Agrigenics
Leonard
(I can't remember if we settled on this or not — is Roger going to Vacaville to visit Agrigenics solo? Jocasta will go with him if he wants. Otherwise she'll just hang around doing research.)
Bill
Roger was more thinking of listening to the hippie rant about them, which according to the flyer is Castro Valley. He definitely does not want to go with hippies to a second location alone. Infiltration of AgriGenics itself wasn’t on his list yet. Plus, hey, maybe the hippies have an infiltration plan.
But we have until Thursday night for that. I guess Roger wouldn’t mind doing a drive by.
Michael
(the "hippies to a second location" joke never gets old)
Tuesday morning, before Marshall and Mitch arrive: now that Jocasta knows what the deal is with Beale Farms and Agrigenics, she can get down to research on Agrigenics itself. And that's definitely a company that will pop up in the URIEL library's collection of mundane news and geopolitics journals. So how about a Research-14 roll, Leonard. Don't be dissuaded by a "failure"; there are various bonuses here I'll be assessing.
Leonard
>>>> SUCCESS by 6
Made by 6.
Michael
All right, so Agrigenics, as I mentioned the other night in the live session, really made its name as both an outgrowth of and an innovator within the so-called Third World "green revolution" where new hybrid strains of rice and other grains enabled populations in Asia, Africa, and South America to have increased crop yields and avoid vitamin deficiencies. Agrigenics was founded as a company in 1965; its senior researchers and scientists had all worked for the UN-related NGOs and research centers who'd pioneered the work. Their new HQ in Vacaville was built in '71; it contains a full suite of laboratories as well as the usual space for corporate functions. Vacaville was considered a good spot considering the proximity of both Silicon Valley and UC Davis, which of course started as a land grant ag school and still pumps out lots of biologists, botanists, entomologists, all kinds of people useful to recruit from.
The magazine pieces have been puff pieces mostly; glossy affairs that say things like "First Agrigenics saved the Third World. Now they're going to help consumers and farmers on the home front." The challenge of the 1970s and '80s, say their senior management team, will be going beyond simple hybridization and into actual genetic engineering. In each of the magazine stories, of course, there are the usual Silent Spring ecologist types warning against such "tinkering with nature," but nothing as seemingly unhinged as the goldenrod flyer.
The Research into the geopolitical journals, on the other hand, expressly looks at companies like Agrigenics as a "peace dividend" of the softer side of the Cold War: proving to the Third World that America is the right number to place your bets on if you're a developing nation. The role of these nations as more or less explicit "laboratories" for Agrigenics and companies like them is openly acknowledged; furthermore it's made clear that operating on the more lucrative First World stage is a tacit reward for their work in making American look good to India and other non-aligned nations. (If you have follow up questions, that Research roll deserves at least a couple.)
Leonard
Okay, so a two-fold approach here.
First, two threads that Jocasta will try to run down via research [either an extension of this roll or a new one]: first, are any of the Agrigenics brass people whose names trigger anything in terms of being on the 'inside' -- any natsec or intel people, anyone with a loose thread that might connect to SANDMAN, anyone who's tied to anyone else that's on our radar? Second, a follow-up on the areas of the Third World where they've introduced their product: anything that would tickle Jocasta's sensibilities like (unexpected) war or bloodshed, cult activities, occult weirdness, widespread or notable changes in mass social behavior, reports of psi or mystic goings-on?
Second, when Jo goes home, she's going to lay the "MAD SCIENTISTS!" flyer on her kitchen table, flat. She's then going to build a little campfire pyramid out of a cigarette, a joint, and a stick of incense, light all three, and, not until after depleting the cig and the joint a little, try to do an oracular knissomancy reading with her mind focused on Agrigenics, the flyer, and their possible connection. She'll then do a long-shot psychometric read on the flyer itself, and finally, assuming she doesn't freak out or faint or whatever, she'll dose, meditate, and try to clarify and/or synthesize everything the learned from both normal and magical research.
Michael
1) Agrigenics brass being natsec, intel, SANDMAN, Intelligence Analysis roll: Here's the thing about the folks who have ended up on both the board of directors and scientific advisory boards of Agrigenics: the vast majority of them were involved in the past decade in various international NGOs: namely, the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center in Mexico (founded as a joint effort in the 1940s between the Mexican government and the Rockefeller Foundation) and the International Rice Research Institute (founded in the 1960s as a collaboration between the Ford Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, and the Phillipine government). Two years ago a new umbrella organization, the Consultative Group for International Agricultural Research, was founded by the World Bank and the Rockefeller Foundation (this of course was after Agrigenics was founded but Jo does see a few familiar names on CGIAR's advisory board from Agrigenics. Even the term "Green Revolution" itself was coined by the head of USAID, which as far as Jo can tell is the National Security Council's and CIA's soft power arm in the Third World. As Jo goes deeper into this research, it checks out up and down the line that these efforts to feed the Third World are an American soft power op, 100%. Everybody on this board, both corporate and scientific, could be involved in intel or defense-related work, still, because of course, you never quite quit the Agency, do you? (OOC, I will flesh out the major players in Agrigenics' boards if and when necessary, but suffice to say Jo finds enough news article references to some of them affiliated with Ford, Rockefeller, USAID, CGIAR, Defense and State agencies—let's say a narrow majority of both boards—to surmise all this.)
