An Afternoon in Charley’s Lab
Michael
So Mel, I was thinking we could start this all off with a roll against the Midnight Irregulars to collect the "on-line gossip" since the last time you checked in with them. So that's Contact Group (The Midnight Irregulars)-12 once per game day until you succeed.
Going to follow up on some dangling ARPANET/tech mediumship plotlines:
The Midnight Irregulars
Emailing Jacques Vallée
Any sign of Houdini?
Poking around for LO
Tinkering with ORACLE and/or the Uriel Frequency
And maybe that idea of Marshall's to hack/download the glyph-drawing software they have at Granite Peak?
Mel
Also exploration of the Uriel frequency.
>> FAILURE by 1
Mel
Boo
Michael
Keep rollin'
Mel
>> FAILURE by 2
>> FAILURE by 2
Michael
Oh man
Mel
Oh my lord
Michael
This is good! I'll work it into the narrative!
Keep 'em coming till you get a 12.
Mel
>> SUCCESS by 2
Michael
It is easy for Charley to get an email address for Jacques Vallée at the Institute for the Future if she wants to reach out to him. Let me know if or how you want to introduce yourself if you want and we can do a little email back and forth. During the week of September 10, there's no word from Houdini or LO, and no word from the Irregulars until Friday. When the Midnight Irregulars finally resurface, the online bulletin boards are rife with rumor-mongering about the decline and fall of ARCNET. Doug Engelbart at SRI's pride and joy is being pillaged for its source code and sold off to the highest bidder in the private sector; the members of the ARCNET team who were the unwitting guinea pigs for the social experiment of turning the office "virtual" are being either reassigned to other teams at SRI, or are resigning/being let go. There are going to be a good number of folks out there looking for work this fall, and lots of Silicon Valley startups and research foundations snatching them up.
Now, did you want to try and tune into the Uriel Frequency this week as well?
Mel
Uriel. Apart from playing around with electric sounds no. Emailing Jacques would be AWESOME
What about LO
Michael
No word from them in these first two weeks after the end of Mission 7. Nor any sign of their passing online.
Electric sounds... we should make a Musical Composition roll at some point in September to see how Charley's synth experiments are coming
And for Jacques, if you want to think of a way to get the conversation started, that would be great. But for now, trying out your Uriel receiver seems like the easiest scene to set up.
Mel
Charley is looking to play. What if she tried astral again to reach LO?
Michael
Oh we could for sure do that. If LO was able to enter the Ransom home through Dad's Telex terminal, they could certainly manifest given Charley's high-bandwidth connection to ARPANET in her lab if met on the Astral. (edited)
Mel
I could see a bored Charley playing around to see what might happen.
Michael
I like it. Want to give me an Astral Travel-13 roll to see how easily Charley is able to go Astral at Livermore?
Mel
>> SUCCESS by 6
Michael
Charley dips her toe into the Astral Plane in her lab. Her lab, in the Outer Astral, is a comfortable place, ringing with the music of the spheres as mediated through the synthesizer fugues yet-to-be-born from Charley's mind and soul. The computer terminal for ORACLE looks like a stone slab—one of the standing stones from Long Meg and her Daughters, maybe—with a face that looks like the fusion of David Wolf, Catherine Davies, and Elias Simon on it. The original cassette tape of Houdini, attached to ORACLE to give the computer its reality shard "oomph," looks like a tiny, cassette-player-sized chained chest or box—the kind Houdini used to escape from—with a very small set of eyeholes through which Charley can see Cassette Houdini looking at her, his eyes darting about.
Charley's lab equipment takes on a more streamlined and less cobbled-together look in the Outer Astral. Charley can also sense, through the now-translucent walls, the pulsing activity of the Livermore Building 451 mainframes. They are limned and outlined in cool blue neon lights, and Charley's synthdream soundtrack seems to be seeping into these surrounding rooms full of mainframes, both active and decommissioned. Charley would have to move further away from her lab and her sub-level of the basement to see what the Operation URIEL offices and the rest of the Livermore campus looks like, but in the distance, through the translucent walls, between here and the URIEL office, Charley can sense the orange couch in the hallway, giving off the glow of a lazy summer sunset, throbbing with Good Vibes.
Charley's gateway to the ARPANET doesn't look as sinister as the Fisher-Price phone representation of dad's Telex machine did. It's only occurring to Charley now that maybe dad always got Bad News through that Telex and that negative energy imprinted on its reflection in the Astral, corrupting an innocent childhood toy, which Charley now bets was one of Charlie's. Charley's gateway to the ARPANET instead just looks like a normal, institutional door might look in the Livermore lab buildings. But behind it, Charley can sense a glow, reminiscent of silvery moonlight. And with that sensation, if Charley can give me a Theology (Hinduism)-15 roll please (which Charley still has Renched from Mission 7).
