An Acid Trip to Nowhere

Michael

Given the situation at Point 7 and the deployment of the "arsenal of democracy" meme, I would imagine that the chiefs of Point 7, Messrs Ransom and Redgrave, probably feel like they have built up a bulwark against further expansion of the zone. I will say that by dinnertime on Tuesday, word of what happened down in Tennessee at Point 10, with the empty graves, will likely have appeared in the ALLOCHTHON nightly briefing via Telex/ARPANET.

Brant

5 pm-ish, Tuesday. Having read the Telex about Point 10, Marshall squares his conservative horn-rimmed glasses and seeks out Archie. Marshall has felt laden. Like he was back in Saigon, back at the start of his career. When he knew nothing — nothing really. Pilate fresh off the boat in Judea. Nothing made sense back then. He had to make it make sense. Create a system. That was the only way. That feeling, again, of being hedged in. Like there is no right move. Like nothing is what it seems ... even the very notion of something seeming like something else. Lately he has tried thinking differently. The phrase itself was going to be the title of his next book. But can we ever really change? Be someone else? Camus said the only legitimate philosophical question is: why don't you kill yourself? "Arch," Marshall says quietly, once he's able to flag Archie down privately, "come with me tonight to try something. You, me and Parks."

Rob

When Archie first sees Marshall, he gestures to the Telex. "Did you see this? Point 10, that's Mitch, of course. We could have saved some tax dollars by just sending all the teams to wherever he got assigned, ha ha." When Marshall speaks to him privately, Archie's game. Replies quietly, matching Marshall. "Of course. What have you got in mind?"

Brant

“Something different. I’ll explain in the car. Bring Parks, tell him it’s extremely hush. We’ll meet outside at 9.”

Later.

Marshall drives. "I think the problem was that I was trapped by the ontology of this place. The Midwest. I've never understood the appeal, honestly. Even conceptually. But, you know, I'm not bound by the psychic landscape out here. I can do what I want. I can do what I want." He says that last part with some reverberating NLP emphasis. "I brought some high grade acid with me from the city. We're going to that fucking field and we're gonna take that acid -- the three of us -- and I'm gonna call down the shava sadhana and we're gonna see what we fucking see." He glances back at Parks in the review-view.

Michael

"Technically, Dr. Redgrave, the strictures of my faith do not allow me to partake in intoxicants of the mind, soul, or body." Parks says this in a jivey, melodic, ironic way as he then takes a conspicuous drag off his cigarette. "But man... I ain't flown since '67. I'm game to take off if the big guy is." He points his cherry-red cig at Archie.

Brant

(Basically Marshall's goal for himself in GURPS mechanics terms is that he wants to get high on acid and see if he can use Dreaming to "guide" the trip so that he can get some clarity on what is going on, what the team should be doing; and he's hoping having Parks [IlluminatedWeird] and Archie [Stoney] there will make something happen.)

Michael

Well, Morris isn't big-I Illuminated, but he is a taisher.

Brant

(True, true, I just figured he must have something weird about him vis-a-vis History B if he can detect it.)

Michael

Marshall can tell with Detect Lies and Body Language that Morris is cool with the idea, not just for thrills but that on some level he gets the idea of thinking different by going into a mystical/shamanic state. There's not a ton of overt mysticism in Bahá'í; it's more that the entire universe is suffused with the being of God so every everyday act is a mystic one. But Marshall has a weird feeling that Bahá'í was maybe the last in a series of mystical explorations Morris has gone on in his life. He's a seeker. He might be pushing 50 but he has the same look in his eyes as Marshall's Special Ones.

Bill

(Spiritually hungry: Marshall's favorite prey. Set up a room in the Mission.)

Rob

"High grade acid... You mean L.S.D.?" Archie whispers, though everyone in the car can hear him. Archie whistles. Then, "Well, I'm not saying it's impossible. Think differently, right? Ha ha," he laughs nervously. "But, I mean, using mind-altering drugs in a subduction zone... that can't be safe exactly. Do you not want me to, I don't know, stand guard? Or, can we take some kind of precautions?"

