7/5

Played: November 10, 2022.

Wednesday, August 22, 1973. Livermore. Marshall arrives around 11 am and gathers URIEL’s assorted members, some sleep-deprived, in the Rooster House. He debriefs them on his interrogation of Bernadette Fry. Then he writes on the wheel-in chalkboard:

RANKED IN ORDER OF PRIORITY

1. Chris Butler + Agrigenics

2. Beale Farm

3. Bernadette Peters Fry

4. Dan Miller

5. Dixon / Vacaville

He brushes the chalk off his hands and turns to the team.

Marshall: So, OK. Agenda going forward, we're down a man. These, I think, are our action items. I ranked them in order of priority. OK, so, first we have Butler and Agrigenics. And I think that – I think the chief takeaway there is that Butler has some ability with predictive mathematics or esmology and possibly came to that ability naturally. Like he's … he just, uh figured it out on his own or it was slipped to him in some way. Regardless, his predictive mathematics is trying to guide him, I think, towards OZYMANDIAS or if not OZYMANDIAS, maybe the SANDMAN organization. He knows that there's – his math has shown him that there's something – some “They” out there – and he's trying to appeal to them and get their attention with this cryogenic wackadoo project over at Agrigenics. That's my – that's my operative theory right now. So we have to figure out what to do with him and with the company. There's a lot of questions within that.

So then we have Beale Farm. So I thought we could just leave Beale Farm alone but from Bernadette's account it sounded to me at least – my interpretation of the Beale Farm situation is that there's something to what grows there that can clue people into History B in some way. It seems to me like Bernadette – or at least she didn't think that she was connected to Beale Farm or Beale Downer in any real way that she knew of. She just ate some of the fruit that was growing there and then had this communion experience. I don't know if that means that there's something at Beale Farm. I don't know if that is how the ontology works. But I just feel like we – I don't know – need to need to check that out. We need to figure that out. That seems like something that we need to, like, get a grip on out there. People see a great bush and eat a grape, we don't want them, you know, starting cults and stuff.

Those two things I think are the two big, like, lots of unanswered questions, what the fuck are we gonna do situations – sorry I have to use the f-word, Charley. The other three are simpler. Basically, Bernadette Fry, what are we gonna do with her? We have her and we have one of her boys still alive – Stephen – like, we can kill them. We can turn them over to Granite Peak, you know. But we need to tie up that loose end um and stage something so that their disappearance seems legitimized. Staying with Dan Miller, like what are we gonna do with him? He's knocked out in a room up in the Mission. But we gotta turn him loose eventually before people start noticing him missing. And then lastly we gotta deal with the the weird vibes over in Dixon and Vacaville. Like there's just been a lot of weird – I just feel like we just need to put some word out there among people so that, you know, no one's asking too many questions about random burn marks on the side of the highway and strange evil corporations and you know, uh, shootings on the side of the road and that sort of thing.

Alright! Thoughts, questions. That's the agenda. We start with item one. Anyone?

Archie: So, we think Butler was fishing for OZYMANDIAS, wanted to make contact with them – not knowing necessarily who they are – but wanted to make contact with them to join them. In other words, he's not playing for the opposition, he's angling for a way into …

Marshall: That's what I think. I think that he knew that if he did – his math told him that if he did certain things he could come to the attention of some bodies, some cabal, some group and that if he could join them he would be part of the elect. He would become part of this powerful cabal at the heart of the world. And that could be History B but the nature of what they're doing at Agrigenics suggests to me that it's – that it's OZYMANDIAS.

Archie: Well, what if we gave him what he wanted. I mean he has come to the attention of a … uh, shadowy cabal, which is to say us. We could reach out to him. I don't mean … you know, we could make contact.

Mitch: We did talk about this yesterday. It seems like a long time ago, but time moves differently here. But we talked about this very topic yesterday and decided that was what was the impetus for rolling up Bernie now as opposed to later, so we could get information from her about what they … what they wanted, how they wanted to make connection. Because the thing that I noted yesterday is still true, which is that it seems like there's a lot of suggestions of some kind of … if not CIA, then some kind of three letter acronym connection already. So it's weird that they would be seeking OZYMANDIAS through these different channels as opposed to those back channels that presumably exist.

