Furthermore, I don’t know whether the reader will have access to digital electronic devices, or for that matter any post-medieval technology whatsoever, and so I’m writing this in ink on paper so that you don’t need gadgets to read it.
Hell, it could be that by the time we reach France the whole continent will be nothing but smoking ruins . . .
I’m in a steel box on a big boat. I came here with my friends Felix Dorn and Rebecca East-Oda. I talked them into this adventure. Not to say they’re not grown-ups or anything (for the record, Rebecca is a grandmother), but I take responsibility for this, and if there are legal proceedings to follow, they should be exonerated, because this whole thing was my call.
As general background, just to help the reader calibrate the level of weird that’s going on, I believe that the building we all know as the Pentagon was called the Trapezoid when it was first built, circa World War II, and that it remained the Trapezoid all through the Cold War and the decades that followed. It only became the Pentagon a few months ago. But when it did, it wasn’t only the building itself that changed, but everyone’s memories of it as well. So everyone, including me, thinks it has been the Pentagon from the moment its cornerstone (vertexstone? whatever) was laid, and has memories consistent with that, and it’s what you’ll read in old documents and see on old maps. I have memories of the Trapezoid but they have the same surreal and suspect vibe about them as things seen in dreams, or hallucinated during LSD trips.
It was converted into the Pentagon on Halloween, just about two months ago, when a significant chunk of the United States military-industrial complex was taken over by witches in a carefully premeditated coup d’état. They remain in power—well, one does. If you, the reader of this document, are a Special Forces operative who just finished taking me and Felix down in a raid, or a Military Intelligence analyst at the Pentagon, then you actually work for her. The witch, that is. Sorry to break it to you.
The witches’ goal is to roll back scientific and technical progress to roughly the late medieval period. I think they are probably okay with a Leonardo da Vinci level of tech, but once we get into Galileo or even Francis Bacon, these witches get the heebie-jeebies and want to put a stop to it. Cf. my earlier remarks about the Enlightenment.
Okay, so Felix read the above while I was peeing into an empty water bottle (we are saving it in case we end up having to drink our own urine in a few days), and he has advised me to get on with some more concrete details of what’s happening. Thanks, buddy.
But I’ve done some stuff here that from a narrow-minded point of view looks just incredibly batshit illegal, and I need to explain that.
In retrospect, we should never have built the ATTO.
The whole diachronic operations thing was never perfect—actually we had some pretty hairy misadventures from day one—but at least it was under some kind of control as long as we just had a few ODECs that were totally locked down in secure facilities, with necessary bio-containment procedures in place, etc. We used them for one thing and one thing only: time travel, according to a clear set of rules and procedures.
Our critical mistake was the recent policy shift toward using ATTOs (portable ODECs) for psy-ops in the present day. (Note: Melisande Stokes was always iffy about the psy-ops tack, not that she had a say in policy, but given the impact this has had on her fate, she at least deserves her opinion to go on the record.) On the face of it the psy-ops redirection seemed reasonable, or at least no crazier than diachronic operations, but we didn’t reckon on Gráinne and the fact that she would immediately begin using those very techniques to influence DODO’s top leadership.
And Gráinne, in turn, didn’t reckon on Magnus.
Who didn’t reckon on the Fuggers (see below).
So lots of people are surprised.
I won’t re-tell the whole story here because it can be gleaned from documents on GRIMNIR, especially Julie Lee’s entry, but I do want to record (a) what’s happened since then and (b) what I’m pretty sure is the behind-the-curtain truth to What’s Going On. Which I will do first. I’m leaving out an enormous amount here—I’m not “showing my work” as my grade-school math teacher would complain, because I don’t know how much ink is left in this ballpoint.
After Magnus finished getting what he wanted out of the Walmart (treasure maps, basically) and made his getaway, there must have been one witch remaining in the ATTO, since a witch can’t Send herself. (I see empty cold cut wrappers and a whole lot of used water bottles, so somebody was hanging out here for a while.) After the siege, when DOSECOPS showed up and Major Isobel Sloane went in to check the (still-operating) ATTO, the witch clearly used some kind of mind-influencing technique on Sloane.
The tractor-trailer containing said witch was then shanghaied to Conley Terminal, given a false identity, and sent off to France. Major Sloane was maintained in an altered mental state for a full week while that happened; eventually she turned up unharmed in Julie’s hotel lobby, and I’m guessing the truck driver has turned up somewhere with a similar story.
BUT: after hashing this out ad nauseam, I need to change/add one detail:
The warehouse and all that’s happened since is clearly a Fugger operation—which means it must have been a (new-to-us) Fugger witch, not Magnus’s witch, who was controlling Major Sloane.
This in turn means that Magnus’s witch got “jumped” by some other (Fugger) witch who manifested in the ATTO at some point post–Walmart siege and Homed Magnus’s witch back to Viking-era Norway or wherever, with or without her consent.
No idea why the Fuggers stole the ATTO from DODO, or why they are getting it not just out of the country but specifically to France, which happens to have old, secret laws governing the use of magic for diachronic operations.
If this all seems even beyond the scope of the Fuggers, remember—DODO’s own Dr. Cornelius Rudge is a Fugger agent (hi, Dr. Rudge!), meaning the Fuggers know whatever DODO knows. And always have. Also: they are obviously waiting to collect ATTO #1 in Le Havre.
So we decided to beat them to it, so that we have a way to get Mel home.
Felix and I packed duffel bags with all the gear we could carry and found a chopper pilot who was willing to fly us and Rebecca out to the Alexandre Dumas. We circled the ship a couple of times and identified the ATTO. Even though it has a new paint job, it has some identifying characteristics, such as the side door, that make it stand out clearly if you know what to look for.