!

Post by Dr. Roger Blevins on

“Department Heads” ODIN channel

DAY 1808

cc: LTG Octavian K. Frink

General Frink has asked to present an account of the confusing and regrettable events preceding and following the disappearance of one of our MUONs: Rachel bat Avraham. Please note that this is a confidential and privileged communication for senior management only. You may disseminate relevant facts to your subordinates on a need-to-know basis.

I must begin by emphasizing that none of these events were within my power to alter, in large part due to the somewhat decentralized nature of our current org chart and the inherent limitations of managing Anachrons, MUONs, and other personalities who are not a good match for modern organizational discipline.

Having said that, below is a summary of events courtesy of Macy Stoll after interviewing all relevant witnesses. I believe at this point you are aware, at least anecdotally, of most of what happened, but you may consider the following account definitive:

Per established HR procedures, Dr. Blevins was interviewing Rachel bat Avraham in Conference Room #2. This was a quarterly review, of the sort normally conducted by Lieutenant Colonel Lyons, but since LTC Lyons was away on a DEDE, Dr. Blevins had decided to conduct the review himself.

Under normal circumstances this interview would have been unremarkable. Rachel’s personnel record indicated a few areas that were in need of improvement, which Dr. Blevins brought up in the conversation as a matter of course. Dr. Blevins reported after the incident that Rachel showed signs of being under considerable emotional distress, presumably related to the upcoming climax of our 1203 Constantinople operations and possible repercussions for the family and friends she left behind in that DTAP.

Rachel became highly emotional and announced her intention to return home at once. Dr. Blevins reminded her that this was forbidden. A confrontation developed and Dr. Blevins informed her that he would summon DOSECOPS if needed to prevent her from gaining access to an ODEC. She reached into her purse and drew out a small canister of pepper spray which she discharged in Dr. Blevins’s general direction. He did not sustain a direct hit, but the cloud of spray drifted into his face and created intense irritation of the eyes and nasal passages, forcing him to leave the conference room and grope his way down the hall to the men’s washroom where he washed his face in a sink for several minutes before recovering to the point where he could summon DOSECOPS. By that time, Rachel had long since fled the room.

Subsequent review of security camera footage shows that Rachel proceeded via the back stairwell to the cellar level where she entered the bio-containment area and passed directly through it without performing any of the required decontamination procedures. ODEC numbers 1 through 3 were vacant, but ODEC #4 was occupied by Nadja Cole, a MUON in training, recruited only three months ago. She was using the ODEC to do “homework” related to her training program; she was not there to Send anyone, nor does she yet have the seniority or training required to do so.

Because of Rachel’s seniority, Nadja did not question her when she requested entry to the ODEC. Once the two of them were closed up together inside of ODEC #4, we lose the thread of the story, since our only witness is Nadja, and it appears that Rachel employed magical techniques of some sort to cloud her judgment and induce her to Home Rachel back to 1203 Constantinople. Nadja’s account of what happened is fuzzy and clearly unreliable. Since Homing is a much easier spell than Sending, apparently Nadja, with Rachel’s assistance, was able to accomplish it.

We will likely never have the complete story of what Rachel did upon returning to her home DTAP. The historical record is, at the moment, clouded by GLAAMR and impossible to make sense of. LTC Lyons is expected to be Homed three days from now and may be able to supply some further details.

Dr. Blevins was examined by Dr. Srinavasan in-house and discharged with oral and topical medications to control swelling and discomfort from the pepper spray. No permanent injuries are anticipated.

Nadja has been placed on administrative leave pending the outcome of a more formal investigation.

The bio-containment zone is still being scrubbed down as per protocol and is expected to be back in working order in time for LTC Lyons’s scheduled return.