Mel
>> SUCCESS by 6
Michael
Hindu cosmology presents the believer with a set of nested, interconnected worlds... at whatever scale! Whether it is the fourteen lokas whirling both above and inside the Earth, or the countless universes potentiated within each atom that each of us are made up of, cited the Bhagavata Purana, there is in Hindu cosmology a sense of wheels within wheels, endless advancement and descent.
This silvery doorway to the ARPANET is a portal between the Outer Astral Plane which is lightly laid over the "real world"—the only Astral Charley has explored thus far—and a truly new realm, untethered from the material world, within the Inner Astral Plane. This realm will have none of the landmarks of the physical Earth; it will exist purely as a loka created from the collective belief energy of everyone who has used ARPANET, designed it, pondered it, dreamt of it, walked its imaginary corridors. The ARPANET may not be fully alive quite yet, but it is already a conceptual place in the noosphere.
One thing Charley knows instinctively, even as an inexperienced Astral traveler, is that the Outer Astral is not somewhere you want to get lost or run out of projection time in. Much like the sense of danger Charley experienced pondering the "hell pit" in the Agrigenics building (which Charley now realizes was a similar gateway to the Inner Astral, probably created by the dreams of all the frozen old people down there), Maman Brigitte crows a wordless warning as Charley contemplates the silver door to the ARPANET. Since there's no easy path from the Inner to the Outer Astral, a soul can get trapped there if they don't know their way back. If Charley's cassette tape of astral projection binaural synth sounds snaps at STOP and she's still in the Inner Astral, she'll start to die. Charley's pretty sure she could try the Astral Crossing technique untrained to "punch" back into the Inner plane but that kind of activity is better done trained.
Mel
Charley calls into the silvery light, “LO!? Are you in there?”
Michael
No one answers Charley's spontaneous summoning call into the Inner Astral. The doorway awaits, patiently.
Mel
Houdini’s eyes watch as Charley turns away from the light of the ARPANET portal and moves towards a near by wall. She stands looking at it for a moment before reaching out her hand and discovers it can pass through it. Then sensing Houdini’s gaze she looks down and says, “I’ll be back. Going to building 451.” Before fading from his encased sight.
Michael
From inside the cassette that powers ORACLE, Houdini bids a silent farewell to Charley and wonders what she will find on the Astral Plane further and deeper into Building 451 or in the vicinity of this place, this lab that has been his only home since hitching a ride back from purgatory on that cassette.
While ORACLE already knows.
Charley floats out of her lab and into the hallway. Using the good vibes couch as a beacon, she peers first into the dark of the sub-basements adjoining her lab, a space occupied by the dark, towering tombstone-like dead dreams of old outmoded computers and the whirling activity of the newer active ones. It's not like Charley can read the data by sight here in the Astral Plane; it would still take actively using her Data Retrieval ability to do that. But watching the data get processed here on the Astral is a fascinating sight, all grey-silver pinwheels spinning, little black and white particles—zeroes and ones, Charley guesses—being thrown off like sea spray. It's beautiful, even if deep down Charley knows these whirling halos of TV static are probably Pentagon weapons design parameters or accounting math or something.
URIEL's office takes on some extra presence and weight in the Astral. The unobtrusive door in the material world here looks like an old stone archway—uncarved by human hands, looking more fashioned by generations of erosion than a chisel. The archway still contains a wooden door, and surmounted over the archway is a rough figure, shaped from the stone, that could, if peered at in the right fashion, be seen an angel, spreading its wings, looking down on whoever enters the office from the single vague "eye" in the middle of its face. Probably the cumulative impact of everyone glancing at that page from Milton every time they exited the office over the past five years.
When Charley passes through the door and peers inside the office (assuming this is a day that Jo and Archie, at least, are here) she sees Jo in the library hard at work. Her astral form perfectly matches her material form, page turn for page turn. The library also has a tiny bit extra symbolic weight to it here in the Outer Astral, probably from years of Sophie's fastidiousness and care for the collection. It feels, not necessary cozy or comfortable, but safe... and orderly. An oasis from the chaos of outside. Dad's office, too, possesses some astral identity of its own. There is a glittery gold burnished sheen to his office's windows, through which Dad looks like he's under starker lighting than in the material world; the shadows are sharper, his material face paler, his various corkboards and blackboards looking like they've been drawn in bold strokes of black ink on white paper.