The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O.

“What if I told you we had more than a thousand such documents. All eras, from six continents.”

“All bearing this family crest?” I asked, pointing to the blurry stamp.

“That is the core of the collection. Others we collected on our own.”

“Well, that would challenge certain assumptions about the nature of reality that I did not even know I had.”

“We want you to translate all of them and extract the common core of data,” said Tristan.

I looked at him. “I assume there’s a military purpose.”

“Classified,” he said.

“If I have a context for translating, I can do a better job of it,” I protested.

“My shadowy government entity has been collecting documents of this nature for many years.”

“By what means?” I sputtered, both fascinated and dismayed to learn that a well-funded black ops organization was competing against academic researchers in such a manner. That sure explained a few things.

“The core of the collection, as you’ve been noticing, is from a private library in Italy.”

“The WIMF.”

“Beg pardon?”

“The Weird Italian Mother Fucker,” I said.

“Yeah. We acquired it some time ago.” His face twitched and he broke eye contact. “That’s not true. I was just being polite. We stole it. Before other people could steal it. Long story. Anyway, it gave us plenty of leads that we could follow to acquire more in the same vein. By all means fair and foul. We now feel we have a critical mass that, upon translation, might yield a sense of what precisely ‘magic’ was, how it worked, and why there are no references to it anywhere after the mid-1800s.”

“And you wish to have this information for some kind of military purpose,” I pressed.

“We wish to have one person do all the translations,” Tristan said, firmly not answering my query. “For three reasons. First, budget. Second, the fewer eyes, the safer. Third and most important, if the same person processes all the material, there is a greater chance of gleaning subtle consistencies or patterns.”

“And you are interested in those consistencies or patterns why, exactly?”

“The current hypothesis,” Tristan continued as before—that is, without actually answering me—“is that perhaps there was a worldwide epidemic of a virus that affected only witches, and magic was literally killed off. I don’t think that’s it, but I need to know more before I offer an alternate hypothesis. I have my suspicions, though.”

“Which are classified, right?”

“Whether or not they are classified is classified.”

The documents were many, but brief; most were fragmentary. Within three weeks, working alone at my coffee table, I had produced at least rough translations of the first batch of material. During that time I also gave notice, apologized to my students for abandoning them before they’d even gotten to know me, moved out of my Harvard office, and managed to reassure my parents that I was still working, without telling them exactly what it was I was doing. Meanwhile, Tristan was in communication with me at least twice a day, usually appearing in person, occasionally calling and talking to me in the most oblique terms. Never did we email or text; he did not want anything said between us to be on record. There was something rather swashbuckling, if unsettling, about the need for such secrecy. I had no idea what he did with the rest of his time. (Naturally, I asked. You can guess what his answer was.)

Our dynamic was singular, unprecedented in my life certainly. It was as if we had always been working together, and yet there was an undercurrent of something else, a kind of charge that only comes at the beginning of things. Neither of us ever acted on it—and while I am the sort who rarely acts on such things, he is (while extremely disciplined and upright) the sort who immediately acts on such things. So I attributed the buzz to the excitement of a shared endeavor. The intellectual intimacy of it was far more satisfying than any date I’d ever been on. If Tristan had a lover, she wasn’t getting the real goods. I was.

At the end of the three weeks, when he came to my apartment to receive the last (or so I innocently thought) of my translations, Tristan glanced around until he saw my coatrack. He studied it a moment, then took my raincoat off of its peg. It was late September by this point and the weather was starting to turn.

“Come on, we’re going to talk at the office,” he said. “I’ll buy you dinner.”

“There’s an office?” I said. “I assumed your shadowy government entity had you working out of your car.”

“It’s near Central Square. Carlton Street, about fifteen minutes’ walk from the Apostolic Café. How’s Chinese sound?”

“Depends on the dialect.”

“Ha,” he said without smiling. “Linguist humor. Pretty lame, Stokes.” He held my coat out. I reached for it. He shook his head and glanced down at it. Giving me to understand that he was not handing it to me, but offering to help me put it on—a gesture much more common in 1851 London than it was in that time and place. Some low-grade physical comedy ensued as I turned my back on him and tried to find the armholes with my hands. What a weirdo.