AFTER ACTION REPORT

DEBRIEFER: Dr. Melisande Stokes

DOER: LTC Tristan Lyons

THEATER: Constantinople

OPERATION: Galata

DEDE: Relic relocation

DTAP: Pera, Constantinople, July 1203

STRAND: Fourth and last repetition of this DEDE

(Note to readers: Refer to the reports on the first three repetitions of this DEDE for general background. The specific DEDE was to enter the abandoned battlefield tent of the Byzantine Emperor, secure a religious relic of importance to Orthodox Christians, and move it to a different tent so that it would be found by the Bishop of Halberstadt. —MS)

As I [Lyons] knew going into this, the battle for Galata Tower took place over the course of two days, and my DEDE had to be accomplished the first day. But I had to remain until the end of the second day before I could connect with our KCW to Home me.

This was my fourth Strand prosecuting this DEDE, so at this point I knew, or thought I knew, what to expect.

I’m passing as a member of the Varangian Guard. I’ve attained enough seniority and respect by this point that I’m working as part of the Emperor’s personal guard. In peacetime that means standing near him when he goes to church or whatever, but in wartime it means being near him on the battlefield.

The battle strategy for both sides of this conflict is all over the wiki, so I don’t need to explain that. The Emperor’s so-called navy is in appalling shape, it’s just a handful of ships literally rotting in the harbor, and the Emperor’s army is an embarrassing joke except for the Varangian Guard.

We were camped out on the steep hillside that’s north across the Golden Horn from the old walled city.

[The Golden Horn is the inlet that serves as the city’s harbor. —Mel]

Across the Bosporus from us, so on the Asian side, is where the Crusaders had been camped since they arrived a few weeks earlier. The Emperor had sent emissaries over there to them, with bribes and threats, telling them, “I’m the Emperor, why are you trying to replace me with this punk kid nobody wants?” and the Crusaders’ response had been, “Actually, no, we’ve got the real king right here in our pocket, and we’re putting him on your throne.” They didn’t want to attack the city, they just wanted to get rid of the “tyrant.”

There’s two notable things about the hillside where we are camped with the Emperor. First, there’s Galata Tower, which is a huge stand-alone structure right at the top of the hill. It’s one of the best-sited strategic defenses I’ve ever seen. Archers can shoot at anyone approaching from the Bosporus, or the Golden Horn, or even the Sea of Marmara, or from inland. The single most important thing they’re guarding is the chain that goes across the entrance to the Golden Horn. That inlet is so deep and narrow that it feels like a river mouth, more than a harbor. The chain is enormous, it’s held up by a series of barges, and the only way to undo the chain is through a mechanism at the foot of the hill where Galata is. So the archers in Galata Tower, more than anything else, are there to keep invaders away from the mechanism that releases the chain. That’s the defensive mantra of Constantinople: nobody can scale the walls, nobody can break the chain, so what matters is, don’t let anyone near the mechanism that releases the chain. If you’re invading, if you want to get near the mechanism, you first have to take Galata Tower. Which is pretty much untakeable.

The other thing of note on the hill is Pera, the Jewish neighborhood. On a map, you could draw a line east from Galata Tower across the Bosporus to the Asian shore, where the Crusader army was attacking from. You could also draw a line south from Galata Tower that would cross Pera, then cross the Golden Horn to the old city. We were camped outside the tower, close to Pera.

That explains why the Emperor and his army were in tents—knowing that the Crusader attack was going to be directed against the Galata Tower, they had been deployed on the north side of the Golden Horn to protect it.

On the morning of July fifth, it’s no secret that the Crusaders are about to attack. We—the Emperor’s army—are fully geared up, the tower full of archers. On the hillside going down to the Bosporus are thousands of Byzantine soldiers fully armed and ready for the Crusaders to attack. None of them were really worried, because when you’re looking at that intense Bosporus current, it seems obvious that the Crusaders could not cut directly across in those particular ships—those ships weren’t built for the Bosporus, they were built for Alexandria, they were never supposed to be anywhere near Constantinople. Even if they could get across, they would have to anchor in that current, which would be extremely challenging, and then disembark without first being picked off by our archers. That was not going to happen. They were sailing into their own destruction. Of course, I knew better, but I kept my mouth shut and just let it all happen.

