Pilot Material
Rob
Thinking about situation as well as setting (what the old Forge-Heads used to call kickers) — given all our crazy backstory, why is the TV show about these characters set now?
n.b. I may every now and again introduce “old friends,” fellow Sandmen NPCs from past missions who are stopping off in the Bay Area to help with a particular investigation or mission. URIEL is an umbrella for all operations having to do with the California occult underground and thus it can enfold quite a bit of turnover.
Michael
I can also answer this question, which is that as many of you read in The Madness Dossier, SANDMAN is going through arguably its most tumultuous period since WWII right now, with Irruptor agents, moles, and traitors being discovered throughout the organization and the kulullû exposing all the mind games and social engineering and MK-ULTRA type atrocities that SANDMAN’s catspaws in the CIA, academia, the media, and the military-industrial complex have been perpetrating to “keep us safe” from History B. So we turn our attention to the fairly idyllic oasis of California (where maybe the lines between SANDMAN and its left-ish occult contacts are a little thinner) at a moment where people are going to be forced to make some hard decisions about which side they’re on.
↬ Preliminary Concepts
Leonard
She's basically a warrior-monk type assigned to an early, Vietnam-era version of Col. Jim Channon's First Earth Battalion. Originally from Northern California and starting out as a drugged-out hippie type, her increasing feminism and radicalization led her down the path of discovering utopianism, martial arts and self-defense, communitarianism, and anti-colonialism — basically, her path diverged between New Age mysticism and self-discovery and extreme left-wing revolutionary violence. So she has that blend of commando skills, psychic tendencies, and universal acceptance of the weird, but she's also pretty fucked up: government-controlled experiments to try and activate her latent mental powers left her unstable and prone to spells of disassociation, and her own experiments in self-actualization through the use of drugs makes her brain cut in and out at unfortunate moments. She's also got a conflicting world-view insofar as she has the optimism of the Human Potential Movement, but she's also seen some shit and her memory won't let her forget the depths of perversion and horror humans are capable of. So essentially a kind of New Age ninja/New Earth Army type, but prematurely burned out.
Brant
Marshall Redgrave, a radical psychiatrist and "spiritual adviser," sort of blended Eugene Landy and Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. He's a shaggy-haired white guy who wears tinted sunglasses and open-necked kurtas with Buddhist prayer beads. Recruited by CIA out of Stanford Medicine, sent to Vietnam in the '60s, ostensibly to act as a sort of commissar but in reality to study the psychological impact of the war on American service members. His credentials and insights eventually brought him to the attention of Project SANDMAN, who gave him license to explore the application of fringe psychiatric practices on "damaged goods" (i.e. traumatized soldiers). Enamored of Thich Quang Duc's self-immolation and the ability of certain Buddhist monks to meditate through incredible pain and privation, Redgrave's studies ultimately led him to various esoteric Buddhist traditions, even going so far as to make contact with certain nearly-forgotten monastic orders deep in the Vietnamese and Cambodian jungle. Redgrave was pulled out of Vietnam c. 1970 along with numerous other SANDMAN-affiliated intelligence assets — fallout from the disastrous Cambodian invasion and increasing public pressure back in the States to wind down the war. Over the last five years he has developed a bizarre and largely unethical psychiatric method that blends elements of Mahayana Buddhism, Transcendental Meditation, the Human Potential Movement, and an early version of EST.
Jeff
He was drafted in 1965 and before that he graduated high school, class of '64, which would mean he must have been born in 1945 or 1946. Let's say 1971 our boy is recruited into SANDMAN by one of the handlers in LA, he's on the ground at some kind of bad situation the details of which I don't know enough about how the Red King's offensives work to describe. Before that he was working as a studio musician, most of the tracks on The Birds, The Bees & The Monkees have him on guitar, that was the album that tracked. Summer of 1968 he surfaced in one of the caves in the back of Frank Zappa's house, the Laurel Canyon lodge, with no clear memory of the last six months. He remembers injections he was told were vitamins that hit him like heroin, being strapped into some kind of chair, having his worst memories from junior high school getting relentlessly reviewed and evaluated by a two-headed serpent woman, flying in the back of a cargo plane, getting told that he would get some kind of off-the-books cash bonus for agreeing to be a test subject for an Army doctor in Saigon, watching a bunch of Disney movies on really lousy prints with garbled sound, feeling the most hung over he'd ever felt in his life, sipping coffee in an outdoor café in some little French village with Audrey Hepburn, getting kicked a bunch by an old man (who was also his grandmother) who made sure he was tied down first... he remembers a lot of things from November of 1967 to June of 1968, but none of it makes any sense.
