9/6

Played: May 16, 2024.

MIKE

It was a very busy Saturday night. A lot happened. We've got possession of the two guys who were shooting radio beams at DeFreeze's head. We've got DeFreeze, and Willie Wolf. All four of those people are at Lookout Mountain right now, with Roger, some SANDMAN Commandos, and now Merrick, who's just flown down from San Francisco.

Archie and Mitch flew up to Mount Shasta ran into Nola van Valer on the road. She was carrying two very powerful…one pragmaclast, but in two parts: a pair of sapphire tablets with

cuneiform, classical Sumerian inscribed within. When Mitch looked at them, one of the tablets had solid inscriptions inside and the other one, scrambled characters. Archie saw something different: he saw both tablets having solid inscriptions within.  They're on the way up to the St-Germain School with Nola and the two tablets. 

Marshall did some calls to find out who these two guys shooting radio beams at DeFreeze are, and he found out that one of them was a former electronic surveillance guy in ‘Nam, worked for a CIA-adjacent program there along with IGLOO WHITE, the computer-controlled perimeter sweep thing that was being put into place in the late 60s in Nam by the US. When he came back he joined Governor Reagan's countersurveillance team and eventually became one of his closest countersurveillance guys. We don't know who the white guy of the two of them is, yet.

I should also remind everyone that Mitch had a run-in with one of his former BLUE STAR handlers in LA, an Armenian guy named 'Mickey.'  He hasn't told anybody about that yet in character, but I just wanted to remind people that happened.

Jocasta has been driving all the way back up to Mount Shasta with Elsie Whitaker Martinez and Patricia Hearst…

JEFF

It's not that Mitch is trying to keep that secret, it's just that we've all got other stuff on our minds. We got bigger fish in the fryer right now.

MIKE

For sure. At Lookout Mountain: Merrick has just come down and brought Roger into one of the interrogation rooms, handed him a pack of cigarettes, and said "Hell of a night," in Danbe to him. Basically trying to break the ice and to cut the tension.

I am going to start at Shasta. Before Jo, Patricia, and Elsie get up there, Mitch and Archie will have some time to prepare for what's going to happen. They've got Nola in the car,  they've got these two major pragmaclasts in in their possession, and at the school we've also got Peter Mount Shasta. And Dan Miller, who really nobody has talked to yet, because he came up here after both Archie and Mitch had come down from the mountain. He's been hanging out and helping out at the school. There are a lot of Illuminated on the mountain right now. 

As soon as Mitch, Dave, Archie and Nola pull into the school drive, Mitch senses that it's heavy here. The Vibes are heavy, and there's a lot going on. We have to prepare for the arrival of Patty Hearst and Jo (and Elsie). To remind you what Mitch found out when he scanned the tablets with Detect, they feel like computers to him. 

ROB

They are History-B? Nola: what state is she in right now?

MIKE

Physically she's doing better. Mitch wanted to see if he could heal her up, but… Her muscular deterioration is still there, she's still very weak, but she was digging through the dirt to get these tablets with her bare hands. She was very intent on getting these out of the ground tonight because she had a vision, a feeling that they were going to be important.

This is the treasure that was buried in her yard during the Mission One intermission, when Mitch first came up here, and again when he came up during Mission Six. 

JEFF

I forget whether or not I mentioned the treasure buried in Vera's yard when I told everybody about Ol' Vera. I'm not trying to keep anything secret; if Mitch can clarify anything for Archie at this point, he'd be be happy to.

MIKE

There were a couple of cryptic mentions either after Mission One or after Mission Six, but because we didn't dig it up it was a pure "Chekhov's Pragmaclast."

JEFF

I figured it wasn't going anywhere.

ROB

Okay. We want all of these important people and objects to be safe, but maybe not necessarily all in the same place, right? We don't bring Nola and the pragmaclast in to see Bierce or whatever. If there's enough cabins to stash everybody, Archie would rather keep all of the components separate, until he can talk to Mitch and figure out what we think is going to happen…

JEFF

I imagine we can do that.

MIKE

There's definitely a lot of outbuildings, we've got cars; we can take things away from the school itself, if we need to. Nola is not like attached to the tablets. She came as a messenger to deliver them to Mitch, specifically. As far as she's concerned, she's done what she wanted and needed to do. As an illuminated she feels the important Vibes here, and she'll absolutely rest in a guest bungalow if if it's offered to her. 

ROB

Does does she say what she thinks the tablets are? Can we just ask her about it?

MIKE

Nola used to just think that Mitch was Alpha Leonis. She said "you haven't aged a day." It seems now she is able to differentiate the two of them. It takes her a couple of times to get it all straight in her head, but she says is, "back when the Master Jesus came to me and said that I had to keep these safe until…he said I would know when the moment is right…"

She looks at Mitch and and says "tonight…there were other times I felt like…the first time I saw you last year, I thought maybe…but then I pushed you and Sheila and Lynn away because it wasn't quite the right moment. But tonight…or perhaps at dawn…" she says to herself, kind of under her breath, "is the time for these. You know what these tablets are, don't you, master?"  She'll still call Mitch Master.

JEFF

"It's not impossible that there's something that you assume that I know, that I don't know. But I feel also that I could probably explain them to somebody. I'd be guessing at big parts of it, but I'd probably be okay with that. Anyway let's assume, just for the sake of clarity for everybody,  that I don't know. That I'm in fact mistaken, and there are things I think I know that I'm actually wrong about. So, correct me, Vera, please, if you can."

ROB

There's a line in Best of Show when the Jane Lynch character meets the Christopher Guest character, and she's like, "you know who I am, of course," because she's a big deal in the dog world. Christopher Guest says, "well I do and I don't," which I always quote.

MIKE

"These are the original tablets, my Lord. The story that came down to us is that Moses received the Word from God, but there was a first version of those tablets, and these are they.  They are not Commandments, they are sublime prophecy…"

She's trying to come up with words that will accurately…both Mitch and Archie could hear her stumble through a little bit of Sumerian before she gets to saying "sublime prophecy." Neither of you have Sumeiran, it's Enki who does, so…

JEFF

I'm glancing over at Archie to see if he's nodding his head and recognizing some kind of deep Mormon thing that I'm unaware of.

MIKE

Could you give me a Mormon theology roll here?

ROB

No problem.

MIKE

Add two to that skill, because this is not the first set of Biblical pragmaclasts that we've come across.

Rob rolls Theology (Mormon)-16, success by 6

MIKE

What she's saying is accurate, sort of, to both Biblical and Talmudic legend: there was an original set of lapis lazuli or sapphire tablets that were broken, or were not the final ones that Moses received.

But Archie gets to thinking about that night out in Ohio last year, when he was tripping on acid, thinking about that whole thing from the Book of Mormon or one of the other adjunct books. About everybody getting their own urim and thummim, when the time is right. And then he starts thinking about Reinhardt, and the urim and thummim.  This is another situation where we've got something from ostensibly the Old Testament here, that was buried here in America. 

Nola hasn't said whether Alpha Leonis brought these to her or not, but they were buried in her yard and we haven't reached the point of asking, "where did they exist before they were buried in the yard? Did they appear there like a pragmaclast does, when a reality temblor happens?" We haven't gotten that information, yet.

Archie's beginning to think that North America is scattered with a bunch of stuff that may have been brought over. If Archie's supposition about the ships that brought the Jaredites over is historically true in some sense, in the pre-Ontoclysm, then they certainly could have come over during one of the various Book of Mormon migrations that happened from the Old World.

If these are the tablets that Moses was originally supposed to have, and they are full of prophecy, and they're written in cuneiform… identifiable as Classical Sumerian? What we're talking about here is some object that the Annunaki put together either as a trick, or to fulfill a memetic purpose.

Archie realizes now that he's back at the mountain… you were up here a few days ago to talk to Ambrose, but the energy is different up here now. St-Germain has been turned into a mascot for a school and that's it. Peter Mount Shasta has abandoned his worship of the Ascended Masters. Nola van Valer is also losing her faith, too. Whatever Mitch and the school have been doing here, they've been affecting the memetic character of the mountain itself. 

The fact that these have come here at this point in time, though? Archie knows we don't want these things around when Patty gets up here. There's just going to be too much stuff. They've got to be sequestered. Given the power level that Mitch just told you about, it's a foregone conclusion. They need to be out of the Zone.

ROB

Archie asks her, what is going to happen tonight? She said she realized that tonight was the time?

MIKE

"I believe that…" she points at the tablet within which Mitch can see the cuneiform characters spinning, the one with the five verses on it. "I believe that the first of the verses will be confirmed tonight."

She doesn't care about the one with the eight verses on it, she's pointing at the one with the five verses on it.

Archie doesn't know what she means by that because he doesn't know what's on either of these, but Mitch has the Illuminated connection. Mitch realizes she's saying that the slot machine is gonna land on some actual characters tonight, in that first line of the five. Whether you two have communicated what you see or not is entirely up to you, but…

ROB

I think we want to get Nola somewhere safe, but also that allows us to talk freely.

