8/1

Played: January 19, 2023.

Friday. September 28th, 1973. First things first: Roger requests Mitch's "blessing" and assurance that he is still Roger, in whatever metaphysical sense Mitch claims to be able to sense. Mitch assures Roger, and everybody, that Roger is still in the club, for what that's worth. Mitch adds that he's less convinced than he once was that the in-the-club/not-in-the-club distinction is as meaningful as he once made it out to be. He's sure it's Roger, or somebody is being "super-sneaky."

MARSHALL Let's not go down that road…all right, Roger, how are you and what happened?

ROGER I am alive and actually a little better off than I used to be. Don't know entirely what that's all about man, but you take the blessings where you can… Just to be really clear: as far as the loa are concerned I died, and that is a spiritual change that you have to deal with. I'm really happy not to have actually died but some of the loa are pretty pissed off with what happened, especially the ones who usually wait around for souls.

MITCH Would you have preferred I'd done something different, man?

ROGER No.

MITCH Okay. I just I want to know for next time, if there is a next time, hopefully there won't be.

ROGER I think, from what I'm hearing from the debrief, I may once again have preferred that you'd not completely put the person who set you off into crispy mode. But you know that's neither here nor there. I'm sure you've already gotten chewed out from the the brass about it, but… It's just hard, you know?  I don't know whether you guys knew this but there's been a voice in my head for a very long time that I know could tell me when I'm gonna die and how. I've never asked; you don't want to know that kind of thing, right? I think I may have asked when I was a little kid, but I don't remember what the answer was, so that doesn't count.

My number was up, and…you know, for those of us who were in Nam, you know that kind of conversation went on for a long time. Something you worried about, and it came up…whatever as,  happened and I am grateful. It wasn't really actually my time and now we have to figure out what that means. But believe it or not, actually going to the VA and like talking with other vets and stuff like that? Turned out to be really helpful. Who knew the head shrinkers knew what they were doing!

Other things…I'm sorry Archie for being a little mysterious. I was kind of a little messed up, but: we have successfully infiltrated the Cheval program.

ARCHIE Fantastic.

MARSHALL What does that mean, though? Are there like agent double zeros in other people now, like they all…is it dangerous, the agent?

ROGER It's the same loa.

MARSHALL Right. My question is, if it's the same shared archetype what's stopping our Agent Zero from telling them about what we are doing? Do we have his loyalty?

ROGER Yeah. He is an agent, right but you know that his schtick is that he's a good Saint. He works for the good guys, and that is US, established long ago.

MARSHALL It is very Bondian to side with us, yeah.

ROGER So no matter how much there's double agency and difficulties and attempting and trying to be…he reports back.

MARSHALL And you feel you can manage him?

ROGER We have a much better relationship than we did before. Honestly, now that he's on Mission everything in his being is going to keep him reporting, right. I have not 100% fully tested the man because… you know. I would need your help to talk to him and debrief him. But if you want to know what he's seen through other people's eyes… it is a resource for us.

The only other important thing was, I've seen how far they're really trying to go with that Cheval program. It's a big deal to them. It's a really big deal, which means that the people running it…one of them is an old handler of mine…they're really highly connected, and you probably know what that means. So they're either [OZYMANDIAS] or they're targets of it.

MARSHALL Why do you think they value the program so highly? We've seen what you can do; I can see the specialist utility of what you can do, but what am I not seeing is mass application? Maybe they could want to create a legion of Rogers but that just seems a little odd to me.  

ROGER I know that you think of this as a different way, just utilities that get put on…but I've always tried to explain man that we are in a covenant with things that are greater than ourselves. Gods, some might argue, right? If you want to talk about allies in the fight, that is an incredibly important ally.  I mean when you think about the kind of things that are on the other side…

ARCHIE Isn't part of the excitement in the higher-ups that this whatever-we're-going-to-call-it is new? That we made it, that we made it out of beliefs and stories and a bunch of ropey motion pictures from the United Kingdom. It's not some atavistic holdover from the ancient past, it's something we made and so we can make more.

ROGER I may have a disagreement about how old the spirits are, but I will say it is something that is Humanity's, not the Enemy's. These are the spirits that side with us because they are related to us; they love us. They are intricately bound with us. I don't see how they could turn over. Some of them, their nature might be to play both sides, but ultimately they have to land on humanity's side because they are bound up in US.

ARCHIE What the agent is actually going to accomplish, based on these pictures, is he'll probably fool around with some women and then blow the place up! That's how it usually goes in all the ones I've seen.

ROGER We can delay Act Three for as long as we can, right? And remember, they'll be sending him out to do Agency stuff out there, and we can find out what's going on. If the higher ups start trying to turn the program in a certain way…?

ARCHIE That's good, that's good work, Roger.

MARSHALL It is good work, Roger.

ARCHIE You are under great duress. We all really owe you.

ROGER You don't, because it was also not just an assignment from you. It was also something the loa wanted.

MARSHALL Have you reconciled with them? Are they talking to you again?

