A Noble Calling
April 18, 1973 | Thursday
MIKE
On the morning of Thursday, April 18, Archie wakes up with a wild, gasping start. The stress of being back in the active mix of a "mission" after so many months of admin down in Tarzana, the strangeness of being in the bed here in San Francisco, with Melanie, on a weekday, and all the information and esmology tumbling around in his head... it's taking some time to get used to.
There was a dream there, a strong hypnopompic one—Archie hasn't remembered his dreams much since the Charley dream on the set of The Amateur Hour back in December—a half-remembered feeling of being drunk, in a cold, concrete room covered in half-finished paintings when the walls suddenly fell away... and at that Archie realizes he'd internalized that bit from Elsie Whitaker Martínez's oral history, where she told the story of how Xavier—"Marty"—survived the big San Francisco earthquake.
Archie looks over at the alarm clock on his side of the bed: 6:12 am. Take away one hour to remove Daylight Saving Time and there it is: 5:12 Pacific Standard Time, the moment everything changed 68 years ago. Or changed back, if URIEL's current theory is true.
Melanie is still dozing, so Archie throws on his robe and paddles off to his old office, now a shadow of the museum of his ad career that it once was. The secure phone is still there, but the Telex is gone. And his inbox is full of personal mail that's come to Pacific Avenue over the past week or so. Letters from professional societies, bills, all the mundane business of his half-lived life in San Francisco... and a personal letter, postmarked on Monday the 15th. Return address is 3200 16th Street, but there's no name above the address.
On the inside of the envelope is a plain piece of paper. On it is handwritten the following:
"To Our Poor Blind Candidate. Today is, indeed, the time to shit or else get off the pot. If you're in, bring your poke of gold dust for the benefit of the widders. Credo quia absurdum."
ROB
Archie reads the the Clampers' motto under his breath as he folds up the note. He looks around the house — the kids' things, pictures of his family, all the domestic touches — as if the absurd thing he nevertheless ought to believe is his life here, with his family.
He will try to get dressed and slip off to work (could be Livermore or 1 Kearney, wherever he expects the action to be) before anyone else wakes, telling himself he's already up, he's being considerate by not waking anyone. It's just easier. But feel free to have Melanie or someone catch him before he goes if there's a scene at home you have in mind.
MIKE
Just as Archie is getting ready to head back up to the bedroom, get changed for work, and head out the door, there's a knock at his office door.
"Hey Dad." Jane is standing outside Archie's office door. "You got a minute?"
She sits down on the small office couch, having to shift over some pictures that once hung on the wall. Jane's rarely been down here—none of the family have—but since Archie's been working in Los Angeles and Charley's left, all kinds of long-standing Pacific Avenue traditions have fallen by the wayside.
"I wanted to talk to you about college... and career, a little bit, while I had the chance." Jane's mouth is pursed and she has put on her "Serious Face"—one of the little Ransom family terms Archie and Melanie used to use to gently tease and poke fun at Jane was she was very little and sometimes took small things very seriously. On a young woman it looks less cute and more like a show of dissatisfaction and worry.
Jane has received acceptances from Berkeley, Columbia, USC, UCLA, and Chicago in the past few months, among others; she'd been applying to schools with good journalism and communications departments and done exceptionally well on the standardized tests and application essays.
"You're probably sick of me talking about Watergate," she says, smiling at how for the past nearly 12 months, it's all she's been studying and talking about at school and at home. "Would it be crazy if I said that maybe I'm starting to feel a little jaded about journalism? Like, here we are, it's April, Nixon has been on the gallows for almost two years now, and he still hasn't gotten the noose yet! And now," Jane sniffs dismissively, "all people care about is Patricia Hearst; every newspaper, every newscast. A pretty Berkeley girl decides to join a bunch of revolutionaries and all of a sudden good governance is the least of our worries. Do we really have that short an attention span as a country?" Jane sounds honestly exasperated; maybe there's a little bit of the petulant child in her tone, and maybe Archie can't help hearing that. But Archie can also tell, deeper down, that she is honestly disillusioned that it's taken so long for Nixon to pay the price for his administration's crimes, and if the esmology Archie did last year is true, it's going to take at least a few more months.
