8/3
Monday, October 8th (Columbus Day), 1973. Back at the ersatz SANDMAN headquarters, Archie oversees a team of junior esmologists as they watch the three local television channels, cut up newspapers, etc. He starts his data analysis by considering whether there's active source-coded-powered memetics out in the first 72 hours of the subduction zone's appearance: no. Right now war fear is the main influence on the local community, tinged with a lack of trust in government due to the Spiro Agnew revelations. The national newspapers, tied to the wire services, are giving the first indications of the Yom Kippur War, and the possibility of it becoming a proxy USA/USSR conflict, and thus the fear.
Archie leans back and spitballs with the bullpen of junior SANDMAN analysts. These junior types are, or are similar to, ones Marshall met during his visit to Granite Peak. They don't like Carson. One thing they're all in agreement on, is that there's a lot of military bases and DoD business in the area. On the one hand, war is scary, but on the other hand, war is good for business. Another item they're all in agreement about, is the Yom Kippur War will last substantially longer than the Six Day War.
Archie throws out a few ideas to see how the younger men react, including his Indian Mound suspicions as one possible factor among many, and when he brings up the ancient burial mounds, he's answered by six near-identical blank looks. One of the kids pipes up. "Uh, with all due respect sir, I really don't think…maybe if we were talking about a subduction zone that had broken out in the Middle East there would be something, but these are just dead Indians."
It's instantly clear to Archie: these kids who have come from Granite Peak who have come from the HQ in Huntsville have been infected with a meme: very specifically "don't pay any attention to the Indian mounds." It's couched in all kinds of SANDMAN and History-B justifications and rationales.
When Archie unwinds the underlying memetic code he can tell not only that, but also because of the work that Jocasta did in going through all those Fate magazines and such, this is an OZYMANDIAS meme.
If Archie's back of the envelope calculations are correct and it's infected these six, they probably deployed it in the esmology and memetics teams from the start. This is a very powerful meme; Archie would estimate it to be in the 10 to 12 range.
In a sense, this is standard operating procedure: all the time memes are deployed for agents' own good. It's like inoculation right.
They're ready to start going on any number of countermemes Archie directs, to help keep people calm so that the Zone doesn't get bigger and start triggering more events. They don't have a lot to say about the UFO side of things, as civilians really haven't seen any of them yet. But this is an aviation state, this is an aerospace state. There's going to be pilots, amateur or professional, who might see stuff up at 40 000 feet and who might start spreading rumors.
Archie quietly takes Marshall for a walk outside, on the streets of Albany, and fills him in on this analysis.
ARCHIE
"I don't know if that means 'pay no attention' like they're not important, or does it mean they are important? They know it, and they don't want you looking at them. 'Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain?'"
MARSHALL
"I don't have any immediate thoughts. This is just a weird one."
ARCHIE
"It could be a right-hand-doesn't-know-what-the-left-hand-is-doing situation. OZYMANDIAS perhaps has some interests in the Mounds, in the Indians, separate from this. Or it could mean that they are handicapping us in this mission, right now. That they don't want us to succeed."
MARSHALL
"Any number of possibilities are possible at this point. We just don't have enough data. This whole thing could be an OZYMANDIAS op for all we know at this point."
ARCHIE
"It doesn't seem like them, frankly, to me. But yes, we don't know—"
MARSHALL
"It doesn't not seem like them. It's being spearheaded by the esmology team and Dr Sydney Gottlieb. Candidly: question everything. What have we seen to suggest that there's actually anything happening? A random dude from Detroit said 'I'm picking up weird fear vibes in this empty field?'"
ARCHIE
"This is what I was saying about the St. Francis! We had jungle vines growing. We had we had a hotel turning into a ziggurat, there were seven of us there. Now we got a hundred people walking around in fields."
MARSHALL
"I'm keeping an open mind. It could be both things, it could be multiple things at once, multiple things could be true. Everything could be false. I don't know. I have no bright ideas."
