3/1 - UK

Charley: Jocasta did you know that on a strictly mathematical level, engineers know how to design planes that will stay aloft. But equations don’t explain why aerodynamic lift occurs.

Jocasta: I did not know that! The hard sciences were something I never knew much about, you can teach me more than I can teach you, is what she’ll say as her mind starts yelling THE PLANE CAN’T FLY at her.

Played: October 15, 2020.

Friday, May 25, 1973. Archie, his family, Charley, Jocasta, Roger, and Sophie arrive in the village of Dufton in Cumbria, England. This is a capital-V, “The Village” from The Prisoner-style village – a self-contained Ministry of Defense community, one of many “lost villages” abandoned during the War and used now by the government for military drills, war simulations, and other clandestine operations. As David explained:

It's a village essentially run by the Ministry of Defence, for personnel at the radar installation on top of a nearby Pennine, and for other personnel needing accommodations in the Peak District. It's a quaint little place; we have a cluster of lovely 19th century brick homes a stone's throw from the local pub, the Stag Inn. Lovely views of the Pennines as well, lots of hiking trails lead right up into the mountains.

The team checks into their respective bungalows and then rendezvouses at the local pub with GRAIL TABLE’s leadership: David Wolf, Catherine Davies, and Elias Simon. (Archie sends his family on a sightseeing tour). David explains a bit about how ORACLE works and the lay of the land in the simulated, predictive future of the year 2020:

The world has kind of split up into four big power blocs. The Americas, Australia, and New Zealand is one. They're sort of under the thumb of America.

There’s the Soviet Union and Europe. They’re Communist.

There’s a sort of loose confederation of principalities and emirates in the Middle East.

And then just like England got taken over by left-wing insurgents, Japan also got taken over by their Red Army faction in the late ‘70s. But they’re under the thumb of the Chinese so there’s basically a sort of co-prosperity sphere of Asia and they definitely lean more towards sort of what in our timeline Communist China has become. Kind of an authoritarian state capitalist kind of enterprise. They are probably, among all the four blocs, the sort of economic engine that keeps the world going.

David then explains that five people will be entering ORACLE later that afternoon: Archie, Roger, Jocasta, Sophie, and himself. Charley will remain outside the simulation in the “Controller” role, providing her with a God’s eye view of what is transpiring. While in past simulations team members were assigned random personas upon entering, refinements to the program have enabled teams to be “linked” in some way, e.g., as family members, co-workers, neighbors, etc. Still, such ventures are random – there is no way of knowing where in the simulation the team will wind up. But this doesn’t matter, David says, as according to his research on medieval mysticism, there will be elements of truth to “whatever situation we are thrown into,” just as there:

will be elements of truth to the future. The prophecies that those medieval monks undertook didn’t make much sense to them at the time because they were plumbing the depths of probability and time and seeing something they couldn’t understand. Now, we’re only going ahead 47 years, so I’m hoping that everything that you see and conceive of and understand will be something that is more easily deciphered.

URIEL has questions. Most pointedly, Archie wonders how “in character” they need to act within the simulation in order to ensure it works. He expresses doubt about the utility and “reality” of ORACLE’s simulated future-history, calling it “make believe,” and asks if they will be in any real danger. David tells him that all participants have a sort of “mental panic button” that will eject them from the simulation, but urges them to abide their characters as best they can in order to have a fully formed experience. Archie finds this amusing.

Charley: “Prophetic chant sonics? How does that work, exactly?”

David: “The sonics are there to provide the ‘prophets’ with the ability to enter a more realistic, fleshed-out simulation than would be possible with a mere psychotronic interface with a computer simulation. All my research into medieval mystics – Hildegard of Bingen, the English anchorites, and so forth – revealed that these songs allowed the brain to shift into a brainwave pattern that enabled the mystics to essentially imagine the future in greater sensory detail, with a fuller, richer experience using all five senses.” Very much a parallel to the sonic influencing that Xanten was doing with electronic tones.

The team is transported to the old chapel at Brougham Castle, which has been extensively outfitted with all the equipment necessary for entering the simulation, including five sensory deprivation tanks and psychotronic helmets linked up to a gigantic bank of absolutely bleeding-edge computers. The chapel’s ceiling resembles a Gothic vaulted ceiling out of the Middle Ages, but is done entirely in ultramodern white plastic – better to accommodate the prophetic sonic chants and mantras being piped in on the huge loudspeakers. Charley is escorted to the Controller terminal, where she dons an elaborate psychotronic helmet of her own. Before immersing themselves in the warm, salty waters of the deprivation tanks, Jocasta drops a tab of acid.

