4/6

Locations in the ATLANTEAN CULTURAL MISSION
formerly known as the ST. FRANCIS HOTEL

BASEMENT

Entrance to garage, coin-cleaning service, barbershop, other old hotel amenities including office of the hotel historian.

FIRST FLOOR

Lobby (sans clock), main ballroom (where opening ceremonies, big events, and masquerade are), a number of smaller conference rooms, art room, huckster room, registration, restaurant, bar, and kitchens.

SECOND FLOOR

“Consuite,” additional conference rooms, babysitting, film room.

THIRD-TENTH FLOORS

Guest rooms, additional meeting rooms on 3 and 4.

ELEVENTH-TWELFTH FLOORS

Suites, some meeting rooms (11th floor “party floor”).

Played: March 29, 2021.

Friday, June 29, 1973. 1:30 pm. Marshall, Archie, and Andy are at Livermore. Sophie and Charley are driving back from Berkeley. Jocasta is en route to the St. Francis. Mitch handcuffs a dehydrated and unconscious Carl to a chair and prepares to go downstairs so he can meet up with Roger and Viv. As he walks down the hallway, he finds — to his alarm — that the door of the so-called “Fatty Arbuckle” suite, previously shattered to pieces by a kusarikku, is now in perfectly restored condition, though oddly it does not match the rest of the hotel’s aesthetic. It looks … older, somehow? Mitch clocks this and decides he’ll investigate later. When he gets to the elevators, a couple staggers out and throws up, one on the floor, the other in a planter. Mitch figures he’ll take the stairs. A long walk, since he’s on floor 12. He doesn’t notice anything suspicious on the descent, but when he reaches the lobby, the vibe is definitely off. Everyone seems slightly dazed. Their air is warmer than it should be, like the air conditioning got shut off on a summer day. Some people are milling about, some are seated on the floor, some are looking around for others that they recognize. People ask each other banal questions — “What’s up with the lights?” “Anyone else feeling a little … warm?” “What time is it?” — but no one supplies answers. Eventually, he spots Roger and Viv. Roger gives him the high sign to come over.

Roger introduces Viv to Mitch and vice versa. He explains that Viv has spoken with Archie, and that there are plans in the works:

Mitch: Oh! She talked to Archie. OK! OK, that’s … (pause) … what do you think of Archie?

Viv: Uh, I think that Mr. Ransom is very, um … I think he has some interesting ideas that aren’t — gosh, sir, I just met you.

Mitch: No, sorry, I have like three things going on in my mind at once and one of them is, uh, Archie and this whole thing with him and his family and then there's the stuff going on upstairs which probably should be more pressing but is it really? When you come down to it, everything is connected, right?

Roger: “Pressing”? Did you find out what the boundaries of this place are? Like, where it’s safe to go?

Mitch: It’s not really safe to go anywhere. I don’t think it’s safe to go anywhere. The inner courtyard seems to be like part of it. I opened a window and it got kind of the sense that I was looking through a soap bubble at the the world outside, is probably the simplest and minimally … uh, misleading way to phrase it. Talked to Carl. Got some answers. Actually, Marshall got some answers out of Carl. Called him — uh, called him up. There's demons running around. There's a, uh, kusarikku around here someplace. (turning to Viv) Do you know what those are?

Viv: I don’t believe I do … (though as she thinks about it, she recalls that kusarikku are something out of Sumerian mythology, a sort of bull beast-man that acts as an usher, or intermediary, for the Sumerian gods).

Roger: So just one? Oh, good.

Mitch: — minotaur but he can also start fires with his mind. But one of the things Carl said was that there's another guy, uh, back at Berkeley — I'm trying to spread this information out in case something terrible happens — um, some old man. Presumably there since the ‘20s. I don't know if that's accurate or if he was only there since the ‘20s earlier today.

Roger: Oh. Wow. So another Zeb kind of thing?

Mitch: Maybe! Maybe. That's what he was — that's what he described.

Viv: A ‘zeb’ is not Sumerian, is it …?

Mitch: Zeb’s this guy we know. The Oldtimer. You don’t need to worry about him. That’s not relevant to, like, the immediate situation.