Lacking a better plan, Marshall and Archie spend the evening and night organizing the sizable group assigned under them, and interviewing the, and in the process the working out the shape of the OZYMANDIAS meme. Marshall determines that the meme has spread most deeply into the 'suits,' into the esmology and memetics team. A few of the commandos have have been infected, but not all.
This makes sense if you consider what people are talking about: if people are analyzing the history of the area the Mounds are going to come up. They're nearby, they have a pre-Ontoclysm origin. The Commandos don't really talk about that very much.
Marshall is a hundred percent sure that Morris, their assigned taisher, is not infected with the meme. He and Archie decide to keep Morris siloed away from the memetics guys.
Tuesday, October 9th, 1973. Cairo, Illinois. Jocasta just wants to talk to Charley before we go to the assignment, in private, and then chat on the way to it about general stuff. She's going to tip Charlie to the fact that she can telesend now. Nobody except Marshall knows that, and she hasn't told anybody higher up in SANDMAN either.
JO
"I this happens you'll know that it's because I'm in distress, or because, if we're not together…don't be alarmed by it, just know that I'm trying to get you information. I think I may have learned to do it because of what happened to us at Shasta."
CHARLEY
"Oh, really?"
JO
"Yeah, something very similar. I was trying very hard to send you and the rest of the team a message from wherever we were that I was in a lot of danger, and that I needed you to come get me … and soon enough I kind of worked at that, and developed the ability to do it."
(This may just be a weird theory that Jocasta just came up with, or it could be an in-game explanation of how experience points work.)
"What do you think about this? What do you think about everything that's going on? It seems so huge and yet…I've never worked with with the outfit on this big a scale before."
CHARLEY
"Yeah, me neither."
JO
"I guess the play is to just go along with the team, and do what we're told, but my curiosity is getting the best of me already. We don't really know anyone on the team."
CHARLEY
"I'm surprised you haven't done anything large like this before."
JO
"My specialty has always been close-up work, you know. I don't usually get sent on the big-brained missions like Archie and Marshall do. Although it's strange to think about, because memetically this part of the country is so rife with meaning. It's very heavy with historical implications. I don't know if any of them have anything to do with what's happening here. These Mounds that they're taking us to, that that was the biggest Native American population center in existence for hundreds of year. Just down the river there's a place that they were going to make a 'Midwest White House' after the Civil War to emphasize the idea that the Union was intact and that the division between the North and the South had ended, and now the the power of the federal government reaches all over the slave states and the free states.
"And that's right down the river from Metropolis, where everybody says Superman lives."
CHARLEY
"Superman, yeah. Wow."
JO
"They have a little museum to him there that I'd like to see."
CHARLEY
"Me too!"
JO
"Maybe we can sneak away at some point and see it, yeah… What I'm saying is, especially given what's been happening in this part of the country recently, there's been a lot of racial violence there. The bad vibes that the enemy thrives on are omnipresent here. Do you have any ideas about anything we should do to prepare, or should we just head on out and go with the flow?"
CHARLEY
"I don't know. At this stage going with the flow seems like a good idea. But if you're asking me things I'd like to do… talking about the Indian burial mounds, I'd like to sit and take some time there, maybe talk to the Indians."
JO
"Good luck finding any, they're all gone. You'd have to go to Oklahoma…"
CHARLEY
"Jo! The ones buried in the ground!"
JO
"Oh. Of course. Yeah."
CHARLEY
"I don't even know what I would want to ask them at this point in time. But yeah, that's a thing I would like to do."
JO
"Right, well, I'll have your back while you're there. I'd like to take a look at them myself just for a purely anthropological perspective."
CHARLEY
"Yes, you could meditate."
One mound is on private ground. It's the one that's closest to the center of the subduction zone, in Mounds, Illinois. The Kincaid site is very intact, been looked at by anthropologists and archaeologists for 60+ years at this point. Multiple expeditions have gone down there to excavate and study them. Kincaid is the larger, and it's a public site, so people can visit it.
