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

Diachronicle

(PREAMBLE, JULY 1851)

MY NAME IS MELISANDE STOKES and this is my story. I am writing in July 1851 (Common Era, or—let’s face it—Anno Domini) in the guest chamber of a middle-class home in Kensington, London, England. But I am not a native of this place or time. In fact, I am quite fucking desperate to get out of here.

But you already knew that. Because when I’m done writing this thing—which, for reasons that will soon become clear, I’m calling Diachronicle—I am going to take it to the very discreet private offices of the Fugger Bank, Threadneedle Street, lock it up in a safe deposit box, and hand it over to the most powerful banker in London, who is going to seal it in a vault, not to be opened for more than one hundred and sixty years. The Fuggers, above all people in this world, understand the dangers of Diachronic Shear. They know that to open the box and read the document sooner would be to trigger a catastrophe that would wipe London’s financial district off the map and leave a smoking crater in its place.

Actually, it would be much worse than a smoking crater . . . but a smoking crater is how history would describe it, once the surviving witnesses had been sent off to the madhouse.

I’m writing with a steel-nibbed dip pen, model number 137B, from Hughes & Sons Ltd. of Birmingham. I requested the Extra Fine Tip, partly to save money on paper, and partly so that I could jab my thumb with it and draw blood. The brown smear across the top of this page can be tested in any twenty-first-century DNA lab. Compare the results to what is on file in my personnel record at DODO HQ and you will know that I am a woman of your era, writing in the middle of the nineteenth century.

I intend to write everything that explains how I came to be here, no matter how far-fetched or hallucinatory it may sound. To quote Peter Gabriel, a singer/songwriter who will be born ninety-nine years from now: This will be my testimony.

I DO ATTEST that I am here against my will, having been Sent here from September 8, 1850, and from the city of San Francisco, California (the day before California was granted statehood).

I do attest that I belong in Boston, Massachusetts, in the first quarter of the twenty-first century. There, and then, I am part of the Department of Diachronic Operations: a black-budget arm of the United States government that has gone rather badly off the rails due to internal treachery.

In the time in which I write this, 1851, magic is waning. The research that DODO paid me to perform indicates that magic will cease to exist at the end of this month (July 28). When that happens, I will be trapped here in a post-magic world for the rest of my days. The only way anyone will ever know what became of me is through this deposition. While I have managed to land myself in comfortable (by 1851 standards) quarters with access to pen, ink, leisure time, and privacy, it has been at the expense of freedom; my hosts would not consider allowing me out of the house alone for an evening constitutional, let alone to seek out witches who might help me.

One comment before I begin. If anyone from DODO ever reads this, for the love of God please add corset-makers to the list of abettors we need to recruit in any Victorian DTAPs. Corsets are intended to be custom-made to conform to the actual shape of a lady’s body, and it’s uncomfortable to have to borrow one or buy one “off the rack,” although servants and poorer women generally do that (but do not lace them tightly, as they must engage in manual labor). Being here entirely on charity, I prefer not to ask my hosts to extend credit for a custom-fit one, but wearing this one (borrowed from my hostess) is just awful. It makes a Renaissance bodice feel like a bikini, I’m not even kidding.

Diachronicle

DAY 33 (LATE AUGUST, YEAR 0)

In which I meet Tristan Lyons and immediately agree to get into more trouble than I could possibly realize at the time

I MET TRISTAN LYONS IN the hallway outside the faculty offices of the Department of Ancient and Classical Linguistics at Harvard University. I was a lecturer, which means that I was given the most unpopular teaching assignments with no opportunity for university-supported research and no real job security.

On this particular afternoon, as I was walking down the hallway, I heard voices raised within the office of Dr. Roger Blevins, Department Chair. His door was slightly ajar. Usually it gaped open, so that anyone walking by might glance at his ego-wall, upon which hung every degree, honor, and accolade he’d ever collected, honestly or otherwise. When not yawning thus, the door was tightly closed, advising “Do Not Disturb” in 48-point Lucida Blackletter to make sure we all understood how exclusive his company was.

But here it was, uncharacteristically a quarter open. Intrigued, I glanced in, just as a clean-cut man was making a decisive exit, looking back at Blevins with an expression somewhere between disgust and bemusement. His biceps smacked into my shoulder as he ploughed into me with enough force to throw me off balance. I pivoted backward and landed sprawled on the floor. He retreated instinctively, his backpack smacking into the doorjamb with a hard thump. From within the office, Blevins’s voice was hurling a stream of invective.

“Apologies,” the man said at once, turning red. He was about my age. He slipped out into the hallway and began to reach toward me to help me up.

The door swung farther open, quite forcefully—right into my shin. I made a noise of pained protest and the pompous voice from within the room went silent.

Blevins—thick grey hair perfectly immobile, dressed as if he expected at any moment to be sworn in to give expert testimony—emerged from his office and peered down at me disapprovingly. “What are you doing there?” he asked, as if he’d caught me spying.

“My fault, I’m sorry, miss,” said the young man, again holding his hand toward me.

Blevins grabbed the edge of the door and began pulling it closed. “Watch where you’re going,” he said to me. “If you’d been in the middle of the hall you’d have avoided a collision. Please collect yourself and move on.”

He gave the young man a look I could not make out from where I was, then turned back into his office, closing the door hard behind him.

After a second of stunned silence, the young man extended his hand closer to me and I took it, with a nod of thanks, to rise. We were standing quite close to each other.

“I am . . .” he began again. “I am so very sorry—”

“It’s fine,” I said. “If you’ve annoyed Roger Blevins, how bad can you be?”

At that he looked startled—as if he’d come from someplace where speaking ill of the brass simply wasn’t done. We kept staring at each other. It seemed a perfectly normal thing to do. He was nice to look at in an ROTC sort of way, and his expression implied he didn’t mind looking at me either, although I am not the sort the ROTC boys ever took an interest in.

Suddenly he held out his hand. “Tristan Lyons,” he said.

“Melisande Stokes,” I rejoined.

“You’re in the Ancient and Classical Linguistics Department?”

“I am,” I said. “I’m an exploited and downtrodden humanities lecturer.”

Once again, that startled, wary look. “I’m treating you to coffee,” he said.

That was presumptuous, but I was so pleased with him for upsetting Blevins that it would have been churlish to turn him down.

He wanted to take me to the Apostolic Café in Central Square, which was perhaps ten minutes by foot down Mass Ave. It was that time of year in Boston when the summer feels definitely over, and the city’s seventy-odd colleges and universities are coming back to life. Streets were jammed with parental minivans from all over the Northeast, moving their kids into their apartments and dorm rooms. Sidewalks were clogged with discarded sofas and other dump-bound furniture. Add that to the city’s baseline traffic—people, cars, bikes, the T—and it was all very loud and bustling. He used that as an excuse to cup my elbow in one hand, keeping me close to him as we walked. Presumptuous. As was the very idea that you could walk two abreast in such a crowded place. But he kept making a path through the crowd with expectant looks and crisp apologies. Definitely not from around here.

“Can you hear me clearly?” he said almost directly into my ear, my being half a step ahead of him. I nodded. “Let me tell you a couple of things while we’re walking. By the time we get to the café, if you think I’m a creep or a nutcase, just tell me, and I’ll simply buy you a coffee and be on my way. But if you don’t think I’m a creep or a nutcase, then we’re going to have a very serious conversation that could take hours. Do you have dinner plans?”

In the society I inhabit currently, such an approach would be considered so outrageous that when I think on it, it is hard to believe I did not instantly excuse myself and walk away from him. On the contrary, at the time I found his awkward inappropriateness, his bluntness, rather compelling. And I confess, I was curious to hear what he had to say.

“I might,” I said. (Confession: I did not.)

“All right, listen,” he began. “I work for a shadowy government entity, you’ve never heard of it, and if you try to Google it, you won’t find any reference to it, not even from conspiracy-theory nuts.”

“Conspiracy-theory nuts are the only ones who would use a term like ‘shadowy government entity,’” I pointed out.

“That’s why I use it,” he retorted. “I don’t want anyone to take me seriously, it would get in the way of my efficiency if people were paying attention to me. Here’s what we need. Tell me if you’re interested. We have a bunch of very old documents—cuneiform, in one case—and we need them translated, at least roughly, by the same person. You’ll be paid very well. But I can’t tell you where we got the documents, or how we got them, or why we’re interested in them. And you cannot ever tell anyone about this. You can’t even say to your friends, ‘Oh, yeah, I did some classified translating for the government.’ Even if we publish your translation of it, you can’t take ownership of it. If you learn something extraordinary from translating the material, you can’t share it with the world. You’re a cog in a piece of machinery. An anonymous cog. You’d have to agree to that before I say another word.”

“That’s why Blevins threw you out,” I said.

“Yes, he’s strongly committed to academic freedom.”

Dear reader, give me credit for not going LOL on mocking him. “No he isn’t.”

This startled Tristan, who looked at me like a puppy after you’ve stepped on his tail. On second thought, given his ROTC bearing, let’s make that a mature German shepherd.

“He was pissed off that he’d never get any glory or royalties,” I explained. “But he knew he couldn’t say that. So, academic freedom or whatever.”

Tristan seemed to actually think about this as we crossed Temple Street. His type are trained to respect authority. Blevins was nothing if not authoritative. So, this was a little test. Was his straight-arrow brain going to explode?

Through all the bustle, in the golden light of early autumn, I could see the entrance to the Central Square T stop. “What’s your position?” he asked me.

“On academic freedom? Or getting paid?”

“You haven’t kicked me to the curb yet,” he said. “So, I guess we’re talking about the latter.”

“Depends on the paycheck.”

He named an amount that was twice my annual salary, with the caveat “. . . once you convince me you’re the right person for the job.”

“What will the translations be used for?”

“Classified.”

I tried to think of reasons not to pursue this lucrative diversion. “Could they somehow be justification for unethical actions, or physical violence, on the part of your shadowy government entity?”

“Classified.”

“That’s a yes, then,” I said. “Or at least a possibly. You’d have just said no otherwise.”

“That amount I just mentioned? It’s for a six-month contract. Renewable by mutual agreement. Benefits negotiable. Are we having coffee together or not?” We were nearing the turn to the Apostolic Café.

“No harm in coffee,” I said. Stalling for time, trying to wrap my head around the math: four times my current take-home pay, which would never include benefits. Not to mention that I’d be trading up in the supervisor department.

We entered the café, a beautiful old desanctified brick church with high vaulted ceilings, stained glass windows, and incongruously modern wood tables and chairs sprinkled across the marble floor. There was a state-of-the-art espresso station to one side and—most disconcertingly, as much as I’d overcome my upbringing—a counter set just about where the altar would once have been, and a complete wet bar curving around the inner wall of the apse. The place had only recently opened but was already very popular with the techno-geek crowd from both Harvard and MIT. It was my first time in. I felt a brief pang of envy that there weren’t enough linguists in Cambridge to warrant a designated polyglot-hangout as lovely as this.

“What’s your pleasure?” asked the barista, a young Asian-American woman with interesting piercings, tattoos in place of eyebrows, and a demeanor that blended I’m sooo interesting and this job sucks with I have a really cool secret life and this job is an awesome front. Her nametag read “Julie Lee: Professional 聪明的驴子•双簧管” (which I understood, roughly, as “Smart-ass Oboist”).

We ordered drinks—Tristan, black coffee; myself, something I would never normally have, a complicated something-latte-something with lots of buzzwords I picked out at random from the menu over the bar, and which prompted a brief smirk from our barista. The agents of shadowy government entities, I reasoned, were likely to be trained in psychological evaluation of potential recruits, and I did not want him getting an accurate read on me until I decided whether or not I wished to pursue his offer. (Also he was rather handsome, which made me jittery a bit, so I decided to hide behind an affected eccentricity.) The result being that he sat down with a lovely-smelling cup of dark roast and I sat down with something almost undrinkable.

“You ordered that to try to throw me off the scent, in case I was doing some sort of ninja psych-eval of you,” he said casually, as if just trying the idea on for size. “Ironically, that tells me more about you than if you’d just ordered your usual.”

I must have looked shocked, because he grinned with almost savage self-satisfaction. There was something disturbingly thrilling about being seen so thoroughly, so quickly, and so stealthily. I felt myself flush.

“How?” I demanded. “How did you do that?”

He leaned in toward me, large, strong hands clasped before him on the café table. “Melisande Stokes—may I call you Mel?” I nodded. “Mel.” He cleared his throat in a very official-sounding, preparatory manner. “If we’re going to pursue this,” he said, “there are three parts to it. First, before anything else, you have to sign the nondisclosure form. Then I need you to do some sample translations so we can get a sense of your work, and then we have to run a background check on you.”

“How long will all that take?” I asked.

Four times my salary. With possible dental.

And no Blevins.

He had set his backpack on a chair beside him. Now he patted it. “Nondisclosure form is right here. If you sign it now, I can text your name and social to DC.” He paused then, and reconsidered. “Never mind. They already know your social. Point is, they’ll have finished the background check before you’re done choking down whatever the hell it is you ordered. So it’s just how long it takes you to translate the test samples and have our guys look over your translations. But”—he waved a warning finger at me—“no fooling around here. Once you sign the form, you’re committing to do this. Unless we reject you. You can’t reject us. You’re stuck with me, for six months minimum, as soon as you sign the form. Got it? No half-assedness on your part. So maybe we just talk tonight and then you take the form with you and give it to me tomorrow when you’ve had a chance to sleep on it.”

“Where would I find you tomorrow?” I asked.

“Classified,” he said. “I’d find you.”

“I don’t like being stalked. I’d better sign it now,” I said.

He stared at me a moment. It wasn’t quite like that first moment, when we had stared and it had felt so strangely normal. This felt charged. But I wasn’t exactly sure why. I would like to think I was simply delighted to be ridding myself of Blevins and quadrupling my income all in one go. But if I am honest with myself I confess there was a definite pleasure in being Chosen by someone with such agreeable features.

“Right,” he said, after we had been staring for a couple of heartbeats. “Here.” He reached for his bag.

I read the form, which said precisely what Tristan had described, making it at once boilerplate and singular. I held out my hand, and Tristan offered me a government-issue ballpoint pen. A far cry from the slightly blood-smeared Hughes & Sons Ltd. model number 137B, Extra Fine, with which I am writing this.

As I signed the form, he leaned in closer to me and said quietly, sounding delighted with himself, “I have some of the cuneiform in my bag if you want to take a look at it.”

I believe I gaped at that. “You’re carrying a cuneiform artifact around in your backpack!?”

He shrugged. “If it could survive the fall of Ugarit . . .” There was a boyish gleam in his eye. He was showing off now. “Want to see it?”

I nodded mutely. He opened his bag and drew out a lump of clay, roughly the size and shape of a Big Mac. So that’s what had banged against the doorjamb of Blevins’s office. Marked into it in tiny, neat rows . . . was cuneiform text. Tristan handled it as if it were a football. I stared at it for a moment, disoriented by seeing something I had only encountered while wearing gloves in the workroom of a museum, now casually sitting on the table next to my coffee-like beverage. I was almost afraid to touch it; that seemed disrespectful. But within moments I had tossed such a delicate thought aside, and my fingers were caressing it. I studied the script.

“This isn’t Ugaritic,” I said. “It’s Hittite. There are some Akkadian-style markings.”

He looked pleased. “Nice,” he said. “Can you read it?”

“Not offhand,” I said patiently. Some people have a very romanticized notion of what it means to be a polyglot. But not wanting to appear lacking, I added quickly, “The light in here is too low, it will be hard to make out the forms.”

“Soon enough,” he said, and pushed it back into his bag with the same casual roughness. Once it was out of sight I began to wonder if I’d really seen it.

