URIEL Connects the Dots
Jocasta: Research on the La Cienega Strangler
Jocasta's first task is making sure she gets the chronology straight here. The La Cienega Strangler struck nine boys between 1959 and 1961. All the victims were white males between the ages of 8 and 12, all sexually assaulted, all murdered, all taken from lower to lower-middle class areas of LA. Seven white victims, two Black. The first five victims' bodies were found dumped in dumpsters and trash cans all along the southern end of La Cienega Boulevard. LAPD didn't realize they had a "serial" killer until the third vic was found; the killer struck sporadically over late '59, '60, but picked up pace right around the election in late '60. That's when the general warnings to parents in South LA finally went out; too late to save five of the nine kids. Now Jo finds no record of Pat Price being quoted or involved in any of the newspaper articles; as a member of Burbank PD he was a little out of the general South LA jurisdiction of the crimes. What eventually led the cops to the perpetrator, Robert Philip Bradley, a grip at Paramount Studios as mentioned, was his use of a trademark strangulation weapon: heavy-duty microphone cord. Detectives started asking questions at the movie and TV studios, despite the studios' clear desire to keep this all hushed up. Bradley was shot in his apartment in Inglewood in April 1961 as cops were serving a warrant: according to the papers and case files he shot at the cops but what Jo knows about cop shop, it could've been a throwdown piece the PD planted so they could extrajudicially take care of this kind of pervert killer. The more sensationalistic papers and crime rags hyped up Bradley's shitty apartment, a "Satan lair" where "diagrams dedicated to the Prince of Darkness" were painted in red paint (or was it blood? the rags asked rhetorically) all over the walls. Jo's interlibrary request to get some of the more lurid, more photo-heavy and -dependent crime rags from Berkeley libraries leads to a second-tier crime photo mag's pair of blurry police forensic shots of Bradley's apartment. While the "Satanic" diagrams on Bradley's walls don't completely resemble fully-formed Anunnaki glyphs, they are... more than a little reminiscent in their design and geometry. (As mentioned the other night, Archie and Roger, both living in LA at the time, ages 30/14 respectively, both vaguely remember the bare outlines of the case but any of this detailed information, either from the newspapers, crime rags, or PD files, is entirely new to them.)
Marshall: Savoir Faire (Academia) on SRI and Stanford
Marshall's examination of the SRI staff listings, trying to nail down the couple dozen staff members who also currently hold tenured or research positions at Stanford after the 1970s split and divestment lands straight and square in the midst of the military-industrial-higher education complex: a lot of physics, math, and chemistry profs, with a scattering (three or four) of social sciences faculty. On the physical sciences side of things, none of the names rings a bell with Marshall. On the social sciences side, there are a couple of psychologists and sociologists he's familiar with: one of these, M. N. Srinivas, a researcher into the caste system in contemporary India, had his office at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (and 20+ years of sociological research) burned down in the spring '70 protests; he's been given a sinecure and funding at SRI since that to complete his coming book on the topic. And then there's Dr. Willis H. Harman.(all the knowledge in this Wikipedia entry up to '73 would be pretty widely known by both Marshall and Viv and have come out in great detail in Marshall's research.) Harman holds a faculty appointment at Stanford (where he teaches a very popular graduate seminar called "The Human Potential"). He's called a "futurist" but heads the SRI "Educational Policy Research Center" which does what it says on the tin: it's about how to educate kids in the next few decades to help them cope with a radically-changing world. The EPRC has released no final reports yet but occasionally a Stanford grad student will put out a paper under their auspices.