Marshall: Yeah, that's a good point.

Mitch: But again we talked about this yesterday and decided we didn't have enough information and that we needed to question Bernie on this topic and it seems like Bernie hasn't given us enough information other than indicated that we need to roll up Butler.

Marshall: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think we've probed the depths of what she knows about Butler's motives and they differ. I mean Bernadette and Butler definitely have … Bernadette I didn't entirely trust him. They seem to have had different agendas that sometimes merged and moved in the same direction but not all the time. They're they're both you know eschatological and apocalyptic but in very different sort of capacities. So the sense that I got from Bernadette during the breakdown in the interrogation is that you know this is an alliance of convenience almost. Sort of the ability to use Agrigenics for her purposes also meant that Butler got something out of it as well. But they were both kind of using each other.

Mitch: This is probably the … uh the benefit of hindsight. But I did try to use magic to find out more information about Bernadette when we first encountered her and the answer that came back as I recall was that she is not the main problem. She's not the final boss. She's not the, uh, dragon at the bottom of the tower. She's, uh … well, I mean, she shot Roger. So still pretty bad.

Marshall: I had the same thought, Archie, about Butler. Because all our questions about him now can be answered by him. So I think it just is sort of a question of how we want to go about doing it. If, as you say Archie. if he's looking for Them we are Them. We could just be at his house one day when he gets home. Or something else. It doesn't need to be large, to be totally frank. Like, you just invite him over for dinner one night or you just … that you be the one to make contact. My thinking was that, of the assets we have in play right now, we've already used uh Jocasta, so he might already be suspicious of her. We obviously can't send Charley. I don't think Mitch would be a good fit. That leaves you and me and I think between the two of us you would be a better sell for him.

Archie: Yep. We can do that. What's the goal then? Do we – do we actually want to have a sit down with him? Or is it to lure him into an alley somewhere where we can jump him?

Marshall: I mean I think we want to know – well, I guess that, yeah, what are our goals? Like, what do we want? To just burn Agrigenics to the ground? Do we want – if he is usable by us – do we want to make him an asset? Like a URIEL asset? Do we just want to turn it over to SANDMAN? Like, that's probably not – that's just his when he wants to have happen, so …

Archie: That's what he wants, I think. Yeah, it doesn't seem like he long-term … like we want him long term. He's too ambitious for that and he'll find his way right to OZYMANDIAS, if they're not already looking for him. But I do think that we could use his interest in us just as a lure, as bait, to get him to the Barn or … or wherever we wanted to get into.

Marshall: Yeah, I don't know if we even need to bring it to the Barn yet. Like I wonder if you just had a meeting with him kind of like that time that you had that talk with Andrew Krane at the cocktail party and you just sort of, you know, implied things. Something like that, maybe, and see what he does.

Jocasta: You both are in marketing.

Archie: Yes, right.

Jocasta: Um, I have a lot of things that we can go over if that's necessary. I brought – I also have a recording of the interrogation of the Beale Farm boys, which I don't know how much it's relevant to this generally, but I think it does have a few insights from them about how Butler felt about Bernadette, and what their relationship was. I also have some soil samples from the farm. And I do have – these may be irrelevant now because it's probably the case that they were more tools that Bernadette was using – but I have a couple things, I have a couple of glyphs and some other stuff that maybe .. they’ll need to be handled hot. But if we're talking right now specifically about how to deal with Butler I am of the opinion that, yes, we need to burn Beale Farm to the ground and salt the Earth; that the best way to deal with Butler is to – sorry to repeat myself – shoot him from a rooftop. I don't think he can be an asset to us because unless we just reduce him to a pawn that we have to keep blanked out all the time. He's actively hostile to us, right? Like, our belief right now is that OZYMANDIAS, which he seems to either already be aligned with or want to join, is an antagonistic organization to us, and so he's not going to be turned the way that we were able to turn Andrew, right? Because Andrew was not hostile to us. He may have had opposing beliefs but he was willing to give us a fair hearing and I don't think Butler is. I think at the very least we don't want to expose ourselves to him in any greater way because we don't want to – again, we don't want to build up any more verifiable contact between us and him than we already have. And secondarily, if we want to let him live, which, you know, thumbs down from me on that, I think maybe the only thing we could do that's not as final but just as permanent is try and involve him in the bad shit that Beale Farms was up to and maybe engineer his downfall as a figure of power in the business community. Like, scandalize him, essentially, and strip him of his power. Otherwise I think he's just gotta go.