Brant

“No,” Marshall says, adjusting his glasses again. “I get it. I do. You’re nervous. About the consequences. But that is old thinking. This is a war of vibes. It needs to be all of us. For the symbolism. Heuristics are a powerful tool. Each of us is an avatara of this country in our own way. Consider this a psychic counteroffensive.” He pulls up at the site where the observation team is located. “Besides, we have snipers.” He turns the engine off and gets out. So, Mike, he’s going to walk up to the commanding officer of the observation team and basically explain that the three of them are there to do a thing. He wants them to visually monitor the situation with binoculars from a considerable distance — outside the zone radius — but not to intervene unless one of them gives a pre-arranged high sign. Or, you know, snake men show up.

OK! Assuming the observation team understands their directions, Marshall wants Morris to lead him and Archie to as close to the geographic center of the zone as he can discern. As they walk, Marshall distributes the tabs before popping one under his tongue. The moon is Waxing Gibbous. “A Tuesday,” Marshall says as they walk through the field. “Propitious.”

Michael

Morris gets the group to what he estimates is the center of the zone; a rectangular patch of woodland in the midst of the area's various parcels of farmland. As Morris, Marshall, and Archie's tromp across the field towards the copse of trees, their flashlights illuminate the broken, cut corn stalks. It's harvest time. The evening chill is more pronounced as the three men enter the wood. (You can see the patch of woods in the far distance at the rough center of this modern Google Maps photo.) When Morris navigates the group to the center of the zone, he takes a moment to kneel and pray. This time it's much quieter than the ostentatious display yesterday when he was examining the zone for its vibes; this prayer seems to be between Morris and his God. Morris waits. (All right, trippers. It's time to roll HT-2—that's a 9 for Archie, 8 for Marshall, and a 10 for Morris—to see how the LSD affects y'all.)

Brant

>> FAILURE by 2

Michael

Marshall's going to have some strong effects the next 2 hours at least.

Rob

Archie demurs for long enough to be plausible and stay true to character but we already know he'll pollute his body for the sake of the Mission, and hey, it's what the C Suite wants, what's he gonna do? So take that scene of him resisting and being convinced as read. He doesn't even require the plausible deniability of Stoney taking control though I'm sure Stoney can be in the mix if we need him. He does ask, while quizzically examining the tab: "Is there anything we're supposed to do? I mean, any kind of of ritual? Terry McKenna made a whole to-do about 'shamanic traditions' but in the end we just ate the mushrooms." Then he pops it.

>> FAILURE by 2

Michael

Man, Archie and Marshall are in sync

With Morris as the babysitter. This is pretty good.

Brant

"Yes," Marshall says, "just follow my lead. But remember: no fear." Once at the site, Marshall has Archie and Morris sit in a simple cross-legged meditation pose. He's adopted the air that he adopts with his students at the Mission: gentle, patient, instructive. Once Archie and Morris are seated, Marshall draws a triangle around them by dragging his heel through the dirt. He sits at the northern end of the triangle; he makes sure Archie is seated on the western tip and Morris is seated on the east. Then he's going to guide the three of them into a meditation as the acid sets in, starting out with just basic meditation practice — attending to the breath, clearing the mind, etc. — before eventually he starts intoning a Tantric mantra. He is going to give the mantra some extra NLP oomph, too. Sarira avidya-jal, jodendriya tahe kal, jive phele visaya-sagore tar' madhye jihva ati, lobhamoy sudurmati, ta ´ke jeta kathina samsare.

Michael

Marshall notes that Morris effortlessly slips into meditative breathing; Marshall's NLP allows him to feel and sense Morris's ease in emptying the mind and feeling the breath. Marshall should give me a Meditation-18 roll and Archie a Will-12.