Tristan reached back into the bag and pulled out something else now: a sheaf of papers. He pushed them across the table to me. “You still have the pen,” he said. “Want to get started on these?”

I looked at the papers. There were seven blocks of writing, almost none of them in the Roman alphabet—even the Old Latin passage used Etruscan. At a glance I also recognized biblical Hebrew and classical Greek. The Hebrew I knew best, so I looked more closely at this one.

And blinked several times to make sure I was not imagining what I was seeing. I took a look at the Greek and then the Latin to make sure. Then I looked up at Tristan. “I already know what all of these say.”

“You’ve taken this test before?” he asked, surprised.

“No,” I said tartly. “I created it.” At his confused look, I explained: “I chose these specific samples and I wrote the translation key against which to check the students’ work.” I felt my cheeks grow hot. “I did it as a project under Blevins when I was a graduate student.”

“He sold it to us,” Tristan said simply. “For a lot of money.”

“It was for a graduate seminar on syntax patterns,” I said.

“Mel,” he said, “he sold it to us. There was never a graduate seminar on syntax patterns. We—that is, people high up in my shadowy government entity—have been working with him for a long time. We have contracts with him.”

“I would happily sign that nondisclosure form seventeen times over,” I said, “to express the depth of my sentiments toward Roger Blevins at this moment.”

Julie Lee, Professional Smart-ass Oboist, swept by us, bussing our cups without asking, as Tristan’s phone made a noise and he glanced down at the screen.

He typed something into the phone and then pocketed it. “I just told them you passed with flying colors,” he said, “and they just told me you passed the background check.”

“Of course I passed the background check,” I said. “What do you take me for?”

“You’re hired.”

“Thank you,” I said, “but whoever they are, please let them know I’m the creator of the test I just passed.”

He shook his head no. “Then we get into an IP inquiry with the university and things get messy and public, and shadowy government entities can’t go there. Sorry. If this project falls apart, though, feel free to take it up with Blevins.” His phone beeped again and he checked the new incoming message. “Meanwhile, let’s get to work.” He pocketed the phone and held out his hand for me to shake. “You have an agreeably uninteresting existence. Let’s see if we can change that.”

Diachronicle

DAYS 34–56 (SEPTEMBER, YEAR 0)

In which magic is brought to my attention

TRISTAN DETERMINED TO BEGIN the translations immediately—that very evening—and so he ordered carry-out Chinese, asked for my address, and said that he would show up in an hour with the first of several documents. I was, please know, outraged that he was driving around with ancient artifacts in the backseat of his beat-up Jeep.

At that time, I dwelt alone in a one-bedroom walk-up flat in North Cambridge (without being considered a spinster or a loose woman, as would be the case in my current environment). It was walking distance from the Porter Square T stop and an easy bicycle ride down Massachusetts Avenue, cutting through Harvard Yard, to the department (although I would no longer be making that ride). Tristan appeared punctually with bags of Chinese and a six-pack of Old Tearsheet Best Bitter, which as I was to learn was the only beer he would consider drinking. He casually commandeered the living/dining/cooking area, placing the food on the counter, far from the coffee table, where he laid out four documents and the cuneiform tablet, a notepad, and several pens. He looked around the space, zeroed in on my personal reference library, pulled out four dictionaries, and set them on the table.

“Let’s eat first,” he said. “I’m starving.”

For the first time, we made small talk. It was only brief, for he eats too fast, although I did not comment on it that first time. Tristan had studied physics at West Point but ended up assigned to the Military Intelligence branch of the Army, which—in roundabout ways he constantly deflected with the term “classified”—led to his recruitment by his “shadowy government entity.”

For my part, since nothing was classified, I divulged the source of my polyglot tendencies, that being: my agnostic parents having been raised Catholic and Jewish, my two sets of grandparents competed for my faith from my earliest years. At the age of seven I proposed to my Catholic grandparents that I learn to read the New Testament in Latin, in lieu of attending Sunday school. Thinking I would never attain this, they agreed—and I was functionally fluent in classical Latin within six months. Emboldened by this, shortly before my thirteenth birthday I similarly evaded being bat mitzvahed by testing out at college level for classical Hebrew. My Jewish grandparents offered to fund one semester of university education per each ancient language I mastered at college level. That was how I afforded my first three years of school.

Tristan was very pleased with this story—almost as pleased with himself as with me, as if patting himself on the back for having chosen such a prodigy. When we finished our meal, he collected the disposable containers, rinsed them, and packed them neatly back in their bag. “All right, let’s start!” he said, and we moved to the couch so I might examine the documents.

In addition to the cuneiform tablet there was something in Guānhuà (Middle Mandarin) on rice paper, about five hundred years old—Tristan to his credit at least knew to handle this with gloves on. There was also, on vellum, a piece written in a mixture of medieval French and Latin, I would say at least eight hundred years old. (It was fucking insane to see these things sitting casually on my coffee table.) Finally there was a fragment of a journal, this written in Russian on paper that looked positively brand-new in comparison, and was dated 1847. The librarian in me noticed that all of them had been marked with the same stamp—a somewhat ill-defined family crest, surrounded by blurry words in a blend of Latin and Italian. They had, in other words, been acquired by a library or a private collection, and been duly stamped and cataloged at some point.

As he had warned, Tristan would not tell me where he had obtained these artifacts, nor why it was such a (seemingly) random collection. After several hours with them, however, I saw the common theme . . . although it was hard to believe what I was reading.

In short, each of these documents referred to magic—yes, magic—as casually as a court document refers to the law, or a doctor’s report refers to medical tests. Not magician-trick magic, but magic as we know it from myths and fairy tales: an inexplicable and supernatural force employed by witches—for they were, per these documents, all women. I don’t mean the belief in magic, or a mere weakness for magical thinking. I mean the writer of each document was discussing a situation in which magic was a fact of life.

For example, the cuneiform tablet was a declaration laying down what a witch at the royal court of Kahta was due in recompense for her services, and regulated the uses of magic that courtiers were allowed to ask of her. The Latin/French one was written by the Abbess of Chaalis regarding the struggles that one of her nuns faced, trying but failing to renounce her magic powers, and the abbess wondered if she herself was to blame, as she was not truly wholehearted in her own prayers for the sister to be relieved of her powers, since those powers often made life easier at the abbey. The Guānhuà took a little more work—I had but a cursory relationship to Asian language groups by then. It was itself a recipe from the provinces for a dish involving various hard-to-find aromatic herbs, as described to the writer (a circuit-riding Mandarin magistrate) by self-reported witches (whose activities were referred to as a footnote on the side of the recipe). Finally, the nineteenth-century Russian was written by a self-identified (aging) witch and lamented the fading powers of her sister witches and herself. This one also made a passing reference to the desirability of finding certain herbs.

These were rough, almost off-the-cuff translations. When I had finished the fourth one, there was a silence between us for a moment. Then Tristan gave me a disarmingly sly grin, and spoke:

“What if I told you we had more than a thousand such documents. All eras, from six continents.”

“All bearing this family crest?” I asked, pointing to the blurry stamp.

“That is the core of the collection. Others we collected on our own.”

“Well, that would challenge certain assumptions about the nature of reality that I did not even know I had.”

“We want you to translate all of them and extract the common core of data,” said Tristan.

I looked at him. “I assume there’s a military purpose.”

“Classified,” he said.

“If I have a context for translating, I can do a better job of it,” I protested.

“My shadowy government entity has been collecting documents of this nature for many years.”

“By what means?” I sputtered, both fascinated and dismayed to learn that a well-funded black ops organization was competing against academic researchers in such a manner. That sure explained a few things.

“The core of the collection, as you’ve been noticing, is from a private library in Italy.”

“The WIMF.”

“Beg pardon?”

“The Weird Italian Mother Fucker,” I said.

“Yeah. We acquired it some time ago.” His face twitched and he broke eye contact. “That’s not true. I was just being polite. We stole it. Before other people could steal it. Long story. Anyway, it gave us plenty of leads that we could follow to acquire more in the same vein. By all means fair and foul. We now feel we have a critical mass that, upon translation, might yield a sense of what precisely ‘magic’ was, how it worked, and why there are no references to it anywhere after the mid-1800s.”

“And you wish to have this information for some kind of military purpose,” I pressed.

“We wish to have one person do all the translations,” Tristan said, firmly not answering my query. “For three reasons. First, budget. Second, the fewer eyes, the safer. Third and most important, if the same person processes all the material, there is a greater chance of gleaning subtle consistencies or patterns.”

“And you are interested in those consistencies or patterns why, exactly?”

“The current hypothesis,” Tristan continued as before—that is, without actually answering me—“is that perhaps there was a worldwide epidemic of a virus that affected only witches, and magic was literally killed off. I don’t think that’s it, but I need to know more before I offer an alternate hypothesis. I have my suspicions, though.”

“Which are classified, right?”

“Whether or not they are classified is classified.”

The documents were many, but brief; most were fragmentary. Within three weeks, working alone at my coffee table, I had produced at least rough translations of the first batch of material. During that time I also gave notice, apologized to my students for abandoning them before they’d even gotten to know me, moved out of my Harvard office, and managed to reassure my parents that I was still working, without telling them exactly what it was I was doing. Meanwhile, Tristan was in communication with me at least twice a day, usually appearing in person, occasionally calling and talking to me in the most oblique terms. Never did we email or text; he did not want anything said between us to be on record. There was something rather swashbuckling, if unsettling, about the need for such secrecy. I had no idea what he did with the rest of his time. (Naturally, I asked. You can guess what his answer was.)

Our dynamic was singular, unprecedented in my life certainly. It was as if we had always been working together, and yet there was an undercurrent of something else, a kind of charge that only comes at the beginning of things. Neither of us ever acted on it—and while I am the sort who rarely acts on such things, he is (while extremely disciplined and upright) the sort who immediately acts on such things. So I attributed the buzz to the excitement of a shared endeavor. The intellectual intimacy of it was far more satisfying than any date I’d ever been on. If Tristan had a lover, she wasn’t getting the real goods. I was.

At the end of the three weeks, when he came to my apartment to receive the last (or so I innocently thought) of my translations, Tristan glanced around until he saw my coatrack. He studied it a moment, then took my raincoat off of its peg. It was late September by this point and the weather was starting to turn.

“Come on, we’re going to talk at the office,” he said. “I’ll buy you dinner.”

“There’s an office?” I said. “I assumed your shadowy government entity had you working out of your car.”

“It’s near Central Square. Carlton Street, about fifteen minutes’ walk from the Apostolic Café. How’s Chinese sound?”

“Depends on the dialect.”

“Ha,” he said without smiling. “Linguist humor. Pretty lame, Stokes.” He held my coat out. I reached for it. He shook his head and glanced down at it. Giving me to understand that he was not handing it to me, but offering to help me put it on—a gesture much more common in 1851 London than it was in that time and place. Some low-grade physical comedy ensued as I turned my back on him and tried to find the armholes with my hands. What a weirdo.

Carlton Street was the poor stepchild in an extended family of alleys and byways near MIT, where scores of biotech companies fledged. Most of the neighborhood had been rebranded into slick office complexes, with landscaped parks, mini-campuses, double-helix-themed architectural flourishes, and abstract steel sculptures abounding. Tristan’s building, however, had not yet been reclaimed. It was utterly without character: a block-long two-story mid-twentieth-century building thrown together of tilt-up concrete slabs painted a dingy grey that somehow managed to clash with the sidewalk. There were a few graffiti tags. The windows were without adornment, all of them outfitted with vertical vinyl blinds, all dusty and askew. There was no roster of tenants, no signs or logos, no indication at all of what was within.

Laden with bags of Chinese food and beer, we approached the glass entrance door at dusk. This building was one of the few places on earth that not even twilight could improve upon. Tristan slapped his wallet against a black plate set into the wall, and the door lock clicked, releasing. Inside, we moved between buzzing fluorescent lights and matted industrial carpeting, down a corridor past several windowless doors—slabs of wood, dirty around the knobs, blazoned with signs bearing names of what I assumed were tech start-ups. Some of these had actual logos, some just cutesy names printed in block letters, and one was just a domain name scrawled on a sticky note. We walked the entire length of the building and came to a door next to a stairwell. Its only distinguishing feature was a crude Magic Marker drawing of a bird, seen in profile, drawn on the back of a Chinese menu blue-taped to the wood. The bird was somewhat comical, with a prominent beak and big feet.

“Dodo?” I guessed.

Tristan made no answer. He was unlocking the door.

“I’ll take that as a yes—you’d have jumped all over me if I’d guessed the wrong species.”

He gave me an inscrutable raised-eyebrow look over his shoulder as he pushed the door open and reached for the light switch. “You have a gift for caricature,” I told him as I followed him in.

“DODO welcomes you,” he said.

“Department of . . . something?”

“Of something classified.”

The room was at most ten feet by fifteen feet. Two desks were shoved into opposite corners, each with a flat-panel monitor and keyboard. The walls were lined with an assortment of used IKEA bookshelves that I suspected he’d pulled out of Dumpsters a few weeks ago, and a couple of tall skinny safes of the type used to store rifles and shotguns. Perched on top of these were military-looking souvenirs that I assumed dated from some earlier phase of Tristan’s career. The shelves were filled with ancient books and artifacts I recognized very well. In the middle of the room was a long table. Beneath it was a bedroll: just a yoga mat wrapped around a pillow and secured with a bungee cord.

I pointed at the bedroll. “How long have you—”

“I shower at the gym if that’s your worry.” He pointed to the closer of the two desks, by the door. “This one will be yours.”

“Oh,” I said, not sure what else to say. “Do you have . . . guns in here?”

“Would that be a problem for you?” he inquired, setting the Chinese food on the table in the middle. “If so, I need to know sooner rather than later because—”

“How much firepower were you expecting to need?”

“Oh, you noticed the gun safes?” he asked, tracking my gaze. “No.” he turned to one of them and punched a series of digits onto the keypad on its front. It beeped, and he swung the door open to reveal that it was stuffed from top to bottom with documents. “I keep the most sensitive material in these.”

My gaze had wandered to my desk. I was looking at the flat-panel display, which was showing a few lines of green text on a black background, and a blinking cursor where it was apparently expecting me to type something in. “Where did you get these computers? A garage sale from 1975?”

“They are running a secure operating system you’ve never heard of,” he explained. “It’s called Shiny Hat.”

“Shiny Hat.”

“Yes. The most clinically paranoid operating system in the world. Since you have an overdeveloped sense of irony, Stokes, you might like to know that we acquired it from hackers who were specifically worried about being eavesdropped on by shadowy government entities. Now they work for us.”

“Have they got the memo about the invention of the computer mouse? Because I don’t see one on my desk.”

“Graphical user interfaces introduce security holes that can be exploited by black hat hackers. Shiny Hat is safe against that kind of malware, but the user interface is . . . spartan. I’ll bring you up to speed.”

His desk was crowded with copies of everything I had been translating for him over the past weeks. My notes were marked up with colored-pencil notes of his own. He transferred some of those to the central table while I set up the Chinese food. He read over my day’s work as we ate.

Then we reviewed all the material to date. It took us until sunrise.

In all the documents I’d deciphered, there was almost no useful information to be gleaned regarding the “how” of magic, which is what I assumed Tristan’s bosses had been hoping for. We discovered some examples of magic, in that we learned what was valued by both the witches themselves and those who employed them. Of highest value was what Tristan called psy-ops (psychological operations—mind control, essentially) and shape-shifting (themselves or others). This was considered a weapon of considerable significance, whether it meant turning oneself into a lion or turning an enemy into a lower form of life. In homage to Monty Python, we employed “newt” as shorthand. Of middling value was the transubstantiation of materials and the animating of inanimate objects. Of low value was space/time-shifting, such as teleportation, which was viewed as a laborious leisure-time diversion across all witch populations. Much of what I had associated with “magic” in my bookish youth was disappointingly absent—there were few references to the mastering of natural forces, for instance. And there was absolutely nothing about the mechanics of making any of it happen.

