I Found Her
April 16, 1974 | Tuesday
Michael
Okay, I have now done all the necessary GM rolls to prep for tonight's session behind my virtual GM screen so I can kick straight into the action. Chronology should be:
Jocasta's sending out a message to Patricia (Mon 9 pm-ish at URIEL HQ)
Jo heads out into the streets the next morning, starting at Ingleside then heading north into the Haight (Tue 5 am-ish onwards)
Marshall calls Hollywood to inquire after Redford, sends the Special Ones out in the streets (Tue 9 am)
Viv heads back out into Oakland and to Berkeley if necessary (Tue 9 am)
Mitch narcs out at the USF campus (Tue 9 am onward)
Archie arrives at Mitch's school to speak with Brother Dod (Tue 11 am-ish)
On Tuesday early afternoon, as Marshall and Mitch are deep into the bag watching As The World Turns, Marshall's main line is ringing. A payphone in Berkeley. It's Genevieve.
"Hi Marshall. I've managed to get a little deeper into the political reaction out here in Oakland and Berkeley. The consensus is that most of the leftist factions out here are absolutely 100% turned off by what happened with the SLA at the bank yesterday. All the serious organizations are, anyway. Opinion is divided between a few viewpoints: the futility and negative press that came from killing a couple of civilians, the SLA's fundamental unseriousness and danger, and, this was a common belief, the theory that the SLA are a deliberate attempt by the FBI to make the left look crazy and dangerous. More than one person told me they can't believe the FBI can't catch them, that they're just letting the SLA run free and devil take the hindmost."
"The old Peking House commune, people had some choice opinions on them. 'Spoiled rich white kids' I heard more than once from folks who'd known them. Dilettantes. One particularly funny comment I heard from a former Panther was, quote, 'Named themselves after a motherfucking Chinese restaurant.' And that's true: the real Peking House was a Chinese food stand in Berkeley, right next to a juice bar where Nancy Ling Perry used to work. But the important thing is that I found out there are loads of former Peking House squatters, members, passers-by and hangers-on out here. If we need more information..." at this Viv pauses, wondering if she's throwing these kids to the wolves, "well, they're thick on the ground for interrogation. A few young people said they've seen men in suits asking questions, presumably FBI, so it sounds like they're chasing leads on this side of the Bay too."
"That's the material side. The metaphysical side... the threads have shifted since yesterday. As I tried to see the web that Peking House had cast through Oakland and Berkeley, I sensed faint but growing connections, between Peking House, Patricia Hearst's apartment in Berkeley, and the site of the Mansa concert. And two more, newer, yet very faint threads that I hadn't noticed yesterday, both of them stretching into the hills out towards Piedmont and Montclair. I haven't followed them yet because I wasn't sure if I should work those leads on my own. Not sure if they're a wild goose chase or not, but something connected to Patty and maybe the SLA is out there."
Brant
Marshall is sitting on the conference room table with his legs crossed, the remnants of a few lines of coke on a mirror nearby. He’s watching the TV that’s attached to the wall. He says: “You know Archie was telling me the other day they’re thinking of expanding this to full-hour episodes. Seems like a lot of time to spend just having characters talk about nothing but I—” He cuts himself off when someone hands him the phone.
After listening to Viv, he puts a hand over the receiver and says to Mitch, talking extremely fast: “Hey, wanna go meet up with Viv out in Berkeley? She says she has a bead on a few possible places that might be worth checking out. Not that you’d need me there for that, naturally, but we could take my convertible. I told you I bought a convertible, right? Well, gifted it, really. Someone gave it to me.”
Michael
(Remind me to check the cocaine rules for you guys once we get into the field )
Brant
(n.b., no one actually "gave" Marshall the convertible, he just saw a guy getting into it at a fancy restaurant and mind controlled him into giving him the car.)
(He'll probably leave it parked somewhere and forget about it)
Michael
So the spy who's coming in from the cold wants to drop in to report on her brush-by at the Panhandle?