Genevieve: Politics on SRI and Stanford
So given Viv's overall knowledge of futurists and faculty members at Bay Area institutions who are doing "future" work of the ilk seen at SRI, Harman is someone she's more than familiar with. But in terms of human dynamics and politics, it's the SRI/Stanford rupture that interests her. The kids in '70 were very much wielding every weapon in their arsenal to get Stanford U. to divest from every aspect of the war machine they were supporting during that turbulent summer: SRI, classified Defense funding, the draft and ROTC on campus, increased admissions of and programs focusing on minorities and women, etc. And that didn't just include non-violent sit-ins and protests. Molotovs were thrown and they did scare the bejeezus out of the faculty: (this article written by Provost Lyman in his book from the '00s is a good survey of how The Man felt about the spring of '70). But Viv sits here now three years later at Livermore and realizes that all that protest, all that foment, and even the violence didn't end up changing much. The funding from Stanford has been cut off from SRI, and there are no "official" connections between the two institutions, and Stanford and SRI have both gotten a fair bit, well, "Weirder" in the past 3 years, if Harman is any indication, but the upshot politically is that the separation is really all just in name, not in fact. Which means there are probably people at Stanford who still have a vested interest in SRI's progress. And as seen in the Lyman piece above, which is the opinion of a member of the Establishment, all the reforms that the kids pushed for have been... mutated, recuperated, changed into a kind of brittle polite professionalization, with employee handbooks and vision statements promising "diversity" and "divestment" just a way of cloaking the Real Mechanisms of power beating under the surface. (I'd say that Viv's new Detect Connections power, while not explicitly used during this research/politics roll, give Viv a tinge of the real story under the press releases and "reforms": Stanford U. and SRI are still pretty much one and the same.
Archie: Hidden Lore (History B) on the Bay Area since February
Golly, a lot has happened in the Bay Area the last five months since Frank wrote that letter to the Examiner. Sophie used to keep an informal index of all the irruption sites, subduction zones, and other Weird happenings that had occurred since URIEL kicked off in '69, and now Archie has taken to putting those sites on a regular old road map he picked up at a gas station when he first moved to San Francisco four years ago and that was in the Dodge's glovebox. (It's the one from our Locations page header, attached here.) It's Archie's job to look for patterns of History B infection in populations but hey, he's also pretty well-versed in how History B works in practice in our world physically, so what do we see now? Well, the irruption/subduction events cause "dips" in the reality of History A; sometimes they smooth out over time, with less concentrated belief or blood or buildings in the vicinity. With Altamont in our backyard and Roger there regularly, Archie feels pretty good about the safety level there. San Francisco and Oakland, well, hey, they're very sticky, dense population centers; the ontological ground's a lot more mutable just due to all the believing agents living, working, and playing there but things seem to be holding stable. Besides, Pat Price's interest seems to lie completely within Silicon Valley, right? And it's a strange mix of vacant lots, undeveloped properties, and current computer industry giants. URIEL hasn't seen a lot of action in the Valley the last four years, and Pat's interest might or might not be History B- related, of course; Roger's insistence that it's all about "real estate" since Price bought his Christmas tree lot a little over a year and a half ago (October '71) and Price's ability to see the future makes Archie initially think, well, this is just a get-rich-quick scheme: buy up important properties before the buildings get built in Silicon Valley as computers get bigger and more important. But there's something about the pattern that Archie can't get out of his head. Something nagging at him. He tries drawing lines with pins and string between the various sites, looking for fracture lines that could send part of Silicon Valley into History B, but nothing seems to click. Archie's pretty sure that Pat's plan isn't to get the right buildings built on those vacant lots to bring Those Who Provide back, but gosh, Archie would really love to know exactly what Pat saw on those three vacant lots. That would give him a lot more certainty.
Roger: Area Knowledge (San Francisco) on Archie’s map
Roger can be consulting with the Boss as he draws his lines on his cork-mounted, creased AAA road map and muses out loud. Roger knows that the land on those vacant lots is CHEAP: that waterfront land in north Menlo Park especially is all wetland. Waterfront land is of course at a premium but this is the South Bay! So much of the South Bay economy is like Frank's dad's old digs up in Pittsburg: zoned industrial and given over to shipping and receiving and portage. Polluted water, not places you'd exactly want to unwind or plunk down a research park campus. You'd have to be daffy or crazy to build anything big on that spot. Same thing, honestly, with the Christmas tree lot; that whole area would need to be completely re-zoned to be valuable for a private investor and that requires real connections in county and city government. The computer and hardware makers in this area are absolutely industrial, but more and more of Silicon Valley is becoming residential or commercial real estate. People want to work near where they live and vice versa, after all. That second lot in Cupertino, a rare oasis of rurality in the rapidly growing Silicon Valley, is full of apple orchards, and is currently set to be turned into tract housing, like much of rural Livermore has been the past few years, and it's undeveloped and in the hands of a real estate developer right now. But surrounding that patch of arable land are tons of heavy industrial semiconductor and circuit makers. Bad lands. Those apples are probably doomed anyway thanks to industrial leakage and pollution. As are any houses that eventually pop up there.
