8/5

Played: April 4, 2023

Friday, October 12, 1973. Morning. Archie and Charley have rushed into the middle of the room: “It smells like burnt flesh, mephitic gunpowder, and blood.” Kendrick Mead is with them, looking a little woozy. Jocasta has her gun trained on Sidney Gottlieb, the last man sitting at the conference table. Gottlieb is sweating, anxious not to have his head blown off by Jo or the myrmidons he assumes are about to storm the office. Reinhardt is on the floor, smoldering. Jolly West is gasping for breath. Mitch is attending to Marshall’s grievous head wound. Only Roger—that is to say, Kalfu—looks calm, cool, or collected.

In another reality, distinct from yet not unconnected to this one, there is animated discussion:

Leonard: If we don't do something fairly drastic right now, how does this end with anything other than the brass having us killed? Like, there's no going back to the status quo now.

Rob: It’s almost like shooting yourself is not a good idea. It’s almost like that was a foolish thing to do. Yes, it made the game fun, but it's almost like, tactically, it was not the sharpest move.

Back in reality, Archie puts the phone on speaker, telling Gottlieb: “One call. No funny business.” Gottlieb punches a button, calling ALLOCHTHON Central, just down the hall. He asks for a status report. “The board’s all green, sir.” Other than the hallway camera glitching out, they aren’t reporting any issues. Gottlieb plays ball, doesn’t pass along any code words or signals that Team URIEL can detect. Commandos do not appear to be storming the hangar. 

A Psychology roll tells Archie that Stanton must be shaken. If he hasn’t called in the troops, it’s because he doesn’t know what’s happening here in Alabama. Beyond that, everybody in what we’ve been calling OZYMANDIAS seems fairly ready to believe that Reinhardt could go crazy, that he’s always been a bit of a loose cannon, that the lie our heroes are hurriedly constructing does not seem completely preposterous to these men.

Archie: (asking the room) Okay, so what do we tell Frank Stanton?

Kalfu: Well, Archibald, it’s time for you to negotiate control.

Gottlieb makes a sour face at that, but his shoulders drop in resignation.

Jocasta: Stanton was on that call! He’s one of them!

Kalfu: And while we’re making suggestions, Archibald, I would also recommend you have Agent Helix there make sure that nobody destroys anything on the devices in that room. They're clearly very invested in that evidence.

Archie: (nodding) Good thinking, “Roger.” Maybe you'd like to take Charley there right now?

Kalfu: If you don’t think you’ll need my skills, I will happily take control of the situation there. Of course, if you did need my help for making any deals, I think you’d find that I’m an excellent—

Archie: I think we have it in hand.

Roger-Kalfu and Charley take Kendrick with them to the control room to secure the data. Archie tells Gottlieb to call Frank. He and Jocasta watch as Gottlieb calls Stanton’s private office.

Archie: Frank, it’s Archie. I'm here with Sid Gottlieb and my team—

Stanton: Archie! What happened?

Archie: Well, we're still figuring that out. It’s a mess, Frank, a real mess. Marshall’s been shot, Reinhardt’s near death.

Stanton: Jesus.

Archie: I don’t know what happened. I think Reinhardt went rogue? But it’s worse than that, it’s some kind of enemy cabal, if you can believe it, Frank. Working for the other side! I don’t know how many people are rotten here, but listen: what I want you to know is, me and my team have it completely under control.

He punches that last line: we have everything under control.

Stanton: … Is Sid there?

Archie nods to Gottlieb, letting him talk.

Gottlieb: Yeah, Frank.

Stanton: Reinhardt… went rogue?

Gottlieb (looking from Archie to Jocasta, her gun still leveled at him): That’s correct.

Stanton: What happened to Redgrave?

Jocasta: When we got in here, Marshall was on the ground, with his head blown off. That’s what I know.

Stanton: Is that Menos?