Inside the simulation, the team awakens as their new identities in the simulated future of the year 2020. They are all employees of a “belief engineering” outfit called El Dorado Opinions (“Your One-Stop Shop for Belief Engineering”). In 1973 terms, El Dorado would most closely resemble an advertising agency, but in 2020, such agencies are considered beyond obsolete as memetic and information warfare has replaced traditional warfare between the four power blocs. El Dorado is itself atypical among belief engineering firms in that it is a very small, very bespoke operation – it does everything in one place, ranging from computer animation to scenario writing, from a half-minute TV spot to a full-length movie. El Dorado’s offices are located in the Transamerica Pyramid.

Victoria Chastain

Piloted by Archie Ransom.

A 42-year-old (born in 1978) member of upper-middle management at El Dorado Opinions.

Grew up in Los Angeles, with two parents who both worked in the now long-gone world of broadcast and satellite television. Always a little starstruck and after finishing her degree in Film Studies at UCLA in 1999, she set off to get into belief engineering. She’s worked as a Hollywood agent, a pollster, a political fixer (she was essential in the success of Jim Rentoul's 2016 campaign for President, putting the White House in Republican hands for five consecutive terms), and now, wealthy and comfortable, she exists in a sort of cozy semi-retirement in San Francisco.

She met “the Boss” during the 2016 campaign and he wanted her onboard at El Dorado as a general traffic and client manager, as well as a liaison with the creative and modeling teams, and she’s enjoyed a healthy sinecure to add to her fortune.

Deirdre Wu

Piloted by Jocasta Menos.

A 34-year-old (born in 1986) political refugee from Hong Kong who now works as El Dorado's main predictive psychology modeler.

At the age of 5, her father, a computer magnate, moved away from the island enclave of the Oceanic Anglophone alliance because mainland Chinese memes from the Sphere were beginning to leak across the border via satellite transmissions. Her father did not want her raised under those circumstances, so she and the family moved to Silicon Valley, where her father re-established his business. All while growing up, she heard about the evils of both Chinese and European Commun(al)ism and the superiority of Western thought and economics. She attended Harvard and concentrated in Psychology, with a specialty in mass psychology and computer predictives.

As the house modeler for El Dorado, she works closely with both the design teams, reining in their artistic flourishes when necessary and boiling all the memetics down to bare essentials for effective delivery. She also works very closely with Strategics and upper management and is often the bridge between the creatives and the Boss.

Joshua Telfair

Piloted by Roger Martin.

A 25-year-old (born in 1995) white male artist and designer originally from Marin County who creates computer-generated actors and scenarios for El Dorado Opinions.

While he was an undergraduate at Berkeley, he was part of a student underground who secretly accessed European television programs and films from across the Digital Divide and used them to create a "cargo cult" version of European Communism. Now three years later, he is a loyal agent of the European Communist Union in America, using techniques learned from European cinema and emotional engineering to insert damaging and demoralizing subliminals into ads, programs, and campaigns that El Dorado designs. He always manages to design the subliminals in such a way that their effects are only noticeable after repeated viewings and he’s never gotten caught by the FBI or MDA (Memetic Defense Agency). He hates American pluralism and capitalism with all his heart and await the day he can do something more than merely slip hidden messages into political ads and public service campaigns. He keeps these opinions largely to himself, although unlike many of his urbane liberal Republican co-workers, colleagues and friends, he is publicly a dyed-in-the-wool populist Democrat.

Andrew Casco

Piloted by Sophie Edelstein.

A 27-year-old (born in 1993) biracial (Black and white) scenario and advertisement writer from Chicago, Illinois.

He went to Northwestern and majored in Mass Communications with a minor in English, and bounced around a few opinion engineering internships before ending up at the quaint bespoke shop at El Dorado. He loves his job, loves living in San Francisco despite the headaches (he hasn’t yet won a Car Lottery so he’s forced to take public transportation to work and play), and he loves the hip, urban life he’s been able to create for himself in the field of opinion engineering, and he loves his country (he votes Republican every two years loyally).

He sometimes wonder if, in another time or another lifetime, he would have written novels or poetry, both those two dead art forms, but he takes great pride in the scenarios and spots he creates and, after all, it's the only game in town for a patriotic American.

As the team acclimates to the simulation, Jocasta discovers that the acid combined with the trance-mantras being piped into the chapel has made Diedre more “real” than the personas typically generated by ORACLE. She is now more akin to a separate, complete person than a mere simulation. On top of that, she can see auras. She observes that Victoria is surrounded by an intense, heavy halo; Andrew is engulfed in wavy grays and blues, projecting a retiring sort of vibe; and Joshua is consumed by deep purple bordering on black, just rotten to the core. This revelation does not startle Diedre, however. It seems perfectly natural, in fact, that she can “understand” her colleagues for the first time in a three-dimensional way.

