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

Neal Stephenson and Nicole Galland wrote a cute time-travel book where the bad guys are inept and conniving department bosses. The highlight is definitely The Lay of Walmart, a long 14th-century narrative poem about a Walmart raid. I have a number of quibbles by the end of book; chiefly, I find Grainne's plan to bring magic back opaque and unconvincing.

• “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.”
• 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.”
• WE WAITED A couple of days for my leg to heal, and then Erszebet sent me back again. And then she sent me back again. And then again and again and again. 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.
• the tiring-house was. “How is it anti-Irish?” Tristan asked. “The villain is a Catholic friar,” I pointed out. “He being a meddling busy-body who traffics in poison—he’s the reason it’s a tragedy and not a comedy, and everyone knows Catholic is code for Irish.” “Aren’t the French Catholic?” asked Tristan. “And the Spanish?” “The friar’s name is Lawrence,” I countered, as I pulled him along. “So obviously named after St. Labhrás. He was martyred by drinking a poison of his own concocting. The whole play is just a coded insult to the Irish, a demonstration of how amoral we supposedly are.
• And the fact is that in all of your dozens of diachronic transport insertions, which have taken weeks to accomplish and have generated operating costs now far exceeding your allowed budget, you have found a total of three potential but unauthorized Assets in two DTAPS, without any confirmed achievement toward actually securing the monetizable artifact by liquidation of the blocking factor. MS: You mean we still haven’t yet secured the psalm book by preventing the maple syrup boiler. LH: Isn’t that what I just said?
• For an endless moment her eyes flicked between the passport and Les Holgate’s face, whilst her other hand continued to press down on the British Airways itinerary. Some fathomless gulf inside of her survived a change of moral tides, and then with a look of genuine pain on her face, she released her grip on the passport and crumpled the British Airways page into a ball, hurling it away from the table.
• We see traces of it in the everyday glamour that accompanies our spells. But isn’t lomadh compared to glamour what the firing of a cannon is compared to a wee candle flame? There are certain changes that must not be made through magic, and while this is true—has always been true—with even the most benign of entertainments, it is far more true and far more dire with Sending, for then you’ve put one person in a place where they don’t know the way of things, and are like to make some dreadful change, and it takes an áireamhán plus common sense to guard against. When the worlds cannot bear the weight of one Strand suddenly altering that abruptly from the others, it is lomadh, as if you’ve snapped off a twig upon a hearth broom: it is broken, gone, and cannot be redeemed. So it was that moment.
• Impossible monstrosities their bodies became, like two-headed calves you sometimes see stillborn at home (not among Your Grace’s cattle but often enough around Lough Swilly or Killybegs), and then out of that impossibility, decaying like rotten fish in sunlight, flesh coming off so quickly it fizzed and sprayed, and those it sprayed on caught it like leprosy and went down to fates of the same nature. A mercy it was that flames consumed what remained.
• Milady, never have I believed in the priest’s tales of Hell, discounting it all as a load of bollocks. But if the lomadh has occurred in other times and places, surely it explains where stories of Hell originated. Any soul unversed in magic, who wasn’t knowing the true nature of what they witnessed, would try to explain what Tristan and I saw by claiming that the mouth of Hell itself had, for a moment, opened upon this mortal coil.
• For these reasons, witches think of Sending and Homing as asymmetrical, and fundamentally different, spells. Sending is much more difficult, first of all because it entails more advance prep work if it is not to produce a random result, and secondly because it means working against the natural flow of time.
• When the same DOer is Homed, it is as if their connection to the DTAP is simply severed by the Homing witch. The “rubber band” yanks the DOer unerringly back to the ODEC from which they were Sent. Indeed, if this were not the case, diachronic operations would not be possible at all. In the case of Dr. Stokes’s colonial Boston DEDE, how could KCW Fitch possibly have returned Dr. Stokes to the ODEC in modern-day Boston—a time, place, and environment beyond her imagining—if not for this “snap-back” effect?
• Compressing mission time by returning the DOer to an earlier moment is, therefore, not simply a matter of using the Homing spell in a different way—turning the knobs to different settings, as it were. It would require a different spell altogether. And the witch performing it would have to have some prior familiarity with the future DTAP in order to “aim” the DOer in the correct “direction.”
