8/10
Played: July 23, 2023.
Thursday. October 18, 1973. Jocasta and Roger touch down at Mansfield Air National Guard Base in Mansfield, Ohio. It's around midnight. A driver takes them to the crash site at Charles Mill Lake, about 20 minutes away. Charles Mill Lake is a reservoir that feeds several communities throughout central Ohio. It’s surrounded by forests and campgrounds – isolated, reasonably remote, a great place to down a UFO.
Jocasta and Roger can see the floodlights illumining the trees as they approach. SANDMAN has cordoned the area. Local law enforcement stand at barriers along the two-lane roads that lead to the lake; Sandmen commandos and operators have set up a second perimeter closer to the crash site itself at the southern end of the lake.
When Jocasta and Roger arrive they find several dozen Sandmen – technicians, surveyors, engineers, recon teams – and a pair of taishers examining the debris field. Many are wearing full hazmat suits. A few carry Geiger counters and other strange looking instruments. Armed soldiers stand at intervals, watching the tree line. Workers in hardhats finalize calibrations on a mechanized crane. The winch hangs over the lake.
Exiting the vehicle, Jocasta and Roger notice a small obelisk made of gray stone. It is four sided, fairly old looking, with memorial stones on two sides. The inscriptions on the memorial stones read:
JAMES COPUS
AND THREE SOLDIERS
GEORGE SHIPLEY
JOHN TEDRICK
AND WARNOCK
KILLED BY THE INDIANS
SEPT. 15, 1812
JOHNNY APPLESEED
DIED
MAR. 11, 1845
BURIED NEAR
FORT WAYNE, IND.
The officer in charge introduces himself and explains the situation:
The fuselage is underwater; a dive team of SEAL commandos have managed to locate it using short-range radar. Per orders from HQ in Huntsville, they have kept their distance from the wreckage until “the other team” has arrived.
A team of engineers and crash-site experts should be ready to extract the fuselage shortly. A convoy of vehicles bearing U.S. Army insignia are waiting nearby to transport it, presumably to Granite Peak.
The two taishers on site report no irruptor activity. However, both can sense two very powerful sources of History B corruption down in the lake.
The current plan is to spend the night salvaging the UFO from the lake so that, when morning arrives, the locals will have no idea what happened.
Jocasta reiterates to the officer the instructions from ALLOCHTHON command that under no circumstances should anyone attempt to engage in survivor search-and-rescue protocols. The officer nods. He assures her that they have, so far, found no trace of any entities, living or dead.
Jocasta tells Roger she’ll need to get in the water to commune with the Underwater Panther and confirm that their pact is satisfied. She asks if Roger wants to come with her or would prefer to “handle things on the ground.” Roger demures the invitation – not because he can’t swim, he definitely can. He’s just reluctant to engage in nocturnal diving for the first time in his life. Plus, he says, holding up the infrasonic headphones that Charley hacked together in Pascagoula, he can use these to “keep an ear” on what Jocasta’s doing. If things go wrong and she needs help, better that he be on dry land to facilitate rescue operations. Jocasta thanks him and goes to change. She also pops a tab of acid.
About an hour later, Jocasta finds herself floating in the murky depths of Charles Mill Lake. She’s wearing infrared goggles; the SEAL team monitors her from a distance. She feels anxious and overwhelmed, but strangely giddy. The green tint of the goggles makes everything look ghostly. Then, emerging from the pitch-black haze, she sees it: the skeleton of an oblong, saucer-shaped craft.
It’s in bad shape. The “struts” that form the UFO’s “skeleton” appear to be made of wood and are covered with intricate carvings. Attached to these are tattered pieces of what looks like a thin metal foil; they float and wave lazily like seaweed in a slow current. At one end of the saucer is a crystal, which Jocasta estimates is about the size of a softball or a fist. Another, similar one is attached at the other end.
High on acid, Jocasta thinks to herself: huh, this one doesn’t look at all like the one I saw in Oakland. That one was filigreed, ornate, almost baroque. This one is just a giant metal bean. Or it was, anyway. Her acid-addled mind can’t really parse what this means, but increasingly it seems to her that this UFO is a … put-on? A prop? “Where are all the electronics?” a voice says in her mind. “Where are the engines?”
Jocasta swims a bit closer but as she does, the water vibrates. When she’s regained her bearings, Jocasta sees a gigantic creature rising out of the abyssal depths. It looks something like an American wildcat but with hideous sharpened antlers rising out of its head and rows of menacing quills running down its back like hackles. It fixes Jocasta with its eyes. On land, Roger senses a shift in the noosphere. The Underwater Panther has arrived.