Jocasta: We only heard snippets of their conversation but we know. We’ve got plenty of evidence that what is happening is happening. I don’t really need to know the details of what they did to him to know that they did it to him.

Stanton: When you say “they”… are you talking about Reinhardt and someone else?

Archie: Reinhardt wasn’t acting alone, Frank. I mean, this whole mission is fishy. If I didn't know better, I’d say that this was all the hand of the enemy. I think we’ve got moles, and people suborned. It’s a real mess.

Stanton: Just who are you accusing, Archie? You say you’re in control there—

Archie: We’ve got the situation under control.

Gottlieb: I’m inclined to give the URIEL team, uh, wide latitude in investigating this, Frank.

Stanton: … Why, exactly?

Gottlieb: (looking at the gun in Jocasta’s hand) “Um, they’ve proven themselves trustworthy … the kind of folks who can be trusted … trusted with, uh—”

Stanton: All right, all right. I get it.

Long sigh from Stanton in New York.

Stanton: You realize this isn’t going to be easy, Arch.

Archie: I understand that, Frank, but you’ve got to understand this: What we’re dealing with here. ALLOCHTHON. The intentional creation of subduction zones. People on our side opening the gates. Not little pinholes, not one, not two. A dozen major subduction zones all over the country! This could go badly very quickly. It would be very easy for things to tip. We’re in a delicate situation right now, I mean in terms of the politics of the whole thing, yes, but also in terms of reality itself. A very delicate situation.

Stanton: Archie, did I ever tell you about the letter that President Eisenhower sent me, in 1958?

Archie: Gosh, Frank, no. I don't think so.

Stanton tells Archie a story:

Frank: Well, as long as we’re divulging secrets here, and we're talking about doing things that seem to go against our moral code… Sputnik had just gone up, you see. You and I both remember how horrifying that was, Arch. The Soviets holding the sword of Damocles over our heads, spying on us anytime they wanted to, the prospect of nukes raining down on us from space … Ike put together a team of ten Americans, prominent at the time. He said we need some way to survive a nuclear war. We need to think about the unthinkable, in a logical, rational way. Along with nine others, he appointed me member of an emergency ‘continuity of government’ organization. Obviously, the American people were not to know.

But when I got this invitation from the president, I thought about the ramifications of something even greater, which would be the day that we lose the battle against the real enemy. Forget about continuity of government— how would humanity survive? How would we remain ourselves? Who is to say we would even exist, if the enemy were to trigger a second Ontoclysm? And it was that set of thoughts that started me writing memos and papers to the rest of SANDMAN in the late 50s. Was anybody thinking about this? Was anybody thinking about these contingencies?

The last fifteen years have been productive for us, in finding ways to survive a second Ontoclysm.  But we’ve had to use methods that would be considered outrageous … unsound … seemingly mad. What you’ve correctly identified as an experiment—one that has always been under our control—is an attempt to keep us safe in that eventuality. And Archie: it is not just an eventuality. It is a certainty. There are numbers that you haven’t seen, esmological numbers that have been traded at the highest levels of SANDMAN and amongst Control. We cannot win this war. Not long term. It may happen after you and I have gone to whatever is after this life, but the Kings will take back this planet.

That’s not defeatism. That’s not giving up. That is a cold, hard fact. You know all through the Cold War we’ve juggled the numbers, and seen that there’s a balance of power between the U.S. and Soviet Union that can’t be upset for fear of destroying the entire planet… Well, everything that we are seeing right now, all the trends point towards what De Chardin would have called an Omega Point. A singularity, a moment where the switch gets flipped. We’re here to make sure that at least some Americans survive that switch being flipped. It’s the most important mission SANDMAN has right now, and I don’t want you to be in the dark about it anymore. You or your team.