• doesn’t Sir Francis love to debate with the nature of the universe, in ways that seem like conversations witches might have with each other, if witches were wont to waste their time putting into words things which go without saying. There are no witches in their discourses and indeed no women at all! Like a bunch of turtles trying to discuss flight, they remind me of, and not getting all of it correct, neither.
• none of us could possibly know how to behave appropriately with the new witches. She maintained all of her charismatic narcissistic bitchiness prepossessing fierceness, but she became, in effect, the Den Mother of Weird Sisters.
• It became increasingly obvious that Dr. Cornelius Rudge, who’d been in on the project from the beginning, had deep connections to the Fuggers, and was basically serving as their man on the inside.
• The Fourth Crusade was an epic clusterfuck a comic-opera misadventure a tragic saga with farcical elements. It never even reached its intended target in the Holy Land. Instead the Crusaders—Catholics from Western Europe—invaded the Byzantine Empire, which was a Christian land, and sacked Constantinople.
• we planned out a long interrelated series of DEDEs. Any one of these would seem innocuous unto itself—stealing a pitchfork in some small town in the Urals, digging a trench in the city of Zara, moving a sleeping dog from a hut in a back alley in Budapest to another hut fifty feet away. Collectively, these slight alterations pushed our agenda, shifted the quantum tendencies of reality to allow us to form what we ultimately desired: that Catholicism would spread its wings over more of Christendom, and the Orthodox Church over less of it.
• Catholicism unchecked would mean disaster for both the colonizing of North America and the development of science, and so every bit of strengthening that happened on the church’s eastern flank had to be offset on its northwestern one, to maintain within Europe the tensions and conflicts that would lead to a successful Protestant Reformation.
• 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.
• Even if Tristan smacked the burglar with the oar on only a single Strand, it’s possible that storytellers in other, nearby Strands were able to sense it or perceive it and tell the story in a compelling, convincing way. From there, the story could propagate to other Strands—including ours, where just this morning I found an entry on St. Tristan of Dintagel in Alban Butler’s original (1759) edition of Lives of the Saints,
• Two Greek soldiers ran right up to the Crusader army, grabbed a lord, slashed him across the face, and began to drag him back toward the tower, but one of his knights went after him and hacked the heads off both of the Greeks, and brought the lord back to the safety of the crusading army. The whole thing happened in about thirty seconds. That shifted everything—suddenly the Crusaders rose to the occasion, cheering and catcalling, and Christ, talk about a counterattack. None of our men had horses, and most of them were conscripted—they didn’t want to be there, they had essentially no military training. So as soon as things got really heated, they deserted their stations. Some of them ran down to the harbor chain to try to pull themselves across the Golden Horn on it—it could take the weight, those links were nearly as big as I am—but the Crusader archers picked them off easily. Remember, there’s a quarter of a million people watching this for their morning entertainment. It was surreal.
• Halfdan recited: “Vexing my vision, many marvels. Ignoring them, I wait. Ingibjörg sends more. In the meantime, knives from Storolf, Axes and hammers from Brand, harden my hand. “All told, my band is four. My companions three Are Thorolf, Bild, and Glama. Travel to the tenth cairn. Turn to the left. Toys stacked to the ceiling. Do not let them beguile the eye.
• In turn, each told the tale, written by Tóki, Foretelling the future of what was to come, The doom to descend on the Fatlanders’ storehouse, What deeds each warrior would do, and when. Under the awning of the longship, idle till now, Ingibjörg waited, sipping stew of spotted mushrooms, Eyes lazy, but half in this world, Fingers fondling her broom-twigs. Magnus met her there, sharing the shade, Smelling the scent of eldritch herbs, Gathered round the gunwales, we felt the glamour. Ingibjörg had Sent him, sticks thrown, die cast.
• TL;DR Magnus hijacked the ATTO, the Fuggers hijacked it from Magnus, and now we have hijacked it from the Fuggers. As long as Felix and I keep it powered down, people can’t be Sent to it.