3. Canceled the trip. Mom’s showing up late tonight, we’ll hang out at my place. Too much going on here, and Erszebet gets a little nutty around the holidays.
4. You’re right that Sending a historical forward is different from Homing a DOer back to their “natural” time and place, but Erszebet says it can be done. Especially if the Sending witch has developed familiarity with the ODEC by Homing a lot of people there. We have, as of today, run fifty-five DEDEs in 1200 Constantinople. We have used three different KCWs to Home all of our DOers. One of them (Rachel) has done it thirty-two times and Erszebet feels she has our ODEC strongly dialed in. We should consider it.
—MS
From LTC Lyons:
OMW with the usual. Break out your finest chopsticks!
From Dr. Stokes:
OK but setting a knife and fork for E. She won’t eat otherwise.
—MS
Post by Mortimer Shore on
“General” ODIN channel
DAY 887 (NEW YEAR’S DAY, YEAR 3)
Happy New Year, everyone! I’m still a little buzzed (heh) from the festivities at Oda-sensei and Rebecca’s, but now that we are almost FOUR WHOLE HOURS into the new year I wanted to buckle down to work and send this out.
As we prepare to power up the Chronotron for real (T-minus four days and counting, huzzah), Dr. Oda recommended that I send out some informal layman’s language on What Exactly Is a Chronotron. I’m pretty amped about this (so to speak) and really grateful that I’ve been able to move away from the SysAdmin role (a big hand to the staff who’s running all the stuff I used to manage, especially Gordon Healey, another MIT CS’ist who now gets asked all the questions about email servers, but hey, Gordie, I’m proof this place is all about job growth LOL).
So just a reminder, I’m not qualified to explain WHY this works, because that’s the physics part where I’m a bonehead, but here’s a simplified take on HOW it works:
The Chronotron is based on a theoretical model, which proposes that for the present-day universe that we all live in, there’s not just one past, and not just several alternate pasts, but an infinite number of them. Similarly, this one single present also has an infinite number of possible futures. But 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. If you’re really interested in the details of that, check in with him in his spare time (heh) and he will be happy to expound.
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). They know how to “renormalize” per plausibility quotients, so that irrelevant pasts can be ignored and high-leverage pasts can be zeroed in on. Thanks to all the input from our fine team of in-house historians, it can sort out what leads to what (and what DOESN’T lead to what) with more accuracy than Google directing you to NSFW porn sites.
Diachronicle
DAY 891 (EARLY JANUARY, YEAR 3)
In which the manifestly obvious takes us by surprise
THE CHRONOTRON WAS READY TO be turned on and used for the first time.
During the year and a half that DODO’s R&D division, under Frank Oda, had been developing and testing the Chronotron, the rest of us had been slowly building out the witch network through many DTAPs, and recruiting HOSMAs (Historical Operations Subject Matter Authorities—what any normal person would call professors) for DORC. We hadn’t been conducting full-blown diachronic operations per se, but we’d been laying the groundwork, recruiting new DOers with painstaking care, training them in languages and other skills, Sending them on dry runs to various DTAPs just to break them in.
The ODEC had gone through two complete redesigns. Four copies of that design had been constructed in the basement, with two others roughed in and ready to be finished as soon as there was a need for them. But there was no need, for we still only had a single witch—or, in the jargon of the agency, MUON.
The exact numbers have flown from my memory, but on the day that we booted up the Chronotron, our head count looked something like this:
DORC (of which I was in charge, and, reader, how often does one have the opportunity to say one works for the DORC of DODO?) comprised about twenty full-time HOSMAs, five support staff, and one hundred part-time consultants, all security-checked and sworn to secrecy, not to mention five full-time DORCCAD technicians (this being our Cartographic and Architectural Database). One of the more colorful and active subdepartments was DoVE, the Department of Violence(s) Ethnology, which was responsible for instructing DOers in historical martial arts as well as related skills such as riding, armor, and making improvised weapons. This had expanded far beyond Mortimer Shore’s early training sessions in the park. Under the leadership of Dr. Hilton Fuller, an Ivy League academic with a passion for historical martial arts, it now operated an in-house dojo as well as a larger training and riding center outside of Boston.
C/COD (headed up by Macy Stoll) had a head count of nearly a hundred, many of whom seemed to be busy setting up other DODO facilities around the world. The department had five full-time medical professionals, as well as the usual complement of janitors, HR people, finance, IT, and the like. Its largest single subdepartment was the redundantly named Diachronic Operations Security Operations, under Major Isobel Sloane, who had been recruited “sideways” from a military police unit based in the Middle East. People in the know pronounced it “doe-seck-ops,” but its acronym, DOSECOPS, inevitably led to new hires pronouncing it “dose cops” and referring to individual members—who did actually resemble police officers—by the same name.
R&D (in Frank Oda’s purview) was the smallest department, some dozen computer scientists and physicists, a few programmers, and an administrator. Until this point it had worked on the Chronotron to the exclusion of all else, but Frank had some other ideas he was itching to work on.