Carlton Street was the poor stepchild in an extended family of alleys and byways near MIT, where scores of biotech companies fledged. Most of the neighborhood had been rebranded into slick office complexes, with landscaped parks, mini-campuses, double-helix-themed architectural flourishes, and abstract steel sculptures abounding. Tristan’s building, however, had not yet been reclaimed. It was utterly without character: a block-long two-story mid-twentieth-century building thrown together of tilt-up concrete slabs painted a dingy grey that somehow managed to clash with the sidewalk. There were a few graffiti tags. The windows were without adornment, all of them outfitted with vertical vinyl blinds, all dusty and askew. There was no roster of tenants, no signs or logos, no indication at all of what was within.

Laden with bags of Chinese food and beer, we approached the glass entrance door at dusk. This building was one of the few places on earth that not even twilight could improve upon. Tristan slapped his wallet against a black plate set into the wall, and the door lock clicked, releasing. Inside, we moved between buzzing fluorescent lights and matted industrial carpeting, down a corridor past several windowless doors—slabs of wood, dirty around the knobs, blazoned with signs bearing names of what I assumed were tech start-ups. Some of these had actual logos, some just cutesy names printed in block letters, and one was just a domain name scrawled on a sticky note. We walked the entire length of the building and came to a door next to a stairwell. Its only distinguishing feature was a crude Magic Marker drawing of a bird, seen in profile, drawn on the back of a Chinese menu blue-taped to the wood. The bird was somewhat comical, with a prominent beak and big feet.

“Dodo?” I guessed.

Tristan made no answer. He was unlocking the door.

“I’ll take that as a yes—you’d have jumped all over me if I’d guessed the wrong species.”

He gave me an inscrutable raised-eyebrow look over his shoulder as he pushed the door open and reached for the light switch. “You have a gift for caricature,” I told him as I followed him in.

“DODO welcomes you,” he said.

“Department of . . . something?”

“Of something classified.”

The room was at most ten feet by fifteen feet. Two desks were shoved into opposite corners, each with a flat-panel monitor and keyboard. The walls were lined with an assortment of used IKEA bookshelves that I suspected he’d pulled out of Dumpsters a few weeks ago, and a couple of tall skinny safes of the type used to store rifles and shotguns. Perched on top of these were military-looking souvenirs that I assumed dated from some earlier phase of Tristan’s career. The shelves were filled with ancient books and artifacts I recognized very well. In the middle of the room was a long table. Beneath it was a bedroll: just a yoga mat wrapped around a pillow and secured with a bungee cord.

I pointed at the bedroll. “How long have you—”

“I shower at the gym if that’s your worry.” He pointed to the closer of the two desks, by the door. “This one will be yours.”

“Oh,” I said, not sure what else to say. “Do you have . . . guns in here?”

“Would that be a problem for you?” he inquired, setting the Chinese food on the table in the middle. “If so, I need to know sooner rather than later because—”

“How much firepower were you expecting to need?”

“Oh, you noticed the gun safes?” he asked, tracking my gaze. “No.” he turned to one of them and punched a series of digits onto the keypad on its front. It beeped, and he swung the door open to reveal that it was stuffed from top to bottom with documents. “I keep the most sensitive material in these.”

My gaze had wandered to my desk. I was looking at the flat-panel display, which was showing a few lines of green text on a black background, and a blinking cursor where it was apparently expecting me to type something in. “Where did you get these computers? A garage sale from 1975?”

“They are running a secure operating system you’ve never heard of,” he explained. “It’s called Shiny Hat.”

“Shiny Hat.”

“Yes. The most clinically paranoid operating system in the world. Since you have an overdeveloped sense of irony, Stokes, you might like to know that we acquired it from hackers who were specifically worried about being eavesdropped on by shadowy government entities. Now they work for us.”

