Charley’s Homework
Week of November 12, 1973
A Chat With Mitch
Jeff
"Hey, Charley, you got a second?"
Melanie
“Hi Mitch!”
Jeff
"So, what..." He trails off when he sees what Charley is working on. "What is that? Some kind of amp?"
Melanie
"Yes! I'm using it for experiments involving matter and vibrations and how they translate to states of consciousness. And what that may mean for our understanding of time and reality."
Jeff
"Vibrations. Huh. I always assumed that was some kind of metaphor..." Mitch shrugs. "Anyway, I just wanted to touch base real quick. Make sure that you aren't feeling lost in the shuffle. Lots going on, lots to deal with. Is there anything I can help you with?
"Or," Mitch continues before Charley has time to answer, "do you have anything on our...mutual family?"
He makes the ASL sign for bird and the sign for queen.
Melanie
“Oh. No, I haven’t really had an opportunity to talk to mom much, about things. But I will.” Charley moves closer to Mitch to ask, “So, Mt. Shasta. Are you ready to go?”
Not really caring about the answer to that question she starts to ask another but stops suddenly feeling lost as to what she really wants to say.
Jeff
Mitch nods. "Okay, cool. You let me know, all right?"
Then he blinks. "Ready? I don't know. I don't know if there is a 'ready' to be...
"Anyway, I should let you get back to work."
Melanie
“Yeah, okay… Say, if you see Jo or Roger can you let them know I want to talk to them?”
“Oh wait Mitch. Did you say at the meeting you’re going to try and train the other kids on the Mountain or something?”
Jeff
"...yeah. Yeah. I'm trying to think a little more long-term. There's a bunch schools, Comte has one. Or at least, it's named for him. Named for the same minor historical figure whose name he's co-opted, I guess.
"But I'm serious about supplanting Comte, the guy we call Comte. Which means claiming his stuff, which means the school. And I don't want Puharich getting his claws in any little gellerlings.
"Were you... you're not going to LA with Archie, right? You're planning on staying here? Were you thinking maybe school in Shasta?"
Melanie
“Where do you think replacing him will lead? To victory?”
Jeff
Mitch shrugs. "It can't hurt. He's not even really alive, killing him is just...tying up a loose end.
"It's like, uh... Gandalf tells Frodo about Gollum and how Bilbo felt sorry him, and Frodo says he doesn't feel pity for Gollum. Gollum deserves death. And Gandalf is like, 'deserve' death? Sure, he deserves death. Lots of guys are alive and deserve death. And a lot of guys who are dead deserve life. Can you give that to them?
"Of course, Frodo can't."
(NB it was actually Charley, not Mitch, who undid Marshall's death, transmuted him from a dead guy to a not-quite-dead guy. Mitch just turned him from a dying man into a not-dying man, he didn't do the hard part.)
Melanie
“What? But you can? You’re planning on killing the Comte so are you saying you would have killed Gollum? Then all would have been lost.”
Jeff
"Hmm. I don't know what part Comte may play before the end, but I feel like it's unlikely History-B's defeat will be up to him. That'd just be bad plotting."
"Seriously, though, I don't even know what killing him would consist of. It's not like he's got the same kind of body that you and I do. May as well try to murder Saturday afternoon, or brunch."
Melanie
“Right, he’s basically a thought form. I’m not sure how you would end him.” Charley looks worried. “So you don’t really have a plan on how to replace him?”
Jeff
"I dunno. Cross that bridge when I come to it... You don't happen to have a Comte-trapping machine, or an idea for one, do you?"
Melanie
“Nooo I don’t. At least not yet.” Charley takes a deep breath before she continues. “Don’t you think you’ll need the entire team for you to take Shasta? I got the impression there was some plan that I probably wasn’t listening to. But, but there isn’t. Oh boy.”
Exceeding at non sequiturs, Charley adds," Oh do you know any masters of astral projection?"
Jeff
"Masters? I dunno. We've both... you're the person I know that best fits that, I think, Charley."
Melanie
“Oh! I. Well I. Thanks.” Charley, says blushing. “But do you think it” RRRREEEEEEEEEE! RRRREEEEEEEE! Before she can finish, a serious sounding alarm goes off at a door leading deeper into her lab. “Oh not again!” Charley cries as she rushes towards the door. Then calling back to Mitch. “I got to go! Bye!!”