Archie: Well, Frank… Thank you for being straight with me. I don’t think enough folks appreciate how hard a job like yours is. “Thinking about the unthinkable,” like you said. But the thing about thinking the unthinkable is: okay, somebody’s got to do it, but it isn’t good for you, thinking about it for long. Sometimes, you get a little too fond of it. I’m sure when there’s time, you can walk me through the numbers. I’ve got to say, I’m not convinced, but you can show me. But I just want to ask, because I respect you, Frank: who profits from having people like you think that way, if it’s not the Red Kings? You say that the esmology only adds up one way. Okay, I mean, the math is powerful—but you know where the math comes from, right?

(Mike: Are you laying in any NLP here? Rob: What the hell, enthrallment never works anyway. Public Speaking roll for Enthrallment: 6, a crit.)

Charley, Kalfu-riding-Roger, and Mead go down the hall to the control room. Kendrick swipes his card to open the door. The walls are lined with whirring TL7+1 computers, maybe cabinet-sized minicomputers with big 8” floppies. Charley can feel the data thrumming on the memory banks. A handful of technicians monitor the machines.

Mead: This is Martin and Helix from the San Francisco team. Agent Helix here is an Indigo. She’s here to check on data integrity.

Mead tells “Roger,” earnestly, “I want you to know, I want this conspiracy rooted out. I want the evidence to be able to do it. There is data here that I have not been given any chance to review. They keep it on these computers, and these technicians are the only ones who know how to operate them.”

Charley sits down at a computer terminal and goes to work. She soon sees that there are two tiers of data in the data banks. There’s the intel that all of ALLOCHTHON has had access to: the subduction zones, the memetic analyses, the lights in the skies. But there are also encrypted files, which Charley will need more time to hack into. She starts copying data onto disks. There is some affectionate discussion of what TL7+1 data storage would look like in 1973: Magnets good, lasers bad.

Back in the conference room, Archie tries to use NLP/Enthrallment to make sure Stanton takes URIEL seriously, maybe plant some doubt in Stanton’s mind regarding OZYMANDIAS’ otherwise unimpeachable plan. The roll is underwhelming. (Enthrallment never works!)

Stanton: Archie, I've heard all of these arguments before, about being careful that one does not become like the Enemy. They’ve been argued in our little Working Group since we began. And in our Working Group, as in any group of Sandmen, there are, well, differences of opinion, on exactly how far things should be taken.

He makes it sound so innocuous: “our little working group.” They don’t call themselves OZYMANDIAS. If they had a name, they would call themselves something very bland and bureaucratic, like “the Continuity Working Group.” But that would be if they had a name. Which they don’t. 

Stanton: You know, Arch, I feel bad, personally, that we kept you in the dark for so long. You understand that URIEL’s role out there in the Bay Area was to find the best and brightest among the New Age. Because after all this becomes History B again, we're going to need powerful psychics. We're going to need people whose abilities have been activated, people who believe in the perfectibility of the human body, mind, and spirit. Now what you've done today, in making your way into this little working group, it’s proof enough for me that you've graduated. That you’ve achieved just what we’re looking for. And so, if you and your team want to contribute, constructively, to what we've been working on…

Mitch is making exaggerated expressions of doubt and disgust.

Somewhere, neither near nor far from there, Leonard makes and fails a self-control roll representing Jocasta’s obsession.

Rob: I was actually just thinking it's a good thing Brant and/or Marshall are not here, because isn’t it amazing how quickly any rebellion can be reincorporated into the power structure?

Mike: Leonard, you have failed your self-control roll. You gotta tell me what that means.

Leonard: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Archie cuts Frank off.

Archie: Frank, I can’t talk about all that now. I’m standing in a puddle of Marshall Redgrave's blood. We’ve got a big mess to clean up. We’ll talk again.

He hangs up the phone.

Archie: Jo. Are you all right with this?

Jocasta: Archie, you know he's lying. You know it!

Archie: I know, Jocasta. He’s just stalling. He’s trying to play the cards that he has.