We did, however, glean something significant about magic’s decline, and this is what led to our next stage of inquiry.

Diachronicle

DAYS 57–221 (WINTER, YEAR 0)

In which Tristan determines to fix magic

AT DAWN, TRISTAN DROVE ME home to collect my library, which had been taking up a significant section of my living room since I’d moved out of my faculty office. He plied me with coffee and croissants until I felt able to start a new day without having completed the previous one. Back at the office, he smiled broadly and presented me with the combination to one of the gun safes. It was full of photocopies of manuscripts, documents, and artifacts I had not yet seen. “At the rate you’ve been working, this box will probably take you about a month.”

“I had no idea there was this much still to do,” I said.

He was pulling documents out of the safe, arranging them on the table. “Why would I hire you for a six-month contract if I only had one month’s work for you? There’s a lot more where this came from. But it should be easier now that we’ve sketched out the general picture. You know what you’re looking for now.”

“I still don’t know why I’m looking for it,” I said.

“You know that’s classified,” he said, almost paternal. “Have a seat. Want some more coffee? Working on a shoestring budget here, but I can spring for Dunkin’ Donuts.”

“DODO,” I said. “Department of . . . Donuts?”

“Do you like sprinkles?” he asked.

While he got donuts, I unpacked my dictionaries and lexica and got to work.

IF MY TRANSLATIONS were to be believed, at the start of the Scientific Revolution (Copernicus in the 1540s, etc.), magic was a ubiquitous and powerful force in human affairs, and witches were both revered and feared members of most societies every bit as much as military leaders or priest-mystics (although they were rarely written about, their work being so often the equivalent of “classified”). However, once the Renaissance gave way to the Enlightenment, magic became less omnipresent and less powerful, especially in institutions of learning and government. Judging by the hundreds of references in the texts, it paled increasingly through the Industrial Revolution—remaining most potent in artistic circles and least potent in philosophical ones (these two populations diverging after many generations of entwining), more potent in societies not blessed with booming industrialization, and slightly more potent too in Islamic cultures—and then it vanished altogether in the nineteenth century. The latest text was dated from July 1851. DODO had not been able to find any references to magic after that, except as something that “once was but is no more.”

I translated the box of photocopied documents in less time than Tristan had anticipated, but there was no letup. I began to dream in dead languages as ancient books, scrolls, and tablets kept coming, delivered to the drab office building almost every morning by unidentified couriers in unmarked vehicles. Department of—Dusty Objects? There were plenty of documents in English or modern Western languages—mostly these were transcripts of early anthropologists interviewing the elders of indigenous peoples. I translated the ones that Tristan couldn’t read for himself, and he built a database. Reader, if you don’t know what a database is, rest assured that an explanation of the concept would in no way increase your enjoyment in reading this account. If you do know, you will thank me for sparing you the details. A dreary enough task even with modern user interfaces, it was a mind-numbing death march when implemented on Shiny Hat. Tristan had to write little computer programs to automate some of the data entry tasks.

One of the things we kept track of was the provenance of each document: Had it come from the Library of Congress? Was it simply downloaded from the Internet? Or was it a rare, perhaps unique original? Did it bear any stamps or markings from library collections? In that vein, a disproportionate number had that mysterious stamp on the title page, an image I’d come to know well: the coat of arms of some aristocratic family, with extra bits of decorative gingerbread all around it. Lacking any other information, I just entered this into the database with the code WIMF. Quite a few of the WIMF documents bore older stamps from no less than the Vatican Library, raising the question of whether the WIMF had stolen them? Or borrowed them and never brought them back? Tristan wasn’t talking.

Almost as fast as they could be translated, more books showed up. We would empty out a new crate and then fill it right up again with books that had already been translated, and the bland couriers would haul them away. To where? Many of the boxes were stenciled with a logo I did not recognize at the time, but which I now know to be a modernized, streamlined version of the brand used since time immemorial by the banking family known as the Fuggers.

This phase ate up most of my six-month contract, as a fierce New England winter yielded muddily to spring. Other tenants in the building—scruffy start-up companies, mostly—failed or got funded and moved out. Whenever they did, Tristan made a couple of phone calls and ended up with a key to the space they’d just vacated. In this way, DODO’s footprint in the building expanded. We inherited cheap plastic chairs, duffed-up coffeemakers, and crumpled filing cabinets from the former neighbors. Clean-cut technicians showed up in unmarked cars and put card readers on all the doors, expanding and sealing what Tristan called “the perimeter.” The database grew like a dust bunny under the bed. Tristan thought of ways to query it, to search for patterns. We printed things out, stuck them to the walls, tore them down and did it again, stretched colored yarn between pushpins. We went down blind alleys, then backed out of them; we constructed huge Jenga towers of speculation and then, almost gleefully, knocked them over.

But there was never any doubt as to the gist: some manner of cause-and-effect relationship existed between the rise of scientific knowledge and the decline of magic. The two could not comfortably coexist. To the extent that the database could be cajoled into spitting out actual numbers, it was clear that magic had declined gradually but steadily starting in the middle of the 1600s. It was still holding its own in the opening decades of the 1800s, but plunged into a nosedive during the 1830s. From then through the 1840s, magic declined precipitously. As our store of documents—many written by witches themselves—grew to fill a phalanx of used filing cabinets and gun safes that Tristan scored on Craigslist, we were able to track the decline from year to year, and then from month to month. These poor women expressed shock at the dwindling of their powers, in some cases mentioning specific spells that had worked a few weeks ago but no longer had effect.

As it turns out, in 1851—the year in which I find myself as I scribble these words—all of the world’s technologies were brought together for the Great Exhibition at the newly constructed, magnificent Crystal Palace in Hyde Park, London. Tristan’s hypothesis therefore held that this coming together, this conscious concentration of technological advancement all in one point of space-time, had dampened magic to the point where it fizzled out for good. Like a doused fire, it had no power to re-kindle itself once extinguished.

The causal relationship between the two eluded us for a time. I suggested that magic’s flourishing required people to believe in it, but Tristan dismissed this mentality as belonging more to children’s literature than to reality. He was certain there was a mechanical or physical causality, that there was something about the technological worldview, or technology itself, that somehow “jammed the frequencies” magic used. We both began to read whatever we could about the Great Exhibition in the hopes that it might illuminate something.

(You may notice that I was exceeding by far my responsibilities as a translator. Translating, especially of obscure texts written in extinct tongues, often resembles the solving of a riddle. Here was a riddle to put all others to shame! Tristan’s enthusiasm was infectious and I could not divest myself from it. Having no other responsibilities, I became as preoccupied with his project as he was himself.)

Per Tristan’s suggestions, I took out stacks of books from Widener Library (Harvard had not figured out yet that I’d quit—I suppose Blevins wanted to hide the fact lest it reflect poorly on him). These included tomes on everything from heliography to Queen Victoria’s private life to Baruch Spinoza’s sexual proclivities to Frederick Bakewell to the Tempest Prognosticator to Strouhal numbers. I would bring these to Tristan, and we would divide our time between perusing them and Internet searches.

We soon knew more about the Great Exhibition and its thirteen-thousand-odd exhibits than Prince Albert ever did. We knew more about its showcase, the Crystal Palace, than even Joseph Paxton, the gardener who’d designed the fucking blessed thing. We learned little that was helpful. However, one evening in March, as I sat on the consignment-store couch I’d insisted on bringing in to spruce up the place, and Tristan lolled on the rug (provenance ditto) beside a low table with a beer, each of us bleary-eyed from reading, I encountered a passage in an obscure booklet entitled Arresting and Alluring Astronomical Anecdotes, published in 1897. Here I learned that while the Great Exhibition of 1851 was in process (it lasted for several months), an event of relative interest occurred elsewhere in Europe, to be precise, in Königsberg, Prussia: for the first time in history, a solar eclipse was successfully photographed.

I read this statement aloud. It set Tristan on fire with excitement. He had already suspected that photography in particular, of all technological developments, was the likeliest to have somehow impeded magic. Now, somehow, he was certain. It took me a while to calm him down to the point where he could explain himself.

“I’ll be honest with you: as a physicist, I am a hack,” he admitted. “I majored in it, yes, but I was never employed in that capacity. But if you cut me I still bleed physicist blood. I’ll go to my grave believing that, if magic existed, there’s a scientific explanation for it.”

“That sounds like a contradiction to me,” I said, “since our whole working hypothesis is that science broke it somehow.”

He held up a hand. “Work with me here. Have you ever heard of the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics?”

“Only in cocktail party discourse that would make you roll your eyes and heave deep sighs.”

“Well, there are certain experiments where the results only make sense if the system that’s being observed actually exists in more than one state until the moment when the scientist makes the observation.”

“Is this Schrödinger’s cat? Because even I have heard of that.”

“That’s the classic example. It’s just a thought experiment, by the way. No one ever actually did it.”

“That’s good. PETA would be all over them.”

“Do you know what it is?” Without waiting for me to answer, Tristan went on: “You put a cat in a sealed box. There’s a device inside of the box that is capable of killing the cat, by breaking open a vial of poison gas or something. That device is triggered by some random event generator, like a sample of some radioactive material that either decays—producing a bit of radiation—or doesn’t. You close the lid. The cat and the poison gas and the radioactive sample become a sealed system—you cannot predict or know what has happened.”

“You don’t know if the cat is alive or dead,” I said.

“It’s not just that you don’t. You can’t. There is literally no way of knowing,” Tristan said. “Now, in a classical physics way of thinking, it’s either one or the other. The cat is either alive or dead for real. You just don’t happen to know which. But in a quantum physics way of thinking, the cat really is both alive and dead. It exists in two mutually incompatible states at the same time. Not until you open the lid and look inside does the wave function collapse.”

“Whoa, whoa, you had me until the very end!” I protested. “When did we start talking about—what did you call it? A wave function? And how does that—whatever it is—collapse?”

“My bad,” he said. “It’s just physicist lingo for what I was saying. If you were to express the Schrödinger’s cat experiment mathematically, you’d write down an equation that is called a wave function. That function has multiple terms that are superimposed—it’s not just one thing.”

“Multiple terms,” I repeated bleakly.

“Yeah. A term here means a fragment of math—it is to an equation what a phrase is to a sentence.”

“So you’re saying there is one term for ‘cat is alive’ and another for ‘cat is dead’? Is that what you mean in this usage?”

“Yes, O linguist.”

“And when you say they are superimposed—”

“Mathematically it just means that they are sort of added to each other to make a combined picture of the system.”

“Until it ‘collapses’ or whatever.”

He nodded. “Multiple terms superimposed is a quantum thing. It is the essence of quantum mechanics. But there is this interesting fact, which is that that kind of math only works—it only provides an accurate description of the system—until you open the lid and look inside. At that point, you see a live cat or a dead cat. Period. It has become a classical system.”

“Department of . . . Deadly Observations?” I asked.

He rolled his eyes.

“Anyway, that’s what you mean by the collapse of the wave function.”

“Yes, it’s just physicist-speak for the thing that happens when all of the superimposed terms—the descriptions of different possible realities—resolve into a single, classical outcome that our brains can understand.”

“Our scientific, rational brains, you mean,” I corrected him.

A look of mild satisfaction came onto his face. “Exactly.”

“But now we’ve circled back to my theory!” I complained.

He looked mildly confused. “Which theory is that?”

“The one that belongs more to children’s literature than to reality—remember?”

“Oh, yeah. People have to believe in magic.”

“Yes!”

“That’s not exactly what I’m saying,” he said. “Yes, human consciousness is in the loop. But hear me out. If you buy the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, it means that all possible outcomes are really happening somewhere.”

“There’s one world with a live cat and another with a dead cat.”

“Exactly. No kidding. Complete, fully independent realities that are the same except that in one of them, the cat’s dead, and in the other, it’s alive. And the quantum superposition? That just means that the scientist standing there with his hand on the lid of the box is at a fork in the road. Both paths—both worlds—are open to him. He could shunt into one, or the other. And when he hauls the lid open, the decision gets made. He is now in one world or the other and there’s no going back.”

“Okay,” I said. Not in the sense of I agree with you but of I am paying attention.

“The scientist can’t control which path he or she takes,” Tristan continued.

I saw that he was trolling me—waiting for me to pick up the bait.

No, it was more than that. He wanted me to mention a possibility that he could think about, but never say out loud—because he was all Mr. Science.

So I did. “Let’s switch it up a little, then,” I said. “And swap out the white lab coat and the clipboard for, I don’t know, a pointy black hat and a broom. And lose a pronoun. If she did somehow have the ability to choose which world she was going to be shunted to when she opened the lid—if she could control the outcome—”

“It would look like magic.”

“What do you mean ‘look like’? It would be magic.”

“Just saying,” Tristan said, “that it’s about choosing possible outcomes that already exist—slipstreaming between closely related alternate realities—as opposed to bringing those realities into existence.”

“But that’s a distinction without a difference.”

“As far as normal observers are concerned? People who haven’t studied quantum physics? Sure,” he agreed.

“Put it however you like,” I said. “A witch may summon the desired effect from a parallel-slash-simultaneous reality. Thus the historical references of witches’ magic as ‘summoning’—that is quite literally what they were doing.”

“My hypothesis,” Tristan said—pronouncing the word with exaggerated care, since he had a few Old Tearsheet Best Bitters in him—“is that photography disables this summoning, as you called it. Photography breaks magic by embalming a specific moment—one version of reality—into a recorded image. Once that moment is so recorded, then all other possible versions of that moment are excluded from the world that contains that photograph.”

“I get it,” I said. “There is no wiggle room left in which to function magically.”

He nodded. He seemed relieved to have got all of this off his chest. And that I hadn’t laughed him out of the room.

“You’ve been thinking about this for a while,” I said.

He nodded.

“But it wasn’t until we saw the daguerreotype of the solar eclipse that the penny dropped.”

“That’s right.”

“That was only about the bazillionth daguerreotype ever made,” I pointed out. “People had been taking photographs for sixteen years by that point. What’s so special about that one?”

“The scope of it, I think,” Tristan said. “The number of minds, and worlds, affected. If I’m Louis Daguerre screwing around in my lab in Paris, taking pictures of whatever is handy, then I’ve collapsed the waveform, yes. But only inasmuch as it encompasses my brain and a few little objects in my lab. If I show the daguerreotype to my wife or my friend, then the effect—the collapsing of the waveform—spreads to them as well. And we can guess that witches who live in the neighborhood might sense a dampening of their magical abilities, without understanding why. But the total eclipse of the sun on July 28, 1851, was probably witnessed by more human beings than any other event in the history of the world up to that point.”

“Of course,” I said. “Everyone in Europe could see it—”

“Just by looking up into the sky. Hundreds of millions of people, Mel. That event captured more eyeballs, at the same moment, than any Beyoncé video on YouTube. And to the extent that it was frozen, embalmed, on a daguerreotype, well—”

I was nodding. “If previous uses of photography had dampened magic, then this was like dumping the Atlantic Ocean on it.”

He nodded. “When the shutter opened to capture that first perfect image of the eclipse, magic ceased to function across all human societies.”

We back-checked the dates of all documents from 1851. Indeed: there were three from the first half of the year (two English, one Italian). There was a fragment of one in late July (Hungarian). There were none after July 28, the date of the eclipse. None.

“That’s it,” muttered Tristan, preoccupied, getting to his feet. He rested his hands on his desk and stared absently at the wall.