Roger: With the Sumerian stuff, yeah a lot of this stuff is — I didn't get to explain that, sorry — but yeah, the bad gods? They have a lot of Sumerian names.

Mitch: Did Archie not tell you that? It seems like it'd be one of the things he should bring up.

Viv: Archie told me this is a … mind-algae bloom coming from people talking to each other. Roger told me that it is, uh, an alternate reality hellscape and until all of this started happening, I would’ve told you that I was the weirdest person here, with the weirdest belief set, and everything that I think is being challenged right now by what I'm experiencing. (deep breath). OK, so, alright. Do you understand — OK, so I'm trying to understand: is this thing trying to eat us into its space or blossom out into our space?

Roger: That one. The last one.

Mitch: The last time this happened, um, it was abrupt. But it was also very contained and we were able to undo it. But I think that this is not — that's not a good like model to follow in this case. It seems really different. I was at a hotel and it went into — it, uh, it became another place. God, I feel like I'm gonna go — I’m kind of all over the place, not actually conveying useful information.

Roger: I can ask you questions, because that usually works, man.

Mitch says that’s a great idea because he’s trying to be more proactive these days. Roger, Viv, and Mitch go over Mitch’s intel: Carl is secure and there are definitely other irruptors running around the hotel beyond just the kusarikku he encountered. Roger says dealing with the kusarikku seems to be priority one, but Mitch demurs: “I don't know, man, because he's bullet resistant, he can start fires with his mind — like, way better than I can — and he's like 12 feet tall. There's not a lot that we can do in a direct confrontation with a kusarikku. The last time I had to deal with one we had like some bargaining chips and that's … I don't think that's the case here.” Roger says that they have supplies on the way, so maybe the calculus will change in a little while.

Jocasta pulls up to the St. Francis, where she is greeted by Special Agents Padden and Hall. They tell her that they’ve cordoned the hotel, positioning agents at all the entrance and exit points. They ask if they should also block entry to the hotel through the garage, and she says yes, that’s wise. They head off and Jocasta goes back to the van, where she calls the front desk, asking for Roger. The front desk pages Roger. The two briefly discuss the situation, alternating between English and Danbe (on Roger’s end). Jocasta asks if it is safe for her to come in. Roger, cheerily: “No.” Jocasta says, “Let me rephrase. How unsafe is it, do you think, for me to come in?” Roger responds, “Of course, once you're here, we'll just love to keep your company. I don't know if you'll even want to.” Jocasta mulls this over. They decide that Jocasta will pull into the underground garage and rendezvous with Roger at the hotel entrance down there. Jocasta remarks that she is “loaded for bear.”

Sophie and Charley arrive at Livermore. Sophie immediately excuses herself to go to the library so that she can research how Carl and Rich may have learned about these glyphs. Marshall remarks that it is funny she mentions that, because he just learned from Carl about their mentor, the “Old Man.” He reveals what Carl told him and then plays the recording of the interrogation. The office team debates what is going on. Marshall ruminates about how this tactic with the Old Man is similar to what they encountered with Zeb, though the Old Man sounds more sinister. Archie remarks on the fact that Carl said the Old Man always stays in the same place, the “cooling tanks,” which seems odd. The four of them put their heads together and deduce that they are probably dealing with a kulullû. Archie asks if it’s possible that the “thing” is still there now. No one knows — if it is, it’s still in the basement of the physics building, and they’ve never gone there to check it out.

Archie says that the Old Man at Berkeley is obviously important, but that he’s been there (apparently) for five decades, and the situation at the St. Francis seems more emergent. Marshall agrees and analogizes the hotel to a boat on the edge of a sinkhole.

All the weight is on the wrong side. We can shift all the way to the front and tip the boat forward, but there's still going to be a sinkhole. And I'm not even sure that this shifting is going to work. We might not have … from what Mitch told me about the scene on the inside, this is an order of magnitude worse than what we encountered at the Stanley Hotel, and it could get out of control very quickly. So we need an auxiliary plan. And I think that the auxiliary plan has to entail getting to the root of the problem very quickly. But I don't know what the root of the problem is and I don't know how to fix it.

