Thursday. October 11, 1973. Newark, Ohio. Archie, Marshall, and Morris continue their tour of the mounds, visiting the Newark Earthworks. Eileen, their guide, delivers her standard spiel: as far as most authorities know, this site dates back to the Hopewell culture (approx. 1 to 400 CE), unlike the previous site where the effigy was constructed around 1000 CE. Massive mounds, moats, and dips; the work of a vast number of hands.

She cites the possibility of some radical ecological change circa 500 CE, at which point the site was abandoned. Morris paces around, followed by Marshall. He looks almost out of breath, despite being on forty-something and in fairly good health.

MORRIS (in Danbe, to Marshall, while Archie distracts Eileen) They helped them build this place, the fish-beasts [kulullû]. It was built in tandem, humans and them, prior to the time-the-old-kings-vanished [Ontoclysm]. This place is a machine; I don't know what that means, but it's a complex machine, with multiple parts.

He gestures over to the to the octagonal Mound and to the ditch that connects it with one of the other Mounds. It's definitely shaken him up: it's not that there's fresh History-B energy here, but rather that he can tell that this place was built with their help, with their expertise.

EILEEN (oblivious) What are the general theories as to what all of these different Mounds mean? Obviously most of the archaeologists and anthropologists believe there's a ritual aspect to it. There's nothing for us to see here that's as you know clear a sign as the as the effigy on Alligator Mound, but each of these different areas must have had different purposes … Now, as you've no doubt noticed, this place is in the middle of a golf course. Back in the early 20th century, about 60 or 70 years ago, somebody bought the land and, um,  built a golf course around it. During the New Deal the municipal authorities and the Ohio Historical Society, Licking County, they snagged control so the site wasn't completely razed. 

I think there's a lot more evidence, given the different kinds of structures here, to say that this was a place of worship. Have they found any remnants, as far as burials are concerned? No, no. Much like Alligator Mound, there's been no human remains found here, but it's just too big, it's just too varied, for it to have had a simple purpose like a lookout Mound, or a place only for rituals. It was a multi-purpose site, but what all those purposes are we don't know.

MARSHALL OK.

ARCHIE So what happened to the Hopewell people? What happened to the people who built this?

EILEEN Well, it's the same thing I was talking about with you back at Alligator Mound: there were successive cultures that moved through the Ohio and Mississippi river valleys and … again, this is just my supposition from what I've read more broadly in history … between the Adina and Hopewell cultures, I believe there was some kind of climatic catastrophe that maybe killed off the people that were here. Maybe they couldn't survive and had to move on. It's one of these things where all of these sites have just been … we've barely scratched the surface.

Eileen signals, nonverbally, that people who want to advance their careers in archaeology tend to focus on other things than Hopewell mounds.

EILEEN Smithsonian researchers, back in the 1840s … you know people still adhere to these ideas.

She scoffs.

EILEEN The idea that Europeans came over here in ancient times, and helped build all these, because the native populations couldn't have known how? Well, that's obviously ridiculous. There are mounds all over the eastern United States. They couldn't all be the result of somebody getting on a Phoenician boat and sailing across the Atlantic. 

Eileen is willing to indulge in theorizing, and a little bit of crackpottery, she's not interested in either Mormon or ancient alien explanations for any of any of these mysteries.

Meanwhile, in the skies above Louisiana. Roger and most of the Point 1 Sandmen are aboard a 737, with his new associate Joe. Roger's Chevelle will be shipped back overnight by separate military freight. Roger sees the glittering Gulf Coast underneath him as as they take off from Keesler Air Force Base. He looks back towards Mississippi as they fly the hour or so to Huntsville … and Roger sees something hovering in the sky beneath the Boeing.

He sees in the sky, about a thousand feet below the Boeing, an oblong blue glowing saucer hovering over the Gulf Coast, near Point 1, to the west of the epicenter. The plane soon flies off; the saucer is just hovering there. He feels a sinking sensation in his gut, something faintly reminiscent of when he was in Mount Shasta, and the light codes there. 

Roger rises to his feet and as soon as his line of sight to the saucer is broken, it's gone. Nobody else seemed to notice. Roger reflects that the problem with having the ability to let you see other stuff is that it's like an instinct never to say that. So he decides maybe it was a weather balloon, and sits back down. An hour later the plane lands in Huntsville. Joe, who had fallen asleep in the seat next to Roger, wakes up when they touch down. Eventually they get off the plane and head back to the dorms.

JOE Roger, it was good working with you, and if we get assigned together again I hope it's somewhere with food that good again.

Joe departs Roger's company.

Friday, October 12, 1973. Early morning in Huntsville, almost all the Sandmen have returned from their assignments; only skeleton crews are still in place at each of the twelve sites. The Friday morning report indicates that there were no further UFO sightings overnight anywhere, nothing further on the line between Cairo and Columbus. The morning briefing basically consists of the suits explaining to the collected Sandmen how things are going to go from here on out:

  • Obviously we need to contain the possibility of all of these near to ground sightings causing some kind of mass panic, or mass rumor.