MIKE

She's tired. She'll go to sleep, so you guys can talk.

ROB

I'm assuming we're now talking privately? We can share what we've seen about the tablets.

JEFF

"It's a little like spinning a big Wheel of Fortune, where they're all different colors but you don't know what the different colors signify.

"Sorry, I can tell from your blank expression that I just completely failed to convey what I was trying to with that metaphor. I mean that, with the the way the tablet is in this indeterminate state… if she's right and it's going to settle on something, I don't know how meaningful it is to know that in advance, given that we don't know what any of these things actually say.

"I can't read it, you can't read it, and if neither of us can read it obviously no one can."

ROB

"Actually I think Enki could read it."

MIKE

The puppet case is in the car.

JEFF

[audible shudder]

ROB

"His Sumerian is pretty good…"

JEFF

"Are you going to need me here for that, or should I step out and let you do your … business?"

ROB

Archie knows that it makes Mitch uncomfortable.  "I could take a look at it, but what… What do we want to happen here when Jocasta arrives? Is Nola safe? Is it safe to have all these folks here together? Do we want to keep them away from each other?"

JEFF

"I think that if we get a critical mass of…us together, then it will tip the scale and something will happen. It may be something that looks like a reality quake, or it may be something different. I think that if we let that happen without trying to control it, then it's not going to go great for us. I think that f we do try to control it then we're going to be relying on techniques that we don't currently have.

"That may be something we want to do in the future, but for tonight the more conservative play would be to disperse folks as best we can. Maybe Peter can take Dan back to his place. That's as far as I've got with it right now, because I'm not going to send Vera home in her current condition, and obviously Brother Dodd is here, and I feel like I should be here because it's my house."

ROB

"No, you should be here. We need you here to tip the scale, whatever happens. Hearst is going to want to talk to Bierce, that's what we've organized, what we've engineered, initially. But we don't know what's going to happen when they come together. There's enough of that Bohemian energy between the two of them that they can pull off…"

JEFF

"Best case scenario is that there's some kind of hiccough and then we're in a timeline that is somewhat more hoity-toity, artsy-fartsy. They tried that and it didn't work very well. I don't feel like, right now, we're in a good position to do better than they did. 

"I hate to be the guy who's like, 'let's not,' 'let's do the conservative thing,' because our best thinking is what got us to this point.  But I don't know, man."

ROB

"Well, I want to see what happens. I want to see what they have to say to one another. But sure, let's not mention the pragmaclast and let's only add one Illuminated at a time to the Equation…"

MIKE

There's a knock on the door of the office that Mitch and Archie are using. It's

Dave. "Dr Redgrave wanted me to head back to the city as soon as possible, but given what we've gone through, should we be giving him a report right now? I'm guessing he's still awake in the city. I just want to make sure he still wants me down there and I want him to be fully apprised."

ROB and JEFF both

"Sure."

MIKE

"All right, I'll make the call." 

(MIKE turns to BRANT)

At about 3:30, 3:45 in the morning…this would be after you've gotten confirmation that the black guy who was shooting the beams at DeFreeze is not SANDMAN but you do not yet have his full information… you have his name but you don't have his whole CV… Dave calls from Shasta. "I'm going to put him on." 

I'm going to put Archie on with him just so he can explain what happened, and you guys can infodump, but the the big news is that there was a pragmaclast here.

ROB

We tell all that and…when is Jocasta arriving?

MIKE

She'll be here around like seven or eight in the morning, probably. Maybe a little later. It's a long drive.

ROB

And Marshall is where, in LA? Or he's in San Francisco?

MIKE

He's in San Francisco, yeah.

BRANT

Marshall will have Dave come back to San Francisco, unless the Shasta team feels like they might need muscle. I don't think Dave would be the type of muscle…seems unlikely that you would need a Dave there. 

ROB

It's three in the morning. Do you need him at five in the morning or can we keep him until…?

BRANT

No, no, I'm just thinking…he can sleep. He can come out in the morning when Jo gets there. We still have to get Roger out of LA, or out of jail or whatever and find out what he knows… Marshall will tell Archie what he learned about this Reagan connection…

ROB

What was that?

MIKE

We'll say that that information has come in at this point.

ROB

Makes sense, don't need to go over it again.

BRANT

From Marshall's perspective, he's waiting to see all this plays out. Let's find out what happens when Patricia gets to the mountain. Let's find out what Roger and Merrick can learn from DeFreeze—not from DeFreeze, from, uh… 

MIKE

Freeman.

BRANT

Yeah, Figure out what's going on in LA. We have like five different things happening in LA.

MIKE

All right. It's probably a good time for us to go back to LA. The plan is, right now, is for Archie to take Enki into a distant…?

ROB

Yeah.

(MIKE turns to BILL)

MIKE

Merrick will give you what he has right now, which won't be everything that Marshall's got, but it'll include that these guys who were using SANDMAN equipment on DeFreeze? They are not Sandmen. 

"I have been sent down here to find out what they know…right now, Wolf and DeFreeze and as far as they know, you, are all locked up separately. They don't know what's happening with you…just keeping them on ice. 

"Do you want to help me with this interrogation? Do you want to be present to watch it from behind the two-way glass? What role do you want to play? I'm going to go in pretty hard: I'm going to be using hypnotism, I'm going to be using NLP. I want to interrogate the Black gentleman first because we have more information on him. We know he's a technician. There may be a way to get in through that. 

"The white guy, I haven't talked with him yet. Looking at his body language, he strikes me as more of a hard case, more of a bruiser. I feel like if there's a weak link here, it's going to be uh the Black gentleman."

BILL

"All right. So you're going to separate them?" 

MIKE

"They're separate."

BILL

"The main thing I need to know is, how much more do I have to play out with the SLA? Those two, I can keep undercover, or we can just say we have them and that's it. 

"We have control over the others, I hope. I don't know what happened with Patty. I hopefully gave them enough time for Hearst girl to get taken out."

MIKE

Merrick can tell you that Jocasta is on the way up to Shasta with her.

BRANT

To insert Marshall: somehow in here…this would have been information communicated either to Merrick or someone in the chain… I imagine Marshall fielding a lot of phone calls all night while doing lines of coke…

Right now we have everything safely contained on ice. We have the entire SLA being closely held, we have DeFreeze under control, and these two technician types… 

We don't need Roger to be undercover with DeFreeze any more, but we do need to figure out how we're going to solve this problem with the media. Someday, you know, he needs to be arrested or killed in a shootout, and we have to do something with Hearst that cleans her off in the public perception. Anything creative that Roger might have up his sleeve from talking to DeFreeze would be valuable in that regard, because I am coming up empty on ideas of how to stage this in a way that resolves everything cleanly.

BILL

"If DeFreeze and Wolf are on ice and we can keep them here indefinitely, let's put that on the back burner, and concentrate on two other things which may be a little bit more urgent: what the hell is this meme that they're trying to release into LA, right, and how do we counter it in case it's going to cause mass death? And who's behind it, right?

"I'm with you that they're on ice. They can sit in their black hoods for the next couple hours. I don't know if it's helpful for me to be to be the interrogator, or to come in as a second one if you get blocked… I'm leaning towards that, the the second one. Yeah. I'll watch behind the glass, okay? Especially if there's something where they still think I'm part of the SLA…we could play off of that, you know? Let's just hammer at "Agent Black" and find out what he knows, then trace it back up the chain and get if he has any understanding of what the hell they were releasing via DeFreeze."

MIKE

"The other thing is, we've got their transmitter here. We've got their black bag with their equipment in it, and we're going to need to get an expert in psychotronics down here to take a look at it. It's SANDMAN equipment, but this is a black site, with commandos. We don't really have a technician… I mean, we do, but he's not quite yet in sync with, um, cheval… so…"

BILL

"I do have some technical skills. If you can break the guy to find out just, literally, what he was doing? What was he programming. If we can go through the machine and see if it has any record of what was being scanned through, that's first steps.

"In fact, before you interview, let's go down and look at the equipment and see what we can find from that, because it's not going to lie, okay?"

MIKE

Let me see what you've got for skills, without tapping into the Phreak, that can help here… let me just get the character sheet up…given that you've got some technical skills we can cross-default them… 

BILL

I don't know if Mechanic is going to help…

MIKE

But you've got Electronics Operation, this is Psychotronics… we haven't defined the Phreak skills yet, but this adventure can help us do that…

BILL

I guess the only critical thing is just searching the bag and seeing what other evidence there is. An instruction manual?

MIKE

That's a great point. You and Merrick go through the bag. The components…it's got three parts. A power supply, SANDMAN tech with all the retro bells and whistles…  it's got the transmitter, which Roger can instantly identify because it's just a radio transmitter… and then there's a microcomputer. It's weird, because it reminds Roger of what he was doing six hours ago: hanging out with those guys with their eight track tapes. It's got like a slot for a data cartridge…everything's unlabeled, obviously, as SANDMAN tech…

BILL

Roger has the Renshaw machine slots, that tech is very familiar to him because he's been a subject of it many times. Is there any relation to—

MIKE

Well, shit. You could spend an hour and Rench psychotronics if you want to.

