The Legend of Patty Hearst
April 21, 1974 | Sunday
Michael
The SANDMAN takedown of Roger, Cinque, and Wolfe is textbook. LAPD, LASD, and plainclothes vehicles pull up seemingly out of nowhere on this lonely street in late-night Downey, although Roger realizes in the immediate aftermath of their arrival and the arrest, the reason why it seemed like they came out of nowhere was a preparatory series of ikoter rifle shots that dazed the group beforehand. Wolfe and Cinque both crumpled before the first series of blasts of linguistic white noise; it took Roger a little longer to be affected. Bundled into an LASD paddywagon and shackled and hooded while they were dazed, Cinque, Wolfe, and Roger sit on the benches of the wagon; if Roger gets a glimpse of Cinque's hood before he gets sacked up himself, Roger might notice that the interior of Cinque's hood is lined with some kind of metal; a Faraday cage to interfere with any further signals he might receive. Good work on the part of our URIEL-assigned Project commando teams.
As I may have mentioned previously, Lookout Mountain has been pretty much unoccupied by MORNINGSTAR since the big Event in late 1970; it was used by the Air Force and the Atomic Energy Commission for film work right up until '69 with MORNINGSTAR working side-by-side. From '71 to '73 the Pentagon and AEC chaps started moving the film archives out of here to various bases throughout the West: some in LA, some in New Mexico. As the LA SANDMAN team was reconstituted under Jolly West and the various LA personnel from '71 onwards, they used offices at UCLA and in Hollywood for most of their ops, but the good thing about Lookout Mountain is that it's always had secure cells; once vaults for holding top secret atomic test footage, these chambers now can hold up to a couple dozen domestic troublemakers as needed, along with one-way mirror interrogation rooms that used to hold sound and production studios for the Air Force and AEC.
And it's in these cells that Roger, Cinque, and Wolfe find themselves after a 40, 45-minute drive up I-5 and the 101 to Laurel Canyon. All three men are separated from each other, and as Roger sits in the cell counting down the minutes from his being thrown convincingly into this cell, Roger considers how down the hillside at the Whisky and the Troubadour, pretty young LA things are leaving the Hall & Oates and Kool & the Gang gigs while Roger waits a "plausible" amount of time in a concrete basement with a hood on his head: blind, deaf and dumb.
Around what Roger presumes to be 3 am, two hardheaded Sandmen still dressed as LA sheriff's deputies come into the cell and drag Roger out, taking him to the nearby interrogation room. When Roger has his bag and shackles removed, he's sitting across from a fairly cool, calm, and collected John Merrick. The commandos in sheriff's clothing leave the two men along and Merrick says in Danbe, while sliding a pack of cigarettes and a lighter across the table, "Interesting night so far, no?"
—
By mid-afternoon on Sunday, Marshall arrives at Lookout Mountain. The status is pretty much on hold at this point: Donald Cinque DeFreeze and Willie Kahjoh Wolfe of the Symbionese Liberation Army; and Walter Smith, California Highway Patrol and Freeman Calvert, California State Police, both of Governor Ronald Reagan's personal security detail, are all locked up in separate cells at Lookout Mountain and have been for nearly 14 hours. They've all been left incommunicado for this whole time; observation via closed circuit cameras in their cells this whole time note that Calvert and Smith have actually gotten some sound sleep; Wolfe has drifted off a few times... but Cinque has been wide awake ever since he woke up from the ikoter blast in here.
Cinque has been audibly cursing the Man, cursing the government, cursing Colston Westbrook, cursing the doctors at Vacaville, cursing that bitch Patty Hearst, cursing that undercover brother who led Willie and him into this trap, cursing himself for being so gullible, cursing the situation where he thought he could play both sides of this and parlay it into revolution. On some level from these outbursts, it's apparent that he knows he got used by the Man, maybe the whole time was conscious of exactly how it was going down, and curses himself for thinking he could ride that bull into something approaching a real revolutionary event. Underneath all this disorganized ranting, it's apparent to Merrick, Marshall, and Roger that Cinque doesn't expect to leave this weird black site dungeon he's woken up in alive. He had been muttering to himself, "They're gonna use you one last time,
Marshall and Roger can both give me Psychology rolls, Marshall at Psychology-20 and Roger at Psychology-16 (bonuses included for background, knowledge of the receiver in his brain, Roger's having bonded with/observed Cinque up close all weekend, etc.)
Bill
>> SUCCESS by 6
Brant
>> SUCCESS by 8
Michael
Boom. Okay so obviously Roger and Marshall will take slightly different tacks from observing some of the Cinque cell footage, Marshall's more clinical, Roger's more "I hung out with this dude for 48 hours and have a clue as to what he might do now."
