Jocasta Investigates
Wednesday, August 8, 1973
Michael
So what's the angle on the research on Bernadette and Butler? Going back to the trade magazines, or are you going to call upon law enforcement? FBI? SANDMAN?
Leonard
Jocasta has a hunch they probably won’t have anything like a tawdry criminal record, so she’ll forgo that angle for now, and she’s still a little too paranoid about OZYMANDIAS (and may lack the rank) to pursue that angle. So for the time being, she’ll just focus on the trades, business mags, newspapers, and court records. If nothing comes up that way she’ll consider other angles, but that’s where she’ll start.
Michael
Okay, let's do another Research-14 roll then.
Leonard
>> SUCCESS by 7
Brant
(There's also the literal Yellow Pages)
Michael
So trying to find any info on Bernadette in the trade mags comes up empty, but it's pretty clear that the "Butler" mentioned by Marshall is one Christopher Butler, head of public relations at Agrigenics since at least 1970. He appears in a couple of the articles Jo referred to over the past couple of days giving a quote here and there about Agrigenics's domestic plans now that their good works in the Third World are more on the back burner. One interesting quote from 1971: "There is no reason why Americans cannot share in the bounty we've provided to struggling developing nations. These advancements will serve all of mankind in the years to come. American farmers deserve the very best technology, whether that's tractors and fertilizers or seeds and hybrids. We'll be here for them."
Typical PR flack type stuff.
White Pages search in the North Bay gets you a dozen or so "B Frys" scattered across Sacramento, Vallejo, Berkeley, etc. No evident Bernadette.
Leonard
Jocasta takes a few notes and frowns. This is so much more work than just shooting people.
She makes a map of the B Frys and outlays them on a map around Vacaville, and, after eliminating the ones that seem too far to commute, considers driving around to each one that remains, then scowls at her own foolishness. I can't break into all these houses, she thinks, and how do I know she's not married with a different last name? Besides, even if I found the house, what could I learn? I'm not Mitch.
Tapping a pencil between her teeth and waiting for inspiration, she scolds herself again: Remember to tell the boys to bring you things, personal things, when they meet with people out in the field. You're wasting your talents. The last part makes her shudder a little: It sounds in her head like her father's voice, not hers. Frustrated and full of self-doubt, Jocasta decides to call it a day. She checks out of the facility, hops in the Javelin, and guns it down the 580 towards home. Then, it hits her: the Berkeley Co-Op.
Before going back to Masonic Avenue, she pulls the Jav into a spot near the famous university co-cop grocery and goes in. Throwing a few essentials and some fresh produce into a basket — and remembering to pick up some hippie incense to do a little knissomancy later — she grabs a box of Kellogg's Country Morning and crinkles her face up reading the "all natural" branding all over the box. Putting on an expression of confusion, she heads over to the small raised desk near the entrance and talks to the staffer manning the customer service area, as they always seem to have more on the ball than the hapless student volunteers.
"Pardon me," she says in her old housewife voice. "Can you tell me if this has —" and here she deliberately stumbles over the words, as if she's not certain if she has them right — "high fruit-cose corn syrup? Someone at the Ladies League said we shouldn't give our kids anything with high fruit-cose corn syrup, but honestly, I don't really know what that even is. I would just buy granola, but my husband can't stand it," she says with what she hopes is an ingratiating smile.
[Basically, she'll try to draw the employee out just to determine if the idea of this stuff has crept into the public consciousness in any meaningful way — and, on a very remote Mitch-level of good fortune, if they have any negative knowledge of the stuff that might have drawn them to the group that made the flyer. She won't do anything out of the ordinary if this yields nothing, but she might push a Psych roll or Detect Lies attempt with Empathy if they seem cagey. If nothing comes of it at all, she'll just go home with her new joss sticks and meditate over whatever scent "AQUARIAN AGE" is.]
Michael
(Heh, Jocasta is not digging being the new Sophie.)
Leonard
[Secretly she kind of likes it but it's hard to admit being a brick can only take you so far, especially if you're a woman]
Michael
The customer service manager, who does look a bit more on the ball as mentioned, looks quizzically at the box then at Jocasta. "I hafta say, ma'am, I've not heard of that. Corn syrup in dry cereal sounds a bit unappetizing to me! You say it's some kind of additive?"
Leonard
Jo smiles. "I … I think so. Cards on the table, I barely pay attention when Katrinka starts talking about nutrition. So this stuff is safe? I just want to make sure it's not just the farmhouse on the box that's reassuring me."
Michael
"It's a major brand, always gotta be a little more suspicious of them, of course," the co-op grocery manager says sagely, "but the ingredient list seems pretty innocent. Oats, nuts, toasted rice. A bit bland. You ask me confidentially though, ma'am, you'd be better off with some small-batch granola; it's the same stuff, made closer and thus fresher, and you can be a lot more sure of what's in it." He gestures over to some boxes and bags, a dozen or so different small-label brands of granola made in Northern California, their labels' art and text mostly smudged and indistinct because they've been run off on someone's basement printing press.
Leonard
She thanks him politely and grabs a bag of the least sketchy granola on the shelf. Well, whatever this stuff is, it hasn't reached the well-meaning grad student population, she thinks.
She'll pay, head the mile and a half up to her house, and munch a little of the granola before dosing, lighting the incense, and slipping into a hopefully oracular meditative state.
Michael
Jocasta stares into the smoke rising from the cone of grainy, fragrant incense. The mound looks like a little volcano—a tiny Shasta, Jocasta muses to herself absently—as the effects of the acid begin to slowly sink in.
