Hey all,
In the wake of yesterday’s incident in the cafeteria line, Macy Stoll has asked me to post a few safety tips that y’all should keep in mind until such time as we can print up posters, establish training programs, etc.
Just as background, the requirement for Fighter-class Diachronic Operatives (DOers) to achieve and maintain proficiency in various historical martial arts styles entails wearing, transporting, storing, and using a wide range of historical weapons and weapon simulators on premises. No single, blanket policy can cover all such cases, but here are some general rules:
- Scabbards are trip hazards! Glance down before stepping behind a swordfighter.
- Assume all blades are razor sharp.
- If you see something falling out of a scabbard, don’t try to catch it.
DODO WHITE PAPER
UDET: OR, DIACHRONIC MISSION DURATION
BY REBECCA EAST-ODA
Submitted to ODIN archive, Day 622
The recent influx of funding and new personnel has led DODO staff to look more deeply into certain aspects of how diachronic operations are conducted that hitherto we had just taken for granted. In particular, the need to schedule complex missions, such as the upcoming kalonji-related DEDEs, has forced us to think in greater detail about the duration of missions and how many can be scheduled in a given span of time.
Most of DODO’s experience has centered on the colonial Boston and Elizabethan London DEDEs conducted last year by Dr. Stokes and LTC Lyons respectively. Both of these were of relatively brief duration. Dr. Stokes was able to accomplish her tasks in the course of a single day. With the exception of the first repetition, LTC Lyons’s DEDE was a “sleepover” in which he had to spend one night at the DTAP. In all of these cases, the responsible witches (KCWs Karpathy, Fitch, and Gráinne) acted in a way that preserved “Unity of DOer-Experienced Time,” hereinafter UDET. The idea of UDET is simple and can be quickly explained: if Dr. Stokes experienced eight hours of elapsed time during her mission in colonial Boston, then the same span of time separated her being Sent by Karpathy from the ODEC to the DTAP and her reappearance in the ODEC upon being returned home by KCW Fitch. Likewise, when LTC Lyons spent approximately twenty-four hours in the 1601 London DTAP, the same amount of elapsed time occurred between his being Sent there and his being “Homed” by KCW Gráinne. UDET means that from the point of view of the DOer as well as observers in the facility, it is as if the DOer walked through a door into another room, spent eight or twenty-four hours there, and then walked back through the same door.
This does not pose a serious inconvenience for short missions. By contrast, however, the nature of the kalonji DEDE is such that it cannot be accomplished in less than approximately two months. For those unfamiliar with the premise of this DEDE, a short explanation follows: we are attempting to recruit Winnifred Dutton, a potential KCW in Antwerp circa 1560. The only way we have found to motivate her is by supplying her with samples of an herb called kalonji, which is rare and nearly unobtainable in her time and place. We have found a source for kalonji seeds in Constantinople circa 1200, which is a DTAP of interest to us anyway. The current plan of record is to send one DOer to 1200 Constantinople to obtain the seeds. She will then hand them off to a wilderness survival expert (Strider class) who will carry them overland to Belgium and sow them in a known location where we think that they will thrive. It should then be possible to visit that location circa 1560 and harvest the herb in the wild. The plan’s primary drawback is that the overland journey from Constantinople to Belgium is projected to take two months, and it will have to be repeated on at least three Strands in order for it to “take.” Our Strider will therefore have to experience a total of at least six months of (our) elapsed time in that DTAP.
If the mission is performed in a way that preserves UDET, then the Strider will indeed be absent for a total of six months.
If, on the other hand, we can arrange for the Strider to be “Homed” from 1200 Belgium only a few minutes after he is Sent to 1200 Constantinople, then the entire series of missions could be conducted in less than a day, as time is perceived by those of us here in modern-day Boston. The Strider would still be six months older at the end of it, and would have six months’ worth of memories from his journeys, but the clock, as far as DODO is concerned, would only have advanced a few hours.
The latter procedure is obviously a more efficient use of time as far as DODO is concerned. Moreover, to the extent DODO is engaged in a competition versus the diachronic operations agencies of foreign powers, we must assume that our adversaries are making use of such optimization wherever possible and are getting their jobs done that much more quickly.
This is a topic that has been on several people’s minds for some months now and that has been brought to the front burner, as it were, by the kalonji DEDE planning process. Initial attempts to raise the question with KCW Erszebet Karpathy proved unavailing, as the very idea of it made very little sense to her and could seemingly gain no purchase on her mind; she could not make heads or tails of what it was that we were asking her to do, much less express an opinion on it, and repeatedly accused us of being de-mented or insane. As the overall emotional tone was becoming counterproductive, I was asked to work with her on the topic, since I have known her for longer than most DODO employees, and she trusts me on the basis of the belief that I am descended from witches and that I have some latent magical ability. The results of my inquiry are detailed below. A top-level summary is that DEDE time compression does not appear to be a practical option, largely because witches have great difficulty even understanding the idea, and consider it to be reckless, far-fetched, and childish. The best analogy I can think of is how a modern physicist would react if you approached him and proposed to travel at greater than the speed of light. Mixed with this is a little bit of how Chopin would react if you proposed to play a piano by striking it with a sledgehammer.
Detailed Analysis
Witches’ objections to DEDE time compression (to the extent they can even fathom the idea) can apparently be broken down into two general categories: one, the asymmetry between Sending and Homing a time traveler, and two, the risk of something akin to present-day Diachronic Shear.
1. SENDING/HOMING ASYMMETRY:
Non-witches are apt to think of “Sending” (moving a DOer from an ODEC back in time to a DTAP) and “Homing” (the reverse process) as the same thing, but it turns out that from the witch’s point of view they are entirely different spells. The contrasts are explained in the following table.
SENDING
HOMING
Back in time
Forward in time