Marshall: That's all – that's all very good. The thing that occurred to me when you were talking about the soil samples was that the first thing we should be doing when this meeting is done is we need to put Mitch in a room with every single item that you took from Bernadette's house. We need to have Mitch do … I think, like, just put him in a room with all the items and have him do his thing.

Archie asks if Mitch has been to Beale Farms yet and Mitch confirms he has; he and Marshall took a walk out there when they visited Dixon the first time. His recollection of the site was that he got a “whiff” of History B, like an ontological event had taken place there in the past, but it was faint. Not like Altamont, or the St. Francis. Anyway, Mitch says, his plan had been to go back there this afternoon to scope it out again.

Marshall: Returning to the Butler question, so if Butler is unturnable – if we have no real use for Butler because he is hostile to us and we either need to destroy him by, you know, breaking him down or killing him because we can't risk him getting to OZYMANDIAS, at that point the question becomes: do we need to make any contact with him? Why not just shoot him from a roof and then … but that … just, something just seems off there. Because then what do we do with Agrigenics? Do we suppose that that's the end of the plan? There have to be other people at Agrigenics working on this …

Jocasta: This is kind of a question of what our scope is, right? Like, do we see ourselves as just performing triage on History B slash OZYMANDIAS behaviors and activities? Or do we see ourselves as now being operatives against evil in general? Agrigenics may not – or may, I don't want to close out any —foreclose on any possibilities – but it seems like Agrigenics isn't necessarily clued into History B. They're just a bad organization. They're a bad corporation that wants to do things that will hurt people generally. And whether that helps the Red Kings or not isn't necessarily part of their thinking, which – I may be wrong about that – but it's actually kind of analogous to our conversations about ARCNET and what Mitch saw about the computer network. Like, how much mission sprawl are we willing to engage in, I think is the question.

Mitch: We are anti-evil though, right? Like we –

Jocasta: Well sure. But there's all kinds of evil happening all the time –

Archie: – so if you take Butler out and you take Fry out, what is Agrigenics doing that is evil? They're making non-nutritious food?

Marshall: Well, no. They also have a weird cryo – experimental cryogenics thing in the basement that we're unclear if it works or not. Also, uh, Charley saw a portal into hell at the site of the Agrigenics building …

Mitch: Like at this point I would be willing to accept if you told me that in the basement of Agrigenics there's, you know, several hundred people who were frozen, conscious, alive and constant – in constant anguish and that their pain is powering some kind of psychic demon-monster. I would buy that just based on vibes. So it – so I do feel like action needs to be taken.

Marshall: I don't want this meeting to turn into a debate on the nature of evil –

Mitch: Yeah, no, we’re not.

Marshall: But to Jocasta's point, that's a very good point about what we view our role in URIEL as being. But I don't think we need to resolve that question now because I think it's indisputable that something is happening at Agrigenics that is having sort of History B ripples. Like the trajectories were kind of aligned with this one and now we have like an actual evil organization that is doing evil in such a way that it's affecting the ontology. And that is our brand.

Jocasta: It’s also possible, although I don't really know how, that's really more at your level, that if we choose the path of framing Butler – you know, involving him in some kind of scandal – that might have a ripple effect in taking down Agrigenics, whereas just killing him won't.