Brant

>> SUCCESS by 5

Rob

Will

>> FAILURE by 1

Michael

The effects of the trip hit Marshall and Archie a few minutes into this peaceful meditation. Behind his eyes, Archie can see colors, streaks of light, dazzling effects; when he opens his eyes, the moonlit glade merely contains Marshall and Morris, each limned in a silvery-iridescent glow. The briefest glimpse of their auras soon fades, as Archie finds himself down on his knees in the dirt, digging into it, not urgently but insistently, with his bare hands. There's something down there. Something God left for him to find. Morris looks after Archie with quiet, tacit interest, looking briefly to Marshall to see if there's anything Marshall wants Morris to do about Archie. --- Marshall, meanwhile, has cleared his mind of outside concerns; he knows the patterns that play behind his eyes are mere illusions created by the drug he's taken. His perceptions paradoxically sharpen, his vision in the moonlight becoming acute. There is a vertiginous feeling in Marshall's gut, his solar plexus, of feeling the other history close by—is this how Mitch feels when he detects History B? Marshall wonders suddenly to himself—to Marshall, the sensation is much like when you're on an airplane going through intense turbulence or a roller coaster dropping quickly: thrilling but oddly sickening. History B is as close to Marshall as touch, and it is... clean. There are no pesticides in the soil. There is no smog in the air. There are no rivers that catch fire at the slightest provocation, no microplastics in the soil and in our bodies. What on Earth is a microplastic? Marshall thinks to himself as the trip puts Marshall into the wind, the water, and the soil all around him, a feeling of profound oneness. As Marshall tries to re-assert his ego, he sees a dried corn stalk on the ground in front of him. How did that get here? Did one of us track it into these woods? Marshall focuses on that corn stalk, and in it somehow sees a thousand or more years of maize cultivation here in Ohio. More rubbish to be cleared from my head, Marshall thinks, trying to focus, until he sees Bernadette Fry outside the triangle of Morris-Archie-Marshall, about 100 feet away in the moonlight, facing Marshall directly, sitting locked into the chair from the CCRME. She opens her eyes and peers at the three men.

Brant

Marshall pays Archie and Morris no mind. He squints at Bernadette. "No," he whispers to himself, closing his eyes and concentrating. "You are a distraction. I am the lucid dreamer." Can he attempt to roll Dreaming? He is trying to dispel the illusion of Bernadette, and to go deeper still.

Michael

YES. Now given you're now fully tripping, there are some preliminaries to get through first. Will-18 to act with intent, then if that's successful you'll roll Dreaming at a minus 2, so 16. If the Will check is a failure we'll chat about how that manifests.

Brant

Will.

>> SUCCESS by 8

Dreaming.

>> SUCCESS by 7

Michael

Marshall attempts to control the trip/lucid dream. Bernadette is a distraction, I am the lucid dreamer, he says to himself. Marshall pushes against "Bernadette"... only to find she is real. Marshall realizes in a flash of insight that he is actually seeing Bernadette in the moments in the CCRME chair a couple of months ago during which Bernadette was fully delusional. That the trauma of her experience released her perceptions from the prison of mundane, linear time and space and allowed her to see Marshall, Archie, and Morris here. Of course she is dead now, buried by Jocasta after her mind was harvested for all its useful information, Marshall says to himself. After a further push of his Dreaming ability, Bernadette pops like a soap bubble and disappears. The corn stalk is still here, though.

Brant

(Hm. Pausing here to ponder my options and let Archie/Rob do whatever they wanna do.)

Michael

(And yeah, I'll say that if Archie wants to actively stop following that urge to dig in the dirt, he can, it'll just take a Will-19 roll; I've included Indomitable. I'll wait to say what Morris is up to until Rob decides what he wants to do.)

Rob

If God wants Archie to dig in the dirt, he's gonna dig in the dirt. Though he at least tries to stay alert to whatever else is going on.

Michael

After about a minute of digging, Archie finds what he was destined to find. A pair of men's spectacles in an old-fashioned style—1930s by the looks of them. Where the lenses would be, Archie sees a shining matrix of crystalline light patterns; in Archie's vision, they illuminate Morris and Marshall softly, much like the moonlight. The passage from the Doctrine and Covenants comes to Archie's mind suddenly, about the good Mormons who will live in the final days/in the Celestial Kingdom: 6 The angels do not reside on a planet like this earth; 7 But they reside in the presence of God, on a globe like a sea of glass and fire, where all things for their glory are manifest, past, present, and future, and are continually before the Lord. 8 The place where God resides is a great Urim and Thummim. 9 This earth, in its sanctified and immortal state, will be made like unto crystal and will be a Urim and Thummim to the inhabitants who dwell thereon, whereby all things pertaining to an inferior kingdom, or all kingdoms of a lower order, will be manifest to those who dwell on it; and this earth will be Christ's. 10 Then the white stone mentioned in Revelation 2:17, will become a Urim and Thummim to each individual who receives one, whereby things pertaining to a higher order of kingdoms will be made known; 11 And a white stone is given to each of those who come into the celestial kingdom, whereon is a new name written, which no man knoweth save he that receiveth it. The new name is the key word.