Archie asks Charley if she was able to learn anything about what the competition is doing from analyzing the particle accelerator at Berkeley. Charley says she disabled the accelerator, and could get it working again if need be, but can’t think of how that would help the situation. Marshall asks if Charley thinks that the Magneta Clock could be used in some way to reassert consensus reality — using its natural vector status as a way of distributing a History A meme within the hotel. Charley spins around in her chair and says that her theory is that the Clock was put into place to serve as a reality shard. It would channel and store History B energy, and then distribute that energy out to people. So, in her opinion, it was a good thing that the Clock isn’t there anymore, because that distribution point is now missing. Could the Clock be subverted to SANDMAN’s purpose, though? Kinda. She explains:

If Carl and Rich were trying to use Krane, right, to … um take them to the universe that he imagined, right? The Atlantis Risen universe? And they had the particle accelerator. As well as some kind of History B geometry that was part of the equation. Could the Clock be used as a focus to push the Hotel back into History A? Uh … the answer is yes. But you need to have some sort of particle beam able to be used inside the Hotel. And this would involve bringing a giant source of radiation into a hotel with hundreds of people in it. It would also involve putting the Clock back into place. And again, somehow kind of coming up with the … geometry that is needed to push the Hotel back through the cat flap into History A. The geometry is the part that we don't know. Carl knows it, but Carl's in no shape. Rich knows it, but he's in no shape. There's probably only one other entity right now that knows that geometry and that's the … that's the guy in the basement.

Oh, also, URIEL would need an illuminated person to make that whole scheme work. So, that rules that plan out. Marshall asks Charley what she meant earlier when she said that Carl and Rich had only managed to convert a closet into a “death closet,” not construct the sort of teleportation or translocation device they were talking about. Charley says that any one who went into the closet would be bombarded with an intense amount of radiation — too intense to survive. The person in the closet would just die. But Charley doesn’t know if Rich and Carl know that. They very well could’ve thought they’d built a working teleportation device. Or maybe there was just a piece missing, like an Anunnaki glyph that would effect the workings of History A physics. Charley asks Marshall if Carl said anything about how he met the Old Man. Marshall recalls that Carl said he felt “called” down to the basement by some higher power. Charley asks if they should maybe go to the Old Man in the basement, either to confront him or extort him for information. Marshall says he thinks that is inadvisable, but he won’t advise against it:

We are in a very precarious situation right now. The reason I think it is inadvisable is that this kind of creature can be very persuasive and can get into your head in a way that your typical brute force kusarikku or whatever cannot. Without more knowledge of his capabilities, his intent, how … how enshrined he is in this space, we could just be walking into a trap where we walk out as puppets of this creature. Also, no offense to the four of us here, we are not the field team. All of our best assets are at the Hotel. I don't think any of the four of us are necessarily equipped to deal … we have nothing — let me put it this way: you can only really deal with the opposition when you have something to trade or when you have leverage over them. Otherwise, we mean nothing to them. They could just snuff us out. If we go to this thing now, we could be walking into a trap. Or we could be going to it — but we have nothing to offer him. He has no need to help us or give us anything other than lies and manipulation because he has us at a disadvantage. He has all the cards and we have none. So we either need cards or we need something to trade for information or we need to know how to coerce him into giving up the secrets of how to fix this. And I do not think that, right now, we have that capability.

Sophie agrees, noting that the only thing they seem to have in their favor is the Clock. But the team quickly reevaluates: they have the Clock, and Andy, and Mitch on the inside, and the opposition may not realize Mitch is illuminated yet.

Archie: But even in theory, what sort of — the idea of negotiating with them is weird in the first place — how do you even, what sort of things do they want? How could we have leverage over them?

Sophie: They have everything that they've ever wanted right now. They have a lynch pin in our reality that's going to slip into — that's going to cause our entire planet to slip into History B in four days. Going there and confronting it and killing it — I mean kulullû are very weak physically, but as you say Marshall, they love setting traps because it helps them deal with their physical inadequacies. That basement is probably … yeah, for anybody who that that kulullû is not welcome down there, it's probably a death trap.