And as it does, Jocasta tries to keep her attention on the smoke, following the suggestions for interpretation she's gleaned as she's researched knissomancy over the past few weeks, but for some reason she can't resist instead falling into watching this mountain of incense turn to smoke. And as she does, she feels something quite akin to the sensation she had inside Shasta, that Alice-in-Wonderland effect where the walls blew up to enormous sizes (or, indeed, she shrank down to the size of an insect). Jocasta is on the mountainside of that little cone of incense right now, the individual crumbling grains like boulders tumbling by her, the column of sweet pungent smoke like an actual volcano venting steam and gaseous sulfur... Jocasta sees and feels an implacable, incomprehensible system of solids, and gases, and flame: all around her, interacting with each other in systematic yet inscrutable complexity. She sinks to her (imaginary?) knees wondering how she'll contemplate it all. Agrigenics. Beale Farms. Beale Downer and his cult. The informant at the bowling alley. Venture Toons and Marshall and Archie's visit. Bernadette Fry. Chris Butler. OZYMANDIAS. SANDMAN. URIEL. Charley's predictions from ORACLE about widespread consumption of high fructose corn syrup. Wait, did Charley even tell Jo about that? The acid is strong. Hitting Jo much stronger than usual.
It's all one big system. Conspiracy? Only in that certain causal currents are inevitable: feed people more easily and cheaply and there'll be a perverse impulse, governed by the markets (thinking of "the markets" this way, like it's a giant thoughtform, gives Jo a sudden acid-freakout fright; she shudders on the side of Mount Patchouli, hugging herself) to feed them more: does OZYMANDIAS want a populace stunned into submission by constant consumption of foods with a high glycemic index? Well, they've certainly told us how much they believe in human potential, with some people like Harman thinking everyone deserves to realize that potential. But why squander that potential by consigning the American people to obesity and illness? Do the Red Kings want a fat, happy populace to rule over sure? Sure, but this diet is just as likely to make people fat and unhappy. Maybe it is all just the market. Maybe it is just greed, and petty Cold War commodity politics with sugar. Maybe it is all just cynical marketing of "health food."
As the top of the incense mountain collapses in on itself, though, Jocasta hears the clear-as-day voice of David Wolf. Behind her. She turns around and David is standing there, savaged by the claws of whatever killed him on that day a little over two months ago, his lab coat in tatters. "It's all of them, Jocasta," David says in his clipped Uxbridge diction. "They all want the same thing. The omega [omeeeega, David says] point." Jocasta's eyes go wide at this phrase. "It calls to all of them. It summons them like moths to a flame. They seek its succor, its consolation. They worship it. Like God." And with that, the entire cone flattens, Jocasta tumbles away from the mountain as she realizes there is no God, except this rotten idol that the Kings and OZYMANDIAS and even just some garden-variety capitalists slaver for.
Fright Check, pass on 12 or less.
Leonard
>> SUCCESS by 0
Michael
Damn. Anyway, I hope you don't mind that I just went with it here... with so much circulating around in Jo's head from the past two days, I thought you'd appreciate a... big-picture, holistic Oracle
Also, Occultism roll to see if Jo's heard of the Omega Point/Teilhard de Chardin
Leonard
[no, man, this was amazing]
>> SUCCESS by 10
Michael
Oh yeah.
I mean, it makes perfect sense, his stuff would have been hot when Jo was in college, and of course we keep returning to a LOT of his theories: accelerationism and singularity, the noösphere.
Even the Peking Man stuff is redolent with History B archeology/anthropology/out-of-place artifact vibes
And the thread of his philosophy that spilled over into McLuhan et al., pretty prominent in our world as well. But is Jo sure David was "just" an acid/incense vision? I think that's the part that spooked her enough to have to make a Fright Check. If the dead are, ahem, just part of the noösphere, just hanging out just out of sight of us, waveforms that exist somewhere out there … I mean, what is Houdini but proof of that, huh?
Thursday, August 9, 1973
Michael
So Leonard, I think I'm just going to say that Melanie "keeps Charley home from school" on Thursday because of bad dreams; that way I can work on the astral travel and not hold you back on Thursday in checking out more farmer's markets or further research. I'm not sure if the boys will be prepping for their stakeout of the bowling alley at Livermore on Thursday afternoon but if they are we could see if they need more backup.
I'm gonna abstract out the rest of the Agrigenics/Beale Farms/flyer shoe-leather investigation, Leonard, with a Naturalist-15 roll, so go ahead roll, I'll do a brief infodump, then we can move to Livermore pre-bowling alley.
Leonard
>> FAILURE by 1
Booooooo
Michael
Ugh. Just a fruitless day trying to get any kind of reaction of the organic co-op types to give you anything on Agrigenics, Beale Farms, or the flyer. Basically everyone who's asked hasn't heard of the former two and everyone Jo shows the actual flyer to (if she indeed does) just thinks the person who wrote it sounds like a paranoid fruit loop. I mean, everyone's got their reservations about agricultural engineering but "monstrous chimeras"? That's science fiction Soylent Green stuff.
Leonard
And I'm guessing that the person/people doing the flyering aren't actually here, either. Bah.
All right, Jo's gonna head back to the lab just to make herself available and be there if the fellas need anything (the dream of feminism is alive and well in Livermore). If they aren't there, she'll leave a memo saying she struck out, let her know if they need anything for the bowling alley meet-up, and let's figure out an approach to infiltrating Agrigenics/Beale Farms.