Leonard
Jocasta enters the office, looking as beat to shit as she's looked in years. She nods tersely to a SANDMAN operative who escorted her up and takes a seat in an office chair, reeking of cheap smoke. "I found her," she says. "Or rather, her people found me. They're gonna dead drop me some instructions on where to meet them. They nixed the idea of a safe house, so I'm not sure I can get them to the Barn, but they want safe passage to L.A. If we can set up a safe house there, I think I can make it happen. But, what do we want to do with them? Operating under the assumption they're compromised by the enemy, do we just grease them? Put them on ice for a while? Keep the pretense going that I'm one of them? I don't want to make any risky moves — their trust level is minimal."
Jeff
"Given the way the Enemy operates the distinction between 'is an active agent of the Enemy' and 'is in a position to be recruited or compromised by the Enemy' is minimal. You turn around and there's a kulullu popping up like a mushroom in a mudfield. But you can't just eliminate everybody who has enough of a countercultural vibe to potentially spawn Enemy action, in the attempt you radicalize the survivors and there's always going to be more discontented until we build the New Jerusalem.
"Is there a way, this is out of my area of expertise, but is there a way we can turn this into an opportunity to diffuse the Enemy's influence? Like we've been talking about, making a world where there's a few hundred cable channels, not just us and the Enemy fighting over VHF."
Leonard
"There's something...there's something about Patty," Jocasta says, a bit dreamily (or maybe it's just sleep deprivation). "She was so receptive to a complete long-shot I took trying to reach out to her with my mind. I don't know if they realize what they have on their hands with her. But they've got her fucked up — they're definitely force-feeding her drugs, and worse too, if I had to guess."
She pauses thoughtfully for a moment. "I definitely agree with you, Mitch. Making people like this into change agents instead of enemies, that's what we ought to be doing. But I think we have to figure out if someone got to them before we did before our path to that becomes clear. Their ideology is just a hodgepodge of radical jargon, it's not real Marxism, or even Maoism. That smells like someone else is — or at least was — pulling their strings, and we should find out who and why before we try to turn them around. Patty killing those two people also seems like the Enemy; the ritual spilling of blood and all that. She doesn't seem like she'd just wax people by mistake."
Jeff
"So, what, the Enemy is looking at this situation and seeing Patty Hearst as a potential conduit? More reason to bring her in, right? Maybe recruit her. Maybe that's what we ought to be doing more of, turning Enemy agents and assets."
Leonard
"Maybe. I've been working with some of the AIM people, and that's arguably what's happening — no reason they would have been on our side, and they sure didn't trust me at first. But now, they're close to being allies, and definitely a long way away from being fodder for the Kings."
She runs a hand through her hair, wincing as it sticks. "That's good shit, Mitch, and I think it's a good big-picture. On the near side, though, there's still the question of what to do with them right now. Should I bring them in and put them in the cooler, or should I play along and not tip my hand for now? The former would give us a chance to interrogate them, and also see who comes out of the woodwork looking for them when they disappear, but it's also going to completely put all of them on the defensive, including her. The latter gives us time to build trust and figure out their game, and to figure out what we're going to do in the long run, but it's also gonna put me in a delicate position and out of commission for a while.
"Your call, Marshall..."
Brant
Marshall stirs from staring off into the middle distance. “Well, we know this organization is partly a Company project, so it would make sense that they lack true Commie bona fides.” He pauses for a few beats. “Jo, keep playing along. See what you can find, see if you can get eyes on Hearst. I want her. Use whatever resources you need to facilitate their extraction so as to maintain cover and ingratiate yourself further. I haven’t written off the Barn but the Barn is … old thinking. We’re thinking differently now.” Another pause. “Mitch, did I ask you about going out to Berkeley with me?”
Jeff
"Just before Jo came in, yeah."
Brant
"You down? If it's not your day that's of course fine."
Jeff
"Sure, sure."
Brant
(Marshall will have someone bring his convertible around)
Rob
(The challenge of hanging with somebody with Serendipity: you're just about to head out somewhere and people keep showing up with plot specific information.) (I'll be AFK until this afternoon so if you want to have other stuff happen before Archie's call, feel free, but otherwise I will try to get back on this afternoon-evening.)
