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

      

      

       COPYRIGHT

      This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

      The Borough Press

       An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

       1 London Bridge Street

       London SE1 9GF

       www.harpercollins.co.uk

      First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2017

      Copyright © Neal Stephenson 2017

      Cover design by Mike Topping © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2017

      Cover images © Shutterstock.com

      Neal Stephenson asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

      A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

      All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books

      Ebook Edition © June 2017 ISBN: 9780008132583

       Source ISBN: 9780008132569

       Version: 2019-09-23

       DEDICATION

      FOR LIZ DARHANSOFF

      CONTENTS

COVER

TITLE PAGE

COPYRIGHT

DEDICATION

AUTHORS’ NOTE

PART ONE

PART TWO

       PART THREE

       PART FOUR

       PART FIVE

       ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

       CAST OF CHARACTERS

       GLOSSARY

       ABOUT THE AUTHORS

       ALSO BY NEAL STEPHENSON

       ALSO BY NICOLE GALLAND

       ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

       AUTHORS’ NOTE

      To the reader:

      For your convenience we have included a list of characters as well as a glossary of acronyms and terms that are unique to the D.O.D.O. world. Because the lists contain many spoilers, we have placed them at the back of the book.

      N. S. and N. G.

      

      Diachronicle

      (PREAMBLE, JULY 1851)

      MY NAME IS MELISANDE STOKES and this is my story. I am writing in July 1851 (Common Era, or—let’s face it—Anno Domini) in the guest chamber of a middle-class home in Kensington, London, England. But I am not a native of this place or time. In fact, I am quite fucking desperate to get out of here.

      But you already knew that. Because when I’m done writing this thing—which, for reasons that will soon become clear, I’m calling Diachronicle—I am going to take it to the very discreet private offices of the Fugger Bank, Threadneedle Street, lock it up in a safe deposit box, and hand it over to the most powerful banker in London, who is going to seal it in a vault, not to be opened for more than one hundred and sixty years. The Fuggers, above all people in this world, understand the dangers of Diachronic Shear. They know that to open the box and read the document sooner would be to trigger a catastrophe that would wipe London’s financial district off the map and leave a smoking crater in its place.

      Actually, it would be much worse than a smoking crater . . . but a smoking crater is how history would describe it, once the surviving witnesses had been sent off to the madhouse.

      I’m writing with a steel-nibbed dip pen, model number 137B, from Hughes & Sons Ltd. of Birmingham. I requested the Extra Fine Tip, partly to save money on paper, and partly so that I could jab my thumb with it and draw blood. The brown smear across the top of this page can be tested in any twenty-first-century DNA lab. Compare the results to what is on file in my personnel record at DODO HQ and you will know that I am a woman of your era, writing in the middle of the nineteenth century.

      I intend to write everything that explains how I came to be here, no matter how far-fetched or hallucinatory it may sound. To quote Peter Gabriel, a singer/songwriter who will be born ninety-nine years from now: This will be my testimony.

      I DO ATTEST that I am here against my will, having been Sent here from September 8, 1850, and from the city of San Francisco, California (the day before California was granted statehood).

      I do attest that I belong in Boston, Massachusetts, in the first quarter of the twenty-first century. There, and then, I am part of the Department of Diachronic Operations: a black-budget arm of the United States government that has gone rather badly off the rails due to internal treachery.

      In the time in which I write