The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O.: A Novel Page 35

  SENATOR EFFINGHAM: The budget and head count envisioned for DORC are impressive.

  BLEVINS: The personnel expenses add up as quickly as the technical expenses. That’s why the budget is as large as it is. We obviously can’t outsource any of these services, given that there is evidence that the governments of [REDACTED] and [REDACTED] are already engaged in this kind of training program. Whoever works for us has to be kept very close to the mothership, as it were, and that kind of loyalty doesn’t come cheap.

  EFFINGHAM: How do you know that [REDACTED] and [REDACTED] are ahead of us in this?

  BLEVINS: That’s classified, Senator, even for the purposes of this hearing.

  EFFINGHAM: Be that as it may, I question whether a linguistics student with no management experience is equipped to manage a department of that size.

  BLEVINS: Yes. Most of the day-to-day burden of HR, facilities, and so on will fall under the Conventional/Contemporary Operations Department for which we have been fortunate to recruit a very able manager in Macy Stoll. With those managerial and administrative tasks out of the way, Dr. Stokes will be free to concentrate on the historical and linguistic research that is her specialty.

  HATCHER: Well, I’m in no position to assess the technical requirements and their associated costs—I’ll leave that to my honored colleagues on this hearing committee with more expertise in this field, such as Senator Effingham—but having compiled different staffs, for different purposes, over the years, I certainly feel capable of assessing your personnel hiring goals. So I will be submitting my opinion that the budget you seek is tied into your laying down very clear goals for who exactly you wish to hire, and why. That includes reports on all potential witches you’d be working with in other DTAPs. Can you do that for me?

  BLEVINS: I’ll see to it that Dr. Stokes writes up something specific, as soon as she has calmed Ms. Karpathy.

  HATCHER: Out of curiosity—a curiosity I suspect is shared by other members of this panel—how exactly does one calm Ms. Karpathy?

  BLEVINS: It always seems to help to listen to her spend a few uninterrupted minutes besmirching the reputations of certain people, with Colonel Lyons being a particularly frequent target of abuse.

  HATCHER: Is it accurate to describe her, then, as a truculent and abusive team member?

  LIEUTENANT COLONEL LYONS: If I may, Madame Chair, it is accurate to describe her as the only witch available to us at the present moment. That pretty much trumps any other description.

  GENERAL FRINK: What Colonel Lyons is trying to say, Senator, is that unlike politicians, her job security does not depend on other people’s approval.

  BLEVINS: Not that General Frink is suggesting there’s anything inappropriate about politicians having that dependency.

  FRINK: Yeah, that’s right. Thank you for clarifying that, Dr. Blevins.

  BLEVINS: So to get back to the point, you’re asking us to create two things. First, a personnel profile of our most desired hires. We’re happy to do that. I can create a template as soon as this hearing is adjourned. Colonel Lyons and Dr. Stokes can help me out as their schedules allow. Second, a template for recording how we determine who to approach as a potential KCW.

  HATCHER: That works for me. I yield the floor to my colleagues for further questions.

  FROM LIEUTENANT GENERAL OCTAVIAN K. FRINK

  TO ALL DODO DEPARTMENT HEADS

  DAY 581 (MARCH, YEAR 2)

  After several grueling days of congressional hearings, I am pleased to announce that DODO’s budget has been approved and sent on to POTUS for signature. All DODO staff are to be thanked for their hard work over the difficult months since the tragic and heroic demise of our friend and colleague Les Holgate. During that span of time DODO has been stripped down to the bare metal, as it were, and rebuilt into a new kind of organization that we can all be proud of.

  New resources and responsibilities naturally bring organizational changes in their wake. Effective immediately, Dr. Roger Blevins is the overall head of the Department of Diachronic Operations, reporting directly to me, with a dotted line to Dr. Constantine Rudge at IARPA. To him will be reporting the heads of various subdepartments, as bulleted below:

  - Dr. Melisande Stokes, acting head of the Diachronic Operative Resource Center.

  - Macy Stoll, head of C/COD (Conventional/Contemporary Operations Department).

  - Dr. Frank Oda, head of Research.

  - Lieutenant Colonel Tristan Lyons, head of Diachronic Operations, which for obvious reasons will be organized and run along the lines of a military unit.

  With Dr. Blevins’s change in status, the Advisory Board is reduced, at least temporarily, to one member, that being Dr. Constantine Rudge.

  I hope that the rest of you will join me in welcoming Ms. Stoll to the organization. Her long experience managing operational matters in various civilian and military environments will no doubt prove of enormous value to DODO during the coming era of rapid expansion.

  Top-level direction on DODO’s mission will be supplied during a meeting within the next few days at the Trapezoid.

  Best wishes to all of you and may God bless America.

  Gen. Octavian Frink

  ABOUT ME

  NAME: Mortimer Shore

  OFFICIAL TITLE: Systems Administrator

  UNOFFICIAL TITLES: What’s-his-name, the Tall Guy with the Beard, the Sword Geek, the IT Guy, Hey, What the F*** Happened to my Email?