ROGER We're working on it. We're working on it. We'll see what happens. I'm doing all the rituals and abasements, doing what I should. There are some loa to please that I don't know how to, so it's just a question of whether the ones that I know and trust me and love me will continue to honor our Bargains, or whether they will still stand aside because of the anger of others.

MARSHALL It is still strange to me.

CHARLEY Why are they angry? It wasn't your fault!

ROGER It's complicated. You know the Gede, you have a connection with one.

CHARLEY Right.

ROGER They really rule their realm and they do not lose Souls from their realm lightly. I have already tricked the Baron once, so now it was his chance to get his due, and he was denied. That is the kind of anger that requires more work than I have done. I believe that my ancient friends, the ones that I have known since I was a child, will come back to the call. Because I have done the duty that they would want me to do, and that shows the Loa that I am attempting to…improve loa-kind.

CHARLEY I see, so he wanted you to stay dead.

ROGER Oh yeah.

CHARLEY Did you say how you escaped?

ROGER They know. I don't think they understand fully, but do any of us? There is another temptation, which is to ask 'well now what is the new number that is when my number is up' but I…again, I cannot bring myself to ask.

You don't tell me much, but is there anything else I need to know about how everything turned out? 

Marshall quickly explains what happened with Butler and Brian Hart. He does not (unless Roger specifically asks) include the explicit details about things like the stagings and the tortures and the horrible things: brainwashing, etc. The simple story is there was someone independent, but OZYMANDIAS rolled up that network, as a useful asset. OZY got to him before URIEL could. URIEL must have been right on their heels but were outmaneuvered this time. Jocasta and Marshall cleaned that up.

While they're in the Rooster House, Archie asks Charley if she's heard from Houdini (she hasn't). Charley guesses that if he hasn't communicated with her, either it's technically impossible or it's too dangerous. Marshall speculates about Granite Peak having counter-Houdinis, black ICE, "Little Bighorn on a disc," "Ghost of Napoleon on another disc." It would require an ontoclysm but Marshall imagines those could be generated under controlled conditions. Roger points out that URIEL is the designated 'mad scientist,' 'crazy experimenters' branch of SANDMAN.  Archie wonders what resources the team could bring to bear extracting Houdini, and they muse briefly about leveraging Mitch's remote viewing, or using Agent Double Zero. But that would be exposing one asset to rescue another, which might not be a good play. For the time being, URIEL decides to let Houdini be.

The conversation moves on to the imminent return of Sophie, the subject of the Telex message Archie passes around. To what extent are they going to admit Sophie to the Rooster House, and read her in on everything she's missed?

CHARLEY And who's buying the cake?

ARCHIE It is like Homecoming Week, with Roger and the Librarian [and Viv]. We should have a party or something.

MARSHALL The Librarian is going to be a complicated situation. I don't know what the best way to play it is. On the one hand, I think of her return from a place of reconciliation because I either misjudged her or I just miscalculated what her intents were. In my defense, she did really act suspicious. She had this outburst one time when it was just me in her office, where she screamed to me because she thought SANDMAN had killed David Wolfe.  I thought I signaled to her at the time to just keep chill, we could talk about it not literally in the office where there are bugs everywhere. She seems not to have picked up on that… My feelings about the situation aside, we don't know if we can trust her now. We know why she went to them and why she wanted to go to Project THROWAWAY, but we have no idea what Project THROWAWAY is, and we have no idea the extent to which she was discovered and reprogrammed. If she outsmarted them, great, but I don't know how we would be able to tell she outsmarted them, and that she's not actually now aligned with them and may not even be aware of it.

ROGER There's one possible test: does she know who Reinhardt is? Because they would have wiped that from her, like they wiped it from us. She was the first to remember.

Reminder: in the month of June, her memory was jostled and she remembered seeing the FORGET glyph that was part of the Urrim and Thummim; that's what sent her off to THROWAWAY.

MARSHALL Walk me through this thinking, Roger. If she does not remember Reinhardt then we know that it's very likely they went there. If she still remembers Reinhardt, then they weren't able to get all the way down into her; there was some part of her that she was able to preserve?

ROGER And she, better than the rest of us, remembered it. That was a reason, maybe she had a tough time trusting us and working with us. She was attempting to see how to free us.

MITCH I think that makes a lot of sense, Roger.

ROGER The second they found out she knew about Reinhardt again, they would have to blank it out because they think we don't know about him.

MARSHALL To get to the Reinhardt memory they would need to first discover her true motive for being there, to find out about Charley's mother, and from that they would need to trace it all the way back to Reinhardt because they would need to find the point of deviation from the rest of URIEL. That's very good, Roger. We could just, on her first day here, bring her to the Rooster House, and show her a picture, ask 'do you know who this is?' and see what she says.

JOCASTA From a practical standpoint, why would they reinsert her as a double agent? They've already electronically monitored us. They can appear—Reinhardt can walk in on us at any time, and watch us all the time, without us even knowing it. What's the point of adding an additional level of risk? But even leaving that aside…dealing with a practical issue of whether we can trust her or not, there's more than enough ability to get inside her head just in this room. 

