Mitch’s Personnel File
Michael
So this feels to me like it's going to be a combination of die rolls/Extended Contests, because what Marshall is looking for is beyond the simple summaries of Mitch's time with SANDMAN that we've gotten in the past; he's looking to use his new Rank, URIEL's takeover and subsumation of the CWG, and all our moves over the past six-plus months to get new information. But we can start with the easy bit; Marshall's got Donna who is a trusted Contact, and Donna's got at least the chance to roll a crit of her own to help Marshall out. If Marshall starts rolling on Sunday the 19th, his first daily success on a 9 or less will get Donna on the horn and have her try to go deeper to get additional dossiers on one Mitchell Jefferson Hort.
Brant
>>SUCCESS by 0
huh, didn't see that coming
Michael
Well, Donna is nothing if not devoted to Marshall, I suppose. To be willing to leave her shitty little accommodations on-base and descend to her "office" on a Sunday... she'll do what she can. Like I said, it's gonna take a crit for her to get the deeper files herself, but even a success should put Marshall on the right path for it.
So, without further ado...
>>SUCCESS by 9
Michael
Not a crit, but a success by 9. So after a day's worth of diving into computer and paper files, she'll report back (on a secure connection):
"So your suspicions were right that the CWG had their own file on Hort. I'm sending that along via telefax now. But in the CWG file I saw several references to a unit, code-named 'ISOCLINE.' That work name isn't showing up in any cross-referenced CWG files, nor in the Project computer records at the Peak. I'm checking the mundane military records next, but I'm not anticipating much joy there. ISOCLINE references in the CWG file seem to hint that it was an operation with branches in Saigon and Los Angeles from at least 1966 through 1970. I'm going to assume you've not heard of it before."
Donna's tone of certainty is such that Marshall wonders the subtext of what she's saying; Donna knows Marshall was a big Project kahuna in Saigon and South Vietnam during this precise time period, so she's confident that her own inability to find out anything about ISOCLINE means it's either a red herring planted there by the CWG (unlikely, sloppy even for them), an operation working strictly outside the bounds of the Project (possible, but dubious)... or something more sinister. Perhaps a program so important to the CWG that the records were purged and wiped out. Or, less likely but more troubling, it's a lost fragment of another history, a retro(un)creation that's left tantalizing hints in the CWG records, like those loose newspaper articles about Emperor Norton before Mitch (re)created him on the roof of the St. Francis. Whatever the case, ISOCLINE tweaks Marshall's pre-existing sense of Mitch's uniqueness; Marshall has the weird intuition that ISOCLINE, whatever it was, was in aid of Mitch and Mitch alone.
The CWG files that Marshall receives, as Donna says, only have passing and tacit mention of ISOCLINE but it seems to sound like a predecessor to SCANATE; the CWG's first attempt at a systematized program of remote viewer development. The VC were so dug into both Vietnamese society and the hinterlands of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia that all methods were being used to ferret them out: mundane ones like the computer/electronic surveillance operations of IGLOO WHITE, intelligence ops like Phoenix, as well as paranormal ones like ISOCLINE.
The CWG files from the point Mitch joined URIEL in '71 seem near-obsessed with getting Mitch to realize his remote viewing potential; from the early disappointed CWG reports that his Serendipity/Detect (History B) skills make Mitch "merely a taisher" to the first-hand Reinhardt reports in '72 where he kept bullshitting with Mitch in the URIEL offices trying to get him interested in the "history of scrying," from John Dee's obsidian Aztec mirror through the ages (Mitch didn't bite; clearly he despised Reinhardt as an office-mate), to the clear desire that the CWG had last summer in getting Mitch somehow tested by Puthoff and Targ, the CWG doesn't really care about Mitch's other prodigious abilities; all they want is for him to be the best remote viewer possible. Why they felt he had this potential in the first place isn't clear, but Marshall bets if this intel is anywhere, it's wherever more information about ISOCLINE might lie.
For the record, Marshall has not yet used his Rank or Security Clearance directly to dig into ISOCLINE, but that option is obviously there.
Brant
Well, no reason not to. Marshall thanks Donna and puts in an official request for more information on ISOCLINE and Mitch.
Michael
This is an Influence roll using Savoir-Faire (SANDMAN)! Modifiers to your base 16 skill include...
+2 from Charisma
+2 from Voice (whether this takes phone calls or an in-person visit to GP, Marshall's Voice will come into play for sure)
+2 from Security Rank (SANDMAN Status)
+1 from Donna's aid
+1 situational bonus as The Man Who Took Down The CWG
That totals to Savoir Faire (SANDMAN)-24. This is a Quick Contest against the Will of whomever or whatever you're liable to get these records from. Considering the depth of this program and the lack of information about it, Marshall will likely need to go pretty deep into the Project to find a likely repository of information on ISOCLINE and specifically Mitch and ISOCLINE. Savoir-Faire is, of course, a Corruption skill, which I figured I'd let you know before rolling. A success on the contested roll means "Requests for information are successful. The question is answered accurately."