Rob
I think my guy will be an Applied Anthropologist / Esmologist. It sounds like we have a good assortment of heads and freaks on the team, so I'm hoping to play a bit of a square for contrast, a suit to balance out all the dungarees, if you will. Not necessarily a fragile professor, but older, more big picture, than some of the characters sketched out so far. A fairly high-level esmologist, interested in manipulating society at the macro level. Probably higher security clearance than the rest of you dirty hippies. I still like "fucked-up Jim Henson" as a starting point (if only for the metaphorical resonance of puppeteering) but I will mix him in with some Don Draper, make him older and squarer. Born around 1930, a Korea vet, runs into some brainwashing over there (Mike knows how much I love The Manchurian Candidate). Comes back from Korea, makes weirdly compelling puppet shows for kids' TV and kids' TV ads. Sells a lot of breakfast cereal, gets deep into the subliminal ad wars, especially the manipulation of children and young people. By 1973 he's in his 40s and has been in SANDMAN for some time. He's clean cut and votes for Nixon, but he's not clueless about the counterculture — he's been working to channel it, co-opt it, squish that memetic toothpaste back into the tube for 10 years at least. If Golden/Indigo Children are indeed a thing in this game, he may have been working with them too. Thinks SANDMAN might be better off to give up the whole baby boom generation as a lost cause and focus on these 70s babies coming up. (Also, his puppets talk to him.)
Bill
I'm building a Cheval, and a generally useful team player so someone in this motley crew has his head screwed on straight and can Take Care of Business ("TCB", the secret sacred acronym of Elvis). Roger Martin is a loyal foot soldier, a useful tool, not just for Project SANDMAN, but for the gods themselves, or whatever those deep entities are behind the veil that meddle with/for humanity. But he'll be damned if he doesn't get something out it. Roger is the generally useful agent — Green Beret trained, wheelman, engineer, demolitions. And as a Black man, used to a society assuming he's just there to serve (or destroy). But he's not a servant, not a paladin or blindly loyal believer — he's working for the Man, but getting paid, dammit! He wants his quid quo pro. His and his ancestors' relationship with his gods has always been transactional, and he expects the gods, and the Project, to pay up. So shrink his head, or have Papa Legba ride him like a horse, but he's getting his. Decked out in beautiful suits, driving beautiful cars, he's embracing the materialism and showing everyone Black is Beautiful. Solid.
⇶ Group Psycho-dynamics
Rob
May 20, 2020
So I threatened upthread to say something about gaming and char gen and the challenge of making all these cool rich backstories come alive in play. I was also thinking about something Leonard said in the URIEL email thread way back in week 4 or so of the pandemic, which gives you an idea how long it takes me to put a thought together these days:
Leonard said:
As y’all may or may not know (but definitely do if you saw the list of ten game campaigns I’ve always wanted to run that I posted on my website recently), I am extremely drawn to high-concept, purposefully enigmatic ideas for RPGs. The trouble is that many of them are easier to think about and talk about than to actually, you know, play.
Michael:
On a meta level, SANDMAN is a pretty tightly-knit clubhouse. Which means even if you decide your own PC is new to URIEL (but not new to SANDMAN), there's a chance you might know your teammates or even have worked with them prior to coming to Livermore. We've already got some tantalizing 'Nam-based backstory interweaving happening, but I want to make sure we have more than just Marshall having head-shrunk everyone but Archie in Saigon at some point in the past. Hopefully this idea of SANDMAN being a small world will allow you to know a little more about the other PCs' skills and backgrounds (and thus allow for a more solid and vivid answer to "what do I want from this PC" at the outset of the game).