“Have they got the memo about the invention of the computer mouse? Because I don’t see one on my desk.”

“Graphical user interfaces introduce security holes that can be exploited by black hat hackers. Shiny Hat is safe against that kind of malware, but the user interface is . . . spartan. I’ll bring you up to speed.”

His desk was crowded with copies of everything I had been translating for him over the past weeks. My notes were marked up with colored-pencil notes of his own. He transferred some of those to the central table while I set up the Chinese food. He read over my day’s work as we ate.

Then we reviewed all the material to date. It took us until sunrise.

In all the documents I’d deciphered, there was almost no useful information to be gleaned regarding the “how” of magic, which is what I assumed Tristan’s bosses had been hoping for. We discovered some examples of magic, in that we learned what was valued by both the witches themselves and those who employed them. Of highest value was what Tristan called psy-ops (psychological operations—mind control, essentially) and shape-shifting (themselves or others). This was considered a weapon of considerable significance, whether it meant turning oneself into a lion or turning an enemy into a lower form of life. In homage to Monty Python, we employed “newt” as shorthand. Of middling value was the transubstantiation of materials and the animating of inanimate objects. Of low value was space/time-shifting, such as teleportation, which was viewed as a laborious leisure-time diversion across all witch populations. Much of what I had associated with “magic” in my bookish youth was disappointingly absent—there were few references to the mastering of natural forces, for instance. And there was absolutely nothing about the mechanics of making any of it happen.

We did, however, glean something significant about magic’s decline, and this is what led to our next stage of inquiry.

Diachronicle

DAYS 57–221 (WINTER, YEAR 0)

In which Tristan determines to fix magic

AT DAWN, TRISTAN DROVE ME home to collect my library, which had been taking up a significant section of my living room since I’d moved out of my faculty office. He plied me with coffee and croissants until I felt able to start a new day without having completed the previous one. Back at the office, he smiled broadly and presented me with the combination to one of the gun safes. It was full of photocopies of manuscripts, documents, and artifacts I had not yet seen. “At the rate you’ve been working, this box will probably take you about a month.”

“I had no idea there was this much still to do,” I said.

He was pulling documents out of the safe, arranging them on the table. “Why would I hire you for a six-month contract if I only had one month’s work for you? There’s a lot more where this came from. But it should be easier now that we’ve sketched out the general picture. You know what you’re looking for now.”

“I still don’t know why I’m looking for it,” I said.

“You know that’s classified,” he said, almost paternal. “Have a seat. Want some more coffee? Working on a shoestring budget here, but I can spring for Dunkin’ Donuts.”

“DODO,” I said. “Department of . . . Donuts?”

“Do you like sprinkles?” he asked.

While he got donuts, I unpacked my dictionaries and lexica and got to work.

IF MY TRANSLATIONS were to be believed, at the start of the Scientific Revolution (Copernicus in the 1540s, etc.), magic was a ubiquitous and powerful force in human affairs, and witches were both revered and feared members of most societies every bit as much as military leaders or priest-mystics (although they were rarely written about, their work being so often the equivalent of “classified”). However, once the Renaissance gave way to the Enlightenment, magic became less omnipresent and less powerful, especially in institutions of learning and government. Judging by the hundreds of references in the texts, it paled increasingly through the Industrial Revolution—remaining most potent in artistic circles and least potent in philosophical ones (these two populations diverging after many generations of entwining), more potent in societies not blessed with booming industrialization, and slightly more potent too in Islamic cultures—and then it vanished altogether in the nineteenth century. The latest text was dated from July 1851. DODO had not been able to find any references to magic after that, except as something that “once was but is no more.”