MARSHALL Yeah…

JOCASTA If she resists that suggestion, that in itself is a sign that maybe we shouldn't trust her, right? Because she has to know that we're suspicious of the circumstances under which she disappeared, even if she knows and even if we know that she was doing it for our own good.  or you know for the good of the group. Anything could have happened when she was at Granite Peak and she has to know that we realize that. If she's resistant to any kind of interrogation, that itself should be a clue. I would say, maybe we don't let her in here until we know for sure though, because if we do we're tipping Reinhardt to the fact that this place exists.

ROGER I'm sorry Jo, but sometimes you confuse me. You were just saying Reinhardt could be walking in here any moment and hearing all of this, but you're also using that as part of your argument? You're also saying we have to keep our secret. 

JOCASTA This is the one safe place we have. I think that we have to try and figure out whether we can trust her or not. We have to do that right because we can't just be sitting there constantly double speaking, and attempting to reveal…

ROGER If she's still our Sophie she would submit to tests, because if she finds out that we did figure out about Reinhardt, she's going to want to now help us.

JOCASTA Yeah, that's what I'm saying. 

MARSHALL (sees Mitch has been signaling a hand up)  I want to hear what the wizard has to say. 

MITCH You mean me?

MARSHALL Yeah, you're the wizard.

MITCH Okay, so, I just wanted to, like, touch on something that, um, Jo just said about… like, why would they send Sophie back? Not to put too fine a point on it, there is the question that the non-demonic alien entities from outside time that are watching our every move and making all of the choices that we make for us may just like Sophie and maybe they're dragging her back into the narrative framework that they're stitching together out of our lives for their own amusement? As I say that out loud I realize it sounds… I mean… a little bit… You could rationalize anything that way, pretty much, but on the other hand, you could rationalize pretty much anything that way. So the simple matter of 'it doesn't make any sense that they would do this,' if we're talking about decisions made by people who are not in this room right now… I feel like there can be motivated reasoning that they don't recognize as motivated reasoning, because they're being influenced by, uh, the non-demonic alien entities from outside time that are watching our every move and making all of the choices that we make for us.

If that makes sense?

MARSHALL It does, it does.

JOCASTA It does?

ROGER [Laughter] Or we could say it's God and the saints and…?

JOCASTA [crosstalk]

ARCHIE [crosstalk]

ROGER [crosstalk]

MARSHALL We don't need to get caught up on all this every single time! You guys just need to just sort it! Figure it out and think about it. We're moving on. 

ROGER We're rolling, we're rolling.

MARSHALL Mitch, but that presupposes that it's a story, not a game. If "the C" just like Sophie, and just want her to be part of this Grand esmological whatever-it-is that they're involved in… what if part of their fun is that she can't be trusted? To send her back as a double agent? We have determined, I think, that we don't necessarily share the same interests as "the C." 

MITCH What I'm saying is, we have to play to find out.

ARCHIE [awkward chuckle] That's very good, Mitch. I'm not sure how actionable that is, though.  

ROGER It is not actionable intelligence, no.

MARSHALL A decision needs to be made. We can't be doing two things at once.

ARCHIE We'll talk to Sophie, we'll get her story. We'll get her her surface story, whatever she tells us. We'll ask her how she is, what happened to her, that sort of thing, and then if she's on the level I think that she will consent to…what? Marshall hypnotizes her? What's the best way to… not interrogate her, not put her on the slab, but before we open up any conversations about Reinhardt or this room [the Rooster House]... We just be straight with her, and say "how can we know that we can trust you?" 

MARSHALL Even putting that question to her could raise her suspicion; it would maybe clue her into the fact that we might share the same side.

ARCHIE But when she left wasn't she up front with us? She's the one who put us on…she put Charlie onto it, right?

MARSHALL Yeah. My read of her situation is that she had sort of sussed out the outlines of what we now know. Maybe she had a little less information than we did, but she had put some things together. She was a skilled esmologist.

ARCHIE The chip, she knew about the chip.

MARSHALL She knew there was a chip, and she knew there were sides. She knew that there was SANDMAN and then there was something else happening. And so if we ask her a question, "whose side are you on?" If we are still ignorant, if we are still in the position she was in before she had this realization, we wouldn't ask that question because we wouldn't know anything else. It's just SANDMAN all the way down. So the mere question "whose side are you on," she's gonna have to deduce that we know that there's some sort of a divide within SANDMAN…

ROGER Or is the other side the Enemy, right, because unfortunately we have those two sides, too. 

MARSHALL I don't think that she would think that we would assume that the Red Kings got to her at Granite Peak of all places. That seems really unlikely… The only other thought I had (but I don't like it as much as this "let's just ask her" idea) is… we could just play it super normal and cool as if nothing happened, and see if she reaches out to Charlie because she gave Charlie a note saying "I'm gonna go find out about your mother" and if she succeeded in doing that and getting that information and got out of Granite Peak with her memory intact I think Charlie would be the first person she would go to. Or one of the first people. 