First of all: can you share a list to this list of games you'd like to play, Leonard? (In the LJ days we called these GILTs, as in Games I'd Like To, and they were legion.) But more to the point, I do think this issue is worth talking about. In a game like this, part of the fun is manifestly all the stuff we're doing here: writing detailed character backstories, sharing inspirational reading material, delving into the setting and the feel.
When we actually sit down to play it can be a challenge to bring this stuff on screen in a usable way. One challenge, mostly on the GM's side, is how to manage all this plot: Mike probably had half a dozen scenario ideas before we even started, and now he may be thinking he's also got to work in subplots about the First Earth Battalion, Mahayana monks, Mormon mysticism, and 70s muscle cars. It's a lot!
But there's an equally big challenge on the player side. How do I bring my character to life in play? It's one thing for me to write Archie's character bio: He's seemingly friendly and avuncular, but he's got this trauma and tragedy in his past, a bit of a god complex, deeply buried doubts about the morality of the crusade he's caught up in, questions of faith and patriotism, etc. etc. But I'm a better writer than I am an actor, and I know when our first session starts its going to come time for Archie to say or do something and I'm going to go "uhhh … " Can I really do justice to all that backstory in a game, while improvising? And can I do that while a) investigating a mystery and b) interfacing in interesting ways with all the other characters, engaging with their personalities and stories?
My group has tried lots of different tools to help with this, and all kinds of games have all kinds of relationship mechanics, but probably the simplest/most powerful one we've ever used is this: We talk about how the characters relate to each other, and for each PC-PC relationship (or at least each one we want to foreground) we ask the question:
"What does [my PC] want from [your PC], and why can't they have it?"
What my group has found, in multiple games, is that "What I want from you" is much more useful than just "what I think of you" — you know, those matrices that say Clan Ventrue feels disdain towards Clan Gangrel but condescension towards Clan Tremere — because it's active, you can use it immediately in play, it immediately suggests scenes. And "why can't I have it" gives both sides of the relationship something to do. It's worked really well for us, and if we want active interpersonal play in our game, I highly recommend it. I think we got the idea from DramaSystem, but we do it now for most games, and even when we don't do it, before a session I will often brainstorm on my own what my PC currently wants from each other PC.
PROFILE 1.0 | Mitchell Jefferson Hort
Desire
I don’t know her very well. I’m attracted to her but mostly I want to create a human connection, make friends, given that I’ve been under a lot of stress lately and most of the rest of my coworkers are kind of creepy.
Barrier
It’s tricky because I’m attracted to her and I have some longstanding hangups about women as sex objects not really being people which my conscious mind has rejected but my unconscious mind is way less enlightened and way more reactionary.
Desire
I’ve known Roger for a couple of years, we’ve worked together as more or less the field team for URIEL. I know he’s got this whole voodoo thing going on and listen, I’m from Alabama in the 50s, that’s where I’m from, I followed this whole “civil rights” thing and I try to use good language …
Barrier
… but still, on a fundamental level I know myself to be a better class of human being than Roger and that’s wired very, very deep. Usually I’ve got that tamped way down but, again, my unconscious mind is way less enlightened and way more reactionary. So fundamentally I want Roger to think of me as his superior, or at least his equal, not as his idiot sidekick who has magic he doesn’t understand that turns him into a Red King detecting coon hound. Roger has his head on straight in a way that I resent and envy and it’d be great if I thought he respected me as an agent, not just as a loony wizard.
Desire
Marshall is an egghead who thinks he’s smarter than he is, throws a lot of big words around, seems to hold me in some kind of disdain or see me as a research subject or just looks at me as so much meat to order around. He moves through the social class of LA artist-celebrity that my (former) cohort of LA artists aspire to, he’s rich and clean and probably has multiple mistresses.
Barrier
I don’t so much want his respect as I want everything he has in terms of the prestige and the swimming pools with the professional bikini-babe barflies. I don’t really like him, he doesn’t really like me, he looks down on me, I resent that. At the same time, I want his approval because how dare he disapprove of me? Sometimes he gets unctuous like he’s afraid I’m going to burn him up. Sometimes I kind of want to.
Desire
Archie is an egghead who thinks he’s smarter than he is, throws a lot of big words around, seems to hold me in some kind of disdain although maybe I’m projecting that on him.