BILL

Oh, that's right! We have a facility here.

MIKE

Yeah, Lookout Mountain should have a Renshaw machine… Electronics Operation (Psychotronics)-12. This way you can talk to "Agent Black" about it, have the ability to banter with him. Take extra time…

Electronics Operation (Psychotronics)-13…success by one

MIKE

After you've Renched for an hour, you feel up to speed on SANDMAN psychotronics, all right. 

It's not like you can just read the data on the cartridge, because you don't have the right equipment, but your hunch is the meme is on the cartridge. If there's a way to break it down on some SANDMAN whatever… basically it's highly compressed audio laced with memetics on there. It's plug and play. You plug in the cartridge, you don't even need to know anything about the process beyond that. This is an idiot proof piece of technology.

BILL

"So we have the meme! If we have this tape we have the meme, which means we can come up with a counter meme if we need to."

MIKE

"Yeah. That's how it works. It was designed so that anyone could use it. These two guys aren't Sandmen—"

BILL

"They probably don't know much, other than the other question which is, who the fuck sent you?"

MIKE

"Exactly. That's what we're going to find out right now." Merrick is anxious to do it, so let me roll his Hypnotism…

BILL

I'll be behind the glass mirror.

MIKE

Roger notices, as Merrick very quickly gets Freeman Calbert into a state of hypnosis, that he's easily hypnotized. Sandmen have higher Wills, trained resistance to stuff like NLP. Merrick gets him under control pretty quickly. 

I'm not going to go back and forth in character through the interrogation, but I'll give you the broad strokes. He wants to find out, real clearly in military terms: what was your mission? What were the parameters? Who's your commanding officer? These are the basic operational details that he can get out—

BILL

"Who do you report to after?" Another critical one is, "how long will you go before you're missed?"

MIKE

Yes. Reporting in is very…that time frame is very important. He gives you his name, he says, "I work for the governor," just straight out there. He says this is part of Operation Cable Splicer, a long-term plan to keep Black rebellion under control. The SLA is part of a larger operation, used to suppress and destroy Black political organizing. DeFreeze was operated on in Vacaville: he's got a receiver in his brain.

"It's all Jolly West's plan. His contact in Sacramento is Chief of Staff Ed Meese. Meese gave him this mission. Meese had the guys in the intelligence unit of the California State Police equipped him with this stuff. It all came from Jolly though, he's just the guy on the ground who was put here to get the…he doesn't really know what memetics is, he just knows he's transmitting something to this guy's brain. That he actually accepts. He saw some shit in Vietnam. He'll talk freely about all the weird tech and weird science that he was involved with in Vietnam. It's a perfect choice for this guy to be the technician in this two-man team.

"They are supposed to report back sometime tomorrow morning. They said that they'll be able to start to see this meme spreading through Compton and South LA. They said probably in about 3 to 5 days. It's kind of like a disease, he says, it spreads from one carrier to another. The idea is for them to get really excited about disrupting the polite, liberal, "Impeach Nixon" March next Saturday, and the cops are ready, he says…"

BILL

So this is the basic idea of 'stir it up,' so they can then come in with 'Law and Order,' and justify further… yeah, these people are… whatever happened to compartmentalization? Whatever happened to cover stories? I mean, good God.

MIKE

Well, not like anybody in the press other than those wacko leftist rags is going to believe that there's actually mind control technology able to do stuff like this. If it happens, it's going to feel to the media audience like an organic Black rebellion that they can then, well, crush.

BILL

Note to self: apologize to Jo. We should have killed Jolly.

MIKE

Everybody we thought was going to have a long leash is going to have a much shorter leash after tonight, that's for sure.

BILL

This stuff has happened before.

MIKE

Merrick and and Marshall both know that Jolly left town. He said "I'm giving a lecture somewhere," and Merrick went through his books in his office at UCLA—

BILL

Well here's an idea…

MIKE

He's gone to ground.

BILL

No. here's an idea: he assassinates Reagan. Let's have an assassination attempt on this Ronald Reagan guy.

BRANT

This actually gives us an opportunity. Marshall is confident that his memories of coordinating with the Reagan campaign are screen memories for him actually dealing with somebody else, because that's a very…direct contact with a very prominent person? A lazy hypnotist would be like, "No, you weren't actually meeting with a lizard man, you were meeting with Reagan's Chief of Staff." So Marshall is confident that's not what's happening.

BILL

It's a good point. I mean, it is ridiculously simple.

MIKE

Merrick says, "Well, I can I can go deeper but this guy doesn't strike me as…

BILL

You have the option to pick up Meese and scan his brain…?

BRANT

I want this memory to be real, because if it is, we can flip this. That's how we can solve the Hearst narrative problem: we point to the people who actually made it happen, which are these guys. We can take down rivals to our ontological revolution that we're building, but also people who are using our technology without authorization. 

This is a huge code violation! They're not supposed to be doing this. We have every reason to do that. We can flip it around on them, if that actually is what happened.

BILL

Control, I think, would back us up. If this is a rogue unit, we have to take it down. It permeated too far, it's just gonna have to get cleared out so that we can get this under control. It's the old way of thinking, but the new way of thinking is, we're taking out these fuckers and putting something better.

BRANT

And then Hearst can be depicted as a tragic figure, implicated as a catspaw in this right-wing revanchist conspiracy. That's all good. I just want to make sure that we're not gonna be having this guy assassinate Ronald Reagan for no reason.

LEONARD

For no reason?!

BILL

I assume we're gonna file off the mind control lasers, and turn the story into just regular brainwashing. We don't want anyone, other than Control and us, knowing that this was SANDMAN equipment that did. That such equipment even exists.

BRANT

No, that's… We're getting way ahead of ourselves, because finding out how they got this technology is a whole other issue.

BILL

Like you were saying, they got it easily. They're gonna get Jolly and Reagan on the end user agreement being violated, right?

BRANT

We'll solve it. We don't want to get too far down into the weeds right now.

BILL

"You broke the NDA, you're out!"

BRANT

I want Merrick to go a little deeper on this guy. Probe everything about the the Reagan connection. Who recruited him? Who was the connection, who was the person who's like, "hey bro I got a job for you with this guy who's the chief of staff of Ronald Reagan?" Who was that person? I want all that information.

MIKE

We'll flip back to that in a little bit.

Shasta, now. Jo's not there quite yet. Archie whistles up Enki. The blue of the tablets reflects in his little button eyes.  "You have caught a big fish."

He says 'a big fish,' not 'two big fish,' because Archie and Enki know this is one object.

ROB

It's one object together, yeah. Before he reads it, Archie asks Enki, "do you know what these are? Have you seen these before?" 

Enki has Hidden Lore (History B)-21.

MIKE

"I certainly know some of the words. I have spoken them to you myself, in other places and other times."

ROB

"Are the words fixed? Mitchell seemed to say that the words on the tablets were still changing."

MIKE

"The great souls are able to see are all the unfolding possibilities. To your benighted eyes there is only one path forward in the future. To theirs, many. It's not until this [UNTRANSLATABLE/stylus?] points to the present that you will be able to see what has already happened."

ROB

"Retrocreation is a pretty clever way to make prophecy. If you can just have the prophecy remain undefined until the event happens and, and then your tablet gets carved retroactively… It's easy to look like you knew what was going to happen in advance."

BILL

It's the prophecy and prophesying that makes the future?

MIKE

"It has happened many times before and will happen many times again. The computations are not fully complete, but I will read what is carved in these tablets."

SAPPHIRE TABLET 1 INSCRIPTION:
THE ONE ARCHIE AND MITCH CAN BOTH SEE CLEARLY

ud zagmuk ĝal ya | ekimmu dal tir kunu bala hurum

ešeš nar u esulumak ganzer | unu u gidim šugi tab me

udunita sikipa luKA'inima annibatu bala | gud dabariri zuh niĝnuĝara gaz

anzagar mamud, zal kiš | ešbar ul gud ug imin us imin

luKA-inima uru, kiĝiri neru dim | gin muš NERU igi ğal

kaskal šag kur | ešbar ul gud hur

gana tab, šaggar uš | gin geštug NERU igi ğal

til magur an gu'e peš | NERU a ĝar, niĝsam gal min

At the dawning of the new year there were five placed there, an ekimmu flew [from] the hot muddy forest intent on [turning/pouring out/sacrificing] the children

A festival of [musicians/singers] and a box [that is] a cave to the underworld, a young girl but old soul joins the battle

The ram's-haired magician became a [prophetic] ecstatic and was sacrificed, the daring heroic trickster [maliciously] cheats death

A tower of dreams, a world-earthquake; a choice [refused/escaped] by oh-so-briefly seven-upon-seven

The magical experts cultivated, the ill road being laid; the true [face/appearance] of the enemy glimpsed

A [journey/path] inside [the heart of] the [mountain/underworld], a choice again [refused/escaped]

The fields [owned/burned/marked red], [food/fodder] poisoned; the true [plan/wisdom] of the enemy glimpsed

Finally, as the [barges/geometric figures] from the [skies/heavens] [descend/are birthed], the enemy is defeated, at great price to two

SAPPHIRE TABLET 2 INSCRIPTION:
THE ONE ARCHIE CAN SEE CLEARLY
BUT ALL MITCH SEES IS A BUNCH OF CONSTANTLY-SCRAMBLING CUNIEFORM SYMBOLS

egir su muš mamud kiš bala kur | namgalam sur agar dug

saĝĝa sağ iri bur dur | gin niĝsisa lum un sumug mada

mah namhe abrig, name niĝin iri kar satium diĝir hurum | anam ak zae ri ĝu, šag dab

lugal ěsbar šugi | ge til bala arad namlulu

kigiri šud dim, dur urra šu gi; anam tar ak zae šeš, Mit-šel

The red princess of snakes dreams a [different world/revolution/sacrifice]; her [talent/greatness] harnessed for the health of the commons

The temple official in the [head city/capitol] reveals all as true justice [shines/swells like fruit] like dawn on the darkness of your [land/nation]

So many cults, some of them [encircle/search] the harbor city in the east for a [child of the gods/stars, a messiah]; what will you [do with/impose upon] me, I wonder?

