The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O.. Nicole Galland

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СКАЧАТЬ approximately the size and shape of pizza boxes, and slamming them into rails on those racks. Each of them, I was assured, contained sixteen computers, each of which was a bazillion times more powerful than the single, forlorn Indigo that had served as the brains of the Mark I. The Vladimirs were nothing if not friendly. I got the sense that this would be my last opportunity to have anything like a normal conversation with them. Once all of these pizza box servers were up and running, they would revert to their natural behavior patterns. For now, working on their knees with screwdrivers, performing tasks well below their pay grade, they were just happy to have someone to talk to. And talk they did, with a kind of messianic zeal, about the awesomeness of the cluster they were assembling. One of them, whom I’d mentally renamed Longbeard, actually did have an Eastern European accent. I got the impression from stray remarks dropped here and there that he’d had a hand in the creation of the uber-paranoid Shiny Hat operating system that had been the bane of my existence these six months. Perhaps he was the ur-Vlad.

      I was drawn into the mindless but satisfying activity of flattening boxes and stuffing plastic packing material into garbage bags. On a trip to the Dumpsters, I noted that it was dark. Perhaps we would knock off soon. But the Vladimirs had just ordered another round of quadruple-shot espresso drinks from the Apostolic Café, and Tristan announced that he and the Maxes were going to pull an all-nighter and leak-check the entire chamber so that it could be test-filled in the morning. Frank Oda kindly gave me a lift home. I wondered what Rebecca made of all this, but suspected this was perhaps a delicate subject, so refrained from asking.

      It was strange spending an evening in my own apartment. I’d anticipated a sense of relief, but the solitude was almost disorienting. I heated up some leftovers, settled down with my laptop, and checked my email for the first time in days. I had three notifications from Facebook.

      I usually forgot about Facebook; I checked in about once a month. I logged in now, to see that my account had three “friend requests.” One was from my mother, one was a nearly pornographic image of an attractive young Chinese man whose name translated to “Jade Dagger,” and one was a woman named Erszebet Karpathy whose picture appeared to be a state-issued ID of an octogenarian drag queen. I accepted my mother’s request, disregarded the other two as spam, sent my mother a perfunctory “Welcome to the Twenty-First Century” post, and checked my wall.

      There was a message posted on it from Erszebet Karpathy, dated three days earlier. “I am still waiting! Let me know when you are ready to begin.”

      Odd.

      I scrolled down. The next most recent post on my page was also from this Erszebet Karpathy, ten days earlier: “I am waiting for all to be placed in readiness.”

      Next was a request from one of my former students to play some kind of dumb social media game.

      Then another post from Erszebet Karpathy, this one from nearly a month earlier: “Melisande, is it time yet? You said April or May of this year.”

      That was unnerving. Who was Erszebet Karpathy? I went to her “About” page, to find it blank. Occasionally I accepted private students, usually interested in Bible studies, who wished to parse something in Aramaic. But it had been at least a year since I’d fielded any requests. Tired from a long day, I closed the laptop and went to sleep without even finishing dinner.

      The next morning, when I opened my laptop again to check the New York Times headlines, I was still logged in to Facebook, and there was a new message from the Karpathy chick: “Melisande. I see that you have been active on Facebook within the past 12 hours, so I KNOW you are receiving these messages. Contact me and I will tell you where to collect me.” She had changed her profile picture: now it was a “vintage”-looking, sepia-toned portrait of a matron in Edwardian costume, the kind of photo you dress for at Ye Olde County Faire.

      If life had not become so exceptionally peculiar over the past month, I would simply have blocked her. Instead, chewing on my lower lip, I sent her a private message: “Who are you and what do you want?”

      Before I could even log out, I received a response: “Come and get me. Elm House, 420 Common Street, Belmont. Do not make me wait any longer. Do you have any idea how much I have suffered?”

      I stared at this statement, flummoxed.

      “I know you are online,” came a new message. “There is a little green light next to your name. Come at once. I shall be waiting near the front desk with my luggage.”

      After an unsettled moment, I typed back, “What are you expecting of me?”

      “That you will help me to do magic once again. As you promised.”

      Thirty seconds later, laptop under my arm, I was dashing out the door to get to Tristan.

      Diachronicle

      DAY 290

      In which adjustments are made

      I SPRINTED INTO THE BASEMENT office ready to thrust my Facebook page at Tristan. But he and the assembled Maxes, all bleary-eyed yet full of pep, were cheering the results of the overnight test, which had apparently found no leaks. Frank Oda (radiant) and his wife, Rebecca (stoic), were also present, creating yet another mound of empty boxes and packing material as they uncrated the newly arrived circuit boards.

      “Tristan, I found—!” I began, but he was moving so quickly as to resemble an animated character, without the least interest in anything I had to say. He seemed to be headed for the server room, so I darted past him, executed a 180, and blocked his path. “I found a woman who says she can do magic. That is, she found me,” I clarified, seeing his eyes go wide with wonder. “On Facebook. We haven’t met in person.”

      Tristan frowned. “Oh God, not some social media thing, Stokes. Please tell me you didn’t put out a call for witches.”

      “Of course not,” I snapped. “I signed a nondisclosure form, I know what that means. Give me some credit, Lyons. She sent me a message out of the blue, saying she was waiting for me so she could do magic.”

      He blinked. “Strange.”

      I reached for my messenger bag. “I’ve got it right—”

      He held up a hand, shook his head. “Stokes. I forbid you to communicate with this person, whoever she is, over social media channels. It is totally insecure. You have got to go about this systematically—not by sitting around your apartment waiting to get friended by supernatural trolls.”

      “Well, now that we’ve ruled out the use of the Internet and all other modern communications devices,” I said, “what systematic approach do you recommend for responding to the only lead we have?”

      “Don’t do anything till we have a chance to hack into Facebook and get this person’s real identity for a background check. Leave your laptop with the Vladimirs.”

      “And what do I systematically do in the meanwhile?”

      “Go to Salem.”

      “We’ve been over this. There never were any actual witches in Salem. Even the Puritans ended up admitting as much.”

      “Back in the day, yes. That’s true,” Tristan said agreeably. “But now, because of its reputation as a witchy place, it is a magnet for people like that.”

      “And СКАЧАТЬ