The Panther intones: “YOU HAVE SERVED UP A MEAL FOR ME. I KEPT THEM HIDDEN FROM YOUR SEERS.” Jocasta watches as four small gray bodies rise up, seemingly of their own accord, out of the silt and soil at the bottom of the lake. They have hairless, hydrocephalic heads, huge eyes, and child-like bodies with frail limbs. And they’re clearly dead. “Grays,” Jocasta thinks.
Once free of the earth, the bodies open their tiny mouths slowly. Out emerge four kulullû curled into themselves like fetuses. They drift lifelessly toward the maw of the Underwater Panther, but don’t get very far before they flicker like a picture on a television set that is caught between channels. Jocasta watches as the gray aliens are replaced with the bodies of four U.S. pilots wearing high altitude helmets and flight gear. (“Just like those alien doctors, with the shields over their eyes, from that vision I had of Charley’s chip being installed!” Jocasta thinks with rising panic). The bodies flicker again. Now they are alive – living humans! Seven feet tall if they’re an inch, clad in diaphanous togas. They look Nordic, Jocasta thinks.
The Underwater Panther opens its monstrous jaws and tears into the bodies, rendering them limb from limb. As it does, the bodies flicker once more. For an instant, they look to Jocasta like three U.S. Army soldiers from the early nineteenth century plus one black-clad reverend. On land, Roger can sense the Underwater Panther’s deep sense of primal satisfaction at being fed. Then, through his headphones, he hears the Panther speak:
UNDERWATER PANTHER: OUR COVENANT IS NOW FULFILLED. THE THREE WORDS ARE YOURS. YOU WILL REMEMBER THEM UPON WAKING, THE NEXT TIME YOU AWAKE. I HAVE CHOSEN THEM CAREFULLY FROM THE CRITERIA THAT YOU GAVE TO ME.
Jocasta: O great Mishipeshu, it was my first meal for a being this great, but I hope it was to your liking.
UNDERWATER PANTHER: I HAVE LEARNED MUCH ABOUT WHAT THUNDERBIRD HAS DONE. BUT THIS KNOWLEDGE IS FOR ME ALONE.
It smiles a toothsome smile.
Jocasta: Perhaps that will change some day. But, until then, well met. I’m sure we will see each other again.
UNDERWATER PANTHER: I AM ALSO SURE WE WILL MEET AGAIN. BUT OUR AGREEMENT IS NOW FULFILLED.
Jocasta nods with respect and turns to swim away. As she emerges from the water, word comes across the radio that the remaining subduction zones – the two in Ohio, the one in Illinois, and the final one in Georgia – have now all closed.
The recovery engineers arrive and, over the next two hours, winch the UFO fuselage out of the lake. It looks basically like a giant, tattered, three-dimensional kite made of aluminum foil with two fist-sized crystals, one red and one green, attached to the “front” and “back.” One of the taishers – visibly sweating – examines the crystals. He reports that the green crystal has something to do with people’s memories, while the red crystal seems to possess a sort of motive energy that would enable the saucer to fly.
The wooden frame of the saucer is covered in glyphs, but not glyphs of the Anunnaki variety. They have an entirely different appearance and don’t seem to affect anyone who looks upon them. Eventually, a linguistic specialist announces that they are not glyphs at all, but individual characters for a series of unknown words. Jocasta and Roger confer over this discovery. They decide to take as many photographs as they can and bring them to Mitch for his assessment.
Roger and Jocasta arrive back in Huntsville a few hours later, only to find a party underway, organized by Marshall to celebrate ALLOCHTHON’s success. Technicians, Mil-Ops commandos, researchers, officer, everyone is gathered in the main hangar drinking and smoking and having a good time. Missing from the festivities is URIEL, however – Mitch, Charley, and Archie have all gone to bed, anxious to have this mission over. Jocasta explains that she needs to sleep and Marshall gives her sedative. That night, she and Roger share a dream.
In the dream, Jocasta finds herself dressed in her high school basketball uniform. She is holding a flint spear. Roger is dressed like Agent 00, that is, in a tuxedo. They stand on a dock over a body of water that looks like a combination of Pascagoula and Lake Champlain. Jocasta turns to Roger and says a word in proto-Abenaki. Roger says a word back in proto-Pascagoula. It is a word of greeting, one that carries with it the heavy implication that they share a secret fraternity capable of seeing through the lies that prey upon the human mind. It is a pure word – one that Roger and Jocasta “hear” in their separate languages – but it is also the same word. Deep within himself, Roger can sense Kalfu stir. This is the language he heard in Pascagoula, but which he kept under wraps beneath the cool, collected shell of Agent 00.
Friday. October 19, 1973. In the early morning hours, Archie, Marshall, and Charley board a plane for Wyoming. They go to collect Agent RAVEN – a/k/a “Andrea,” a/k/a Rose Nichols, Charley’s mother, whom SANDMAN is turning over to URIEL. They are joined on their flight by Sidney Gottlieb and Jolly West, who are traveling under armed escort to Granite Peak. Aboard the plane, Marshall gently puts it to Charley that she should be prepared for the fact that her mother might not be completely herself, and may even be missing memories of their life together from before her transfer to THROWAWAY. Charley says she understands.