A king is chosen by the elders; the [blows, inscriptions, strokes of the stylus] try one last time to make slaves of men

The blessed road now laid, all debts settled; but what will fate do with you and your brethren, Mitchell?

MIKE

At around 8: a.m. Jocasta, Patricia Hearst, and Elsie Whitaker-Martinez show up at the St-Germain school. Jo has been up here at least once before. Elsie and Patricia are both tired, it's been 8 to 10 hours on the road, a long long trip. 

This is a Sunday so there's no classes in the school right now, but some of the students are having breakfast. We sent Peter Mount Shasta down the mountain with Dan to just hang out in town for a little while. Nola is sleeping. Ambrose is resting… that's the current situation.

Mary-Lynn will poke her head out of Mitch and Mary-Lynn's bungalow… I'm sure Mitch needed to get a little bit of sleep?

JEFF

No, we have drugs.

MIKE

Oh, right. Everybody's on modafinil. That's fine… Mary-Lynn isn't, but, y'all are. Okay.

Jocasta ushers Patricia and Elsie to the main office.

LEONARD

"Hi, everybody. I brought some friends!"

MIKE

Mary Lynn at this point simply accepts that international fugitive Patty Hearst is here at her school. "I'm just gonna leave this to you, hon." She pats Mitch on the shoulder and goes back to the bungalow.

Mitch has seen Patricia before at a distance, when he was surveilling her. Her aura is very much the same as saw last time. There's a little nugget of History-B energy in there, but otherwise she's not psychically active right now. She's not projecting any illusions, or doing anything like that.

Elsie you haven't seen yet. She has a very bold, powerful soul. She's not Illuminated, she's not "special" in any way. She's not hijacked by a ghost or memetic demon… Mitch can tell  she's actually in very decent health. Another old person for Mitch to feel a Sense of Duty to… Her aura's emotional color is is very stalwart. She's a little scared, she doesn't know what's going to happen, but she's along for the ride.

She wants answers, so there's curiosity in her aura as well.

LEONARD

"Is Ambrose still with us?"

MIKE

Elsie and and Patricia's auras show interest in Mitch's answer.

JEFF

"As far as I know." It just occurred to me when you asked the question, I haven't checked on Ambrose this morning.

MIKE

That's fine. We're trying to avoid too much concentration of Illuminated energy.

LEONARD

"My friends here would very much like to meet with him, but I think we should probably be around him when it happens."

JEFF

"All right. Let's get you some coffee."

LEONARD

"How much you got?" 

MIKE

Ambrose's bungalow… Dave's been keeping an eye on him, making sure he doesn't get up to anything. He hasn't had the energy to. Just a reminder to everybody, because it's been a while since we've seen him: horrible radiation burns. Obviously, he's weak. He doesn't have a lot of health to speak of… but when Elsie walks in he sits up straight. He's probably wearing pajamas… All of his dignity, his officiousness come to the surface. "My God, it's the demoiselle!"

Elsie says, "how is this possible?"

Patricia's aura, Mitch sees, starts to flare a little bit. Jocasta's connection with her indicates to her that the "red curtains of Bohemia" are starting to ooze out of her psyche into the surrounding area…

LEONARD

Jo puts a firm hand on Patricia's shoulder. "Steady now. Remember, we're playing by new rules." And then she will say, somewhat distantly as if talking to herself, "well old man, here we are, getting the old gang back together, how are you feeling?"

MIKE

And then another voice comes out of Jocasta's mouth. Mitch has never seen the London memeplex speak through Jocasta. She's not a cheval, this is not like what happens with Roger and the Loa…

JEFF checks Mitch's Uncontrollable pyrokinesis, it does not trigger.

MIKE

In the past 24 to 48 hours Mitch has seen a very powerful meme, in Patricia's head. Now he can see something very similar happening in Jocasta, but it's a different meme. The voice that comes out of Jocasta is gruff, masculine.

"Ambrose," Jocasta says, and at that Ambrose does a double take.

JEFF

Is Jack London an agent of the Red Kings?

MIKE

'Is Jack London…?' This is not Jack London. this is all of Jack's stories mashed together into a memeplex…

JEFF

My question still stands. Should I roll?

MIKE

If you want to give me a Detect roll, sure. And an aura analysis role too, why not?

JEFF rolls successes.

MIKE

Unlike the "wine of wizardry" meme that is in Patricia now, there is no History-B taint inside the Jack London meme. But the meme is resonating with the meme in Patricia, and in Ambrose.. The meme is resonating with elements of Ambrose's Illuminated nature, only Ambrose's, and with Patricia… forming a triangle between the three of them. Pure memetics. At first those memes were coming out in Illusions around Jocasta and Patricia but Jocasta got her to stop that. 

It's as if these three being close to each other, they're reinforcing bits and pieces of each other's memetic payloads, shall we say. It's all memetics.

Now Archie's here…he was talking to a puppet a little while ago, but a memetics expert can get in here quickly…?

ROB

I'm not sure what Patricia thinks is going on here, and who she thinks she has joined.  Is Jocasta still perpetuating…? Mitch can plausibly be part of whatever countercultural revolution Jocasta is seemingly part of… It's harder for Archie to fake that. I don't know what Jocasta has told Patricia about who exactly runs this school.

LEONARD

Jocasta would definitely want Archie to be there, if he's available— 

MIKE

Jocasta is present right now. She can speak freely, she's not being ridden or anything like that… Jack London has a mouthpiece through her, basically.

LEONARD

As far as that goes, I think Jocasta has not given Patricia any hard data about who she is or what's going on. But she has more or less let the mask slip that like we're not really on the SLA's side. A whole different thing is going on here, bigger than you suspected. The world is a different place than you know.

Just kind of the real bare-bones 'the veil is going to be lifted' stuff, no detail.

MIKE

Okay. I want to leave the four of you in—because if Archie's gonna come in, if somebody's gonna get sent out to get Archie? I'd like it to be Hilton. He's got his own way of getting into situations he shouldn't be. If Mitch or Jocasta wants to say, 'hey why don't you go get the man with the puppets'  then Hilton can go can go run and get Archie.

Archie's finished consulting with with Enki, maybe he's not off his hand quite yet, but when Hilton knocks on the door of the main office of the school… "Mr Ransom? They said that they might need you to come in, and be present for what's happening over there. In the old man's room."

He sees Enki on Archie's hand, says "you got a… you got a puppet on your hand."

ROB

Archie met Hilton before, when he was at the school, so Archie is is friendly to Hilton. It's not the middle of the night anymore, around ten in the morning… "Hilton, good to see you. Yes, well, this is my friend Enki."

MIKE

"What does he do?"  I'm sure you've covered up the pragmaclast as well.

ROB

Yeah, he tossed a blanket over the pragmaclast.

MIKE

Enki says, "you better not let that kid in the room with the rest of them."  

Hilton goes, "wow that that was pretty good!"

ROB

"Oh, thanks. I've been working on the glass of water trick."

MIKE

Hilton takes Archie over to where our new arrivals are speaking with Ambrose… there hasn't been a lot of verbal communication so far. Elsie will do some of the speaking here because she's not involved in this three-way memetic communication. She's looking like… When she first came in, Mitch saw her aura. There was love there. She respected him, he was the old they all snickered at, but in the end Ambrose was one of the only men who respected her intelligence… her being well-read and literary. When she saw him she was at first happy, and when she saw the physical condition he was in she was taken aback by it…

As Archie comes into the room, Hilton peeks in too, and he steps in…

ROB

Archie does intervene. He says, "thanks, Hilton."

MIKE

"Please, please don't keep me out! This is part of my education!"

ROB

Archie throws Mitch a glance and says, "Um…"

JEFF

Mitch's Sense of Duty is to the elderly, not to children, so he feels no obligation to indulge Hilton's desires.