ROGER But if she thinks Charley still has the chip in her head? 

MARSHALL But she knows how to get around it, with the written code…? That was my only other thought, in terms of how we could figure out which side she's on.

ARCHIE It doesn't have to be decided today. Ixnay on the Rooster House and OZYMANDIAS for today, and we see what happens.

ROGER We're going to have cake.

MARSHALL Who's going to go get the cake? Jocasta?

ARCHIE But that won't be the real cake, which is just in here, in the Rooster House.

MARSHALL Jocasta, we need you to go to the grocery store and get two cakes. One is going to be the good cake.

ROGER You'll want to go to a bakery.

JOCASTA Do you guys want me to make you some coffee while I'm at it?

MARSHALL Would you? Coffee would be great, thanks.

Monday. October 1st, 1973. Promptly at 9AM there is a knock at the URIEL door. Not the sound of a key opening a lock! Sophie Edelstein, returned, walks uncertainly into the office. Her longish black hair has become a blonde bob, and her clothing is more modish. She smiles when she sees Marshall, who has been waiting for her, and Charley and Archie.

MARSHALL Sophie, you've changed so much!

SOPHIE You like it? It's just a little something I did in preparation for coming back. Figured it would be good to have a new look.

MARSHALL Wow.

SOPHIE I feel much more myself. I'm so thrilled to be back. I'm rested and ready to catch up.

Marshall studies Sophie's posture and affect, while Charley hugs her.

SOPHIE Oh, Charley, I'm so glad to see you again. I'm so glad to be back.

CHARLEY We missed you!

SOPHIE Mr. Ransom, we departed on…the evening of July 4th, it was difficult to say goodbye to all of you.

Sophie looks meaningfully at Roger as Archie awkwardly moves in for a hug, thinks better of it, and they engage in a comradely arm clasp, very platonic shoulder holding.

ARCHIE Return of the prodigal. How are you now?

SOPHIE Rehabilitation wasn't easy. Operationally there are probably a few things you need to know.

Marshall discerns that Sophie still has the same core of neuroses but her body language is much smoother than it was. Her words are less stuttered, smoother and more measured. Her voice is less histrionic. He concludes there has been some SANDMAN modification to her.

Jocasta and Mitch arrive shortly after Sophie. Mitch sees Sohpie's aura as bright lemon yellow, free from astral parasites and joyous, but there's a gray undercurrent, her uncertainty that URIEL might not accept her. The tenor of her aura is different: she was never this outgoing, this relaxed. She's not as closed off.  Also, Mitch can see that her blonde bob is a wig, her head is shaved, and she has a scar on the back of her skull. No implants or foreign bodies, however, in her brain or anywhere else. 

MITCH You look like a completely different person.

SOPHIE [awkward chuckle] Well, that is part of the rehabilitation, Mitchell… As you all know, I was getting into a bit of a tricky business with the technology of the Enemy. I passed all of their tests as far as my loyalty to the Project is concerned, but when it came to giving me an opportunity to practice my "geometry…" I failed that one. And so measures were taken to reduce the taint that playing about with Annunaki glyphs had laid upon me. And no, it wasn't easy, and no, it wasn't pleasant and… it wasn't a very pleasant price to pay, but I'm clean.

Everyone can tell she's speaking in the terms an addict uses.

ROGER You need help to help you stay clean, like limited exposure?

SOPHIE Well, obviously you know the orders put in as far as my deployment is concerned. They probably didn't want to put this over the Telex, but yes. Reducing my exposure to any of the enemy's remnants, and that would include both glyphs and reality shards, would probably be a good idea.

Marshall has been watching Sophie very carefully. He can tell that she believes what she is saying. She knows that something was done to her, wherever she was, that has removed the compulsion for her to want to practice "symbol drawing," but there are some lacunae in the way she's able to process the the memory of having it done to her and the method by which it was done. Marshall knows what the headcrackers at Granite Peak, and by extension THROWAWAY, can do: insert false memories, intense hypnosis, brain hacking, etc. Marshall deduces "brain hacking" was done here, specifically to eliminate the urge to play around with Anunnaki glyphs.

Roger knows war stories: the brain hackers' method is to take an undesirable Corruption trait and reroute around those areas of the brain, which can sometimes cause personality changes. You may see somebody who goes in with corruption that's made them sadistic and more like the Anunnaki and they may emerge after the headcracking as overly solicitous or overly open.

It's very clear to URIEL that Sophie's basic personality has been edited.

MARSHALL Well, Sophie, I just want to say I am so sorry for how um how all that went down. I could tell something was wrong, but I interpreted everything you were doing in a unit-cohesion, project-loyalty perspective. I didn't cue in on the personal angle, missed some cues there on my part. I'm really sorry. I hope that the way that I treated you didn't further contribute to your problems.

SOPHIE No, you were right to be suspicious. A lot of the erratic behavior that I displayed had to do with…this very addiction.

