Mitch Visits a Gift Shop

Michael

The remainder of Mitch's R&R daytime can remain uneventful, with trips to the Catholic Church as noted as well as anywhere else in town he sees fit to visit. When Mitch gets back to Redstone Arsenal, the white paper from Kendrick Mead would be circulating and the talk of the HQ and of course Mead himself is here at HQ if Mitch wanted to bend his ear about it after reading. The HQ hangar, if Mitch decides to stop in before heading back to his room to watch his specially-recorded episode of Maude, is abuzz, with the UFO sightings near ground now charted on the big electronic board/map of the US along with the subduction zones. Mitch notes that Point 10 symbol on the map has changed from an ugly red to a more subdued amber color; Mitch assumes that means a reduction in the severity of the zone's effects. It's fine if Mitch wants to hang around the periphery of the HQ hangar — everyone's quite busy — but I figure even if he's heading back to the dorms to unwind, he'd be able to get a peek at the status quo.

Jeff

Is Point 10 the only one on the map that's different?

Michael

That is correct. Also I should mention that none of the other eleven points have gotten any worse or changed in intensity at all. The only other new events on the board are the ground-level UFO sightings in French Lick, Evansville, and Xenia. The campaign map has all these updates; I am using a lighter gray for Point 10 instead of the stoplight system simply because black indicates subduction/temblors on our campaign map.

Jeff

So anyway, let's be clear. Mitch went back to his dorm-room bed after talking to von Braun and slept and dreamed of a scabbard of chalcedony. In the morning he lay in bed for a while, dozing and resting, not rising until close to noon. He ate in the same cafeteria where he met von Braun, a nondescript meal more in keeping with what one might expect to find in the canteen at Marshall Space Flight Center.

After lunch he goes walking, heading on foot from the NASA installation towards the city center of Huntsville. He has no destination in mind; but after a couple of hours he reaches the Redstone Arsenal complex, where he stops in a little snack bar/gift shop/visitors center.

One might expect that a scruffy drifter-looking guy wandering around on foot between NASA headquarters and the Missile Intelligence Agency headquarters would attract some cop attention but no, not today. Maybe there's a SANDMAN operative given the job of babysitting Mitch and he surveils and keeps the local security at bay. Or maybe Mitch is just lucky and avoids notice.

Either way, he buys a little notepad and pencil set with an ABMDA logo on it, and sits in the snack bar for a while and writes some stuff down.

Then he walks back to Marshall, hoping that by the time he gets back his Maude tape will be ready.

This is what he wrote.

Fact: Within the central fiction of the lie that is this universe, there is one timeline, which we call History-A. We can imagine an infinite number of other possible timelines, but these other possible timelines do not exist in the way that History-A exists.

Fact: One of these alternate timelines, which we call History-B, is dominated by the Annunaki. In their timeline, the Annunaki have interfered tremendously in human development, programming into humanity's brains various memetic and linguistic weak points and handholds for control. They created Proto-Indo-European and other languages; all modern languages derived from these languages contain these handholds. The Annunaki have also created their various servitor races and weird technologies and so on.

Fact: History-B, alone among the infinite array of possible timelines, fights for its own existence. Whenever some weakness in History-A is exposed, History-B attempts to exploit that weakness. Everything from Emperor Norton to Mount Shasta to Andy Krane's Atlantis novels, all of these alternate timelines are just chaff for History-B.

Fact: The explanation for why History-B presses onto History-A that we have been given is that once upon a time History-B was the true timeline, and the Annunaki ruled everywhere forever, but then in AD 535 a cabal of human rebels somehow triggered the Ontoclysm, and purged History-B, and created History-A, in which the Annunaki never existed.

Issue one: if the Annunaki, as powerful as they are, truly ruled everywhere and everywhen without meaningful opposition, as every description of History-B purports, how on earth were rebels able to organize, much less conspire to successfully overthrow reality and flip it on its head?

Issue one: if the Annunaki, as influential as they were in the development of human language and culture, never existed due to having been erased by the Ontoclysm, and now exist only as a story no more real than the story of Andy Krane's Atlantis novels, how is it that human language and culture still show the evidence of their tampering?

Conclusion: it's not the case that the Annunaki never existed. The Annunaki existed, and put their poisonous seeds into human language, at least. Then something happened and they weren't around any longer. That "something" wasn't the Ontoclysm; the spoor of the Annunaki persists after the Ontoclysm. That "something" happened in History-A, after the arrival of the Annunaki and after they began their program of interfering with humanity, which is why humanity in History-A retains the traces of their work.

Conclusion: that "something" was inserted into the timeline by the Ontoclysm. The Ontoclysm maybe took place in AD 535, in Britain, in Camelot even, but the change it wrought on the timeline goes back farther, to somewhere in prehistory.

Conclusion: the Annunaki existed in History-A and aren't here now not because they never existed, but because they existed and were defeated. They are not unbeatable. They are beaten.

Conclusion: History-B presses into History-A not because it has some kind of primacy over all the other histories that don't exist either, but because there are events and entities in the real and true history of the world (ie, History-A) that match the timeline of History-B. The Annunaki arrived on Earth at the same time in both histories. They began making their changes, and made the same changes, in both histories.

Fact: I was talking to Wernher von Braun when I figured this out and he was not surprised to hear it. His aura was that of someone pleased that I had successfully realized a thing he already knew. He's the highest-ranking Sandman I've met, as far as I know, and someone I'm confident isn't OZYMANDIAS.

Fact: von Braun immediately zeroed in on the question of how the Ontoclysm happened, observing that the humans of History-A's AD 535 did not know of the Annunaki and wouldn't have reason to conduct whatever weird science, psychic magic, ritual procedure triggered the Ontoclysm, and indicated that they must have been in contact with someone aware of the Annunaki. That is, with SANDMAN. With us.

Conclusion: Wernher von Braun, speaking with the voice of SANDMAN and acting in accordance with the desires of C, wants us to tackle the problem of triggering the Ontoclysm by either traveling backwards in time to Camelot ourselves, or sending messages backwards to the people there. Speculation: this whole weird mission might be arranged, by SANDMAN or by C, to signal to us the need for this time travel project.

There's a lot of crossed-out words and corrected misspellings and stuff, of course.

When he arrives at Marshall, Mitch picks up his copy of the white paper along with the Maude tape and directions for where to go to find a machine to play it on. He reads the white paper with interest.