Archie gets Mary-Lynn to show him the phone, and calls in to URIEL HQ some time that afternoon.
Michael
(Like I said, I'd like the rest of the team to have Archie's report on the Bierce interview before they head out to check out what Viv's getting a hunch about. But I can start Viv's sequence in a new room whenever you all are ready.)
Brant
(Oh, sorry, I thought we were pausing so you could coordinate some other things. If Archie calls in Marshall will of course put him on speaker with him, Mitch, and Jo before they all leave)
“Arch? You’ve got me, Mitch and Jocasta here. We’re about to take off — following some leads.”
Michael
(I'm good to go again! Yesterday I was working with Bill on getting Roger back into things. Roger is more or less set to enter Mission 9 now, which is something I'd love to drop into the narrative as well, whether that's a wellness check at his apartment or some other mechanism, but let's get through this bit first.)
Rob
"Hello all! Glad to catch you together." After whatever small talk or pleasantries make sense: "I interviewed our guest at Shasta." Slight pause as he waffles between "I" or "we" there, but Archie just says "I."
"He does seem to be the real Ambrose Bierce. Born 130 years ago. Fought at the Battle of Shiloh." Archie marvels at that a little.
(I'll write this out as a monologue but feel free to interject anywhere or assume that people did interject as appropriate.)
"Maybe you've pieced this together already, but just so I have it straight in my head: Bierce was one of the original Bohemians, a founding member of the Club. He worked for William Randolph Hearst back in the day, who worked for John Wilkie. Or maybe Wilkie worked for Hearst. Wilkie was head of the Secret Service; he basically ran the American SANDMAN before it was SANDMAN. So Hearst and Bierce knew something about the world behind the world. At the least they had access to Anunnaki memetics: that's how Hearst used Bierce to kill President McKinley."
"It seems that, back in 1906, Bierce's circle of Bohemians — him, Jack London, this poet George Sterling — engineered some kind of ontoclysm. This would've been at the old Montgomery Block, where the Transamerica Pyramid is now. They tried to change history, dreamed up a world 'where Bohemia was victorious over Mammon.' Have to wonder if Hearst was on board with that."
"And they succeeded! Or at least thought they did. Lived maybe twenty, thirty years in their new and improved history... but then it fell apart. That was the Great Quake. Maybe they caused it, maybe the Kings caused it, maybe whatever they'd done wasn't stable? I guess the quake undid whatever they'd done. They snapped back into History A, back into 1906, like it had all been a dream."
"I doubt they were acting on behalf of the Kings, but mucking around like that must have brought them to their attention. So the Kings got to Bierce in New Mexico, and put him to work."
"Bierce is — well, he's like Mitch, you know? He's a powerful believer, powerful enough to change things. Just talking to him, getting him to remember the un-done history in his mind, things got a little... soft here while he was talking. I mean, it's Shasta, I suppose it's always been soft here. Still, we might need to lay down some new memetics."
"Oh, and one more thing. The kid from Agrigenics — Danny Miller, the one with the flyers? He just turned up at the School here. Said he felt 'called.'"
"That's all. I'm wondering if I shouldn't join you in the city. What's happening there?"
Leonard
“Danny Miller? Our Danny Miller? What the hell is his angle?”, Jocasta goggles. “Is everything…stable there, Archie? I do think you should come up the coast, if for no reason than your own safety.”
She’ll briefly cover her end: her psychic vision of Patricia, the SLA contacting her, her plans to get in tight with them and bring them downstate.
“The strings are starting to get more visible, anyway. All this leading back to the Bohemians and the Hearst family…circumstantial like a trout in the milk, as another American man of letters once said.”
Jeff
"Well. We definitely want to know how and why they failed."