Marshall detects again Sophie weaving in and out of areas that she really shouldn't be picking at in her brain, causing her newfound confidence to falter 

MARSHALL Yeah, it's funny you mention erratic behavior. There was this time when you accused the Project of assassinating an ex-boyfriend of yours, and I wondered, has she completely lost it? Is she just broken?

He carefully judges her response.

SOPHIE Marshall, there were a lot of ways that I was acting before I left that…how do I explain this… The influence of the corruption I was carrying around inside myself, the hand of the Kings, was making me think all kinds of horrible things about the Project. You can be sure of my loyalty both to URIEL and to SANDMAN. I've put ideas out of my head that are dangerous ways for the enemy to get a foothold in, with the help of the doctors that I saw. All I can do is apologize for doing that damage to you.

MARSHALL Oh, no, you didn't do anything wrong, I was just remarking on my own misread of a situation.

Marshall observes no hint of recognition, no wink; she's just blank as regards David Wolfe. Her memories have been tampered with as well, he deduces. When the THROWAWAY headcrackers went in there they didn't just transfer her Corruption Disadvantages to

Gregarious and Odious Personal Habit (Annoyingly Chipper), etc. They did some "mucking about" in her memories as well.

ARCHIE We have complete confidence in you now, we're just glad that you're back.

SOPHIE I'm going to need a little time to catch up. From what I've heard very briefly before I left my rehab assignment, you've been through some things in the last three months while I've been gone. I'll take a look at the after-action reports.

ARCHIE Actually…yeah, definitely we'll give you the reports and we'll catch you up, but… what are you hearing from Granite Peak about URIEL, or in general? What's the word?

SOPHIE Am I supposed to have heard something? [anxious] The topic didn't really come up at all. The doctors I worked with were more concerned with my problems with glyphs than anything to do with the operation. Do they feel that maybe they exposed me to too much? Obviously from the new orders you can tell that I'm not meant for the field anymore, and that you've got the full backing of Detachment 301 at Alameda…

As Sophie speaks it becomes clear to everyone with Aura Sight or a keen grasp of human behavior, which is to say most of URIEL, that Sophie is unspooling patter, repeating a script. Her emotional balance has shifted again, and she's more fearful, though still pleased to be back at URIEL.

MARSHALL It's great to have you back, Sophie. Can't wait to get you back up and running. I do know that Charley wanted to show you that we got a new fancy coffee machine in the office kitchen. Charley, do you want to go show Sophie our new fancy coffee machine that I donated to the office?

CHARLEY [not getting it] I don't like coffee but I know you do…?

MARSHALL Why don't you go show Sophie the new fancy coffee maker, Charley. I'll have a cup with the cake. What kind of cake did you get, Jocasta?

JOCASTA It's a very nice cake, Marshall. It's in the refrigerator.

MARSHALL [giving up] I'll get it, okay? 

SOPHIE All right, show me this new coffee machine that everybody's so enthused about…

While Marshall fetches the grocery-store cake, Sophie and Charley examine the coffee machine.

CHARLEY Sophie, do you… what do you remember? Just before you left? What exactly do you remember…?

SOPHIE Ah? 

CHARLEY Do you remember our conversation about… what you promised me?

SOPHIE Yes. I remember, Charley. It's probably best that I don't say anything right now. 

Sophie grabs a handy piece of paper and writes, in the cipher they used in the past, Chip Gone?

SOPHIE I remember. I didn't find anything. I'm so sorry.

Charley sees a tear trickling from the corner of her eye.

SOPHIE So, should we make fully caffeinated or decaf for the team? Everybody seems a little excited right now…why don't we make some decaffeinated coffee?

As she makes the coffee, Charley can see underneath that Sophie is upset at remembering the promises that she made and the suspicions that she threw around.

CHARLEY Sophie, thank you for trying.

SOPHIE I'll always try my best for everyone on this team. Thank you for understanding.

Sophie keeps her words vague just in case somebody's listening. Charley is fairly convinced of Sophie's sincerity: that she went looking, she tried, and she failed. Either she didn't get far enough to actually try to find out what happened to Charley's mother or she got caught and that's what caused her to get this radical personality change and the glyphs are just a cover story. She still has the memory of everything that she said and everything that she believed but she now thinks that these are artifacts of her having been addicted to glyphs.

While Sophie busies herself with tidying the library (a horror show after months of inattention) and reading the after-action reports for the missions she missed, the rest of URIEL reconvenes in the Rooster House. 

MARSHALL My belief going into this whole thing was that she was struggling with glyph addiction, and also had figured out in some capacity about OZYMANDIAS, and wanted to know more about Charlie's mother. So she used her own glyph addiction, which was true, to get herself sent to THROWAWAY in hopes of finding out information about Charley's mother. She figured that was a plausible enough cover because it was true that she was addicted. So she thought she had at least that layer of protection, and another layer of protection beyond even that because she knows as well as anyone that Granite Peak has the best of the best of the mindwipers and brainhackers in the world. They would get through the first layer at least. So she went in knowing she had at least two layers. She just had this interaction with Charlie: the note she wrote was in a code that she told Charlie to decipher in her head, and to not write anything down, and then to destroy the note because she was afraid of the chip. She's now back here, telling us her cover story that she had a glyph addiction, and we just sussed out with that interaction that she remembered her mission of finding out about Charlie's mother. 