Barrier
Despite knowing Archie for as long as I’ve known Marshall and Roger I feel like I don’t really know Archie as well. He’s not the kind of large personality the other two are, so I lack the kind of immediate visceral response to Archie that I have to them. He’s kind of a question mark from my perspective.
PROFILE 2.0 | Roger Martin
Desire
To prevent his exploitation as a weapon, reach his spirit of Ogun and align them.
Barrier
Walking too much on eggshells around him.
History
Roger did some recon on Mitch pre-recruitment in LA, but was in deep cover before LA brought him in and blew up.
Notes
Solidarity with hatred of cops, but doesn’t want Blacks taking flak or blame in Mitch’s wake.
Desire
To kick loose and have fun with a good partner, wherever it goes.
Barrier
Fear of lynching for getting too near a white woman, her clear relationship baggage.
History
They met in 1972 during a quick assignment in Vietnam.
Notes
He would really like to be closer. Would be up for combat, racing, casual sex — whatever. But casual.
Desire
To convince him to turn his knowledge and memetics towards the class and race divides.
Barrier
Roger’s deep suspicion of white power figures.
History
Roger’s had his head shrunk more than once by Archie, especially rebuilds after shatterings.
Notes
Responds well to his kindness, except when it gets too patronizing.
Desire
To get to live a bit of the sweet life in Marshall’s orbit.
Barrier
Roger’s intolerance towards privileged hippies.
History
Had a couple of overlaps in Vietnam when Marshall was doing damage to enlisted men.
Notes
He would never admit his attraction towards the wealth or ever want to look like a parasite.
PROFILE 3.0 | Jocasta Menos
Desire
To protect and ‘normalize’ him, to convince him not to give up on the world.
Barrier
Fear based on his ability to start deadly fires leads to lack of trust and personal discomfort.
History
They just met — she is the newest URIEL recruit and he is the youngest.
Notes
She is intrigued but also repelled by him and the trail of death he has left behind. Muddled romantic and sibling feelings.
Desire
To work effectively with him and have a team partner she can relate well to.
Barrier
Their very different backgrounds prevent her from empathizing with him as much as she wants.
History
They met briefly during her first assignment in Vietnam.
Notes
Mild attraction hindered by her general distrust. Jocasta probably has a not-great white liberal behavior pattern around blacks.
Desire
To learn from him and understand the odd experiences and perspectives that motivates him.
Barrier
Her perpetual worry that any man she places her trust in will eventually disappear from her life.
History
None, but as the oldest member of her URIEL team, he may have played a role in her recruitment or training.
Notes
Sees him somewhat as a father figure, but this is complicated due to both of their family histories. Admires and likes him.
Desire
To gain his respect in the area of psychology and learn his approach and techniques — and to best him?
Barrier
He is far more successful, and has more formal training; she thinks he probably looks down on her.
History
It’s possible her father may have met him at a party or other social event when she was younger.
Notes
Complicated relationship. She wants his approval and insight, but doesn’t really like him and thinks he doesn’t like her.
PROFILE 4.0 | Archibald Ransom
Desire
He probably wants nothing to do with Marshall, or at least wants to keep him at arm's length, to limit his ability to endanger the work.
Barrier
Well, they're stuck together, aren't they? So they'll have to find a way to make it work.
History and Notes
Marshall's notes say "people want to not like Marshall" and I'm sure Archie does respond negatively to him, even if he's susceptible to Marshall's charm. There's a fair bit of overlap in their abilities, but that probably just makes things worse. To Archie, the kind of one-on-one persuasion Marshall indulges in is more deceptive and harmful than the group-level persuasion Archie regards as rational and humane. And the way Marshall dresses up the good science of motivation in all this New Age mysticism is entirely irresponsible.
Desire
To look out for her, protect her from harm.
Barrier
Well, she surely doesn't want or need Archie's protection, at least not his physical protection. If anything it's Archie who's going to need her protection in the field.
History and Notes
Archie sees the younger members of the team much more positively, and is likely to feel a parental regard for them. That's definitely true in Jocasta's case. He's going to be protective of her, as little sense as that makes. A woman soldier is a novelty to Archie; until he sees her in action he probably hasn't processed that she's the most physically capable of the bunch.