  • We've been doing a lot of memetics to try to keep the overall fear down out there, but now we're going to be deploying some specifically chosen memes that will hope to discredit any witnesses.

  • That's going to be a complex overlay of local and national media; we don't want to draw attention, so the memetics have to be done more subtly than the usual rah-rah, let's-all-back-the-American-war-machine stuff. 

  • Our working theory is that absent Sandman intervention, these subduction zones will expand and create more History-B manifestations between the zones (the brass isn't using the term 'ley lines' but it's implicit in the framing of the situation).

  • We want the Sandmen who have reported here to work within their existing operational groups and projects going forward.

  • We're going to give orders through existing structures and field team leaders. When necessary the computers will match up teams with situations that appeal to their specific set of skills and powers.

  • In the meantime, hurry up and wait.

The briefing lasts a little under an hour, so by nine o'clock URIEL are collectively free and at liberty to get together, finally, and share intel. Charley finds one of the Apollo 13 quarantine units and converts it into a Faraday cage that Mitch sweeps for bugs and Roger blesses against surveillance, and URIEL convene in an ersatz Rooster House.

While others are doing that work Charley checks her tapes from her cameras at the Kincaid site and in Mounds, Illinois. The only thing that's unusual, and the only thing that triggered the motion-detector/light-detector unit that Charley put together, is that on both Tuesday and Wednesday nights there was an aurora-like glow around the Kincaid site, specifically. No orbs, no vehicles, but the light detection turned on for a period of about three minutes on Tuesday night and five minutes on Wednesday, each night between 10:30 and 11 pm. Just a soft glow, surmounting the whole Mound.

Everyone compares notes.

ROGER Does anyone see any other enemy action? Marshall was very originally worried that like this might all be some kind of OZY plot.

MARSHALL (referring to enemy action) Not where Archie and I were. I mean, we had bad vibes in Ohio.

JO Yeah, the CO of our unit was very unpleasant, but I didn't get the sense that she was working against our organizational interests.

MITCH Ditto. I met Wernher von Braun. I don't think he's OZYMANDIAS.

ARCHIE You met Wernher von Braun?

MITCH Yeah, a couple nights ago. He was in the cafeteria and I was in the cafeteria.

JO You guys get to have all the fun!

MITCH I'm sorry.

JO I met a bunch of angry white housewives!

MITCH Yeah, I know, it sucks.

Jocasta talks about how she experienced a new manifestation of her abilities, allowing for long-distance communication. She doesn't know exactly what Marshall and Archie were doing on the other end that made it a two-way possibility (answer: LSD), but she was able to do it by communing with an underwater panther, a spirit creature. 

JO A creature of the spirit world. 

ROGER Creature, or god, or saint?

JO Unclear. I don't know enough about native religious beliefs. I believe it was some kind of…not really a god, but a protector of some kind. Also a messenger, and Roger this may be your department … because I had to make a deal with it in order to do what I did. And that's how I got these.

Jocasta holds up her hands which are perfectly fine.

MITCH Did you get a manicure?

JO No! Don't you see them?

ROGER Did you lose your psychometry?

ARCHIE When we saw you in the vision, your hands were bleeding, but they're not bleeding now. You're not hurt. Your hands look perfectly fine.

JO There's a stigmatic mark on both my palms! You don't see them?

Archie examines their hands closely.

ARCHIE Yeah, I don't see them. Did you say 'underwater panther'?

JO Yeah, that's the spirit guide I mentioned?

Everybody moves on from Jo's hallucinated stigmata, as she relates her experience with the underwater panther and what she knows about it from her studies at the library. Archie explains that the Alligator Mound in Ohio, according to the historian who took us around there, it wasn't necessarily an alligator, it might have been an underwater panther.

ARCHIE It was some sort of giant protective effigy. The panther was helping you? You don't think that that it was an Annunaki?

JO I don't think so. I know we're still in the "five blind men looking at an elephant" stage here, but I'm operating from the assumption that it is a creature of the long-vanished Natives' religion. That it serves them, and that I think — and maybe I'm wrong — what we need to do is somehow heal the rupture that's been made with the missing spirits of the dead, or restore those spirits. I want to emphasize I do not believe it is only the spirits of the Natives. I think that the Black community and the white community, everyone who settled here, is undergoing that same trauma. Whatever this thing is, it's trying to help us achieve our goal rather than thwart us. If we believe that the disappearance of the spirits is the work of the enemy — whichever enemy we're talking about — I don't think this thing was on that side.

ROGER The disappearance of the dead is, by report of the spirits, definitely the work of the Kings. The reason I asked about OZYMANDIAS is that it from what I have heard in the Realms Beyond, they are taking advantage of this. So we must make sure we get rid of them or their influence first, because it's going to really disrupt trying to talk to these spirits.