“Yes,” I said. I felt deflated. Although he’d never told me why DODO was so interested in understanding magic, common sense screamed it was because they wanted to be able to do it. Department of Doing the Occult? Which clearly could never happen: “There’s no getting rid of photography, so there’s no bringing magic back.”

Tristan froze and, after a beat, jerked his head in my direction. “You’re right,” he said, staring. “That’s it. Where there is no photography, there could still be magic.”

“That’s not quite what I said.”

He began to pace the office. We had made it somewhat larger by knocking out walls that separated it from adjoining spaces, but this still required following a figure-eightish path between piles of books, artifacts, freestanding gun safes, to-be-recycled beer bottles, and still-unexplained high-tech military gear. “How do we get rid of photography,” he murmured, more to himself than to me.

“We cannot ‘get rid of photography.’”

“No, it’s definitely possible,” he insisted, eyes unfocused as he paced. “I just have to figure out how it’s done.”

“What do you mean, how it’s done?”

He shook his head, grimacing, dismissing me. “I’m not seeing something,” he said. “What am I missing?”

“You’re missing the part where photography became ubiquitous and all magic went away forever.”

He turned to look at me, his eyes focused now, and bright. “No,” he said, almost scolding me. “It’s not a lost cause.”

That was not the tone of hypothesis or theory; that was the tone of either faith or knowledge. I felt a shiver run down my spine.

“I realize there are a lot of things you can’t tell me,” I said, “but whatever it specifically is you’re not telling me at this precise moment . . . fucking tell me. Otherwise I’m useless.”

His gaze went fuzzy again as he engaged in some brief mental soliloquy. Then he nodded. “I can’t tell you much,” he said. “But I can tell you that we know it’s possible.”

“. . . we?”

“DODO,” he confirmed. “There’s evidence. That’s all I can say.”

“Wow,” I said, feeling pathetically inarticulate for a linguist. “Good God.”

“Yes. It’s a thing,” he said. “It’s real. There’s just”—he made a frustrated reaching gesture—“there’s a missing piece. And I’m so close. It’s got to be photography, that makes sense, it aligns chronologically, it aligns with magic failing slightly earlier in societies that valued and used the photographic image, and lingering just a little in cultures that didn’t, like Islam and aboriginal tribes. That’s got to be it. There has to be some way to make photography not happen.”

“But the existence of cloud technology, cell phones, video surveillance, means photography is literally everywhere.”

“I don’t need to get rid of it everywhere,” Tristan said impatiently. “Just within one manageable space.” He stopped short, in the middle of the room, and looked around through narrowed, thoughtful eyes as if at invisible colleagues. “Okay, that’s part of it. A controlled environment. If we can create an environment in which photography not only does not happen, but could not happen, then perhaps magic could exist within that space.”

“And you guys, you DODOs, think someone’s already doing that?”

He nodded slowly. “If they can do it, we can do it. We just have to figure out how.” For a moment he was gone, lost completely in thought, even the alertness of the trained soldier distracted by the intense introspection of the thinker. “Let’s break it down,” he said. “First: photography collapses the wave function of light.”

“Yes. Or so you told me. So I’m just going to sit here and say yes.”

“So,” he continued, “if we can interfere with that collapse—” And then seeing the stupid look on my face, tried, “If we can keep the quantum balls in the air—”

“Like, by not opening the lid of the box?”

“What box?”

“The box with the cat in it. Schrödinger’s cat.”

He gave a little shake of the head. “That’s just a thought experiment. But you’re onto something,” he said.

I knew perfectly well that it was a thought experiment. But that could wait. It felt like we were on the trail of something. And I was fascinated—and a little alarmed—by the subtext, which seemed to be that this wasn’t all just a dry academic research project, but something akin to an active military campaign. Someone, somewhere in the world was doing magic. The government of the United States didn’t know how—or perhaps even who. It was a Sputnik moment: someone else had stolen a march on us. Tristan’s shadowy government entity had obviously been thrown together in a panicky effort to catch up.

Tristan settled back down, and muttered buzzwords (“collapse of wave function,” “quantum entanglement”). I typed them into Google, while Tristan, hunched over his Shiny Hat terminal, used other search engines only available to people working for shadowy government entities. An initial search for “quantum wave function” yielded four hundred thousand responses (it went up to three million without the quotes) and advanced searches—adding “collapse,” etc.—had brought it down to about thirty-five thousand. Mostly what came up were YouTube videos of geeky-looking high school kids attempting experiments in their parents’ cellars, often with refrigerators or the remnants of darkroom chemicals, frequently resulting in small but interesting explosions. There were also a kajillion academic papers that Tristan, the undergraduate physicist, dismissed by their titles alone. We added more and more modifying terms to focus the search. In this way, several hours passed. No dice.

We stopped for dinner (take-out Indian—actual Indian food, not the insipid so-called ‘curry’ now coming into fashion here in Victorian London thanks to the East India Company’s running riot over the Punjab). We then continued the search all evening; I biked home, slept, and biked back, and we kept searching. Late morning, we paused long enough to take a walk along the Charles, as being cramped in that small dingy office so long was crazy-making. For most of the walk, Tristan continued to brainstorm in a soliloquy that further convinced me he was both brilliant and a pretty bad listener.

Back at his office after the walk, he ransacked the fridge for some leftovers that hadn’t gone bad, while I returned to my desk to scroll through the results of yet another highly modified Google search. As long as Tristan wasn’t looking over my shoulder, I tried something: I searched on “Schrödinger’s cat experiment” and then began adding in other terms to narrow it down. I excluded “thought experiment” and its German equivalent, Gedankenexperiment. I threw out anything that included such phrases as “will shock you!” and “you won’t believe what happened next!” I skewed the search in favor of words like “actual,” “practical,” and “real-world.”

Reader, you won’t believe what happened next. A single response came up.

“Rejected patent application,” I read aloud to Tristan. “Someone from MIT applied for a patent for . . . hang on . . .” My eyes skimmed over the legalese and bureaucratese (two languages I had never mastered), until I found something descriptive to read. “Something he calls a cavity, intended to quote ‘jam enemy nations’ surveillance systems by maintaining a feline test subject in an indeterminate state of existence.’ Unquote.”

I heard the microwave shut down. “I can’t hear a thing when this is running,” Tristan said. He turned to look at me. “I could have sworn you just said something about a feline test subject.”

I looked him in the eye and nodded. “It’s called the Ontic Decoherence Cavity. ODEC. Proposed by Professor Frank Oda. Kind of a narcissist, I guess.”

“How do you figure?”

“He named it after himself. Oda—ODEC.”

“I’m not so sure. ‘Ontic’ means—”

“I know what it means.”

“Something to do with knowledge. Decoherence, as I am sure you are well aware, means its negation. Something about this cavity prevents the formation of definite knowledge. So, it lines up pretty well with what we are looking for.”

“Cool!” I exclaimed, and began Googling Frank Oda. “Let’s figure out where he lives and—”

“But it’s a joke,” Tristan said flatly. “The guy is a troll. Oh, a scientifically sophisticated troll. Making a very clever in-joke. But a troll nonetheless.”

“What makes you so sure?”

“The part about the feline test subject. Mel, this is just a prank. A fake patent application that this guy put on the Internet for the lulz. He slipped it past some dipshit patent examiner who didn’t know physics, had never heard of Schrödinger’s cat. Any physicist who stumbles across it will get a belly laugh out of it and move on. But we need to confine ourselves to serious—”

He stopped to read the screen of my laptop, which I had swiveled around to aim in his direction.

It was a thirty-year-old article I had dredged up from the archives of The Howler, an alternative weekly newspaper, now defunct, but once a common sight on the streets of Boston and Cambridge. Known for its leftist politics and muckraking fervor. The article featured two photographs. On the left, a middle-aged Asian-American man, captured by a sidewalk paparazzo as he took out the garbage. On the right, a stock photograph of a wire mesh enclosure in some animal shelter, housing a menagerie of stray cats.

CAT’S OUT OF THE BAG, PROFESSOR ODA!

MIT professor denies cruelty to animals, but accepts early retirement.

Tristan licked curry from his fingers, reached for the trackpad, and zoomed the image on the left. “Empty boxes, old newspapers, a milk jug, and a wine bottle.”

“You’re identifying the contents of the garbage bag?”

“No dead cats. Or live ones.”

“Maybe it’s a Schrödinger’s Hefty bag.” I spun the computer back around to face me, and Tristan scampered around the table so that he could read it over my shoulder. Parsing the story wasn’t easy given the amount of tabloid-style innuendo and leaps of inference, combined with the heavy presumption that Frank Oda was guilty of something. But the bottom line seemed to be this: Professor Frank Oda, a theoretical physicist at MIT, had, three decades ago, gone off the reservation and started attempting to do experimental physics.

It had started with what seemed like a gag: a prop, for use in undergraduate physics lectures, consisting of a box with an actual cat in it, and a mockup of the apparatus envisioned in the Schrödinger’s cat Gedankenexperiment. So far, so good. A fine way to liven up an otherwise dry lecture. No cats were harmed; the cat-killing mechanism was obviously fake, just a glass bottle with a skull and crossbones painted on it and a Rube Goldberg contraption involving a rat trap and a Geiger counter. But if the story was to be believed, the construction of this device had caused Oda to become obsessed with the underlying concept. Which was very real—foundational to quantum mechanics, and not disputed by anyone.

“Holy fuck,” Tristan exclaimed. Which for him, clean-cut West Pointer that he was, was a mickle oath. We were on page three now. “He actually did it.”

“No way, they must have got something wrong.”

Tristan pointed to a phrase in the middle of the screen.

Records obtained by The Howler from the Somerville Animal Shelter indicate that Dr. Oda “adopted” no fewer than six cats from the facility over a span of three months in spring of last year. This coincides with a formal request made by MIT authorities that Oda remove “all apparatus involving living test subjects” from his on-campus laboratory. According to a former graduate student interviewed by The Howler, who requested anonymity for fear of possible professional repercussions, Dr. Oda complied with the request by relocating the ODEC project to the basement of the Cambridge home that he shares with his wife, Rebecca East.

“Maybe Rebecca’s a cat lover,” I said.

“Then why were the cats being kept in his lab at MIT until they kicked him out?”

“There’s gotta be an explanation.”

“Keep scrolling.”

Contacted at his home by a reporter from The Howler, the disgraced mad scientist denied all wrongdoing. “This was never about the cat being alive or dead,” he insisted, repeating a claim he had also made in internal MIT documents obtained by The Howler. “Killing the cat isn’t of the essence. The point is that the cat is in either one state, or another. I was experimenting with other states—non-fatal, non-painful.” Pressed by the reporter to provide specific examples, Oda seemed flustered and became inarticulate—which is consistent with the claim made by anonymous sources in his neighborhood that he has, in recent years, exhibited signs of mental impairment consistent with senile dementia. “I don’t know, how many states is it possible for a cat to be in? Asleep or awake. Sitting down or standing up. Purring or meowing. Any of them is as good as alive or dead for purposes of the experiment.” Asked why an equivalent experiment couldn’t have been performed on a non-living subject, Oda shook his head condescendingly. “The test subject must contain living, active brain tissue,” he said. “That’s how the apparatus works.” The interview was cut short at that point by Oda’s wife, Rebecca East, who emerged from their house—a colonial-era dwelling on a tree-lined street near the Harvard campus—brandishing a broom at the reporter. Ms. East, who appeared upset, insisted that none of the cats had been mistreated, adding that the shelter from which they had been adopted was a so-called “kill shelter,” meaning that all of the animals had been earmarked for euthanasia anyway. The Howler’s reporter, fearing for her personal safety, fled from the premises and later filed a report with the Cambridge Police Department. The subsequent criminal investigation was terminated when Ms. East claimed to the investigating officer that she had been using the broom to sweep vegetable debris from her front walk.

“Off with their heads!” I exclaimed. Tristan had already tired of reading the article and begun searching Oda’s background using his top-secret equivalent of Google. “That’s pretty old history, Stokes,” he said, without looking up. “And not even accurate. Let it go.” He kept reading. “Check it out—this guy also worked for DARPA, and what he did there was—”

“What’s DARPA?” I asked.

Tristan looked appalled. “Wow,” he said, almost thoughtfully. “Wow. You really aren’t up to speed, are you?”

“I study dead languages for a living,” I said. “That’s why you hired me. Why should I be up to speed on your line of work? How’s your Serbo-Croatian? What’s your position on the relationship between Oscan and Marrucinian?”

He gave me an amused look. “Wouldn’t have pegged you as pissy, Stokes,” he said. “Okay. DARPA. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.”

“Ah. The stealth bomber guys. The ones who develop clever ways to kill people.”

“They’ve developed all kinds of things,” said Tristan breezily. “Not just weapons. Night-vision technology, GPS satellites. Surely somebody living in Boston can appreciate GPS.”

“I bike everywhere,” I said in a superior tone. “I read maps. I don’t rely on Big Brother to tell me where to go.”

Abruptly, he sobered. “If you’re going to get anti-establishment on me, this won’t work. The first thing you learned about me was that I work for the government, and the second thing you learned was that I went to West Point. Eighty-six the attitude.”

Taken aback by this sudden intensity, I held my hands up briefly. “Fine,” I said in a conciliatory tone. “DARPA.”

“And even after his forced retirement from MIT, he kept on doing work—serious work—for them.”

“Did it involve cats?”

“Classified. But my point is that the accusation of senile dementia is reckless, unfounded. He turned in good work as recently as”—he paged to the bottom of a screen—“four years ago.”

“The patent application said something about jamming foreign surveillance devices.”

“When DARPA signs your paychecks,” he said, “everything you do relates to national defense. Frank Oda was trying to create a defensive technology involving the sort of science we’re interested in. But . . . the patent application was rejected.”

“What do you think he meant by this line . . .” I scrolled back in the Howler article. “The test subject must contain living, active brain tissue?”

“Something to do with how the ODEC works, I guess.”

“I find it mildly unsettling.”

“Maybe we should just ask him.” Tristan typed something into the computer. As he read the result, his eyes went wide, as they usually did when he was pleasantly surprised by something.

“Stokes,” he said. “He’s still around. Right here in Cambridge.”

“That’s convenient,” I said. “What address?”

By way of an answer, he swiveled his screen around so I could see the map he’d Googled up.

I almost choked on my saag paneer. “It’s right down Mass Ave from where I live!” I said. “We could walk there from here in less than half an hour.”

Tristan grinned and reached for his pocket. “We can call even faster than that.” He punched a number into his phone, reading off the computer screen. As it connected and began to ring on the other end, he gave me a sideways grin, like a child about to be awarded a prize for solving a riddle. I smiled back.

But the moment wore on and his smile faded until finally he hung up. “Huh. No answer.” He looked at his phone as if it had insulted him. “Not even an answering machine. That’s weird. Nobody does that these days.”

“Maybe he’s a Luddite,” I said.

“An MIT physics professor who tried to patent groundbreaking technological inventions is a Luddite?”

“He was rebuffed,” I pointed out. “He overreacted and now he’s a Luddite.”

“Lunchtime’s over,” said Tristan, standing and reaching for his Yankees sweatshirt. “We’re going for a visit.”

THE ODAS LIVED on a street of grand houses, most of which, judging by appearance, had been built in the late 1800s. But theirs stuck out like a pilgrim at a White House dinner. A plain, gable-roofed three-story, it was older than the others by well over a hundred years. Its garden outshone every other yard on the street. It was full of flowers and herbs and ornamental shrubbery, with the efficient use of space associated with Japanese gardening.

We rang the bell. The door was answered by an older woman. Caucasian, not Japanese. In fact, downright WASPy, including her reception of us.

“Rebecca East, I presume,” Tristan said, holding out his hand.