In their new roles, the team participates in a planning meeting about their current assignments: a “Buy American Food” campaign to convince consumers that American food is totally safe thanks to the miracle chemicals used by agribusiness; a propaganda campaign against the Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere; a trailer for an upcoming World War II historical drama (films depicting World War II are quite popular); and finally, designing the logo and associated promotional campaign for the 2020 Republican National Convention, which set to take place in San Francisco.

In the simulated future predicted by ORACLE, the Republicans are the “middle of the road party” for polite, socially liberal people who have nice houses and work as part of the informational economy in the big cities. The Senate Majority leader at the time is a Republican: three-time incumbent Senator John Lennon. The Republicans have also held the presidency for the past five terms. The Democrats are everybody else in the middle of the country where people don’t have much money. Over the past 47 years, the Democrats have gone off in a weird populist direction which encapsulates both ends of the political spectrum.

It’s all fairly grim.

After the meeting and some tense back-and-forth among the El Dorado team, Joshua returns to his office and checks his electronic mail on one of the many screens that populate his desk. He finds he has a private message with an encrypted attachment from one of his comrades. The message reads, in part:

we no u r goin 2 be part of the logo team for the RNC we want u to put this hidden in the logo

Joshua opens the attachment and, as Roger, realizes it is an Anunnaki glyph. Charley, from her command post as Controller, likewise observes this happen and is hit by the memetic payload of the glyph. Fortunately, both are able to resist its command, which is ANZIL (Abomination, Taboo). Joshua throws himself into implementing this glyph and integrating it into the RNC logo. Roger is hesitant, but is uncomfortable and unfamiliar with the concept of piloting another persona, as opposed to being piloted.

Weeks pass within the simulation. Diedre explores her aura-reading and incipient esmology abilities, also the apparent product of the acid. Victoria directs the team in their various projects, but never meets “the Boss,” a reclusive figure who is rarely if ever seen in person. Joshua works fervently to weave the ANZIL glyph into the RNC campaign logo and promotional materials. After about two “real world” hours elapse, the team wakes up.

In their post-simulation debriefing, Jocasta hints to Archie that she has a better understanding of esmology now thanks to her experience, shares some sketches she made after the fact of her visions within the simulation, and then reveals to the group, and GRAIL TABLE, that she dropped acid before entering the simulation. David seems intrigued and simultaneously concerned by this revelation. Archie, meanwhile, politely opines that the experience was a “swell ride” that could “put Walt Disney World out of business,” but notes:

surely you see that that wasn’t another world. That was just solipsism. You told us a story about ourselves. I mean, I was an ad man — or an ad lady — and that’s fun, that in the year 2020 they have ad ladies. That’s great! But, you know, a bunch of ad agents and creatives with a government contract in San Francisco? It’s really interesting. I could see it being a kooky therapy. Folks in California would go crazy for this! But we’re not telling the future here.

David pushes back, explaining that they could have been assigned personas anywhere in the predictive world, but for some reason, they were assigned to El Dorado. As they discuss further, the URIEL team determines that one news story that kept popping up in the simulation, and which was beginning to leak across international borders, was that a type of genetically modified rice used in India was beginning to cause crop failure. Famine in Asia seemed imminent. David presses further: did the team not see the role that media played in their lives? How intrusive it was? How truly their lives were controlled by the media? Roger disagrees, explaining that he saw a lot of resistance to the pervasive control of the media world. He posits that the simulation showed them a future, but not the future.

David reveals that he landed in the role of “the Boss” at El Dorado and that, in that role, he had no knowledge of SANDMAN, but intimate knowledge of memetics. Archie nods like this proves his point: this is a toy, and David is playing with it. David suggests this is a good thing because it gave him a “bird’s eye” view of what the informational landscape, but argues that the sublimation of humanity’s urge to violence into information warfare, depictions of graphic violence, is a grave concern. The discussion goes on about the future, about esmology, about memetics and whether people writ large can be trusted with SANDMAN’s tools. Amid this, Roger gives Charley the “high sign” to indicate she should not reveal what she saw inside the simulation to David.

The meeting ends with David suggesting everyone meet for a pint and dinner in Dufton at around 6:00 p.m. before re-entering the simulation later that evening. URIEL then meets privately to discuss the situation. Roger reveals to the team that he was exposed to an Anunnaki glyph inside the simulation; Charley confirms this is true. A heated debate ensues among the team about whether David is responsible for this, whether ORACLE is tainted by the Red Kings, whether ORACLE auto-generated the glyph independently, whether the glyph is just a “simulation” of a glyph, and whether GRAIL TABLE can be trusted. Sophie vouches for David’s integrity. The team resolves that Roger and Jocasta will re-enter the simulation and investigate further.