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

by Neal Stephenson

“IARPA—the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Agency, which has been running this thing until now—thinks other countries might have, or might soon have, access to . . . others like Erzsebet.

In layperson’s terms: if it has to be dunked in liquid helium to work, I don’t understand it. If it’s in a rack with fans blowing on it, that’s a different story.

As you probably know, the Vikings invaded France, were bought off with Normandy, settled there, then used it as a base for invading Britain and many other places. The most bad-ass Normans crossed the Channel with William the Conqueror; the ones that stayed behind in Normandy spawned the generations who mostly enjoyed jousting and courtly love, etc. . .

The QUIPUs (Quantum Information Processing Units) that make up the Chronotron are capable of dealing with the infinite-pasts-as-weighted-by-plausibility calculations in SLIT (Something Less Than Infinite Time).

But it is quite obviously a matter of male jealousy. Magnus is ludicrously hyper-masculine in ways that have been bred and trained out of modern-day men and so they have to deprecate his intelligence.