Rob
Archie sits opposite his daughter, swivels his chair so they are knee to knee. "How many fairy tales start with a princess being kidnapped from her castle? That story is thousands of years old. People are wired to respond to it. Especially every little girl who ever dreamed of being a princess, and everyone who ever had a little princess in their life." His voice turning just a little husky there. "You can't blame them for that, it's just deep conditioning."
"Journalism is still an honorable profession. A noble calling. But it doesn't hurt to be a little jaded about it. Not everyone is sharp as you, peanut. Not everyone has as clear a sense of what's really important."
He gestures at whatever newspaper is closest to hand. "I guess every journalist has to tread a line between telling people what they need to hear and telling them what they want. Right now, people want to hear about the Hearst girl. Absolutely. But as long as she gets home safe, Patty Hearst is going to be a nine day wonder. You'll see."
"As for Nixon, these things move slowly. They've subpoenaed the tapes, indicted his aides. What would you consider justice: does the president have to swing too?"
MIKE
"Mr. Bernard, my civics and journalism teacher, says Nixon will only resign or get impeached when the intelligence agencies and big business have had enough." At this, Jane makes an effort to get Archie to look straight at her. "When Nixon endangers international business and finance and the U.S.'s credit rating, out he'll go." Archie recalls last year Jane was just looking for bias in the nightly news and this year, she's half-convinced a cabal of businessmen and intelligence operatives hold the key to...
In the middle of that line of thought, Jane says, "I know what you do, Dad." A substantial pause. "Okay. Maybe not exactly what you do. But I know enough. Mom's terrible at hiding things, especially from me. But even if I couldn't read her like a book the past few months, I'm no dummy. The weird village we stayed in in England. Charley staying with us and then going away with her mom. Her mom, and your... your weird work friends! Do you know how... damaged they all seem? And you showing up here for a 'surprise' visit the week Patricia Hearst robs a bank and shoots two people?" Jane's voice stays pretty steady throughout all this, but Archie can detect a real edge in that comment about his being up here being a "surprise" visit.
"Maybe you're an intelligence analyst, or just someone who does propaganda for the government. Or maybe at a certain level, all that is basically the same job, but instead of doing it from Washington DC or a think tank on a university campus, you do it from a cool LA ad agency or at an obscure non-profit organization."
"You know, when I did my Berkeley campus visit with Mom last month... I saw the kids there canvassing and tabling for all kinds of left-wing organizations. Even after all this Patricia Hearst stuff, they were just... out in the open. Brazen. You know, there's been times I've thought I'm kinda a socialist; I'll think about politics and imagine, like, 'what would Dad say if I went away to college and came back that first Christmas shaking the Little Red Book at him.' But I'm not really. I'm not Patricia Hearst. I'm not Bernardine Dohrn. I just want justice in this country. For everyone. And I figure the only people able to make that justice happen... work from the inside. Inside the newspapers... inside the government, like Deep Throat."
Jane looks up again, but instead of challenging Archie's gaze, she pleads with her eyes. "Is that who you are, Dad?" She bites her lip as if to stifle a gasp or a sob. "Are you one of the good ones?"
ROB
Archie smiles and shakes his head wryly, at least as proud of her as he is dismayed to be called out. "The work I do... I don't call it propaganda. I like to think we're protecting people from propaganda. Inoculating them, good ideas for bad, hopefully helping folks think for themselves." Watching her closely to see what she thinks of that.
He quotes the Book of Mormon, but lightly, putting quotation marks in his voice, like he knows the words are inadequate: "'I remember the word of God, which says by their works you shall know them; for if their works be good, then they are good also.'" Then, more earnestly, he says, "I'm just as flawed as any human being, but I try to be one of the good ones. Just like you're going to be."
He tries to get a smile out of her.
"If you want to read the Little Red Book, go right ahead. I know you're too smart to fall for it."
"As for Nixon... give him four, five months. My guess is, by the time you head off to college, he'll be impeached. Or maybe he'll resign. Maybe he hangs on by his fingernails and gets shellacked in the midterms. Whichever way it plays out, his goose is cooked. Not because his puppet masters turned on him. Just because secrets always come out in the end." He speaks confidently, having already gamed this all out: "There'll be a lot of handwringing about what it all means for our country. But in the long run, we'll be stronger. It'll send a message: the system works. Nobody is above the law. Pretty good advertisement for the Fourth Estate, too. And say: you saw how it all had to go before I did! I'm glad I've got you around--you, your mother, your brother--to help me see."