Marshall: My recommendation is that we focus … that we put all our eggs in the basket of shifting the tide through memetics and whatever else we can throw at the Hotel to get it to right the ship and then deal with the opposition later when we have more information.

Sophie: Should we get … should we have a particle accelerator ready? Because I can talk to Granite Peak about that.

Marshall: Oh God, I so badly do not want to tell Granite Peak about this.

Sophie: Marshall, I understand — I understand why you would feel that way. This a fuck-up. Um, sorry Charley. This is a profound, I mean, Archie how long do you think that the memetics will take to take effect? There's about a thousand people in there. (she does some quick esmological calculations in her head) I mean, for this thing to spread, it's gonna need to be pretty powerful. Are you — do you think you and Krane are up to it? Do you need my help?

Archie: We're gonna make it as powerful as we can. I can't imagine the tides shifting before — it's now mid-afternoon, like it's gonna take hours, but hopefully the situation on the ground will be different in a day. You know, by tonight. So we can hold off —

Marshall: We have Abeille! She can use the source language, right?

Archie: No, no she doesn’t have access to the source code. She just has this … natural facility with neurolinguistic programming.

Marshall: I mean, we have to leverage that to our advantage to try to accelerate our timeline. We have to lean on her to use that, but is there any way we can use …

Archie: Charley, you're the only one who even comes halfway to understanding this science stuff. What do you think we should do with the assets we have? The Clock, the particle accelerator, Krane.

Charley says she thinks she should try to get deeper into Berkeley’s computer system to see if she can learn more about the alien geometries Carl and Rich were using. She wants to know how they were able to “summon” the weird ikoters they deployed at the St. Francis, which apparently came from Andy’s Atlantis universe. “Hold on,” Archie says, “they pulled MARPA ikoters out of Krane’s book. Is there anything else in Krane's book that would be useful to us? Because we've got Krane right here. Is there a deeper weapon in his book that we could pull out of the Rad Lab?” Marshall blanches. He tells Archie to listen to what he’s saying. He’s proposing further weakening the borders between History A and a “fictitious history” created by an “insane sci fi author who’s high on drugs all the time.” Archie says no, he thinks Andy’s a good man. Marshall says he understands that but the solution can’t be that the team saves History A by “importing” more History B — or whatever — into it. Sophie chimes in, “This does get back to what Mitch was saying about History C …” Marshall cuts her off: “WE DON’T HAVE TIME FOR THAT, SOPHIE.”

Archie, undeterred, starts flipping through his notes, looking for any sort of world-saving “MacGuffin” that Andy may have mentioned. But he finds nothing. Sophie reminds Archie that Andy wants Atlantis to win — and he hasn’t written the end of the series, yet. Archie gets more enthusiastic. “But he can write the ending! We have him right here!” Marshall, exasperated, says, “Let’s put a pin in that and hold onto it in case the memetics don’t work.” Sophie asks him where they should rank this plan Archie is proposing. Plan B? Plan C? Marshall says Plan A is the memetics. Plan B is the particle beam, the Clock, and an illuminated person. Plan C is he calls Granite Peak and they send a kill team to wipe out everyone in the Hotel. He goes off to meditate. Archie ruminates and works on preparing the role-playing packets. Charley goes to her lab to see if she can delve deeper in Berkeley’s computer system.

At the St. Francis, Jocasta unpacks her gear from the van. She grabs the box containing the Atlantean plaque. Meditating for a brief moment, she ponders what steps she can take to help counter the riptide caused by this emergent subduction zone. One thing, she realizes, is that she could reattach the plaque to the foundation, which may help “shore up” the narrative of the “game” that Archie and Andy are proposing to deploy. Another thing, more suited to her skillset, is to kill any irruptors the team may find inside the Hotel. Of course, shedding human blood is entirely out of the question: human “sacrifice” inside a temblor will only hasten the descent into a full-blown ontoclysm. But killing irruptors will have the opposite effect, diminishing History A’s influence and strengthening the boundaries of consensus reality.