“Rebecca East-Oda,” she corrected him. She was in her seventies, with a salt-and-pepper bob and Laura Ashley sweater, and she was the epitome of a particular New England Congregationalist bloodline that manages to simultaneously suggest cool, contained patrician and indefatigable peasant stock. The kind of woman who could pleasantly instruct you to fuck off, dear, and you immediately would because you’d just hate to disappoint her.

Luckily she did not explicitly request us to do so. Tristan explained that we were here to talk to the professor about an old project of his from his MIT days. She pursed her lips uncertainly. “It’s important,” said Tristan.

“Frank does not like to talk shop much in his retirement,” she said.

“We won’t take long, and he’ll be glad we came,” said Tristan.

She gave him a wary look. “He’s napping at present, why don’t you come back tomorrow.”

Tristan opened his mouth again, but I clutched his arm, dug my fingernails into his wrist, and spoke over him:

“Please pardon our rudeness, but we would be deeply indebted to you if Oda-sensei would consider giving us a moment of his time.”

She studied me with guarded amusement. Then her eyes flicked meaningfully at Tristan—as if making sure he noticed that I was the one she was responding to—before looking at me again to say, “I will see if he’s awake.”

When she was gone I glanced up at Tristan. “When speaking Japanese,” I said, “it is impossible to grovel too much or too often.”

“She’s not Japanese,” he grunted dismissively.

“I just demonstrated to her that I understand her husband’s culture,” I said. Goodness how I appreciated being the more informed one, for a change. “Which suggests we will be respectful, which is obviously important to her or she wouldn’t have deflected you to start with.”

“Women make everything so complicated,” Tristan said in mock dismay.

“If you’re going to get sexist on me, this won’t work,” I said. “The first thing you learned about me is that I am a woman. Eighty-six that attitude.”

“You’re all right, Stokes,” he said, and roughed up my hair as if I were his kid sister. I smacked his hand away. Before the roughhousing could progress any further, we heard Rebecca East-Oda’s clogs clunking back down the stairway.

Diachronicle

DAY 221 (EARLY MARCH, YEAR 1)

In which we meet Dr. Oda. And his wife.

SHE LET US INTO THE house, which had the subtle smell of old wood and old wool—as I used to imagine Victorian homes smelled in Victorian times, before I was recently alerted to the painful truth that actually, at least here in London, they stink of whale oil, patchouli (woven into shawls to keep worms from eating the fabric in transit), and backed-up sewers. I am now convinced everyone here goes to church for the incense.

But to our story: Rebecca diverted us immediately to the front room on the right, which had been a formal dining room back in the day but was now her husband’s study. The double-hung windows let in plenty of light; the two inner walls were lined with bookshelves (except where the fireplace was), most of them packed with piles of papers, journals, and folders in no discernible order. Dr. Frank Oda, seated at a desk that faced toward the street, was a slender, cheerful, absentminded-looking Japanese-American gentleman. Rebecca introduced us and offered to serve us tea, in a tone suggesting she’d be perfectly happy if we weren’t staying long enough to drink it. Tristan, socially tone-deaf, accepted her offer.

The professor, smiling, invited us to sit on a couple of Harvard chairs that faced his desk, hastening to remove tattered copies of Anna Karenina and Geometric Perspectives on Gauge Theories (Dr. Frank Oda, ed.) from one of them. We sat, and Tristan immediately launched into an explanation of what we were trying to do (although not why we were trying to do it) and how we had encountered his rejected patent application online. Professor Oda’s expression settled into thoughtfulness.

“Rather than inventing the wheel, we thought we’d ask you if you could explain your work to us, and why it did or didn’t work,” said Tristan.

Oda gave him a considering look. “You’re not with DARPA, are you?”

“No,” I said quickly, reassuringly. “This is a different kind of project altogether. I’m a linguist,” I offered, as proof of how benign we were.

He shook his head, frowning. “I do not understand the point of your research, then,” he said.

Tristan smiled that Boy Scout smile of his. “I’d need you to sign a nondisclosure agreement before I can tell you any more about what we’re doing. I was hoping this could just be a casual conversation about what you were doing.”

Oda smiled back. “I should share information with somebody who won’t share information with me?”

Tristan upped his smile to Eagle Scout. “You’re not willing to talk physics with a fellow physicist in the name of science?”

“If it is applied physics, he would like to know what it’s being applied to,” said Rebecca East-Oda from the study door.

The professor smiled at her. It was such a sweet smile. “It’s all right, Rebecca,” he said. “They’re kids. They’re curious. I like curious. And if you’re here to ask, let’s make it Darjeeling.” She nodded and left; he returned his gaze to Tristan. “As you must have read in the patent application, I was trying to interrupt the collapse of the wave function—specifically in living neurological tissue.”

“Brains,” Tristan translated.

“Cat brains,” I added.

Oda got a here we go again look, and drew breath.

“We’re not from PETA,” I assured him.

Tristan threw me a look.

“We totally get it that you weren’t killing the cats,” I went on.

“The cats that you saved from the kill shelter,” Tristan concluded.

Right on cue, a black cat jumped up into Oda’s lap and settled in for a long purr.

“I was wondering,” I ventured, “why cats? Could you have done the experiment on worm brains, for example?”

“Yes,” Oda said, “but it would have been difficult to gauge the outcome, because it’s hard to know what a worm is thinking. With a cat, you are rarely in doubt.”

“Ah. Well, in that case, why not just use a human subject?”

“Because of the Helsinki Declaration!” Tristan scoffed.

Oda nodded. “Partly that. But even if there were no regulations on use of human subjects, I would have been stymied by physical limitations.”

For the first time since Tristan had become energized about the solar eclipse photographs, he looked a little deflated. “The ODEC won’t work on a human?” he asked almost plaintively.

“Oh, it would work,” Oda said, “if you could fit a human into it.”

The relief in Tristan’s voice was obvious. “So you would just need to make a bigger one.”

Oda held back before answering, giving Tristan’s face a careful study, with occasional glances at me. “If you wanted to use it on a human,” he said, “then yes. But this was impossible at the time.”

“Your lab space wasn’t big enough?” I asked.

“It was plenty big,” Oda returned, “but that wasn’t the problem.”

My colleague was back to being Sad Tristan. “What was the problem, Dr. Oda?”

“Maybe it’s easy if I just show you,” Oda said, standing up abruptly and spilling the cat onto the rug. He was a slight man, hardly taller than I. “I have it in the basement.”

“You have what in the basement?” I asked.

“The ODEC. Rebecca wanted me to throw it out, but I have a . . . bittersweet sentimental attachment to it, and it doesn’t take up much space.”

He began leading us toward a narrow door beneath the stairway. “Rebecca,” he called out. “I’m taking them down to see the ODEC.”

No answer, just some indistinct clacking of dishware. He gave us a rueful smile. “She doesn’t approve,” he said in a conspiratorial voice. “But she’s making us tea all the same.”

The cramped wooden steps down to the basement were nestled underneath the hall stairs to the second floor. He switched on a light, and the three of us slowly descended.

The basement was wonderful: low ceiling, thick stone walls with small transom windows, and a pounded-earth floor, very musty in a way that said this is an authentic old house (although of course I now know most houses smell that way almost as soon as they’re built, in any time period but the modern). Near the hatch stairs to the yard lay a tangle of wood and wicker lawn furniture, with satellite baskets of sandbox toys, suggesting grandchildren. To the other side of the steps was the furnace, and other systems-viscera of the house. Along almost every wall were shelving units on which were neatly stacked old apple crates, labeled and color-coded. Tristan at once began to read these, muttering his findings aloud. There was a very orderly garden worktable and grow lights in the corner nearest to the hatch. “Rebecca’s the gardener,” the professor said in an affectionate voice. He gestured around. “This house is architecturally interesting because it has an unusually deep cellar for its time.”

“Is that so?” I asked politely, while Tristan kept scanning the crates for the ODEC.

Oda nodded, looking almost tickled. “Becca is the one officially qualified to give the tour, but after fifty years I guess I know the spiel. The whole area, for blocks around, was a farm back in the colonial era. The farmhouse was torn down a few decades ago, there’s a gas station in its place now down at the corner of Mass Ave. This house we’re in was built for the farm manager’s family, when the estate was large and prosperous, and we think he dug the cellar so deep to hide extra food, all the end-of-year gleanings from the field. It was a stop on the Underground Railroad. Rebecca’s family were abolitionists—but the farm owner, in the big house, was not.”

“Her family’s been in the house since before the Civil War?” I asked, surprised. Tristan continued to eye the neat storage stacks, looking for the ODEC.

Oda nodded. “It was built for her ancestor, Jeremiah East, that very farm manager. And Jeremiah’s great-something-grandmother was—”

“Is that it?” asked Tristan, pointing to the far corner beyond the furnace. God he could be rude.

“Yes,” said Oda, not minding, and led us toward it.

In the corner, under a heavy canvas tarp peppered with mouse droppings, was a large rectangular object. Oda dragged the tarp aside and it folded stiffly onto itself as it fell to the floor.

The ODEC was a little larger than I’d expected; as advertised, the interior volume could just accommodate a cat, but the apparatus constructed around it made it as big as a clothes washer. The cat box itself—plywood, and covered with slabs of pink insulation foam from the home improvement store—was suspended by a web of thin, taut cords inside of a somewhat larger fiberglass tub. This was in turn surrounded by more pink foam insulation. All of it was hung from, and supported by, a sort of exoskeleton of slotted angle irons. Wires were coming out of it all over the place: thick, round black cables like the ones that the cable guy staples to your house, hair-thin copper wires coiled millions of times around hidden cores to make what I guessed were electromagnets, medium-sized wires with colored insulation, flat rainbow ribbons, tubular braids, bare copper that had gone greenish-brown with age, and power cords with two-prong plugs at the end, their plastic insulation now stiff and cracked.

On a shelf beneath the cat enclosure rested a plastic box that looked like the CPU of an old desktop computer, except that instead of beige it was an intense purple color.

“Silicon Graphics Indigo,” Tristan said, reading the logos on its front.

“An awesome machine,” Oda said, “before you were born. Fastest thing I could get at the time.”

The entire thing was mounted on rubber-wheeled casters. When Oda tried to pull it away from the wall, these made noises suggesting they hadn’t moved in a long time. “May I, sir?” Tristan offered, and then put his considerably broader back into it. The ODEC creaked and squeaked its way out into the middle of the room, leaving a trail of mouse turds, dust bunnies, and dead spiders across the floor. I was now looking at the back of it. From here it was obvious that Oda had opened up the back of the Silicon Graphics workstation and routed a number of cables into it.

A miniature Manhattan of electrical stuff covered the top. Oda pushed, and this chittered out of the way on ball-bearing drawer slides, revealing the foam-clad lid of the fiberglass tub. Oda picked this up and handed it to Tristan, who found a patch of bare stone wall to lean it against. Exposed in the middle was the lid of the inner plywood box. Oda reverentially unhooked the simple clasp holding it down. He paused a moment, smiling to himself. I wondered how long it had been since he’d last opened it.

Then he lifted the lid, hinged on the far side. A pair of little chains kept it from flopping back. I don’t know what I had been anticipating, but it was no clumsy contraption. The box itself was plywood, but it was lined on the inside with thin sheets of green plastic, scribed all over with fine copper traces that I recognized as circuit boards. In some places, little electronic components had been soldered to these, projecting out into the airspace within the box, but in others, the copper tracery itself seemed to be what mattered. The linguist in me couldn’t help fancying a connection between these fine whorls of metal and the interlaced figures in old Irish manuscripts. Neat holes had been drilled through the plywood in many places to allow wires to pass through and make connections with these circuit boards. In many cases, these coincided with the massive coils of copper wire mounted outside the box. I now began to see these as being aimed inward, like science-fiction weapons.

Aimed, that is, at the cat inside the box. For resting on the box’s floor was a flat circular pillow upholstered in red velvet that had become permeated with cat hair down to the molecular level. A tiny saucer of spun stainless steel sat next to it, a thin disk of brown residue congealed in its bottom. I needed no forensic analysis to know that it had once contained cream.

Tristan had a look on his face as if all this was exactly what he’d been expecting. I confess, it mystified me.

“Call me stupid,” I said, “but I don’t understand the connection to photography.”

“Photography?” Oda asked, puzzled. As if I had just wandered into the wrong eccentric professor’s basement.

“There’s a connection,” Tristan reassured him. “I give you my word I’ll explain it—once you have completed certain paperwork that, I regret to say, is mandatory. In the meantime, I wonder if you could explain the ODEC to us.”

Oda-sensei shrugged. “In a nutshell,” he said, now entirely immersed in the science of the moment, “here is the premise. You insert living nerve tissue. You close the lid, creating a sealed environment. You pump in the liquid helium . . .”

“Wait, wait!” Tristan protested. “This is the first you’ve mentioned cryogenics.”

“You freeze the cat?” I exclaimed, aghast.

“No, no,” Oda scolded us. “That would just be mean. See for yourself, the box itself is super-insulated! And it has its own air supply, enough to keep a cat alive for an hour.” He was directing my attention to the thick foam mounted to the outer surface of the plywood. Then he moved his hand a couple of inches outward and patted the inner surface of the enclosing fiberglass tub. “The inner box is completely surrounded by a bath of liquid helium, chilled to a few Kelvins above absolute zero.”

“Cold enough,” Tristan hazarded, “to form a Bose-Einstein condensate?”

“I love it when you talk dirty,” Oda said, so perfectly deadpan that I did a double take. “Yes, we begin by isolating the subject—”

“Within a jacket of matter that all exists in the same quantum state,” Tristan said.

“You’re completing each other’s sentences. Great,” I said.

“I’ll explain later,” Tristan returned.

“Conveniently, the low temperature also brings some of the coils down to the point where they become superconductors,” Oda added, tapping a fingertip against some of the things that I had identified as big magnets. “A continuously recirculating and self-reinforcing current pattern establishes itself in these. Its state can be read continuously by analog-to-digital converters at a sampling rate of about a megahertz. Which we used to think was fast.”

“So you’re reading the cat’s mind?”

“Not so much that,” Oda said, “as looking for the signatures of nascent wave collapse events.”

Tristan stood frozen for a few moments, then shaped his hand into a blade and whooshed it past his head. Good, I thought. Have a taste of what I’m experiencing.

“I lost you?” Oda inquired.

“Yes, sir.”

“I’m messing around with renormalization.”

“Oh.”

“That’s what determines what the wave function is most likely to collapse into. By messing around with it, I can alter the probabilities.”

“You can do magic,” I blurted.

“Sort of,” Oda said. Then, in a curious, polite tone, he asked, “Is that what you’re here to talk about? Magic?”

“Classified,” Tristan said, and gave me the stink-eye. Then he turned to Oda. “Under normal circumstances we can make educated guesses about what is likely to happen when the wave function collapses. You’re screwing around with that.”

Oda nodded ruefully. “But only sometimes. And I can’t account for the variations. That’s why the patent was rejected. Why DARPA didn’t renew my grant.”

“What’s the computer doing?” Tristan asked.

Oda sighed. “Not enough, unfortunately. As I said, it was a fine machine for its time. Even so—despite a lot of code optimization—it wasn’t up to the job, even when it was running flat-out.”

“So it’s of the essence. It’s not just a data logger.”

“It is very much in the control loop,” Oda said. Glancing at me, he explained: “For the ODEC to work, it has to take in sensor data, perform certain calculations that are highly non-trivial, and make decisions about how to alter the current flowing through the coils. It has to do so quickly, or else the whole project fails. And it wasn’t quick enough.”

“What are the specs on that Indigo?” Tristan asked.

Oda sighed. “I don’t even want to tell you.”