Morris says, "What do you got there, Arch? Some spectacles?"

Marshall sees Archie picking up a pair of broken old glasses he's dug up from the ground. Marshall sees no crystalline illumination, no other strange properties.

Brant

Between the feeling of limitlessness that comes with an acid trip and the realization about Bernadette’s “appearance,” Marshall is now convinced more than ever there is a way to disrupt this subduction zone. He has never done something like this before; he has only ever observed. He wishes Jocasta were here; Mitch, too.

“This is a war of vibes,” he murmurs to himself, looking down at the ground and closing his eyes. He thinks: vibes. Short for “vibration.” He remembers the first time he heard the word “vibe” — his driver in Saigon used it once, on their way to a temple to talk with an informant. How do you change a vibe? No, how do you disrupt a vibe? His eyes snap open.

“A tuning fork.”

So what Marshall is thinking is to put either Archie or Morris into deep, deep hypnosis — he’s thinking Archie while Archie is wearing the glasses — his operating thesis being that if he can attune one of them to the right frequency and then “ring” them, it will disrupt the History B vibes here. But OOC I don’t know if there’s anything to this or if I’m just spinning wheels. Marshall has a shit-ton of skills that might inform his thinking here: Occultism, Esoteric Medicine, Theology (Hinduism), Philosophy (Buddhism), Hidden Lore (History B). Thoughts?

Michael

(Just going to hold on this until I hear back from Rob on what he's going to do with Archie's scriptural revelation and/or move Jo along a little bit, but I definitely do like where this is headed, I'm leaning Esoteric Medicine given the tuning fork/geomantic acupuncture metaphor)

Rob

Archie holds up the glasses in answer to Morris' question. "Yes, spectacles!" He wipes them off with his handkerchief or his tie, looks at the moon through them, still held at arm's length. "Golly, look at the light. I guess I should put them on?" He takes off his own glasses, carefully puts them in his breast pocket, puts the glasses on.

Michael

So if Marshall still is planning to make Archie into a medium and a "tuning fork," a pair of rolls would be great. Hypnotism-18 first, to get Archie into a clear state of mind, and then Esoteric Medicine-16 to begin sussing out how to "tune" Archie to the right frequency.

Before Marshall comes over to Archie to hypnotize him while he is wearing the Urim and Thummim, Archie can see the vaguest outline of a woman standing in the trees a few dozen yards distant from the group. Archie turns his gaze that way, and the light from the Urim and Thummim catches her shape in the forest... Archie (and only Archie for the moment) can see... it appears to be Jocasta.

I don't want to step on the toes of the tuning fork plan too much but I do want Archie, who failed his Meditation roll, to feel a little bombarded with acid-headed stimuli, so excuse me for dropping the Urim and Thummim in his lap while Jocasta appears out of nowhere

Brant

Hypnotism.

>> SUCCESS by 7

Esoteric Medicine.

>> SUCCESS by 1

Michael

As Marshall puts Archie into a trance state, Archie is staring off into the middle distance in his "new" glasses, seemingly distracted, but he follows all of Marshall's hypnosis prompts to Marshall's satisfaction. Morris follows Archie's gaze off into the trees; he also seems slightly discomfited, but he's not staring with intent and focus like Archie is/was. (Rob, Archie is now feeling very relaxed and receptive to what Marshall has to say. Archie can still see Jocasta out of the corner of his eye, but he cannot hear her.) As Marshall gets ready to give the hypnotized Archie a spiel about tuning forks, acupuncture points, subduction zones and vibrations, Marshall sees, clear as day, a bunch of writing in Jocasta's handwriting spontaneously appear in his head: She's going to write out as clear a list as she can, minimal bullet-point stuff, no extra verbiage, of what she and Charley have learned from the mounds: the absence of spirits in the burial sites, the setting up of the surveillance equipment, and the vision of the proto-SANDMEN blanking out the U of C researchers and taking the reality shard. She's then going to focus on the list and try to Telesend it to Marshall. (I figure with both Archie and Marshall aware of Jo's "presence" at this point, I'll step back a bit and let the two of you try to figure it all out.)