Archie thinks to himself during this discussion that there have to be other people involved in what is happening at Agrigenics beyond Butler and Fry. The amount of lab equipment and everything else going on in the basement of the company’s HQ – that requires human infrastructure. Lab workers. Technicians. Security. Even if there's some sort of “off the books” black budget at Agrigenics that is running a lot of these nefarious projects, it can't just be one man. There's got to be employees who work in the forbidden levels.

Archie: OK, so if Agrigenics is our target, and not just Butler, then that does shape how we go after Butler. Because how do we take down the whole corporation? It sounds like –

Marshall: Can I pause you for a quick second? Sorry. I feel like – let’s just take a quick show of hands. Do we think we should take down Butler and Agrigenics? Raise your hand if you think we should.

Everyone raises their hands.

Marshall: OK. We’re taking down Butler and Agrigenics. Sorry Archie, go ahead.

Archie: OK, so what does it mean to take it down? I mean, there are memetic ways to destroy a corporation. There are – we could ask about – are there other corporations we could leverage against them? But it sounds like we also physically have to get in there. That there’s stuff that needs to be taken care of there. Am I wrong there? Physically no one has been in there? We've gotten in there through remote viewing?

Marshall: Jocasta got in once, but briefly.

Archie: Right.

Marshall: Yeah, I mean that's – this is a really hard question. This is a hard situation. I kind of want to table the meeting. I kind of want to shift to the back three items of, like, what are we gonna do with these bodies that we have, let Mitch go to Dixon and Vacaville or to Beale Farms and, I don't know, I can go – somebody, take someone with you? Charley maybe go with you? Charley's good with weird things. She sees ghosts. And all of us can take a day or so to sort of think about what we need to do about Agrigenics because I feel like that's a big decision that we need to really think through. There's going to be a lot of moving pieces and it's going to be complicated unless we literally just blow the building up.

OK, so let's hit these back three items real quick, just to get them out of the way. And then we can move on – we can try to get some other things moving to get some more intel. What should we do without Bernadette and Stephen? Should we – we can just execute them now and Jocasta and I can stage the deaths or dispose of the bodies. Do we see a reason to keep them in the loop or should we keep them around in the Barn for longer?

Archie: Can they be – can she be of any use to us in getting at Butler? Or can the story we come up with for what happened to her – I mean, explaining the disappearance of a couple of hippies is not that hard to do. I'm not concerned about that. They could have – there's a million things that they could have done. They could have run off to, you know, they're farming out of kibbutz in Israel. It's not that hard to explain their disappearance. But if there's a way to … if this cover story would flush Butler out in some way that's useful to us, that's the only …

Marshall: Could we lure Butler to us with her? But he's probably suspicious of her. She said that she was suspicious of him.

Archie: No, he's probably suspicious of her but what if he thought that she, rather than he, had been approached by the secret masters he's so excited to join? Or that she had sold him out? What action would he take that would show his hand in some way?

Mitch: I feel like we're all dancing around the question of, is there something at Agrigenics that is worth salvaging, trying to take, understand and study? Or should the whole thing just be destroyed? And we don't really have enough information to know what we would be destroying if we decided that it should be destroyed. So we're dancing around the question. We don't really know, how can we get more information, how can we get more information, how can we get more information – and I think, though, that based just purely all of the vibes that we've got we don't actually need more information to decide that this is not something that we want to try follow up and investigate further.

Jocasta: I agree, and I would yes-and that and say it's not really – assuming that Butler is not already connected to anything larger, that he's just spearheading his own attempt to get in with OZYMANDIAS or advance an OZYMANDIAS-like agenda, we don't know a lot about that but who cares, right? Like if we've decided that he's a bad guy, that he's tied up with Beale Farms- – which we know is bad – and that whatever Agrigenics is specifically doing it's not good and we're thinking –

Marshall: We are going to destroy Agrigenics.

Archie: Yeah, I actually don't think that that’s being debated –

Marshall: We just don’t know how we're going to destroy Agrigenics. Like, are you proposing that we just drive a truck full of C4 into the building and then call it a day?