For Marshall, it's clear that Cinque realizing that his high-risk set of missions has now fallen apart and he's gotten stitched up has made him borderline psychotic and certainly on a path to a dissociative disorder if he's not there already. Deep down Cinque has been two people since he got operated upon at Vacaville, and now those two sides cannot exist in ignorance of each other's agendas any longer. If this had all happened while he was free to operate out there in the world, who knows what he would have done. Did the planners of all this—Jolly West, OZYMANDIAS, the Owls, whatever agglomeration of the above—know this was possible, or plan it? It's not like long-term studies of the effects of broadcasting memetics through someone's brain have been studied. Ultimately, all those factions saw Cinque as someone expendable, who could be used to accomplish whatever it is they saw as the culmination of all this next Saturday; whether he was crazy or hiding multiple personalities seemed incidental at worst and a fringe benefit at best.
For Roger, viewing things through the lens of having seen Cinque perform so confidently at the social club last night while delivering the Owls' memetics, he's seeing whatever "authentic" revolutionary personality he built over the past few months just completely fall apart. Cinque is acting like his pre-surgery self here: scattered, chaotic, pulled in several directions by the social forces that have manipulated him all his life. When Roger and Donald were talking in the van down from San Francisco about his time doing petty crime back East, about how he couldn't hold a job or stay with his woman, it was one of these rants he uncorked: about how the police, the bosses, the landlords, everyone else drove him to a condition of extremis. Only now it's intensified, magnified, gone into areas of near-mystical import what with the voices in his head. Roger, like Marshall, can see Cinque is near a final breakdown, but Roger's context allows him to see he's been close to the edge like this not just for a couple of years since the surgery, but for a decade or more.
Whatever the case, both of you (and Merrick) can see that if he got loose, he'd be completely unpredictable at this point, torn between seeking revenge on those who have wronged him and a suicidal end somewhere.
Brant
"Well," Marshall says to Roger, smoking, observing Cinque pace around the holding cell from behind a one-way mirror. Marshall's eyes are a bit red; it's unclear when he last slept. "I normally leave this sort of thing to Jo, but what are you thinking? Flip a coin? Rock-paper-scissors?" This is a call-back, Roger knows, to 'Nam: it's how he and Roger would decide who pulls the trigger on someone whose lifespan has outlasted his value.
Bill
Roger looks likes he’s getting no pleasure from his own cigarette. “A man is not a dog that you put one down lightly. But this one… even if West and company are somewhat to blame, he was FUBAR even before they got their hands on him. And he is absolutely a real and present danger. He’s gonna blow. And he’s gonna take out whatever he can as he goes. There’s no point in leaving any of this up to fate. He’s a dead man walking. Only question is how you want the death to look, what helps repair the damage.”
“Do we actually need to have Hearst do it?”
“I don’t think I have it in me to do it any other way than an execution, but that’s not how she’d do it, I think. It needs to look passionate, right?”
Roger’s grim look hasn’t subsided at all even after his attempt to talk it out.
Brant
“Yes. It needs to look … clumsy. Unprofessional. Perhaps that’s a reason for me to do it. And you might be too tall for the trajectory to work. Hm.” He takes another drag off the cigarette. “OK, let’s cuff him, bring him to the loading bay. I’ll do it there and then we can load him into one of our vehicles. Drive him out to the desert, dump him there where someone will find him — some place a little off the beaten path but not so obscure no one could ever find him. We want it to seem like she shot him, messily, in a panic, drove him as he bled out to some … remote location and dumped him in a culvert. Or something. Then some civvy will hopefully find him in a couple days, by which point we’ll have laid the necessary memetic groundwork. Merrick,” he says, having not checked if Merrick’s even in the room, “did we confiscate any side arms off him when we brought him in? If he’s carrying, I should use his weapon. For consistency.”
Michael
"A .38 Smith & Wesson," Merrick says, pointing over at a table set up in the main area of the Lookout Mountain complex laid out with the evidence from both the DeFreeze/Wolfe apprehension and the Calvert/Smith one. The DeFreeze/Wolfe side of the table is totally mundane—car keys, the aforementioned pistols, and other personal effects in evidence bags—while the Calvert/Smith side is entirely more weird and esotetic, including the black duffel bag, the psychotronic broadcast device and its power supply, along with the solid state memetics cartridge. "It matches the FBI description of the weapon Cinque lifted off the Hibernia Bank guard during the heist on Monday. Guard's ammo still in it. Pretty good chain of evidence there."
Bill
Roger nods, then rubs his temple. "Yeah, you could add more to that by giving the police the car... with blood. If you can wait an hour, I'll go steal a car from the right neighborhood, for you to shoot him in, and drive out the body somewhere. Stolen car adds to the desperation story."
"I can abandon the car anywhere else you want the story to lead... like near the border."