So that leads me to believe that the real thing that she did actually was not going to look for Charlie's mother. Her real purpose was to seek more information about OZYMANDIAS. The second layer of protection was that she was going to go for Charlie's mother, so she went into THROWAWAY, they got through the first layer, glyph addiction. They found the, "I'm gonna go find your mom" memory, and they assumed that was the real memory. The truth. Then they sent her back to us. But if they had breached the last memory of betrayal, they would know about the cipher code she used with Charley and they would have taken that away from her too. But she used that code now, and… so I think we can trust her. I think we can bring her in.

ARCHIE [considers] That's very good, Marshall. 

What Marshall describes is what Archie doesn't actually think of as "the Ransom Method," of layering multiple lies on top of one another to protect the truth, but which he used at St. Francis and on other occasions.

ARCHIE The only thing that I was thinking was that…using the cipher code as a way of defeating the chip, yes, but…I was thinking we can't assume that Sophie thinks that all of us are equally trustworthy. She could be in a situation where she's willing to say something to Charley but not to Marshall or me. Her map of who she can trust might not be the same as ours.

ROGER If we're talking about Reinhardt, her map will have to do with people who came after. All the people who were here before are potentially compromised.

Archie, his mind racing down pathways he's not fully comfortable with, finds his consciousness impinged upon by the personality of Stoney.

ARCHIE-AS-STONEY I don't see why we have to pussyfoot around like this. Let's just crack her open and see what she knows!

MARSHALL What they did to her is going to be orders of magnitude more sophisticated than anything that I, or even Jocasta with her abilities, can get out of her. If my operative hypothesis is correct (and it could be wrong) she went in with multiple layers of internal narrative, multiple layers of screen memories. Those memories have now all been shuffled around, so now it's a twelve-layer cake but all the layers are jumbled and you're trying to re-ice it to make it look nice while inside it's a huge jumbled mess.

All I can do with hypnosis is try to piece together some of those layers. It would take me you know months or years to do that to get a coherent narrative out of it. Maybe Jocasta's abilities are better than that but… from our experience they've always seemed to be sort of like focusing on the strongest or most recent memory. I don't know how efficacious it would be, Archie.

ARCHIE-AS-STONEY Uncharacteristically modest of you! You've got all the tools we need! [turning to Mitch] And what about you, wizard? If Marshall's too lily-livered, you show us what you can do!

Marshall raises an eyebrow.

MITCH It's a little outside my wheelhouse, man. I would pass the ball over to Jocasta.

JOCASTA We could just take her to the Barn…?

MARSHALL We're not taking her to the Barn. She just spent three months at a Barn.

MITCH I recollect, Marshall, you and I having long conversations (maybe this is a screen memory) about how humane your methodology is. I'm surprised that you're hesitating to apply it here and now.

Marshall considers. Maybe he feels bad for Sophie, and that compassion is clouding his judgment.

MARSHALL But when you put it all together, it seems like Sophie really did outsmart THROWAWAY.

MITCH It was OK to do this to the Oldtimer.

MARSHALL Zeb? Zeb, yes, Zeb is happy as a clam. Living his best life. That's totally different! Completely different: he was already going insane, and I gave him a coherent narrative. Sophie has a coherent narrative now. We would be tearing down a perfectly constructed crystalline palace that is her entire being. Zeb was just the shattered remnants of a man out of time, who had lived as a vagrant for seventy years. I built a palace. He lives in mental luxury.

ROGER So what you're saying is if you mess with her she might not have the same abilities. Which strikes me as maybe the way they were thinking: maybe they didn't mess with her too much because she's still useful if she has her mind. They destroy the mind, what use is she?

MARSHALL Right, right.

ROGER So we have to guess that maybe even though they're the most skilled people, there's still some things that might be outside of their ability. They would mess with personality but they don't want to mess with mind or too much with memory, in any way that would make her less useful.

MARSHALL There is a theory that I have been pondering ever since Mitch and I had drinks a couple weeks ago, about the nature of things with us. The people in this room. I want to test something about how to proceed here, because I'm sensing that there's still some…we still don't quite know what to do. I would like to know what we should do. I think we should all just stay right here and do nothing and then see what coincidence happens. Like have Mitch just…do his thing. We all hang out here and maybe the answer will just walk through the door, or maybe a letter will arrive, and the letter will tell us. It'll give us the final clue that we need. 

Does it work that way, Mitch? Can we just…?

MITCH Here's my concern about that: there may not be a way to make that narratively and dramatically satisfying, trying to force it like that.

MARSHALL Is that how it works? 