Brant
>>SUCCESS by 9
Michael
So why the name ISOCLINE, anyway? Sure, a lot of code names in the intel community, the military, and by extension SANDMAN are essentially picked out of a bingo cage (like they did back in World War II) or assigned-by-computer nowadays, but Marshall, along with his intuition about Mitch being central to ISOCLINE's plans, also has a hard-to-place feeling the name itself is a clue. Marshall's seen enough smug, clever CWG types in the upper echelons at Granite Peak and Duncorne the past near-decade of his SANDMAN career to know when an op is going to have an arch, ironic name.
So Marshall, while he's waiting for a call back from deeper in the seized high-security CWG archives at Granite Peak, decides to take his unabridged 20th Century Webster's off the shelf at Kearny Street and idly have a look.
Isocline is Greek of course; Marshall has enough knowledge from med school to be able to puzzle it out himself: iso- meaning "same," cline meaning "slope," and much like ALLOCHTHON, it seems to be, at least according to the good people at Webster's, primarily a geological term. The material Sophie sends along from Livermore indicates more technical usages in geometry and calculus (isocline: "the line formed connecting the moment of identical slope for two curves/equations") as well as a fascinatingly-titled 1964 paper on the mechanics of human perception, archived by the military, and written by an engineer at Boeing titled "Pattern Recognition by the Method of Isoclines: A Mathematical Model for the Visual Integrative Process," research done by psychoelectrodes in an effort to understand how human beings visually differentiate and perceive patterns neurophysically. The abstract seems to indicate human perception possesses a built-in grid and that the isoclines between perceptible objects (and concepts) are the method by which the quantum effects in the brain discern and comprehend patterns. Just on the edge of Weird SANDMAN type research, but being done openly (with human subjects and electrodes, no less!) at Boeing in Seattle. Strange. Nothing to do with our ISOCLINE, but strange.
In the CWG files that Marshall's become familiar with since the end of ALLOCHTHON there's a sizable section of more... esoteric research on the (meta)physics of History B that revolves around the questions of survival as a "bubble" of History A: the questions being asked by OZYMANDIAS being primarily "how can we survive a second Ontoclysm," where shall we survive a second Ontoclysm," and "how can we make sure that survivability is durable?" The mention of ISOCLINE Marshall finds in that section is a single research paper from 1965, commissioned by ISOCLINE and intended for internal SANDMAN use, referenced in these survival plans, specifically around Question 3 of survivability.
The epigraph at the beginning of this anonymously-submitted research paper, titled "Temporal Inertia and Probabilistic Human Identity in Two Parallel Relativistic Frameworks: A Speculation" is, fittingly for SANDMAN, a quote from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland:
“I’m sure I’m not Ada,” [Alice] said, “for her hair goes in such long ringlets, and mine doesn’t go in ringlets at all; and I’m sure I can’t be Mabel, for I know all sorts of things, and she, oh! she knows such a very little! Besides, she is she, and I'm I, and—oh dear, how puzzling it all is!"
The paper focuses on a series of theories much talked about in the early-to-mid '60s at Duncorne and the Peak, as defense scientist (and former theoretical physicist and game theorist) Hugh Everett's many-worlds interpretation (MWI) of quantum mechanics, expounded upon in his 1957 PhD dissertation, took the theoretical physics world by storm (at least in terms of controversy; Niels Bohr and his coterie famously rejected his assertions outright in a 1959 visit to Copenhagen). Everett himself ended up working at Sandia Laboratories in New Mexico on nuclear weapons; mainly this was engineered by the Project because SANDMAN wanted to keep him and his unique mind very safe and very close. Mainstream science had no call for the idea that every quantum event creates a new universe-line; it did not fit the Copenhagen model of quantum physics. But SANDMAN's metaphysicians and theoretical ontologists couldn't get enough of it.
PART ONE: Multiplicity of worlds and perception thereto
The ISOCLINE paper first posits that MWI suggests a multiplicity of worlds exist, can be glimpsed by human sensory apparatus since the human brain works on quantum principles, that these sensory apparatus were purposefully tweaked genetically by the Anunnaki and have come down to humanity haphazardly since the Ontoclysm, and that the Anunnaki did this for the purpose of Their being more easily sensed by human minds. Evidence is brought out from pre-SANDMAN and early Project operations that the Kings' existence is dependent in some basic way on observation. This quickly gets into a panoply of theoretical ontology that Marshall can barely follow but the upshot of it is that SANDMAN has been sitting on a theory that human consciousness shapes reality, that the Anunnaki cannot in some way exist in our present quantum frame of reference without human observers, and that certain psychically-gifted individuals can more effectively believe (or, the paper merely suggests, disbelieve) in the timeline (or timelines??) in which the Anunnaki are ascendant and triumphant still over mankind. The paper author says, "We collectively (sic) term any or all of these worldlines as 'History B'."