Brant
Marshall hops off the table and starts writing on the whiteboard. “OK. We have the Hearsts. We have the Bohemian Club. The two have a contentious history dating back to the Gilded Age. We are now forming a hypothesis that, in 1906 — at the end of that Age — an ontoclysm occurred. It created — ‘briefly’ — another History. It fails, and History reverts back to History A-1906.
Now, fast forward. A leftist organization fostered by the Company — and, tacitly, OZYMANDIAS — has seemingly gone rogue and abducted a member of the Hearst family. They rob a bank. Hearst kills multiple people. She presents as brainwashed to an improbably high degree of sophistication. The robbery seems ‘fake’; cover for something else. On the same day, a guest room at the Bohemian Club — famously haunted — catches fire. The whole matter is dealt with and hushed up rapidly and with a high degree of finesse. The Club, who disdain the Hearsts, threatens Mitch after I infiltrate the building — a place practically laden with symbolic magic and shielded by surprisingly powerful psycho-compulsions and memetics. All this coincides with Ambrose Bierce emerging from Shasta after years of Anunnaki enslavement.
So how do we parse this? How do we decide what avenues to pursue and to what extent? I — Arch, I was going to have Jocasta keep her cover with the SLA to see what she can see and perhaps get closer to the Hearst girl — anyway — I still think placing Jo inside the SLA is the right move at this point. But what else? No bad ideas. Go.”
Jeff
"Uhhh..."
"This might be nothing. But the guy from the grove...he didn't have an aura, did I mention that? Some kind of something, I don't know, maybe he had a personal anti-aura-sight shield, maybe he had a make-Mitch's-aura-sight-not-work machine, maybe he was golem...
"Anyway the guy from the grove, him finding me like that, it smacks of...something unwholesome. It's an OZYMANDIAS kind of thing. In rolling up the working group did we, maybe, create a hole in the world that the Bohemian Club had to sprout into? Like a mushroom growing out of a...no, because then it's casual...like a vine on a trellis...no, that doesn't make sense...
"It's like you're, uh, you're doing a puzzle. You're doing a puzzle and it's all these little blue pieces, and you slowly fit them together and you think you're done, and then you find out the actual puzzle much larger, bigger than you'd imagined it could be, and you only put together one piece of that larger puzzle, and...it's fractal, every puzzle piece has an infinite perimeter because you look at it and you see that it's actually made out of smaller puzzle pieces, and those pieces are made out of smaller puzzle pieces, all the way down to where you can't see it...and what you thought was a whole puzzle was actually just one piece of sky, and there are other puzzle pieces you didn't have the eyes to see until you'd make your piece of sky.
"I'm not making enough sense. I'm suggesting that there is some framework within which the activity, now, of the Bohemian Club, and the SLA, and Brother Dod, is all happening because we created an environment where something like it could happen, when it couldn't before."
He shrugs, abashed. "Anyway Patty killing people reads as Annunaki sacrifice, pulling in an incipient event, but I'm probably the last person in the room to notice that."
Brant
Marshall has his eyes closed as Mitch speaks, a thing he often does when he's trying to commit something someone is saying to memory.
Leonard
Jocasta listens, lost, nursing a Slim and looking like she wants to nod in agreement but isn't sure of the right moment.
"It might be too early to really get a sense of the metaphysics of it all, not that I feel like I ever get a sense of it," she says. "But there's no question that we've made ripples in reality. And...the game has changed, too, right? It used to be a basketball game. It was just Us vs. Them, and the best we could hope for was to win more games than they did. But after OZYMANDIAS — which was, I dunno, them buying off the refs or something (I can already feel this metaphor slipping away from me) — we changed the game. They want it to stay basketball, and they're pushing for a change of venue, but they got good at it and want to make sure it stays pretty much the same. While we're trying to turn it into a different game — more players, less clearly defined goals. I dunno. Maybe none of this scans.
"But, we figured out a different way to play and we changed the game, even if it's not clear to what extent. And there's no reason to think they're not going to respond; we might have the advantage, but they're not stupid. So what if what's happening is that both sides are shoring up their teams? We took OZYMANDIAS off the floor and changed the Indigo Children from something of theirs to something of ours. We're building connections outside SANDMAN's usual milieu. So why wouldn't they be doing something similar?