MIKE

All right. Hilton's curiosity is still piqued but he will respect… if there's one thing that they've… the bond, that the two of them have come to over the last couple months… Hilton respects Mitch and and respects his wisdom… and I actually need you to make a roll. Teaching-15.

JEFF rolls a success.

MIKE

It's enough. He'll take the gentle nudge out of the room.

Elsie says, "what do the three of you think you're doing?"

Ambrose says, "I believe I have been sent here in my final days of life to share with these people, Elsie, all we did wrong. All the mistakes we made. All of the hubris we showed the gods." He closes his horribly burned eyelids. "They need to know. They need to know…"

"Well, I can't remember, Ambrose! And you can't remember, can you? And Jack, if you're in there somewhere," she says to Jocasta, "you can't remember either. Only George can! And George isn't here, either. It's just his silly stupid poem! Why did you make people read it?" she says to Ambrose.  "Why did you put all those messages in the Examiner, the Chronicle, and then Cosmopolitan and everywhere else! Why? You knew what went wrong."

Give me a spirit empathy roll, Jo.

LEONARD rolls a success.

MIKE

Ambrose responds "it might be better to show them. These… people," he was gonna say 'these men,' but Jocasta is here… "These people are strong, Elsie. They're able to see through things that you and I can't, even though we were there."

Elsie says, "Marty drank himself into cirrhosis because of you. Nora Mae drank cyanide. Jack kept taking laudanum and George used the cyanide himself at the Bohemian Club. The trail of wreckage that you left behind…"

Ambrose says, "You don't think I know that? You don't think I realize—not just the people in this story, but in the previous one… Do you know how many people were born between 1906 and 1926?"

"You left! You went to the desert. I thought you died."

"I went to the desert to make up for what I had done—"

LEONARD

Jocasta is gonna put a little of the old Army in her voice and say, "folks, folks. I'm sure you have a lot more of this catching up and recrimination to do, but what you're here for is because… Elsie, I can't answer your question, but I can tell you where I found him. I know what I brought him back from. What you need to understand is, there were forces working through you to deliver that message that none of you intended. Forces that we have dedicated our lives to fighting, and there are messages that were brought through that poem that were not your own. They're still here and they're still trying to exert their presence now…"

MIKE

Patricia has been very quiet during all of this. She walks right up to Ambrose and very gently takes her hands and brings them to his face and shoulders. "I know what you tried to do to help us. I know what you tried to do to repair what had been done. But you helped the wrong people."

Ambrose, tears begin to flow from his eyes. "I believe that the three of us…" and Ambrose looks at Jo and Patricia… "can show you, can dig through enough of the faint echoes of our lost Bohemia, to show you what happened. I take the fullest of responsibility for what my part was. But in order to do this we must join together the different pieces, the different fragments that were left behind. In George's poetry, in your novels, in my stories."

LEONARD

"You don't have to take responsibility for anything. We're not here to assign blame. There are forces at work here that you couldn't have suspected even existed, let alone resisted in any meaningful way. There's value in what you did, because it's going to inform what we try to do moving forward. I ask you just to be patient for our colleagues to arrive, because just as it was a critical time when you did what you did. It's a critical time for us now. You're right: we don't want to repeat the same mistakes that you did, and we need your insight to avoid that. But the path here is not recrimination and inaction, it's understanding."

MIKE

Leadership-17. I have your Spirit Empathy roll, I have some more information to give you on that but start with the Leadership roll.

LEONARD rolls a success.

MIKE

Elsie's anger simmers down. Mitch can see her aura calming as Jocasta takes control here. Jocasta can feel Jack London retreat a little bit… The Spirit Empathy role I had you make is because what the London memeplex really wants to do right now is tell his stories. What Jo can tell from her subconscious connection with the spirit is, he wants to like mix them all together to find like a cipher within all of the different stories, what Bohemia actually looked like.  He wants to tell a story, very similar thing with the memetics in "Wine of Wizardry" and in Ambrose's stories of epiphanies before death, hauntings, and long dead civilizations and cities. They want to come together to paint the entire picture of what Bohemia looked like, and how it went wrong.

LEONARD

Yeah, I get that.

The only reason I'm being cautious with them is because Jocasta does not really understand the nuts and bolts of memes, and Archie does. So she wants him here also in case getting all these people together somehow triggers something.

MIKE

Do you do you want to tell Archie all that in Danbe? The only people here able to understand Danbe are Mitch, Archie, and Jocasta.

LEONARD

Yeah.

MIKE

Good, good. Danbe subtitled scene here. Patricia and Ambrose and Elsie will just have to sit and listen.

ROB

So I assume…?

MIKE

They want to fit together all the shards of the pot. They want to bring the stories together, basically. 

ROB

If what they're building is memetic then they have to…is it literally in their words? They have to tell a story? They have to say it out loud, I mean, not something magically happening just by them being present.

MIKE

If we had psychic powers that could connect all of our minds they could do it effortlessly with telepathy, but we don't… We have Telesend, but they would need to speak aloud, for the memetics to take over.

ROB

Okay, so Archie will be very alert for anyone speaking in a way juiced with source code, or that sort.

MIKE

Patricia and Ambrose are quiet while you guys are talking. They understand that the tension here is because you guys don't want them to go whole hog, and they're not going whole hog. Ambrose is haunted by guilt right now, and the measure of that guilt would only come out if he was able to tell his story. Elsie seems to know on some instinctive emotional level that they all fucked up but she doesn't know how, either so…

LEONARD

"Archie, that poem means a great deal to Hearst. She's got an original of it with her right now, and we know it's juiced with Anunnaki source code. I don't know enough about it to say one way or another, and I think I've guided her away from her original intentions significantly, but you know how powerful those things are when they get their hooks into you. I wanted you here to see all this, because we need to be very careful.

"I don't know what might happen. I think their intentions, at this point, are good. But we don't want them to get pulled back into that way of thinking."

JEFF

"Can we extract something that will have utility for us down the line?"

LEONARD

"Well, I hope so! I mean, that's the point. We want to let them—" 

JEFF

"What does that look like, though?"

ROB

"We want to give them a little bit of rope. Let them talk, so that we can see what it was that they were trying to do. Is that the plan? We can cut them off, shut it down if it starts to go sideways. You know reality is slippery here…" 

JEFF

"Hopefully we don't have a critical mass." 

LEONARD

"Yeah. This is a place of power, but it's also a place where we control the environment to a certain degree. Once we get down beneath the rock, anything can happen. But up here, there's not much They can do. 

"I think the value of getting them to tell their story is… We're trying on every level to do what they were trying to do, and if there's something that they did that can be a warning sign to us, or helpful to us, or whatever…? It seems like they pulled it off, however temporarily, and to whatever end, so there's got to be some object lesson in letting them tell that story. 

"Otherwise we're just guessing."

ROB

"Okay, so we let them tell it, we watch for signs of History B, and just generally signs of reality shifting. And we keep the other Illuminated away."

LEONARD

 "This may seem like a weird request, Mitch, but I think it might help Patricia open up to us… we don't have a video camera up here, do we? Or a movie camera?

JEFF

"We could, sure."

LEONARD

"I don't know if we need to film it, but if she thinks we're filming it…she likes that audience, whether that's a natural instinct of hers or something that was put into her."

JEFF

"I'll just run over to the AV closet, okay?"

(This whole conversation has been in Danbe, of course. How phrases like 'critical mass,' 'video camera' and 'A/V closet' are translated in and out of Danbe is left as an exercise for the reader.)

MIKE

All right. I'm gonna zip back down to LA. We'll come back to you guys in a little bit…that gives me a little time to prepare for that… 

What other information can we get out? Some time has gone by, and if you were able to get identification on the other guy as well…

BILL

My standard operating procedure, especially with what Marshall put into our heads about doubting the idea, is to compare the two stories, right? We have to crack the other nut, get his story out and see how much it corroborates.

MIKE

The other guy who was part of this two-man team, his name is Walter Smith. He is a member of the California Highway Patrol. He is also high up in the counter-intelligence unit of the governor's office. He is also a Vietnam vet, and he has been, over the past four years, part of various operations with the FBI and the CIA on Black radicals, on Chicano radicals, on leftist radicals in the state. 

His name pops up as a bodyguard in a couple of news stories Sophie sent you from Livermore. He's you know been spotlighted a couple times as one of the Gipper's top personal bodyguards… this was earlier, in Reagan's first term. This guy is very close to the governor. Sort of muscle and intelligence for this operation. 

Merrick hasn't gone in to hypnotize and talk to him yet, but now that we've had time to consult over what "Freeman Calvert" had to say… we want to go deeper into Calvert's memories of the meeting with Ed Meese… That'll require Merrick to do another Hypnotism roll against his Will…

BILL

This is a weird thing, and Roger wouldn't ask this question except that he's been buddies with Mitch far too long… There have been circles that Roger was in when he was basically undercover COINTELPRO but also working for SANDMAN, trying to take down some Black cultists, right? He and this white guy ever met before?

