“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.