Consultation with Sophie
Michael
Sophie brings in the records of the reality shards retrieved by URIEL over the past 9 months, extracted from each of the mission dossiers. Sophie uses her own esmological talents to feed ORACLE the most pertinent information about the context of each shard's origin, discovery, retrieval, and abilities, so that ORACLE (itself, remember, powered by a reality shard, Houdini's original cassette upon which is the version of Houdini who was never copied and put onto Charley's chip/the OZYMANDIAS hard drive) and the GRAIL TABLE simulation software can analyze these pragmaclasts' relationships to each other, History A, History B, and perhaps other Histories as well. (Recall that we have a few reality shards we've retrieved that are not physically located at Livermore; right now, Mitch is still in possession of the Norton Coin, for instance.) But the Norton Coin will go into the ORACLE calculations, as well the Golden Throne and the Mattock of Enlil (both at Granite Peak). ORACLE will take an hour to process this data at minimum, but as we are dealing with downtime right now, we can afford to take Extra Time pretty much whenever and wherever possible. So for ORACLE, that Extra Time maxes out at a +5 to effective skill, which would mean ORACLE would need to run its simulations—simulation after simulation of the shards' creation and discovery by URIEL—for 30 hours total. @Raven_Hare, if you'd like to use maximum extra time, that is going to make your roll Ontomancy-18. You and Sophie can program ORACLE on a Friday, say, and have results waiting for you on Monday.
Melanie
>> SUCCESS by 4
Michael
The output from ORACLE on Monday morning tells the tale. After having processed the data on where each of URIEL's reality shards was found and under what circumstances they were (retro)created, ORACLE has found some patterns.
First, ORACLE examines the shards by event.
Mansa, Keiner, and Zeb:
Created by Keiner as part of an unknown creative/temblor event: Beth-El
Created by Zeb, ostensibly from History B: The ZEBULUN Tapes
The Stanley Hotel:
Created in the aftermath of the Houdini séance temblor event: The Houdini Cassette, the Patent Medicine Bottle
The St. Francis Hotel:
Created before (from our temporal perspective) the temblor event at the St. Francis: the RFK posters, the Atlantean Cultural Mission Plaque.
Created in the aftermath of the temblor event at the St. Francis: the Redgrave Statue, the Redgrave Cassette, the Mattock of Enlil, the Golden Throne, the Norton Coin
Created outside of the zone of the temblor (at the particle accelerator at Berkeley), but still associated with the world of Atlantis Rising: the MARPA Memory Gun
ALLOCHTHON:
Created as part of the subduction event in West Virginia: the Satellite Dish
Created as part of the subduction event in Pascagoula: the Pascagoula Dart
The pattern that ORACLE finds here is that in close proximity to most of these events, is the presence of an Illuminated. Whether that presence is creating a piece of art from which others are able to pull pragmaclastic energy—the Memory Gun, the re-election posters (Beth-El doesn't quite fit perfectly here, but Zeb was an inspiration to Moore who in turn inspired the art that Sebastian Keiner put into Beth-El and the cover for Ikenga) or the pragmaclast happens to be stumbled upon by the Illuminated (the two objects from the Special Ones suite with Marshall's face on/in them, the Norton Coin, etc.), ORACLE believes that the unique perspective of an Illuminated will increase the probability of coming across or creating reality shards. Of course there are other ways to create a reality shard—any temblor event will do it—but proximity to Illuminated seems to inflect these reality shards, taint how they manifest in our world.
Now to ponder which ontological universe each of the objects comes from:
most likely History B or some Sumerian/Annunaki-inflected ontosphere:
Beth-El, the ZEBULUN Tapes, the Patent Medicine Bottle, the Redgrave Cassette, the Redgrave Statue, the Mattock, the Throne, the Satellite Dish, the Pascagoula Dart
from Krane's universe:
the MARPA Memory Gun, the Atlantean Plaque, the RFK Posters
from Earth-Norton (?):
the Norton Coin
As you can see, the default seems to be that the majority of temblor or subduction events create Sumerian-inflected objects from a parallel/non-existent timeline the Project commonly calls History B. But those aren't the only type of objects that can be created from an event! We've proven that the Illuminated can create worlds that we can pull objects from—Rich and Carl proved it at the particle accelerator! So what does that mean for us, who know of at least five Illuminated at this moment (Mitch, Zeb, Krane, Nola von Valer, Peter Mt. Shasta). Could they create worlds from which we could draw objects or even create subduction events to bring forth places from the worlds in their minds... even people?