Jocasta: What I was leading to is, is there any way that we can … like, we've already got a pile of corpses from Beale Farms right? And it wouldn't be much of a way to establish that something very bad and culty and weird and gross is happening there. So could we not just simply establish, both through a manipulation of evidence and the construction of memes, that Agrigenics is a bad company who is doing bad things and here's the evidence they were mixed up with these crazies at Beale Farms who went nuts and killed each other? You know, there was a mass murder there and that's justification in the public eye for the company being destroyed in whatever practical way that we can destroy it. Presumably Agrigenics has a lot of employees who are not involved in anything sinister, they have janitors and receptionists or whatever. What I'm getting at is, if our goal is to take down Butler and through him, presumably, what he knows is going on in the basement, and then if the executives – the other executives of Agrigenics – are involved in that, they got to go to, or if they're not, you know, who cares that's an acceptable casualty right? Some big shots lose their jobs. But if we're like – not to advocate for my own plan here too much – but if what we're doing is to try is to engineer a scandal where we take down Agrigenics structurally, not physically, by involving them in the in the scandal of being involved with the crazy cult at Beale Farms, that might be enough of a justification for a a legitimate mainstream law enforcement agency to go there and investigate, find out what's happening in the basement, and just round up all the executives and throw them in the can for doing awful experiments that come out.

The team debates what to do. Memetically dismantling Agrigenics would be a long-term project. It could be done, Archie explains, using both the cult angle and a food scare. But it would take time. That still leaves open the question of what to do with the equipment in the basement and, of course, Butler, who is the lynchpin in determining the extent of the “contamination” within the organization. “If we squash it like a bug,” Marshall says, “I worry that all these little bugs will just scurry out and we’ll lose them all. So it has to be complicated. Mitch.”

Mitch: To your point, that's the benefit of doing it with memetics as opposed to doing it with, like, direct corporate actions. Memetics poisons the whole field so, you know, you could – you're spraying down the whole field with poison. You're not flipping each plant.

Marshall goes over to the chalkboard and erases the list he wrote originally and starts writing down action items.

Marshall: So it is agreed that we need to physically get in touch with Butler in some capacity so that we can press him for more information about the extent of the corruption within Agrigenics. We need Archie to come up with a memetics campaign to destroy Agrigenics and also cover up the weirdness that's been going on in Dixon and Vacaville. And those two things will clearly go together. They'll – it'll be two phases, basically. We need to get Mitch and Charley up to Beale Farms to look at the land, figure that whole scene out. And we need to figure out, lastly, what to do about Dan Miller, Bernadette and Stephen, who I think at this point we could just kill all three of them and make it part of this elaborate memetics campaign that Archie's going to come up with.

Jocasta, Marshall, and Archie then discuss the Butler Approach – how it should be done, what the best tact is to take, etc. Marshall doesn’t think Butler needs to be physically apprehended. Jocasta notes that she has previously proposed inviting him to a meeting, using her cover as an NGO representative. She proposes that URIEL rent out a downtown office for that purpose and invite him to a “meeting” there with her “bosses,” who are impressed with what they are hearing about the work Agrigenics is doing and the information Jocasta obtained during her visit. Marshall and Archie agree that is likely the best path. The meeting breaks up with Marshall writing down the many items that everyone will need to be working on in the coming days.

Item one: Mitch heads to URIEL’s all-purpose storage room to scope out the items that Jocasta obtained from Bernadette’s residence. Nothing pings his radar except for the small safe that Jocasta hauled out of Bernadette’s master bedroom. The safe itself is fine, a mundane safe, but inside are a couple of things that radiate History B energy. These, he supposes, are glyphs, and analyzing the vibes further, he discerns that there are three of them and that they are quite potent, intricately drawn, and sophisticated. He also takes a look at the Polaroid photo that Jocasta took of the glyph she found on the ceiling of Bernadette’s bedroom, before she painted over it. Though the glyph has lost much of his “punch” due to being photographed, he is still able to divine its effect: it is a HUL glyph, “delight,” the glyph of absolute, addictive joy and pleasure, a high more potent than heroin and more blissful than an orgasm. Mitch puts the photograph down and heads back into the office, where he updates the team of his findings and taps Charley for a ride up to Dixon. As they turn to go, Marshall suggests that Mitch and Charley bring Mary-Lynn. Mitch says OK. Charley chimes in:

Charley: So you’re bringing your girlfriend, Mitch? To the Farm?