I translated the box of photocopied documents in less time than Tristan had anticipated, but there was no letup. I began to dream in dead languages as ancient books, scrolls, and tablets kept coming, delivered to the drab office building almost every morning by unidentified couriers in unmarked vehicles. Department of—Dusty Objects? There were plenty of documents in English or modern Western languages—mostly these were transcripts of early anthropologists interviewing the elders of indigenous peoples. I translated the ones that Tristan couldn’t read for himself, and he built a database. Reader, if you don’t know what a database is, rest assured that an explanation of the concept would in no way increase your enjoyment in reading this account. If you do know, you will thank me for sparing you the details. A dreary enough task even with modern user interfaces, it was a mind-numbing death march when implemented on Shiny Hat. Tristan had to write little computer programs to automate some of the data entry tasks.

One of the things we kept track of was the provenance of each document: Had it come from the Library of Congress? Was it simply downloaded from the Internet? Or was it a rare, perhaps unique original? Did it bear any stamps or markings from library collections? In that vein, a disproportionate number had that mysterious stamp on the title page, an image I’d come to know well: the coat of arms of some aristocratic family, with extra bits of decorative gingerbread all around it. Lacking any other information, I just entered this into the database with the code WIMF. Quite a few of the WIMF documents bore older stamps from no less than the Vatican Library, raising the question of whether the WIMF had stolen them? Or borrowed them and never brought them back? Tristan wasn’t talking.

Almost as fast as they could be translated, more books showed up. We would empty out a new crate and then fill it right up again with books that had already been translated, and the bland couriers would haul them away. To where? Many of the boxes were stenciled with a logo I did not recognize at the time, but which I now know to be a modernized, streamlined version of the brand used since time immemorial by the banking family known as the Fuggers.

This phase ate up most of my six-month contract, as a fierce New England winter yielded muddily to spring. Other tenants in the building—scruffy start-up companies, mostly—failed or got funded and moved out. Whenever they did, Tristan made a couple of phone calls and ended up with a key to the space they’d just vacated. In this way, DODO’s footprint in the building expanded. We inherited cheap plastic chairs, duffed-up coffeemakers, and crumpled filing cabinets from the former neighbors. Clean-cut technicians showed up in unmarked cars and put card readers on all the doors, expanding and sealing what Tristan called “the perimeter.” The database grew like a dust bunny under the bed. Tristan thought of ways to query it, to search for patterns. We printed things out, stuck them to the walls, tore them down and did it again, stretched colored yarn between pushpins. We went down blind alleys, then backed out of them; we constructed huge Jenga towers of speculation and then, almost gleefully, knocked them over.

But there was never any doubt as to the gist: some manner of cause-and-effect relationship existed between the rise of scientific knowledge and the decline of magic. The two could not comfortably coexist. To the extent that the database could be cajoled into spitting out actual numbers, it was clear that magic had declined gradually but steadily starting in the middle of the 1600s. It was still holding its own in the opening decades of the 1800s, but plunged into a nosedive during the 1830s. From then through the 1840s, magic declined precipitously. As our store of documents—many written by witches themselves—grew to fill a phalanx of used filing cabinets and gun safes that Tristan scored on Craigslist, we were able to track the decline from year to year, and then from month to month. These poor women expressed shock at the dwindling of their powers, in some cases mentioning specific spells that had worked a few weeks ago but no longer had effect.

As it turns out, in 1851—the year in which I find myself as I scribble these words—all of the world’s technologies were brought together for the Great Exhibition at the newly constructed, magnificent Crystal Palace in Hyde Park, London. Tristan’s hypothesis therefore held that this coming together, this conscious concentration of technological advancement all in one point of space-time, had dampened magic to the point where it fizzled out for good. Like a doused fire, it had no power to re-kindle itself once extinguished.

The causal relationship between the two eluded us for a time. I suggested that magic’s flourishing required people to believe in it, but Tristan dismissed this mentality as belonging more to children’s literature than to reality. He was certain there was a mechanical or physical causality, that there was something about the technological worldview, or technology itself, that somehow “jammed the frequencies” magic used. We both began to read whatever we could about the Great Exhibition in the hopes that it might illuminate something.

(You may notice that I was exceeding by far my responsibilities as a translator. Translating, especially of obscure texts written in extinct tongues, often resembles the solving of a riddle. Here was a riddle to put all others to shame! Tristan’s enthusiasm was infectious and I could not divest myself from it. Having no other responsibilities, I became as preoccupied with his project as he was himself.)