Jocasta: He sold us a lie for a lie. He got caught with his hands in the till, and now he’s telling us, “oh yeah, I really want you to investigate how this happened.”

Gottlieb interrupts to say, “We need a medical team in here to evac the wounded.” But when he looks down, Gottlieb is stunned to see that Marshall has stopped bleeding. He’s unconscious, but his head wound is healed. Mitch holds up a bullet; his hands are covered in blood and brains.

Archie: We have a medical team. How’s he doing, Mitchell? What does he need?

Mitch: I mean… bed rest? I would advise that. And I need, like, a wet towel or something, to clean off my hands.

Archie: Does he need to go to the hospital?

Mitch: I mean, what are they gonna do, give him a CAT scan? What would be the point? I guess it wouldn’t hurt for him to go to a hospital. But I don’t think it’s necessary, frankly. He needs rest, and, you know, someone giving him Tylenol and making sure he gets enough water, but, yeah, I think he’s gonna be okay. Now these guys (Mitch gestures to Reinhardt and Jolly West) I don’t know about.

Reinhardt is still unconscious, and likely to die without medical attention. Jolly West is conscious, weak and in a lot of pain, but he should live. It was a minor cardiac infarction.

Mitch: This one needs hospital attention. This one we’re going to need to plant somewhere. Do we have a good place for that?

Archie: Wait, which one do we need to plant? What is that a euphemism for?

Mitch: What I’m saying is, Reinhardt’s gonna die. I’m under the impression that if he dies right here, it’ll be bad. Is there a place where, if he dies, it’ll be good? A place where his death can begin the healing process for this fallen earth? I mean, this is outside my area of expertise.

Archie: That’s correct. We can't let him die here.

Kalfu: Plenty of swamps around…

Archie: If only we knew somebody with a fast car.

Jocasta (urgently): Archie.

Archie: Yes, Jocasta?

Jocasta: Archie, you and I talked once about what we might do if things got really bad. Well, things have gotten considerably worse than that. Now right here in this room, we have a queen, we have a bishop, and we have a knight. And even if the king doesn’t care about them, it’ll still hurt him to lose all three of them. I can put them all in a car, and I can take them far away, and I can make sure that we never see them again. Or, I can just leave. By myself. You tell me.

Archie looks at Reinhardt, Gottlieb, and West.

Archie: Take Reinhardt.

Jocasta: It’s not enough, Archie. You know it.

Archie just holds her gaze.

Jocasta: If that’s what you want…

Jo puts her gun away and walks out of the room. She asks one of the rank-and-file guys to get her a crash cart and an ambulance. They wheel Reinhardt away.

This leaves Archie, Mitch, Gottlieb, and a gasping Jolly West. Gottlieb tells Archie, “I’ll appoint you coordinating chief officer of Operation ALLOCHTHON. Kendrick will be your second, like he was mine.”

Archie: Well, I want your name on things too, in case it all goes from bad to worse.

Gottlieb: Is your team going to be in on, on what we are trying to accomplish?

Archie: Sidney, ALLOCHTHON is over! It was a monstrous idea. We are closing those holes. Afterwards, Frank Stanton and I will have a talk about how we go forward, but my priority now is saving my friend and cleaning up this crazy mess that you all tried to make.

Gottlieb: You want us to shut down the subduction zones?

Archie: That’s what we do!

If Sidney had a little more juice right now he’d probably roll his eyes, but he knows he’s in checkmate. 

Gottlieb: Well, you’ll have the ALLOCHTHON team at your disposal. Once you’ve taken a look and see what we've been working on, you can make your own decisions. I’m willing to act as an advisor, to help you reach the goal that you’re talking about, to eliminate all of these subduction zones. But there’s a lot more to this operation. There are a lot of moving parts.

Mitch: Man, I’ve been listening to you talking, and I keep waiting for you to say something where I can say, “that's the first smart thing you've said so far” and you keep not saying anything.

