The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O.. Nicole Galland
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couriers would haul them away. To where? Many of the boxes were stenciled with a logo I did not recognize at the time, but which I now know to be a modernized, streamlined version of the brand used since time immemorial by the banking family known as the Fuggers.
This phase ate up most of my six-month contract, as a fierce New England winter yielded muddily to spring. Other tenants in the building—scruffy start-up companies, mostly—failed or got funded and moved out. Whenever they did, Tristan made a couple of phone calls and ended up with a key to the space they’d just vacated. In this way, DODO’s footprint in the building expanded. We inherited cheap plastic chairs, duffed-up coffeemakers, and crumpled filing cabinets from the former neighbors. Clean-cut technicians showed up in unmarked cars and put card readers on all the doors, expanding and sealing what Tristan called “the perimeter.” The database grew like a dust bunny under the bed. Tristan thought of ways to query it, to search for patterns. We printed things out, stuck them to the walls, tore them down and did it again, stretched colored yarn between pushpins. We went down blind alleys, then backed out of them; we constructed huge Jenga towers of speculation and then, almost gleefully, knocked them over.
But there was never any doubt as to the gist: some manner of cause-and-effect relationship existed between the rise of scientific knowledge and the decline of magic. The two could not comfortably coexist. To the extent that the database could be cajoled into spitting out actual numbers, it was clear that magic had declined gradually but steadily starting in the middle of the 1600s. It was still holding its own in the opening decades of the 1800s, but plunged into a nosedive during the 1830s. From then through the 1840s, magic declined precipitously. As our store of documents—many written by witches themselves—grew to fill a phalanx of used filing cabinets and gun safes that Tristan scored on Craigslist, we were able to track the decline from year to year, and then from month to month. These poor women expressed shock at the dwindling of their powers, in some cases mentioning specific spells that had worked a few weeks ago but no longer had effect.
As it turns out, in 1851—the year in which I find myself as I scribble these words—all of the world’s technologies were brought together for the Great Exhibition at the newly constructed, magnificent Crystal Palace in Hyde Park, London. Tristan’s hypothesis therefore held that this coming together, this conscious concentration of technological advancement all in one point of space-time, had dampened magic to the point where it fizzled out for good. Like a doused fire, it had no power to re-kindle itself once extinguished.
The causal relationship between the two eluded us for a time. I suggested that magic’s flourishing required people to believe in it, but Tristan dismissed this mentality as belonging more to children’s literature than to reality. He was certain there was a mechanical or physical causality, that there was something about the technological worldview, or technology itself, that somehow “jammed the frequencies” magic used. We both began to read whatever we could about the Great Exhibition in the hopes that it might illuminate something.
(You may notice that I was exceeding by far my responsibilities as a translator. Translating, especially of obscure texts written in extinct tongues, often resembles the solving of a riddle. Here was a riddle to put all others to shame! Tristan’s enthusiasm was infectious and I could not divest myself from it. Having no other responsibilities, I became as preoccupied with his project as he was himself.)
Per Tristan’s suggestions, I took out stacks of books from Widener Library (Harvard had not figured out yet that I’d quit—I suppose Blevins wanted to hide the fact lest it reflect poorly on him). These included tomes on everything from heliography to Queen Victoria’s private life to Baruch Spinoza’s sexual proclivities to Frederick Bakewell to the Tempest Prognosticator to Strouhal numbers. I would bring these to Tristan, and we would divide our time between perusing them and Internet searches.
We soon knew more about the Great Exhibition and its thirteen-thousand-odd exhibits than Prince Albert ever did. We knew more about its showcase, the Crystal Palace, than even Joseph Paxton, the gardener who’d designed the fucking blessed thing. We learned little that was helpful. However, one evening in March, as I sat on the consignment-store couch I’d insisted on bringing in to spruce up the place, and Tristan lolled on the rug (provenance ditto) beside a low table with a beer, each of us bleary-eyed from reading, I encountered a passage in an obscure booklet entitled Arresting and Alluring Astronomical Anecdotes, published in 1897. Here I learned that while the Great Exhibition of 1851 was in process (it lasted for several months), an event of relative interest occurred elsewhere in Europe, to be precise, in Königsberg, Prussia: for the first time in history, a solar eclipse was successfully photographed.
I read this statement aloud. It set Tristan on fire with excitement. He had already suspected that photography in particular, of all technological developments, was the likeliest to have somehow impeded magic. Now, somehow, he was certain. It took me a while to calm him down to the point where he could explain himself.
“I’ll be honest with you: as a physicist, I am a hack,” he admitted. “I majored in it, yes, but I was never employed in that capacity. But if you cut me I still bleed physicist blood. I’ll go to my grave believing that, if magic existed, there’s a scientific explanation for it.”
“That sounds like a contradiction to me,” I said, “since our whole working hypothesis is that science broke it somehow.”
He held up a hand. “Work with me here. Have you ever heard of the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics?”
“Only in cocktail party discourse that would make you roll your eyes and heave deep sighs.”
“Well, there are certain experiments where the results only make sense if the system that’s being observed actually exists in more than one state until the moment when the scientist makes the observation.”
“Is this Schrödinger’s cat? Because even I have heard of that.”
“That’s the classic example. It’s just a thought experiment, by the way. No one ever actually did it.”
“That’s good. PETA would be all over them.”
“Do you know what it is?” Without waiting for me to answer, Tristan went on: “You put a cat in a sealed box. There’s a device inside of the box that is capable of killing the cat, by breaking open a vial of poison gas or something. That device is triggered by some random event generator, like a sample of some radioactive material that either decays—producing a bit of radiation—or doesn’t. You close the lid. The cat and the poison gas and the radioactive sample become a sealed system—you cannot predict or know what has happened.”
“You don’t know if the cat is alive or dead,” I said.
“It’s not just that you don’t. You can’t. There is literally no way of knowing,” Tristan said. “Now, in a classical physics way of thinking, it’s either one or the other. The cat is either alive or dead for real. You just don’t happen to know which. But in a quantum physics way of thinking, the cat really is both alive and dead. It exists in two mutually incompatible states at the same time. Not until you open the lid and look inside does the wave function collapse.”
“Whoa, whoa, you had me until the very end!” I protested. “When did we start talking about—what did you call it? A wave function? And how does that—whatever it is—collapse?”
“My bad,” he said. “It’s just physicist lingo for what I was saying. If you were to express the Schrödinger’s cat experiment mathematically, you’d write down an equation that is called a wave function. That function has multiple terms that are superimposed—it’s not just one thing.”
“Multiple terms,” I repeated bleakly.
“Yeah. A term here means a fragment of math—it is to an equation what a phrase is to a sentence.”
“So you’re saying there is one term for ‘cat is alive’ and another for ‘cat is dead’? Is that what you mean in this usage?”
“Yes, O linguist.”
“And when you say they are superimposed—”
“Mathematically