A Life Never Lived
April 17, 1974 | Tuesday
Michael
Archie feels the Dragon Lady's persona drift away as he rushes to Hilton with concern. Hilton slumps to the floor, holding his head, droplets of blood hitting the guest bungalow's rug. Archie feels the edges of the room go all red—the same lustrous silky red as the Dragon Lady's cheongsam—for a brief moment, then the visual hallucination rapidly passes. Ambrose remains hypnotized, recounting verbally what he can past the blocks placed there by his time in another timeline.
"How could you lose a score of years and come right back to the origin," he says dully. "A life never lived. Like seeing... a false life flash before your eyes before the executioner's noose. The relief and respite of escape, of being Elsewhere, safe, warm, a world of our own. I helped George. I helped him. Paintings, poems, predictions, politics. George knew I'd need imagine it. Imagination, ha. A warehouse of facts, with poet and liar in joint ownership. Jack filled us with facts, George with poetry. I was the liar."
Archie feels reality once again solidify around him and Hilton. Hilton gets to his feet and puts on a display of not crying or being scared by what's happened, rubbing the blood off his upper lip with his sleeve, silently. Archie casts an eye at their surroundings once more: no dusty Mesopotamian winds, no intrusions of clay ziggurats out the window, no Irruptors waiting to tear the kids of the Mt. Shasta School apart. Just a pleasant spring day on the mountain. But if Archie were a betting man, he'd guess things might be... a bit soft here now, and may need some eventual memetic buttressing, for long-term safety's sake. "The Wolf and the Greek, their deluded Theban love... their wicked flights of Fancy. A world where Bohemia was victorious over Mammon." Even the dead-eyed hypnotized Ambrose has to scoff at that. "Of course it could not last."
(Oh yeah, this semi-temblor seems like a good moment to do a Corruption roll for Archie. With his latest expenditure of 1 point of Corruption for the Dragon Lady's Hypnotism crit, Archie is at 65 Corruption. That means he needs to roll Will minus 6, which is Will-10. Failure means he takes on 2 points of Disads/Quirks related to this scene. Success means we just let the 65 Corruption ride.)
Rob
(Going to let the Corruption roll decide what Archie does in this next instant, whether he tries to squeeze one more answer out of Bierce or focuses on Hilton being OK.)
>> FAILURE by 2
Michael
Whew, that's a 2-point Corruption Quirk/Disad.
Rob
So Archie tries to get one more answer out of the old man while he's still hypnotized. He takes hold of Bierce's shoulder, gets more in his face than before, and demands: "But how did you know how to do it? How did you change history? Okay, so Hearst taught you the memetics, how to stack the poem so the idea would stick in some anarchist's mind. That changed the course of history, but how did you change the past? ... Or did it get changed on you, in 1906?"
Michael
Ambrose swallows, evidently putting much effort into breaking down all the ontoclastic fractures, lacunae, and blocks in his mind. "To apprehend this clearly, to recall precisely what happened... I remember George made explicit that he sought a different world. We all did, after our fashions, even myself. We held a colloquium, on the eve of the 'quake, at Coppa's. Drinking that dago red. Perhaps some, yes, dipped into their laudanum. The... the Pisco Punch." Ambrose licks his lips, smiles in memory at the Montgomery Block's famed concoction. "'The world is a palimpsest,' Jack said. 'We scrape clean this error-filled page, uncover the raw parchment underneath, and we, the Bohemians, can pen the world anew.' George smiled at him. Jack was always good at whipping people up into a cause."
"Drunken boasts to challenge the Deity and all his Angels with pen or brush, these were no stranger to our table at Coppa's. And yes, the next morning our city was shaken to dust. But Mr. Ransom. I believe..." Ambrose looks up pleadingly at Archie, real emotion coming through the hypnotic state. "George believed. He believed whatever was decided that night did create a new world. But somehow it itself was erased, and thus we returned to the zero of the evening it was all decided, the earthquake being the... scraping away of the old, dead parchment."
"I cannot recall what George and Jack did to accomplish this, what we all did to aid them, for it never happened, you see? We all saw glimpses of Bohemia after the 'quake, surely: at the bottom of our bottles, in our mad quixotic quests, we saw in a glass darkly perhaps the score of years taken from us. But George was the center. He remembered more than any of us." (edited)
Rob
"History," says Archie: "Noun. An account, mostly false, of events, mostly unimportant, brought about by rulers, mostly knaves, and soldiers, mostly fools." (He is of course quoting The Devil's Dictionary, by Ambrose Bierce.)
Then: "Thank you, Mr. Bierce. I'm sorry we had to poke and prod you so. I'll let you be now, and we'll do all we can to make you comfortable."
Archie leads Hilton out of the room, gently. But he stops at the door to say to Bierce, "I do know something about how it feels to think — to know — the whole world's gone down the wrong path. But there's really just one world, in the end. And the path it took is the path it had to take. That's the only way to stay sane."
Michael
After Hilton exits the guest bungalow with Archie, he says, "I guess that's the sort of thing they were always warning us about at The Lab." Hilton, blood on his overalls and his jersey, Granite Peak on his mind, looks down at the blood and then up at Archie. "People believin' stuff. Makin' it real."
Rob
"Well, I hope we can find you some good things to believe in, Hilton." Archie looks around as they step out of the bungalow, takes in the setting. "The trees, the fresh air, the sunlight: this isn't a bad place to start."
Michael
"That man was scary." Hilton doesn't look at the wholesome outdoors but instead back at the bungalow. "He felt like a magnet." Hilton does not further explore this passing metaphor, but heads instead towards the administration building and the dining area, for lunch with his half-dozen fellow students. A couple of the mundane members of teaching staff are sitting down to lunch with them.
Mary-Lynn is in the administration building. "Peter and that Daniel've gone for a hike; Peter said he wanted to rap with him a little more, away from the old man." A short pause. "Is everything all right, Archie?"
Rob
"Everything's fine," Archie tells her. "Well, I think the old codger gave Hilton a bit of a scare. He's been through a lot--the old man, I mean."
"I guess that happens here: people just turn up?" he asks. "Do you worry at all, does Mitchell worry, about security?"
(curious to hear what she says but don't need to extend the scene indefinitely; Archie's next move will be to call SF (or just go there?) and compare notes with everyone)
Michael
Yeah, let's do it as a phone call so at least Marshall, Mitch, and Jo can get the news before they head off in different directions.
But yeah, after this encounter I'll be curious to see what avenue Archie investigates next.
"Security? Well, I can't say as it's come up, we've been so busy trying to get the pupils settled in, and the curriculum of course... I mean, if you think it's wise, we'd definitely consider it!"