Even getting to the other site, the one closer to the subduction zone, would involve hopping a fence. You could see it from from a distance, but if you wanted to get on the mound you would need to go on to private property.
JO
"What do you think?"
CHARLEY
"I'd like to check out some of these places ahead of time. Do you think we're gonna have time to visit every all of the sites ahead of time or do you think we just need to pick a couple?"
JO
"They're all pretty far away. We couldn't get to more than one in a night, I would imagine, and I assume we'll get our orders in the morning, so I'd say pick one that seems the most resonant to you and we'll do that one. The primary decision is, do we want to go to the one that's on private property and relatively unknown or do we want to go to the one that's still built up and has been thoroughly researched but is easier to get to?"
CHARLEY
"I'm more curious about the one that's on the private property. What do you think about starting there? Is that going to be too difficult?"
JO
"I've never minded a little sneaking around."
Jocasta and Charley get a little under 100 yards away from the Mound. It's small: the diameter is approximately 35 to 40 feet and it only rises five or six feet up. Looking at it, one can imagine what it looked like when it was taller and its dimensions roughly twice its present height.
Jocasta hesitates as her psychic powers of detection mostly require touch, and aren't effective from a hundred yards out. She wonders aloud if she should hop the fence and take some photos. This is a small and singular mound, suitable for a burial site, not a community center…
Charley, however, has come prepared, with no fewer than four handcrafted jerry-rigged videocameras, each with six hours of capacity, an internal power supply, and motion-sensor activation. She and Jo place one, and when basically anybody or anything appears in this backyard and surroundings of this Mound it'll be recorded.
Most of the land is open and easily seen from a distance, though there's a farmhouse and some trees nearby; approaching from the south there is some cover but in other directions there's only corn.
JO
"You know how to drive?"
CHARLEY
"Yes."
JO
"You want to drive?"
CHARLEY
"Yes!"
Charley has never driven but believes she can figure it out. It's twenty-five miles from the Mounds site to the Kincaid site and traffic is light. They pass by Metropolis on the way, and reach Kincaid in about forty-five minutes.
The Kincaid site has been studied extensively by researchers from the University of Chicago, and it's on public land. A handful of tourists are visiting when Jocasta and Charley arrive. Charley reads informative signs and is disappointed by the lack of specific detail available about the civilization here; the mounds were abandoned shortly before European contact and so there were no extant cultures present to provide colonial archaeologists with information.
Jocasta points out that one of the things that is known about the Kincaid mounds is the presence of stone box graves, which not every buried body received and which implies some kind of elite chief or shaman grouping. She quietly pulls out her divination kit: incense and a burner, and sits and watches the smoke in an attempt to extract vibes. The smoke's patterns she can interpret as essentially positive: the preparatory work Jo and Charley are doing right now is worthwhile, and will pay off.
Meanwhile, Charley places her second of the four videocameras and considers. She'd like to reach out to the dead here, but without more information to go on, her options as a medium are limited. So: astral projection! She departs her body and enters the spirit realm. There she can see the emotional scars of the Kincaid Mounds: loss, the dead, loneliness. The noosphere has forgotten what happened here, leaving behind an empty place. She feels a slight tugging, an eddy of memory of life, deeper in the astral plane. The site becomes alive the deeper she goes, partly due to age and partly because the memories of these people who lived and died here have sunk down and in.
Jocasta presses her hands into the earth and attempts to read the emotions of the mound with psychometry. To her surprise she senses a scene not from centuries or millennia ago, but one of the University of Chicago expeditions in the 1930s. Tweedy academics and grad students, all male, methodically excavating one of the stone-box burial sites.
In her vision Jocasta sees an early 1930s sedan pull up. The driver and three other individuals inside get out of the car almost simultaneously a little ways away from the site.
