Goodbye, Clodagh
Rob
Regarding the memetic mop up operation: Archie suggests the official explanation for everything that happened should be that the military was conducting a training exercise, including a test of the missile alert system. All perfectly harmless. The quiet rumor we let circulate in and around Dufton, though everybody official will deny it, is that some Tommies got a little overexcited during the exercise, and shot up one of the standing stones with live ammo. People can cluck their tongues at the clumsy military, thoughtlessly damaging a 3000 year old megalith, but we actually want that meme out there: symbolically it says a) the British military defeated Morgan/Long Meg once again; in the tradition of King Arthur and St. George the dragon slayer, England is the land of modern men who put down the monsters of the past, and b) who do so with no more concern than Tommies blowing up dumb old rocks. If possible, SANDMAN archaeologists should replace Long Meg with a replica, but not perfectly. Make the stone look less like the profile of a witch, and leave it lying down, or damaged in some way. "See what happens to those who oppose us."
Then we do our best to suppress reports of weird phenomena but let cranks and wingnuts blame whatever stories we can't suppress on the radome and nefarious military science. Get some crank to say the MOD was experimenting with extremely-low frequency sonics (aka ELF transmitters, the pun is serendipitous). Rather than try to deny anything strange ever happened, better to let those who fixate on that stuff believe it's the result of rationalist Western military science. It's NATO and the MOD who have the power to change the weather and mess with crows, not the witches and druids of old.
Finally, as a longer term project, Archie offers some ideas on co-opting the legend of Arthur, centering Arthur as the king who brought Christianity and order and reason (ie who defeated the Red Kings), downplaying Morgan and her ilk. I was only half joking about Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975). I don't know which of the Pythons could be our catspaw, but a super popular, memetically-sticky retelling of the Arthur myth that: dresses up Arthur up in late medieval crusader garb, leaves Morgan Le Fay out entirely, and makes it all seem incredibly silly kind of ticks all the necessary boxes. (With all respect to Leonard's suggestion, I think hot Helen Mirren is not the most effective way to make people stop thinking about Morgan.) One side effect of SANDMAN's script doctoring may be that every nerd who sees the Monty Python film will feel compelled to quote it incessantly for the next decade. Can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs.
Michael
In the immediate few hours after the reality temblor, the knocking down/apart of Long Meg with mortars seems to have stopped the progress of the ontological fault line slippage. The birds go back to normal, the skies clear, the hills around the vale stop being so redolent of Camelot and the brutal times of 6th century England.
SANDMAN swoops in: a SANDMAN-trained SAS tactical team sets up a cordon/quarantine 12 miles around Long Meg to keep ideas from passing back and forth across the border of the subduction zone. All telecommunications signals are jammed inside the zone; no amateur ham operators can report on what they've seen. A retrieval and cleanup team has been sent to Brougham Castle to remove/destroy all the GRAIL TABLE equipment and quarantine all the records (including both papers and computer tapes). Within 20 minutes of the mortar attack at the stone circle, URIEL is back at the command post in Dufton.
Dufton, luckily, was right on the edge of the presumed subduction zone; when URIEL gets back there, the nuclear alert klaxon is off and SANDMAN personnel have taken over the command post. The body of the kulullû is gone, uncreated now that the vibes are a little better in the area. Clodagh, sadly, is still comatose and paraplegic, but she’s a tough old bird (who had her life extended by her teenage merman lover; one of the British SANDMAN History B boffins calls her a “clear a case of a bean-nighe being created by an encounter with an each-uisge as I’ve ever seen.”)
Archie’s family are in the infirmary; the SANDMAN doctors are being careful with bringing them out of their drugged state. The drugged ammunition from the kulullû's gagkula is pretty familiar to SANDMAN doctors, but they want to be careful as the three of them are civilians and have never been exposed before to History B. They’ll be up and around by dinnertime, the doctor says; that gives Archie some time to think about how he’s going to explain all this missing time.
The nuclear alert was determined to have been a hijacked signal from the early warning radome on the hill; apparently, “Morgen,” if we’re calling the irruptor entity/entities who managed to penetrate GRAIL TABLE that, was able to send a desperate last chance fake nuclear war signal to create psychic chaos and turmoil among the Dufton personnel only (the Anunnaki do not want to nuke the planet they want to take over)—this is likely what caused the (weak) temblor in the vicinity. The theory about the value of GRAIL TABLE to the Red Kings being the eight billion imaginary human beings that Elias gave “belief” to? That seems as likely as any to Archie and the SANDMAN boffins. If the drives had gotten wiped and thus an apocalypse had “rolled up” the simulated world, it could have been much more dangerous.
The British SANDMAN contingent also wants to consult with Archie (and Sophie) about the best set of cover stories for what happened here today. (The death of GRAIL TABLE will be covered up and a series of “appropriate deaths” concocted for the GRAIL TABLE personnel in their personal and professional lives over the next few months: they had been living in isolation here in the North of England for eight months under top secrecy, with not even their families knowing the nature of their assignments.) But for the mortar explosions, the weird meteorological and naturalistic phenomena, even the chaos around the Dufton village with respect to the nuclear warning ... we’ll need some memes.
So with Clodagh very badly permanently disabled by being attached to a kulullû for seventy years or so (before it was un-created, of course), she will be one of the people with memories of what happened around the River Eden before the reality temblor here. Having that kind of … intimate contact with History B for so long will leave permanent physical and mental marks. Jo sits by the old washerwoman's bedside. Clodagh cocks an eye at her. "Aye, I had a feeling I'd be seeing you again before you went back to America."
Leonard
"How are you feeling, Clodagh? I'm sorry we couldn't … we couldn't help you sooner."
Michael
"Help me?" Clodagh's voice croaks. "How did you help me? You took my lover away. You took him away and now I can't even remember his beautiful face anymore. And now I'm lying here too weak to even move my limbs. 'Help,' she says." Tears begin to well up in her eyes, pouring freely all over her wrinkled cheeks.
Leonard
"No, you're right, we didn't help you at all," Jocasta says, swallowing hard. "It won't even do you any good to say we tried, or that I know what it's like to have someone you love disappear. There's no point in pretending any of this had a happy ending. I'm sorry."
Jo will quietly say "Anyway, we'll take care of you. As best we can." She slips off a glove and reaches over to Clodagh's hand, thinking at first to try psychometry or sensitivity. But after a moment, she changes her mind, and just walks out of the room, out of the medical ward, and off the base, far into the hills.