Archie Uncovers the OZYMANDIAS Memeplex
Michael
Okay, as Marshall and Jo leave Archie to it, first he's gonna give me an Expert Skill (Memetics)-21 roll to analyze the meme in the occult mags.
(gave him an additional +1 for Rob's excellent technobabble)
Rob
>>>> SUCCESS by 14
rolled a 7 (yay, technobabble)
Michael
One short of a crit. Okay.
Archie puts each page Jocasta's marked into its own distinct quarantine, breaking down the semantics and context individually, looking for the tell-tale infravisible ant tracks of the source code wending their way through each of the stories. On the upper, literal level, these are the typical "Aquarian" tales of psychic powers and visitations from spirits and ghosts and visits from UFOs. The meme laid into these texts is pretty much exactly as Jocasta described: science will soon be able to quantify "all this" and, most importantly, this research will provide all of us with an opportunity to develop our own psychic and physical powers. Only a very few of the stories at the outset in '69, '70 state this technocratic agenda and memeplex on the surface, but as the stories get closer to 1973, more and more of them do, mentioning things like laboratory experiments and think-tank funding. It's like the meme engineers were easing this audience into a slowly-boiling pot by gradually turning up the heat. Or finding less need to hide their agenda as time went on.
The construction of the meme is pure Granite Peak/SANDMAN as far as Archie can tell, even if it is using the "underground" press to spread the word. Archie can see tell-tale textbook source code deployment, right out of his initial training at the Peak back in early '68. (Of course Archie had been doing memetics for years in TV production and advertising but without the benefit of source code.) Of course individual creativity and knowledge of one's audience matters in the effectiveness of memes and can end up leaving a unique signature, but SANDMAN also provides a bunch of "out of the box" memetic payloads and that's what's been used here. Archie's far from paranoid of course, but he's thinking the engineer or engineers were very deliberately trying to make this meme as hard to track back to an individual as possible. This means that the engineers weren't able to make the meme super-Powerful. Higher Powered memes often are exceptionally sui generis, and the instances of this memeplex usually hover around a 4 or 5: not an outright sledgehammer but certainly no mere nudge either. One would imagine some of these potential psychics might have high Wills and thus need to be knocked on a little harder.
But even with this attempt to hide their tracks, if Archie had to bet, he'd guess the engineers were among the younger cohort at the Peak. These memes aren't using the big guns of base human drives, the type that the older, Madison Avenue cohort at SANDMAN uses: appealing to sex and hunger and power and envy, telling people to buy and consume and express themselves specifically in order to put the idea of the Kings' return out of their heads. This business is far more subtle. This meme's engineer(s) did know their audience well—credulous subscribers to paranormal mags who fervently wish for their mundane lives to be more interesting. Here in the source code they are promised power, sure, and they are encouraged to express themselves and told that psychic powers are small-d democratic, but all this is secondary to something else: the idea that "all this" will be as commonplace as jet airplanes and satellite transmissions: the future will be psychic. But to what end? Is this just all meant to lay down a set of expectations among this admittedly very fringe population of what OZYMANDIAS has in mind to make America into? Not entirely. Archie can see deep down in the memeplex that the audience is being encouraged to make evidence of the paranormal, if the reading audience should witness them or develop them, visible, known. Start a UFO zine of your own. Write letters to this publication. Call in to late-night radio shows. Buy and clip articles from these mags and the tabloids and create a scrapbook. Tell your friends. Infect them. Create a community of Elect. This memeplex is creating obsessives in the hope that real psychics and attuned human beings will show themselves and make themselves known. It's a cyclical effort: the articles activate believers who in turn "break out" in contagious exhibitions of their own belief which in turn gets others curious about the paranormal. This is dangerous stuff, Archie realizes, because curiosity in the paranormal is precisely one of the ways They get back into our heads! But Archie knows that this is all in aid of normalizing said paranormal and causing real psychics to pop up and make themselves visible: in tradecraft parlance this would be known as "trailing one's coat." This is a normalization drive, yes... but more importantly it's also a recruitment drive. Someone in this presumed accelerationist cabal is very likely keeping a very close eye on what this memeplex is producing in its target populations and whom it is activating.
In the back of Archie's head, Stoney doesn't think this sounds all that bad at all. While he doesn't like the idea of OZYMANDIAS accelerating Collapse, of course, he very much does like the idea of "every man and woman is a star." Why be afraid of magick? Let it loose, let everyone achieve their potential!
And now, Rob, when you're done digesting that, an Intelligence Analysis-19 roll would be great.
Rob
>>>> SUCCESS by 5
Can Archie tell (from either roll) if this "recruitment drive" is local to SF or California? Or is it everywhere? (I mean, the ideas are going to diffuse one way or the other, but can we find the same source code, the same SANDMAN-style fingerprints in, say, New York-based or UK-based publications?)
Michael
Well, most of Jocasta's publications were from the West Coast but they all mostly have national or at least mail-order distribution. But statistically there are enough publications from the East Coast, the Midwest, and the UK with the same meme in them to determine that this is likely a global (or at least Western, I guess I should say) campaign. As Archie contemplates this memetic campaign in terms of tradecraft, he realizes that if one of the primary objectives of this memeplex is recruitment/coat-trailing for OZYMANDIAS to build up their reserves of psychics and wild talents, there would need to also be a sizeable contingent of Watchers—talented esmologists, dedicated memeticists, and people with knowledge of the occult scene—to find the likely fish once they shout their shout... and then hand them off to agents who know how to recruit. There has to be, in other words, an entire infrastructure to handle the process from start to finish. And that level of human infrastructure would be hard to hide.
If Archie were scratching up a likely flowchart here, he'd put Puharich in the third bucket: the handler/recruiter.
Rob
there would need to also be a sizeable contingent of Watchers—talented esmologists, dedicated memeticists, and people with knowledge of the occult scene
Does this not describe SCANATE? Or, indeed, URIEL? Is Archie thinking that there must be some additional infrastructure separate from both of the above that is finding and recruiting wild talents?
Michael
Oh my sweet heavens. Archie goes pale and gets up and goes to the Xerox that has been taped onto the door of URIEL since he came here 5 years ago. The timeline fits. The portfolio fits. Five years of investigations, reports dutifully sent up the chain of command. New personnel who are more and more part of and familiar with the occult/human potential scene in California. It's us. We are the Watchers. And we always have been.
This must mean that OZYMANDIAS are simply suborning huge parts of the SANDMAN apparatus—without their conscious knowledge!—in order to fulfill their goals.
With this, Archie goes deep into the history of Operation URIEL …