Backstage with Matt
Michael
May 16, 1983. Computer Lab, UC-Berkeley.
Poor Mitch.
The janitor opens the soundstage door onto a computer lab. All the overhead fluorescent lights are switched off; the only light comes from a desk lamp in a small windowed-in observation office/server room and from an amber monitor at the back of the room, at which a bespectacled, badly-haircut, acne-ridden young man with a bowl cut and a mustache is typing away—feverishly, like a man possessed—while occasionally drinking from a can of Coke and eating a candy bar.
"Let's leave Bill to it. Come into the office, we can speak privately." The janitor takes a ring of keys from his work pants, spins to one, and unlocks the door to the computer lab's office area. There are two rickety rolling chairs in there, upholstered in fake green leather. "Have a seat. You seemed eager to get out of there. Ohio, I mean."
Jeff
"Matt, hi," Mitch says again. He sits down in one of the chairs. The seat sinks a half-inch as he settles into it. Does he know that guy, Bill? Here and now? Probably not. Probably it's some guy with a Wikipedia entry, but Mitch doesn't recognize him. Mitch doesn't quite feel himself.
"I don't want to step on anybody's toes, you know?" Mitch sits down in one of the green rolling chairs. The seat sinks a half-inch as he settles into it, with a little pneumatic or hydraulic or atomic hiss. "I want Jocasta to help me with my evil twin and with my nemesis, so I don't want to disrespect her."
"Her and Roger and Charley, I mean, Roger and Charley, you know …" Mitch gestures vaugely as he sits down in one of the fake-leather chairs. The seat sinks a half-inch as he settles into it, with either a noise that Mitch barely hears or a vibration that he barely feels. "I want to give them room. They should get room."
Michael
The Janitor pulls out a mustard-yellow pack of Pall Malls as he sits down at the office desk. His chair does not sink down loudly when he settles contentedly into it. He taps the pack and slips out two cigarettes, offering one to Mitch. After lighting and puffing, whether Mitch accepts the cig or not, the Janitor takes a moment to consider Mitch's words.
"Eh, I wouldn't worry about giving Roger and Charley 'room.' They got plenty. You know how mystics are. You maybe have too analytical a mind for a mystic yourself. No wonder you didn't react well to the LSD."
"I just figured it was a good time to speak because hey, the Redgrave Gambit! You managed to scrabble at one of the Levers of History without even going on a mystical quest and riddling with an enigmatic cosmological personification of ontological entropy for it! Well, I guess Marshall's higher self did put Marshall's life up at risk to do so, but it's not like your higher selves have any lack of backup personas to access."
"Regardless, you're off the main path now! The future is now all yours to be written … if the Panther asking you to shoot down a UFO goes well, I guess. How do you feel about that? Finally actually being one of the six Secret Masters of the World?"
Jeff
"Seven." Mitch lights up and considers Matt's words as he paces. "Too analytical to be a mystic? So I'm a preppy jock who thinks he's a goth nerd, is that it?" Then he shrugs affably. "It doesn't matter, I guess. If this …" He indicates the room around them. " … is how you want to do it, okay."
Reluctantly Mitch sits in the remaining empty office chair, which sinks down a half inch or so under his weight. "How do I feel about it, man? I feel like a kid in some kind of a store, you know, like, let's just do it already, make stuff happen. But we've still got a lot to sift through even now. Vanishing Indian, the Pascagoula UFO flap, OZYMANDIAS, plus the whole deck-chairs ALLOCTHON itself. Seems like there's a buried secret we're on the verge of uncovering, but maybe the only revelations were getting are the ones we already got and we shouldn't be digging further, just bedrock below."
Michael
"Admittedly, one of the trappings of the genre is that 'Every mystery just hides a deeper, yet more profound mystery.'" The Janitor taps cigarette ash into a "Worlds' (sic) Best Boss" mug on the desk. "Whether you define 'genre' as a mystic Working or trippy postmodern 1970s-set occult narrative. I get that that digging can get kind of annoying."
The Janitor leans back a little bit, taking it all in while taking another deep draw off the Pall Mall. "Being in charge of history and feeling in control of affairs is arguably more fun than finding out a new way in which your own life story is a lie and everything you believed previously is part of a maddeningly opaque and internally inconsistent setting written by a politically-dodgy demiurge." The Janitor blinks. "As usual, balance is key. Give everybody a little of what they want. I've been wanting to give you all the chance to change history for a while now! So now, at least, you can do it without gathering Zeb, Bigfoot Pete, the racist old Theosophist lady, Krane, and Dan Miller and wishing really hard on a mountain. That never seemed like a fun denouement to me, either, honestly."