So the Crusader ships approach us. The Emperor gives the order for my contingent of VGs to reinforce the archers up in the Galata Tower. By the time I and my guys are up to where we have a decent vantage point, the archers in the tower are barraging the ships with fire-arrows, regular arrows, stones, we’re so sure we’re going to annihilate them and litter the Bosporus with their shit-stained armor.

But then something happened: the sides of the Crusaders’ ships broke open and thousands of knights on horseback came leaping out of the holds, straight into the water. In that moment of the Byzantines’ amazement, the archers on the boats began to shoot at us. After loosing one flight of arrows, they jumped into the water, ahead of the horses, with their bows and quivers held up over their heads, and as soon as they were in water shallow enough to keep their bowstrings dry, they began to shoot up the hillside. In full chain mail and some plate armor. As I said, this was my fourth Strand so I’d already seen it three times, but it was an astounding thing to watch. Makes footage of the Normandy landings look like nothing special.

Then the same thing happened that had happened on every Strand: the Emperor turned and fled, and most of his army fled with him. There wasn’t a battle, it was just them getting chased by the Crusaders along the shore of the Golden Horn, about a mile inland, where there was a bridge across the water that the Emperor’s army crossed over and then burned behind them.

The only part of the Emperor’s army that didn’t flee was the tower garrison, which was largely Varangian Guards but also partially local conscripts. I was still there. The whole hillside, including the imperial camp, was emptied. I knew I had about an hour and a half before the Crusaders returned. So I fulfilled my DEDE—went into the Emperor’s abandoned tent, got the relic, put it into the other tent so that it would be found by somebody we need it to be found by. So the DEDE was accomplished without incident just as on the other Strands.

Now I just had to wait to rendezvous with a KCW, and since I know how things pan out, I know there will be a KCW in the Crusaders’ army who can Send me back tomorrow. That’s what I had done the first three Strands. I just have to survive through the rest of what’s to come, without accidentally telegraphing anything to any of my cohort.

So I re-enter the tower. Approximately one hour later, as I knew, the Crusader army comes back and tries to get at the mechanism releasing the chain, but we have shitloads of arrows and, more important, fire-arrows. More specifically, fire-arrows made with Greek fire, which burns more when it touches water, so we’re making them weep down by the casing to the chain-release. Their squires are holding shields over their heads to protect them, with water-soaked hides over them, and we’re lighting the fucking shields on fire.

Their leader, the Marquis, finally calls them off. They pillage the Emperor’s camp (and the right guy finds the relic I moved, so my DEDE is officially a success despite what happened next) and spend the afternoon and evening hollering up to us in every language they can think of, trying to bribe us to just give up the tower. Obviously we don’t. So eventually they get drunk and squat in the Emperor’s camp for the night, celebrating. They know there’s only a couple dozen of us in the tower, and once they take us down, then they’ll have Galata, which means they’ll get into the harbor, which means they’ll get into the city. They know tomorrow is theirs.

But what they don’t know is that all through the night, what looks like regular ferry traffic across the harbor is actually thousands of armed soldiers, disguised like ragmen and coal sellers and Jews and fishermen, sneaking across from the walled city, up the hillside by Pera and into the tower. By dawn we are all packed in like anchovies. It’s a miracle nobody accidentally castrates anyone else, and the stench of all those bodies is so intense, it’s almost psychotropic.

The Crusaders think there’s approximately thirty soldiers inside, when it’s now nearly a hundred times that. In the morning, we wait for the moment when the Crusader knights are getting geared up with their squires’ help, and the grooms are saddling the horses—they all do it at the same time, which is ill-considered, because right at this moment, when they are all vulnerable, we hurl open the gates of the tower and a thousand soldiers burst out and rush the Crusaders, swords and axes swinging, spears flying—and at the same time, thousands more are shooting fire-arrows down the slope at everyone on the ships, who thought they weren’t even in the game today. We had a catapult on the roof of the tower that hurled boulders down into the Bosporus—they didn’t hit any of the ships but they made waves big enough to capsize the smaller ones. The whole Crusader army was almost literally caught with its pants down.