MIKE

Um… when the name comes through, maybe some of his aliases, list of operations… Roger has not met him personally before, but he does know him by reputation. The fact that there's a direct line to the governor's office here is interesting, because SANDMAN calls on FBI, CIA, law enforcement at the state and local level whenever they can… But it seems clear to both Marshall and Roger at this point, given the amount of intel…

Actually, can Marshall give me an Intelligence Analysis roll? You've got a lot of information to process right now… Roger can also give me a Hidden Lore (SANDMAN Legends) roll as well, because that that will help connect up…

BILL and BRANT both roll; BILL succeeds by one and BRANT fails.

BRANT

Marshall's been doing a lot of coke.

MIKE

So…how to put all this together… In California since about 1967, when the state authorities realized that there was going to be a long war against student radicals, Black radicals, and all the other kinds of leftists… They realized that they were going to need to work on all angles. The connection between Sacramento operations that involved the highway patrol, the state police, and all of the various eminence grises in the Reagan administration… 

Jolly West saw an opportunity to get on the side of someone that wasn't SANDMAN. Why would he bother doing that? That's the question! Why would Jolly want to get himself attached to a power structure that was way less powerful than SANDMAN?  It's kind of like he was covering his bets, but that doesn't quite make sense.

BILL

Well, he'd be the big fish in the small pond?

MIKE

That's true. He would have the ability to supply these folks with advanced technology. Techniques that would allow them to do the kind of weird social control that they've been dreaming about. But it feels to Marshall like there's something missing here, like there's an element that you were alluding to earlier, in character, that doesn't fit the missing…

Let me look at Marshall's character sheet, he must have a skill that applies…

BRANT

It might be Philosophy (Hinduism), maybe? That skill will finally connect all the dots! 

MIKE

You've also got Savoir-Faire (SANDMAN), which is pretty apt here… Let's do the Hinduism, that sounds really cool. Go for it.

BRANT

Why not? That'll be really impressive.

MIKE

I don't know when Marshall dropped the…when Marshall and Archie were doing the coat-dragging, the dinner? The Arjuna tale was such a perfect analogy for what was happening… you'll have to fill me in. What if I give you the information, you come up with a good in-character Hindu mythology or philosophy concept that matches? Give me a roll. 

BILL

Turtles all the way down?

BRANT rolls a success.

MIKE

'Turtles all the way down' is interesting, because the idea that there are castes or different levels to enlightenment and everything… Think about the kind of things that Viv would say about 'higher selves' and everything like that… What Marshall's intuition…

BRANT

Here's an idea, here's how I can frame it for you, yes. There's an element in Hinduism of connecting what you perceive with what other people perceive. Trying to see what the difference is there, so what Marshall is seeing right now is, maybe you can connect these dots. 

Jolly West was black-marketing SANDMAN tech to some third-party faction that, to some degree, is affiliated with the Reagan office. The Reagan team had an op goinging that was aimed at discrediting the left in the Black community and preventing Black political organizing,  and the SLA was part of that.

What I'm missing is, what would Jolly West get out of that relationship? He's already a member of the most powerful organization in the world! What could the governor's office have to offer him? If his interest was just 'I want someone who will fund my research,' even that doesn't make sense! He can do anything he wants.

MIKE

You can put this in whatever framework you like, but Marshall gets thinking about 'desire.' What do all these people in this situation desire? Very simple to make it into a case of Jolly West looking for a sponsor or a protector, but why would he go elsewhere if he's got SANDMAN? 

What does Ronald Reagan want? Easy to break all this down to control over California, but who's pulling the strings? If there's another level to all of this, what desire is there?

Marshall looks down at the morning copy of the Chronicle that came in… he sees the headlines about Watergate. If Reagan was able to prove himself on this stage, what vistas would be opened up to him? If he was master of this state, to show that he can absolutely control every bit of rebellion that has been unleashed in California over the past five or six years. Who would benefit there?

At that moment Marshall thinks about the Bohemian Club, and the fact that the year before Nixon became president he made a speech there at Bohemian Grove… and lo and behold, November of 1968, he got elected. Everyone is talking about Reagan maybe running in '76, running in '80. He's not running for reelection. He's not just gonna sit on the sidelines.

BRANT

Marshall is on speakerphone. If Merrick or Roger have insight, please. "Let's say that's all true, okay? Either Reagan or someone very close to Reagan has this grand ambition to become the King of America. To achieve Shiva-level dominion over all of the epochs and aeons of of this country. 

"They're related to the Bohemians. Do we need to call Shasta? Are we about to get played? Is this actually all what the Bohemian Club wanted to have happen?"

BILL

"Which Bohemian Club? The 'Bohemians' or the 'Bohemian Club,' which was the remnant that came after them?"

BRANT

"Right."

BILL

"If you ask this Black man, right, let's just quickly rename the 'Bohemian Club' to the Man. It's got a ring to it. The Man is trying to do business, which is really about fighting the war. SANDMAN is the military, right, but then there's the Man, and the Man is keeping everything down and under control. For whom? For the top Whitey-tidy. No offense.

"You could make guesses about who's behind the Bohemian Club. Who likes control?

 Who likes enslaving? If the Red Kings are behind that, you could probably make that guess too. 

"If we're right, the Bohemian Club is a powerful force of control. For all we know it's theirs: the SANDMAN operation trying to keep the Red Kings out, Control playing off of other groups. We already know about…maybe they also have this spun-up group with the Bohemian Club. Keep everybody down so that they have control.

"Jolly was just like, 'well I'm actually moving among different groups that are really part of the same power structure. I'm trying to play in the 'working group,' and then I'm also trying to play with the Bohemian Club. The Man.'

"The Bohemians before that, and whether they had a whole other world, is kind of freaky, because it means that those folks the Bohemian Club might be clued-in, and I don't know what to think…"

BRANT

"What I'm trying to reverse-engineer here is, part of the answer of what needs to happen in Shasta. Someone set this in motion with some kind of intention towards an outcome. When I say 'set this in motion' I mean two things. I mean someone set in motion the SLA as just a mundane COINTELPRO op by the state of California. But also, someone wanted Patty Hearst. She is a vessel for something related to the Bohemians. They wanted her, and they got her, and she's now doing what I imagine they wanted her to do, why they wanted her in the first place…"

BILL

"A media thing, to grab a lot of attention?"

BRANT

"But then, why? Why is she the vessel for this memeplex she has inside her? Was her abduction intended just to, as you say Roger, create a media shitstorm? To make this a bigger thing, and it just so happened that, entirely coincidentally, she was a vessel for this memeplex related to the Bohemians?"

BILL

"No, you're right . If they're that powerful, they should know something more about her. Especially if her grandparents had connections."

BRANT

"Yeah her grandparents are the Hearsts. So someone had the motive, the means, and the opportunity to create a mundane COINTELPRO right-wing psychological project and to specifically abduct Patty Hearst, knowing that she is integral to shifting the ontology. What did they want to have happen, so that we can do it differently? And how do we make sure it's not happening right now?"

BILL

"We got three days, and we have a meme that's already been sent out…" 

BRANT

"It's already been put out there. And we already have the girl at Mount Shasta, which is the most ontologically unstable area in the state."

BILL

"But taking the girl up to Shasta, I don't know if that was part of their plan. Right up until we started pushing on it, she was all about coming to LA. All about being at this event, all about following the SLA plan, which was heading to this Nixon protest and blowing it up, right?

"We have to hope that taking her to Mount Shasta is the correct move. It took out of play in LA."

BRANT

"Right, right, right. We should…" 

Marshall's gonna get Sophie, who presumably has been on the line taking dictation (hi, modanifil!), to summarize all this into an executive report and get it to Shasta and Archie ASAP.

MIKE

Sure. Do you want her to use a little esmology here? We've been talking about big-picture… 

I looked at your character sheet you don't have it, but she does, so I'm gonna go ahead and roll that.

BILL

Way to delegate! That's leadership.

MIKE

Sophie says, "this is a lot of data, but let me tell you how I see it. Your talking about the different levels of existence got me thinking about this.

"Let us surmise, as we have, that the artistic Bohemians in in the original 1906 made a decision that led to the next twenty years becoming… something. We don't know the details yet, but they may become revealed at Shasta as Patricia and Ambrose begin to speak. Let us assume that the Red Kings got into that timeline, and before they were able to take over completely someone hit a "panic button" and took everything back to 1906 again, and the San Francisco earthquake happened and the Bohemian Club became the rulers of the world. Let us also assume that Sandman is the police force for these Bohemians who have controlled the ontology of the world since 1906. Let us also assume by the looks of the esmology…

"These are calculations that I would not ordinarily make because they do seem to be the ravings of a lunatic… but let us assume that the Bohemian Club put Richard Nixon into power.

"It would make sense for them to want to orchestrate events during Nixon's downfall."

BILL

"He's the Man. I buy it."

MIKE

"It does seem to me that what Ronald Reagan is trying to do right now is audition for the Bohemian Club to be Nixon's successor. The last few years of him putting together these secret internment camps for radicals, and all of the things we've talked about… COINTELPRO, SANDMAN working with the FBI and the CIA, trying to keep things ontologically stable because that is what this is all about… if we assume that, the Bohemians may be catspaws of the Kings, because they believe in hierarchy so absolutely.

