The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O.. Nicole Galland
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professor denies cruelty to animals, but accepts early retirement.
Tristan licked curry from his fingers, reached for the trackpad, and zoomed the image on the left. “Empty boxes, old newspapers, a milk jug, and a wine bottle.”
“You’re identifying the contents of the garbage bag?”
“No dead cats. Or live ones.”
“Maybe it’s a Schrödinger’s Hefty bag.” I spun the computer back around to face me, and Tristan scampered around the table so that he could read it over my shoulder. Parsing the story wasn’t easy given the amount of tabloid-style innuendo and leaps of inference, combined with the heavy presumption that Frank Oda was guilty of something. But the bottom line seemed to be this: Professor Frank Oda, a theoretical physicist at MIT, had, three decades ago, gone off the reservation and started attempting to do experimental physics.
It had started with what seemed like a gag: a prop, for use in undergraduate physics lectures, consisting of a box with an actual cat in it, and a mockup of the apparatus envisioned in the Schrödinger’s cat Gedankenexperiment. So far, so good. A fine way to liven up an otherwise dry lecture. No cats were harmed; the cat-killing mechanism was obviously fake, just a glass bottle with a skull and crossbones painted on it and a Rube Goldberg contraption involving a rat trap and a Geiger counter. But if the story was to be believed, the construction of this device had caused Oda to become obsessed with the underlying concept. Which was very real—foundational to quantum mechanics, and not disputed by anyone.
“Holy fuck,” Tristan exclaimed. Which for him, clean-cut West Pointer that he was, was a mickle oath. We were on page three now. “He actually did it.”
“No way, they must have got something wrong.”
Tristan pointed to a phrase in the middle of the screen.
Records obtained by The Howler from the Somerville Animal Shelter indicate that Dr. Oda “adopted” no fewer than six cats from the facility over a span of three months in spring of last year. This coincides with a formal request made by MIT authorities that Oda remove “all apparatus involving living test subjects” from his on-campus laboratory. According to a former graduate student interviewed by The Howler, who requested anonymity for fear of possible professional repercussions, Dr. Oda complied with the request by relocating the ODEC project to the basement of the Cambridge home that he shares with his wife, Rebecca East.
“Maybe Rebecca’s a cat lover,” I said.
“Then why were the cats being kept in his lab at MIT until they kicked him out?”
“There’s gotta be an explanation.”
“Keep scrolling.”
Contacted at his home by a reporter from The Howler, the disgraced mad scientist denied all wrongdoing. “This was never about the cat being alive or dead,” he insisted, repeating a claim he had also made in internal MIT documents obtained by The Howler. “Killing the cat isn’t of the essence. The point is that the cat is in either one state, or another. I was experimenting with other states—non-fatal, non-painful.” Pressed by the reporter to provide specific examples, Oda seemed flustered and became inarticulate—which is consistent with the claim made by anonymous sources in his neighborhood that he has, in recent years, exhibited signs of mental impairment consistent with senile dementia. “I don’t know, how many states is it possible for a cat to be in? Asleep or awake. Sitting down or standing up. Purring or meowing. Any of them is as good as alive or dead for purposes of the experiment.” Asked why an equivalent experiment couldn’t have been performed on a non-living subject, Oda shook his head condescendingly. “The test subject must contain living, active brain tissue,” he said. “That’s how the apparatus works.” The interview was cut short at that point by Oda’s wife, Rebecca East, who emerged from their house—a colonial-era dwelling on a tree-lined street near the Harvard campus—brandishing a broom at the reporter. Ms. East, who appeared upset, insisted that none of the cats had been mistreated, adding that the shelter from which they had been adopted was a so-called “kill shelter,” meaning that all of the animals had been earmarked for euthanasia anyway. The Howler’s reporter, fearing for her personal safety, fled from the premises and later filed a report with the Cambridge Police Department. The subsequent criminal investigation was terminated when Ms. East claimed to the investigating officer that she had been using the broom to sweep vegetable debris from her front walk.
“Off with their heads!” I exclaimed. Tristan had already tired of reading the article and begun searching Oda’s background using his top-secret equivalent of Google. “That’s pretty old history, Stokes,” he said, without looking up. “And not even accurate. Let it go.” He kept reading. “Check it out—this guy also worked for DARPA, and what he did there was—”
“What’s DARPA?” I asked.
Tristan looked appalled. “Wow,” he said, almost thoughtfully. “Wow. You really aren’t up to speed, are you?”
“I study dead languages for a living,” I said. “That’s why you hired me. Why should I be up to speed on your line of work? How’s your Serbo-Croatian? What’s your position on the relationship between Oscan and Marrucinian?”
He gave me an amused look. “Wouldn’t have pegged you as pissy, Stokes,” he said. “Okay. DARPA. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.”
“Ah. The stealth bomber guys. The ones who develop clever ways to kill people.”
“They’ve developed all kinds of things,” said Tristan breezily. “Not just weapons. Night-vision technology, GPS satellites. Surely somebody living in Boston can appreciate GPS.”
“I bike everywhere,” I said in a superior tone. “I read maps. I don’t rely on Big Brother to tell me where to go.”
Abruptly, he sobered. “If you’re going to get anti-establishment on me, this won’t work. The first thing you learned about me was that I work for the government, and the second thing you learned was that I went to West Point. Eighty-six the attitude.”
Taken aback by this sudden intensity, I held my hands up briefly. “Fine,” I said in a conciliatory tone. “DARPA.”
“And even after his forced retirement from MIT, he kept on doing work—serious work—for them.”
“Did it involve cats?”
“Classified. But my point is that the accusation of senile dementia is reckless, unfounded. He turned in good work as recently as”—he paged to the bottom of a screen—“four years ago.”
“The patent application said something about jamming foreign surveillance devices.”
“When DARPA signs your paychecks,” he said, “everything you do relates to national defense. Frank Oda was trying to create a defensive technology involving the sort of science we’re interested in. But . . . the patent application was rejected.”
“What do you think he meant by this line . . .” I scrolled back in the Howler article. “The test subject must contain living, active brain tissue?”
“Something to do with how the ODEC works, I guess.”
“I find it mildly unsettling.”
“Maybe we should just ask him.” Tristan typed something into the computer. As he read the result, his eyes went wide, as they usually did when he was pleasantly surprised by something.
“Stokes,” he said. “He’s still around. Right here in Cambridge.”
“That’s convenient,” I said. “What address?”
By way of an answer, he swiveled his screen around so I could see the map he’d Googled up.
I almost choked on my saag paneer. “It’s right down Mass Ave from where I live!” I said. “We could walk there from here in less than half an hour.”
Tristan grinned and reached for his pocket. “We can call even faster than