It seems like Zeb is one of those Illuminated; he was a true believer in his mission given to him by the Anunnaki, after all, and managed to inspire Keiner and Moore. But Nola and Peter were/are solid believers in the Comte, who represents some kind of outgrowth of History B as far as we can tell. Mitch believed so hard in old Emperor Norton he called him back from non-existence and put him in the history books, although it seems he wasn't the only one to retro-remember him (remember E Clampus Vitus?). And Andrew's books put a whole lot of real-life shards into existence thanks to Rich and Carl's efforts. Maybe one of the reasons subduction events default to History B is a whole lot of Illuminated, somewhere, somewhen, are keeping History B alive. ORACLE also states that the energy equations from the massive event at the St. Francis show there should be two more entities from the event, perfectly balanced: one from Krane's universe, one from History B. The irruptors were all accounted for (well, except the bašmu that escaped Le Conte Hall and the "Old Man" kulullû who later appeared with the Comte in Mount Shasta), and there didn't seem to be any loose reality shards rattling around the St. Francis after WesterCon from what Mitch's Detect (History B) had seen the next couple of days. Could one of them be Stoney? If so, who or what is the missing History B intruder?
@Raven_Hare, there's more data to be interpreted, and Houdini-Cassette himself to consult with if you want to, since he is one of these reality shards, but this is first set of patterns ORACLE saw so if you want to prod at any of these or consult with Sophie on them, feel free.)
Jeff
Maybe one of the reasons subduction events default to History B is a whole lot of Illuminated, somewhere, somewhen, are keeping History B alive.
Maybe one of the reasons subduction events default to History B is a whole lot of Illuminated, somewhere, somewhen, are keeping History B alive.
Maybe one of the reasons subduction events default to History B is a whole lot of Illuminated, somewhere, somewhen, are keeping History B alive.
Melanie
After hours and hours of what seemed like endless analysis Charley asks, “Should we destroyed them Sophie? Won’t further investigation just make them more real?”
Michael
Sophie's expression shows a lot in the couple of seconds she takes digesting Charley's suggestion. Mirth, worry, pain, honest thoughtfulness all play across her mercurial post-Brain Hacking mind. Charley has noticed some of the changes in Sophie's personality since Sophie's return to URIEL and since Charley's return from ALLOCHTHON; Sophie is definitely less serious and businesslike and more happy-go-lucky, but the mention of the reality shards brings out the faintest shadow of Old Sophie. She considers her words very carefully.
"They're all supposed to go to Granite Peak, of course, the pragmaclasts. We've always been security-classed for reality shard storage here at Livermore... but I'm sure that has more to do with the Continuity Working Group's standing orders for URIEL than anything else. Nobody from SANDMAN has come asking us for any of these since ALLOCHTHON, but that makes sense considering the circumstances."
"Do I think they should be destroyed? Well, it's near-impossible to do that to pragmaclasts anyway. Physically destroy them, I mean. They do offer the dangers of Corruption to those who try to utilize their powers." Sophie blinks slowly for a moment, her mind whirling with faint echoes of her own (former) glyph addiction that was wiped away at THROWAWAY. "I don't know if removing reality shards from the world would necessarily make our History stronger. And now that we have confirmation that reality shards don't all necessarily come from, well, where the Annunakku come from, it feels like investigating reality shards should be something we are doing, whether or not the concept of us being a reality shard shop came from the CWG or not."
"I know this was all a prelude to you specifically psychically studying of the reality shards we have in our possession. We asked ORACLE about their origins: how they were created and where they came from and what patterns there were; the presence of the Illuminated is the key here. Maybe next we add to ORACLE a second set of data and simulation parameters: we ask what impact shards might have on our work going forward. ORACLE would need the data about what happened with SANDMAN and the Continuity Working Group and what URIEL's general plans are now that we're in charge of our own destiny at URIEL. We could see whether these and other, future shards could have a role in what we're trying to do. I'm not necessarily talking about using them, of course. I'm talking about them as... reality-archeological clues, as tracks of past reality subduction events. And then depending on ORACLE's analysis, you could decide whether it's worth it to study them deeper specifically. What do you think?"
(As I'm reminded due to Sophie's reference to Corruption, @Raven_Hare, you need to roll 1d6 for Corruption for using ORACLE's Ontomancy ability on your first question. I will likely have Charley make a final Corruption conversion roll once all the ORACLE questions/Shard Study work is done.)