Rob

In his relaxed state, Archie doesn't find it strange to see Jocasta. It probably rhymes in his head with the way she appeared in visions to Pat Price. He nods in her direction to Marshall. "Look who's here," he says.

Brant

"Do you sense it, Arch? We're doing something here. Potentiality. We are doing something." Marshall stands and puts a hand on Archie's shoulder; he gestures for Morris to do likewise on Archie's other side.

"The Larger Sutra of Immeasurable Life tells of Amitābha, the Buddha of the Pure Land. In another cycle, perhaps even in another world, he was a king who renounced his throne upon learning the teachings of the Buddha Siddhartha. After meditating for five eons and accumulating great merit, he achieved enlightenment and created a realm known as buddhakṣetra, the buddha-field -- a pure land, a place of celestial perfection. Hear me, Archibald Enoch Ransom. You must be our Amitābha. Go deep. Deep within yourself. Feel the breeze against your skin. Hear the beating heart in your chest. Your people once pioneered through this land in search of their own Kingdom. You must lead them. You must exert your will upon this place." Marshall starts chanting in Sanskrit.

Michael

(Rob, Theology (Mormonism)-14. Not assessing any LSD penalties because, well, the acid is talking here. )

Rob

>> SUCCESS by 1

Michael

Archie breathes, feeling a very different set of impulses from the calming, centering ones that Terence, Viv, and Jo pushed at him when he went on his turbulent whirlwind trip through 1940s Peru, 1930s Utah, and 1980s Los Angeles a few months ago. Archie feels Marshall bolstering his will, lending him power, just like a good bard should. A good bard? Archie wonders. What an odd thing to think. And Jo is here; for some reason Archie feels like that's right too. She's on the right track, Archie realizes. She got here in a hurry and it cost her; her hands are bleeding, like Christ. Christ. Oh Heavenly Father what was I trying to remember about the Urim and Thummim, Archie thinks to himself. An Urim and Thummim were here in America when the Jaredites of old, fleeing the fall of the Tower of Babel, used them to encode the Golden Plates at the behest of Christ (thousands of years prior to his Incarnation) and Moroni: Book of Ether, Chapter 3, of course. "Write these things and seal them up; and I will show them in mine own due time unto the children of men." Destiny dictated that Joseph Smith would find them and lead his people to the promised land. What if the chronology in the Book of Mormon isright, and the understandable historical confusion came from Joseph Smith trying to understand the differences between pre- and post-Ontoclysm America? The Urim and Thummim were buried here, in America, and SANDMAN found them. Maybe in one of these mounds, maybe in the '30s like Jocasta just said about the reality shard. Wait,did she just say something about finding a reality shard in the '30s? Morris and Marshall (and Jocasta) can hear all of this, all of Archie's inner monologue; whether that's because Archie is vocalizing like he did with Enki during his mushroom trip, or because all four of them are tripping balls together and benefiting from Jocasta's acid-and-Corruption-empowered Telesend, it's all the same in the final analysis. All four of you can now speak to and understand each other. --- Jocasta's Empathy, the acid, and the Telesend mindmeld opens up Morris's heart completely to Jo's perception and... quite simply, Morris is a good dude. He's been through a lot, he's got a lot of hurt in his heart, a hard traumatic life in his rear-view. But he's a man with a moral core, one who's looked long and hard for a spiritual path, a man who hates the Anunnaki with a cold fury... and casts the kind of suspicious eye on SANDMAN that only a Black veteran born in the 1920s might be able to do.