"Go back to my Plato discussion the other day: we outlaw all music, we make the Republic into an ideal. Then what we are looking at here is, this Symbionese Liberation Army is in some way a test to see if Reagan can be trusted with the presidency."

BRANT

"So this whole time… it would make so much sense. This whole time that's all SANDMAN was. We were the intelligence service in the Army and the FBI for the Bohemians. Our main mission was just to deal with the thing that got them last time… which was the Anunnaki, yes, but they have a whole game going on with the ontology over here that we weren't supposed to be paying attention to.

"Then the first thing we need to fucking do at Shasta is flip that on its head because I didn't get born into the white ruling class of America to do some other asshole's bidding! That's my job! So that's the thing that we're changing!"

BILL

"Also, fuck the Man."

BRANT

"Fuck them! Them, specifically! Put that in the report, Sophie, get it up to Archie. We need to be acting on this!"

MIKE

"Yes, I will. Yes." Sophie's dealing with the shock of like realizing what all of this means.

BRANT

Marshall's gonna go take a bath. He's signed off.

MIKE

Get yourself a nice hotel room right across from Kierney, big deluxe suite, take a bath.

JEFF (aside)

It's why the whole "we're at war with the Red Kings" thing barely holds together and falls apart upon close inspection. Fucking Nazi catspaws.

BRANT

I am so fucking motivated right now. We are going to burn these bitches to the ground.

Ugh and that's why Jolly West was in league with them -- it's like trying to get into the private sector.

MIKE

Back up to Shasta…we're going to allow them to tell their story to a video camera with close control. Archie can interpret the memetics as we go, come up with a panic button—hit them with a "purple cow," if necessary.  You can absolutely do that, but let's tell the story of

Bohemia.

The story goes back and forth between Patricia, the Jack London memeplex, and Ambrose… I will try to indicate who's talking when…

JEFF

Do we have the camera set up? Mitch is operating it?

MIKE

Yes, we do. Elsie's gonna be in the room, because Elsie is one of the only things that's going to keep Ambrose honest. Mitch can tell from their auras: Ambrose feels guilt over what what he's done, and a lot of it is directed at the last living member of that group, which is Elsie.

Patricia is Big Bill's granddaughter, fine. The other girl seems to know Jack's stories really well, but…Elsie keeps him connected to his former life. She'll have to stay. We can do whatever we want with her memories later, if we want to…whatever.

The story begins with Jack's voice, coming out of Jocasta's mouth. "Well, there was violence at first."

"Violence at first," Ambrose says, "it all begins with McKinley." 

LEONARD (aside)

All the best stories start with McKinley.

BILL (aside)

He was moving up the ladder, playing groups against groups.

MIKE

"We needed to see if we could take action on a grand scale. To remove a president. And we found we could."

Jack says, "that's what you remember. It's because that was your part of the operation when we decided, at [Copa's?] in April of 1906, that we were going to try to change the world. We knew there would need to be violence at first."

Elsie warned us about this the other day, when she was talking about them being anxious for blood. "There were people that needed toppling, clearing away. Finance, militaries. A revolution is easy to touch off." This gets to what Jocasta sensed from Jack on the ride up, which is that they neglected something at the very beginning. 

"Now we have all of these people that we need to rule over…" Jack's voice cracks.

"We had certain ethics, that we believed would keep the world safe, and out of the hands of people who would abuse their power."

At that, Patricia says, "we needed to teach them how to dream, and we needed them to dream not just of pleasant things."

Ambrose says, "we needed to teach them fear and mystery, for these things are essential to the human spirit. There were people like George—there were poets, painters, who could create a republic of aesthetic, a republic of sensation."

The memetic web starts to be woven. Archie can sense it, so Archie should give me a…  what's your best aesthetics-related skill? Artistically…either verbally or visually… you've got Artist, you've got…

ROB

He has Artist-15, he has Performance-17, Musical Composition-15… 

JEFF (aside)

Man Archie is the classic triple threat.

MIKE

I'm gonna have you use Public Speaking actually, because you're listening to them and interpreting what they're saying. 

ROB

Okay.

MIKE

A republic of aesthetic, a republic of a sensation… as Archie begins to interpret this joint meme the three of them are putting together…

ROB rolls a success.

ROB

It's just barely, by one.

MIKE

We're doing our thing again. We're succeeding by one. 

Archie starts to put together… give me an Expert (Memetics) roll… because that that was to find the meme, now you're going to determine what it's all about…

Patty will start talking a little more, now that we're getting into the the Sterlingesque memetics of it…pardon me.

"Life in Bohemia was quite often savage," Patricia/Fancy says. "It was quite often brutal, frightening and weird. But we found that at a base level of stress…people not knowing when they rounded a corner if they would see a wyvern or a bloodthirsty witch…"

"It wasn't all spook stories," Ambrose says, "there was beauty, too." 

"Yes, of course," Patricia says.

"And it wasn't just about beauty and horror," Jack says. "It was about people learning to be strong. To be willful, to be right…" Jack London's survival-of-the-fittest Darwinian socialism edges into the memeplex here.

What Archie can tell, here, is that what they wove was a series of ethics, basically. What they involved: the world was a frightening place, sometimes wonderful, where you could never be sure what you were going to see. Existence became unpredictable, and it also ended up isolating people.

Here I would like Mitch to give me a History-B roll. Not Detect, Hidden Lore.

JEFF rolls a success.

MIKE

Beautiful. 

Patricia-as-Sterling says, "we knew that there was something in all of us that could not be accounted for. An alien presence. These aesthetics were meant to keep people from yearning for…to keep them from yearning for the whip, for hierarchy. Every man and woman and child in the Republic of Bohemia was equal. Equally able to be entranced, enchanted…" 

"But it wasn't quite enough, was it?" Ambrose says.

"No," Patricia says, "it wasn't quite enough. They still yearned for those masters. We saw more and more holes… fraying in the fabric of our society. The men who we hadn't killed at the outset—the plutocrats, the rich men, the politicians who stayed with us, who helped us organize this new society…" Patricia sighs.

Jocasta looks at Ambrose as Ambrose says, "they said, enough was enough. If we kept on this path, we'd let them back in again." 

"And what did you do?" Jack says to Ambrose.

"I gave them a blueprint." 

JEFF (aside)

Wait, wait, are they saying Ambrose Bierce invented the Red Kings?

MIKE

When Ambrose came through the mountain, you know, he had his clothes on from the 1910s, where that he had gone down in New Mexico. But even when Mitch was hanging out with Ambrose, he didn't realize that he had a book on him. Ambrose says, "the idea of Carcosa did not start with me." He holds up Robert Chambers's The King in Yellow. 

"I showed them a way." He thumbs open to "the Repairer of Reputations."

"A way that a society could be reorganized if we put the energy in and got enough of us to go back to 1906. A society based on blackmail. A society based on secrets held against the powerful. Once you know a man's secrets they can be controlled utterly."

…No, they're not saying Ambrose Bierce invented the Red Kings. What he is saying is, the republic of sensation and aesthetics did not work, because it still allowed for the sort of weird urges that would lead to the Red Kings eventually colonizing our minds. What Ambrose decided to do was side with the Bohemian Club—the men who would become the Bohemian Club in our new timeline—and gave them the blueprint for a society based on blackmail. The society in which we live today.

BRANT

Because it would be more secure against the Red Kings, yes, but they would still be the ones in control.

MIKE

As the meme spins to a close and Ambrose gets to the moment when it all reversed, what Archie is able to sense in the memeplex is that…

Ambrose has been adamant since he came through the mountain that he doesn't remember the old timeline. With the three of them together, they're starting to piece it together but the fact that Ambrose was the Judas—was the one who basically betrayed the dream of

George Sterling, and this also the reason he went to New Mexico… this Society still had these Red Kings in it…

JEFF (aside)

I'm still thinking about the idea of Ambrose Bierce codifying the incoherent human desire for dominance and submission into a bunch of lion-headed monsters and scorpion men.

MIKE

"I felt it was my fault. I had reset things but I put us into a situation where the same thing would happen again. Maybe not twenty years down the line, but seventy, eighty…"

This is straight OZYMANDIAS framing: eventually it's all going happen again, we can't escape. 

BRANT (aside)

Is it enough to just overthrow the Outer Church but otherwise leave SANDMAN intact to protect against the Kings? That seems naive.

MIKE

"I thought to myself, if I am to be redeemed I must be like the protagonist of one of my stories. I must face my own death. I went to the desert to find the city of the Red Kings and they captured me like a bug in amber…

"You kept the other Illuminated from this room, didn't you?" he says to Mitch, behind the camera. "You were afraid of what might happen."

JEFF

"Yeah, wouldn't you be?"

MIKE

"When I came back, I told you that they used to keep us at each other's throats, with court intrigues and constant betrayals. It's because they didn't want all of us thinking the same way. They just wanted us thinking about them. We were not able to create heaven on Earth, because we thought people would be better off inherently disconnected, to avoid themselves creating new beliefs."