Kalfu-Roger and Charley return to the conference room, Charley carrying a box of large floppy disks. 

Kalfu confronts Gottlieb: Whatever you were thinking you were going to do, you should let us know. But we have no guarantee your little plans are going to work, because you opened the door. Now the enemy is here.

Gottlieb: No. The saucers are us. They’re just advanced aircraft, using broad spectrum ikoters.

Kalfu: And what of the souls that were stolen?

Gottlieb: The what?

Kalfu: See? You don't know everything that's going on. You don't know the enemy’s moves at all, do you? Or maybe your masters just weren’t telling you.

Gottlieb is at a loss for words.

Mitch: This is what you do. You think you have the answers, and you stop looking.

Kalfu: The bodies that went missing. What’s been disturbing the ether. You haven’t noticed? You haven’t even read the reports from your taishers, have you? There’s something else going on here, something beyond your technological marvels.

Gottlieb: Oh. You mean the Indians.

Kalfu: I mean all of the souls that have vanished.

Gottlieb tries to center himself. “First of all,” he says, “there is no such thing as life after death.”

Kalfu: If you believe that, I hope you live a very long life.

Gottlieb: I am trying to!

Kalfu looks into the future to see what Gottlieb’s death is going to be. 

Mitch: All I’m saying, Sidney, is that if you’re not sufficiently cooperative, the next step for us is going to be killing you, and interrogating your ghost. If you don't want that to happen, you need to be giving us more than you’re giving us right now.

Kalfu: Yes. If you would like to make it to the very end of this century, you're going to need to believe a little bit. If you want to make it to, shall we say 1999? Then you need to think about the fact that we may have more information than you do. It doesn't matter how many lepers you help, or how you try to make up for the things you've done in this lifetime, you're coming to me in the future. But how soon will depend on how cooperative you are right now.

(Intimidation roll. Mike: I mean, he's already been intimidated left and right… Mel: But this time we can make him cry!)

Gottlieb (crumbling): We released the meme about ignoring the Indian mounds because, what we’ve been able to determine is that we are in an advantage here in America. And the reason we are in an advantage is because, before the Ontoclysm, the Anunnaki’s presence was not as profound or concentrated here on the American continents. They were a Eurasian phenomenon. That doesn’t mean that they weren’t present here, but they hadn’t colonized. They simply remained as sort of “cultural memories” that outlasted the Ontoclysm.

Kalfu (scoffing): You have no idea the power of “cultural memories,” do you? 

Gottlieb: After the Ontoclysm, the entire social structure of the pre-Columbian Indians changed. I know you've been poking around the mounds, you’ve probably gotten a hint of this. The Indian groups started settling in larger populations. The agriculture meme made its way over here. These were remnants of what had happened for all of those years in what was History B. 

Archie, there is a reason why we had your team in our sights. Not just because of how you've been proving yourself in the Bay Area. It also has to do with the memes that you’ve encountered, through your upbringing. Including the ones about an alternate history that happened here on the North American continent. There are truths in the Revelation that Joseph Smith received. I know this must sound crazy to you, coming from a Jew like myself, but there is truth to what your religion has divined. 

And the areas where those mounds are, they've been a treasure trove of reality shards. We picked these areas to trigger subduction zones, because there is a kind of counterbalance to these areas, from the inhabitants before the Ontoclysm. The rebellion didn’t just happen over in Mesopotamia. It happened all over the globe. Our theory is that the Ontoclysm was a concerted effort amongst human beings from all over the planet. That’s the only way you’d be able to get that many people to all believe something at the same time.

This puts Charley in mind of her revelations from her lifetime as Owain. This is the meaning of the vision she had, of knights coming from all over the world.

Gottlieb: The Enemy can’t do anything with the dead. The dead aren’t real. Their timelines have been cut short. They don't exist.

Kalfu: It is helpful to understand what you don’t understand, because now we understand your blind spots.