Brant
“Yes, good. That’s good. Get us a car. I’m going to think a bit about where we want to leave it for the best impact. We’ll wrap this up once you get back.” A grimness to Marshall’s vibe at that; he always hated being the trigger man. (Mike, can Marshall do a Memetics roll to determine a locale that would be best for depositing the car once we’ve deposited the body? Roger’s idea of “near the border” is a good default but just thinking in terms of any other location that would help give the cover story/mythos an extra punch)
Michael
Marshall's Propaganda skill is slightly better than Expert Skill (Memetics) so I think a Propaganda-17 roll would be a good fit.
Brant
>> SUCCESS by 5
Michael
So I'll just bring in a little excerpt from Marshall's blue-skying in the Revelations thread here as Marshall ponders the locations we could stage this:
(2) If we are going to neuter or counter that meme, what does that look like? Since the initial vector for the meme was Cinque, can we use his coming death as a way to inject a counter-meme into the noosphere? Like, maybe leak to the press that he was a snitch? That would a be good foundation for our later attempt at bringing down Reagan & Co. by tracing this whole fucked up situation back to them, actually. So maybe we should do that? Fold it into the plan we've come up with for Patty, and execute that plan like, tomorrow or the next day so that we have time to disseminate the "Cinque was a snitch and a coward and a rapist and he died at Patty's hand" meme to counter the original meme?
So we've got SANDMAN choppering into the hills above Malibu right now to secure the Nike base that Jolly used for the memetics and programming portions of the Vacaville project for Reagan et al. What if we staged the shooting there, which would lead the mainstream press to ask questions about Jolly's Violence Center that only the underground hippie scientist press had been asking up to this point? The mainstream press is so hungry for Patty developments, that no one would be able to sweep the Violence Center under the rug after that. It solidifies the narrative that Cinque was a snitch (but still gives the Black community an "I knew the feds were up to some shit" narrative, discrediting Cinque's activities and the SLA in the community's eyes) and it starts the process of "tracing this whole fucked up situation back to Reagan & Co."
It's a big, bold move, to be sure, one that's going to burn a Project-adjunct op. But since SANDMAN can easily clean out the Nike base by Tuesday, we can leave whatever incriminating evidence we choose in the base (maybe even staged video surveillance with Patty and Cinque or the other members of the SLA?) and it helps build a bigger memeplex that threatens whatever's left of OZYMANDIAS plus it puts the Owls on watch. Marshall's expert skill in memetics tells him it would be a powerful set of revelations that, if leveraged properly with the right adjunct memetics, could really hit on both the short and long term.
The narrative around why the SLA saga would end there of all places would need to be bolstered with evidence that the Violence Center was responsible for Cinque's violent behavior. Ironically.
Brant
Marshall lingers in the observation closet after Roger leaves to get a car. He finishes his cigarette and stamps out the butt in a nearby tray. Then folds his arms across his chest. The whole time, watching Cinque. After a minute, he says, seemingly to no one, though Merrick stands nearby: "Yes ... but that is very direct. It would raise confusing questions that might undermine the meme's credibility matrix. Plus, staging a crime on a federal military installation is a federal crime ... so then we'd be dealing with the Bureau plus a bunch of hick MPs. Or they'd call the whole thing state privilege and the 'facts' won't see the light of day for 50 years." He's quiet for a bit.
"Here's what we'll do. Stolen car. Slap a GU.SHUB on it. DeFreeze, alive, unconscious. We sedate him and the two boys in the other room. Roger drives DeFreeze in the GU.SHUB car. We follow in a company van with the two boys. We bring them out of the city, about an hour. Desert or hills. Stage a meeting: all three shot, messily, Patty missing, car deposited ... somewhere. Somewhere that it will be found eventually, but not immediately. A logging road. Train tracks. Something like that. Roger will know what looks right.
Merrick, go pick a few of the boys to come with us for protection."
Michael
So the plan is to implicate the two Reagan goons in this? Gets us the "sending Reagan/the Owls a message" part of the Nike base scenario but without the wider exposure, is the idea?
Brant
Yes!
Michael
That's going to allow for a much longer fuse than the Nike base scenario would, Marshall's Expert Skill (Memetics) tells him. It'll take time for the press to ferret out who Calvert and Smith are, and if Reagan's people or the Owls try to scotch the story, they'll have played their hand in such a way that URIEL can see how they're operating on the press.
Willie Wolfe goes back to the safehouse and gets rounded up with the other SLA members?
Brant
Yes, we still need the meme cover story with them about DeFreeze and Hearst having a fight and leaving abruptly, etc. But then let regular law enforcement round them up in a day or so.
