Project SANDMAN
The conspiracy at the heart of the world.
Who said this had to make sense?
"As befits a binational organization that is half theoretical research program and half secret war-fighting executive, Project SANDMAN organizes and utilizes its vast resources in a seemingly chaotic and contradictory fashion. In a war against the beings that created humanity's organizing behaviors, however, it pays to keep things mixed up."
Kenneth Hite
GURPS Horror: The Madness Dossier
⏀ The Deepest State
“During my first interview, Doug explained to me how he launched his project: at the end of World War Two, he found himself sitting on the sand of a Pacific island, thinking of all his dead comrades, surveying the smoldering remains of civilization. Why were people engaged in such wanton destruction? he asked. Was technology the root or the tool of war? The atom bomb, the aircraft, the radar, all had been developed to serve the high priests of Mars.”
Jacques Vallée
The Heart of the Internet
Indirectory
“Instead he found a disused hospital for the mad, a few token lunatics, an enormous pack of stolen dogs, cliques of spiritualists, vaudeville entertainers, wireless technicians, Couéists, Ouspenskians, Skinnerites, lobotomy enthusiasts, Dale Carnegie zealots, all exiled by the outbreak of war from pet schemes and manias damned, had the peace prolonged itself, to differing degrees of failure — but their hopes now focusing on Brigadier Pudding and possibilities for funding: more hope than Prewar, that underdeveloped province, ever offered.”
⏀ INDIGO
“This is what you people learned from the German Nazis after the war, yes? They called it Operation Paperclip? While our Soviet comrades were busy shooting Nazis, you took these fascist monsters in, gave them wealth and comfortable homes and new names and the power to continue their vile research.”
Marshall’s dream of Sophie
“If it seems like the present conditions are inevitably set up to lead to decline and collapse ... well, we’ve run dozens of pure computer simulations before the addition of the sensory deprivation technology/sonic meditation allowing human subjects to enter the simulation ... and 99.8% of them ended in some kind of total societal collapse between the years 2020 and 2050.”
“He’s a godsend, that Carson," the older gent says, "He's absolutely pitched right down the middle, he hits every goddamn adult demographic, it doesn't matter whether they're swingers in Glendale or the Smiths and Joneses in Peoria. It's uncanny. I’m sure your own movement's messaging that night synergized well with the subliminals in the 11:30-12:30 commercial time slot. Carson is … well, he’s a fantastic venue.”
Kendrick Mead
Marshall at Granite Peak
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Ozymandias
“When I saw the response to The Limits to Growth last year, when I saw how virulently people in the West responded to the idea of arresting their own insane quest for constant growth and economic exploitation, it really opened my eyes as to how difficult it is going to be to get people in the West to stop the endless extraction of resources from the developing world.”
David Wolf
Picnic at Bunhill Fields
⑉ PSAMETIC
“Just before the turn of the century, the Project began an experiment called PSAMETIC, named after the Egyptian pharaoh Psametik I who, according to Herodotus, isolated a group of children from infancy to see which language they would learn. (The official backronym stood for Psychophysiologically Adaptive Memetically Isolated Crèche.)”
Kenneth Hite
GURPS Horror: The Madness Dossier
⁜ TAVISTOCK
"The British Sandmen take a different approach. All of the British Project staff have cover assignments and work from those facilities: memeticists work out of GCHQ in Cheltenham; commandos train and base with the SAS at Hereford; scholars and researchers use labs and studies in Cambridge and Oxford; psychologists practice at the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust in north London; and more specialized personnel work from anonymous, rented offices in London’s Docklands."
⏚ THROWAWAY
“I have to imagine it’s some kind of an in-joke with someone. Hat on a hat, otherwise. Anyway — it must be some kind of place, right? Either a … community where she might find the girl—ah, Charley’s—actual mother. Or a facility, where she might be able to sneak into the files, or … meet her in common sessions. Why do you think she’s doing it?”