Half of the Crusaders just fled because they were unarmed, or because they were servants whose pay grade didn’t include armed combat. They scattered immediately into the woods beyond the camp. Meanwhile there are hundreds of thousands of citizens of Constantinople sitting on the walls of the city, watching this from across the Golden Horn like it’s reality TV. Most of them don’t actually care who wins because they understand it’s just about who sits on the throne, they know the Crusaders aren’t here to try to actually harm the city itself. All the potential emperors are assholes, and they’re all related to each other, it hardly matters which one wins. So the citizens are literally picnicking and placing bets on who wins the day.

Finally the Crusader knights were mounted, and their foot soldiers got their heads together enough to finish armoring and grab their weapons, and we finally had full engagement. We still had the advantage of topography, because we were coming from the top of the hill and they were down the slope. Two Greek soldiers ran right up to the Crusader army, grabbed a lord, slashed him across the face, and began to drag him back toward the tower, but one of his knights went after him and hacked the heads off both of the Greeks, and brought the lord back to the safety of the crusading army. The whole thing happened in about thirty seconds.

That shifted everything—suddenly the Crusaders rose to the occasion, cheering and catcalling, and Christ, talk about a counterattack. None of our men had horses, and most of them were conscripted—they didn’t want to be there, they had essentially no military training. So as soon as things got really heated, they deserted their stations. Some of them ran down to the harbor chain to try to pull themselves across the Golden Horn on it—it could take the weight, those links were nearly as big as I am—but the Crusader archers picked them off easily. Remember, there’s a quarter of a million people watching this for their morning entertainment. It was surreal.

Abruptly, there’s only a couple hundred of us left, and we start to realize (of course, I knew this all along) that we better close the gates of the tower before the Crusaders come charging in.

To be more precise, they have to close the gates; I have to get my butt out the gates and away from there. As much as it insults my military instinct, I can only meet my KCW if I get away from the tower, because all the Varangians in that tower are going down. So—just like the three times before—I push my way out during that moment of confusion, when the Varangians and Greeks are trying to close the gates while the Crusaders are trying to force them to stay open. I’m wearing Varangian lamellar armor, relatively lightweight, so I have more mobility than the Crusaders whose ranks I have to break through. I jab at a couple of armpits and groins to encourage bodies to get out of my way, but my goal isn’t to terminate anyone, it’s just to get out of there. I know how it ends. My job is not to stick around for it. It’s hard because I know some of those men pretty well now and leaving them to their doom while I slip away to find a witch to Send me home . . . we should consider getting counselors to help soldiers deal with that, it could fester into PTSD.

The only other Varangian I see fleeing the tower is Magnus. He follows me out of the place. He’s got his eye on me. I think he’s expecting me to grab a boat oar and single-handedly mow down a few hundred armed knights or something. But in all of the confusion it’s easy enough for me to elude him.

So I get out, away from the tower, and I watch. I watch the Crusaders barely manage to pry the gates back open, and I watch them stream into the tower, and I hear the carnage inside, and I know what it means.

That’s when it happened.

I knew what was supposed to happen next. The Crusaders were supposed to go down and open up the casing for the chain mechanism, release the chain, and sail into the harbor, to the astonished horror of their quarter million spectators. Then they send across the Bosporus for the rest of their camp—especially the women and the cooks. There’s a KCW in the Crusader army, and she’s supposed to Send me back here. Meanwhile the Jews of Pera are frantically packing their bags and hightailing it out of town to start the well-documented Byzantine Diaspora. All of that is what happened three Strands in a row.