Melanie
“Yes we could do that.” Charley turns from Sophie to face the black monitor of ORACLE. The intention of entering more data fades as she catches her reflection and watches the girl in glass. After some moments she asks,”Do you think we are making progress towards liberation? URIEL is going to be so different. Aren’t you afraid?”
Michael
Sophie smiles, then laughs. "Oh, I'm petrified." She reaches over and pats Charley's hand. "But not in terms of being afraid of danger, really. More afraid of the multiplicative possibilities we have available to us now, being able to move and operate so freely. But ORACLE should give us good advice, and we have so many other people and organizations we can consult and liaise with. This freedom gives us a whole new set of advantages, if we can tap the skills of those allies with prudence and intelligence and imagination."
Melanie
“Um-hum. So, you like this job. You would never want to.. So you like it.”
Michael
"If you had asked me before my time at THROWAWAY, Charley, I would most definitely not have said I liked it, no." Sophie looks around the lab a moment, brushes her hair absently through her blonde wig. "But things seem different now, don't you think? For all of us."
Melanie
“Yes. Very different.. Sophie, can we schedule a tour for my mom of the campus? Maybe Sunday when it’s quiet?”
Michael
"I think that's a very good idea, Charley. When she's ready, I'll show her 'round the library, and you can show her your lab."
Melanie
Charley moves to hug Sophie tightly. “Thank you.”
Michael
"Oh Charley, you're... you're so very welcome." Sophie's memories of what compelled her to slip into THROWAWAY and try to find out more about where Rose was being held are all mixed-up in her head now, lost along with the bits of her mind excised to quash Sophie's glyph addiction. Given that it was the recovered memory of Reinhardt wiping her mind with the Urim and Thummim that got her onto the idea in the first place. All glyphs. But somewhere, on some unconscious level, Sophie's will and fragmented memory can at least put together some emotional tug that lets her know she had some small role in bringing Charley's mom home. Sophie returns the hug.
Melanie
Charley divides the group of 14 reality shards into 2, the first group of seven would be the following.
Dart memory gun medicine bottle Beth-El Houdini Cassette Redgrave Cassette Redgrave Statue
Then:
Zeb tapes RFK Posters Atlantean Plaque Mattock of Enlil Throne coin Satellite
Charley would give a report to the group of her preliminary findings before starting her detailed studies of the shards. And would first look at any that people are most interested in. And @Dr. Cronk she would ask if Mitch would be interested in using his serendipity ability to find the missing History B intruder.
Reality Shard Study
Michael
Okay, so I'll give you the results of Extra Time on Specific Study on all these shards. Maybe after all that data is collected we could feed it into ORACLE once more with Sophie's suggestion at finding out what role the shards could play in URIEL's future plans?
What I'll do is give a paragraph or two on each of these shards over this long weekend, one by one. Again, Specific Study will give you "details about how this shard relates to a specific event, person, or place." So this would get deeper into each shard's origins and how it slipped into History A from wherever it came from. Could pop up some interesting backstory.
I'll start with the dart, which has the benefit of being one of the more recent reality shards we caught.
(And @Raven_Hare, I will do rolls on these secretly just so we can see if you get critical successes (or failures) or not.)
The Pascagoula Gagkula Barb: With Specific Study, Charley can see the dual origins of the dart very clearly; she had already done Shard Study on the barb when we found it in Pascagoula. On our side of history, the dart was manufactured by a contractor who supplies the CIA with all kinds of non-lethal weaponry. It was used by one of the Continuity Working Groups “UFO teams” to knock out Calvin Parker. On the other side of history, it came into being as the UFO abducting Parker and Hickson “flipped” from being an OZYMANDIAS operation to being an Irruption of History B on the night of October 11, 1973. Both darts had the same ontological purpose: to knock out a mortal witness and bring him to a place of quietude and safety to impress upon him the importance of his bearing witness to an important message about mankind’s future. The dart’s a functional item on its own but the emotional energy behind it remains strong, and lingers on the object. In fact, it seems to Charley that the reason why History B was able to “hijack” the OZYMANDIAS UFO abduction in Pascagoula is because the purposes behind each version of the abduction narrative were so similar. That’s all Charley gets from the dart.