Mitch: I was thinking I would … uh, assuming that she is up for it. Which I feel like she probably would be.

Charley: So is she gonna like be part of the team?

Jocasta interjects and asks if it is wise to bring Mary-Lynn into such uncertain territory. Marshall explains, sure, why not? They’re down a man, they need to use the assets they have. Jocasta says she’s not sure what Mary-Lynn brings to the table here; “I’m a little murky on this one. Why did you suggest bringing her again?”

Marshall: Oh, because when Mary-Lynn and Mitch are together … they have a sort … they're both in that other club. They're in the Mitch Club. So Mary-Lynn and Mitch, they're like – you know, we need all the weird little coincidences and energies and vibes we can get. It's young love. There must be something to that and, you know, we need intel. This is sort of a Hail Mary pass – is that a saying? – and we need to get the young lovers together, out there, and the vibe that they spark will help us triangulate stuff.

Jocasta opines that a man who does not know that the phrase “Hail Mary pass” is not a man who should be sending total non-club members on a dangerous mission, but Marshall notes that they don’t know it’s dangerous (yet). “It’s just surveillance,” he says, shoo-ing Mitch and CHarley out of the office. “Plus she’s Club-adjacent.”

“She’s a friendly,” Mitch says, before Marshall shuts the door.

Mitch and Charley arrive at Mary-Lynn’s and Mitch proposes the three of them go for a picnic at this old farmstead he’d heard about. Mary-Lynn does not 100 percent buy the cover story, and makes this obvious in a playful way, but agrees good-naturedly. They stop at a grocery store for some picnic supplies. “What’s more harmless than a picnic?” Mitch asks rhetorically as the three of them stand in line waiting to pay.

About an hour later, the trio find themselves on the Beale Farm property. They observe – Mitch now for the second time – that this land has not been cultivated in generations, and a lot of it is in rough shape. The soil's not been treated or plowed in decades. This is, indeed, a desolate place. But for all that, it is still August, a beautiful summer day, and much of the landscape is green and in bloom. They wander through the main “campus,” past the dilapidated barn, which Mary-Lynn remarks “gives [her] the creeps.” Eventually, she spots a large, non-fruitful tree a ways off and suggests they set up there. At least then they’ll be out of the sun.

As they head in that direction, passing the barn as they go, Charley senses a fear in her – the fear of Maman Brigitte, whose fear tastes like that of an animal facing slaughter. “That’s odd,” Charley thinks to herself, since the Pruists who lived on Beale Farm were vegetarians and did not slaughter animals for food. Perhaps the fear of a hen whose eggs are being taken away? No, that can’t be right, she thinks. Maman Brigitte’s form is a rooster, not a hen.

From their picnic blanket redoubt, Mitch surveys the scene, looking out for anything unusual, any direction that his intuition may pull them. He senses that the boundary between the Histories is fairly solid here. Certainly, some sort of ontoclysmic event occurred in the vicinity but it happened long ago, and since then, consensus reality has been able to “settle” everything down. This is, again, no Altamont. But it is also not entirely safe. He senses weaknesses in the boundary, areas of uncertainty or permeability. Places of History B potential, however faint. The big house, where Beale Downer lived, and the old barn are the two locations where that potential is greatest. Mitch gets the impression that if something were to happen here, it would need to happen at one of those two buildings to “push” this area into History B.

That’s not all. The edible plants that still grow here – a few berry bushes, a few trailing grapes, a few rock-like tubers – also hint at History B. It is almost undetectable unless one is looking for it, so faint is the impression he gets. But there they are, these little quasi-reality shards, History A plants suffused with History B potential. As he reaches to pluck one of the berries from a nearby bush, and thinking about what Bernadette told Marshall in her interrogation, he intuits that these plants can provide those who imbibe them with the briefest flashes of History B – the shortest, most fleeting glimpses of the Other Side.