“Why not?”

“Because you’re going to laugh.”

“I won’t laugh.”

“One processor; 175 megahertz; 512 megabytes of RAM.”

Tristan laughed.

“I told you,” Oda said.

Tristan stood there a moment, eyeing the contraption. “With modern computers . . . or a cluster of them . . . some GPUs cranking the numbers . . . faster clocks . . . all of your problems on that front would be solved.”

“Possibly,” said Oda with a nod. “But I had neither the funds nor the space for that, and the Howler article pretty much made me a laughingstock in the academic community, so I’ll never get funding again.”

“Sorry to hear that,” I said, “especially if the theory is sound.”

“No one funds theories. They fund results,” said Oda. “The results were not reliably reproducible. Using cats was a mistake; the premise was very easy to mock among lay people.”

“What if you were given the funding to rebuild this the way I just described it, room-sized?” Tristan said.

Oda gave him a cautious, wise-old-man smile. “Scaling issues would become huge. The amount of computational power required goes up as the square of the cavity’s volume.”

Tristan made a quick mental calculation. “So, as the sixth power of the box’s size. That’s okay. We’ll make it a small room. Moore’s law will take care of the rest.”

“Don’t even suggest this in Rebecca’s hearing or she will chase you out of the house with her gardening shears. It was a very draining and humiliating period. She would never endure it being brought back to life.”

“This would all happen under a cloak of secrecy. The Howler would never hear about it. Nobody would.”

Oda pondered it.

“If Rebecca said yes?” I asked.

Oda shrugged. “It was my pet project, of course I would love to see it work. And I tend to say yes to things. But I would want to know why you were pursuing this.”

“I can tell you all about it as soon as you sign a nondisclosure form,” Tristan said.

Oda smiled to himself a moment, then returned his attention to Tristan. “Well, then you must ask Becca to sign the form as well,” he said. “I could not keep this from her.”

“Go on upstairs and work on that, Stokes,” said Tristan, without even looking at me. “I want to talk shop with the professor for a few minutes.”

Journal Entry of

Rebecca East-Oda

MARCH 6

Temperature today about 43F, fair and dry, with slight breeze from the west. Barometer steady.

Snowdrops blooming. Crocuses will bud soon, Buddleia just cut back, Hellebore has just come up. Witchhazel blooming and lilacs have tight buds. Planted the first of the basil, peppers, and tomatoes inside (under the grow lights) and harvested the last of the kale. Harvested the parsnips, sweeter for enduring the hard winter.

Strange event today. Frank received visitors, a couple named Tristan and Melisande who somehow happened upon his old ODEC patent application from DARPA, something I would just as soon forget ever existed. They appeared at the door without warning this afternoon. He is clearly military, has the energy of a Labrador retriever (thinking in particular of the one Uncle Victor trained for duck hunting). She milder, more reserved, better-spoken than he.

Frank received them in his current study, the dining room. (Melisande was charmed that although that chandelier was wired for electric lights about a century ago, and outfitted for gas light before that, it can still be lowered by a pulley system from the days of candle-lighting. Tristan was not as charmed, because the chandelier wasn’t the duck he was here to hunt.)

They told Frank they believe that they know why the patent application failed and that furthermore, they know how to rectify this—that, with his assistance, they can actually create an ODEC that will successfully suppress the collapse of the wave function. I was not sure how I felt about hearing this, remembering the stress and bother that went into our last go-round with this enterprise. Frank said they would have to convince me. Melisande was tasked with doing this. I could tell from the way she approached me in the kitchen that she did not expect to succeed. She was surprised.

I will support Frank in anything he does and any decision he makes. Since he did not immediately say no to them, it means he is excited by the prospect of being vindicated all these years later. I truly wish he wasn’t. But he is. And I understand that. To make a short story shorter, we both signed a nondisclosure agreement, and they joined us for tea.

Then things got quite strange.

They shared something preposterous, which is hard for me to write down without shaking my head. They claim to be interested in the ODEC not for its defensive capabilities, but because they believe it can be used to perform acts of—I cannot write this steadily—magic. Not sleight-of-hand; not wishful thinking. Sorcery. They are sincere about this. She attempted to validate the claim by citing ancient documents she has been translating. He gave a passing technical explanation, which I admit sounded as plausible as anything else re: quantum theory, but that’s not saying much, is it?

But Tristan played the winning card re: Frank’s mental constitution: he said that ultimately it should not matter if we believed about the magic or not, we should sign on to this for the sake of the science itself. That is like offering catnip to a cat. Of course Frank said he would assist however he could.

They’d explained why magic is no longer possible today, and further, why, even were magic to become possible (within the ODEC), it would require the application of specific people (“witches”) who could “perform magic.” So naturally, I asked them who they were expecting to “perform” it. It was the only time I saw them at a loss: this most obvious and basic of concerns had never crossed their minds.

I don’t know who they are, or where their funding comes from—it definitely isn’t MIT this time. God forbid MIT even suspect he’s tinkering with this nonsense.

Diachronicle

DAY 221 (CONTD.; EARLY MARCH, YEAR 1)

In which we divide to conquer

REBECCA EAST-ODA SERVED TEA LIKE a proper New England matriarch—not mugs with teabags, but loose-leaf tea steeped in and poured from a china teapot into teacups resting on saucers, with rock sugar on sticks and a little porcelain pitcher of milk, all set out on a wicker tray. She also presented a plate of biscuits both ginger and savory, which of course at the time I’d have called cookies and crackers. I spirited these to my side of the tea table so that Tristan would not swallow them whole.

For early March in New England, it was uncharacteristically gorgeous, and crisp afternoon sunlight streamed at a low angle through the bay transom windows, hitting the dangling crystals of the fancy old chandelier that hung incongruously above us all, throwing dozens of little rainbows around the walls.

“So we have this space. Not far away from here actually,” Tristan was saying, and on reflex glanced around for sweets.

“Have some more tea,” Rebecca offered Tristan, who of course had downed his almost instantly. She held out her hand for his teacup and saucer.

He gave it to her with a nod of thanks, but then his attention returned to Frank Oda, talking amps and circuitry requirements—

“How does he take it?” Rebecca asked me.

How odd that she assumed I’d know this. “Based on his dietary habits, probably milk and sugar,” I said.

“All right then,” said Tristan, staring fixedly at a blank place on the wall. “The human-rated ODEC has to be built . . . this becomes a four-part strategy.” (I had not realized he’d fashioned even a three-part strategy.) He held up a fist and stuck out his thumb: “One, extensive modifications to our building.”

“Hang on,” I said, “it’s not DODO’s building!”

“What is DODO?” Rebecca asked.

“Department of Diabolical Obscurantism,” I guessed.

Tristan was still frozen in midsentence, like a video when you hit the “pause” button, thumb in the air, gazing at me patiently while he chewed a biscuit he had somehow snagged from my side of the table. “Anyway,” I continued, “you can’t just modify someone else’s building . . . can you?”

“We will acquire the building,” he announced. Then he extended his index finger. “Two, design of the human-rated ODEC. Three, its construction. Four, find somebody who can do magic.” He looked around at us. “Conveniently, there’s four of us. Professor, you work up a design, then oversee the construction. My bosses can fly up some fellows from DC to work with us, Stokes and I will help—you can manage a screw gun, can’t you, Stokes?” This was a throwaway, almost rhetorical, question; he did not even glance at me.

Oda nodded, his face still but radiant. I could see him restraining himself from glancing at his wife. Her face was also still, but not so radiant. “We’ll need people with expertise in bulk cryogenics.”

“NASA,” Tristan said dismissively. “Those guys don’t have enough to do. Then there’s procuring and installing all the hardware. We can get as much computational muscle as we need from cheap off-the-shelf hardware. Weird fabrication can be sourced from Los Alamos. Witches is you, Stokes. Ask around at New Agey places. Yoga studios or whatever. That should be easy enough, and you look the part.”

“What does that mean?” I demanded.

“Grad student. Primary demographic for magical thinking.”

“Tristan. It’s the twenty-first century. Get a clue. I will look for witches online.”

He was already shaking his head. “No. You can’t leave a paper or electronic trail. You have to show up somewhere witchy in person and ask questions, without giving them any information about yourself.” Before I could respond he turned to Rebecca. “Wanna help Stokes find a witch?”

Rebecca said, “No.” She said it politely, calmly stroking a calico cat that was curled placidly on her lap. It was clear that she would not be changing her mind about it.

“You’re the one who gets credit for thinking of it,” he said, almost (by Tristan standards) cajoling.

“I am here for Frank,” she said. “I’m not a soldier in your army, Mr. Lyons.”

“All right then,” Tristan said, after a pause. He suddenly brightened, grinned at me. “Stokes, you own witches.”

“What the hell, Tristan. How does one find a witch, anyhow? Not in a yoga studio, that’s for sure. Nobody’s been able to do magic for about a hundred and seventy-five years, so what does that even mean, for somebody to ‘be a witch’?”

“In Japan, still today, there are tsukimono-suji,” said Oda, as casually as if he were discussing lunch. “Witch families. Witchcraft is considered hereditary—matrilineal—and I don’t know what kind of magic they claim to do, but the witch identity remains.” He grinned slightly. “Maybe if you find the descendant of a witch, you’ve found a witch waiting for her broomstick.”

“Very funny,” said Rebecca. When Tristan and I turned curious eyes upon her, she explained in a desultory tone, “An ancestress of mine was hanged in the Salem witch trials. Frank finds that exotic.”

“Salem doesn’t count,” I said. “That was mass hysteria induced by ergot-tainted rye.”

“Correct,” said Rebecca in a so-there tone, her eyes darting toward her husband.

“But Salem is the epicenter of modern American witchiness,” said Tristan.

“That’s a bunch of commercial tourist-trap nonsense, and anyhow, what would I be looking for?” I asked again.

“If there really were witches,” Oda-sensei suggested, “maybe there are people today who know they were descended from them, and who continue some of the ritual elements even if the magic isn’t active. That is probably the case with the tsukimono-suji.”

“We can work with that,” said Tristan. “Stokes, get on it.”

“Salem won’t have any witch-descendants because—as I just said—Salem never had witches to start with,” I insisted. “If we’re looking for witch-spawn, we should check out someplace like New Orleans.”

Tristan considered this. “Go poke around Salem first. If you don’t find anything, maybe I’ll send you to New Orleans.”

Crikey, that was easy. And a perk I’d never get under Blevins! “Is this taxpayer-funded?” I asked. “No judgment. Just curious.”

“Classified,” he said, and gave me a wink.

Diachronicle

DAYS 222–244 (MARCH, YEAR 1)

In which there are constructive developments

TRISTAN LATER MODIFIED HIS PLAN, deciding not to send me witch-hunting until we had a feasible chamber in which to put our witch. As there was nothing to occupy me, and I’d let slip that I had taken (one semester-long) shop class in high school, he declared me his aide-de-camp for the campaign of Office Reform that was to come.

During the next few weeks the office, as I had known it, rapidly ceased to exist. Even before taking ownership of the building, Tristan had, with sledgehammer and Sawzall, wrought changes on it that, at the time, had struck me as quite material. He had perfected the art of gazing thoughtfully at a wall between office suites, casting his gaze hither and yon, and blithely announcing that it was not load-bearing and hence a candidate for being knocked out. In this manner the original DODO office had tripled its square footage during the time I had been working there, with several of its walls already marked for death whenever the neighboring start-ups went “Tango Uniform.”

“Department of Demolishing Offices” was all I could say the next time I went to the building after our teatime strategy session at the Odas’ house. Less than twenty-four hours had passed, but Tristan appeared to have spent most of them walking freely through the building with a can of fluorescent green spray paint marking doors, walls, and other impedimenta with the word DEMO or, when he ran low on spray paint, with a simple X. In the center of the building was a large conference room, meant to be shared by all of the tenants. Tristan had hurled the conference table against the wall, Xed it, and then spray-painted a huge rectangle directly onto the industrial-carpeted floor and filled it in with the inevitable X. Young, lavishly bearded tech entrepreneurs were trudging forlornly down the hallways, laden with computers, printers, high-end coffeemakers, and foosball tables. Like digital Okies they loaded their stuff into their Scions or Ryder trucks and rumbled off into the unforgiving Boston commercial real estate market.

“So you’re going to, uh, remove basically the entire floor of the conference room?” I inquired.

“The conference room will cease to exist,” he said. “DODO is not about meetings. Not about PowerPoints.”

“I never imagined otherwise,” I said.

He had lost focus on me and was now looking over my shoulder at a wall, which currently supported a large flat-screen monitor. Something about the look on his face told me where this was going. “Not load-bearing?” I guessed, glancing back over my shoulder. He sidestepped by me, raised his can of acid green paint like the Statue of Liberty’s torch, stood up on tiptoe, and sprayed a dripping, diagonal slash across the entirety of the wall, passing directly across the monitor screen en route. As he completed the other leg of the X he explained, “Between the loading dock and here we need to clear a path for the tanks.”

“You seem a little preoccupied,” I said, “and I don’t want to elbow in on your painting. I’ll just take all the translation notes back to my apartment before you paint them green.”

“Remember to maintain—” he began.

“—operational security,” I ended. “Not to worry.” I found my way to the part of the building where it had all started. Oda was there, perched on a large blue yoga ball before the largest computer monitor I had ever seen, peering intently at some tiny widget in the user interface of what I guessed was a computer-aided design program. Next to him was the cell phone Tristan had bought for him (his first) and a bowl of foamy green Japanese tea. Matcha. Still steaming and filling the room with a fresh but bitter fragrance. It had to have been made only seconds ago. A faucet gushed briefly down the hall, in the ladies’ room, and I guess Rebecca was here washing up. I snapped a couple of file folders marked UNCLASSIFIED: TRANSLATIONS out of a cabinet and went to find her. She had spread all of her matcha-making whisks and paraphernalia out on the counter.

“Herbs,” I said.

She looked up and gazed at me in the mirror.

“Just a thought,” I added.

“What about them?”

“Witches were obsessed with them.”

“It is a familiar stereotype,” she pointed out, and returned her attention to drying her matcha gear.

“One based on reality. All of our research points to it.” I rattled the folders in the air, as if this would lend authority to my words. “I thought of it when the fragrance of that tea filled my nostrils. Powerful stuff, fragrances.”

“Yes,” she said drily, “so perhaps you should be recruiting the descendants of famous perfumers, or incense-makers, rather than those of famous non-witches hanged in Salem.”

Taking the hint, I used the facilities and moved on. As I was walking back to my apartment, folders tucked under my arm, I had time to ponder Tristan’s statement we need to clear a path for the tanks. Given his military background, my mind had immediately flashed up an image of a column of huge armored military vehicles thundering through the building. But of course he didn’t mean that kind of tank. He meant a large vessel for holding fluids. To be specific, for holding liquid helium.

When I returned to the building the next day, my keycard didn’t work. This was due to the disappearance of the entire keycard-reading machine. In its stead was a contraption, apparently some kind of eyeball scanner. I went around back and pounded on the loading dock door until Tristan let me in. “New perimeter security,” he explained. “Max will get you squared away.”

“Who’s Max?”

Tristan was leading me down a broad open corridor that had been sledgehammered through the building overnight. It terminated in the ruins of the conference room. A huge square hole, perhaps fifteen feet on a side, had been cut through the floor, and yellow caution tape strung up around it to prevent people from falling through into the cellar. Hard at work down there were what appeared to be the offspring of a Benetton ad and a UPS commercial: four attractive, buff young men in nondescript brown uniforms, one African-American, one Asian (Korean?), one Hispanic, one with a Persian aspect, all impeccably kitted out with eye and ear protection. Two of them were framing in a wall with steel studs, and the other two were wrestling with cables. Tristan hailed them and they paused in their labors to greet me briefly. To a man, each identified himself as Max.