Per Tristan’s suggestions, I took out stacks of books from Widener Library (Harvard had not figured out yet that I’d quit—I suppose Blevins wanted to hide the fact lest it reflect poorly on him). These included tomes on everything from heliography to Queen Victoria’s private life to Baruch Spinoza’s sexual proclivities to Frederick Bakewell to the Tempest Prognosticator to Strouhal numbers. I would bring these to Tristan, and we would divide our time between perusing them and Internet searches.

We soon knew more about the Great Exhibition and its thirteen-thousand-odd exhibits than Prince Albert ever did. We knew more about its showcase, the Crystal Palace, than even Joseph Paxton, the gardener who’d designed the fucking blessed thing. We learned little that was helpful. However, one evening in March, as I sat on the consignment-store couch I’d insisted on bringing in to spruce up the place, and Tristan lolled on the rug (provenance ditto) beside a low table with a beer, each of us bleary-eyed from reading, I encountered a passage in an obscure booklet entitled Arresting and Alluring Astronomical Anecdotes, published in 1897. Here I learned that while the Great Exhibition of 1851 was in process (it lasted for several months), an event of relative interest occurred elsewhere in Europe, to be precise, in Königsberg, Prussia: for the first time in history, a solar eclipse was successfully photographed.

I read this statement aloud. It set Tristan on fire with excitement. He had already suspected that photography in particular, of all technological developments, was the likeliest to have somehow impeded magic. Now, somehow, he was certain. It took me a while to calm him down to the point where he could explain himself.

“I’ll be honest with you: as a physicist, I am a hack,” he admitted. “I majored in it, yes, but I was never employed in that capacity. But if you cut me I still bleed physicist blood. I’ll go to my grave believing that, if magic existed, there’s a scientific explanation for it.”

“That sounds like a contradiction to me,” I said, “since our whole working hypothesis is that science broke it somehow.”

He held up a hand. “Work with me here. Have you ever heard of the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics?”

“Only in cocktail party discourse that would make you roll your eyes and heave deep sighs.”

“Well, there are certain experiments where the results only make sense if the system that’s being observed actually exists in more than one state until the moment when the scientist makes the observation.”

“Is this Schrödinger’s cat? Because even I have heard of that.”

“That’s the classic example. It’s just a thought experiment, by the way. No one ever actually did it.”

“That’s good. PETA would be all over them.”

“Do you know what it is?” Without waiting for me to answer, Tristan went on: “You put a cat in a sealed box. There’s a device inside of the box that is capable of killing the cat, by breaking open a vial of poison gas or something. That device is triggered by some random event generator, like a sample of some radioactive material that either decays—producing a bit of radiation—or doesn’t. You close the lid. The cat and the poison gas and the radioactive sample become a sealed system—you cannot predict or know what has happened.”

“You don’t know if the cat is alive or dead,” I said.

“It’s not just that you don’t. You can’t. There is literally no way of knowing,” Tristan said. “Now, in a classical physics way of thinking, it’s either one or the other. The cat is either alive or dead for real. You just don’t happen to know which. But in a quantum physics way of thinking, the cat really is both alive and dead. It exists in two mutually incompatible states at the same time. Not until you open the lid and look inside does the wave function collapse.”

“Whoa, whoa, you had me until the very end!” I protested. “When did we start talking about—what did you call it? A wave function? And how does that—whatever it is—collapse?”

“My bad,” he said. “It’s just physicist lingo for what I was saying. If you were to express the Schrödinger’s cat experiment mathematically, you’d write down an equation that is called a wave function. That function has multiple terms that are superimposed—it’s not just one thing.”

“Multiple terms,” I repeated bleakly.

“Yeah. A term here means a fragment of math—it is to an equation what a phrase is to a sentence.”

“So you’re saying there is one term for ‘cat is alive’ and another for ‘cat is dead’? Is that what you mean in this usage?”

“Yes, O linguist.”