But this time something happens that has never happened before: there is a massive flash of light and an explosion on the harbor side of the hill, right exactly where Pera is. The entire hillside—all of Pera, which was built of stone—is flaming. This has never happened before, I have no idea why it’s happening, obviously at the time I didn’t know that Rachel had come back to 1203 and meddled by telling people what was coming. I realized from the 1601 London DTAP that this has got to be Diachronic Shear and I knew I had to get as far away as possible. So I run toward the woods and wait to see what happens when all the fire and explosions die down. That happens very fast, actually—just like in London.

I come back toward the tower for reconnaissance, and I see at once that two things are different from how they’ve always been. First, because of the explosion and fire and all that hell that broke loose, there’s no way to release the chain mechanism. It’s fused. That thing is never going to open. Ever. And just as I’m thinking about what a massive fuck-up that is—because without the chain being lowered, the ships cannot get into the safety of the harbor, and then literally, history cannot move forward—and then the second thing I notice is that . . . Pera is gone. Gone. Not even any foundation stones. It’s obliterated—a black charred spot, acres of it—on the hillside, as if there was never anything there. And that awful smell I remember from the Albigensian DTAP, that noisome smell of charred bones after an execution. The whole area, which had been walled and locked, went up so fast that nobody there had time to escape. Horrible.

A quarter hour later, while half the army is still walking around in a daze, something incredible happened: the Eagle, the largest and heaviest iron-prowed Venetian ship, rammed into the harbor chain and broke it. They broke the harbor chain of Constantinople! That’s not how it was supposed to happen. Invaders tried for five hundred years to break the chains guarding the Golden Horn. Every generation of that chain was unbreakable. Something about the Diachronic Shear must have had a molecular effect on the metal and weakened the chain. I think the multiverse required the Crusaders to get into the harbor and so made sure it happened, even if they couldn’t do it the way they did on every other Strand.

Anyhow—neither side lost many men to the Shear, but it freaked the hell out of everyone. Even being aware of the Shear, I’m already feeling confused about what happened, so I’m sure all kinds of crazy things will end up getting said about it. I’m willing to bet everyone will say that Pera must have been made of wood to go up in flames like that, and the flames must have come from the fire-arrows—something like that, even though I know Pera was made of stone and tile, and I also know the angle the fire-arrows came from would never have landed in Pera anyhow. So lots of weird crap is going to get said.

In conclusion, it appears Rachel was reunited with her family and warned them. This changed everything.

Clearly Rachel’s information moved quickly out of the Jewish settlement. There is no way we will ever know what Rachel said, or to whom, or what that person attempted to do with the information. We know only that the multiverse could not bear such a change of course, and eliminated its possibility.

Post by Dr. Melisande Stokes

on “All-DODO” ODIN channel

DAY 1812

All,

Mortimer has requested that everyone please stop checking the wiki for updates on Constantinople, it’s slowing the servers down and it is a waste of time until the GLAAMR dissipates. Lieutenant Colonel Lyons and I believe that over the next few days, history will literally rewrite itself, as the oral accounts of that day’s Diachronic Shear make their way into written testimonials and then eventually history books, and finally the Internet.

Rachel bat Avraham almost certainly died in the Shear. Although she died in defiance of our regulations, it is important to be sensitive to the grief of the many DODO workers—especially her fellow MUONs—who had the fortune and pleasure to have worked with her for the better part of three years.

Respectfully submitted,

Melisande Stokes

Exchange of posts by LTG Octavian K. Frink,

Dr. Constantine Rudge, and Dr. Roger Blevins

on private ODIN channel

DAYS 1810–1813 (MID-JULY, YEAR 5)

Post from LTG Octavian K. Frink:

Blev, (cc Rudge):

I’ve been following the traffic on this system as my schedule permits. Relieved to hear LTC Lyons made it back in one piece. Somewhat confused otherwise. He accomplished the mission on all four Strands? So, how do we know whether it worked?

