The Houdini Cassette

A tape cassette that D. Scott Rogo smuggled into the séance held by Marshall and Mitch at the Stanley Hotel. Houdini channeled his fragmented consciousness onto the tape in order to avoid destruction at the hands of a Kusarikku agent. Unaware of its contents, but not willing to allow Rogo to keep any evidence of what had transpired, Marshall and Mitch confiscated the tape and brought it back to Livermore for analysis.

Charley determined that something to do with the cassette’s exposure to History B changed the way it stored data. With that change came a vast increase in the amount of data that can be stored on the tape. Really vast.

Charley later transferred a “copy” of Houdini’s consciousness from the cassette tape to a chip implanted in her brain. Thereafter, she transferred that copy to a separate hard-drive where he resided until the drive was given to Anthony Reinhardt; this copy of Houdini is now a free agent (an Ally of Charley’s) presumably infiltrating the systems of OZYMANDIAS. The cassette tape still contains the “original” Houdini consciousness-state conjured during the séance, which is now integrated into Charley’s ORACLE system as an uncanny power source for its heightened ontomantic abilities.

Specific Study: Honestly, Charley has been dreading Specific Studying this one a bit. When she first was asked to work with this shard, Charley saw its tremendous data storage, apart from the waveform of the long-dead Harry Houdini, as a way to boost the abilities of GRAIL TABLE's simulation programming: a data buffer, if you will, for ORACLE's calculations. And it has proven enormously useful in that regard. But the transformation of an ordinary oxide audio cassette in young D. Scott Rogo's tape recorder, meant to surreptitiously record the séance at the Hotel Stanley, into a highly-advanced piece of media storage onto which Houdini "escaped" his trap. But how did this happen, how did the subduction event metamorphose this cassette? Charley has, of course, been grouping the Houdini Cassette with the other forms of media in the URIEL shard collection: the ZEBULUN Tapes and the mysterious U-Matic videocassette from the St. Francis. This object, unlike the other media in the collection, did physically change in order to have the storage capacity for Houdini's waveform. And this time, even with spending Extra Time on her Specific Study, Charley is having trouble seeing the origins of this reality shard. She can't precisely see what series of events led to the physical change, but the flavor, as it were, of the change resembles that of the Pascagoula Dart. In other words, the cassette was "chosen" as a reality shard because the purposeful agendas of both History A and History B were so similar that they merged. Rogo attempted to record the séance out of curiosity and a desire to know more about the nature of life after death; whatever power bestowed this cassette with miraculous storage was working out of the same sense of wanting to "probe" the other side of history: curiosity, a point of entry for History B into History A. The Anunnaki created this shard, but they didn't put Houdini on it. He was a third party, a wild card in the process, leaping into the spacious void created on the tape. History B had an agenda for this object, one Charley can't sense... but that agenda definitely didn't include Houdini.