"We lost some people. They lost some people. So maybe something, fate or fortune or the Demiurge, in response to the stakes getting higher, is letting some new players on the court? They get the man with no soul. We get the Indigo Children. There's other players gathering around the playfield, but it's bigger and broader and we don't know what team they play for: Bierce. Danny Miller. Patricia, who may be theirs or ours — or no one's, there's something very strange about her — and the SLA, ditto. Hearst and the Grove lining up on opposite sides. We're expanding our brief and maybe they are too. Someone or something opening up other histories, shaking the residue of previous realities we never knew about before, just to see who falls out and where they line up."
She puts out the cigarette, looking exhausted even given her erratic sleep schedule. "I dunno. Maybe I'm the one not making sense, I can't pull this into any coherent picture beyond thinking we need to pull Patricia closer and get what we can out of Bierce before his, his life or his reality or whatever he brought out of Carcosa with him shuts down completely. But it feels like the game is different now, and that people are being called in a way that they weren't before."
Brant
"You're both making sense. For now, I think our best leads remain the SLA and the Grove. It is worrying that the Grove was able to locate Mitch so easily. And so quickly. Clearly they clocked me there. But you'd think it'd be easier to find and threaten me than Mitch, being a public figure and all.
So what pieces are in play right now? There's Bierce and Miller up at Mitch's in Shasta. It strikes me as unlikely that Miller is a threat, but his ability to find Mitch's school is concerning. Mitch is the best security we have and he's not there right now. Is it safe to leave Miller with Mary-Lynn and the ... children, without security? Arch, is there any way you could convince Miller to come back to the Bay Area with you, and we can have David isolate him until I have a chance to interrogate him? I may have prematurely blown our cover with the Grove, but we cannot let them off the hook right now. But maybe we can turn that to our advantage. Once Arch is back in town, we could have him contact Fred Merrill on a handler-to-handler level. Play it off like a silly faux pas, 'I'm terribly sorry, Fred, one of my boys got a little over his skis, haha, you know how it is.' That may give us an 'in' and answer some questions.
Oh, also, I got in touch with Redford, Arch. He's coming to my place in Laurel Canyon [INSERT DATE HERE]. You'll need to bring Melanie and the kids."
After a pause Marshall looks around at Mitch, Jo, whoever else from the team is there and says, like an afterthought, "You're all invited too, of course."
Jeff
"Given what happened at the ball field I dunno if I am any kind of effective security, much less the best available. I mean, it's one thing if, uh, if you're like, okay, this isn't a story where a bunch of kids get killed violently by the bad guys while the good guys are off doing something else. But maybe it's a story where the hubris of the good guys is showed by how effortlessly the bad guys can come in and wreck house because the good guys have big big weak spots that the bad guys can exploit.
"Maybe I'm just rattled from the no-soul, no-aura, maybe-a-hologram, maybe-a-robot, maybe-a-something-else guy."
Brant
"He sounds like a legitimate thing to be rattled by, Mitch."
(OOC, Marshall would remember this with his eidetic memory: have we run into someone with no aura/what Mitch is describing before? I don't think we have ...)
Michael
The only time Mitch has run into someone with no aura was when Rich got pushed out of the St. Francis and became a "zombie." And Mitch's friendly bespectacled older businessman friend certainly did not seem to act or react like Rich did (i.e., not at all). So Mitch's theories about there being some kind of anti-aura-sight shield or some kind of interference seem valid, if conjectural.
Rob
"Well, I can't see how all the strings fit together but I agree with Marshall: finding the Hearst girl, getting her out without bloodshed, that's a top priority. Jocasta, you stay on the SLA. The Bohemians, this Jack London picture, Beirce and his circle: it's all got to be connected, but those parts don't seem as urgent. They're not life or death — not yet — as far as we can see."