Michael
The timeline works really well. Figure everything still converges on Tuesday: the Nike lab is cleared and we decrypt the meme from the cartridge, someone tips law enforcement off about the bodies in the desert and the SLA in Compton, all while Archie can get to making sure Cinque's meme doesn't result in a big event at the Impeach Nixon march on Saturday. Merrick and Andrew's meme/narrative gets dropped while all this is going on (maybe we just feed it to Wolfe and have him come back to the safehouse late Monday/early Tuesday in a loopy state of mind, giving the rest of the SLA enough time to absorb the story before they get raided; it makes sense for us to get the SLA demoralized before we send law enforcement in, so we don't end up with the same shootout/fire that happened in our timeline), then the press picks the meme up, spreading it to a nationwide viewing audience over the rest of the week. By the time the Nixon march happens, the Cinque meme should be neutralized, the Legend of Patty Hearst should circulating, and there should be the start of whispers that something hinky was happening with the Reagan administration with respect to the SLA. The rest of the spring the press can keep the heat on Reagan, slow-burn Watergate-style. Tremendous.
Brant
Right, we want to leave as much of this to mundane authorities as we possibly can, which means just setting a trap and waiting -- the trap here being everything you just laid out. The goal is to spin out an entire mythos using Andy's weird story for the SLA, the circumstances of the death, Patty's disappearance, the unexplained nature of the meeting, the connection to Reagan and his people, the inability of Reagan's people to fully deny any connection (though they will) because there is an actual connection, coupled with a self-explanatory crime scene that occurs in LA county, so it falls to the county PD to deal with it. All of that works on its own, like a Rube Goldberg machine, but it all hangs together well enough that no one questions what started it all.
Michael
(And oh, if we are worried about bullet trajectories et al. when it comes to staging the shooting, we can always get a Sandman who specializes in such things to be part of that team of "a few of the boys" you mentioned above.)
(Interesting how we never had anyone with Criminology or Forensics on the team.)
(Although I suppose, hah, we could bring Ray Mulligan out of retirement for this op.)
("Ray, we need you to shoot a Black Communist and make it look like one of his own people did it." [Ray standing at his front door in a bathrobe smoking a Pall Mall] "....what, again?")
(btw, OZYMANDIAS files confirmed that Ray was never clued-into the CWG; he got moved to San Francisco because he seemed like too much of a brute to appreciate the finer points of the CWG philosophy, so Archie's "35%" estimation turned out to accurate)
(Ray and Marshall never overlapped at URIEL but I bet Roger had to work with him at least once during Roger's undercover days in LA in the latter part of 1969 before Ray retired in early 1970.)
Brant
I actually am gonna have Marshall shoot them, himself, once at the scene. I have a thing I want to try and him murdering three men will help.
Specifically I’m thinking of a scene where Marshall stages the murder scene as a way of creating the meme that gives rise to the legend of Patty Hearst.
No rush, basically we need to be at the kill site; there may be some rolling involved. We'll have Merrick, Roger, Marshall, some SANDMAN commandos to stand guard in case things get out of hand and to do a sweep of the area before anyone gets shot to make sure there are no civvies nearby. DeFreeze, Calvert, and the Third Guy sedated but not unconscious; just loaded up with benzos. Marshall will want this to happen at night.
Michael
Sunday night sounds good for this, that's going to allow for the 24-36 hours for the rest of the plan to unfold. I'd like you to make a Pharmacy-16 roll if Marshall wants to prepare a hypnotic compound that won't show up on a tox screen in an autopsy.
Brant
>> SUCCESS by 3
Michael
Cool, the Doctor's potion is good.
(no, I didn't google "benzo that won't show up in an autopsy" to confirm whether such a thing is possible because I don't need the NSA seeing that shit in my history; consider it SANDMAN TL 7+1 tech)
Brant
Night. Marshall has the commandos stand Calvert and Smith near one another. He has someone put DeFreeze in the driver’s seat of the car that Roger stole, and gives him a side arm — something someone like DeFreeze would use, nothing military or hard to obtain. Then Marshall takes the .38 they confiscated from DeFreeze and gets in the passenger seat of the stolen car. He turns DeFreeze’s face toward him and whispers, “Ma Kālī, hear this man’s story.” Then he’ll try hypnotizing him. He’ll spend 1 Corruption now in case he needs to spend more to succeed.
Michael
Hypnotism-18, with 1 Corruption to open, go for it.
Brant
>> SUCCESS by 0
Haha, that’s a failure right? Marshall’s lack of sleep catching up with him.
Michael
Well, the Corruption luckily gets you out of the automatic failure zone. Cinque, drugged and still in a mentally and psychologically liminal state from his earlier rage-filled breakdown, looks over into Marshall's eyes, Cinque's own dark eyes reflecting the lights of the dashboard. "Doc.... Doctor Ervin?" Cinque squints, trying to focus on Marshall's face.
Brant
(no, I didn't google "benzo that won't show up in an autopsy" to confirm whether such a thing is possible because I don't need the NSA seeing that shit in my history; consider it SANDMAN TL 7+1 tech)
it also doesn’t need to be high tech; the bodies will be out here a few days at least and in ‘74 the tech to test for most drugs post-mortem was really limited.