The MARPA Memory Gun: The aura of purpose surrounding the MARPA Memory Gun competes between two oscillating poles, unsurprisingly much like the Pascagoula barb given its nature as an incapacitating weapon. In its making and manufacture, Charley can vaguely sense the methods by which MARPA in Krane’s Altantis Risen universe makes these things: it’s not a mass production process like the tranquilizer dart but assembled at the hands of trainee thaumaturges working for a MARPA contractor: a more bespoke, magico-electronic workshop in one of MARPA’s skunkworks, perhaps the Hughes Magical Tool Company in Glendale, or the Lockheed Advanced Thaumaturgical Development Projects Skunkworks in Antelope Valley. It’s meant to be a functional item for the use of MARPA agents, used with discretion, but one resolutely used to break up crowds susceptible to or under the influence of Atlantean belief engineering. The other aura of purpose is, of course, the residual stain/patina left on it by Richie and Carl’s desire to bring it across the dimensional divide through their particle accelerator and use it against the attendees of WesterCon. But there is actually a third, much more subtle aura of purpose around it, and that one definitely originates in History B. The forces of History B had a slight hand in helping nudge this object across the dimensional divide; Charley sees vague implications of the Old Man kulullû who inspired Ernest O. Lawrence’s original cyclotron built at Berkeley, forty years before Carl and Rich ever set foot on campus, being involved. History B knew what would happen if Rich and Carl “detonated” a MARPA Memory Gun on a crowd of fabulists, dreamers, and fantasists in close quarters, and the odds were very good it would trigger a reality temblor, as it did. What happened to the Memory Gun, and whoever used it, after that Event was inconsequential to the History B forces who helped put it in Rich’s hands in the first place.
The Patent Medicine Bottle: Charley has to laugh when she first looks at the label on the empty bottle that Mitch and Marshall brought back from the temblor event in Colorado, with its etching/engraving picture of Mitch, looking a little bit older than his History A self—bearded, but not as old as Alpha Leonis is supposed to be now in History A—and smiling. Charley has the weird dissociative thought that Mitch on this bottle looks a little like the picture of Colonel Sanders on a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken. But when Charley touches this weird object, all her bemusement at its funny label fades away. She sees where the bottle was filled; right near a huge Sumerian temple-looking complex in some very high mountains; they do look a bit like the Rockies. Human slaves of the Anunnaki draw up vast buckets of iron- and copper-rich water from a deep mountain spring while other slaves, working under the lash of human overseers and a few watchful girtablullû guards, move huge barrels into a processing center where the liquid is decanted, filtered, and refined for its eventual placement inside these bottles.
The elixir is clearly meant for human, not Irruptor users; it’s “marketed” to the human subjects of the Anunnaki in History B as a natural cure-all due to the powers of these springs, a quite effective panacea for all nagging ailments that (limited) human medicine can’t quite heal on its own. But that “refinement” process Charley witnesses, done under the watchful frog-like eye of a kulullû in the laboratories at the springs, also puts an outside additive into the medicine, one designed to make any human who drinks it even more helpless to the “caretaking” impulses of the Anunnaki. In some people this chemical might bond with their amygdala, hypothalamus, and pituitary to carefully release oxytocin to make their personality more psychologically dependent on Those Who Provide by making them into hypochondriacs, or giving them a psychosomatic injury or pretext for Munchausen syndrome. Effectively, drinking enough of this elixir will render a normal-Will human into a willing dependent whose body, mind, and psyche shout “take care of me, pity me!”… care and dependency which their Anunnaki masters are more than happy to provide.
Beth-El: In his interrogation session with Marshall Redgrave, Sebastian Keiner admitted that the creative process around Beth-El and the Ikenga artwork was at least partially set into motion by the East German agents who trained him to come to America, and most importantly the kulullû who sat on the shoulders of his lover, the “Tutor.” This is not to say that Keiner was not a preternaturally talented artist and evoker of History B before this training! Charley senses deep History B roots in the structure and design of the Beth-El art installation. The critics were right in finding that Keiner was influenced by North African and Middle Eastern art; it seems like in crafting Beth-El, Keiner managed to instinctively find all the flourishes of the larger Muslim art tradition that had the power to evoke History B: a precise mix of pre-Muslim, pre-Ontoclysm cult material (the god Hubal to whom the Kaaba was originally dedicated, just as one example) combined with elements of Muslim, post-Ontoclysm abstract non-figurative art (geometric mosaics, calligraphy, etc.).