"Mitch running into this mouthpiece of the Bohemian Club, seemingly at random — that's unsettling. But I don't think it necessarily means they have total surveillance, that they're seeing or predicting everything we do. Sometimes Mitch just... runs into people he's meant to run into, right? Could that not happen... in reverse? Like, he runs into people he doesn't want to run into? Or, how do we know they don't have their own Mitch?" Lets that hang there for a second. Then:
"I'll join you all in San Francisco. It's been too long since I was home as it is. The only question before I come is, what to do with Miller... or with Bierce?"
Leonard
“I have no idea what to do with Bierce,” Jocasta sighs. “Hard enough to believe that’s a conversation we have to have. We probably shouldn’t let him stay at Shasta with none of us attending to him, but that seems like your call, Mitch. I think we should find out what’s going on with Miller, but just in case he’s turned or controlled, don’t travel with him, Archie. Come up on a private plane and he can fly coach. Or drive.”
Brant
"You know what, wait a minute — this is old thinking. We have people now. Dave," Marshall says, as if Dave had been there the whole time, "can you head to Mitch's place at Shasta? Just hang there until we contact you or Mitch gets back. Keep a close eye on Miller. Teach the kids blackjack."
"Dave can keep an eye on the 'St-Germain' school for us until we know what we're doing. He's sharp and reliable. So, Arch, just wait there until Dave arrives. I can head out to the East Bay with Mitch to rendezvous with Viv, who thinks she has a bead on something in Oakland. We leave Jocasta with the SLA. Merrick will be here to assist you as needed when you arrive, Arch." Marshall would never allow his superior to be unattended at the office; he considers Merrick extremely capable and would convey to him that he should treat Arch as a VIP, because he is.
Rob
Okay, so Archie will do that: stay at Shasta until Dave arrives, then go to SF.
There are tactical and memetic reasons to prioritize finding Patty Hearst, and that's all Archie will cop to. But the kidnapping has to have shaken him up. Patty is what, one year older than Jane? They could even know each other. There's a good chance Jane will be going to the very same school in under six months. Every well-to-do white San Francisco parent is freaking out right now, but they don't all have 18-year-old daughters and I doubt many of them have themselves been kidnapped and brainwashed by Maoists. Plus if it turns out Patty was targeted because of her family's connection to the reality war, that just brings it closer to home for Archie.
Michael
(I will probably want to do a scene at the Ransom house in SF at some point this mission. Doesn't need to be long and we can do it in a live session maybe.)
Other scenes I'd like to do in the coming days/weeks:
Someone looking in on Roger at his San Francisco apartment
Something to do with the overall memetics of the SLA situation
Looping Sophie in on the literary history angle (also could dovetail with Redford/Roeg and The Star Rover, Soph would totally volunteer to meet Robert Redford if it came to that, lol)
An update from the FBI on the SLA; they're not completely useless and they're less implicated in the creation of the SLA than the CIA/Defense • Of course Jocasta's infiltration of the SLA
Fill in some blanks on the past four months (Marshall at Granite Peak getting back his Reinhardt memories, how Andy and Mystic Kate settled in in LA, updates on the spirit world/AIM stuff in South Dakota, etc.)
Okay, so I'd like to pursue the Marshall/Mitch/Viv scene over the next few days; it shouldn't take too long to check out what Viv is sensing. Jocasta is on deep cover SLA assignment as of now and I think I'll progress that plotline during the live session Monday night. Archie, too, we can do his next couple of days in the Bay Area during Monday night's session, including talking big-picture memetics around Patty Hearst. I think one thing we should reserve for Marshall or Mitch during the live session is going to see what Roger is up to, maybe going to his apartment, and seeing if we can bring him back into the fold; I'd even be willing to make the lead-up to that part of chat play leading up to Monday night if we have time.
For now, I'll start a room for Marshall/Mitch/Viv.
It occurs to me that checking in on Roger is something Jo could do in her undercover guise pretty safely, since her cover identity is going to need to do a good amount of Waiting and the fact that Jo's Look will hold her in good stead in the Mission District.
Leonard
Sure, she'd be thrilled to do that.