Team Meeting
Rob
Archie's talking to Roger as they look at the map but anybody else should feel free to insert themselves in the scene - I assume we're talking in the URIEL common area and it's not a private conversation.
Archie stares at the pins and lines on the map. (As Mike says above) Something is nagging at him but he's not (yet?) seeing the pattern. He shakes his head. "You put enough lines on any map it starts to look like you're drawing pentagrams." He says to Roger, "So you think Price--Cohen, sorry, I keep doing that--is using his, what should we call it, 'foresight' to buy up valuable real estate. Or rather, cheap real estate that he believes is going to become valuable?" "I like that. It's refreshingly mundane, you know? But I don't quite understand the scheme. If the South Bay gets more developed, sure, he'll make some money as property values increase. But let's say IBM comes along next year and wants to build a computer factory on his Christmas tree farm. Set aside the zoning issues and all that. It's not like he can hold them hostage for that particular spot, is it? If he asks them for a million dollars, won't they just buy the next lot over instead? ... unless IBM is the one drawing pentagrams, ha ha." "I wish we knew what it was that Cohen saw on each of those lots."
Bill
"Well, boss, I think he might be trying to get markers from a bunch of side bets to cash in on big with the bookies later, see?" Seeing Archie doesn't see, Roger tries to explain. "Sorry, it's just this all sounds like gambling, when you've got a sure thing. Lemme see if I can translate. Let's say Cohen knows some gambler, err, company, probably small fry now, is gonna hit big on a bet later. You'd want to make a side bet with that guy to get his marker, errr, umm, stock, in the company? Yeah, stock. Then when the small fry makes it big, you've got his marker to cash in... so, like the little company beats the big ones, they buy out the marker... err, stock, and you make big money. You pull in the small fry with small side bets they can't turn down when they need cash, so, that'd be like selling them the land not for cash, but a marker, like stock. Maybe Cohen knows the little companies coming up, wanting land. He knows where they want to build. So he'll take stock as part of the land sale, making a deal that irresistible to a small company, then later that stock will be worth a lot. Or even power over those companies later, a seat at the table."
"I don't think IBM would give him stock, unless they really thought they were getting the better of him in the deal. Those guys are the house, and the house always wins. I think he's holding out looking for some smaller fry willing to make side deals."
"If you can see the future, you don't buy IBM today: too pricy. You buy the IBM that's just starting, so whatever the next IBM is gonna be. If you could see the future, you'd know who that was, just from reading their name off the signs on the building. Find the company with the fanciest campus you see that you've never heard of, with the land for sale cheap now, and you could make a mint."
"Of course, the weird thing for us is that the guy ends up making the future, helping the company get the land cheap. What if he's picking winners and losers and that's changing the future?"
Rob
"Gosh, Roger: have you ever considered a career in finance? That makes a lot of sense! It's not exactly fair play, what he's doing, but I can't see much that's sinister about it." "It is funny, thinking about whether he's just seeing the future or whether he can affect it. Makes me think of that song, 'I Am My Own Grandpa.'" Archie stares at the map some more, and a different thought strikes him. "The La Cienega Strangler. Ugh. You were living in L.A. back then, weren't you? But you must have been only a kid. Do you remember any of that?"
Leonard
As if on cue, Jocasta passes by the office with a small stack of freshly run-off memos. "Oh, good morning, gentlemen," she says. "I was just bringing this to everyone. A bit of a dead end, I'm afraid -- sorry about that."
Bill
Roger looks up from his copy and whistles. “You’d never convince Abuela it wasn’t occult in nature. Though, thinking about it, she was probably happier to worry about Satanists than anything sexual.”