"I don't like keeping secrets from you, sweetheart. I sure don't like lying. Is there anything you'd like to ask me, about my work?" (edited)
MIKE
Jane takes it all in, just barely smirking ironically at a couple spots where Dad gets especially corny ("too smart to fall for it," with an eye roll at "the system works"). But she listens attentively the whole time. At "helping folks think for themselves," Archie can tell she has a rejoinder ready for that statement and not an ironic one, but she lets him continue regardless. Oddly Jane doesn't roll her eyes at the scriptural palaver. Overall, Archie can tell her "why can't Nixon swing for it all now" impulses are still there strongly, but she's also clearly intrigued at how the "slow" version of the system working... well, how it all really works. The interlocking elements of politics, the media, material conditions (like the current inflation-recession she was rather intelligently talking about on Tuesday night at a late dinner when Archie came in from Shasta), the judicial system... Archie can see she's got an esmological mind, tinged with an idealism that, let's be honest, never hurt a young aspiring esmologist. How the bees swarm is all about belief, after all.
"It's not that I have questions about your work per se," Jane says, almost like she wants to keep some tacit distance if the stuff Dad does really is top secret. "It's more like, well, you went to war, did a couple of years in college, and then after doing the TV show, you went to work in advertising. What if I wanted to go about things where I'm... well, where I'm on a track for your kind of career? Like, okay, I still would love to get into journalism. But it feels like it'd be better for me to look for a job that's on track to being in a different side of media: production, or demographics, or even advertising. Or maybe not even journalism or media. Maybe just plain politics, do poli-sci. But that doesn't seem right either. Like, how do you get recruited? Is it still the whole Ivy League club thing?"
ROB
Archie nods encouragingly, some parental pride and maybe also his accumulated Corruption counterbalancing his desire to keep Jane far away from this world. "Journalism, advertising, politics... those are all good starting points for — for this kind of work. But there's not really a track, not one that leads anywhere important. Sure, those Ivy League clubs recruit more Ivy Leaguers to fill more club houses, but they only think they're where the action is. Just be smart, do good work, keep your eyes open, and your calling will find you. I know it will."
But knowing that's not enough to satisfy an impatient teenager, he then says, "Here, let me show you something neat." He takes a legal pad and pencil and teaches Jane some simple but fairly reliable esmological trick, the sort of thing an Esmology 101 professor might present with a flourish on the first day of class. Like a quick-and-dirty way to math out with remarkable precision when a leader will lose the support of their followers (Nixon and Congress, the popular girl in school, whatever) based on group size, cohesion, heterophily, multiplexity. Something that shouldn't work as well as it does but for Anunnakku programming (though he doesn't mention that). (edited)
MIKE
(Okay, to start with I'm going to have you give me a Teaching-21 roll, Teaching-23 if you want to let a little bit of Stoney out during your initial spiel. Corruption is also available for Teaching skill rolls, I'll just remind you. Regardless of how the Teaching goes, this is how Jane engages with it at first: )
Like a quick-and-dirty way to math out with remarkable precision when a leader will lose the support of their followers (Nixon and Congress, the popular girl in school, whatever)
Jane watches as her Dad goes into an introductory-level esmological scenario on tipping points in cults of personality. Dad goes back and lays down some generic history in this pure thought experiment: how the leader assembled his (or her!) core following using big ideas that each core follower adapted to their own worldview (this allows Archie to insert some rudimentary memetic theory in the lesson as well), and Jane engages quickly with all the variables Archie shows as tugging on the support: how leaders can actually use failures and setbacks to rally their following, how smaller subcultures within the leader's following (and even among enemies/outgroups!) can affect and mutate and warp the big memetic picture.