JO I feel like that was more of its standard operation. If it was working with the Anunnaki, it just would not have helped me at all, right?

ARCHIE No, that makes that makes sense. If this mound is also the same thing then maybe the people who live there used it as protection …

Archie also says some of what he had said earlier, about all the disappearances: the disappearing bodies from the graves, the disappeared people, the disappearing souls, disappearing spirits. There's all these things, it's all a pattern.

JO Yeah, this whole area is a spiritual void.

ROGER The bodies, too. So physical, as well.

ARCHIE What do you think is going on, Mitch?

MITCH I don't know. I had kind of an idea, but I don't think that it's worth talking about more because more data has kind of gone led us in a different direction. I had some unrelated thoughts that I'm being reminded I should I should share with y'all …

JO When has it ever been a waste of time to not engage in speculation about things that you've experienced, Mitch?

MITCH Okay, so, you know how human nature inevitably bends towards fascism, right—

ROGER No.

MITCH —and this is like, the big question is why and how, and you're right it doesn't actually because fascist states always collapse. The Anunnaki … but it's this thing and the Anunnaki, you're like, “Oh, it's because we made you to be fascist bully boys.” And that's not a very satisfying answer, right? But it has been bothering me for quite a while, this question of: if the Kings didn't exist, right? If they're just imaginary, if they're just another imaginary story like Superman Red and Superman Blue and they're not any more real than Superman Red and Superman Blue, then why is it that we have to speak in Danbe, right? Why can't we use regular language? Because art, because regular language, has been corrupted by things that don't exist. That doesn't make sense. That just, like, fundamentally doesn't make sense. And then I think I figured it out, which is that They did exist, They just don't exist anymore. Which is good news. Because we beat Them.

ROGER So, we didn't unmake Them? They are locked out?

MITCH Yeah. I mean, listen. They must have been here because you can look and see all these traces, right? But They're not here now because we beat Them. It's not a situation where we're like a little candle in a gale force wind, we have to struggle to keep the thing lit for fear of — you know, if it goes out for even a moment, then whoosh! Winter, darkness forever. No. No, it’s the opposite of that. We already won. This is just Them being sore losers. Which I guess is not really actionable. And it's not even particularly relevant to the current situation. But it's been on my mind a lot. So I wanted to share it. But I can tell it’s not super relevant, so …

ROGER No, it’s actually, like, super relevant, man. Right now we are trying to figure out a really big attack by the Enemy. And knowing that we could is really important. Now, who the “we” is is a whole other question.

MITCH The team of people who are opposed to Them. Us. Merlin. Superman. I don’t know. He’s pretty cool.

ROGER I would add the loa to that.

MITCH Sure, yeah. All those guys. Him. Azalin.

ROGER The Underwater Panther? Is that the kind of vibe we’re getting from him?

MITCH: I mean, maybe. I’m listening to this and it’s sounding like the Underwater Panther is one of Them, but that doesn’t jive with your experiences with him.

JO Well, let me ask you this. Do you believe that? It's interesting that you have this theory because honestly since I received my training, that's the way I've always conceptualized it. Not because I think it's more or less true but because it's easier to intellectually comprehend than, “They still exist, They're still omnipresent, They still have their own history and existence but They keep trying to intrude on ours.” For me it's just easier to believe, well, somehow we beat them once and drove them off. Even though I know that may not be what we're taught it may not even be what we're true it's just easier to understand.

MITCH See, I feel like that’s a really good conceptual model but I feel like it leads you down this pathway where they have this separate, concurrent existence. That there's another dimension. That there’s History B and we could build a machine that could make a magic door that allows us to walk to it. That’s what Beth-El is. But that’s not what Beth-El is, right? Beth-El is something very different from that. It’s important to bear in mind that there isn’t another reality out there that they’re living in and based in and peering into ours.

JO I think we’re talking at cross purposes because what I'm saying is: I believe you are correct, because that is where my thoughts led me after trying to conceptualize it the way that we are taught. But what I'm asking is, given all of this — given that we maybe have a a new metaphysics about what we're doing here, do we believe that the Enemy was present here, geographically? Do we believe that They were here before and then left earlier than They did in Europe? Do we believe They were here later? Do we believe they were never here? Because that, I think, would help us understand whether the Underwater Panther … well, what its existence means and where its allegiances lie. If the Enemy was more localized than we previously thought, how would the Underwater Panther even know about Them?

MITCH Well, they did successfully conquer all the world, right?

ROGER They all sorts of flying shit, right? We all saw the Mansa album art.

JO Sure.

MITCH So, I mean, either They were here after or They left earlier or They left all at once …

ARCHIE: Are you not just describing the Ontoclysm? They were here, and then we beat Them. That’s the Ontoclysm.

MITCH OK but yeah, but like, in Year Zero. Oh wait that doesn’t exist … Year One. Either AD or BC, doesn’t matter. Year One: were the Kings here?

