Finally there was Diachronic Operations, under Tristan. This was the unit that employed all of the actual DOers and Sent them on missions. By this point I think we had about twenty DOers who were “good to go”—fully trained and checked out—plus a dozen more in the pipeline. More than half of them were Fighters or Striders. Those classes were easier to recruit, in a sense, because the military’s Special Forces units had already done the work for us of combing through the entire population and picking out the ones who were suited for the job. We just had to sift through their personnel records looking for ones with the right combination of good teeth and unusual language aptitude. Lovers, Closers, Spies, Sages, and the rest were under-represented simply because finding them was harder. But we had a few of them in each category—enough, we felt, to “make a dent in the universe” once the Chronotron came online and started telling us what we should actually do with them.
All told—once General Frink’s entourage from DC had been bundled in—some two hundred people were present at the ceremony where we booted up the Chronotron. And, by extension, the Department of Diachronic Operations in its fully operational form. It was An Event—the sort of thing Macy Stoll excelled at organizing. Erszebet persuaded me to get a haircut and borrow one of her skirts. Tristan wore his dress uniform. Frank Oda put on a suit, then threw a white lab coat over it to conceal some moth holes that he didn’t notice until he put it on. Even Mortimer found a necktie and a pair of leather shoes.
Merely getting all of those people into the building without causing a public spectacle required some planning. We were still operating out of the same dingy, nondescript industrial building in Cambridge. Outwardly this hadn’t changed at all; it still sported the same graffiti tags and vinyl window shades as when I’d first seen it two and a half years ago. People in the neighborhood, when they noticed it at all, shook their heads and wondered when some real estate developer would snap it up and turn it into a high-tech office building. To hide the fact that more than a hundred people were going in and out of it every day, Macy’s facilities team had built half a dozen secret entrances connected to neighboring structures by tunnels. We were about a block away from the river and so we also made use of some utility passages connecting to public works facilities in the green belt. When General Frink arrived, he was in the backseat of a small SUV that was completely nondescript save for the fact that its rear windows were darkened, lest some pedestrian at a stoplight look in and recognize the face of the Director of National Intelligence.
The Chronotron itself was not physically that large, but the space in which Frank and his team had built it was obstructed and complicated by the requirements of ventilation and power. Between the ODECs in the basement, which still had to be jacketed in liquid helium, and the QUIPUs on the second floor, which also ran at super-cold temperatures, this building was one of the largest cryogenic facilities in New England. A large fraction of its interior volume was set aside for tankage, insulation, ducting, and safety equipment.
Consequently, we didn’t have anything like enough room for two hundred people in the actual Chronotron room, which was up on the second floor. The only people physically present were General Frink, Dr. Rudge, a few of their top aides, Blevins, the department heads—including yours truly, as the head of DORC—and some of Frank’s senior geeks. Everyone else watched it from their offices or the cafeteria via live stream.
We’d actually had a small celebration of our own at the Odas’ beforehand—just the original quintet, plus Mortimer Shore, of whom both Odas were very fond. By unspoken agreement we had always shielded Mortimer from too much information about DODO’s high-level political dysfunction, though I often wondered if he used his sysadmin privileges to eavesdrop on some of our internal disputes. On this particular morning, as I looked at his beaming face, it didn’t seem likely. Mortimer just thought it was cool that the big kids had invited him into the sandbox.
Then we’d all piled into Frank’s Volvo and gone to the office. General Frink showed up twenty minutes later, right on schedule, and toured the facility with Blevins at his elbow, ending up in the Chronotron control room where there was a great deal of fuss over the powering-on and the booting-up of the machine. As we had actually been beta-testing it for several weeks, this was largely ceremonial, but Oda-sensei still looked flushed with pleasure and I did not begrudge him the moment. He “switched on” the Chronotron. Actually it had been on more often than it had been off over the past several weeks. And it was in fact already running, so all he was really doing was turning on a fancy workstation that was connected to it. But that’s ceremony for you. As a grid of flat-panel screens came alive with scrolling text windows and dancing infographics, everyone clapped and some of the coders hooted. Frink congratulated Oda-sensei heartily, Blevins almost as heartily, and then Tristan, Erszebet, and myself with little more than civil courtesy. We were getting used to this, although in truth it pissed me off saddened me.
Adjacent to the control room proper was a secure conference room, equipped with all manner of screens and VR and AR displays, where the results of its analyses could be reviewed and cross-correlated with maps, historical timelines, and diagrams of DODO’s network of safe houses and KCWs. We filed into it once the Chronotron had been turned on, and received a briefing from Blevins on the projected first few months of DODO’s operations. These focused on what we were calling the Constantinople Theater.
The Constantinople Theater was a broad canvas of safe houses and planned DEDEs, all having to do with limiting Russia’s power in the Balkans and the Black Sea. This was not to be done in an invasive manner that would alter any of that area’s endlessly turbulent history, but in a subtle way to ensure a lack of Russian hegemony in the future. This included, of course, massaging the boundaries of the East/West schism of the church. But there was far more to it than that. Hundreds of discrete DEDEs were encompassed in this plan. We did not yet have all the resources required to accomplish them. But we knew what the first four or five gambits were supposed to be, and so today, we would move en masse directly from the Chronotron down to ODEC Row to send Tristan off on the first one.
I say “supposed to be” because Robert Burns was right on the money about best-laid plans.
As if in a medieval street festival, our clutch of officials, aides, geeks, and department heads followed Blevins, Rudge, and Frink down the hallway and staircase to the basement, and were joined along the way by additional historians, DOers, office workers, and techies emerging from the spaces where they had been watching the live stream. The basement level had room to accommodate a few more spectators. Erszebet, decked out as only she could deck herself out, awaited us.