MITCH I don't know!

ARCHIE No one's going to walk through the door of the Rooster House!

MARSHALL I know, but something could happen. Maybe a card will fall off the wall, and it'll be the Ace of Spades. That kind of thing, you know? 

MITCH Yeah, okay. That seems less implausible when you cite that example.

MARSHALL You were in the conference room and you were leaning back on the chair and you fell backwards and banged your head and you grabbed a Time magazine that had Uri Geller on the cover!

MITCH Yeah, but then we weren't expecting it. So it was cool.

MARSHALL So you can't do it if we're expecting it?

Jocasta sips her decaf and takes a bite of cake (the good cake, the inside-the-Rooster-House secret cake, which is a grocery store buttercream sheet cake but a nice one). Then she makes a face, because her bite of cake featured an inexplicable raisin.

JOCASTA [extracting the raisin from her mouth and displaying it] Is it out of line to suggest we're experiencing a little Mission drift at the moment?

MITCH I endorse putting Jocasta in charge, for the next five minutes. Whatever Jocasta says, that's what we do.

JOCASTA Let's adjourn.

MITCH All right, you heard her!

ROGER If my grandmother was alive to see this level of crazy Oracle talking, I don't know what she would say, but I'm sure she would whoop my ass.

MARSHALL [as everyone exits the Rooster House] I'm just trying to get a handle on some things.

Everyone returns to the main URIEL office, leaving the good cake behind.  Marshall arranged a catered lunch.

JOCASTA Sophie, welcome back. It's good to see you.

SOPHIE I was a little confused before. I feel much much more at home now, Jocasta. It's very good to see you, too.

JOCASTA Let's catch up soon. I've been doing some research work that I'm sure management will want to pass back to you.

SOPHIE Something to do with those psychics I sent you after, back in July?

JOCASTA [long thoughtful pause] That's really above my clearance level at the moment, Sophie. I do have to go. Let's catch up tomorrow.

SOPHIE [as Jocasta is already walking away] Splendid! Somewhere off-campus?

Jocasta leaves early, clearly in a bit of a mood.

ARCHIE What's up with her?

MARSHALL If it's not Sophie it's Jocasta, if it's not Jocasta it's Sophie… women in the office, right?

ARCHIE Was it the two cakes? I thought she would have liked that…

Sophie reviews the after-action report on the SCANATE investigation, specifically the version URIEL sent on to Granite Peak.  She consults Marshall and Mitch, the parties most closely associated with SCANATE.

SOPHIE First things first, they were the real deal, correct? I was right? My esmology was correct?

MARSHALL Yeah, there are some real deal ones.

SOPHIE [pleased]  I just think that's tremendous for both us and the project. You've been keeping a kind of loose hand on them over there at SRI, yes?

MARSHALL Oh, yeah. I don't bother them. I occasionally ask a couple questions. I think Mitch checks in periodically? We keep them on a fairly long leash.

MITCH I go over there a few times a week.

SOPHIE What's your impression of them, Mitch? Are any of them possible SANDMAN material?

MITCH Well, I mean… that's kind of a loaded question. What constitutes SANDMAN material, really?

SOPHIE It's an excellent question, as I sit here after three months of psych rehab. Yes, it's  an excellent question. But seriously. Are any of them SANDMAN material?

MARSHALL [flatly] No. 

SOPHIE Oh.

MARSHALL Two of them have substantial talent but they don't have the disposition. And the people running the program are fucking idiots.

MITCH Would you look at me on paper and say I'm, "SANDMAN material?" Probably not.

SOPHIE I guess that is a good point… on the basis of pure ability, yes.

MITCH And you know Pat and Mary-Lynn have stuff going for them definitely. Or did you mean Ingo?

MARSHALL [stirs, he was avoiding mentioning Mary-Lynn to Sophie] I guess if we're just going strictly based on ability, those two, Ingo and Pat…

SOPHIE But it's Price who has the real gift?

MARSHALL Yeah, no. He's good, yeah. He has the real gift. 

SOPHIE What do you make of this Puharich fellow, and Geller?

MITCH Fuck that guy.

SOPHIE [uncertain] Ah.

MARSHALL Uri is a fraud, but he has some natural ability with the source code and neurolinguistic programming. Puharich is an interesting character… it turns out he's SANDMAN, and he was toying a bit with SCANATE, but he's mostly running Uri Geller.

SOPHIE You have to wonder if this is a test for us.

MARSHALL [uncertain] Uh …

SOPHIE I saw the potential in SRI through my esmology… We investigate it, all along there's been this one person attached to the program, sort of a traveling recruitment agent… It really just makes me wonder why they did it.

MARSHALL I got the distinct impression this was not intentional. If it was a test? I don't think it was. If it was a test he didn't indicate in any way, like, "Congrats, you passed, you discovered me," or whatever. The vibe we all got off of him was that he genuinely was like, what the fuck is going on here…

SOPHIE Since you've taken over SCANATE, SANDMAN hasn't—Granite Peak hasn't said to you, "Alright let's move along with this project and…?" 