Desire
He certainly won't be able to articulate this, but what Archie wants very much is for Mitch to Not Be Screwed Up: because it is very important for Archie to believe that a young U.S. soldier can be captured in Asia, subjected to psychological torture, and then just Decide to Be OK.
Barrier
Well, is Mitch OK?
History and Notes
Archie is also going to have parental/protective instincts towards Mitch, but that will play differently with a young man than with a woman; it may come across as more judgmental, less sympathetic. If Archie knows Mitch's backstory, the fact that he was captured and experimented on by Americans pushes all sorts of buttons for Archie. Of course Archie will see echoes of his own story in Mitch's, but it will be hard for him to admit or process this.
Desire
What Archie wants from Roger will most often be situational: chase that guy, break into this building, get us the heck out of here. Because he Archie sees Roger as more dependable than either Marshall or Mitch, he may try to enlist him in "looking out for" Jocasta and even the others. They probably have a very good working relationship! But like Roger's write-up predicts, the danger of Archie being patronizing or just assuming "you can count on Roger" without considering his point of view is real.
Barrier
I'm not certain yet how Archie will view Roger's voodoo stuff. He'll be uncomfortable with superstition and any talk of devils or spirits, but he respects Christian faith sincerely held.
History and Notes
Let's say that Archie has seen Roger in action and knows how capable he is. I think he likes Roger and certainly he values his skills, but even before we get into any racial stuff, Archie's first instinct would be to think of Roger as a highly valuable employee. And then there is the racial stuff: Archie's a nice, well-meaning white liberal, with all that implies for good and ill. He probably asks Roger now and again what "the African American community" (or "the Hispanic community") thinks about this or that issue, sincerely wanting to know, but not seeing the problem with the question.
PROFILE 5.0 | Marshall Redgrave
Desire
Unlock his true potential. Marshall thinks Archie is quite brilliant, and is fascinated by the memetic and psychological implications of the puppets. But ...
Barrier
… Marshall regards Archie’s work as pedestrian and naïve. To use the vast powers of memetics to sell cereal? Come on, man. Professional disdain.
History
Collegial, but distant. They may have assumed a sort of “mother-father” role vis-à-vis the other URIEL operatives?
Desire
Learn more about his perceived multiple personalities and, to the extent possible, harness their power.
Barrier
Marshall is discomfited by Roger in a way that is hard to describe. He thinks something may have happened between them in the jungle, but he can’t quite remember what ...
History
Marshall has known Roger for several years. Roger was assigned as part of his security detail in Vietnam on several occasions, including on Marshall’s infamous trip into Cambodia.
Desire
Test her limits. Jocasta is an intriguing specimen, and Marshall is unsure of her capabilities, but they seem extensive.
Barrier
She’s still a newbie. Marshall’s been in this game for a long time and he’s seen a lot of “Jocastas” come and go – into early graves, into psychiatric institutions, into desk duty.
History
Marshall may have been involved in Jocasta’s psychiatric programming and testing during her recruitment.
Desire
Minimize his fallout while evaluating potential memetic, psychiatric, meditative applications for his abilities.
Barrier
Fear. Mitchell reminds Marshall of too many eldritch things he confronted during the dark, wild time he spent in Vietnam.
History
Marshall probably conducted Mitchell’s psych evals and reprogramming when URIEL plucked him out of LA.
●○○ several people are typing …
Jeff
Orthogonal to your question, but post-9/11-Madness Dossier, much less post-Trump Madness Dossier, strikes me as too on-the-nose depressing to be playable. I can pretend the 70s are a distant country, but if this were in the present, I dunno. Glyph propagation on 8chan and Parler.
Leonard
Oh Christ the 4chan gooners just endlessly posting the most dangerous glyphs "for the lulz."
Jeff
A previously undiscovered Annunaki glyph, MA.GA or "Own Libs." See? It just gets so grim so fast.
Leonard
I would personally be the first to sign up for History B to escape this hell world. It can't be worse than what we have now, good old fashioned enslavement by a lizard god would be heaven compared to trying to figure out my ACA policy.
Bill
Again, I need that emoji for "most beautiful cynicism, Gen-X approves (but is not thrilled or anything, whatever.)"