  BIO: Hey all, as DODO keeps expanding there seems to be a lot of colorful rumor floating around about how I came to work here and so I thought I would tell the whole story.

  TL;DR: I got recruited out of a park to prevent Tristan from getting his ass kicked in a swordfight and they found out I was a CS major.

  EDIT: This is mostly about computers. If you are visiting this page because you are a DOer and you think you might be about to get into a swordfight, scroll to the end.

  So, as you can probably tell from my appearance and mannerisms, I am California born and bred, my father and his father before him (heh) worked in commercial building construction in SoCal, punching out Home Depots and parking garages and making enough money to put me in a private school when I turned out to be kind of a screw-up academically. Turned out I was just bored and over-medicated LOL so they cut off my Adderall and put me on the robotics team where I made the mistake of telling them I knew how to weld (because of my dad’s company) and so then I was just the welding slave for a long time until they finally let me start writing code. Long story short, I ended up at MIT doing both, which is to say, metal and code. The code part of it is pretty self explanatory: an MIT CS major can pretty much always get a job, a fact that was important to my dad who was paying a lot of money to put me through school.

  As you have probably noticed if you work at DODO, I hang out near the server room. During my first six months at DODO I spent most of my time setting up ODIN, the Operational DODO Intranet. If that sounds like a long time, let me just say that getting a full-featured wiki to run under Shiny Hat is no picnic! I still put out IT fires and help people with their email, etc. when not working with Dr. Oda on the Chronotron. We’re recruiting more IT staff to keep our systems stable and secure, so pretty soon I’ll hopefully be a full-time Chronotron geek.

  A word about metal. The substance, not the genre of music (though I like both!):

  This is the part of my story that seems to cause the maximum amount of confusion and rumor among new hires at DODO and so this is the part you’ll want to read if you are having trouble understanding why a newly minted MIT CS major is helping people with their email for a small gov’t agency instead of making a zillion dollars in a start-up LOL.

  My dad was a civil engineering major with a minor in metallurgy and so this runs in the family—a lot of commercial buildings are made out of steel, and in California where earthquakes are a problem there are a lot of rules around what kinds of steel to use, how to weld it properly, etc. I picked a lot of this up through osmosis when I was
a kid, and when I was doing robotics in high school, and the smart kids wouldn’t let me write code, I ended up doing a lot of industrial art: robots with flame throwers, rotating blades, etc. So, I ended up doing a double major in Comp Sci and metallurgy.

  At this point I could say a lot about steel. A LOT. But I’m not going to. If you want to talk about steel FOR A LONG TIME, come by my desk with some beers LOL. Point is, I am a steel geek.

  When you are a steel geek you inevitably end up talking about swords. Sort of like when you are a climber you end up talking about Mt. Everest.

  I got interested in swords when I put some crappy homemade blades on one of my robots and they kept breaking/bending and I couldn’t understand why.

  My interest in swords led to an interest in swordfighting. Not modern fencing, which is cool and everything but totally different. I mean historical swordfighting with actual things that look like swords.

  As a freshman I joined a LARPing group that did foam fighting on the Esplanade, but that was just a gateway drug to a real HEMA (Historical European Martial Arts) group that fought with real steel blades (blunt obviously) using documented historical techniques.

  During one of our practices I was approached by Rebecca (East-Oda) who asked me a lot of questions. Not the usual dumb questions like “is that a real sword?” but like super nitty-gritty questions that clued me in something weird was going on. She took me back to her and Frank’s house and NDAed me, and like ten minutes later I was with Tristan teaching him the Four Grounds and the Four Governors of George Silver, the Elizabethan backsword master who hated Italian rapier fighters with an unquenchable fiery hate LOL.

  Later I found out I had passed a background check, and after I had peed in a jar and all the other stuff I was sworn in and have been working for DODO ever since—I guess seven or eight months now. I am responsible for having set up most of DODO’s basic IT infrastructure such as the intranet, the wiki, etc. but don’t hate on me because it was all supposed to be temporary LOL.

  Dr. Frank Oda was also kind enough to take me under his wing and get me in on the ground floor of the Chronotron project. DISCLAIMER RE THAT: I am not a physicist and so all of the quantum mechanics underlying the chipset of the QUIPUs (the Quantum Information Processing Units) is totally incomprehensible to me. All I know about it is that it runs really, really fast and solves problems that would take forever using traditional non-quantum computation.

  Fortunately for dumbass computer scientists like me, at one end of each QUIPU unit there’s a connector where you can jack in a plain old Ethernet cable, and from that point onwards it just looks like a traditional computer, albeit a really fast and weird one, to the outside world. All of the cables from all of the QUIPUs (as of this writing, 128 of them—soon to be 256) feed into the Chronotron itself which, never mind what people say about it, is JUST A BIG OLD COMPUTING CLUSTER that happens to be tied in to a lot of historical databases, etc. Which is more my speed.

  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.

  —IF YOU ARE ABOUT TO BE IN A SWORDFIGHT—

  This comes up a lot and I am working on upgrading the relevant wiki pages, but people seem to end up here anyway LOL.

