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

by Neal Stephenson

“Which are classified, right?” “Whether or not they are classified is classified.”

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.

“What is DODO?” Rebecca asked. “Department of Diabolical Obscurantism,” I guessed.

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.

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.

He operated on my psyche the way a lively Mozart sonata might.

Death would have been less boring than surviving this last century. This is a terrible country for old people. You put them away in horrible buildings that are completely shut off from life, and then do everything possible to keep them alive. It is a very stupid system. You should all be shot.

A fine scheme if there were no complications. Dear reader: there are always complications. Every fucking time.

Lying on the floor were Tristan’s scrubs and two white ceramic fillings I hadn’t known about. How ridiculous to confess this, but it saddened me that I had not known about his fillings. The gulf of my ignorance regarding his dental work left me feeling irrationally bereft.

The best analogy I can think of is how a modern physicist would react if you approached him and proposed to travel at greater than the speed of light. Mixed with this is a little bit of how Chopin would react if you proposed to play a piano by striking it with a sledgehammer.

our relationship to these infinite pasts and futures isn’t random—plausibility throws its weight around, per some freaky quantum mechanics stuff that Dr. Oda calls Feynman Diagram History Pachinko.

We need to know more before Sending you into a potentially messed-up situation. And by “messed-up situation” I mean “alternate universe in which you are a two-hundred-year-old warrior saint.”

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

“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.”

Going to click “send” on this now. 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.)

“If I could rewrite the world so there was never any slavery, I would do that, yes, absolutely, but then human history would be unrecognizable to us, and you would not like what replaced what you already know, because everyone wants familiar things. 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. And that is inconvenient for your view of how life is to be lived, with Walmarts and cotton underwear and things for which you need this so-called rare earth. You want to have always had those things. That’s all. Gráinne’s plans are inconvenient to your lifestyle. You have no valid complaint beyond that.”

Obviously science and technology has improved the existence of humanity.” “Tell that to the people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” she said. “Tell that to the atmosphere that is choking on carbon emissions.”