The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. (D.O.D.O. #1)

by Neal Stephenson

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.

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.

“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.

“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.”

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.”

We walk out to the Thames, and himself sees that massive long London Bridge to the east, with all its fine buildings, and some two dozen traitors’ heads decaying on the Great Stone Gate, and his eyes pop right open like a caged monkey’s, so I reckon he’s from a place without much architecture to speak of.

LOL

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

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

Hopefully I will be able to update you all soon. If I do not, assume it is because the Walmart Vikings have gotten to me, in which case somebody please remind Frank to water the garden. (If you had told me five years ago, when Mel and Tristan first knocked on our door, that I would find myself writing that sentence I’d have laughed you down the street.)