“Dang,” Mitch says to no one in particular as this realization dawns on him. “Should the three of us do some berry picking and then make some berry jelly? Because I mean, the berries aren't going to last very long.”

Before they leave, Mitch says he’s gonna try a thing. With Mary-Lynn’s assistance he locates the epicenter of the “zone” they have identified. The thing that interests him, Mitch explains, is the physical manifestation of History B – its tangible quality. Once there, he lays down on the ground, arms outstretched, and looks up at the sky. He thinks. And thinks.

“How did Bernadette think?” He ponders as white clouds pass overhead and the wind rustles the standing grass and Mary-Lynn and Charley watch from a “safe” distance. What was she trying to accomplish? How was she going to trigger the return of Beale Downer? That was her intention, after all. “I'm going to be the one to bring him back,” she said. Or something like that, anyway. He still exists somewhere, that’s what she told Marshall, and I'm going to bring him to where he should be right now, in the present day. The air here is thick and humid, and even though this land is mostly uncultivated, there's still plenty of things growing here. Was it the land itself? Mitch soon becomes more interested in the dirt beneath his body. He rubs some between his fingers and feels something. A piece of grape-vine. He thinks: what she was hoping to do, scientifically, was find where the strongest energies were. What she felt is that if she grew something on those lands, and people consumed it, not only would they be able to see those faint visions, they'd be able to actually cross over.

“Well, if I were her,” Mitch thinks, “and I was existing in this place and I had a brief vision, I'd want that to be longer. I'd want it to be more sustained. I'd want it to be something I could walk into.” Mitch doesn't feel like he's getting ready to slip over into the other side right now. The walls of existence are way too strong, too heavy here. The curtain is almost impossible to part on its own. But what she hoped was that if she gathered enough people to believe here, and they all ate together of what grew in this land, that she could use the belief energies of those people to part the veil and allow her to slip onto the other side.

Mitch realizes in a flash that what Bernadette would need to accomplish this would be hundreds of people. Just like Beale Downer did back in the day. So that was her plan: gather a mass of people here, at ground zero, and engage them in ritual worship of Beale Downer, following his rites, consuming the tainted produce – throw in a ritual sacrifice or two, likely at the Barn, and begin the subduction that would crack the world and carry her to the other side.

Mitch rises to his feet and brushes himself off. He explains his oracular message to Charley, Mary-Lynn having head off to the car with the picnic supplies.

Charley: Should we set the barn on fire?

Mitch: I get that you’re anti-barn, and I am certainly not pro-barn, but I don't know that we want to burn it down right now because I don't want to start an uncontained wildfire in the San Francisco region in August of 1973. I feel like that's a thing that I don't want to be doing. So if – you know, when we burn the barn down, we're going to need to set up some fire breaks and stuff first. I'm sure Archie or Marshall can get some guys out here for that part of things. But now what it seems to me is this is more like a place that we want to rope off and, uh, I don't know. I feel like we could maybe get something useful out of these berries. I'll tell the guys about it. I mean, what do you – well I shouldn't be making that decision unilaterally – what do you think Charley?

Charley: About picking berries?

Mitch: About picking berries. Do you think that something that we can do? Because I was thinking some jelly. Because the berries are not gonna last very long. Jelly lasts a lot longer and I don't see a reason why jelly wouldn't work just as well.

Charley agrees. So does Mary-Lynn – which is good, because Mary-Lynn knows a thing or two about foraging and is able to help the trio locate the best patches of fruit to pick. Over the next hour or so, the three gather a variety of berries and other edibles. Then they pack it all into Mitch’s VW Beetle and hit the road. It all went rather well, Mitch thinks to himself, before hearing sirens approaching from the distance ahead of them. A moment later and a series of local police vehicles race past them, heading in the direction of Dixon. Mitch, always keen to follow the clues laid out for him, takes an abrupt u-turn and follows the cops at a distance. A short time later, the trio in the car watch as the police pull into the driveway of Bernadette’s residence.