Leonard

Jocasta doesn't bother to ask if they can see her. The spirit brought her here to speak and she assumes she will be heard. "Marshall -- what you are doing, it's working. It's having an effect. And this is the spot, where they're trying to break through. But be careful. We're being watched. If you are too loud you will attract anger from on high." She looks around, trying to process the limits of this experience. She feels she has more to explain but her mind is racing. "Archie, you're ascending. To heaven, to the clouds, to the stars. Just trust your faith to guide you. And this -- this is a holy place. A spirit guide brought me here, but I had to enter on my own -- it told me it was, was from a different world than the Kings, when they were here. Mitch was right...Mitch is always right...but I don't know how. This is so new, so strange." She looks down at her hands, trying not to fear the sight of the blood.

Brant

"Watched by who? SANDMAN? The Kings? I am not leaving this place until I know how to fix it."

Rob

Archie grins: it's so nice to see everyone here (whoever that might be). But he laughs at what Marshall and then Jocasta say. He's not scared or upset, just skeptical, like they must be having him on. Ascending to heaven? The Buddha of the Pure Land? Come on now. He says, "Jo, your hands are bleeding," with gentle concern.

Brant

“We need to return it. That’s it, isn’t it? We need to return the pragmaclast.”

Leonard

"I don't know. The Kings. SANDMAN. OZYMANDIAS. God. All I have said is what I saw in a vision. I wish there was more." She turns her hands around, fixated by the stigmatic throb. "It cost me to come here, Marshall. But you know that I will do anything for...us, for us all. I'm not sure how long I can stay here, or even if I'm here. I don't want to put another unknown in front of you, I really don't. I came to help you because this place is where they're trying to come through to our reality. Whatever you decide, I will do my duty. All I know is what I have seen, and whatever we do, we have to do it quietly." She turns to Archie, smiling through the turbulence and distress of it all. "It happened when I rode a spirit animal over here. From...wherever I am. I used to question things like that," she half-laughs. "How are you feeling? Remember, don't speak."

Brant

“You’ve done great work for us, Jocasta. Thank you. I should probably remember to remark on that more — what good work you do.”

Rob

Archie laughs. "I do remember! And I feel ... clean. Marshall is an excellent bard. How is Charley doing?"

Leonard

"She's great. She's asleep in the next room. She learns more every day. She's how I learned about the empty graves."

Brant

“We must convene the team. Soon. As soon as we can. Morris, you’re coming with us.”

Michael

Morris looks at the way these three members of URIEL talk to each other, with respect and inquisitiveness and care and love... and he just starts silently crying as he stammers, "Who... who are you people? There's no way you're with the Project! No one in the Project talks or acts like this!" His mouth is a wide smile as the tears pour down his face. Is it the acid? Probably a little bit. But Jo would guess Morris has a little bit of latent ability with experiencing radical Empathy and the acid has unlocked it.

Brant

“We have a unique portfolio.”

Leonard

If ever there was a moment for Jocasta to exercise her duty of care for people undergoing psychedelic experiences, this is it. She turns to Morris and speaks calmly, reaching out her hands. "Morris. All is well. You can feel that, in your heart and soul. A new way has been opened to you; do not fight it, but follow it," she says. "Remember: many faiths, one goal. Many people, all united. So it is with us."

Michael

(I also wanted to share that the realization Archie has had about the "Urim and Thummim" is that they are not unique; if God can create one for every good Mormon in the Celestial Kingdom and/or the Celestial Kingdom and Earth themselves are in their own way Urim and Thummim, then all things truly are possible through God, including democratically-distributed miscellaneous magical items. Which means, yeah, even these old glasses could be an Urim and Thummim! Maybe these broken glasses are like the Magneta Clock at the St. Francis; if this zone got more powerful, they'd be a receptor for reality shard energy, but right now all they have is potential. How all this squares with the Reinhardt Urim and Thummim being such a totem of frankly immense and scary and kind of evil glyphic + shard power, we don't have enough info yet.)