“What, do they row for the DODO crew team?” I asked, when they had returned to their work.

“Classified,” Tristan said. When I made a face, he added quietly, “Don’t talk shop in front of them. They know it’s a physics experiment but they don’t know about the magic.” Then he nodded at a work party of Hispanic men busy heaving shattered drywall and rolls of nasty old carpet into huge rolling bins for disposal. “And those guys are from the sidewalk in front of Home Depot. If my higher-ups knew . . .” He shook his head.

I was busy gazing at my colleague in a somewhat new light. Until I saw him in command of people and a place, there had been, truth be told, no evidence that Tristan Lyons wasn’t merely a convincing psychopath renting a tawdry room in an obsolete office building for unsavory purposes that could have endangered my life. The possibility had never entered my mind, but in retrospect, it really should have. I’d been a sucker for both the smile and the paycheck. I still consider it pure dumb luck that my trust had been well placed.

Journal Entry of

Rebecca East-Oda

MARCH 29

Temperature 49F, sunny, mild, very still. Barometer steady.

Lettuce coming along nicely; yesterday, planted peppers, Swiss chard, radishes. Weathervane needs fixing.

Working on the native-herb garden in the front corner of the yard. Already thriving: thyme, hyssop, spearmint, lemon balm, fennel, chamomile, marjoram. Must add: lavender, ambrosia, valerian, mugwort, pennyroyal, gillyflower, and (when it’s warmer) sweet basil. Might take out the Japanese moss to make room, and bring Mei’s bonsai indoors, now that Frank has lost interest.

They are continuing with the ODEC, on a magnitude I can barely fathom. Frank is happily preoccupied with something I cannot believe will actually ever come to anything, but it is good to see him absorbed in work.

Diachronicle

DAYS 245–290 (SPRING, YEAR 1)

In which constructive developments continue

I BEGAN TO HELP THE Maxes and Tristan complete construction of the ODEC under Oda-sensei’s guidance. The memory, now, of such tomboyishness, freedom of movement, the liberty of a day innocently alone with unmarried young men, and above all, the virtue of labor—these things make me almost pant with longing today, as I sit here breathing the fumes from this stinking whale oil lamp in my whale-bone corset (very difficult to believe Victoria Regina is about to rule over half the planet dressed like this. Just saying.).

As I had guessed, the “tanks” Tristan had referred to were industrial vessels made to contain thousands of gallons within their fiberglass walls. There were two of them, an inner nested within an outer, with a few inches’ separation between them. We had to cover both of them with insulation to keep the liquid helium from boiling away. This was a combination of four-by-eight-foot slabs of pink foam from Home Depot, and some kind of weird brew that you would mix up in a bucket by stirring two different chemicals together. Then it would expand enormously as it foamed up and stick to everything like Krazy Glue before it hardened.

After it had been clad in its insulating jacket, the outer tank just fit through the hole cut through the floor of the former conference room, and rested on the cellar floor below, its upper part projecting up into the ground floor. Here the Maxes cut a rectangular hatch through it, and a matching one through the inner tank several inches away. They fiberglassed the two rectangles together to form a hollow door capable of being filled with liquid helium, and likewise sealed the jambs. Meanwhile, expensive-looking stuff kept showing up at the loading dock. I didn’t need a West Point physics degree to understand that this was cryogenics equipment.

Though the new ODEC (the Mark II) was much bigger than Professor Oda’s cat-sized Mark I, it was recognizably the same machine. Instead of an inner plywood box with a cat bed and a cream saucer, this one had that inner tank, which was just large enough for one person to sit in a chair, or two to stand upright. Much of its volume was spoken for by what Tristan referred to, somewhat unnervingly, as “life support stuff.” I made a mental note to ask him about that later. Its walls, for the time being, were just bare fiberglass, as it had come from the factory. If the Mark I was any guide, however, those walls would soon be lined with circuit boards. I had overheard enough snatches of conversation between Oda and Tristan to know that these were being produced offsite and that some were already inbound, plastered with tracking numbers that Rebecca was checking several times a day. When they showed up, and when the Maxes installed them, they would be connected to the inevitable web of cables, which would be routed under the floor and then up into the server room. This was being bolted together and brought online by a trio of bearded men who all politely introduced themselves as Vladimir.

Once the Vladimirs had bolted the vertical racks into the floor, they devoted whole days to opening cardboard boxes, which had been piling up in ziggurats on the loading docks, and extricating black slabs, approximately the size and shape of pizza boxes, and slamming them into rails on those racks. Each of them, I was assured, contained sixteen computers, each of which was a bazillion times more powerful than the single, forlorn Indigo that had served as the brains of the Mark I. The Vladimirs were nothing if not friendly. I got the sense that this would be my last opportunity to have anything like a normal conversation with them. Once all of these pizza box servers were up and running, they would revert to their natural behavior patterns. For now, working on their knees with screwdrivers, performing tasks well below their pay grade, they were just happy to have someone to talk to. And talk they did, with a kind of messianic zeal, about the awesomeness of the cluster they were assembling. One of them, whom I’d mentally renamed Longbeard, actually did have an Eastern European accent. I got the impression from stray remarks dropped here and there that he’d had a hand in the creation of the uber-paranoid Shiny Hat operating system that had been the bane of my existence these six months. Perhaps he was the ur-Vlad.

I was drawn into the mindless but satisfying activity of flattening boxes and stuffing plastic packing material into garbage bags. On a trip to the Dumpsters, I noted that it was dark. Perhaps we would knock off soon. But the Vladimirs had just ordered another round of quadruple-shot espresso drinks from the Apostolic Café, and Tristan announced that he and the Maxes were going to pull an all-nighter and leak-check the entire chamber so that it could be test-filled in the morning. Frank Oda kindly gave me a lift home. I wondered what Rebecca made of all this, but suspected this was perhaps a delicate subject, so refrained from asking.

It was strange spending an evening in my own apartment. I’d anticipated a sense of relief, but the solitude was almost disorienting. I heated up some leftovers, settled down with my laptop, and checked my email for the first time in days. I had three notifications from Facebook.

I usually forgot about Facebook; I checked in about once a month. I logged in now, to see that my account had three “friend requests.” One was from my mother, one was a nearly pornographic image of an attractive young Chinese man whose name translated to “Jade Dagger,” and one was a woman named Erszebet Karpathy whose picture appeared to be a state-issued ID of an octogenarian drag queen. I accepted my mother’s request, disregarded the other two as spam, sent my mother a perfunctory “Welcome to the Twenty-First Century” post, and checked my wall.

There was a message posted on it from Erszebet Karpathy, dated three days earlier. “I am still waiting! Let me know when you are ready to begin.”

Odd.

I scrolled down. The next most recent post on my page was also from this Erszebet Karpathy, ten days earlier: “I am waiting for all to be placed in readiness.”

Next was a request from one of my former students to play some kind of dumb social media game.

Then another post from Erszebet Karpathy, this one from nearly a month earlier: “Melisande, is it time yet? You said April or May of this year.”

That was unnerving. Who was Erszebet Karpathy? I went to her “About” page, to find it blank. Occasionally I accepted private students, usually interested in Bible studies, who wished to parse something in Aramaic. But it had been at least a year since I’d fielded any requests. Tired from a long day, I closed the laptop and went to sleep without even finishing dinner.

The next morning, when I opened my laptop again to check the New York Times headlines, I was still logged in to Facebook, and there was a new message from the Karpathy chick: “Melisande. I see that you have been active on Facebook within the past 12 hours, so I KNOW you are receiving these messages. Contact me and I will tell you where to collect me.” She had changed her profile picture: now it was a “vintage”-looking, sepia-toned portrait of a matron in Edwardian costume, the kind of photo you dress for at Ye Olde County Faire.

If life had not become so exceptionally peculiar over the past month, I would simply have blocked her. Instead, chewing on my lower lip, I sent her a private message: “Who are you and what do you want?”

Before I could even log out, I received a response: “Come and get me. Elm House, 420 Common Street, Belmont. Do not make me wait any longer. Do you have any idea how much I have suffered?”

I stared at this statement, flummoxed.

“I know you are online,” came a new message. “There is a little green light next to your name. Come at once. I shall be waiting near the front desk with my luggage.”

After an unsettled moment, I typed back, “What are you expecting of me?”

“That you will help me to do magic once again. As you promised.”

Thirty seconds later, laptop under my arm, I was dashing out the door to get to Tristan.

Diachronicle

DAY 290

In which adjustments are made

I SPRINTED INTO THE BASEMENT office ready to thrust my Facebook page at Tristan. But he and the assembled Maxes, all bleary-eyed yet full of pep, were cheering the results of the overnight test, which had apparently found no leaks. Frank Oda (radiant) and his wife, Rebecca (stoic), were also present, creating yet another mound of empty boxes and packing material as they uncrated the newly arrived circuit boards.

“Tristan, I found—!” I began, but he was moving so quickly as to resemble an animated character, without the least interest in anything I had to say. He seemed to be headed for the server room, so I darted past him, executed a 180, and blocked his path. “I found a woman who says she can do magic. That is, she found me,” I clarified, seeing his eyes go wide with wonder. “On Facebook. We haven’t met in person.”

Tristan frowned. “Oh God, not some social media thing, Stokes. Please tell me you didn’t put out a call for witches.”

“Of course not,” I snapped. “I signed a nondisclosure form, I know what that means. Give me some credit, Lyons. She sent me a message out of the blue, saying she was waiting for me so she could do magic.”

He blinked. “Strange.”

I reached for my messenger bag. “I’ve got it right—”

He held up a hand, shook his head. “Stokes. I forbid you to communicate with this person, whoever she is, over social media channels. It is totally insecure. You have got to go about this systematically—not by sitting around your apartment waiting to get friended by supernatural trolls.”

“Well, now that we’ve ruled out the use of the Internet and all other modern communications devices,” I said, “what systematic approach do you recommend for responding to the only lead we have?”

“Don’t do anything till we have a chance to hack into Facebook and get this person’s real identity for a background check. Leave your laptop with the Vladimirs.”

“And what do I systematically do in the meanwhile?”

“Go to Salem.”

“We’ve been over this. There never were any actual witches in Salem. Even the Puritans ended up admitting as much.”

“Back in the day, yes. That’s true,” Tristan said agreeably. “But now, because of its reputation as a witchy place, it is a magnet for people like that.”

“And you know this how?”

“I drove through it once. There was witch shit all over the place.”

“Good. Now I understand what you mean by systematic.”

“Try to see it through the eyes of my higher-ups,” he suggested. “Salem. Witches. Go. Get on it. See if you can find a witch, or a witch’s descendant, or a witch’s DNA or something, just so I can tell them it’s being worked on. I’ve got to work my contacts at Lawrence Livermore, they’re hoarding helium.”

“Of course,” I said, and wished for a brief, exhausted moment that he had asked me to translate Tartessian, or something simple like that.

Feeling like a dolt before I’d even departed, I borrowed Tristan’s Jeep and drove up Route 1 to Salem, about an hour away. In that vehicle, on that road, this was like being beaten with sacks of gravel.

Like many New England towns with something of historical note to recommend it, Salem was a bizarre combination of well-preserved, beautiful old buildings and ugly commercial developments. The commercial developments were winning, however. Ignoring the various signs for the Salem Witch Museum, the Salem Witch House, the Salem Witch Village, the Salem Witch Day Spa, and so on, I found a parking spot on a broad street, marveled at how cheap the parking was, and walked into the older part of town. I have no words to describe how unenthusiastic I felt about this assignment. Three and a quarter centuries after nineteen innocent people were hanged for no reason, a bunch of New Age types whose concept of witchcraft had zero in common with the seventeenth-century concept of witchcraft decided to set up shop right by the graves of the victims. What the fuck. I have no tolerance for sloppy logic like that.

Just so I could tell Tristan I’d done it, I walked into a couple of occult shops that I found along a pedestrian stretch of Essex Street, then fled before the incense overwhelmed me.

There’s another context-is-everything moment, because now I live for incense—if I really am to be stuck permanently in 1850s London, I might have to become an Anglican nun. God, I hope it doesn’t come to that.

In the end, though, the scholar in me won out, and I ended up visiting a few of the legitimate historical sites in the Salem area. The name of Mary Estey—one of the victims of the witch hysteria—kept jumping out at me. Rebecca East, Frank’s wife, had mentioned that she was a descendant of this family, the spelling having changed and the final syllable having been dropped from the surname at some point in the intervening three centuries. In typical WASP style, Rebecca underplayed its significance, pointing out that the families of that era had been enormous and that, if you did the math, every second or third white person you encountered on the streets of America was probably descended from someone who had lived in Salem. But I felt that the least I could do was pay my respects.

Then, suddenly feeling as though it was late in the day and that I must be missing important developments, I got back in the Jeep and fought my way back through late afternoon traffic to the office. I can’t say I mourned my failure overmuch, as it meant I’d get a free trip to New Orleans out of it, and that would rock be most excellent.

I DROVE BACK to the office late in the day to find Tristan collapsed on the couch from exhaustion. I began to make coffee in one of the high-tech machines we had pillaged from a departing tech start-up. While it gurgled and hissed, I idly and out of habit took my phone out and glanced at it. There was a banner notification from Facebook Messenger.

“I will wait in the lobby,” said a private message from the Hungarian woman, with a 9:04 a.m. time stamp on it.

“Oh God,” I said out loud. How could I have gone the whole day with hardly a thought of her?

A mechanical chime sounded as an instant message sprang up. “I waited the ENTIRE DAY. Where were you?” She had changed her profile picture again, this time to an artsy-looking purple blur.

I went to the couch and nudged Tristan. Deep asleep, he almost instantly awoke and leapt to his feet, shoving me sideways without registering my identity, glancing around for an assailant.

“It’s just me,” I said with irritation. “Calm down.”

“You startled me,” he said, as if I should have known better.

I gestured to my phone. “Take a look at this.”

Even as I showed him her comments, our exchange, and her blank “About” page, several more prompts popped up on the bottom of the screen with mechanical chimes, as Miss Karpathy informed me she could see I was online and why was I not answering?

Tristan considered the screen a moment. “The Vladimirs have been all over this. Intriguing-slash-disturbing-in-the-extreme. Tell her you’ll speak to her tomorrow. Today’s got to be about the dry run.”

I tapped in, “Sorry. Will be with you tomorrow evening.”

Immediately the response: “Why the delay?”

“Technical difficulties,” I typed.

“With the ODEC?” she typed back instantly.

I looked at Tristan. “Jesus,” he said under his breath. “Who is she?” He moved closer to the screen and nudged my shoulder with his. “Tell her you can’t discuss it online,” he whispered, as if worried of being overheard by somebody. I typed this in, and a response came back:

“Will you come with your Mr. Tristan Lyons?” she typed back. “I wish to meet him.”

I looked up over my shoulder at my Mr. Tristan Lyons. He nodded, staring at the screen.

“We could go now,” I suggested.

He shook his head. “We don’t know what we’re getting into. Tell her yes, I’ll come with you. But tomorrow.”

“With Mr. Tristan Lyons,” I typed. “Tomorrow evening.”

“Come before 6 p.m. or it will be harder to leave because of the Night Guard.”

We both continued to stare at the screen for a moment in silence. Then Tristan reached out and gently took the phone from my hand, tossed it on to the couch.

“Can’t wait to hear the explanation,” he said, sounding weary. Then, with a tired grin down at me: “Funny how she called me your Mr. Tristan Lyons.”

I felt my face flush. “Maybe she’s dealt with another Tristan Lyons,” I said. “Surely the multiverse contains more than one. The coffee’s ready.”