At a couple of moments Jane blanches and sighs dramatically at the fact that "nobody told me there'd be this much math!" but when Archie slips the constants into the equations—the way the Anunnaki programmed humanity to cohere around a leader—Jane Gets It. Like, immediately. And while she starts sharing ideas on hypotheticals that might weaken or strengthen the leader's control ("Daddy, you remember when Nixon went on Laugh-In? I remember everyone saying he was a fool to go on TV and say 'Sock it to meee?' But it showed he could poke fun at himself, way more than serious old Hubert Humphrey!"), Jane also remains silently respectful and hyper-cognizant of the basic esmological principles of Anunnaki social programming: blind faith, obedience to Control, hierarchy, the flush of endorphins that comes from being in the in-group and demonizing the Other, the effectiveness of short, powerful, brutal statements of belief to manipulate the crowd. It seems to confirm something dark she's assumed about human nature for a long while.
As Archie looks down at what started as a very basic scenario, he realizes that with Jane's input, they've both actually contrived a pretty complicated multi-factor hypothetical here. Archie looks down at the equations and realizes he's had his encounter with Ambrose Bierce in the back of his mind this whole time as well. What would cause someone, a leader with the presumed ability to change the world with the stroke of a pen—let's say for the sake of argument George Sterling, his Kissinger, Haldeman, and Ehrlichman being Bierce, London, and Martínez, maybe?—to lose control over an architecture of carefully-engineered belief to the point that reality itself snapped back violently and erased twenty years of history?
Now Archie can give me an Esmology-19 roll (and a 1d6-2 Corruption roll as well). As always, Corruption can also be used on the roll itself.
ROB
It's not at all critical I succeed here, in some ways would be better if I don't, but I'll take 1 point of Corruption on the Teaching roll just because it seems you should accure Corruption if you teach your daughter Esmology (and then if I really flub it I guess I can spend more). Won't pull Stoney into it, though.
Teaching.
>> SUCCESS by 14
Esmology.
>> SUCCESS by 10
Oh right, I take Corruption anyway.
>> 1d6-2 … 0
MIKE
(It's sliding off of Marshall and Archie like water off a duck lately, must be all that "delegating" to the NPCs)
So this little elementary esmology lesson has ended up becoming a nifty little experiment, Archie realizes. Sterling had a braintrust: the Crowd, the old Bohemians, all of whom it seems had some small power over reality: Native spirituality, memetics and/or NLP, Illumination, predictive powers (maybe esmology?) in the case of Jack London. They did something in their first iteration of 1906 that took the world off along an unknown ontological vector. They must have reached an enormous number of people to do so: perhaps through their history's version of Hearst's newspapers. And then we assume roughly two decades of relative eimic stability in a world written by Sterling and London and Bierce: full of Decadent artists' colonies, bizarre futures, baroque ghost stories. But then something happened. What was it?
Well, the obvious first candidate is the Enemy. As Archie contemplates the "end" of History C-for-Crowd, he takes the equations well past the parameters set in the original lesson for Jane. Archie adds in an Irruption, a serpent in their Bohemian paradise. Once you start getting into the area of reality quakes, it's tough for standard off-the-shelf esmology to keep up, of course. But heck, Archie's been at the site of more than one temblor and near-quake at this point; he knows how reality snaps back once an esmological factor like SANDMAN counter-ops (such as the ones Archie took command of at Cumbria and the St. Francis) has asserted its own reality, stronger than the Enemy.
Archie looks at the central balance of power on the sixth page of his legal pad. Sterling and his circle in the center (but it's labeled "Nixon et al."). History B on the left (conveniently labeled "the Left" for Jane's benefit). And then on the right, some other esmological factor or combination of factors. Archie internally thinks of it as SANDMAN just out of inertia and it's labeled "the laws, the courts, the newspapers, Congress" but that's old thinking and besides, what sort of Sandmen (proto-Sandmen, of course) could survive the radically-different world created by Sterling et al.? No, these would have to be men who could live in Sterling's world, be close/akin to him the way Congress and the Supreme Court are to Nixon, and also be conscious enough of the wrong turn Sterling had taken to snap history back to April 1906... and then take control of it.
"There's a remainder left there," Jane says as she sees Archie model a post-Nixon world. She points to the numbers—big numbers—that show the new post-Nixon/Sterling world would leave Congress and the courts and the newspapers back in charge of it, in every way that matters. The wider population's belief would gravitate to them, power seeks a vacuum and once created, that vacuum will be filled...