Well, the Corruption luckily gets you out of the automatic failure zone. Cinque, drugged and still in a mentally and psychologically liminal state from his earlier rage-filled breakdown, looks over into Marshall's eyes, Cinque's own dark eyes reflecting the lights of the dashboard. "Doc.... Doctor Ervin?" Cinque squints, trying to focus on Marshall's face.
Marshall closes his eyes and sighs. He takes one second to center himself. Clear his mind. If he can try again, he will: “Ma Kālī, I beseech you — hear this man’s story.”
Brant
So Cinque is barely hypnotized, it's not a very deep trance, but Marshall can tell that despite his delusions and inability to focus, Cinque is now open to suggestions. Further suggestions will be new Hypnotism rolls vs. his depressed Will.
Michael
(Basically you just got a functional success, rolling "16" instead of 17 thanks to the Corruption.)
Brant
Marshall says, calmly and quietly: “No. It is me, Tania. We are here for a meeting. Remember?”
Michael
Okay, that is gonna be a new Hypnotism-18 roll vs. his Will. Corruption, again, is available.
Brant
Spend another.
>> SUCCESS by 6
Michael
Sluggishly, Cinque haltingly responds to Marshall's pose as Patty. "Tania... sister... comrade. What is... what are we meeting for? What... is our... agenda?"
Brant
Marshall puts his finger to DeFreeze’s lips. “Shh. Listen to my voice, and do as I say. Quiet now. Go inside yourself.” He’ll watch to make sure DeFreeze is “steady” — compliant, this is tricky business, even for himself, and especially on day three of a coke bender — then turns back to face the windshield and closes his eyes.
He says, in a low tone: “I am Patricia Campbell Hearst. I am 19 years old. I am the child of a great dynasty but I am plagued by malaise; adrift, aimless, without purpose. I’ve been abducted, and the men who abducted me claim they are revolutionaries. They abuse me and lock me in a closet. But they also teach me — teach about Marx, about the Vanguard, about the Revolution. It inspires something in me. They think I am a spoiled princess, a trophy, a hostage. But I am my grandfather’s heir — I am smart and savvy. Their teachings do not fall on deaf ears.” He says to DeFreeze, without looking at him: “Cinque, get out of the car and wait for me.”
Michael
Cinque opens the driver's side door, steps out of the stolen vehicle, and walks a few paces away, the purloined military surplus gun loose in his right hand, finger on the butt not the trigger. He looks at the surrounding nighttime desert blankly, blinking dust out of his eyes occasionally.
Brant
Marshall gets out and walks around the corner to join Cinque. He continues: “The other night, DeFreeze — one of my captors — was meeting with his lieutenants, and they trusted me enough now that they left me alone. It was then that I discovered my abductors were not true revolutionaries. I snooped, and I found some papers — notes, scribbles, missives. DeFreeze, sloppy, always on edge, careless — he had neglected to burn these documents, had shoved them in a drawer, not thinking. When he came back to the bedroom I confronted him. What did these documents mean? What was this really about? We fought. He hit me, and he grabbed the documents from me. We fought some more. Screaming. I tried to get away, but he overpowered me and, struggling, threw me in a vehicle. He said I’d fucked up, finding these things he should have destroyed. He was angry and, I could tell, a little afraid. He said we needed to go meet some people, to figure out what to do with me, now that I had seen these documents. We drove for an hour, out into the desert. When we arrived — the middle of nowhere, a few miles off the nearest road — it was late and the wind was whipping everywhere. I could see two men standing a distance away; I did not know them. DeFreeze grabbed the documents from the glove box and got out, barking at me to follow, pointing his gun at me. I followed. A gust of wind — and I saw a shred of paper slip from his fingers and blow away.” Here, Marshall drops a piece of paper on the ground with Jolly West’s office address in LA written on it.
Marshall turns to DeFreeze. “Cinque, these men mean you harm. They blame you for something that isn’t your fault. They are going to kill you for your error — your blameless error. You must kill them first. Now.” Marshall points at the gun at DeFreeze’s side.
Then he points to Smith and Calvert.
Michael
Marshall turns to DeFreeze. “Cinque, these men mean you harm. They blame you for something that isn’t your fault. They are going to kill you for your error — your blameless error. You must kill them first. Now.” Marshall points at the gun at DeFreeze’s side.
Okay, that is a big ask and will require one more Hypnotism-18 roll vs. his Will.
Brant
Spend another Corruption.
>> SUCCESS by 10
Michael
Bang bang.
>> SUCCESS by 4
>> SUCCESS by 6
Cinque grips the Colt M1911A1, flips the safety, takes the time to aim each time, and fires. Two semi-automatic rounds hit Smith and Calvert each, center mass, from thirty or so feet away.
>> 4d6 … 14
>> 4d6 … 11
Brant
(nice shot)
Michael
Smith death check.