Reply from Dr. Roger Blevins:

Okie, that is the fundamental question of all diachronic operations—how can we know the success or failure of a campaign such as this one, where the objective is to shift national borders a few kilometers, or even a few meters, to one direction or the other?

In the present case, as you know, what we are trying to achieve is to pry Crimea loose from the Russians and get it back into the full and undisputed possession of Ukraine, all without firing a shot or engaging in military operations as that term is normally understood.

If the project succeeds, then our present-day reality changes; we wake up tomorrow and Ukraine owns the Crimea free and clear. Not only that, but history will have changed as well. We’ll have no memory and no records of Russia ever having marched into Crimea in 2014. So how do we know that anything even happened?

The answer is that the alteration of history doesn’t happen in a flash; it takes a little while to propagate through all of the Strands and whatnot, and during that time there is this thing that Dr. Oda terms GLAAMR (Galvanic Liminal Aura Antecedent to Manifold Rift), which even non-magical people can sense if it’s strong enough.

From Dr. Constantine Rudge:

Just jumping in here with a note that DODO’s R&D division has invented ways of measuring GLAAMR. That’s why we had three spy planes in last year’s budget; we mounted the GLAAMR detection systems in their bellies, and even now they are flying routes over Ukraine gathering data.

From LTG Frink:

Yes, I remember the spy planes now, and the ruckus they caused in the budget hearing. Glad to know they are getting some use.

Why can’t we just draw a map or something, and store it, and then compare it to a current map a few days later? I know you’re going to tell me it would change and there would be GLAAMR, but is there no way to just store a document in such a way that it wouldn’t change?

From Dr. Blevins:

That is being worked on too. Apparently if the map were stored in an ODEC, your idea might work. But because space in ODECs is so scarce and expensive we have done very little of this.

From LTG Frink:

Seems to me we could get a hell of a lot of thumb drives into an ATTO. Give me a sitrep on those.

Oh, and I noticed that when Rachel bat Avraham flew the coop, she used mind control on the witch who Homed her. Obviously psy-ops is a common ability among the historical witches.

From Dr. Rudge:

Just a gentle reminder, General Frink, that we try to avoid using loaded terms such as “mind control.”

From LTG Frink:

Connie, you can call it whatever you want, psy-ops has got to be simpler than what we just went through to get Crimea back.

From Dr. Rudge:

Yes, General Frink, Crimea is part of the Ukraine today. You may share with me a vague memory, rapidly fading, of a Russian invasion that never happened. As if we dreamed it, and the memory of the dream is being dispelled by the more concrete realities of the new day.

Without disputing your opinion that the operation was anything but simple, I’ll point out that to achieve the same result through conventional military operations would have been infinitely more complex and risky.

From LTG Frink:

I’ll give you complex. Risky I’m less sure of. Hard to know what the real risks are.

From Dr. Blevins:

To answer a question earlier in this “thread,” the first ATTO is proceeding through its testing routines more or less on schedule, but it is a device of many subsystems and there are endless delays and complications around procuring special parts, debugging “code,” and so on. We are looking at bringing Gráinne forward in mid-September, once we’re certain the device works. In the meantime we could certainly try some experiments with thumb drives or other forms of document storage, as you suggest.

In the meantime, Okie, I would like to draw your attention to a question we were kicking around earlier, namely what to do with the surplus personnel in LTC Lyons’s department—including LTC Lyons himself—now that the big push in the Constantinople Theater is over. Do we wish to throw them into another colossal operation, or sit back and assess?

From LTG Frink:

Will give you a call in five, Blev.

FROM LIEUTENANT GENERAL OCTAVIAN K. FRINK

TO ALL DODO DEPARTMENT HEADS

DAY 1825 (LATE JULY, YEAR 5)

First of all, I would like to congratulate all DODO personnel for the successful conclusion of operations in the Constantinople Theater. That is not to gloss over the tragic story of the late Rachel bat Avraham, however, to the best of our ability to assess these things, it would appear that DODO was able to “undo” a Russian takeover of the Crimea that, on our Strand, never successfully happened. To have achieved a similar result using conventional Trapezoid-style operations would have been immensely costly in both dollars and blood and would have raised the possibility of opening a wider war.