MARSHALL No, no one has. No one from the Peak or the Agency has contacted me about SCANATE.

SOPHIE That's very odd.

MARSHALL If you met Russel Targ I think you might think it's a little less odd; the man does not exactly inspire confidence. The civilians who are in charge of this project, or had been in charge of it… really they're just playing around. They're not really working things in a systematic way. It's just a game to them.

SOPHIE I'd like to do some calculations on this, so I'm very pleased that both of you were able to give me a little more information to fill things in.

She shifts gears.

SOPHIE This thing with the um the food company? So there was some evidence of taint there, with the woman cultist? 

MARSHALL Our understanding is that Butler got away, or whatever.

SOPHIE Is the idea that he had gotten some training from this Bernadette person as far as things like memetics and esmology are concerned?

MARSHALL Yeah, probably a little natural ability with the language, maybe even a little natural ability with the math. But most of what he got was through Bernadette, because where else would he get it from?

SOPHIE And the land has been purchased or is about to be purchased? The possible subduction zone?

MARSHALL Yeah, we got funding for that.

SOPHIE Again: Marshall, Mitch, thank you so much for keeping me filled in on everything that's gone on while I've been gone. The one thing that I regret about this lengthy time away from the Bay Area is that I've lost the sense of esmologically what's happening. I understand that memetics can also be "corrupting" but since I've been able to integrate those into the greater sciences of sociology and…opinion manipulation…I haven't felt endangered by them in the same way that the glyphs did. I'm here to take a little bit of the burden off of Archie now as well, to help with the meme campaigns. And obviously you saw in my standing orders to help out with esmology as well… At the end of this week I will try to put together a report that will bring together everything that we've done, basically, since Jocasta joined us, and try to see where things are going to bubble up next, because that's been my job. To find the next…

MARSHALL You're the great predictor. Don't tax yourself too much, you're just back and we don't want you to give yourself fatigue…

While Marshall and Sophie drone on, Mitch studies Sophie's aura more closely. Her emotional aura is completely different from it was earlier this morning. As she's been questioning Marshall and Mitch, her mind has homed in on the two of them, and she's all business right now. There is a slight golden glow of pride about her being back at work, her being able to do what she did so well before she had to go away to psych rehab. There is a great amount of intention behind what she is doing here, but it does not look like she is running some kind of program or taking orders from a hidden side of her brain or anything like that. Mitch would wager that if the THROWAWAY brainhackers did build some subtle impulse to find out everything she could into her, they didn't have to do too much building; she's always been the kind of person who needs to do the best at her job to prove herself and justify her own existence.

Jocasta arrives home and, sitting on her stoop, she sees Pat Price. Alarmed but armed, Jo pulls into her driveway.

PAT Hey, Chicky, you want to get a drink? 

JOCASTA Do I know you?

PAT We met at that uh dinner a few months ago with Uri and Andrea, didn't we?

JOCASTA I don't know if I know you that well, mister. Not enough to tell you where I live.

PAT I know. Weird, isn't it? Why don't we go down the street, grab a drink, I've got something to talk to you about.

JOCASTA You're a cop. Right?

PAT I'm retired.

JOCASTA That's what they all say… All right, I know just the place.

Eight or nine months ago, Jo and Roger visited the Hotsy Totsy, but now it's a completely different vibe. 

PAT So obviously, that night we all had dinner, we talked about a lot of strange outré topics. that you know… nobody at the table seemed to blink an eye at. Some very very interesting people I met… and then… oh a few nights ago I had a weird weird dream. It was you and a buddy of mine from work. And if I remember it correctly… it was me and you and this buddy of mine from work. We were all in this car right, and you were driving, and we kind of got together and tricked my buddy from work into leaving the car... and after he left I felt like I could tell you anything… and then I realized where I'd seen you. 

Before we had dinner… many years before we had dinner… you told me to trust the man with the cards. Am I right?

Jo glances around. The Hotsy Totsy is mostly empty, early in the afternoon on a Monday. A half dozen bar flies total, a few at the bar and a couple in a couple of booths.

JOCASTA Well, Mr Price, seems like you might want to tell this story to a psychiatrist because I'm sure I don't know what you're talking about and if I did, what did you want me to do about it? You might want to keep it to myself.

PAT You gave me very good advice when I was at my lowest, more than a decade ago.  The message I got from you in that dream was very urgent, but I didn't understand it: who is this man? Give me more information and I can find him. I can find anybody. I found you.

Jocasta reaches into her purse and pulls out a small sketchbook. She writes something down on it, tears the page out, folds it in half, and hands it to Pat Price.

JOCASTA Sorry, mister. I really can't help you. And I'll ask you again to maybe seek professional help before you start showing up on strange ladies doorsteps.

However, what is written on the piece of paper is all of the information (as well as the sketch) that she was able to gather about him: his education, his known whereabouts, everything she picked up in those interviews. 

JOCASTA Have a good night, mister.