She grabs her duffel bags full of equipment and approaches the basement entrance, where she spots Roger on the other side of the glass doors. She tells Roger she thinks she needs to put the plaque back on the foundation; Roger questions whether that’s wise. Jocasta explains she’s not acting on hard intelligence, but that she meditated on it a bit and believes that the plaque can be used as a weapon to stop the temblor from spreading. Roger says she should put it on the list because they’re juggling a lot of things right now inside the hotel.

Roger: I can't wish you were here, but, you know, I kind of wish you were here.

Jocasta: Well, I am here. That's the next question we need to answer … do you think I'm better used out here? Or should I come in? You get me a coat rack and we load all this stuff up and go hunting for bear.

Roger: I think we need every agent we can get. I mean, I know that people are like, ‘Oh yeah use these con-goers,’ but have you seen these pencil necked geeks? I mean, I need someone who has military skills. We’ve got to take one of these things down. I really, really hope you brought, like, the big ikoters.

Jocasta: (gestures at the dolly loaded up with duffel bags and ammo crates)

Roger: OK. You got to come in. I mean … I don't — I'm telling you that's what I want. I tell you what I think the situation needs. But you could be walking into hell, so it has to be your choice. And I let you have it freely.

Jocasta: It wouldn't be the first time, pal.

Roger steps aside and Jocasta pushes the dolly through the doorway, entering the St. Francis. As she does, she feels like she is walking through a thick bubble. Jocasta and Roger head upstairs, where they locate Mitch and Viv in the lobby. Jocasta greets Viv and Viv confusedly waves at “Mrs. Smith.” Mitch doesn’t register Jocasta’s presence; he seems lost in thought. He then asks Viv if she thinks human nature bends inevitably toward fascism. Viv, now even more confused, says: “No. It’s environmental. It’s not the bees. It’s the beehive.” Mitch asks why, then, do bees make beehives over and over again? Viv responds, “Well, the beehive is the province of the engineer who must find the right fit for the bees or they will become psychotic.” Mitch says great, let’s talk about psychosis then. Viv asks if they really have time for this right now, and Mitch says no, sorry, they probably don’t. He just has a million things on his mind right now and Archie was saying something that got into his head. Viv puts a hand on his shoulder and says she very much appreciates him voicing that honestly. She promises they’ll talk more soon.

The newly-enlarged field team feels that the Hotel is getting darker. The air is getting heavier, warmer, more stale. Roger starts running logistics, introducing Jocasta as a fellow agent to the staff and prepping the gear for transport to the URIEL suite. Mitch examines Jocasta’s aura, and finds that it is no different by dint of having entered the temblor zone. The team discusses the need for a further debrief, and debates where best to do that, ultimately deciding on the bivouac suite. The team heads to an elevator, which is an uneventful ride. At the URIEL suite, Viv observes all the recording and audio equipment. She asks if Dr. Redgrave is involved in all this. Roger says, “You mean Marshall?” Mitch asks if Viv’s spoken with him. Viv explains that she had a run-in with Marshall’s proteges on floor 11. She asks Jocasta if her “lovely daughter” is also here at the hotel. Jocasta says nothing, instead immediately setting about unpacking the huge array of highly lethal and in some cases illegal weapons — among them, some … ray guns? Viv puts two and two together. Faced with an utterly surreal situation, she decides to just try to play along as lucidly as possible. But this is not at all how she thought it worked. She knew it worked somehow, but not like this.

At Livermore, Archie and Andy are finalizing the game packets they plan on deploying at the St. Francis. Archie asks Andy, hypothetically, how would his boys at MARPA solve this problem in his books? Andy says that’s an interesting question. The boys from MARPA would probably cordon off the area and then bring in some of the “magical boffins from Chicago” to perform ritual techno-magic on the building, anchoring it back in “our reality.” As he expounds on this topic, Archie realizes that Andy is basically explaining what URIEL is already planning on doing, more or less. As Andy wraps up, Archie tells him to really think about this problem — how would he solve it in his books, how he would resolve the conflict at the heart of this narrative. Andy is uninspired; he’s too exhausted and stressed out for the message to really sink in. The two resume finalizing the details of their live action role playing experience, Atlantis A-Risen. When they are done, Archie looks admiringly at his work. These are some powerful memes. Andy starts pounding away at his typewriter (supplied to him by Sophie), transcribing his and Archie’s ideas and working up the packets for mimeographing. Andy asks if they have any speed on hand. Archie disapproves but says they have a doctor on staff. They page Marshall, who brings Andy some SANDMAN-grade Modafinil. “This man can have whatever the fuck he wants,” Marshall says in response to the side-eye from Archie. When all is said and done, Archie smiles broadly. “This is a really fun game. It’s gonna be a corker.”