ARCHIE Well, the Kings were here, in History B and then, in the Ontoclysm, we defeated the Kings, and retrocreated History A. So we retrocreated Year One-A which overwrote Year One-B.

MITCH Ah, but when you say “and then,” what do you mean?

ARCHIE The same way retrocreation works. That we’ve seen it work. That whatever happens, history bends and reshape itself to fit the current present.

MITCH So, history as we understand it is all one big retrocreation?

ARCHIE Um, well …

MITCH Or is there a difference between the retrocreations? Between everything before the Ontoclysm which was retro created into existence at the point of the Ontoclysm and everything since then?

ARCHIE Well it’s not like flipping a switch! It’s like an earthquake. Something heaves up and ti crumbles some of the other stuff underneath it. It’s messy. Chunks of the old history are still in it.

MITCH See, you’re doing it again. (sighs) When I was a kid I read this comic book where the Flash and Kid Flash were fighting a super villain who could time travel and at one point the Flash is in, like, 65 million years ago and he tries to operate some fantastic futuristic device and it doesn't work. And he says, “Oh no, it doesn't work because in the future the super villain has done something. I have to stand here and wait and keep trying to activate it until we get to Kid Flash in the future, and he successfully completes his mission. And then at that time, I here in the past will suddenly be able to do this.” And when I read that as a kid I was like, that doesn't make even a tiny bit of sense if you think about it for even a second. But if you don't think about it, if you just kind of go with the flow, you know, sure, yeah, 65 million years ago-slash-one block over it … it doesn't make a difference (sighs again). I'm sorry. We're going way down into the weeds of this. I don't think this is what anybody is here to actually talk about. Nothing to do with UFOs and subduction and so forth well I mean kind of but not really

ARCHIE Let me just plant one idea in your head. The problem with your Kid Flash story is, basically, Mitch: the past doesn't exist! That's what makes it fungible: there's only the present, so it's meaningless to talk about someone standing around in the past waiting for something to happen because it's not there anymore. All that happens is we move forward through time and then our wake gets disrupted, but it's not like there's anyone standing back there experiencing that. It's just fossils and bones and Earth being heaved up, language being rewritten and memories being changed in people's heads. It's not a place we can go to.

ROGER Yeah, I can't agree with you there, sorry.

JO No, Price knew who I was, and I had never met him before.

ARCHIE Yeah, in that he had a memory of talking to you, but we know that memories sometimes just appear. The bars that appeared in Oakland, they just appeared into the past. It's like somebody slipped into the library and changed something in the encyclopedia.

Archie shifts gears, and struggles to explain what he was thinking about the Mormon chronology, and he does have the glasses. Archie went back into his deep reading of the Book of Mormon during that acid trip and it felt appropriate because of the things Eileen was talking about. The idea that people came from elsewhere, and settled here, and created vast empires that rose and fell: all of these great pseudo-biblical tales of kings and armies clashing, and then they all just vanished right around 535 CE. We can't really see evidence of it except in these strange little things that get, as Archie's been saying, thrown up because of the two histories grinding against each other.

The Golden Plates as reality shards. Jocasta saw some proto-Sandmen stealing a very powerful reality shard from the Kincaid Mounds. God says he can create as many of these as He wants; he can make the world into an urim-and-thummim. When the final days come every human being on the planet will have one of these things, to see as clearly as God can. 

There's clear evidence at all these subduction zones, there's a reason why they landed in these twelve spots. We know that OZYMANDIAS doesn't want us poking around these Mounds. They've released a meme into SANDMAN about it. Mitch had that theory, that maybe they're trying to create stable subduction zones in a post-apocalyptic, post-second-Ontoclysm world. These things are all linked together. 

Archie's pretty convinced the glasses he got are like the clock at the St. Francis. They would have been a reality shard, if things had flipped over at that site.

The idea about permanent limited subduction zones that Mitch had is, these are permanent zones of History-A persisting in a post-apocalypse. The world flips over to History-B, the Red Kings take over again, but OZYMANDIAS maintains little systems of power, of History-A.

ROGER If that's possible, suppose we say that's happened before. Here's another theory: there was a History-I, let's just say, for the Red Indians, right? They had a whole world, then the Anunnaki came and flipped that to History-B, and there's some places that are still History-I, right? We keep talking about things that are left over from other histories when they manifest and then go away but some remnants are left, because the histories aren't perfectly separate. You were just saying, there's elements all mixed in, reality shards and stuff like that, which can't be nudged and turned into the other new history. So what if some of this Mound stuff is older than History B, and now the History B people are trying to use it, it and the spirits of the dead, and everything else, to flip themselves more permanently. And the Ozzies are trying to figure out if they can do it for History-A in case B flips over.