One of the measures of a successful team is the ability to adapt to unexpected complications that inevitably crop up during the course of a complex operation—the “fog of war,” as it were. Our glitch for this mission was the unexpected advent of “St. Tristan of Dintagel” as blowback from earlier operations in Normandy. While this made it seem touch and go for a short time, the situation seems to have resolved without further repercussions.

Before many of you depart for well-deserved vacations during August, I wanted to supply an idea of top-level direction during the rest of this year, and the year following. The Constantinople Theater has proved that with the help of the Chronotron we can conduct large-scale operations that will reshape history to our advantage without the expense and bloodshed of conventional warfare. As you all know, DODO is also conducting significant operations in five other theaters at this time. All of these are scheduled to wind down over the course of the autumn and early winter. Our general plan is to stand down, stand back, and appraise the results and lessons learned before plunging into additional theater-scale operations.

With that, I wish you all a restful August.

Sincerely,

Lieutenant General Octavian K. Frink

Post by Dr. Melisande Stokes to LTC Tristan Lyons

on private ODIN channel

DAY 1825

I didn’t think Frink could be that smooth.

Reply from LTC Lyons:

Don’t go there, Stokes.

From Dr. Stokes:

No, seriously, that was the nicest “fuck you” letter ever.

From LTC Lyons:

He’s a general. He fights wars. When the war’s over, he stops fighting and puts his army to work training to fight the next war. That’s all this is.

From Dr. Stokes:

Hmm, I think being turned into a saint may have affected your judgment.

From LTC Lyons:

So you’re going to be the little devil on my shoulder?

From Dr. Stokes:

:)

From LTC Lyons:

I’m outta here. Time for some R&R. See you in three weeks.

From Dr. Stokes:

Where you going again?

From LTC Lyons:

Probably shouldn’t divulge this, but I’m going to Normandy.

From Dr. Stokes:

Collinet?

From LTC Lyons:

You got it. It’s a nice place now. There’s a B&B practically right on Thyra’s homesite. Going to go get drunk on cider and light a candle at the chapel of St. Tristan.

From Dr. Stokes:

Light one for me.

From LTC Lyons:

Roger wilco.

LETTER FROM

GRÁINNE to GRACE O’MALLEY

A Wednesday of Late-Harvest, 1602

Auspiciousness and prosperity to you, milady!

So at last, the time ’tis for me to reveal my plan to you in full. As good as all these fellas have been to me both in London and in Antwerp, there’s naught of use that comes of my remaining a spy for Your Grace when I’ve lost the chance to dawdle around Whitehall, and it’s all these natural philosophers and bloody intellectuals I’ve got around me. And the Fuggers, of course, but they at least are clear-eyed, so they are, about how to get things done in this world. I know Your Grace grows weary of the world, and sorrowful I am to think of your moving past us to the realms beyond. I’ve no premonition at all of what shall come of Ireland once you’ve left us, and I fear the English will renew their bloody conquering schemes, especially with the urging of Sir Francis feckin’ Bacon.

So I hope it’s understanding that Your Grace will be, when I tell you that I’ve vowed to myself to look out for my own cause now: that being magic, and the fate of my sister witches. Sure Tristan Lyons trusts me as a sibling, and yet isn’t he always refusing to tell me what stymies all magical abilities in future. So I’m thinking the best way for me to be learning such a thing is to go forward into the future myself, and be looking at things from his vantage point. Glad I am to hear from within the net-work that Tristan’s bosses think to bring me forward anyhow, to help them with a thing they call an Atto, which is apparently exactly like the horrid little chambers their witches be spending all their days in, only not quite so little, and on wheels. As if wheels would make it any better.