As analyzed previously with Shard Sense, something about the interplay of figures, colors, light, and the specific physical design and architecture of the piece will allow someone to “send away” a victim’s consciousness, ostensibly to History B, leaving them a husk. And while Keiner’s artistic impulses were sufficient to help create all the physical prerequisites for Beth-El to function as a reality shard, Charley also now knows from her Specific Study that Keiner did need a little something extra to manifest Beth-El as a reality shard. Charley would bet that it has something to do with how Beth-El exists in other dimensions than the standard three of physical space. In terms of the higher dimensions of time and probability, the shard’s functioning is likely dependent upon how the lights within the artwork project onto those people inside. The coming of the lights were when Jocasta started feeling disoriented, like she was “going away.” (Odd how flashing lights of many different colors figure into another reality shard of great concern to URIEL that could change a witness’s consciousness: the Urim and Thummim as wielded by Anthony Reinhardt.) Beth-El could function thanks to a quantum ocular-cerebral photonic source code trigger, like the blue lights in Mount Shasta or the lights on the underside of the Anunnaki UFO.
As such, Beth-El is a reality shard not specifically in its physical origin. Like other shards URIEL is in possession of that take the form of records on media (the ZEBULUN Tapes, the Houdini Cassette, the Redgrave Cassette), Beth-El’s pragmaclastic identity is derived from the data/information encoded upon the physical medium which then projects into the world of History A. (Proviso: the temblor event at the Stanley Hotel did also change the physical structure of the magnetic tape on Houdini’s Cassette, making it able to hold much more data than a standard magnetic cassette.) This nature means that Beth-El is vulnerable to that data being scrambled. In other words, one burnt-out bank of fluorescent light bulbs in Beth-El, thanks to Mitch’s pyrokinesis, was enough to disable the entire shard’s functioning.
Well, the next use of Specific Study is on ORACLE/the Houdini Cassette itself: The Houdini Cassette: Honestly, Charley has been dreading Specific Studying this one a bit. When she first was asked to work with this shard, Charley saw its tremendous data storage, apart from the waveform of the long-dead Harry Houdini, as a way to boost the abilities of GRAIL TABLE's simulation programming: a data buffer, if you will, for ORACLE's calculations. And it has proven enormously useful in that regard. But the transformation of an ordinary oxide audio cassette in young D. Scott Rogo's tape recorder, meant to surreptitiously record the séance at the Hotel Stanley, into a highly-advanced piece of media storage onto which Houdini "escaped" his trap. But how did this happen, how did the subduction event metamorphose this cassette?
Charley has, of course, been grouping the Houdini Cassette with the other forms of media in the URIEL shard collection: the ZEBULUN Tapes and the mysterious U-Matic videocassette from the St. Francis. This object, unlike the other media in the collection, did physically change in order to have the storage capacity for Houdini's waveform. And this time, even with spending Extra Time on her Specific Study, Charley is having trouble seeing the origins of this reality shard. She can't precisely see what series of events led to the physical change, but the flavor, as it were, of the change resembles that of the Pascagoula Dart. In other words, the cassette was "chosen" as a reality shard because the purposeful agendas of both History A and History B were so similar that they merged. Rogo attempted to record the séance out of curiosity and a desire to know more about the nature of life after death; whatever power bestowed this cassette with miraculous storage was working out of the same sense of wanting to "probe" the other side of history: curiosity, a point of entry for History B into History A. The Anunnaki created this shard, but they didn't put Houdini on it. He was a third party, a wild card in the process, leaping into the spacious void created on the tape. History B had an agenda for this object, one Charley can't sense... but that agenda definitely didn't include Houdini.
Jeff
(Magnets are us, lasers are them)
Michael
The Redgrave Cassette and The Redgrave-Ningishzida-Caduceus Statue: First, the cassette. Charley first analyzes this mysterious object from the St. Francis with her ordinary Shard Study and gets all the information (found on the wiki) on its ability to "program" the victim who watches the tape. The images on the tape, which Charley sorts through with her Data Retrieval ability so as not to fall victim to the videocasette's hypnotic power, allows her to see how the promotional film for the Mission slowly turns into a horrific display of mind-controlled loyalty to the Anunnaki. Charley delves deep into the origins of the images on the tape and the tape itself using Specific Study, curious as to what series of circumstances led to the St. Francis reality temblor creating this weird object.