“I never knew the sex angle, but man did I worry about the occult one. Cops got him, huh? Never one to back the Man pulling extrajudicial murders, but I’m mixed on that one. And the Little Rogelio inside doesn’t really believe he’s dead.”
“There are some freaky legends in L.A. among the kids on this, no shit. Maybe those died out when we grew up, but I doubt it.”
Leonard
"I heard some chatter that the FBI is working on some kind of comprehensive psychological framework for this kind of mass murderer," Jocasta says. "But what I'm struggling with -- what I'm struggling with in this whole investigation -- is, well, why it's our business. That connection, to Charley or to our work, I'm just not making it. Not yet."
"I mean, if -- if -- those blurry symbols on the wall really are some kind of glyph, and if our man Fred was able to somehow see them with his power, and if they somehow infected him...if it's an attempt to create some kind of meme about mass murderers? Or something? I guess that would be something. But I can't really connect those dots, and it seems like a bit of a stretch even to me."
Rob
"No, no. I think you have it right in your memo, Jocasta. (And thank you for this - nice work.) This isn't some Jack the Ripper thing; I don't expect there's any connection between those murders and our assignment, other than the effect they had on, ah, 'Cohen.' It makes perfect sense to me: He's a police officer at the time of the murders. He's not involved in the investigation, but he has a vision or a premonition about a child's death... and he does nothing. He tells himself he's just seeing things or that nobody would believe him. Which is, after all, the reasonable thing to do! But then when they catch the Strangler, or kill him, Cohen realizes his vision was all too real. Think what that would do to you! Children killed, in this sordid, horrible, way... and you believe you could have prevented it? That... that could unravel a man entirely. His whole career since looks like an effort to atone." Archie drops into a fairly long silence.
Then he switches tack. "I'm just trying to think about the bigger picture. Frank Stanton asked me the other day, 'what ... is going on in the Bay Area right now?' And my daughter said last night, 'people are angry.' We've seen more action - more History B - in the last six months than in, gosh, five years before that. Is something going on? Here?" He gestures at the map, but at the whole map, not just the quasi-pentagram he's drawn over Silicon Valley. "Remind me: How long have each of you lived in the Bay Area? Jocasta, you went to Berkeley, right? Roger, when did you move up here?"
Leonard
"Lived here my whole life, chief," Jo says with a slight blush of pride. "Grew up in Sausalito, went to school across the bay." She looks at the map and her mood shifts. "It didn't used to be like this." "When I was younger...I mean, I was never a hippie or anything like that, but I believed in human potential. I still do. Even when I was adrift for a few years, even when I found out about the Red Kings...I studied humanistic psychology at Berkeley. I believe in perennialism. And, after all, this place -- California generally, the Bay specifically -- this is where all that stuff, the hippies, the Aquarians, whatever you want to call it in aggregate, the idea that humans were on the verge of some great transformation in a positive way, was born. But then...what's the name of that crank who writes for Rolling Stone? He said the wave broke and the water rolled back." She looks again at the map as if she's trying to solve a puzzle. "Remember, Archie, when we talked before about how it might be the case that whoever put that chip in Charlie's head, whoever...made her what she is, might be trying to birth something new in the world? To create a new kind of life, in an occult sense -- a becoming? I think Marshall thinks that way too. And I know I got a little loose with the mystical argot, but I talked about how what influences you work on a child to shape that, it has a lot to do with whether they become something benevolent or something malignant." "Maybe this place...and, again, I know this is loopy-sounding, but there's a lot of magic in this place...maybe it was supposed to be a birthing ground for something great. And for whatever reason, by accident or fate or intervention, it didn't happen. It was stillborn. But the ground was still fertile, and now someone, we can probably guess who, is trying to use it to give birth to something darker." She sighs. "I know it's not much. It's not a goddamn bit of practical, just me indulging my occult side and, yes, my paranoia. But honestly, I've been thinking about it since Charlie joined us, and I can't otherwise make any sense of this thing. It's all I got right now. Dead ends and crazy theories."