The archaeologists look up at these people who have come to visit: three men, one woman, all dressed in sort of 1930s business attire. They aren't surprised by these visitors.
Then one of the newcomers removes from the trunk of the sedan what looks like a complicated photographic rig. He sets it up and the group of grad students and professors all gather around to take a photo at their site.
Something happens with the camera's flashbulb and the operator causes it to flash, flash, flash, and Jocasta reels, realizing that what she's seeing is a 1930s-era ikoter. Something was removed from this site, and the records and memories of it erased, by the predecessors of SANDMAN.
MEANWHILE IN NEWARK, OHIO. News comes in: more sightings above eleven out of the twelve subduction zones again, at altitudes of 40 000 feet and above. Whatever these colorful shapes are that are manifesting above the subduction zones on the ground, they're being very careful to stay away from commercial airliners. However there's enough high altitude surveillance crisscrossing the Ohio and Mississippi valleys courtesy of SANDMAN and other U.S intelligence that now they're seeing these things everywhere. A couple of them actually got into a couple of Foo Fighter style World War II sort of situations, with ball lightning and chasing the planes. They took evasive action and nothing on the the planes was damaged. There was an intense amount of electromagnetic energy thrown at them when they got close to these orbs and polyhedra. In short, the UFO activity is picking up, but not yet to a level that would be ordinarily visible to somebody on the ground without binoculars or a telescope.
Also, Nixon has signed off on a huge airlift to Israel, news which will become public soon.
Archie gets off the phone with the Librarian, back in San Francisco. He told her they're fine, and to pass along that the indigenous mounds seem significant (Hilary was right) but not to discuss this with anyone else partly just as good operational hygiene and security, and partly for fear of infection with the "the Indian mounds don't matter" meme.
He reflects that the Archie of Roger's dream, the one that seemed a vision of the future, was concerned with information sequestration and time distortions and Hilary's theories. Are these "time distortions" actually a reflection of the URIEL researchers looking forward and backward with their various psychic abilities?
Archie doesn't feel overly concerned about this synchronization between vision and reality. He considers reaching out to Hilary himself and getting him looped in.
MARSHALL
"I am still tapped for ideas, Arch. I don't know. I feel we should lay some memes down and call it a day? I don't know what we're supposed to do. I guess we could bring Morris to one of the Mounds, but…"
ARCHIE
"Yeah."
MARSHALL
"The description of this site being like an inactive but potentially destructive volcano is… You can't stop a volcano from erupting, you just have to like make sure people evacuate when it happens. We lay a strong memetic foundation so that when the volcano does erupt it hopefully doesn't take all of Columbus, Ohio, with it, I guess?"
ARCHIE
"Yeah. We'll work on the fear angle…"
MARSHALL
"How do you make people not afraid of an empty field where no one goes?"
ARCHIE
"We have to make them not afraid that this war will become…"
MARSHALL
"'Don't be afraid to go to this empty field!'"
ARCHIE
"In the broader sense, fear and malaise in general, and fear of the of war in the Middle East… it's a defense town, a defense region… I’m thinking ‘Arsenal of Democracy.’ The idea is, this is good! Because we're not going to send American boys to Israel, but we're gonna sell them missiles and so on."
MARSHALL
"It's a truly insane idea and I think it's probably outsized to the situation, but: we could build a mall on the site. Malls are a big thing here and now, in the early 70s. It's an emerging exurb of the Columbus area … what's more American than the mall? But I don't even know if that would solve the problem. I don't even know what the problem is!"
There's also the question of how the mounds tie to the zones. They aren't matching up 1:1 with the zones centered on the mounds, they're generally a few miles off.
Archie and Marshall settle on a conservative approach: flooding the local news with feel-good human interest stories and reassurance that the current violence in the Middle East is not the start of World War Three, that everything is under control. They end up deploying the meme at an effective Power of 9 which for math reasons results in Archie gaining 2 points of Corruption.