Finding out more about SANDMAN's direct or indirect involvement will require someone with Rank.
2) Agrigenics or its predecessors triggering any Weirdness abroad: cult activity, mass social changes, etc., Occultism roll: So, does this rapid overnight sea change in agricultural practice create huge societal and anthropological changes? Of course! Without Anthropology as a skill, it's hard to for Jo to pinpoint every factor, but there are plenty of papers out there about how these Third World farmers are dependent on sacks of seeds from America to keep their farms, paddies, and gardens going. Once you've tasted of the fruit of Western science, you end up needing it season after season, you know, to compete at market. It's not just changed the cultivatory practices of these traditional farmers but their social and economic matrix as well. Has anything... Weird emerged in the aftermath of this as far as belief goes? Yes, but only in very infrequent circumstances. The mention of a "cargo cult" in India here, a neo-Aztec rebellion in southern Mexico in an area full of IMWIC pilot programs there, but nothing conclusive, programmatic or systematic. Merely... suggestive. Jo really feels like if she wants to look for mass behavioral patterns, and especially mass behavioral patterns influenced by/into History B, she's going to need to consult an esmologist.
3) Tuesday night Knissomancy (Perception, IQ): Jocasta builds her little three-legged stool of a smoke generator to read the flyer, Agrigenics, and their possible connections to each other. In the midst of the three pillars of differently-fragrant smoke, Jocasta can see the smoke from the cigarette and the incense weaving into each other, like a double helix, while the pot smoke lingers and hovers in an undifferentiated cloud, quite close to the flyer. The two pillars of cigarette and incense smoke separate at the top, going off into their separate directions and each splitting in two once they do; this is one of the visual elements from her reading of the Babylonian Three Collated Libanomancy Texts that she remembers quite well: a single column of smoke that splits into two means "madness."
The pot smoke, though, remains the biggest and richest cloud of all, and doesn't get entangled with either the tobacco or incense. Jo wonders what this means, and then has a "eureka" moment that flashes through her mind and widens her smoke-stung eyes: the cigs are the industrial/technocratic impulse, right? This holy native plant rolled into millions of cancer-sticks and sold in bright packaging, all across the global economy. And the incense reminds us of the ziggurats of Babylon; after all, the original knissomancers didn't use cigarettes, cannabis or even poppy smoke: this was explicitly an art of reading incense. The pot hovers near the flyer, still, after burning for minute after minute. The pot represents whoever created this flyer. They are someone on the outside of Agrigenics looking in. And as soon as Jocasta considers that, a string-like column of pot smoke finds itself finally dallying, flirting, with the cigarette smoke only. Clear as day, Jocasta realizes whoever made this flyer, whichever group: they have a very minor "in" at Agrigenics, maybe just as simple as a single contact. This makes the next step crystal-clear...
4) Psychometry on the flyer (IQ): Jocasta looks at the flyer, brings it away from the incense and smoke, and touches it with the bare skin of the fingers of her right hand. She is knocked backward with an initial sense of stomach-curdling fear. Not the fear of everyday work anxieties ("why did I think about work?" Jocasta wonders in the midst of this emotional psychometric assault) or of being fired, but the kind of visceral, gut-churning fear that comes from going into your own family's dark root cellar and finding just the hint of the smell of dead bodies... then digging into the dirt and finding dozens of half-rotted corpses put there by a family member. Jo can only deal with this flyer-maker's feelings in pure metaphor, it seems. None of this abject revulsion is literally the maker of his flyer having seen a root cellar of dead bodies in Vacaville, but instead the feeling of having a sense of safety and security, of assuming everything at their home/job is normal, just absolutely shattered, like finding out your dad or husband is a serial killer. Whoever wrote this flyer, whoever put this rant into their typewriter... they don't think, they can't think directly about what they saw at work, but it shocked them to their very core and changed the way they see their world regardless. Leonard, Fright Check, pass on 13 or less when you get back. I don't wanna roll this one for you.
Leonard
>>>> SUCCESS by 4
Michael
Okay, so no Fright, no Flashbacks, no Stress.
And you've got a HUGE infodump to ponder while away camping
Oh, and 5) Beale Farms itself. The trademark was (re-)registered in January 1973 under Agrigenics' aegis as a wholly-owned brand label. There was a predecessor company called Beale Farms—a health food company with five employees founded in early 1972 by the tax records—that was purchased lock, stock, and barrel by Agrigenics in October 1972.
No 1972 press or advertisements in either the health food trade publications, local counterculture rags, or mainstream press about Beale Farms at all. Whatever the first iteration of Beale Farms was doing, it was doing it without a promotional budget.