"Well, I welcomed the Bull-lords and the red blood; so much less paperwork."
Brant
"This is the future liberals want."
Bill
Also: I thought it was more like the glyphs change the interpretation of the scene in the (pathetic slave) human brain, right? So it’s not that you see nothing; the light hits the eyeballs. It’s that the brain does the wrong thing with the information. “This is all fine.”
Glyph propagation on 8chan and Parler.
Yeah, just playing the guy in the simulation who was doing this made me feel dirty.
Michael
My instinct (although I am not right at my copy of the MD book rn) is that the camera records the glyph and the glyph still has its effect on the viewer of the recording even if it's on video. It's like a medusa: one glimpse is all it takes to retroactively convince an observer, in the case of SANGUSH for example, that These People Belong Here. Even if the video glitches out or the banner gets a fold in it, there's a memory-and-cognition "grace period" of a few seconds either way. But if you cover up a glyph long enough to leave the glyph users out there unprotected for long enough for the brain to catch up, that's when contradictory information starts to hit. Look at E.L. Moore and his weird memories of Zeb floating out of the house.
I called Moore one of the "special ones" as an important NPC to get a Will roll and he eventually made it. So now he has these jumbled memories of the night before the big concert.
Bill
If you took a recording and degraded it enough to mess up any of the images of the glyph, it might stop working. But, why would you? You didn’t see anything to think to try. AI (of a stupid enough sort) could definitely help here for SANDMAN, to find and process the video. But I doubt you’ll find anything in the 20th century to get around the need for an observer when it’s film or video.
Leonard
That's a good Turing test, right? If a glyph can fool an AI, it's just a regular I.
Jeff
Presumably if the setting featured, like, goblins and elves and gray aliens, they’d be immune to the glyphs since they weren’t contaminated by the Kings. So if an AI would be vulnerable seems like a question mark. Maybe humans would necessarily pass along their innate fallibility in the machines they created, maybe AI research is humanity’s last best hope to resist the Red Kings in this post-information era
Michael
Unsurprisingly I've given this line of philosophical/political inquiry an awful lot of thought, outside of the basic typical Hitean setting premise that America = freedom and communism = slavery. History B is, as it's been depicted by its natives and backers in this game, a place free of want, of human bigotry, of human vs. human bloodshed, of pollution and industry, of all the things that make America in either 1973 or 2021 an utter fucking shithole. And all you have to do is accept the fact that you are a thing to be used by inhuman masters whom you must ostensibly worship. They may let you live your life completely unmolested apart from the hymns of praise and the likely everyday thought-policing; they may recruit you to be a cross-time warrior; they may make you a pet; or they may eat you.
When I had Zeb tell Zeb's Story, I wanted to get inside the mindset of a man who came from that world with Black skin and saw what it was like here. And how, yes, the basics of our societal organization were like hell to him … but he also got to eat meat and drink booze and act exactly as he liked without having a fish-man or an angel tell him what to do. It turned Zeb into a wreck but he still believed because he thought the only way he was getting home was, to paraphrase a certain Rev. Jones, "make heaven down here." So I dunno. It's complex. It's dualistic and Manichean, which suits our Cold War setting down to the ground. Our "third way"/History-C/cut the Gordian Knot/Hegelian synthesis contingent holds a lot of appeal because both worlds have insanely convincing drawbacks. But if you knew nothing other than History B, wouldn't you look at A as hell, and vice versa? Gets you thinking, doesn't it.
Leonard
This basic scenario is one I've thought about a lot, going back to the Matrix, right? If the 'real world' as we experience it is an illusion fed to us by the Secret Masters, and actual reality is a grim, ruined hellscape where we are just food/energy sources for malevolent monsters, why would we want to fight back? Joey Pants was right: it's better to live in the dream that to wake up to hopelessness, despair, and death.
Presented in a slightly less stark way, we're trained by propaganda to think of authoritarian societies as relentlessly dark and miserable, with death around every wrong choice (remember Ayn Rand objecting to the depiction of Soviet citizens smiling?), when in fact totalitarian societies like Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany are exceptions rather than rules. In most dictatorships, life more or less goes on as normal; it can be bad or it can be great, but for regular people, they never really run afoul of the state punishment apparatus unless they do something 'wrong' (same as in. a 'free' country, right?).