Rob

Archie looks up at the sky, still dazzled by the moonlight through the glasses. "It's the Indian Rope Trick, Marshall! No, no, I mean the Vanishing Indian. Not the Crying Indian - but that's a daisy of a meme, Marsteller made that for the American Can Company, can you believe it? But the Vanishing. The Lost Tribe, Indian Removal, The Last of the Mohicans. You ever read that as a kid? Were the Mound Builders even Indians? I mean, the Indians aren't even Indians. That's the point. Where did they go? " He's keyed up, certain that this is all very meaningful. "We can't bring them back, but..." He whistles the Arabian riff: "In the land of Oz, where the ladies smoke cigars!" Laughs like a loon. "Jo! Tell Charley she needs to finish her machine! She's working on a machine, right? Of course she is. She needs to talk to one of them. The Mound Builders. The people who were here. Who would have been here, in History A. We don't need much, just a scrap. A story, or a joke? A bit of music would be great. Even just a name, in their own language. I can do the rest, make it sticky as all get out, just release it into the wild. Nobody needs to know where it's from, it'll spread better if they don't. A memetic memorial, a silver thread between now and then. Write these things and seal them up; and I will show them in mine own due time."

Michael

Morris nods at Archie's manic ideas and has probably finally puzzled out that the big guy is Mormon from this spiel. "It's funny, Doc," he says to Marshall, discreetly wiping the tears from his face, "when you said 'We need to return it' I thought you might have been talking about, well, North America."

Brant

(I don't want to step on Jeff's / Mitch's toes so stop me if this is a bridge too far but is there some kind of roll I can make for Marshall to make a connection between Morris' comment and the whole "we are the irruptors" thing? Does Marshall have enough context to do that?)

Michael

(No. Not quite yet. This whole huge puzzle is going to take some time more to put together but I will allow that Marshall's acid trip is making him quite insistent that he needs to talk to and catch up with Mitch as soon as he can. Like, when the tripping here is over, you all can head back to Newark and Marshall can call Huntsville and see if Mitch is available. That will allow me to get you all in the same time frame as Mitch.)

Leonard

"The memes are good, Archie," Jocasta says dreamily. "And Charley is ready to speak to their spirits, to the Hopewells and the Adenas, to learn their true names. They were here before, you know? Before the Red Kings. And during their reign. But they were not slaves to the Anunnaki. They were in a different world, that's what the panther told me. But those spirits are all gone. They've been stolen, or collected, or driven away. I think...we have to find them before we can build the memes. Bring back the souls of all the vanished, of every people, bring back their spirits so the bodies of those who still live won't be a sacrifice."

Brant

Once back from the subduction zone, and with the acid worn off, Marshall retires to his assigned room and locks the door. He takes a seat at the end of the bed, removes his glasses, rubs his eyes. He slips off his suit jacket and tosses it on a chair.

Nothing changed. “Stupid,” he mutters, shaking his head desultorily. “And reckless,” a voice says in the back of his mind. Jocasta — or whatever that was — was right. He had been reckless. And for what? He’d hoped the acid would do something.

He’d hoped it would help him make a connection. But it’s still there: the rising panic of an animal caught in a trap. “You are trapped,” the voice reminds him. “What can you do that They haven’t already thought of?”

The consensus in psychology is that consciousness is an emergent property of the complex biologic systems in the brain. Maybe that’s what the dharma is, too — or esmology — or the C Suite. An emergent property. The sum of all systems. Maybe that’s why They are unbeatable. They are, after all, Everything.

It’s like he’s back in Saigon, trying to outsmart a smarter enemy, trying to game-theory a game he’d already lost. “You thought you left?” the voice sneers. I thought I did, he thinks. Or maybe I just forgot where I am. “Where you are? Or who you are?”

Is that who he is? Not some wise guru but a novice officer in Saigon? Who submitted the request to go up-river? (Another mistake. A squadron killed. For what? “So you can sit in a shitty abandoned hotel in Ohio? Not solving problems? Getting played?”)

It’s no use, he thinks. “Maybe next time,” the voice agrees. With another sigh he stands up and goes to his luggage. Rummaging through it, he finds his service weapon and takes a seat again. He weighs the gun in both hands, staring at it for a minute or two. These things are always heavier than I think they should be, he thinks. He slips it under his bed pillow.

Later, he goes to sleep.