Brant
Late Tuesday, Marshall takes a seat on the corner of Jocasta’s desk, shuffling a few things around to fit. He has the flyer from the Farmer’s Market in his hand. “As our resident conspiracy theorist — what do you make of this?” He holds it out, smiling.
Leonard
"Oh, Doctor," Jocasta responds slyly. "You'll turn my head with that sweet talk." She lights a cigarette and looks again at the flyer she'd had such an intense reaction to the night before.
"Okay, so, first of all, Agrigenics. Nothing I could turn up through normal channels suggests anything as sinister as this flyer makes it out to be. Founded in '65, part of the whole movement of developing hearty grain species for use in poor countries prone to crop failures, that whole 'Green Revolution' thing. All the major players there are from the UN, think tanks, research labs, NGOs -- you know the type. Probably some spooks in there, but where aren't there?" She hands over a hand-written org chart with some of the major players. "Nobody I know, anyway."
Digging out a few photostats, she goes on. "Moved to Vacaville in '71. Uses UC Davis as a feeder for their tech boys. Bought Beale Farms last year, when they were basically just a garage operation. The popular press mostly loves them, saving the world with American know-how and all that. Natsec and political press dig them too, soft power, the peace dividend, doing good to do well. There's a few dissenting voices, mostly objecting to building dependency or vague mutterings about ecology issues, but nothing that would inspire...this," she says, tapping the flyer with a pencil.
"That's about the extent of which I could find out anything through...standard research. Nothing seemed to suggest SANDMAN activity, but maybe someone higher up the chain, like you," she trills, "might think differently. There were a few little alarm bells around occult aspects — minor cult activities, religious uprisings — but again, nothing that seemed really jarring. Someone who knows more than I do about esmology, which is just about everyone, might want to look at some of these clippings, though, just to confirm."
She slides the flyer back across the desk with the pencil's eraser. "Now, this thing. I dug deep with this, and it paid off. I've been tinkering with knissomantic readings lately, so I took, uh, a flyer on it, and I got some vague tingles at the back of my neck; the natural world and the industrial world forced together in an unnatural way, a bright yellow streak of madness. It was enough to make me do a psychometric scan of the flyer, and Marshall, it lit up like a pinball machine. Whoever made this is on the inside at Agrigenics — maybe somebody up the chain, but I think probably just some worker bee. But they saw something there, and it shook them to their core. They saw something horrible, and it almost drove them crazy. Whatever it was they saw, it drove them to make this. They had to. It was the only way they could cope with what had been revealed to them. After that knowledge, there could be no salvation."
Brant
“It would all seem to point to … “ He spells out OZYMANDIAS using ASL. He puzzles something out in his head. “The person who was handing out this flyer, we need to find them. If the person who made this,” he taps the flyer, “was at Agrigenics and went rogue, then Agrigenics will be looking for them. So it’s incumbent upon us to find them first. Query how we do that, though. I guess we could … send Mitch, with you and Roger as backup, to the Farmer’s Market again this weekend. Hope he — or she — is there again. But I would like to move more quickly than that, in case Agrigenics has the lead on us and can get to them first.”
A pause. He gazes up at the ceiling. “At the same time, the fact that the flyer-maker is making these things and passing them out at a farmer’s market implies that she — or he — isn’t concerned about being found. Isn’t concerned for their safety. So either they know they have nothing to fear, or know they have something to fear but believe that what they are doing is worth the risk, or what they saw unsettled them so much that they don’t care about their safety any more.”
He stands up. “I think our next step is finding this person. It might just be a matter of putting Mitch in a car with you and Roger and driving around to see what he can find. Hit up places where crowds tend to congregate, perhaps? Then bring him in. For questioning.”
“Oh — also, I’ll need you to run down who owns this piece of property in Dixon.” He tosses the little booklet about Beale Farms at her to catch. “No big rush on that. I half suspect I know who it is, anyway.”
Leonard
Jocasta grabs the booklet and gives it a perfunctory glance before responding. “Our target might still be at Agrigenics, though I’m not sure how likely that is. Either way, they shouldn’t be too hard to find; they probably absolutely radiate bad vibes, which should be easy for us to spot especially with Mitch along.” She gathers her other material together and leaves it with Marshall. “After that, I can probably find out what they saw, though I’m not sure I want to.”
She starts out the door. “I’ll do some more research and wait for Roger and Mitch to come in. Let me know if you need me. One other thing we should consider is that our insider has gone to ground and is working with others, and they’re the ones passing out the flyers. That would complicate things a bit, but we’ll see.”
Brant
"If they're still at Agrigenics, that accelerates our timetable — presumably they know they have a leak and will be searching them out, which is easier to do on the inside." He looks at his watch and picks up the materials Jocasta left for him. "I'll be in Archie's office. Nice work with this, Menos." He makes a sort of hat-tip gesture with his hand and walks off.