Rob
"I don't think it's loopy, Jocasta -- or, it doesn't matter if I think it's loopy. If enough people think San Francisco is magic, then it might as well be magic, memetically speaking. Giving birth to something new, that's San Francisco's brand, isn't it? California's where you come to reinvent yourself, and that was true long before the Summer of Love." "The Spanish, the Bear Republic, the '49ers... You've seen the city flag? A phoenix rising from the ashes. Folks think it comes from the city rebuilding after the Earthquake of 1906. But the flag was designed in the 19th century. It had happened so many times already, fire and rebirth was already our brand. Gold Rush San Francisco burned to the ground in the 1850s, everything that didn't belong to Stanford or Hearst. Then the Barbary Coast days, all those burlesque halls and opium dens. But they get flattened in the great quake, the Irish and Italians move in, and that's a whole different San Francisco. Now along come the beatniks and the flower children." "But it's never all the way destroyed or all the way reborn. Each new version of the city gets laid on top of the last... like a chalkboard that's never washed clean. I guess maybe that's true of any city, but memetically, all this birth and rebirth, fire and earthquakes: that's one strong brand identity. Especially if the rest of the country is looking to San Francisco to tell it what's new, to see the 'New Age' and how it's going to turn out. That makes it valuable real estate in the meme game."
Bill
"I don't know about potential much, Jo, but maybe that's from being told my whole life I don't got any, or only so much. Folks talk about SF having potential, sure, and that it's dying or twisting. I don't know. I didn't get up here until SANDMAN moved me here in '70. Honestly, at the time, I wasn't drawn here, like a lot of kooks are. I was just happy to get away from L.A. You want to talk about a place that's dying? I think L.A. died in the Watts Riots, and it's just shuffling along like a zombie. That city has always been kinda undead. Anywhere would seem alive outside it."
"Does a people's dream dying cause this stuff? Then we should be really worried. You know, Archie, Jo, y'all are good people, and all. You try harder than most, so that's something. But do you get the big dream that's dying right now? It started dying long before the Summer of Love was over. You know, I graduated high school in '63, and that summer was the March and Reverend King's speech. I really believed then. I got it, the American Dream: it was for me too. I signed right up to serve my country that summer. Sure, part of that was getting out of L.A. And I did; I wasn't there for the riots. But so much was that I believed I could make it, and America was worth fighting for. But man, that's a really hard sell this days. A lot of Black people, Brown people, poor people-- this past ten years was the crush. Feels like one more blow, and it's all over."
"There's a lot of anger out there-- you saw it in Oakland. Anger just tears apart the closest thing. And that brings fear, and people wanting security at any cost. I don't see a way this SRI stuff and how Cohen ties into that. I don't see them pouring gas on that fire. So yeah, seems like a sideshow to me. But then, I don't want some opportunistic lucky white bastard driving another neighborhood into the ground. Because that could be more fuel for the fire."
Rob
When Roger talks about L.A. and the Watts riots, Archie looks momentarily stricken, but when he turns to Dr. King's dream and the American Dream, Archie's rapt--though he's more pleased about the insight than he is sharing Roger's heartbreak. "Yes, good, good! What's that poem? 'A dream deferred is like a raisin in the sun,'" he misquotes. "Is that the through-line of everything that's been happening lately? Dreams of rebirth or revolution disillusioned, disappointed, broken promises, the future not living up to the picture on the box? Moore and Mansa, the Bobby Kennedy posters, the sci fi buffs at the St. Francis wishing Krane's books were real... And the Red Kings or their servants always worming their way in to that disillusionment. 'Dis-illusion,' heh."
Leonard
No hurry obviously, and I don't even know if this needs to be a scene, but the last lead Jocasta wants to chase down is SRI's clean rooms -- when they got them, what they do with them, if anything makes theirs different from other ones, etc. I dunno if it'll yield anything, but it's the last thread she's got to pull at.