JO This is a lot of what I was trying to get at when I said, "did history B exist in this place at the same time and if so why is their mythology so different?" And not just their mythology but the existence of their Spirits, right, which we can objectively say has some persistence. Sid the the scientists of early SANDMAN just throw all that in for local color? That doesn't seem likely. It seems that something that had an independent existence before, or at least contemporaneous to the Red Kings. Maybe they experienced it different here.

I cannot shake, ever since I've come here, I don't know how to make it connect…but it seems too much of a coincidence to me that earlier this year a radical Native American movement started or restarted an ancient ritual that was meant to restore the livelihood and spirits of the dead on this same geographical line! What is the Ghost Dance but a kind of a meme, right? It's a way to reintroduce or introduce for the first time a cultural notion into the minds of people who have lost it, or have no access to it, and I'm not saying that's the heart of it but…

We're getting all this data from Native American sites that we're also getting the Urim and Thurrim from the Mormon presence in this area, which, by the way, the Mormons also believe that the spirits of the Dead can be altered. They can be converted. And then we're also getting that same message: the alteration of spirits, the loss of the spirits of the dead, in very profound ways from the white community here. That cannot be a coincidence. I don't know how to make it not a coincidence but that's so many threads all pointing in the same direction. I just don't know what that direction is. 

ARCHIE So, two things. One, maybe we need to talk to … I guess there's no Indians in SANDMAN?

(Archie says Indians because it's 1973.)

ARCHIE Maybe we need someone who knows something a little bit more about the Ghost Dance, and so on. But I feel like we need to talk about UFOs.

JOCASTA Well, I didn't see any and I spent three whole nights on the roof of the Holiday Inn. Has anyone here seen a UFO since last Monday?

ROGER Maybe. I mean, maybe. I thought I saw something. I'm not sure. It certainly hasn't been the stuff that is out of the Anunnaki realm, how they manifest with floating cars and stuff like that. With what the brass said about the lights and stuff like that being a manifestation … do we think those have to be the Red Kings? Is that kind of stuff History-B or could it be a different manifestation from somewhere else?

JOCASTA If we conceive of the UFOs as real, with an independent existence, or if they're something created by somebody … if the end effect is to increase people's uncertainty and fear that could be the Kings. Or it could be OZYMANDIAS, right? That's within the goal set of both. If they're actual UFOs that have nothing to do with either of those groups, that would still be the same effect.

ARCHIE Well, I saw a flying saucer in Peru but I don't think that was the Red Kings.

ROGER Sorry, man, Peru? When?

ARCHIE '47.

MARSHALL I didn't know you were in Peru. Were you in the Army in '47?

ARCHIE It was before I went into the Army. It was when I was doing mission work, just when I got out of high school.

JOCASTA That wasn't the Red Kings, that was just a flying saucer? Well, aren't these just flying saucers?

ARCHIE That's what I was asking! These are like lights, and I don't know…

The question arises: did Mitch have a UFO experience?

MITCH Do I classify what happened to me as a UFO encounter?

ARCHIE And if so, of which kind. An encounter of which kind?

MITCH Right, no, I got that, Archie. Is the story of Rip Van Winkle a UFO story? Because if the answer to that is yes, then yes, I had a UFO experience. But if that's a different kind of thing then I might have had a different kind of experience. I wouldn't go so far as to say that if Rip Van Winkle did not see UFOs then I didn't see UFOs, but if Rip Van Winkle saw something that wasn't UFOs that might be what I saw, but in another larger sense it doesn't really matter, right? Because this is this is getting into … I don't want to say semantics because that sounds dismissive but I guess I'm gonna be kind of dismissive … and say that I feel like that that's a distinction without a difference, in a lot of ways. It's a thing that happened to me because of History-B but that really describes the bulk of my life up to this point, so, again is it really special? Is it worth calling out? I don't know. I feel like I haven't done a very good job of answering the question but I've also kind of forgotten what the question was.

ARCHIE (moving on) I haven't heard from Charley. Is there any other data we need on the table? Is it possible that we could move towards next actions? What are we gonna do? We're not going to solve this by talking it out, but what do we do?

CHARLEY Is this fixable by changing belief? Like what you normally do? I made a small attempt at doing that, with some of the kids I was playing with the other day, in the in the town that Jo and I were stationed at. I don't know. It just got me thinking … maybe more work like that? That's normally what we do, so, is that what we should go about doing?

ARCHIE Yes, that's good. I think that's the only plan we've got right now, to memetics, belief: tell people not to worry about the lights in the sky, not to worry about the the war in Israel, but is that going to be enough? Is there something else we should be doing?

ROGER I don't want to give you guys all a downer, but no, it's not going to be enough. It's always hard talking about prophecy, because you don't want to talk people into not trying to fight, but there's the storm is coming. It's just going to keep piling up. There's gonna be some moments where we're gonna get overwhelmed, the doors are going to open, and we're going to have to shut them. We need to be prepared do that. I don't know what else to tell you. We can tamp down fear in a lot of little places but it's springing up in a lot of areas. We just got to be ready to to see when they have the doors open, and they start to flip things over, whether then we can really spot what's going on.