And this is where your History B roll from earlier will come in. If you remember what OZYMANDIAS was planning, these little bolt-holes where people would be in monkey-sphere sized groups, easily controlled, and there wouldn't be any ability for the Red Kings to get into them. Basically what the Bohemian artists did was something akin to that, making the world into a horrifyingly beautiful place where nobody could really join up with anybody and show any kind of like memetic movement in one direction or aother. It wasn't enough. What Ambrose is saying is, there is danger in everybody thinking the way that they want to.

At this, Jo feels the London memeplex start to leave her, leave her listening to Ambrose's words.

JEFF (aside)

The idea was floated earlier that the reason it's the Red Kings instead of any other possible metaphor for human subjugation is due to deliberate engineering still maintained by or through the Bohemian Club.

MIKE

Ambrose says to Jo, "you want to create a world where everybody can believe everything. Anything that they want. Where all myths are equal, where all beliefs can be harnessed and developed and treasured. I believe the Kings do fear a world like this, but it wouldn't keep them out. The only thing that would keep them out would be to rescue the rest of the Illuminated who are being held by them, right now.

LEONARD

"If you want to know what I really believe, it's that…I want a world in which there's not constantly small cabals of schemers struggling to give themselves an advantage over people because they don't trust anybody to understand the world around them! I think you made the  same mistake that the Enemy did, that you don't trust your own creation."

MIKE

Elsie stares directly at at Ambrose.

Patricia is crying.

Ambrose nods. "We can't let those Kings win. They'd never give ourselves back to us if they did."

LEONARD

"You wanted to show us the mistake that you made, so we don't make the same mistake. Am I to understand that the mistake you think you made… I mean you just swapped out one group of masters for another!"

MIKE

The London memeplex, very faint as it recedes, protests at that in the background of Jocasta's mind and soul. But the fact that he's so distant now proves to Jocasta that she's right. 

Everybody got a weird, wonderful, trippy early-70s album cover world… but you can't base a society purely on sensation.

I know we haven't brought the SRI, early-internet stuff into the game in quite a while, because LO was Charley's thing, but it's a similar idea, that we were all going to separate off into these corners and just like have our own little bubbles of belief. That's basically what they did, without technology. They just used art and and memetics and magic and mysticism to do it. So yeah, they did swap out one set of masters for another, and that was enough to let the Kings back in after twenty years, yeah.

LEONARD

"If the price you paid for…maybe it's heresy to say this, after everything I've learned and everything I've seen, but if the price you paid for loosening the Kings' grip on the world, which—

Mitch, we talk about this all the time—that their hold on this world is so tenuous, they have to struggle so mightily to get their hooks back into a world that they made, but…

"If the price that we paid for loosening that grip was just selling the world out to…"

MIKE

"The Owls?"

LEONARD

"To the new Bohemians. That's not a…that's a victory only in kind, not in degree."

MIKE

Ambrose says, "I would argue it's no victory at all. I hadn't realized…I haven't been off this mountain but I get the impression from all of you that this world is not what you want it to be?"

JEFF

"Yeah, man." 

LEONARD

"I don't know if there is a world that's like I want it to be. Every time I look for one, there's somebody behind a curtain throwing up a new set of illusions to distract everybody."

MIKE

Patricia takes Jocasta's hand. "What you said to me in the van, when we were driving up here? We can still make it happen, right? This doesn't change…?"

LEONARD

"I wouldn't be here if I didn't think that we could."

MIKE

"This doesn't change anything, it just gives us a new monarch to defeat…" She's trying to sift through George Sterling's spirit. "I've lost so much touch with him, now that I know what that poem was. It was a trap."

And at this, Mitch can see that the History-B kernel inside her is gone. 

JEFF

Well, that seems like a positive development, I guess.

MIKE

Purging the memetics from them… Archie will be able to tell this enabled Patricia to get rid of "a Wine of Wizardry," in a way. It's also the reason the London memeplex receded to the background of Jocasta. They delivered the message that they were fated to deliver.

So this has been a lot to process, I realize, but…

BILL

It seems like the biggest problem that everyone has is, there's a meme that they aren't escaping because they think it's inescapable, which is that the Kings always arrive. It leads you to the Red Kings, this whole thing with the Bohemians, "we tried to separate everybody and stop them from forming like even the idea of fiefdoms." How about we jettison the idea that kingship is inevitable? That's the problem!

ROB

Ask Patty Hearst if she thinks human nature tends inevitably towards fascism.

MIKE

This set of realizations has purged all of her SLA programming, too. Whatever DeFreeze was feeding her through the radio connection, that's all been broken as well. Archie can tell that, in a weird way, them putting together the story was itself a counter-meme. It basically reset everything, especially the people who were, like Patricia, carrying around multiple memetic patterns in their brain.

JEFF

Well, shit. Now I want to know for all of them: do they think that human nature bends inevitably towards fascism? And has their answer to that question changed in the last twenty-four hours, or twenty minutes?

MIKE

Patricia, now that that she's free of both Sterling and the SLA, and has been inspired by Jocasta, would say no. She would definitely come down on the side of free will.

Jack London's not available for comment.

Ambrose Bierce, his basic cynicism… He tried to be a hero, and he failed. He ended up living out the story that happened—the narrative that happened in so many of his stories. He feels like he's a character who's been written into an unending series of hells that were designed expressly for him. So the question, maybe, doesn't… first of all, he probably doesn't know what fascism is. But whatever. He would definitely say that all men create their own hell and then dwell in it.

Elsie thinks that men are really ridiculous and they're always trying to create systems and worlds and don't really consider what they'll actually mean for the people who live in them. As somebody who lost her husband and her ability to be a writer and a raconteur, her sense of what society was like when she was younger… She'll probably stick to that, and say that things don't inevitably tend towards fascism but definitely men who get power end up uh inevitably abusing it, and using it to hold on to power, which matches up with what Ambrose has told us about how the Bohemian Club operates.

I'm sure Mitch, given his fandom of fantasy and science fiction, has at least read "the Repairer of Reputations" at some point?

JEFF

Yeah, probably.

LEONARD (aside)

Jack London: another man who comes into Jocasta's life, tells her she's wrong about everything, and then disappears

MIKE

That one's all about a weird alternate America. It's got suicide booths, and a secret kingship that existed in another timeline, and the man who seems to hold all the cards is the man who knows all the secrets about the rich and powerful. 

JEFF (aside)

"Repairer of Reputations" was reprinted in Lin Carter's Ballantine Adult Fantasy series in, like, early 1973 so sure, Mitch has read it

MIKE

When Marshall was making fun of the Bohemian Club in sessions one and two, about them being a bunch of secret pedophiles—that's a meme in and of itself, you know what I mean? It's a self-reinforcing meme that says "oh, they're off doing secret things. They secretly control the world," but they actually do.

BRANT

We have to be thinking about how we're gonna do whatever is gonna happen in the next three days.

MIKE

You've got five or six, but yeah. Next Saturday. I do know where Ronald Reagan is going to be for the next six days, I did look it up. I will post an important top secret document, that would be very easy for anybody who taps the press office in Sacramento to get, about where he's going. He is going to Iowa over the weekend that the Nixon March is going to happen, because… why do people go to Iowa in 1974? When they're about to serve the second term of their gubernatorial…? They do it because they're gonna run for president.

BRANT

This is also something TBD, because we have to be very careful. They were able to get to Mitch like within twenty-four hours of Marshall walking into the Bohemian Club, so as tantalizing as it is, out of character, to say the next thing Marshall's gonna do is go fucking interrogate and maybe kill Ronald Reagan? I think we're gonna maybe keep all this on ice for a little while.

MIKE

Of course.

BRANT

We'll figure out exactly how we're going to make the next version of reality at Mount Shasta.

MIKE

I very much want the next live session to be the last one but I definitely want to try and move things along as much as possible over chat over the next couple of weeks, if we can.

We will make the final session about the impeach Nixon march, and that will be the end of mission nine.

Has anybody talked about the tablets, yet? Does anybody want to talk about those in character before we break up? I wanted to go a little later tonight, but we can also break up if people are tired… 

ROB

We'll table it. Archie, he got the gist of the tablets: it's about us. So he definitely wants to share that with people, but not necessarily right now, with the other Illuminated around.

MIKE

Okay. All right, gang. This was fun. It was a lot! I'm sorry if it was too much, but…

BRANT

It's nice to have to figure some things out.

MIKE

Honestly, I did think, early in the mission, that you were going to go to the room where Sterling died and just do a seance. But this was actually much more fun. It took a little longer but that's okay. 

I just assumed somebody would talk to his ghost at some point… but patching it together with the the memes from the different stories was much more fun.

JEFF

We would have done things differently if Charley was around, I think.

MIKE

Oh yeah, probably. 

What if the belief that human beings tend towards being ruled is just a pernicious meme — the meme that is the root of the Red Kings — the door they always come back in through?

"So, see, Emily, that basically sums up the session.. the PCs were the guy, and those NPCs we were allowing to speak to one another, they were the sock."