During the flight, Archie and Marshall make only the most terse and perfunctory conversation with Sidney and Jolly. Marshall reads their body language: Sidney seems tired, worn out, ready to get out of this game. Jolly seems a bit more cocksure, like a man who knows he’s too valuable to kill. Marshall suspects Jolly still has a future at SANDMAN, and knows it.
They touch down at a rudimentary airfield in Lander, Wyoming, about four hours later. Already there, idling, is a large cargo plane bearing U.S. Air Force markings. At the end of the cargo plane’s ramp stand six Sandman commandos plus a few men in suits. These are obviously Granite Peak personnel, there to bring Sidney and Jolly the rest of the way to Utah.
After a quick series of introductions and an exchange of paperwork, Sidney and Jolly are escorted onto the flight that will take them to Granite Peak. A moment later, out of the shadows, emerges a woman. She has short hair, much shorter than Charley remembers. Upon spotting Charley, she smiles broadly and runs toward her.
“Lily,” she says, choking back tears. She scoops Charley into a hug, but Charley is stiff and uncomfortable. Rose lets her go. Reading her body language, Marshall discerns that her emotional reaction seems genuine. She appears to remember who Charley is, though he cannot say more. Rose rises to her feet and looks at Archie and Marshall:
Rose: Mr. Ransom, Dr. Redgrave – thank you for looking after my daughter.
Archie: (extending a hand) Ms. Nichols – Rose – it’s been a pleasure and an honor to look after her. It’s wonderful to meet you. How are you feeling?
Rose: Ready for duty. It’s, um, it’s been a long time and … I ran away from that duty. But I’m ready to be a member of the Project again. With your team. I understand that you’re going to be wanting somebody with expertise in Native anthropology and archaeology.
Archie: That’s fine – that’s great – but duty …
Marshall: Uh, let’s get you out of here. I mean, Wyoming, right? Have you ever been to California? It’s beautiful in the Bay Area. We’ll get you out to California. We’ll get you situated somewhere comfortable. Let you get acclimated. We – our team is currently in the process of winding down a huge project back East, you know, so we have to just wind that down and then when we get back to, uh, HQ, we can – you’ll have had a chance to sort of catch your breath and get yourself situated out there, and we can have what we like to call an “all hands” meeting. We have them every Monday. And from there, sort of figure out what we want to do.
Rose: I understand, Doctor. I appreciate that. Thank you. Lily, I don’t know if you’ve given any thought to just what it’s going to take to be a family again, but I know you’ve been through a lot and I want to try.
Charley: Yes, of course. Of course, “mom.”
Rose: They gave me a lot of information on what you’ve been up to and I’m really proud of you.
Charley: Thank you.
They walk back to the plane, with Marshall snatching Rose’s file from her attendant’s hands as they go. On the flight, Marshall shows Rose several photographs of random men plus one photograph of Mitch. He asks her if she recognizes any of them. Rose studies the photographs carefully. She furrows her brow and scratches the back of her neck. Then she points at Mitch’s photograph and says: “Well, that one looks like a man I saw in a dream, but he did look like this. He was dressed up like a wizard. I don’t know if it was a dream or something to do with the treatment that was done at the retreat, but it was a dream in which I saw Lily with him. I tried to let them know I was alright.” Marshall notes from her demeanor that she is not lying when she says this, but he gets the feeling that something is missing from her story, like there is something blocking her complete recall.
At Huntsville, Roger and Jocasta wake up late, get ready, and then go find Mitch. Over breakfast, they show him the photographs they took of the UFO and the glyphs.
Roger: Alright, so – of what she saw, with the four gray aliens, the four pilots in suits that looked like the Project, and then the four folks from the 1800s who looked to be commemorated on site as having died there, you know, what does that say to you in terms of histories.
Mitch: Well, this is really getting into an area where I question how useful my perspective is going to be. Because what it says to me is, they're just fucking with us. They're just … let's toss this in. It'll be fun. It’ll be funny. “Here's another thin!g Let's just add it to the mix.” It doesn't mean anything. There's no greater pattern beyond: it's just cute. Maybe that’s a helpful position to be taking, right? Because even if it’s like a hundred percent true, it’s still not actionable. So, I guess what I’m saying is, your guess is as good as mine. Better, probably.
Roger: Well, I mean, you were keeping up with those boffos in the conference room.