>> FAILURE by 2
Smith dies instantly from the two rounds in his chest.
Culvert unconsciousness check.
>> FAILURE by 2
Calvert loses consciousness from the gunshot wounds. Bleeding out will take some time. HT-7.
>> FAILURE by 2
HT-7.
>> FAILURE by 4
Let's see, that puts him at -7 HP. Three more bleeding rolls and then a death check.
>> FAILURE by 2
Now his effective HT is down to 6.
>> FAILURE by 7
Brant
Marshall's not doing anything until a commando has confirmed they're both dead.
Michael
HT-6.
>> SUCCESS by 0
HT-6.
>> FAILURE by 8
HT-6.
>> FAILURE BY 3
Okay, after about 5, 6 minutes, Calvert's breath catches.
Death check, HT-10.
>> FAILURE by 1
After a long, agonizing period of his lung whistling and collapsing, Freeman Calvert dies.
Brant
Marshall puts a hand on DeFreeze's shoulder. "The men argued. They accused DeFreeze of fucking up. Raised voices. One of the men implied that they'd need to kill me now. While they were distracted, I tried to make a run for it. The men yelled, barked at me to stop, then I heard several gunshots. I stopped. I thought, for a moment, they had shot me. This was it. But with a shaky breath I patted myself down. I was fine. I turned and saw DeFreeze, holding his pistol. Now was my chance."
Marshall takes the .38 out of his waistband and turns DeFreeze to face him. He wraps one arm around his shoulders like he's hugging him, and with the other, he shoots DeFreeze in the gut, twice.
Michael
So given his helplessness through hypnosis, that's an automatic pair of hits. Let's see what damage is on a .38 S&W.
I figure a shot upward from the gut at the right level that Patty would be standing at would bounce around inside the body cavity, so we'll call it a vitals shot. Vitals (-3): The heart or lungs (from the front) or the kidneys (from behind). Certain attacks can target the vitals for increased damage. Increase the wounding modifier for an impaling or any piercing attack to x3. So that's gonna be 4d6 damage total from two shots, then multiply the whole mess by three.
Brant
>> 4d6 … 14
Michael
42 damage brings him down to -30 HP. I got some rolls to make.
HT-11 death check.
>> FAILURE by 1
Well, that's it. Donald DeFreeze is dead. His lifeless body drops to the ground, the pistol loose in his hand.
Want to give me a quick Fright Check, success on a 13 or less?
Brant
>> SUCCESS by 7
Michael
Steady as a rock.
Brant
Marshall steps back as DeFreeze collapses. "He either tried to grab me again and we struggled and I shot him. Or I deceived him — went to hug him for saving my life, him unaware I had pocketed one of his pistols earlier. It took a minute to calm down. I had killed those two people at the bank, yes, but this felt different."
Marshall walks from body to body, checking them for wallets and IDs. He leaves everything on them except any cash or jewelry that could be easily pawned; if we'd previously confiscated their IDs, he puts those back in their wallets as well. "I knew I'd need cash, so I took whatever I could find off them. And I would need the car, but I couldn't drive it for long; likely, DeFreeze stole it. I grabbed the papers DeFreeze had brought, and which the men had argued with him over, and got in the car. Then I drove far and fast, until I found a place I could abandon it. Someplace unobtrusive. Someplace where no one will find it for a while."
He looks around to find Roger, and points at him. "Off you go."
(What this whole vanity scene is supposed to do is set up a crime scene so that any investigator who surveys it will put the pieces together and come up with the narrative Marshall just unfurled. He's leaving puzzle pieces for someone to piece together, and in that way, hopefully giving birth to the Legend of Patty Hearst, the meme.)
Michael
Acting-21.
>> SUCCESS by 7
Well, the acting and verbalizing out loud anyway was convincing.
Bill
Since leaving a clear trail with treads is actually desired, Roger will peel out. He lets out a little of the horror into his driving, which might help mimic her inexperience with the car. Before he can stop himself, he finds himself following Marshall’s example, and saying aloud, “I’m not used to this car. And I’m upset from what I just had to do.” And that much is true.
Roger drives southeast on back roads for some hours, until he gets to a location he picked on a map: a gulch with a steam bed at the bottom. He drives the car right down into the base of the valley, by the trickle of the stream. He takes some steam water and mud and dirties any traces of his own boots or his grip on the wheel. He then walks down the middle of the stream for a mile before bushwhacking back up to the road. He does his best to leave no tracks.
Michael
(I did assume we were doing a good job of sweeping away shoeprints at the murder site, etc.)
Bill
At the first true crossroads he reaches, Roger stops, and gives a little prayer to Kalfu. He doesn't call him up directly; this isn't a deal, but just prayers. He prays that this wickedness just done is of Kalfu's domain, and will be taken up by Him. Deeds done in darkness, but so that more men see freedom with the dawn.