PART TWO: Consciousness, identity, lifeline destiny, and the concept of "temporal inertia"
In some of these History B worldlines, there is a huge divergence stretching back to the Ontoclysm (it seems that most ISOCLINE theorists believe the Ontoclysm was important but that it doesn't necessarily hold primacy as a determinative historical event); in others, the split and exile of the Anunnaki to outside of the worldline's history happens later or earlier, but the upshot of it is that in the vast majority of these worldlines, human history is radically different.
Vastly different human observers will have been born, lived, and died under the Red Kings' rule in these worldlines; therefore there are extremely few, if any, humanly-conscious subjects of correspondence, or "ontological isoclines," between History B worldlines and History A. But in a rare few, since the sheer number of quantum variances and events are so manifold, there will be a chance meeting of sperm and egg that produces a genetically-identical human being on both sides of the ontological divide. In the persons of these "human isoclines," both the Kings and their nominal opponents will find a foothold in the others' ontology. An isocline with both awareness of its place within the many-worlds model and psychic perception on both sides of the chasm between Histories A and B would be a powerful agent in the case of spontaneous historical reversion in our privileged frame of reference. We call this quality of dually existing on both sides of the ontological divide "temporal inertia."
PART THREE: The value of subjects possessing temporal inertia to ontological survivability and the engineering thereof
Individuals who exhibit temporal inertia could be invaluable assets in the case of a partial overlap with or full reversion into History B. Their dual nature would allow them mutual intelligibility and quantum perception of both worlds; psychic power would be a likelihood if not assured. Upon a History B reversion, this individual would likely possess a quantum imprint of their History A counterpart who could reside as an overlapping pattern in the History B subject's quantum consciousness. They would remember the other timeline, either faintly, completely, or somewhere in between, and be able to negotiate and understand the nature of ontoclastic reversion they had experienced, while the other five billion human beings, whose lifespans were artificially retrocreated by the reality quake event, would have always known History B to be "real" and would be unable to perceive History A in any real way. This graf, mixed in among a bunch of other highly theoretical speculation on how a temporally inertial human being would perceive the Histories, is underlined in the CWG's copy of the paper.
Likewise, it is believed that a genetic sample of a confirmed human individual whose lifespan began in History B would enable the Project to engineer a clone of said History B human, and a dual ontological consciousness could be inculcated in them, along with psychic potential, even if the History B template human did not possess these traits. Even though early experiments in opening paths to different worldlines have resulted in living material not surviving the transfer, both information and inorganic material can and have. We project that the Kings have been able to effect occasional irruptions of human, non-therianthropic Irruptor subjects into History A worldlines, either as a form of ekimmû infestation/psychic driving/programming or, perhaps, bodily. If such a subject is confirmed and found, they should be secured and samples of their genetic material obtained at any cost. The original subject would then need to be sent back across to their home History B worldline for the temporal inertia to be useful in a tactical sense; this may prove more impossible than obtaining the human History B subject in the first place.
The paper ends with this testimonial, which seems to be why the CWG was so interested in it.
It must be conceded that esmological models do show a marked tendency for the Kings' reversion to History B to occur in a majority of (but not all!) future worldlines. Therefore the mission of ISOCLINE will be to find likely possessors of temporal inertia to recruit into the Project and, if such individuals cannot be found, to create them. In the case of ontological reversion, every piece of human culture, every piece of memory or evidence of History A worldlines, and every human able to perceive both histories will be a crucial cache that may enable a autocthonous resistance movement to attempt yet another reversion through mass change of belief, the destruction of Anunnaki culture and memory, and the elimination of lifelines that exist solely on the History B side of the ontological divide. The human isocline is, as it were, as important a weapon to our ontological cold war as the nuclear bomb is to the material Cold War.
Brant
Marshall reads. He’s been doing a lot of reading, lately. A lot more than he used to. Is this what upper management is like? A lot of reading? He shakes away the thought, puts down the file, lights a cigarette. “So which one do we have?” he murmurs. Most plausible sequence of events is that Alpha Leonis is the original. That would explain Mitch’s defiant attitude: classic Oedipal. But how does this all sync up with Mitch’s background? If his birth was manufactured, why wasn’t he more closely monitored? Why just allow him to be sent to ‘Nam, almost killed, maybe? If Mitch wasn’t an ontological accident, but the product of an intentional cloning experiment, what happened?