Rob
So what I want over the next few days (in game days, that is - no pressure on replying to this in real-time!) is for Archie to do some esmological analysis to really try to get at this bigger picture question: Why (besides being protagonists in an RPG) are we seeing so much History B action right now, especially in the Bay Area, and, importantly, what can we do about it? Is there an esmological fix, some positive action we could be taking, instead of, as Mitch put it, just playing Anunnaki Whack-a-Mole? I think the appropriate scale for that kind of analysis is the Bay Area. Like, I could imagine Archie coming up with an even bigger picture answer, like deciding the USA needs a "Morning in America" cultural revanchism after the upheavals of the 60s and 70s, but I'm more interested in actions - whether it's memetics, esmology, or messing with History B - that URIEL could actually take in the time horizon of the game. (Hey, maybe this is how Archie gets thinking about a new program on KQED.) As for how he actually does it, I'm open to ideas. Right now I'm leaning towards a conversation with Enki (who gives him a bonus to Esmology and Hidden Lore (History B), the two skills that seem relevant here), just have to figure out what that would look like. But if that scene would be too strange Archie could just hole up in his office with charts and graphs, or do some spitballing with Krane, as I'd originally floated, or somehow fold it in to the soiree with Terence McKenna. I also want Archie to have the conversation with Mitch about proactively looking for History B, and to help look in to any SRI/Stanford/Charley connection, but the esmology is top of mind right now.
Michael
This is all very cool stuff for me to sleep on (and dream about?) tonight! I almost feel like all those ideas for how to do Esmology are all the same thing in a weird way. Which makes me wonder the Esmology "roll" should be, like, a fusion of ALL those possible scenes up there. Enki. Krane. McKenna and co. Mitch. Charley. Like a series of interviews or oral histories... or maybe, given Archie's Mad Men background, you could even consider it a kind asynchronous FOCUS GROUP. Like, Jo and Roger's monologues about the New Age and the Black Experience already functionally consist of the first portions of said focus group. The second element, yes, will be determining which nodes of power in the Bay Area noosphere to apply pressure point type acupuncture to: the "action" part of the analysis. Which could, like the interviews/focus groups, consist of a few different actions taken by different members of URIEL and our various allies!
Bill
Maybe we could also form a “higher” focus group talking to the intelligences above. Get a “pantheon perspective.” Roger’s going to want to do practical actions, but he could be talked into medium bridge work. When he isn’t running backup for Mitch at SRI, that is.
Michael
That's AMAZING
Jocasta: Research on SRI’s Clean Room/Telesurgery/Laser Tech
So there's two components here: research into clean rooms for use in semiconductor assembly and research into robotics to do at-a-distance surgery. At this point, Jo can be fairly sure SRI is the only institution with a wide enough breadth of research interests to look into both. Clean rooms are a practical measure; to make the most intricately-wrought microprocessors, conditions of almost preternatural cleanliness are needed. And certainly, medical authorities can see great utility in having this kind of technology available for surgical theaters to prevent post-operative infection. To most of the folks in the medical journals in mid-1973, telesurgery is a science fiction dream; also, what would be the point? Surely a human touch and human reaction times will always win out over the machine. Maybe in certain situations where a surgeon can't be present—remote areas of wilderness without surgical theaters, perhaps—but then you'd still need the robots on the ground at the location itself! SRI's remit is doing this kind of pure research that will only have practical applicability decades down the line, but even the medical experts are struggling to think of use cases here. Let's also remember the third element in the vision Jo had of Charley's surgery: lasers. Laser research is big business at both research institutes and universities now but before 1973, that research was limited to a few places in the world: MIT, Livermore Labs, and... yes, SRI. Seems pretty certain to Jocasta at this point that even if the specific components of the Charley Vision were made in various places and brought to a location to perform the chip implant, if there is one location all three of them could have been assembled, that's SRI.
There are likely a couple of clean rooms that are prototypes developed at SRI that are now being used for actual research at SRI at this point. Remember how the cyclotron evolved at Berkeley over the years with just in-house ad hoc additions and revisions and new versions. You wouldn't develop a prototype and then not use it for what it's designed for. Which means SRI can do ad hoc experiments and find in-house uses for them in both electronic and medical research, although SRI admittedly does not do as much on the biological sciences side except theoretically