Michael
(It occurs to me that Roger has largely been spared the nasty gritty wetwork of our time jump between December and April (that's wholly been Jo and maybe Dave if we need to retcon/fill some of that in later), given Roger's involvement with advanced cheval training and then the surprise irruption of The Phreak. So this being his first real "cleanup" operation means at the very least a nod to Kalfu (and thus a tacit acknowledgement that somewhere further down that road, les cousins du cimetière are still keeping a hungry eye on Roger) is a good idea.)
Brant
(I did assume we were doing a good job of sweeping away shoeprints at the murder site, etc.)
Yeah, I omitted a lot of small, obvious things. Like Marshall makes sure that Calvert and Smith both have handguns on them, maybe one of them missing a bullet or two. He wears gloves throughout; he’ll burn the clothes he was wearing. He’ll also keep the .38 and later have it sent to Livermore secure storage — the safest thing to do would be to destroy it, but it may have later symbolic significance that we can use. And he might scatter one or two more extremely oblique clues that lead back to Jolly and the Owls, to be used as additional memetic fertilizer for Archie when he ultimately designs and unleashes the meme for real.
He will also leave the tire tracks from the van that he, Merrick, and the commandos took — an implication of a “third man,” the “person” who either drove with Calvert and Smith, and managed to flee, or who dropped them off and left before DeFreeze arrived.
Michael
Merrick and Andy actually have to work to a pretty close deadline with these meme, seeing as how it needs to get designed, piped into Willie Wolfe, and then given time to spread thoroughly to the SLA before the hammer comes down on them, but they have good source material to work with from the URIEL all-team call on Sunday morning.
It's Merrick's job to actually work with the source code, and Andy's job to make the narrative compelling, going off the notes that Marshall and Jocasta proposed on that call. So let's see what this will look like:
To evaluate a target audience, roll against Anthropology, Area Knowledge, Current Affairs, Psychology, Research, or Sociology, at the GM’s option. Crafting the campaign is a Propaganda roll.
Our audience is two-fold, honestly.
Firstly, it's got to be compelling to the SLA to take hold and address their own internal tensions and politics; second, once it gets really loose into the media memesphere, it needs to be compelling to the public, and that includes everyone: conservatives, liberals, radicals, men and women, Black, white, what have you. The central aspects of the narrative are that Patty can be whatever people want to see in her: a woman brutalized by a man, a white woman brutalized by a Black man, an innocent heiress taken in by commies, a true free feminist radical who couldn't put up with Cinque and Wolfe's misogynistic jive.
So Andy will roll Current Affairs (Politics)-18 to analyze the audiences, that very neatly covers, well, everyone and everything here. And Merrick will roll Propaganda-18 (he will likely open up to Corruption here for 1 point). The average of their margins of success will become the meme's max Power.
Michael
Andy.
>> SUCCESS by 10
Merrick.
>> SUCCESS by 10
Okay, max Power is a 10. Let's put that aside for a moment.
The meme implantation in Wolfe is going to be a Brainwashing roll by Merrick (figure he has a Brainwashing-17) since we're just hammering it into his head. But there's also going to be the moment the Legend of Patty Hearst hits the newspapers. Merrick may want to consult with Archie and Marshall on this one; we could very very easily have the interrogations leak from the FBI to a journalist once the SLA has been apprehended and the gunfight site has been found by investigators. Verisimilitude is the watchword here, but given how crazy the media has been for prurient details on this case so far, it makes a lot of sense for us to choose a key journalist to leak the info to from Padden and Hall (who will likely fly down to LA as part of the FBI HEARNAP team once the safehouse is raided).
Anyway, here's the roll to get the Power 10 meme (max Power seems to make the most sense here, since we want the base elements of this meme to last for years, decades) into Wolfe's head. Merrick again will tap into Corruption for 1 point to avoid flubbing.
Merrick implant meme Brainwashing-17 (with Corruption):
>> SUCCESS by 8
Not a crit, so effective meme Power is 11.
(amongst the SLA)
Okay, next on my agenda is describing the nature of the meme that was in the broadcast device tuned to Cinque's implant. By Tuesday afternoon Pacific time, as the news is starting to break that the SLA are believed to be in Los Angeles and one of their number, Willie "Kahjoh" Wolfe, was believed spotted out on the streets of South Central Los Angeles ranting and raving, the data off of the cartridge from Calvert and Smith's broadcast device is decoded and delivered to Archie (whether he's back in LA by Tuesday or still at Shasta), to Marshall (whether he's still in LA or back in San Francisco) and to Sophie at Livermore. And what the hell, to Andrew at Venture Toons as well. Here is the summary:
The memetic scripts that were being transmitted to Cinque's implant were, again, wrapped up in rhetoric about the various gangs of South LA banding together to march on downtown Los Angeles alongside the Impeach Nixon march, which will likely be predominantly white liberals and young people. The scripts on the data cartridge themselves do resemble computer programming in that they contain a bewilderingly large array of "IF... THEN"-type statements—flowcharts, essentially—for what Cinque was to speak on depending on the feedback he got from his audiences. The assumption to all these memetic messages was that his audiences would be predominantly Black, male, and young. The memetics would not work as well if used on white radicals (like the SLA), or Chicano gang members.