“And when you say they are superimposed—”

“Mathematically it just means that they are sort of added to each other to make a combined picture of the system.”

“Until it ‘collapses’ or whatever.”

He nodded. “Multiple terms superimposed is a quantum thing. It is the essence of quantum mechanics. But there is this interesting fact, which is that that kind of math only works—it only provides an accurate description of the system—until you open the lid and look inside. At that point, you see a live cat or a dead cat. Period. It has become a classical system.”

“Department of . . . Deadly Observations?” I asked.

He rolled his eyes.

“Anyway, that’s what you mean by the collapse of the wave function.”

“Yes, it’s just physicist-speak for the thing that happens when all of the superimposed terms—the descriptions of different possible realities—resolve into a single, classical outcome that our brains can understand.”

“Our scientific, rational brains, you mean,” I corrected him.

A look of mild satisfaction came onto his face. “Exactly.”

“But now we’ve circled back to my theory!” I complained.

He looked mildly confused. “Which theory is that?”

“The one that belongs more to children’s literature than to reality—remember?”

“Oh, yeah. People have to believe in magic.”

“Yes!”

“That’s not exactly what I’m saying,” he said. “Yes, human consciousness is in the loop. But hear me out. If you buy the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, it means that all possible outcomes are really happening somewhere.”

“There’s one world with a live cat and another with a dead cat.”

“Exactly. No kidding. Complete, fully independent realities that are the same except that in one of them, the cat’s dead, and in the other, it’s alive. And the quantum superposition? That just means that the scientist standing there with his hand on the lid of the box is at a fork in the road. Both paths—both worlds—are open to him. He could shunt into one, or the other. And when he hauls the lid open, the decision gets made. He is now in one world or the other and there’s no going back.”

“Okay,” I said. Not in the sense of I agree with you but of I am paying attention.

“The scientist can’t control which path he or she takes,” Tristan continued.

I saw that he was trolling me—waiting for me to pick up the bait.

No, it was more than that. He wanted me to mention a possibility that he could think about, but never say out loud—because he was all Mr. Science.

So I did. “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.”

“But that’s a distinction without a difference.”

“As far as normal observers are concerned? People who haven’t studied quantum physics? Sure,” he agreed.

“Put it however you like,” I said. “A witch may summon the desired effect from a parallel-slash-simultaneous reality. Thus the historical references of witches’ magic as ‘summoning’—that is quite literally what they were doing.”

“My hypothesis,” Tristan said—pronouncing the word with exaggerated care, since he had a few Old Tearsheet Best Bitters in him—“is that photography disables this summoning, as you called it. 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.”

“I get it,” I said. “There is no wiggle room left in which to function magically.”

He nodded. He seemed relieved to have got all of this off his chest. And that I hadn’t laughed him out of the room.

“You’ve been thinking about this for a while,” I said.

He nodded.

“But it wasn’t until we saw the daguerreotype of the solar eclipse that the penny dropped.”

“That’s right.”

“That was only about the bazillionth daguerreotype ever made,” I pointed out. “People had been taking photographs for sixteen years by that point. What’s so special about that one?”

“The scope of it, I think,” Tristan said. “The number of minds, and worlds, affected. If I’m Louis Daguerre screwing around in my lab in Paris, taking pictures of whatever is handy, then I’ve collapsed the waveform, yes. But only inasmuch as it encompasses my brain and a few little objects in my lab. If I show the daguerreotype to my wife or my friend, then the effect—the collapsing of the waveform—spreads to them as well. And we can guess that witches who live in the neighborhood might sense a dampening of their magical abilities, without understanding why. But the total eclipse of the sun on July 28, 1851, was probably witnessed by more human beings than any other event in the history of the world up to that point.”

“Of course,” I said. “Everyone in Europe could see it—”

“Just by looking up into the sky. Hundreds of millions of people, Mel. That event captured more eyeballs, at the same moment, than any Beyoncé video on YouTube. And to the extent that it was frozen, embalmed, on a daguerreotype, well—”