Mitch: Yeah. Yeah. But my takeaway from that conversation was just that there’s no answers to be found. That’s just not the way this particular Gordian knot is made, right? It’s just not a there –
Marshall: (having apparently arrived back from Wyoming, and interrupting) Well, there never was a there, right? There was never going to be a “there.” The very nature of this whole thing that we’re involved in is kind of unsolvable. So you have to figure out some other way of making it all make sense. Otherwise you –
Mitch: OK, so, but that’s what science is, right? This is the basic premise of science, is that the universe is inherently too complex for the human mind to understand. There is no way that we can look at a paperweight and understand everything about a paperweight. A paperweight is too complicated for us. All that we can do is imagine a simplified paperweight, right? A model. And we know that the model is flawed. We know that there are properties that the paperweight has that are not going to fit into Newtonian mechanics. We know that there are properties of the paperweight that are not going to fit into quantum mechanics. We know that there are properties of the paperweight that the paperweight has that are not going to fit into the fucking theory of the periodic table! But all those models provide a useful hook on the ultimately fundamentally unknowable nature of reality. And what I’m seeing … I’ve said before, the worst you can do is think that you have everything figured out. Because at that point, you immediately become blind to all the stuff you don’t understand. And what you don’t understand is what’s going to kill you. But I feel like trying to figure out what’s what, there’s a limit to how useful that is, too. And I feel like we’re brushing up against – and maybe it’s just me! Maybe I’m just coming at this from a … with bad energy. It’s been a long couple of weeks, you know? I have been home. I’ve been in this fucking Nazi arsenal. It’s called an arsenal! That’s not a positive energy. So that’s my answer to your question. I hope it helped.
Roger: I mean, if it helps you, it helps. I think I get the more basic thing which is, is it good or bad? You know, call it a simple model. But I’m guessing it was good, because whatever those different forms were, they’re all gone now. They got ate. And they got ate by one of ours. So, good on us. We’ll keep figuring out how to close this stuff down.
Mitch: That’s pretty good. I like your perspective better than mine.
Mitch reviews the photographs. The symbols on the wooden struts are definitely are not Anunnaki in origin. They’re not in cuneiform, to start. In fact, they look more than anything like the scribblings of an eighteenth century occultist who has pulled symbols and ciphers from various grimoires. A bit of Latin, some hieratic, a little Archaic Greek. It’s a hodgepodge, basically. Mitch can’t be sure, but he’s fairly confident from what he’s seeing that the saucer is similar to the RFK ‘72 posters or the Atlantean plaque at the St. Francis – bigger, obviously, but the same sort of thing, namely, a fragment of a story, a reality shard left behind. Roger tells Mitch about his dream and speaks the word that dream-Jocasta spoke to him. It reverberates in Mitch’s head like a gong. The word is nothing like Mitch has previously encountered; the closest thing it comes to, he thinks, is Danbe. He can tell that it is a pure word, a word wholly untouched and untainted by the Anunnaki, and it is meant to convey a greeting. “Greetings and recognition, you who have resisted the blandishments of the aliens.”
Over the next two nights, Jocasta dreams.
In the first dream she is back at Alamogordo, New Mexico. The landscape is a confusing pastiche. She is standing in the parking lot of a mid-century Googie architecture motel, but ahead of her by about a hundred yards is the Trinity test site. Beyond that is a vast cliff containing innumerable Pueblo dwellings. There is a flash, and she looks back toward the test site, shielding her eyes. A bright glowing star descends from the heavens. It is not shaped like a flying saucer; instead, it is a ball of nuclear light. It sets itself down at the Trinity site and Jocasta hears the second word: a word in the language of this land’s people, from before the white man came, that would be known to the children of the people who still live. Instinctively she knows that this is a holy word, one that was known to the predecessors of the southwest Indians. The word still exists, in bastardized form, among them, and it is a word for Those Who Came from the Stars. “The Holy People.”
The next night, Jocasta dreams herself to be in Cairo, Illinois. She is near the Kincaid Mounds and she is a mess, spiritually and physically. Dirty, malnourished, emotionally devastated from her divorce and her wanderings and her addictions. She feels poisoned. Sick. Tainted. She then looks to the horizon, across a near-endless swath of dry grassland, and to the horizon. There, she sees a crystalline city. But closer, only a few hundred yards away, stand several very tall, very willowy blond white people, each wearing a toga. Jocasta knows, somehow, that this is not the future. This is the past. The distant past.
Jocasta watches as these strange white people walk through the tall grass. Everything that they approach – the trees, the shrubs, and rivers – burst forth with sustenance. It is like the land wishes to give to them. “This land,” Jocasta knows, “and these people … they are untainted by the Red Kings. The Enemy is not here.” And yet she senses that the Enemy crouches among them, half forgotten, buried deep in their collective memory. One of the white people speaks a name to a man riding by on a chariot that partially resembles something out of Bronze Age Egypt and something out of Hellenic Greece. Suddenly, there is a throng of these people waving and cheering at this man. They call out his name as he passes. That is the third word, the name of this great chieftain.