Rob and Brant, I'm going to have Archie, Marshall, Sophie, and Andrew each make Expert Skill (Memetics) rolls (Archie: 18, Marshall: 16, Sophie: 16, Andrew: 16) to get more information out of this rich vein of data ("its Power, its purpose, its etiology, and its designer’s characteristic techniques"), but on the most basic level these memetics are meant to instill in the audience a sense that "violence must be done, justice must be achieved for Watts and for what happened in 1965, and it doesn't matter who gets hurt outside the community because none of them are innocent."
Brant
>> SUCCESS by 5
Rob
>> SUCCESS by 9
Michael
Well, Sophie and Andy also both only succeeded by a few, so it's gonna be Archie, fittingly, who digs deep into the source code to find out what's going on here.
The computer program-like structure of the complicated source code within the cartridge's meme gets Archie thinking immediately of the kind of work the Violence Center was purported to be up to: relegating human beings into the role of subroutines in a society-spanning program. The purpose of the subroutine here is clearly to demonstrate that Black Americans are not to be trusted because of an inherent tendency to violence and "chaos." If Jolly West didn't program this meme personally, he definitely had some of his CWG memeticists do so (prior to ALLOCHTHON). The touches in the source code reflect the CWG's use of "off-the-shelf" SANDMAN memetic packages, just as they did in the occult journals and periodicals to recruit good trustworthy psis who could have their egos catered to. Everyone Has A Role In The System, the CWG memeplex says, and it's clear what the young Black men in Watts and Compton are "supposed" to do. Archie sweats a little bit, thinking back to Charlie and the anger Archie held against himself (was it really against himself?) after he couldn't get young Charlie to the emergency room after the bee sting during the Watts uprising. Maybe memetics like this were out there already, in the aftermath of Watts. Or earlier. If everything that happened in the decade since—Detroit, Newark, Memphis, Washington DC—was an Owl/CWG memetic plot, not just the riots but the white middle-class cold-heartedness to Black suffering that followed, meant to accelerate social collapse (CWG) and solidify the rule of the men at the top (the Owls), it would make a lot of sense. Archie's never been surer that the CWG and the Owls were working together closely: maybe in the sense of the Owls, knowing how fleeting control over reality could be, indulging the CWG in making them an "escape hatch" if the Owls' control over reality and society ever wavered.
But Archie decides to go even deeper. Because there are frustratingly disparate elements in the source code that don't quite match up with the CWG meme style, something like an... asymmetry, a rough spot, like a piece of grit around which some of the memetic elements cohere. And deep in there, Archie realizes that there is a part of the "it doesn't matter who gets hurt outside the community" element directed at Cinque (and whichever Black gang members he would manage to bring over to his side) personally. Luckily, Roger got Cinque out of there before Cinque won over and managed to supplant the white SLA with Crips and Bloods from the neighborhood (and sowed suspicion in their hearts by demonstrating there was a snitch amongst them). Because this little anomalous message for Cinque and his putative lieutenants was one designed to liquidate the SLA. "Let them be the sacrificial lambs," the deep meme says. "Give up the comfortable white pretenders to be arrested or killed." A perfect way to make a public example of Willie, of Nancy, of Bill and Emily... and of Patty. Kill two birds with one stone: impugn the Black community, and stop white radicals from ever trying anything like this again.
There's one more thing that sort of nags at Archie as he looks at the frightening implications of all these memetics and the idea of SANDMAN/the Owls/the CWG engineering Black riots. Thinking about that summer of rage in '67, when Archie was at his lowest point, a few months before SANDMAN came to his doorstep with their own Faustian offer. He thinks back to shooting the breeze back in October with Morris Parks about what he did for the Project back in Detroit in 1967. When he talked about being out in the streets during the riots trying to find Irruptors that were feeding off the death energy of those killed in the uprising. "The entirety of East Grand Boulevard is burning down and I gotta walk around peeking into burning buildings looking for bull-men. One side of the government is trying to shoot my Black ass and the other side is paying me bonus money to call in artillery strikes on demons."
The idea of SANDMAN (or the Owls, or the CWG, what have you) priming the pump for these riots as an excuse to ferret out and eliminate (or even get readings and research on) Irruptors? Not so far-fetched after the hideous events of last October. And not so far-fetched to think they want this Impeach Nixon riot to end in blood for the same purposes. Of course, this time around the difference is that there's no CWG to shepherd the "experiment." Just us. And the Owls, Archie thinks. (edited)