So the way I conceptualize the History A/History B struggle is more or less the way Mike describes it: if you told people they could be freed of the everyday tyranny of modern life — bigotry, want, deprivation, need, casual cruelty, uncertainty, credit ratings — how many of them would agree, even if it meant occasionally interjections of madness or violence, which happen in our world anyway? A lot, I bet. Free will is kind of an abstraction at the best of times. You just have to (decide? remember? pretend?) that the freedom they're selling is the freedom of surrender and self-annihilation. And even then …
Michael
And of course Zeb to a certain extent is lying to himself and the Commissioner when he says there's no castes in History B among humans: given he was recruited because he was smart and sharp and physically a specimen tells you everything you need to know there.
The Anunnaki programmed us to form hierarchies and in-groups because it made us easier to manage but they didn't realize how we'd use it to keep them at bay once we won
So bigotry is kind of their fault. This feels like an Archie argument.
Brant
Marshall's take on all this is you're a bunch of freaking dorks. No one is free anywhere in either History A or History B. But at least in History A, the slave-masters aren't alien extra-dimensional demon-gods. Plus, he'll probably be dead by the time our slave-masters become computers, a la the last episode of Can’t Get You Out of My Head.
Rob
So I was thinking about Mitch and Archie's conversation in the cafeteria, wishing there was a way that Archie could've been a little more help to Mitch in his speculations, but also amused/a teeny bit miffed on Archie's behalf that as Archie was tentatively sharing what were by his standards his deepest/wildest speculations about the nature of existence, Mitch kept saying "yeah, yeah, that's the conventional wisdom."
What I've been thinking (OOC, Archie wouldn't think this) is that the dodgiest part of the History A/B cosmology is the idea that History B was "once" true, and then "later" History A became true. Now, it makes sense that, as 3-dimensional beings unable to comprehend the true nature of the universe, we would narrate/explain events that way, but it suggests a kind of "meta-time" that I find fun for gaming purposes but completely implausible. (Why does Marty McFly's photo of his family gradually disappear? Ooh that used to make me SO MAD I can't tell you.)
Isn't it more likely, or at least elegant, to posit that neither History A nor History B happened "before" the other? If Present A is real, History A was the real history; if History B was real, Present B is the real present. "Retrocreation" isn't actually retroactive, it's more like superimposed probability waves. Yes, the URIEL gang perceive History A to be real, but that's just the anthropocentric fallacy: if History A wasn't real, they wouldn't be there to perceive it. (Well, other than Mitch.)
Where was I going with this? Oh yes: the one problem with this is the idea that the Anunnaki programmed humanity "in the past" (or, the meta-past if you like). If neither History A nor History B came first, how/when did this programming take place? Answer: it must be a Cosmic Chicken-and-Egg deal, symmetrical. Humanity is susceptible to Anunnaki programming because of the deep linguistic structures (we claim the Anunnaki put) in our minds; the Anunnaki are as they are because they are an emergent product OF the deep linguistic structures in human minds. (The Starchildren made Mother made the Starchildren.)
Jeff
the Anunnaki are as they are because they are an emergent product OF the deep linguistic structures in human minds.
the Anunnaki are as they are because they are an emergent product OF the deep linguistic structures in human minds.
the Anunnaki are as they are because they are an emergent product OF the deep linguistic structures in human minds.
Michael
Now that's a man who's read The Invisibles.
Jeff
That fits the facts, and provides some kind of explanation for the thing that’s been bugging Mitch about this whole deal: why are RFK and Atlantis harbingers of History-B, which features neither RFK nor Atlantis??
Michael
How quickly ye all lose faith in Lemuria.
Leonard
Along similar lines (and referring back to both The Matrix and our previous discussion of how Madness Dossier-ish Moore's Miracleman is), don't think it hasn't occurred to me that all of History A, and most especially Project SANDMAN and its antecedents, is an illusion, a fantasy being fed to particularly troublesome slaves. "Let's let these adolescent-brained dissidents think that they really are awesome cool super-agents who can really fight back against us! That should keep them out of our hair."