Archie, Andy, Sophie, and Marshall convene to discuss deployment of the memes. They quickly settle on having Viv act as the primary vector of the “game meme,” that is, the live action role playing experience for the con-goers. Archie proposes having Marshall’s Special Ones act as the vector for the “Cold War espionage meme,” that is, the “deeper” meme targeted at the cynics and guests who are not participants in Westercon. Marshall says he has a particular recruit who would be good for this, a woman named Williamson who has a certain political bent. Marshall picks up the phone to call the Special Ones’ suite. The phone line is extremely staticky. Once Marianne is on the line, Marshall explains that he’s recently learned that there’s a group of cold warrior hawkish fascist type who are purportedly engaging in a weird game theory-adjacent social experiment. He cautions her about becoming involved. Marianne says that they’ve mostly been sticking to their room where they’ve been exploring various “new” types of “worship.” It’s all very heady, she says. Marshall quickly deduces that the group has come under the memetic “sway” of the hotel. In order for Archie’s meme to “stick” to them, it will need to be delivered to them physically. They need to hear the source code.

Marshall decides to try something. He engages the Voice of the Anunnaki, lulling Marianne into a deep meditative state where she is receptive to pure information. He then uses his neurolinguistic programming to recalibrate her brain and implant Archie’s meme. It seems to register with her. He encourages the Special Ones to keep their hotel door open, knowing that this will enable the meme to spread to passersby and the like. As he hangs up, he thinks to himself how impressive Archie’s skills are — the meme is something else. He gives Archie a pat on the back as he leaves the room.

In her lab, Charley works on hacking her way into Berkeley’s computer system via ARPANET. It takes her a while to locate the data she needs, and even longer to convert the data into a usable format, but when she finishes, she finds that the geometries Carl and Rich were using in their experiments take the form of an Anunnaki glyph. It has no immediate effect on her, being only a digital representation of a “true” glyph that, apparently, exists only as pure data, but it obviously is one. As Charley evaluates the shape more closely, she finds herself drawn into the spiral at its center. Her SANDMAN training kicks in and she is able to snap herself out of whatever trance the thing was putting her in. But with this comes a realization: this pattern will do the team no good in securing the hotel. What they will need to do for that is create a new symbol that represents History A.

Back in the URIEL suite, the field team cracks open the room fridge and makes some rum and Cokes while they wait for further instruction from Livermore. They discuss what to do about Rich and Carl. Viv proposes going to the con committee sooner rather than later and explaining that they are dealing with an terrorist attack that was targeted at Andy, that Andy is in protective custody, and that they need to engage in this game to keep people distracted and occupied while the FBI finds the suspects. Roger agrees. The two of them follow Jocasta out to meet with the con committee, where Viv explains the cover story and, together with Roger, convince them to play along. The con committee agrees to help Viv and Roger implement the game, forming “teams,” deploying missions, and so on.

Jocasta, heavily armed, and Mitch set out to find the kusarikku Mitch confronted earlier. They leave Carl restrained in the suite and head to the elevator. Mitch once again pushes a button at random. When he opens his eyes he sees he’s selected the basement. The elevator ride is uneventful, but when they emerge they find themselves in what appears to be a hybrid basement-dungeon. The fluorescent lights flicker like torches, and the architecture is not entirely … right. Concrete walls intersect with rough-hewn stones and arched entryways are occupied by modern doors. They wander a bit, exploring the environment, before stumbling upon the St. Francis’ famed coin cleaning office. There, they spot an old man standing before a huge machine, hard at work cleaning something. With the right eyes, they realize the man is not wholly a man, but a man with a scorpion tail.