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

by Neal Stephenson

“You have an agreeably uninteresting existence. Let’s see if we can change that.”

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

‘jam enemy nations’ surveillance systems by maintaining a feline test subject in an indeterminate state of existence.’

Something about this cavity prevents the formation of definite knowledge.

I am now convinced everyone here goes to church for the incense.

The linguist in me couldn’t help fancying a connection between these fine whorls of metal and the interlaced figures in old Irish manuscripts.

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

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

“Not changing things too quickly is a rule.

“There is never control when magic is involved,”

“The intel community has been noticing some inexplicable shit going on, but it’s a little less inexplicable if it is the case that foreign powers are engaging in diachronic operations.”

Consciousness—the here-and-now of the human mind—is linked to the body’s surroundings by a thousand strands, most of which we’re never aware of until all of them are severed.

There are many possibilities and you cannot completely control which Strand you are on when you are summoning. It is not up to you. Magic does not make you omnipotent.

“It may have been decided by governmental bodies, but it did not happen, it was not real, until many people stopped doing things one way and started doing them another, consciously and deliberately.

“This spot is where we are trying to make change. When there is no magic happening, things look normal. But when magic is happening, then what-could-be becomes . . . louder, or bigger, than whatever-currently-is. That causes the glimmer. So glimmer is a good sign.”

It was as if I inhabited a perverse universe at the intersection of Groundhog Day and a computer game. I knew what I had to do to get to the next level, so to speak . . . and I could do it, increasingly well, but dammit, that did not release me from the requirement of repeating it.

There were always slight variations, of course. For that was, in a way, the whole point of what Erszebet called the Strands. They were never exact clones. They were more like a family of similar pasts that all got to vote on what their shared future was going to look like.

“We have all just had a very sobering lesson as to why nobody should rely on diachronic travel, ever, and instead you respond by saying, ‘Oh, let’s find a way to rely on diachronic travel.’”

“It knows about known unknowns?”

Modern people are calibrated for a whole different level of danger acceptance.

factoid-finding missions

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

You think that witches do magic only at certain times, when we perform a spell, such as Sending. Actually we are doing it a little bit every moment, even when we are sleeping.

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

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

So the first riddle I put my mind to was this: in a world where carriages travel without beasts to pull them, and food is effortlessly abundant, and there is ample light to sunder any darkness, from all manner of peculiar torches, none of them given to burning down a place even if it is all wood, and where all and sundry wear grander clothes than most anyone in London and an astonishing variety what’s more . . . something there must be, some commodity or advantage, that magic can attain but mankind cannot yet. Nothing material can it be, for no magic I ever knew summoned such luxuries for royalty as everyday folk here take as commonplace.

(he wasn’t much for calendars, he was more of a map fella),

“Foraging or raiding?” Then he laughed out loud. “He’s a medieval Norman warrior, sir,” Tristan said. “There’s no word for ‘shopping’ in his language.”

LOL I see drones falling out of the sky all over the place. Very satisfying.

Now you know the truth: that information flows not just along a particular Strand but between them, all the time, in subtle ways known only to a few.

Bankers, you see, don’t actually do very much. We take our percentage. That is all.

“A burning factory cannot ship product.”

History evolves one way or another, history itself is not evil, even if there are evil people in it.

You want to stop Gráinne, not because she is trying to do something evil, but because she is trying to make things unfamiliar to you.