The Bohemians, Archie realizes. Not the artists, but the new, moneyed Bohemians, the ones that George Sterling—the post-critical-shift Sterling—considered servants of Mammon, the ones whom he futilely castigated in our history's 1907 Grove Play The Triumph of Bohemia, the ones who owned the Club he died in by his own hand, knowing that they remembered Bohemia just as well as he did. The ones who control finance and big business, the ones who put the Fear into Marshall and Mitch, the ones who know far more than they're letting on.
And at that Archie looks over at the invitation from E Clampus Vitus on his desk, how they not only remembered but promoted Emperor Norton before Mitch retrocreated him, and how they sent him this letter the day Patricia shot those poor innocent bystanders and, presumably, started all this leaking of History C-for-Crowd into our timeline. Today is, indeed, the time to shit or else get off the pot. If we can't go walking into the Bohemian Club to ask questions, at the very least maybe we could walk into Swede's.
ROB
Ok, cool. Hmm. Interesting.
Now feeling a bit of belated chagrin, Archie gathers up all the papers, plus the note from the Clampers. He's careful not to leave any of the notes in his office or in Jane's hands. "Neat, huh? Of course, it's only a model. The real world has a way of biting back, foiling even the most careful calculations. But it's a useful tool, a way for seeing past the surface of things. 'A prison isn't a prison if you have the key.'"
He will definitely try to call on E Clampus Vitus today. And bring some money (his poke of gold dust for the widders). But he heads in to Livermore or Kearney St. first.
(So does Archie think now that there was an irruption in History C', that the Red Kings reset that timeline somehow, allowing the Moneyed Bohemians (Hearst, others?) to take greater control of post-quake History A? Or, does he think the Moneyed Bohemians betrayed Sterling & co and that's what reset C'? Or is that a distinction without a difference?)
MIKE
In order for the esmology to work out, the Kings have to have been involved somehow; otherwise, the equations wouldn't result in such a massive surplus of Owl Energy in the reset timeline. Whether that means the Kings were bubbling away in one or more of the Sterling Braintrust's hearts and minds, or if they tempted a member of the Owl faction who pulled the whole thing down, or the Kings just set the two factions at odds with each other using Their usual tricks, Archie is not sure. He'd need some hard data from the lost Bohemia in order to puzzle that out—cultural artifacts, works of art, first-hand attestations from people who can remember the lost history, reality shards, that sort of thing—to really zoom down on the esmology.
I would say with the result of the Esmology roll, Archie's educated but by no means 100% certainty guess is that some Red King memetics got loose in paradise—just like they can here, in good old History A—and they grew and grew until someone in, let's call it the Owl faction, pulled a ripcord. But the Owls must have been capable of imagining a new world in an awful hurry, or have been planning such a revolt all along and found a History B infection to be an opportunity. It's all a little too opaque and this is pretty much all conjecture, but that's the way reality quakes are. Snap decisions made in a moment live for lifetimes (both forwards and backwards).
Ok, cool. Hmm. Interesting. Now feeling a bit of belated chagrin, Archie gathers up all the papers, plus the note from the Clampers. He's careful not to leave any of the notes in his office or in Jane's hands. "Neat, huh? Of course, it's only a model. The real world has a way of biting back, foiling even the most careful calculations. But it's a useful tool, a way for seeing past the surface of things. 'A prison isn't a prison if you have the key.'" He will definitely try to call on E Clampus Vitus today. And bring some money (his poke of gold dust for the widders). But he heads in to Livermore or Kearney St. first.
Jane sees her father smoothly clear away the various torn-off legal sheets, like a stage magician deftly sweeping up his 52 assistants after an amazing trick. She realizes he's shared something secret, private—almost sacred—with her. She's definitely intrigued to know more, but she also recognizes the moment and lets her first brush with esmology-related Corruption pass silently. As Archie gets his papers together and gets ready to grab a quick breakfast and hail a car to go to Kearny Street, Jane follows him to the kitchen.
Before Melanie and Eddie have woken up and made their way downstairs, Jane asks one final question. "Does looking at masses of people like that ever... well, does it ever scare you a little?"
ROB
"Oh yes," he says. "Always. If it ever stopped being scary, that's when I'd really have to worry."