Charley never got a chance to see the Special Ones' room at the St. Francis in situ (she was busy speaking with the dead and being flung back to her past life as Léontine), but she knows this tape and the Redgrave-Ningishzida-Caduceus Statue were created there. The Specific Study seems to indicate it was the Special Ones' intense memetic devotion to Marshall that created these, well, cult objects of devotion. But there's also an explicit History B tinge to both these objects. An opportunistic warping of this belief energy by the Enemy? Sure, but why there specifically in the Special Ones' suite, and why around Marshall? The Specific Study gives some vague clues to this puzzle. Yes, the belief energy around Marshall was intense; yes, the Enemy found an opportunity to twist that belief energy on the part of the Special Ones. But it wasn't the Special Ones who were memetically infected with belief in the Enemy, and it doesn't seem like it's Marshall per se who was favored by the Enemy for this ploy; the appearance of Marshall on both the tape and in the person of the statue seems incidental to the objects themselves under further Specific Study.
What Charley's Specific Study suggests to her is that the Enemy is interested in the Mission itself.
Take the images on the videotape, showing the grounds of the Mission being turned into a place of worship of the Kings. And the function of the Redgrave-Ningishzida-Caduceus Statue; to create a healing temenos that would heal people and bring them together in a specific, Sumerian temple-sized space, just like the common areas at the Mission. It's almost as if someone designed these objects to be used at the Mission, by someone with few moral scruples, and thus to eventually concentrate belief in History B there, to trigger a subduction there specifically.
The ZEBULUN Tapes: Charley was the one who recorded these songs back in April when we black-bagged Zeb and brought him to the Barn. He sang his heart out that day. Those eight tunes changed the reel-to-reel tapes, from a mundane History A object to a reality shard that carried infectious History B data. These songs are catchy as all get out; as with the Redgrave Cassette, Charley reads the data on here using Data Retrieval rather than plugging her headphones into the Ampex. Charley knows that they would be superior carrier waves for memetics—any memetics—placed into the lyrics. They also have the effect of generating suitable mental states in those who listen... suitable to the worship of They Who Provide. But Charley realizes that using memetics, you could really instill loyalty (or fear, or awe) of anybody or anything using these tunes; you would just need to layer the right memetic or ultrasonic information into the song, maybe by making them much more sonically complex than an old man and a beat-up acoustic guitar.
When Charley plumbs the origins of these tunes, she seems confident that they did come from the Other Side. But Charley also senses (she doesn't have Sumerian, of course, so she can't understand the lyrics Zeb sang that day, but the Specific Study seems to give her this emotional information), that Zeb was singing out of not just longing for his "home" in History B, but also out of his love of everything that he had discovered living in History A for that half-century. These songs aren't, musicologically, purely products of Anunnaki worship and mind-control, Charley's Musical Ability tells her. The chord structures have elements of blues, R&B, rock and roll, and, yes, the past decade or so of radio-friendly pop. Zeb turned these songs into a kind of fusion of what he loved best about both the Histories he's lived in, and thus made them into more than merely hymns to the Red Kings. They are a child of two histories, and thus... a true reality shard themselves.
Jeff
("The Sign" by Ace of Base is such the perfect song for this.)
Michael
The RFK Posters and the Atlantean Cultural Mission Plaque: Charley can see clearly the origin of these posters; they come from Earth-Krane. A group of clean-cut young Kennedy boosters, real go-getters, received the poster design from the President's re-election campaign, the Team to Re-Elect Kennedy (TREK), and ran off a bunch of these posters in October '72 to aid the prospects of the President in what the less clean-cut kids in town still called "Occupied Yerba Buena" (San Francisco). As hinted at by Stoney, northern California was a real battleground in the years following Atlantis's rebirth: not only political, but military. By Election Day 1972, the city of San Francisco had been "liberated" by U.S. forces, but even with the support of the tradition city fathers in business and finance and MARPA settling in for a lengthy counterinsurgency, it's clear these posters did not curry favor with the Atlantis-aligned magical youth of the Bay Area.
But among the "silent majority" of San Franciscans, those who believed that the Atlanteans went WAY too far in overthrowing American cultural norms during their roughly two-year occupation of "Yerba Buena" after the Battle of Berkeley—the paganism, the outré sex and psychedelic drugs, the psychic hive-mind orientation activities, the teaching of magic to everyone willing to join the Atlantean movement—these posters were a sign of hope. Of normality returning to everyday life. Of RFK's exceptional ability to balance the new reality of magic being in Americans' lives again while not interfering with other esteemed American traditions: traditions like democracy, capitalism, private property, and so forth. This is why the messages on the posters received and stored such intense belief energy, energy that enables users of the posters to "consume" them and gain skills in realpolitik, in persuasion, in American magic. Just one of the ways mass production met thaumaturgy in Robert Kennedy's/Sebastian Stone's America. Is it against the spirit of free democracy? Maybe a little, but hey, '72 was a close one in California, with the vote being split almost perfectly in thirds between RFK, Republican Robert Taft Jr. (strong in Orange County and Silicon Valley), and third-party People's/Venceremos Party candidate and Atlantean stalking-horse Jane Fonda (who turned 35 right before Inauguration Day on the winter solstice of '72, qualifiying her for President!) and her VP candidate Benjamin Spock. Every little bit of magical oomph helps.