I intend to use the resources of Tristan’s own guild, what calls itself DODO, not to restore magic, but to prevent its destruction in the first place, as soon as I ken what is the cause of such destruction. A brilliant plan this is, to my mind, and so obvious and straightforward, I wonder what bollocks excuse Tristan’s superiors have for not be doing likewise. I know not how long a stretch of time there is, between the death of magic and its rebirth, but that stretch is surely a boil on the face of history, and if it can be avoided, then it is my duty to see that happen. For surely the destruction of magic is not only bad for witches, but bad for Ireland and such like nations that are relying heavily on magic for self-defense from oppressors.

So here then is my plan: oft enough have I listened to Tristan and the other DOers lament of a certain officer whose name is Roger Blevins. This gentleman, although little enough he seems to do, yet has more power than all the others put together—even including Tristan Lyons himself! Rose is of a mind with me, and it’s Sending me forward in time she’s agreed to, so that I may ingratiate myself with this Blevins—and yourself knows well enough how easily I may ingratiate myself when it’s ingratiating that is called for! And then won’t I be in a position to be learning things Tristan wouldn’t have me learn. And won’t he be helpless to prevent my learning.

And so, my dear beloved Pirate Queen, I pledge my loyalty to you forever, and to the Irish cause, but it’s off to the future I’m now bound.

Whether I be near or far, may I hear only good things of you, My Lady Grace!

Yours ever, Gráinne No Longer in England

INCIDENT REPORT

AUTHOR: Esme Overkleeft

SUBJECT: Magnus

THEATER: Northern Europe, Early Medieval (NEEM)

OPERATION: Botanical Infrastructure Ops for Magical Enhancement (BIOME)

DTAP: Collinet, Normandy, 1205

FILED: Day 1857 (late August, Year 5)

Having completed my DEDE in Normandy 1205 DTAP (Iris germanica rhizome grafting along La Vie River), I went to KCW Imblen of Collinet to be Sent back to DODO HQ. I have worked with Imblen on several occasions and my Norman French allows us to have reasonably fluent conversations. As others who have visited this DTAP can attest, she is a calm, unflappable, good-humored woman.

However, on this occasion she was on edge. Magnus of Normandy, known to several of our DOers from DTAPs 1202–3 Constantinople, returned to his home village (some 50 km from Collinet) after many years gone, which was a cause of celebration. However, Magnus was excessively preoccupied with querying everyone about their memory of a local song or folktale, about a great hero who had, several generations earlier, saved the village from attack by a feuding tribe and later been canonized by the Church. The hero was named Tristan of Dintagel, an unremarkable enough name—except that Magnus met somebody named Tristan of Dintagel in Constantinople, 160 years after the events of the story.

Magnus called the village elders into council and described this remarkable coincidence to them. They did not share his obsessive curiosity. He then traveled to Collinet to query Imblen, formally seeking her advice and assistance as a witch to make sense of this. He was excited and aggressive and supplied many details about Tristan’s recent activities in Constantinople, making it obvious that he had observed Tristan closely and recruited other members of the Varangian Guard to keep an eye on him.

Imblen feels she said, “I can’t help you,” a little too quickly and firmly, because he became even more intrigued, and declared that he would go to Dintagel directly to seek the (parish? Church? Hundreds?) records and establish if “his” Tristan was a descendant of the hero . . . or if something stranger was happening.

For the record, this is the fourth Strand on which something like this has happened. Each time, Imblen seems more shaken and Magnus appears more clear-headed and determined. This time—given what he understands of witches’ powers—he hypothesized directly to Imblen that given Tristan’s archaic speech patterns, perhaps another witch had Sent Tristan forward in time, and if so, “he would hie himself back to Constantinople to learn more of Tristan’s doings, in case there could be profit for himself made from it.”

Respectfully submitted,

Esme Overkleeft

Exchange of posts by DODO staff on “Anachron

Management” ODIN channel

DAYS 1862–1870 (EARLY SEPTEMBER, YEAR 5)