After Charley's words come through Mitch's consciousness, the Janitor says, "It's really amazing what the human brain can do when given the right chemical stimulation. All kinds of parallel processes. Don't listen to the naysayers who say that's just," the Janitor puts up a pair of sarcastic quote fingers, "'schizophrenia'."
Jeff
Fright check.
>> SUCCESS by 1
"Jeez, man. Give me a second." Mitch collapses into the chair, which sinks a little under his weight, and sighes heavily. "This is instead of the other thing, right? That's your play. Which is fine. Just processing it.
"So, you want to talk changing history? I feel like the inertia against that has been, like, nobody wants to unilaterally make changes in the agreed-upon lie, changes that make it something not the thing everybody signed up for, changes the full ramifications of which aren't necessarily predictable.
"I've considered trying out the remote-viewing, pyrokinesis combo. I literally don't know if you'd let it work, or whether it should work 'by Crom,' but maybe it would, and if it did I could probably assassinate a couple three major villains before whatever showed up to stop me, stopped me. Secretary of State, obviously. Governor of California would be my number two. But … hold on."
Mitch does not throw up.
He looks green around the gills though. "But," Mitch continues, "we've been pulling out those backstops, that reluctance to change things for fear of making them worse, as … especially since the Redgrave Gambit … we've been confronting just how badly compromised SANDMAN is. I mean, we knew it going in, but that's not the same as a slow, painstaking examination of the ramifications of it. There's a desire to smash the house of cards, see what happens …"
Michael
The Janitor scoots a wastepaper basket over to Mitch for his convenience. Inside is a bunch of unspooled magnetic tape.
Jeff
"Hey, thanks. I should probably sit down for a second." Mitch does so, the chair protesting with an audible hiss of hydraulics it sinks a half-inch under his weight. "So now that I've restated your question, what's my answer? My answer is we need to choose collectively how far down the zeppelin path we want to go. The re-elect RFK path, the Soviets-visit-the-Moon path. Nobody wants to ruin everything for everybody else and it's hard to have a frank discussion and I think most of us, all of us probably, would affably accept whatever the group consensus ends up being, even if it's not quite our own personal preferences.
"So my answer is, I should be allowed to kill Henry Kissinger and Ronald Reagan. And Rupert Murdoch," he adds as an afterthought. "I think that would be enough to move history … History-A … onto a different track. And given everything, I think that would be better than not doing it."
Michael
"I mean, what am I gonna do, stop you? On some level, I'm downright excited to hear all that. Besides, all's I'm here to do is run the machines." The Janitor stubs out his Pall Mall.
"I could give you all kinds of in-universe reasons not to get too crazy with the assassinations, but I think you already know the dangers. You just said it yourself, in fact; despite buying yourself some room to operate, SANDMAN itself? Is still rotten to the core, OZYMANDIAS or no OZYMANDIAS." The Janitor chuckles to himself. "'See-doubleyou-gee,' pfft. I really hope someone got fired for that blunder."
"So I'm not going to give you advice at that level. It'd be unfair, it'd spoil everything, and you'd never really trust it anyway. What I will say is that you have to ask yourself what else might be required in order to, well, make the world that you want. Because I think you know as well as I do that systems—human systems, not cosmic ones—make men like your Death List Three. And those systems can make new men, new men just like them, to take their place."
"And that's not even me getting into a meta-discussion of how … elastic your timeline is, how badly it might want to snap back to History-א of its own accord. More science fiction trope stuff: convergent temporal evolution. I may have no problem with what you have planned, but other aspects of the Monad might still have their doubts. I have to give you a fair shot. Chronos doesn't."
Jeff
"Right, sure. That's fair. We —"
"Right, sure. That's fair. We have the memes, and the memes are frankly overpowered if you sit down and read through everything, speaking of blunders somebody should have been fired for. You're lucky my wife isn't involved. She'd be a memeticist and by now she would have gotten ERA ratified. Power 20, 'abortion rights are human rights.' Power 20, 'global warming is settled science and we need to act on it,' soaking up however much Corruption it would have required. Hilarious if you know my wife." Mitch swallows, suddenly angry at this whole situation. He's not fucking married, after all. He would know if he was. He kicks the trash can over like a sullen teenager and sits down in the office chair and folds his arms and glares at Matt. "I just want to say," he adds as he hunches over a little and presses his arms against his torso, "I would have been fine not doing this particular bit this particular way. Okay. Qo'nos, be aware of him, message heard. And re historical inertia, okay, but that only goes so far, you can't tell me that 2015-2023 would have rolled out basically the same if someone had bid one no-trump. It's a combination of factors. The current powers that be are used to SANDMAN acting one way, doing … not one thing, but one kind of things, and thus we blindside them."
