In a daze, I wandered over to the reconstructed Medieval Court, which I alone of all those tens of thousands knew from personal experience to be a hack job abounding in solecisms. The good doctor and his wife collected me and brought me home, expressing great concern that I seemed so exhausted by the outing, and declaring that for the next week or two I must have bedrest or the equivalent. They do not perceive themselves as keeping me a prisoner. Indeed, they believe themselves to be nothing but my benefactors. They were very willing to bring me all the paper and ink I could ask for, although they had no idea I would ask for as much as all this.
For when I returned from the meeting with Erszebet, I realized I must make an accounting of everything, as there shall never otherwise be any record of it. Tristan, I suspect, must also be lost now too, and he is not the sort who would stop to record a narrative like this. So this is all that will ever remain of us.
I shall now take this sheaf of papers to the Fugger Bank on Threadneedle Street and deposit it in a safety deposit box. I have lost all hope of returning to my own time.
And so, dear reader, with these words, as the ink dries, I disappear.
Journal Entry of
Rebecca East-Oda
DECEMBER 6
Nothing good to report. Yesterday—or was it the day before?—realized, while eating Chinese take-out, that a week had passed since the events in the Walmart. Frank, Tristan, Mortimer, and the others have scarcely ventured out of the house during that time, except to run to the hardware store for parts, or farther afield to collect obscure ODEC components from various scientific and industrial supply houses. These are being assembled into a contraption that has taken over half of the cellar. For a while it seemed that this was coming together quickly, and morale was high as the big components were being hammered and welded together with impressive speed. Meanwhile Julie (on her motorcycle) and Felix (in his SUV) kept making runs to the Amazon Locker over by MIT to collect packages of various sizes containing electronics that Mortimer has been incorporating into the “server rack” taking over my pantry. A bundle of cables as thick as my waist now snakes from there down the dumbwaiter shaft into the cellar where it is connected to various devices built into the walls of the ODEC.
So the physical changes are impressive. This had gulled me into thinking that actual progress was being made toward getting Mel back home. But last night, just before he turned in, Frank broke the news to me that the entire project is futile unless he can get his hands on a larger quantity of high-temperature superconductors. He already had some samples on hand, which have been incorporated into the device, but he needs ten times as much of the stuff in order to make an ODEC large enough to accommodate a person.
All of the work that the crew have been doing since Black Friday has been in the hope that these materials could be obtained. Only two companies in the world manufacture them. One is in China and has been slow to deal with. Julie, who is fluent in Mandarin, has spent many hours on the phone with them trying to cajole them into overnight-shipping some samples, but they see us as too small a customer to be worth bothering with. The other possible source is right here in the Boston area—they are on Route 128 in Waltham, so only a few miles away—and Frank had high hopes that they would supply what he needs until yesterday, when his order ran afoul of some kind of internal roadblock within the company. I suspect some kind of meddling by Blevins.
Post by Mortimer Shore on
“New ODEC” GRIMNIR channel
DAY 1957 (7 DECEMBER, YEAR 5)
Hey all, I could just walk upstairs and deliver this news in person but I’m too tired to stand up and I know people are sleeping.
Breaking news: if you check out a couple of these links from this morning’s Wall Street Journal and some other biz sites you will see that we have just been Pearl Harbored as far as getting what we need to finish the new ODEC. TC Materials Science Group—our erstwhile friends out in Waltham—have just been purchased lock, stock, and barrel by a hedge fund operating out of lower Manhattan. This explains why they suddenly clammed up a couple of days ago and stopped processing our order.
So as you might expect I have been learning whatever I can about said hedge fund.
We have all been assuming that Blevins had something to do with our recent difficulties in getting these supercons. That might be the case with the company in Shenzhen, which is a big DODO supplier, but what’s happening today seems unrelated. There is another player, apparently.
This hedge fund has also recently taken big positions in a number of mining companies operating in Mongolia, Congo, and Bolivia, which are the only places to get the rare earths and other unusual minerals needed to manufacture the high-temp superconductors we need.
So it would appear that someone with a lot of money is making a concerted effort to corner the world market on exactly the stuff we need in order to conduct diachronic operations, or for that matter magic of any kind.
I have a few feelers out to friends of mine in the “gray hat” world who I was not allowed to have contact with when I was a U.S. government employee. They might be able to dig up more.
Follow-up from Mortimer Shore, four hours later:
I have heard back from a friend of mine who got scared straight a couple of years ago and ended up working as a programmer for a Wall Street quant fund. He knows his way around the financial systems.
It’s a big data dump, but the bottom line seems to be that our adversary in this case is not Blevins or DODO.
It’s the Fugger Bank.
Reply from Tristan Lyons:
Makes me wonder about the disappearance of the ATTO from the Walmart. We assumed that was Magnus’s work . . . but who knows?
ENTRY FROM PERSONAL JOURNAL OF
Karpathy Erszebet
written in Magyar in a leather-bound diary on linen paper
London, 13 July 1851
Dear Diary,
Today I was at the Great Exhibition in London, with my parents, when I was approached by a woman who, while not a witch, knew much about magic and why it has been waning. She warned me that magic will soon die and requested me to participate in its resuscitation. This required two things of me: first, that I cast a spell upon myself to extend my life out by more than a century, and second, that I Home her back to the future time from where she comes. Overwhelmed by the enormity of her request, I refused.
However, Mother, seeing the distress on my face, demanded to know what it was we spoke of, and when I told her, she said that of course we must prevent this Mr. Berkowski from taking his accursed photograph and ending magic (this is the event that completely destroys magic). As soon as we were back in our room at the inn, she began to scry in an attempt to find a sister-witch in the area of Koenigsbourg, Prussia, who might be able to deter Mr. Berkowski.
Father pointed out with some impatience that this would merely delay, by some small time, the actual snuffing-out of magic, and that if Miss Stokes was so determined, that surely I should follow her resolve and put a spell on myself to lengthen my life. I said I could not bear to do this. When Mother agreed with Father, I told her, “You are free to use such a spell on yourself if you like, then.”