“Good,” he said, “because so is the ODEC.”

During my sojourn to Salem, the crew had mounted all of the circuit boards to the walls of the inner cavity and also bolted in the electromagnets; these were mounted to a sturdy framework of steel angle irons that had been welded together around the external tank. Black melted areas on the floor suggested that welding sparks had set the occasional odd fire to the carpet; larger burns were surrounded by penumbras of powder that had apparently been shot out of the various fire extinguishers, which now lay scattered around the floor like empty beer bottles after a frat party. As Tristan led me in, he absentmindedly nudged these out of the way with his foot, cautioning me to watch my step.

“Did your friends come through with the liquid helium?” I asked. Certainly the first time in my life I had uttered that sentence.

“They will.”

“That’s a no?”

“We’re testing it with liquid nitrogen. Much cheaper.”

As if on cue, the persistent, infuriating beep-beep-beep of a truck’s backup alarm sounded from the street; we could hear it through the roll-up door at the loading dock.

“Woo hoo hoo!” Tristan shouted. “LN2! Up and at ’em, folks!” He strode down the tank right-of-way to the loading dock and hit the button that opened the dock door. A semi-trailer rig consisting largely of a large white sausage-shaped tank was backing down the ramp from the street, scattering nests of rats and pissing off seagulls. Suddenly there were weary-looking Maxes and Vladimirs all over the place. In block letters that could be seen from space, the truck was labeled LIQUID NITROGEN. Ah, of course: liquid nitrogen, aka LN2. After Tristan’s brief, disgustingly cheerful exchange with the driver, hoses were connected between his truck and some storage tanks that, in my absence, had been crudely bolted into the concrete walls of the building. Impressive whining noises came from a thing that, I was informed, was a cryogenic pump. When the LN2 first hit the warm innards of the storage tanks, there was an amount of hissing that defied description, unless you have ever heard all of the bacon in Iowa being dropped onto a red-hot griddle the size of Delaware. With that was a concomitant amount of milky, chilly fog. Tristan grabbed me by the arm and dragged me out of the building. “Non-toxic,” he assured me, “but—”

“But I need oxygen.”

“Yeah. I knew I liked you, Stokes.”

“Is this why the ODEC contains life support equipment?”

He shrugged modestly. “There are certain failure modes,” he said, “such as freezing to death and asphyxiating, that come naturally to mind when we are getting ready to lock human subjects in a sealed chamber completely surrounded by cryogenic fluids chilled to within four degrees of absolute zero.”

That initial spasm of hissing and fog production was because the walls of the tank were at room temperature. Once they had been chilled down, the pumping of the LN2 continued with no more drama than if it had been tap water. The fog dissipated and Tristan made a decision, which I assumed was science-based, that it was safe to go back inside. I followed him through the loading dock doors, past the tanks, and all the way to the door of the ODEC, which now stood ajar. I took a small step up to stand on its threshold, and had a look around.

Every square inch of the cavity’s interior surfaces, including its floor and ceiling, had now been tiled with circuit boards: plates of green plastic covered with fine traceries of orange-red copper and studded with electronic components. Most of these were the tiny black rectangles of integrated circuits, but there were also LEDs blinking in a range of colors. Dangling from the ceiling by their hoses was a pair of oxygen masks—part of the life support equipment, clearly: should helium leak into the cavity and displace the breathable air, its occupants could pull these down and strap them over their faces. (I was never a hard-science chick, but my high school chemistry teacher near enough resembled Orlando Bloom that I had diligently aced the class.)

Still balanced on the raised threshold, I turned around to look out the ODEC door into the space surrounding the chamber. Where the head of the conference table had formerly stood was a control console, attached to the ODEC by a large plastic pipe, channeling gouts of cables. Above it, a cable ladder from the server room disgorged a waterfall of Ethernet cables and fiber-optic lines. Seated at the console, running through some kind of checklist on an iPad, was the probably-Korean Max. Oda-sensei and his wife, Rebecca, were watching over his shoulder.

“Wow,” I said from the threshold.

“Right?” chirped Tristan happily. Somewhat unnecessarily, he extended a hand to assist me back down to the floor. “The professor is giddy. Tell him he should throw the switch.”

“It is your project,” Oda-sensei said peaceably, sipping coffee from a blue thermos. “The honor should be yours.”

“It was your project first! We’ve been arguing about this all week,” said Tristan to me with a grin. “You call it, Stokes.”

I called it in favor of Oda, and Tristan saluted him with a flourish more Renaissance than military. Tristan then closed the ODEC door and engaged several massive mechanical latches.

With a childish, nervous smile, Oda-sensei handed off the thermos to Rebecca, then responded to Tristan with a gesture something between a nod and a bow. Console Max stood up, stepped back from the console, and made a similar gesture, inviting him to sit down. Oda, with a little don’t mind if I do smile, took the Seat of Authority behind the console and pulled on a communications headset.

There was one moment of potent, expectant stillness. What a thrill this must be for him, I remember thinking. I was desperately curious. The enormousness of it far exceeded my urgency to discuss Erszebet Karpathy.

“Exterior vent ports open,” Oda intoned.

I had no idea what he was talking about until I heard the familiar rumble and groan of the loading dock door being hauled up. “Check,” shouted a Max. He was echoed by another Max who had just opened the door that fronted the street.

“Atmospheric exchange augmentation systems to full power,” Oda said.

Tristan darted over to a white plastic window fan—one of a pallet load of such that we had acquired from Home Depot—and turned it on full blast. I saw now that several more were scattered around the room. Feeling a desire to be part of this momentous occasion, I turned on all that were in reach.

“Check!” Tristan called, when all of them were spinning. I could hear a much larger, industrial-sized fan humming out by the loading dock, and another “Check!” from that quarter.

“Burst disks and pressure relief valves are all green,” said Oda, glancing at his display. “Initiating cryogenic chill-down sequence in three . . . two . . . one . . .”

Cryogenic pumps began to hum, and a few seconds later we heard the sizzle and hiss of liquid nitrogen coming into contact with room-temperature plumbing. The idea was simple enough, now that I understood what was happening: we needed to pump the LN2 from the big storage tanks by the loading dock, through piping that the Maxes had installed, to the gap between the ODEC’s inner and outer vessels. But since the plumbing and the vessels alike were currently warmer than the boiling point of LN2, the liquid was going to boil off at first, until everything got chilled down. As before, clouds of milky, chilly fog spilled out of valves all over the facility. But the “atmospheric exchange augmentation systems” did a good job of pushing it out the “exterior vent ports.” Outside of these—as we could all tell by checking surveillance monitors that had been racked up on the half-shattered remnant of a nearby wall—several Lukes were standing guard to make sure that random people didn’t just wander in off the street. The Lukes had begun showing up a couple of days ago; they were big, beefy, taciturn, and dressed in rent-a-cop uniforms devoid of insignia. They seemed to think Tristan was cool.

The cryogenic drama lessened as (one inferred) the plumbing and vessels became super-cold, and then we could hear the fluid level rising between the ODEC’s inner and outer walls. Oda had purchased a large number of cheap digital thermometers from Home Depot and duct-taped them all over the place, and it was fun, for a while, to see their readings plummet into triple-digit negative numbers.

“How much farther?” I asked Tristan, during a lull.

“To what?” he inquired.

“To absolute zero.”

He shook his head. “Not going there today.”

“I thought that was the whole point.”

“Don’t pout. This is a dry run. With LN2. Which costs less than milk. If it works we’ll source the liquid helium and do it for real.”

“Vessel is full. Hatch is full. Both holding steady,” Oda announced. “Confirming criticality in lower magnet ring.”

“Criticality? Sounds very MLA,” I said.

“MLA?”

“Modern Language Association.”

Tristan sighed. “He just means that the magnets in the bottom-most ring have now been cold enough, long enough, that they have dropped through their TC—their critical temperature—and become superconducting.” He seemed mildly offended by my quip.

“Ah, so that’s the purpose of the dry run,” I said.

“Yeah. Until all of the magnet rings go superconducting, we can’t even turn the ODEC on in any meaningful sense of the word.”

This at least gave me something to watch. The vessels, of course, had filled from the bottom up, and so the magnets on the bottom had spent a longer time exposed to cryogenic temperatures. From bottom to top, there were thirty-two distinct rings of little magnets, each of which completely encircled the cavity—the ODEC’s inner vessel. The rings were stacked one above the next, spanning the full height of the cavity. The Maxes had mounted an LED on each ring. It was red when the magnets were warm, but turned blue when they had gone superconducting. Over the course of a couple of minutes we enjoyed the simple but weirdly exciting spectacle of watching that column of LEDs turn from red to blue, from the bottom to the top.

“We have full criticality,” Oda announced when the uppermost one turned blue.

I had found myself standing next to Rebecca. On an impulse, I turned toward her and raised my hand, palm facing out. Startled by the movement, she swiveled her head to place me under her blue-eyed gaze. It was like staring into a couple of those LEDs.

It occurred to me that she might not recognize the gesture. “High five?” I said weakly. She looked away as if hoping that the whole regrettable incident could be forgotten.

Meanwhile her husband was busy. “Internal sensor calibration matrix has been computed and flashed to embedded firmware. Ready to boot the renormalization feedback loop, Vladimirs?”

“Check!” shouted a Vladimir from the server room.

“Booting it,” Oda said, and reached out toward one of the very few mechanical switches on the console. It was military hardware, eBayed (Tristan boasted) from some collector of Cold War electrical components. It had a protective cover that had to be flipped up out of the way to provide access to the switch itself, imbuing it with more ceremony.

I nearly suffered a heart attack after Oda snapped the switch to “on”: an alarm Klaxon began to sound and it happened to be mounted directly above my head. I jammed my hands over my ears and pivoted away from it; Rebecca was doing the same, in mirror image. At the same time the room lights dimmed, flickered, and went out, prompting battery-powered red emergency lights to switch on. I tripped over a discarded fire extinguisher and staggered a couple of paces, finally breaking my fall by colliding with a rolling coatrack that had been set up to one side of the console. This had been stocked, for some reason, with a row of snowmobile suits in various sizes and colors. They were soft, and cushioned my fall as I knocked the whole thing over and went down onto the floor. It must have made a loud noise. No one noticed because of the Klaxon.

Tristan was either a perfect gentleman or no gentleman at all. At the moment he was too fascinated by goings-on surrounding the ODEC to know that I had taken a pratfall. Probably just as well. I clambered to my feet and reached into my pocket, where I’d got in the habit of stowing a pair of foam earplugs. Recently I had been using them when operating power saws, but they were just what I needed now.

Tristan signaled Oda to switch the power off. The Klaxon went silent. The room lights flickered back—this took a few moments, since one of the Vladimirs had to run to the electrical panel and flip a number of circuit breakers back on. The collective excitement of the room palpably dissipated. So much drama, so many sound and visual effects, for—what?

“Anything?” Tristan inquired.

“The data loggers inside the cavity all went dead. Completely zorched, as far as I can tell,” Oda said. The words sounded like bad news but his tone of voice implied fascination.

“So we don’t even know if anything happened in there.”

“Something friggin’ happened,” insisted the most long-bearded of the Vladimirs, who had just stormed in from the server room. “While that thing was on, we ran a ridiculous amount of data through our servers.”

“How much?” I asked.

He looked exasperated. “Enough that I could make up some kind of strained analogy involving the contents of the Library of Congress and the number of pixels in all of the Lord of the Rings movies put together and how many phone calls the NSA intercepts in a single day and you would be like, ‘Holy shit, that’s a lot.’”

“Holy shit, that’s a lot!” I exclaimed dutifully.

“And as to the amount of computational processing performed on that data, using Professor Oda’s algorithms—well—same basic story.”

“Fantastic,” I purred.

“I believe you,” Tristan said, “it’s just that we don’t appear to have any data on what actually happened in there.”

“Confirmed,” Oda said. “The renormalization loop appears to interfere with normal functioning of the sensor package we left inside.”

“That’s exactly as it should be—right?” I said.

“Could be,” Tristan said, “or could be it just went on the fritz. We are blind in there. No real way to know if it’s working.”

“Maybe if we had a cat,” the professor said.

“Maybe if we go inside,” said Tristan. Rebecca made a disapproving sound under her breath as the Maxes and Vladimirs made anticipatory sounds under theirs.

Oda shook his head. “A cat is one thing. But I’m not going in there.”

“I’ll go,” said Tristan.

“It’s your funeral,” muttered Rebecca, as if to herself, and paced away from the console table.

Tristan turned to look at her, and then at Oda. “Does she mean that literally?” And to Rebecca: “Do you mean that literally?”

Oda answered before she could. “It won’t kill you. But . . . you will not enjoy it. The cat certainly didn’t.”

Tristan waved this away dismissively. “As long as it’s not lethal, I’m going in.” And then with an inviting grin: “Want to come with me, Stokes?”

Flattered as I was that he considered me a peer in this undertaking, and eager as I was to know what would come of it, I thought of the cat. “Next time,” I said.

“Internal temp of the cavity?” Tristan asked.

“Twenty-three below zero, Celsius, and holding,” reported Console Max.

“Gotta get better insulation,” Tristan muttered. He pivoted and made for the rolling coatrack, which was still all kinds of messy on the floor. I stiffened, awaiting a reprimand, but he didn’t even seem to notice that it had been knocked over. He found the end of the pile where the larger snowmobile suits had ended up, pulled one out, and stepped into it. “We still go? Everything nominal?”

Half a dozen different Maxes and Vladimirs hollered out “Check!” from various parts of the building.

Tristan zipped up the suit. In a side pocket he found a balaclava, which he pulled on over his head. I helped him yank it around until his eyes were shining out from the oval hole. He gave me a wink and then pulled on a pair of bulky mittens while striding toward the ODEC door. Oda hauled it open for him, then appeared to regret this gesture as the cold burned his hand.

Tristan stepped over the threshold, displacing a column of air that turned cloudy as it spilled out into the room.

A torso flew out and did an end-over-end bounce across the floor, shedding batteries and thumb drives. It was the upper half of a store mannequin that we had instrumented with sensors. Tristan had tossed it out.

Having thus made room for himself, Tristan sat down on the wooden stool we’d put in there to support the mannequin. Providing a bit of padding under his bum was the cat-hair-saturated cushion from the Mark I; Rebecca had moved it to the Mark II to supply a feeling of continuity. He reached out, pawed at the door, and closed it behind him. The Maxes exchanged expectant glances. Rebecca rubbed the space between her eyebrows and paced silently. Oda-sensei resumed his position at the control panel. He reached out and flipped up the protective cover on the switch. Rebecca stuck her fingers in her ears.

For a few moments we all stood at rigid attention, our eyes on Oda’s finger. Then he flicked the switch. Again the lights went out and the Klaxon came on. He checked his wristwatch and let the machine run for fifteen long seconds. Then he flicked the switch back off and gently replaced the cover.

Tristan walked out of the ODEC, pulling off the balaclava and shaking his head as if he had swimmer’s ear. He saw all of our party staring at him, and he stared back a moment, frowning. “That was unpleasant,” he reported gruffly. “Like being in a Russian disco. But that’s all.”

“I’m glad you’re all right,” I said. “But . . .” And I thought better of saying more.

“But it would have been cooler if you had to carry me out strapped to a back board. I know,” Tristan said ruefully. “Vladimir? Got anything for me?”

The Vladimir with red hair was strolling carefully into the space, kicking fire extinguishers and empty Red Bull cans out of his way while studying an iPad. “Preliminary diagnostics suggest a large number of wedged processes. Probably a bug we can fix overnight.”

“What does that mean?”

“The ODEC was running at maybe one percent efficiency.”

“Sounds like you have a long night ahead of you, then,” Tristan said.