Brant
That fits the facts, and provides some kind of explanation for the thing that’s been bugging Mitch about this whole deal: why are RFK and Atlantis harbingers of History-B, which features neither RFK nor Atlantis??
Wait, back up, I need you to expand on this. I don't follow.
Jeff
Ok
(1) History-B as we understand it does not have a lost continent of Atlantis, or a United States where RFK is or ever was president
(2) The signs and portents we’ve seen all involve these elements pulled from Krane’s books, not ziggurats and bronze statues of minotaurs and whatever. Likewise, Moore’s vision was of an Afrofuturist society that resembled History-B in broad strokes but certainly didn’t feature any sedu or kulullû or kusariku or whatevs
(3) Nonetheless it’s History-B that is threatening to come into being, not History-Krane-was-right-about-everything or History-Moore’s-vision
So why does History-B get to profit when these alternatives to History-A seem to be rising?
Mandy
I think that all pasts and futures are like quantum clouds of infinitely apprehend-able potential until the moment at which a likely reality coheres to the observer. So, the people who are looking for History B are causing the forward and backward coherence of History B. But the same is true of all perspectives and it's how we reconstruct personal histories, consciously or unconsciously, and it would, potentially, allow for the movement through subsequently stranger altered worlds until you actually live in a History B take over.
Michael
Brant
Oh I think I see where this going now.
Rob
Setting aside the secret origin(s) of Io Katori aka Schrödinger for the moment, while I like the direction Jeff/Mitch's theory goes in, I think the answer (and here we DO have something Archie might say, or at least the SANDMAN bosses would) is that we're in a Manichean bipolar Cold War for reality. There are only two alternatives, A and B, that's it. Those two are the reality superpowers, and the only actual realities we get to choose from. Anything in either reality that weakens faith in that reality (like belief in fairies, bigfoots, RFKs) can only benefit the other reality. A zero-sum game.
I mean, when I say "that's the answer", I guess I mean "that's the question" — ARE we trapped in a bipolar Cold War or is there a way out?
Leonard
And yet, and yet, and yet: the very act of reinforcing the preeminence of our 'rational' reality of cars and power plants and calculators involves using 'irrational' tools like magic, psychic powers, supranormal technology, etc. Sure, we try to cover it up (using those same tools!), but that just raises the stakes; if the people we're 'protecting' ever find out about the spooky ooky that we use to fight the Red Kings, they'll be more susceptible to belief in that kind of thing generally, thus making them more vulnerable to the Red Kings! So aren't we really weakening our own position just by existing? (I had similar thoughts when I played Mage: The Ascension because I am just that kind of a nerd.)
Jeff
The zero-sum game bit also reminds me that nothing (aside from the impossibility of it) is stopping us from going over there and distributing Carl Barks and Jackson Pollock, what’s destructive to the goose is destructive to the gander.
Michael
So speaking of zero sum games: Again, why is game theory at the root of all this technocratic garbage INCLUDING financialization, computer science, modern foreign policy, and as we've found out, much of postwar edge-case psychiatry. Because this is the world the technocrats dreamed up after WWII to, they thought, prevent that shit from happening again.
But then everything in fucking life is a Prisoner's Dilemma.
A or B.
Brant
The zero-sum game bit also reminds me that nothing (aside from the impossibility of it) is stopping us from going over there and distributing Carl Barks and Jackson Pollock, what’s destructive to the goose is destructive to the gander.
But wouldn’t this whole discussion imply that there are just ... like, Jackson Pollocks in History B that they Kings hunt down and regulate the way we do with the Zebs?
Jeff
Jeez, maybe. I hadn’t considered that, that they might be just happening emergently the same way Zeb did, in fact, “just happen.”
Rob
Well, maybe it was SANDMAN's Jackson Pollock exchange program that retroactively caused the Ontoclysm.
“About astrology and palmistry: They are good because they make people feel vivid and full of possibilities. They are communism at its best. Everybody has a birthday and almost everybody has a palm. Take a seemingly drab person born on August 3, for instance. He’s a Leo. He is proud, generous, trusting, energetic, domineering, and authoritative! All Leos are! He is ruled by the Sun! His gems are the ruby and the diamond! His color is orange! His metal is gold! This is a nobody?”
