The MARPA Memory Gun

The so-called “MARPA Memory Gun,” or “proton gun,” was summoned from an alternate timeline using a particle accelerator and Anunnaki glyph geometry constructed by Carl Fletcher and Rich Talbot with advice and guidance from the Old Man. It functions in a manner similar to SANDMAN’s ikoter gun, but without the fine tuning and with none of the safety equipment. If the SANDMAN ikoter is a carefully crafted military-grade rifle, the MARPA Memory Gun is a black market sawed-off shotgun.

In game terms, this is a modern pistol ikoter (GURPS Madness Dossier pp. 47-48) but with the Area Effect enhancement at a 32 yard radius indoors, 16 yard radius outdoors. It affects everyone in the area of effect and cannot be focused on a single target. In Krane’s novels, MARPA doesn’t worry about picking and choosing its targets when wiping memories; the wielder of the memory gun is at the center of the linguistic white noise vortex and is thus unaffected. It is similar in design and execution to an ikoter and thus fires “ultrasonic … linguistic white noise” which means that SANDMAN training does apply to resisting its effects.

Specific Study: The aura of purpose surrounding the MARPA Memory Gun competes between two oscillating poles, unsurprisingly much like the Pascagoula barb given its nature as an incapacitating weapon. In its making and manufacture, Charley can vaguely sense the methods by which MARPA in Krane’s Altantis Risen universe makes these things: it’s not a mass production process like the tranquilizer dart but assembled at the hands of trainee thaumaturges working for a MARPA contractor: a more bespoke, magico-electronic workshop in one of MARPA’s skunkworks, perhaps the Hughes Magical Tool Company in Glendale, or the Lockheed Advanced Thaumaturgical Development Projects Skunkworks in Antelope Valley. It’s meant to be a functional item for the use of MARPA agents, used with discretion, but one resolutely used to break up crowds susceptible to or under the influence of Atlantean belief engineering. The other aura of purpose is, of course, the residual stain/patina left on it by Richie and Carl’s desire to bring it across the dimensional divide through their particle accelerator and use it against the attendees of WesterCon. But there is actually a third, much more subtle aura of purpose around it, and that one definitely originates in History B. The forces of History B had a slight hand in helping nudge this object across the dimensional divide; Charley sees vague implications of the Old Man kulullû who inspired Ernest O. Lawrence’s original cyclotron built at Berkeley, forty years before Carl and Rich ever set foot on campus, being involved. History B knew what would happen if Rich and Carl “detonated” a MARPA Memory Gun on a crowd of fabulists, dreamers, and fantasists in close quarters, and the odds were very good it would trigger a reality temblor, as it did. What happened to the Memory Gun, and whoever used it, after that Event was inconsequential to the History B forces who helped put it in Rich’s hands in the first place.