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.
-- Mel (Narrator) (Part One)

Importance: This statement on the novel’s second page establishes the novel’s temporal structure, with Mel writing retrospectively but from a location in time long before most of the novel’s events. This quotation also underlines the vagueness of the novel’s twenty-first century setting (just “the first quarter”), when all of the other settings throughout the novel are much more narrowly defined, usually to the year. Since Mel already knows the conclusion up to the protagonists’ nadir, this quotation also foreshadows both DODO’s rise and fall.

Perhaps he was the ur-Vlad.
-- Mel (Narrator) (Part One)

Importance: This throwaway academic joke of Mel’s is...