There's stuff in we can't do until it's manifest, because it isn't real. I think that's what Mitch was telling us.

From the spirit's perspective: they're angry. They want us to take care of this. They want these doors shut, but they keep saying it's going to open and then you're gonna have to shut it afterward … so that's what I'm hearing. I'm prepping everything I can, and looking for every sign, so that we'll know what to do when the moment happens, but I don't think it's here yet.

ARCHIE Nobody has seen any evidence of … there's no Frank, there's no Mansa, there's nobody operating on behalf of the Kings. Doing stuff, laying the groundwork, meddling like that, that we can act on now, before everything manifests.

JO I feel like we have a much better grasp on what is happening, how it's manifesting, and what a possible corrective action could be, around the fact that there are spirits of the dead that are vanished in these areas. That seems to be a unifying idea, and if we believe that it's possible … I think we talked about this in the vision. The idea of creating a spiritual meme that can  bridge the vanished spirits of the these people with the people living who feel their loss. That will reduce the possibility of a violent event or an increasing of tensions here in these areas that could cause the kind of bloodshed that would trigger an irruption.

What we don't know anything about is, the UFOs, and how they have anything to do with this. But if we can develop a plan around addressing the former issue the latter will make itself manifest in whatever way it relates to it. Which way that is, I have no idea. But if it's related they'll either try and stop us, or they'll help us, or they'll be part of it. We'll see the connection more clearly. But I think if we focus on the first thing that will make the second thing reveal itself more clearly…because otherwise I don't really know what we're going to do from this point on.

Topic shift: OZYMANDIAS, who planted the ignore-the-mounds meme in SANDMAN.

JO (staring meaningfully at Marshall) At this point if they really wanted us to go and investigate the mounds, the easiest way to do that would be to tell us not to do it.

ROGER No, the easiest way is to tell you to do it. It's the second easiest, and only for the paranoid types.

JO It's the easiest for us!

ROGER I think the key thing is, if we keep investigating and making loud noises about them, and they're trying to shut that down…they will have to come out and take us out. So if you want to bring them to the the fore in possibly scary ways, yeah, we got to keep doing it. We got to keep looking for allies. We got to have whoever we can get on our side if this thing opens up. We gota find out where the spirits are going—are they being eaten? What's going on?

JO Take it for what it's worth, it came from a vision, but I'm gonna reiterate we should not make a lot of noise here. We should keep our heads down, and quiet, and if that means acting a little incompetent and telling them less than less than we know…less even than they think we know, that's the better path way.

CHARLEY Are the spirits … I mean, is this something that they normally feed off of? Is this a known?

SANDMAN lacks a coherent ontology of the dead, caring only about them inasmuch as the dead can become a source of memetic belief and power. URIEL, of course, knows that something endures beyond death: Houdini on the cassette tape is just the most prominent example. Do other people in Sandman have that same suspicion or knowledge? Maybe. Do they have firsthand evidence of it like URIEL does? Probably no. URIEL did a Houdini seance and brought back a ghost in Colorado, and that's a big deal.

JO There's other Sandman units that have psychics, yes? Surely they're on to the idea that there can be survival after death. Maybe the more important issue is, do the Red Kings have a history of doing necromancy? Black magic involving the spirits? As far as I know they don't, right?

CHARLEY Yeah. [They do like when a whole bunch of people die in the same place] Is it purely for blood, or is it for spirit, or is it for both?

ROGER (recalling Lady Alexandrine said 'fuel') We can ask the loa, right? Who knows the spirits more? And to your beliefs, what has Madame Bridgette said to you? She deals with the dead all the time. I have not done the thing that I would do, because it is dangerous for me, which is to go and actually talk to the Baron. I could let him come and take me, and you would talk to him. It is very clear to me, and I have been told directly several times, that they have assigned me here to do this because the the keepers of the dead are angry that the dead are gone. That they are being eaten. That they're being used … the disappearance of the spirits by those who keep them … it is unnatural and terrible.

There's a question I have, is there another front in this war? The one where the loa are keeping the spirits of the dead from becoming food for the the Anunnaki? Are the Anunnaki knowledgeable about spirits and we just haven't interacted because SANDMAN has been mostly talking about material things? I don't know, but the spirits who do know are the loa. 

CHARLEY I'm really upset now! I didn't know that the spirits were being eaten! I thought they were just being directed elsewhere. But now we can't even get them back? Is what you're saying?

ROGER I don't know. Erzulie said that they could be fuel. She is a terrible spirit of vengeance and may have said ugly things to raise hate in my heart … but she usually does not lie.

ARCHIE What can we do about it?

ROGER I think that we need to go find them. Either we need to find their their used up spirit essence … whatever's left, as evidence and to tell us where the engines are that are are tearing into this horrible fuel…or we have find them because they have been corralled and are being used somehow. Can you do memes among the dead? Can the thoughts the dead think cause changes to this world? 