Michael
It seems reasonable to suggest that in the other Mitch Hort personnel files Marshall gets hold of in this attempt, the ones with deeper ISOCLINE ties, he sees that Mitch was snatched away from an ISOCLINE facility in South Vietnam in March of '67 by Blue Star, the Soviet psi agency, and held as a putative prisoner of war (more like experimental subject) in Laos for nearly a year. The SANDMAN files about this are remarkably unconcerned with any aspect of this time of Mitch's "on the other side." Brainwashing, deep memory work, psi experiments, implanted memetics... the ISOCLINE files from '68, after Mitch disappeared into the LA demimonde the first time, seem to hint that this capture by Blue Star was not of great concern to the operation (and, reading between the lines, Marshall can see ISOCLINE thought it might even be to their advantage to have their human isocline spend some time among the rumored kulullû-filled Blue Star). Remember Keiner's confession about his Stasi handler/tutor with the Pisces on her back?
Brant
(Remind me, did Mitch tell everyone about his encounter with the Russians in LA last mission?)
Michael
(Not canonically!)
Jeff
(He meant to, we were all busy/distracted! By the time he's back up at Shasta going hiking with Pat Price he's absolutely had time to debrief)
Michael
Consider Marshall fully briefed on Mickey and Donald, then.
Brant
Do the files indicate anything as to why Mitch, specifically, was assigned to URIEL, specifically? Meaning, if URIEL itself was sort of a CWG experiment, was Mitch supposed to have a special role in that experiment? And who made the decision to place him — Stanton? Reinhardt?
Michael
First up as a sort of recounting of the chronology: the CWG "mole" or spy, such as they were over URIEL's history, are presumed to be Bedra ('66-'69), Mystic Kate ('69-'71), Reinhardt ('72) and then Charley ('73), with Jo being a sort of de facto Reinhardt protege, at least when she first came onboard. Mitch was never suspected of having been placed in URIEL by the CWG. But the circumstances of Mitch's move to Livermore in '71 have always been a little... cloudy.
Mitch was retrieved by and transferred to URIEL in February '71, in the wake of the MORNINGSTAR team's wipeout in December of '70. (Whether that was some combination of Marshall and/or Roger, we've never quantified canonically, but those two feel like reasonable possibilities for Mitch's "first contact" with URIEL.) It seems that at that time, URIEL would've gotten its marching orders from Frank Stanton through Archie, so if GP told someone to go down to LA to find this taisher at the center of a bunch of ontological chaos/terrorism, it was through Stanton, yes. So suspicion that the CWG wanted Mitch in URIEL can be considered reasonably high.
Now MORNINGSTAR had worked Mitch for a good six months, trying to bring him onboard with SANDMAN proper after a firefight with Blue Star in Little Armenia in June 1970. It seems like in that latter half of 1970 (which Mitch might remember differently, as there were multiple subduction events concluding with the big one in December), reality in East Hollywood, the Hollywood Hills and the Canyon was a bit fungible, and both Blue Star and SANDMAN were trying to recruit our magic man in the midst of it all.
ISOCLINE as its own distinct operation had dipped out of this whole thing by this point, and it's in the latter half of 1970 that the few fragmentary records of ISOCLINE in the Granite Peak records stop. If there are further records, at this point Marshall is pretty sure they've been purged... or maybe even retro-uncreated?
(I did put all Mitch's LA '68-'70 adventures on the campaign map, btw.)
The CWG files on Mitch's URIEL career mostly come thanks to Reinhardt; a few stray observations on what he's seen Mitch do during the year Reinhardt was the Sixth Man. "I do not believe that Agent Hort has truly been tested yet, pace the events in Los Angeles in 1970," Reinhardt wrote in November 1972. "His taisher powers of observation and tracking History B are well-attested. But I can't say that the man has impressed me in the ways the ISOCLINE files are raving about," Reinhardt conceded. "It's almost as if his potential is lying in wait, patiently, for the events that will test him and perfect his psychic abilities beyond the merely divinatory and violently pyrokinetic. These skills are exceptional, it must be admitted. But there is more to the man, and we will not see it until he is properly tested by circumstance. It won't come in a lab; it will come in the field when he is thrust into situations where he must use his latent abilities to survive. And it will come in situations where he is able to see beyond the A/B dichotomy to something more profound. The ISOCLINE/Blue Star game played with Agent Hort in this schema takes the form almost of a mystical initiation, a metaphor for rejecting the easy binary choices forced on him by his life, his socio-historical context, his maturity and psychic development... the rules of the game, as it were. Hort can break those rules, I can tell; he just needs to be given the permission by his higher self to do so. It certainly won't happen so long as I am eagerly poking my head in every month or so." It was at this moment that Reinhardt proposed to the CWG that he move on from his adjunct role at URIEL and wipe any memory of himself from the operation.