  My basic advice: DON’T DO IT! It is ridiculously, fantastically dangerous. Modern people are calibrated for a whole different level of danger acceptance.

  Admittedly, an unfortunate precedent was set by Tristan’s getting into a rapier-vs.-backsword duel in DTAP 1601 LONDON. This is fully documented in the relevant after-action reports, which, as our roster of DOers has expanded to include others in the “Fighter” class, have achieved somewhat legendary status within DODO. But this IN NO WAY suggests that swordfighting works as a standard operating procedure.

  If you’re in the process of getting “trained up” to carry out a specific DEDE (Direct Engagement for Diachronic Effect), you’ll know that each DTAP has a highly localized weapons environment. What is true in one DTAP might not be the case in another that is fifty years or fifty miles away from it.

  So, you have to start by knowing exactly what weapon type(s) can be carried by an individual of your assumed social class in your DTAP without freaking people out.

  Since you’re going back naked, you’ll have to score weapons after arriving. If you’re fortunate enough to be visiting a well-established node in DODO’s witch network, there may be some weapons waiting for you there. In my copious spare time LOL I plan to visit those DTAPs to inspect the available weapons with the modern eye of a trained metallurgist and to check them for fatal flaws. But, never mind what you’ve seen on the History Channel, these people really didn’t know dick about steel and so most of it is crap, and likely to break at the worst possible time.

  If you are “breaking trail” in a new DTAP, then once you have evaded pursuit and stolen some clothes, you’ll have to acquire your weapons in whatever way you can (“proceeding adaptively” LOL). This means evaluating them through visual inspection and, if possible, by subjecting them to certain simple tests which I can explain to you—eventually I’ll document these on the wiki.

  Assuming you have a good sword, you’ll have to know how to fight with it. Which starts by defending yourself from the other guy. Which means you have to know how he fights. Which means learning the martial arts techniques prevailing in your DTAP. One day, I hope we’ll have a vast library of every known historical swordfighting system, but as with so many other things at DODO we are just getting started—just scratching the surface. Here’s what we are currently sort of good at:

  - Late medieval backsword (a personal fave)

  - Italian rapier

  - Medieval longsword

  Come and talk to me if you really think you need training/instruction in these. In the meantime, it helps if you’re in some kind of decent physical condition and you know where your body is in space—we’ve had good luck with wrestlers, circus acrobats, gymnasts, and dancers. People who spend all day looking at pixels, not so good.

  Stay tuned on ODIN for more relevant pages as I have time to write ’em!

  Peace out

  Mortimer

  DODO WHITE PAPER

  BRIEF NOTES ON “WENDING”

  (formerly, “super-witches”)

  BY REBECCA EAST-ODA

  Submitted to ODIN archive, Day 580

  (Note to readers: Please consider this a temporary placeholder in lieu of a more thoroughly researched document to follow. I am feeling an urgency to head off the increasing use of the term “super-witch” and replace it with a more reasoned approach. —REO)

  KCWs Fitch (colonial Boston) and Gráinne (Elizabethan London), while employing similar techniques in most respects, exhibited a marked difference in their understanding and utilization of Strands.

  As best as we can make out, Goody Fitch had a general knowledge that multiple Strands existed, sufficient for her to conduct practical magical operations.

  Gráinne, by contrast, appears to have had an additional ability that Goody Fitch didn’t (and perhaps couldn’t even have imagined). Namely, she had the ability to shift her stream of consciousness from one Strand to another, effectively inhabiting different versions of her body on different Strands. Gráinne jumped “sideways” from one to another as it suited her purposes. In this manner she was able to encounter and re-encounter Tristan on different Strands and thereby to collaborate more mindfully and effectively with him as he repeated the same DEDE.

  “Wending” is a term used by Gráinne to describe this behavior.

  Erszebet seems to be somewhere in between Fitch and Gráinne. She understands the concept of Wending and can speak about it, but seems to consider it a little beyond the pale of normal magical practice. Further conversations will be needed to better understand her misgivings on the topic. I can think of two possible explanations: (1) it is somehow dangerous or disagreeable, so Erszebet doesn’t want to d
o it, or (2) Erszebet simply lacks the required degree of magical power and skill; understandable given she came of age as magic was waning.

  The second hypothesis has led some within DODO to posit the idea that Gráinne is a “super-witch” with a degree of magical power that places her head and shoulders above other witches.

  The “super-witch” concept is now beginning to influence DODO’s planning process, as some members of the staff have begun looking for others of this type. It is supposed, for example, that Winnifred Dutton (1562 Antwerp) may be another “super-witch.”

  The purpose of this document is to discourage further use of the “super-witch” idea for which we really have no firm evidence yet, and instead request that DODO staff use the terminology “Wending” to describe the specific behavior we want. The ability to Wend will undoubtedly make a Known Compliant Witch (KCW) a more effective collaborator, and so let us seek out KCWs who know how to do it, rather than making the “super-witch” distinction which is not supported by evidence and which is pejorative to Erszebet Karpathy—the one witch we actually have to work with in the present day.