Mitch somehow intuits that it is necessary for the Annunaki to preserve the dead somehow, because otherwise they wouldn't be concerned about the dead. It's their existence that is the fuel; they're not being consumed, they're being transferred. The Annunaki wanted Mitch to act as a psychopomp for the dead in some way, to ease their transition to wherever the Red Kings were taking them.

ROGER If what you saw in that scene and in the noosphere, Charley, that they were gone and I know they take spirits elsewhere…there are other places, and I can't get into the manifestation in terms of History-A, History-B, the material world … It is a different plane. If they're being taken and concentrated and pulled away from the guede and the other, normal, keepers and being corralled … is it forcing a manifestation? We need to find out where they went. You went into the plane. You went off and traveled. You went deep?

CHARLEY Yeah, the deepest I've ever been. Pretty deep.

ROGER That is not a skill I have. To journey over to those places is a way that has not been open to me; I stay here and I open the way. I've been reminded: I am a child of Saint Peter. Do we keep looking and going deeper? It sounds like you would go straight into enemy territory if that were true.

ARCHIE Is this something you could do together, or must Charley do this without Roger?

ROGER Is there a better place to spy on the enemy than right in their camp? Perhaps the Guede could act as escort for Charley. The loa can help one go beyond one's limitations. We also don't have an answer for why Site One is so big.

CHARLEY Jo, would you be able to find that water leopard again? Would it want to meet me in the astral? Would it want to team up, do you think? With me?

JOCASTA Whether you can meet it in the astral I can't say. That is also a skill set I don't have, so I don't know if they are coexistent but… I guess here I would defer to Roger. My sense is that if you were to meet, it would want you to pay a price for whatever it did for you. Even if it wanted to help, and that could be very dangerous. But you have also manifested Lola before. I don't know. It asked me a pretty heavy price, and that was just to move me from place to place, essentially. For anything greater than that I imagine it would ask for even more.

ROGER The devil I know is very very dangerous. The devil I don't? I don't know. But there is something to this. Directly asked to go and look for this, I will have to. I would love your aid.

CHARLEY Yeah!

ROGER You can help me, man. Sorry, girl.

ARCHIE If you're thinking of trying to contact the panther, maybe you come to the panther mound? 

Archie outlines a plan of Roger, Charley, and Jocasta going to the Alligator/Panther Mound, while Marshall, Archie, and Mitch stay in Huntsville and work on the political, OZYMANDIAS end. Jocasta speculates that if the field team is able to find information they could send it to the Huntsville team and enable them to use it to build a meme around.

At this point it's been about an hour of discussion. At about 10:00 AM, URIEL wanders back to the main hangar HQ, to check in. See if there's anything new. There isn't, but as Marshall walks in the head of ALLOCHTHON himself, Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, comes and puts his hand on his shoulder.

SIDNEY GOTTLIEB Dr. Redgrave.

MARSHALL Dr. Gottlieb?

SIDNEY I would really like to have the chance to chat with you, right now, about what you discovered out there at Point Nine.

MARSHALL Great.

SIDNEY Follow me. We're going to go back to my temporary office.

Charley wanders over to the tech team out in the HQ hangar, sees the telexes spring to life. Of course Charlie can read them without having to be even close to the machine. It's saying that two civilians called Keesler Air Force Base last night, saying that they've been taken aboard a UFO. Keesler thought they were drunks and hung up on them, but obviously Sandman hears all.

The two of them are currently in Pascagoula, Mississippi, at the sheriff's office giving statements, and the sheriff has been recording their statements. An audio transcription of this interrogation about a UFO abduction will be forwarded to Huntsville.

Meanwhile, Gottlieb leads Marshall to an area behind the big board, where there is a bog standard conference room, with Sidney Gottlieb, and Dr. Jolly West, and a conference call phone in the center of the table.

SIDNEY Hell of a week out there.

MARSHALL Less than you would think.

FRANK STANTON (on the speaker phone) Doctor, it's Frank Stanton.

There's an awkward pause.

JOLLY WEST Marshall, we need to talk about Archie Ransom.

MARSHALL All right.

JOLLY We've got some … uh …

Another awkward pause.

FRANK Dr. Redgrave, I'd like to know your professional opinion about Archie's trustworthiness right now.

MARSHALL (pauses, thinking) I think he's loyal to the mission.

JOLLY You don't believe his, um, actions are compromised in any way by his, um, shall we say, weak sisterhood when it comes to SANDMAN's techniques right now? You don't think he's compromised?

MARSHALL No. I don't think he's compromised.

SIDNEY We're concerned about what he led you out to do the other night at, um, Point Nine. Um, Frankly—

MARSHALL (interrupting) Why do you think he led me out there?