If you see a lot of movement, if flights out of Wright-Patterson and the rest of these Air Force bases in Ohio? Nothing to worry about! It's just us, doing what we're duty-bound to do for our ally in the Middle East. Don't worry about the Soviets or their Egyptian and Syrian clients. This what your tax dollars pay for, and it's going to be fought well away from any of the young men who have just come back from Vietnam in the last few years.
BACK IN CAIRO. Charley dips deeper into the astral plane. This is her first time in the Deep Astral, and the change is a radical one. The world flips upside down; the outer astral just looks like the regular world with a little bit extra, but here symbolism is surface.
The site is active. There are not actual ghosts per se but signs of people living here: fires coming out of you know the smaller buildings, et cetera.
Multiple histories overlap here. Does that mean we're talking about pre- versus post-Ontoclysm, or just the stuff that Jocasta was telling her about there being multiple different pre-Columbian societies that lived here in succession? What Charley sees is a whole bunch of overlapping structures and buildings, some of them have common foundations and have common atria. It's a very confusing sight.
She can feel, stretching off to the west (towards the subduction zone) a pulsing line of energy that collects here in the Deep astral and heads off to feed the subduction zone with energy to keep it alive. What that energy is, Charley doesn't have the tools to analyze. Probably some kind of belief-energy.
In this astral landscape that energy is flowing underground. It felt like a cemetery when Charley was in the outer astral, closer to the real world, but this doesn't feel like a cemetery anymore. There's nobody here. Did something happen the ghosts that were here before, if there were ghosts here before?
Subduction zones feed on death, on the ends of people's timelines. Why did all of these communities just disappear off the face of the Earth? The timing is right for one of them to have been sucked up by the Ontoclysm but the others aren't, so what happened here?
Maybe that the deaths that happened here or the disappearances, if that's what they were, of the living or the dead…laid the foundation for the subduction zone to come up.
Charley mulls all this over. Is there a way she can affect this energy flow, redirect it away from the subduction zone? It would probably require a lot of physical disruption of the site, bulldozing mounds and ripping up foundations. Maybe the reason this flow wasn't as evident at the other, smaller site was because it was so altered, shrunken, compared to this.
Definitely more people disappearing here would be bad.
Later, their divinations done, Jocasta and Charley discuss.
JO
"Look, this is not the first time we've been here. Some early version of SANDMAN—or someone—came here and interfered with the thoughts or the memories of the University of Chicago archaeological team."
CHARLEY
"That's surprising."
JO
"Yeah, maybe."
CHARLEY
"Do you think they'll mention that in the report before they…?"
JO
"I feel like if they wanted to tell us that they would have told us that already which may indicate that they don't want us to know. Although I know I am prone to paranoia. The specifics of that make me very nervous about what we're going to be told tomorrow so maybe we should keep that between the two of us for now." (Jocasta fills Charley in on what she saw on the vision.) "I did an oracular reading, and it led me to believe that what we're doing tonight is just for our eyes only. Let's make sure that we're on the same page about what we tell people, and if there's anything we want to do before we get our marching orders, or talk to the rest of the team, or whatever the next step is as a group. We need to be sure about what we both saw here and whether we want to share."
CHARLEY
"Yeah, yeah, okay."
JO
"What about you? Did you see any ghosts?"
CHARLEY
"No. No, it was really disappointing. There weren't any ghosts, whatsoever. What was fairly exciting was, I was in the astral plane but I was able to go deeper, and that was the first time I've I've been able to do that. Really had no issue getting back, either. But even going deeper there it was…there's no one around.
"There's a lot of energy in this site, underground, and it's all flowing towards the west, which—that's where the the subduction zone is, right?"
JO
"That's where the closest one is, yeah."
CHARLEY
"So it's like a vein of energy, that's feeding it. And really, the only way to try and redirect that, if that's something that we wanted to do, would be we would have to damage the site further. Or somehow manipulate belief around this site. I'm not really excited at this point. I'd have to think about that.