"Did you hear that?" Mitch steps backwards, confused. He sees the office chair and sits down, on the grounds that standing is maybe getting to be a bit much for him, now. "What was I saying?"
Michael
The Janitor looks at Mitch with concern. "I know you're gonna be all right, but … the barriers between yourself and your Higher Self, the ones 99.99% of people never peek past … they're there for a reason, man. I worry about you sometimes. It's a high-wire act you're starring in. I don't want to see you fall. My 'schizophrenia' crack earlier wasn't made in jest, it was made out of concern. The game is set up to make you all even more mad as time goes on. Corruption? Well, yes, of course, but more importantly, the realizations all of you are likely to make about your lives …" The Janitor sighs. "The šedu sent you a message through Calvin, to go visit your mother, right? Your past, Mitchell. It exists in the same state that your future does right now. Parlous. There are enough tantalizing gaps in your chronology up to February 1973 to seriously retroactively mess up your sense of self. You'd better choose a good thread backwards as well as forwards in the coming months, or shit could get all kinds of fucked up."
"All I'm saying is, you'd better watch out when the Big Guy is posting pee-kay-dee quotes in the Inspiration Room."
After Jocasta asks after Mitch back in Ohio, the Janitor does an "aha" motion with his hand to his forehead, roots around in the desk drawer, and takes out a clipboard with a few sheets of paper attached, bearing type in exceedingly small print. "Sense … of … Duty, check." He grabs a pencil, wets the end of the lead with his tongue, and makes a tiny checkmark on the top sheet.
Another little bit of silence, which the Janitor interrupts. "I think you might have misunderstood me on your mom, but ultimately it's not important. She's right, you all're gonna do what you want to do from here on out, and damn the torpedoes. I do wish you all luck. I think it's going to be interesting now matter how you slice it."
Jeff
"Okay, okay, listen." Mitch sits down near Matt, the better to communicate. He spins the chair around before he sits in it, so he can lean forward against the back. Getting real, now. "I know that I'm an outlier in terms of backstory, and I get how that vagueness, the unusually weak way I'm tied to history, I get how that's an opening for a time-active enemy like Qo'nos to exploit. At the same time though … there are some negative associations that weren't there three years ago and I actively don't want to engage at all with my life before I left Ar, Ar, Alabama. If we could keep the mindwipes to after '65, and agree that history before that is off the table, I'd appreciate it.
"Man said, sometimes you make the greatest swordfighter in the history of the kingdom because you really love the dueling subsystem and want to engage with it as much as possible, and sometimes you make the greatest swordfighter in the history of the kingdom because you want to make sure that if you're ever forced to engage with that shitty subsystem you'll be able to resolve it as quickly as possible and move on. Hold on."
Mitch grabs the trash can and vomits into it.
Michael
The Janitor winces in sympathy. "Get it all out, buddy."
"Okay. The secret origin plotline is off the board. It goes into the Apocrypha." The Janitor pulls out another clipboard and makes a quick note on it while Mitch finishes retching. "Plenty more to explore there: ISOCLINE, Tales of Mitch's Hollywood Years, weird scenes inside the Canyon, all that good stuff."
"Getting the feeling you all are going to be spending a lot more time in L.A. soon anyway."
Jeff
"Thanks, man," Mitch tries to say, but there's more retching and coughing and it's not a pretty sight.
Michael
"Okay, let's get you cleaned up and out of here. We gotta go out the way we came in," the Janitor gets up from his office chair and helps Mitch up. On the way out, through the computer lab proper, the Janitor takes one last peek at Bill writing away in the corner.
"Oh yeah, him." The Janitor blinks and smiles, as if responding to something said elsewhere by someone else. "Bill there just got back from Afghanistan a year ago if you can believe that, poor dope. Now he's in grad school, working on his first novel. It's an allegory, all about the age-old conflict between the forces of Control and the forces of Freedom, but told through a satirical, metaphorical lens of secret history, fantasy, and conspiracy. Takes him five years to finish … but he gets it published." The Janitor nods to himself. "In fifteen years this is the kind of thing that passes for 'serious literature.' Thomas Pynchon, these are your children, eh?"