SIDNEY Well, there's a few reasons …

He slaps a Book of Mormon down on the table from the shelf behind him

SIDNEY They started off in the, you know, upstate New York … during the Second Great Awakening … but they moved to Ohio. They were driven out of Ohio, then they moved to Missouri, these sightings are in a line from Ohio to Southern Illinois and Missouri. Listen—

MARSHALL (interrupting) They're also aligned with a bunch of Indian mounds that you guys are trying to keep us from investigating.

Jolly West laughs.

JOLLY Well. I need to say it. Um. What's happened in the past at those Mounds is … far above the clearance of most of the people in the project, but not above Control, and not above us.

MARSHALL That's right, nothing is above you guys.

SIDNEY There's going to come a time of decision. It may happen after we're gone, doctor, but there's going to … there's going to come a time where we all have to decide which side we're on. You didn't go to Britain back in May with the rest of your group, but I'm sure you have an idea of what the folks in GRAIL TABLE found.

MARSHALL Yeah, that we were going to lose the war, and you folks had a bunch of people killed and then staged it to look like birds killed them, or something? I don't know.

SIDNEY Maybe in one version of History that's what happened, but—

MARSHALL (interrupting) That's really all we have, isn't it, is versions of history?

SIDNEY It's true. It's very true. I think what we're most concerned with is the fact that Ransom is doing some … shall we say freelance memetics…that could radically harm what we're looking to do with Operation ALLOCHTHON. Um…

MARSHALL (interrupting) What are you trying to do with Operation ALLOCHTHON?

SIDNEY Well if you're serious about—

FRANK (interrupting) Sid. I'll handle this. Dr Redgrave, your work since returning from Vietnam has illuminated what needs to happen for us to survive what's coming. Self-actualization, the focusing and honing of emotional and psychic power. It would make us much more certain of survival if you were to lend your expertise to us and we in turn let you in on all of the really amazing things we have planned to ensure humanity survives.

Frank pauses, like he expects someone to jump in. No one does.

FRANK Sure, we've been giving you the runaround for quite some time now, but it's clear that you are ready…

Frank pauses again.

FRANK … to be part of the project that we've been working on.

SIDNEY We'd like to offer you a place at that, at that table. It would have been maybe a few years ago something like this… would have been you on the fast track to Control. Um, Control is hide bound. Control is rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. We need to go beyond what they're doing, and we are. Uh, here's the problem, though, we can't just get rid of Ransom…

MARSHALL (interrupting) Why?

FRANK There's something in his head that's too important.

MARSHALL What?

FRANK It's in the hobo puppet.

MARSHALL Okay.

FRANK It's a basic syntax for a language better than Danbe. We don't know where it came from but when we first saw the cinemascope…the kinescopes of … his children's show … we did a linguistic analysis on it. The Secret Language of the Hobos, Doctor. that's what we need out of Ransom's head. I know it sounds ridiculous but he can't be gotten rid of until we get that.

MARSHALL I mean it doesn't sound any more ridiculous than literally everything else that you've been saying.

FRANK (to Sidney) You'd better bring him in.

SIDNEY Right.

Sidney Gottlieb goes out the door of the conference room out to the general area, leaving Marshall with Jolly and the phone. About two minutes later Anthony Reinhardt walks in, taking off the very powerful SAN.GUSH glyph, which dizzys Marshall for a moment. He puts it down on the table.

REINHARDT Doctor, we met back in '67, on that mission to Cambodia. I'm Lieutenant Colonel Anthony Reinhardt.

MARSHALL I don't recall meeting you, but I probably don't recall meeting a lot of people.

REINHARDT It was a very very crazy weekend. Let's just say that … they're still digging up evidence over in Cambodia today, of what you got up to there. But I digress.

MARSHALL Yeah. Another botched mission.

REINHARDT Where we're headed, doctor—

MARSHALL (interrupting) I wonder if you were behind that one, too?

REINHARDT (laughs)

MARSHALL I wonder if my whole career has just been part of the four or five or twelve of yours' plan. All of this may just all have been sort of a fun little experiment for you?

REINHARDT I mean yes, I— I— Of course. I mean—

MARSHALL (interrupting) "Of course." So you thought of everything?

REINHARDT Well, I— I— I— I don't want to say we've thought of everything but we've…we've certainly thought of what it's going to take to survive what happens when the Red Kings come back, it's going to require a kind of clarity that the milquetoasts in Control and people like Archie Ransom aren't willing to do. We can talk more about what this means for your team, but for now, if you take us seriously, if you take what we have planned seriously, if you take our knowledge seriously, um, you'll work with us because if you do nothing will be denied to you anymore, as far as information…operational or otherwise…foreign, we don't want to… we don't want to change anything that URIEL's been doing. In fact we'd like you to be in charge of URIEL once Ransom has been retired. We think that—

MARSHALL (interrupting) Well, I have some bad news for you, boys.

Marshall takes his service weapon out of his jacket pocket and puts it to his temple and pulls the trigger. The gun is loaded; it's not a ploy, he has a loaded service weapon on him.

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