"That's all. It was pretty empty, and sad."
JO
"Maybe this is a terribly subjective question, but it did it seem to you that there was just no one there, or that the spirits had been taken away?"
CHARLEY
"It seemed like they had been taken away. But I don't know. Don't tell anyone about what we saw here, I agree."
JO
"Let's let's head back and see what the brass tells us to do, and we can maybe make some decisions from there, talk to the rest of the team. I'm beginning to develop a theory but I think it might be just crazy Auntie Joey being paranoid again.
CHARLEY
"Well, I want to hear, what's your theory?"
JO
"Charley, have you ever heard of the Ghost Dance?"
AND IN NEWARK. Archie calls Point 2.
HILARY
"Arch? Hello?"
ARCHIE
"Hillary! Can you hear me okay? How are you finding things down in Louisiana?"
HILARY
"Everything is … the memeticists have said … they've said the social matrix here is unstable…the readings spiked a little bit overnight, last night, but there hasn't been a peep out of the subduction zone since then… I went there yesterday in person… didn't really see anything, you know, too-too out of order… no new structures… you know, no signs of anything having been disturbed at the site… really it's been a bit of a wash so far here."
ARCHIE
"It's quiet here, too. Don't know if it's the calm before the storm. Other than some electromagnetic lights in the sky, that's about all that's going on. Have you told anyone else the hunch you had about the Native Mounds?"
HILARY
"Native Mounds? Why on Earth would I do that?" (He's infected.) "No, no, that was just a that was just a crackpot theory, Arch. I mean, it's it's well outside of my expertise, and to be honest with you seems just like another wash to me."
ARCHIE
"Well, I guess so. No harm done, though! There's no bad ideas. I've been telling the kids here, 'there's no bad ideas!'"
HILARY
"They're probably going to start packing us up pretty soon and just keep a barebones crew. I'll probably see you back at Huntsville later in the week. We can talk more then."
ARCHIE
"This is also gonna sound a little bit out of left field but uh…"
Archie wants to bring up time distortions and make the prophecy self-fulfilling.
"Your tech team, your people, you're not noticing anything strange with time distortions? Are they missing time, or… sometimes with these 'flying saucer' stories…?"
HILARY
"Oh, no. No, nothing like that, nothing I've heard of. I've been to subduction zones that are active, you know. I've been to enough of them to know that you're going to see certain phenomena, and I've seen none of them here. Everything's been invisible. Everything has been basically either detected by instruments or at altitude, like you're talking about now. You say 'flying saucers,' I'm not sure if that's exactly what they're using to describe these, but you know we all know that the Kings on the other side have alternate technology that sometimes leaks through through a subduction or a temblor. I would wager that those uh those sightings were machines of some sort of theirs, that are starting to manifest far away from from actual witnesses. Nobody's reported anything on the ground, as far as seeing one of these things. They're staying very far away from any observers on the ground."
ARCHIE
"Okay, thanks. Thanks, Hilary. You take care and look after yourself. We'll talk again, yeah, we'll talk soon!
AND BACK IN HUNTSVILLE. Tuesday morning Mitch goes down to get a cup of coffee at the big gathering place with the big board and everything. On one of the screens is a projection of some photos. Dr. Davids appears and slaps Mitch on the back and says "well, we're probably going to be going back to the site today. Take a look at this!"
There are three very old settle cemeteries to the north of the subduction zone. Surveillance photos from late yesterday and early this morning show that in all three of those cemeteries, the graves have been emptied.
Whatever was left of the century-plus-years-old coffins is still there, but with the implausibly high detail of the satellite photos Mitch can see there are no bodies anywhere to be seen in all three of these cemeteries. No bones, nothing.
The graves have just been dug up, with no piles of dirt next to them. This is a real, physical manifestation of the subduction zone.