The energies around the plaque, however, are very different from that of the posters. This was placed on the St. Francis when Atlanteans took over the building and made it into a cultural embassy, and so it's overlaid with bespoke Atlantean magic rather than American mass-produced magic. The plaque allowed for peaceful exchange of ideas and philosophies within the walls of Earth-Krane's St. Francis building, but much like cultural exchange with the Soviet Union or communist bloc in our timeline, the people inside the building will remain fundamentally wary of anyone with an agenda truly opposed to their own. Essentially the plaque allows for visitors to be tested for their loyalties, allowing Atlantis to recruit the likely and weed out the wary.
The posters and the plaque do still contain a minor, dirty tinge of History B; after all, Rich and Carl were given the keys to Earth-Krane thanks to Anunnaki glyphics used with the particle accelerator, and theoretically it was the reality temblor that retrocreated these objects before the temblor actually happened on Friday, June 29 at 11:15 am. And Charley wonders after spending so much time with these objects, if it's a case of again of some force among the Anunnaki sliding these objects into existence—one (batch) American, one Atlantean—to show how magic, no matter the source, can be tainted by Anunnaki efforts. Sadly that's all the Specific Study gives her on both of these.
Jeff
Maybe one of the reasons subduction events default to History B is a whole lot of Illuminated, somewhere, somewhen, are keeping History B alive.
Rob
(Missed commenting on this while I was in the woods.) Didn't we always know, somehow, the way to save the world would be slaughtering a whole lot of Illuminated holy people?
Michael
If Mitch brings the Norton Coin in, Charley can check it out with Specific Study.
The Satellite Dish: As for the satellite dish, now in pieces in our secure storage, it takes Charley a couple of attempts with Specific Study to get a handle on it. Of course, this object corresponded with the main receiver/transmitter dish at the Operation GOLDPAN site. Being in pieces, it is not able to fulfill its function as a reality shard right now, but what Charley is able to tell is that when whole, this dish was able to remotely (re)direct belief energy, so that, for instance, if a subduction event were happening in San Francisco, that with the right coordinates, the dish could collect that belief energy and direct it, "ground it," in the area around the satellite dish. (This is what was happening in West Virginia in Mission 8; the dish was collecting Point 5's subduction energy and making the valley where GOLDPLAN was located into a powerful subduction zone, complete with Irruptors and reality shards.)
Conversely, this works in reverse; if a subduction event were happening in a location where the dish was/is planted, it could redirect, transmit that History B energy elsewhere.
(Charley realizes that Long Meg and Her Daughters out in the UK had a function very similar to this satellite dish, but at a radically shorter range; whether the stone circle actually consisted of human Annunaki servants and a petrified šedu, the crystalline structure of the stones acted as a resonator with the subduction event triggered by the tainted GRAIL TABLE simulation and the simulation mantras.) Charley theorizes that the range of the dish's abilities is dependent on several factors: the strength of the belief energy, the interference of other human-made or solar electromagnetic energy (this explains why the Radio Quiet Zone worked to the dish's advantage), the landscape, and the curvature of the Earth. In practical terms? That's anywhere between 50 to 300 miles for a subduction zone and 100 to 2,000 miles for a full-on reality temblor. About the range of FM radio vs. AM/medium-wave radio stations. The process is also likely to be "lossy"; i.e., there will always be some History B energy leakage remaining around the transmitting site, as well as some loss of signal at the destination.
But! Charley realizes in an instant that one of these dishes placed in geosynchronous orbit about 26,200 miles above the surface of the Earth could conceivably send, receive, or relay temblor-level belief energy anywhere on a single hemisphere of the planet Earth.
This is a major pragmaclast; classification sigma.
(Should add that the dish would need to be repaired and contains a ton of glyphic elements; effectively the bombing run rendered it inoperative but hey, this Shard Study would conceivably tell Charley how to repair it if it came to that.)