Gottlieb: If you can seal these subduction zones off better than we could with your metaphysical lens, then I say, go to it. But I'm confident we can do it quickly and easily without any extra help.

Archie: Why use memetic means to keep SANDMAN from investigating the Indian mounds? Is it just to protect these reality shards?

Gottlieb looks like he’s been caught out. He’s been talking a lot about how the mounds help to keep these zones stable, but when Archie says that, he has an immediate tell.

Charley reports on what she’s learned so far. She’s been through the unsecured data: it includes measurements and observations of all the subduction zones, the records of everything that’s come in so far. The working group does not seem to have been concerned about actual irruptions. They figured they had the resources to close down any irruptions as they happened, and their esmological predictions said the American people would be too distracted by what was going on politically for History B to take hold.

The encrypted files contain the working group’s overarching objectives for ALLOCHTHON. Phase two of the plan, after opening up the subduction zones, was to spread the UFO meme and actually stage abductions; the rationale was to accelerate the New Age/UFO memeplex, to start triggering a number of embedded memes. Mead’s white paper about the UFO meme being something that goes back to the Anunnaki and is programmed into us somehow: The Ozzies sought to take advantage of that, to get people thinking and believing in Human Potential, trying to save the planet from ruin. And to piggyback on that meme to find more recruits for their post-apocalypse redoubts. Along with that is the information Gottlieb has already confirmed about pre- and post-Ontoclysm American settlements and how they relate to the Anunnaki.

The encrypted files also make it possible to identify who here at ALLOCHTHON is part of the working group. Morris is clean; Hillary is clean; Kendrick Mead was an unwitting catspaw. But Wernher von Braun is OZYMANDIAS. (Jeff: “The old Nazi was a bad guy?”)

Archie asks Charley to look for evidence of genuine Anunnaki influence, any evidence the situation on the ground is not unfolding as the working group projected. She can report that the alien abduction in Pascagoula was OZYMANDIAS, but the UFO Roger saw was not. The emptied graves were not OZYMANDIAS’ doing. Nor was what Jocasta saw in the spirit world, what Charley saw in the astral, or Mitch’s encounter with the orbs in the woods.

But there’s still much more to decipher. Mitch asks to see Charley’s stack of floppy disks. She shows him: eight magnetic disks practically the size of pizza boxes. He picks one, randomly, and tells her to start with that one.

There is some OOC discussion of Control. Is there a non-OZYMANDIAS power center in SANDMAN besides URIEL? 

Mike: Nobody really knows who this vaunted “Control” is. The dictates come down from Granite Peak through a number of different divisions. Gottlieb has made it sound like his working group has presented their findings to Control (this is what we believe is going to happen, this is the contingency we want to work on) and Control hasn’t had a problem with it. They’ve given them free reign to do what they want because it hasn’t affected the primary mission, which is to stop History B from returning.

Meanwhile, Jocasta drives the ambulance west. She makes no effort to treat Reinhardt, to keep him alive or relieve his pain. When she crosses the Louisiana state line, she pulls over, gets hold of some rags and tape, and prepares to suffocate him. Reinhardt jerks awake, wide-eyed. His voice is raspy, his body covered in horrible burns.

Reinhardt: I won’t live to see what they do, but I’m damn sure of one thing. When they come back, there’s going to be no hiding place for you or your friends.

Jocasta: I already know that, Tony. Don’t you think I know that? I've seen it.

Reinhardt: What… the future? You've seen it?

Jocasta nods yes. Reinhardt’s breathing is fast and shallow.

Reinhardt: Are we right? Do they come back?

Jocasta: All I can tell you about the future, Tony, is you’re not in it. You’re nobody.

Reinhardt: Do what you gotta do, soldier.

Jo stuffs a handful of rags in Reinhardt’s mouth and tapes his nostrils closed. She watches him die, then gets back in the driver’s seat and heads for California.