Business at Point 7
Michael
Wednesday. October 10, 1973. Morris will settle into the lobby of the Warden Hotel that morning, receive the morning briefing, and then report in to Archie and Marshall. "Gentlemen. Doesn't look like what we did last night had much of an impact from this," he says as he shakes the briefing. "But I feel differently, don't you? Like something unlocked a little bit."
Brant
Marshall shrugs.
Rob
"Oh, I don't know, Mr. Parks," says Archie — he's dropped into a pattern of being more formal with Morris when around other Sandman personnel, less formal when it's just him or him and Marshall. This in response to him questioning whether what we did had any impact. "'You have a right to perform your prescribed duty, but you are not entitled to the fruits of your actions.' You ever hear that one?" Glancing at Marshall with friendly concern as he says that. "We know what we do, but we don't know what we do does."
Archie looks over the morning report. "The broad-spectrum memetics will start working immediately; we should see symptom relief in a few days. And look at what's happening at Point 10." He tries to engage Marshall: "You think it's Agent Orange that did that, or Agent Hort?"
Archie's plans for Wednesday are mainly to do the job: run our HQ, monitor the memetic landscape and the various tech readings. He will send some young memeticists out to interview any nearby UFO witnesses, posing maybe as local journalists doing a story for the newspaper of the next town over. (Unless Marshall wants to do this.) But we agreed we want to set up a meeting of Team URIEL, right? I don't know where we've landed on what is safer: using the Sophie back-channel or the newfangled ARPAchat the GM keeps pushing.
Brant
“Do we know what we do?” Marshall asks. Then, in response to Archie’s quip about Agent Orange: “No idea.”
Marshall will also spend the day doing whatever work he’s supposed to do, but anyone who watches him closely will note he actually isn’t doing anything — mostly he just observes what is going on.
Michael
Archie's plans for Wednesday are mainly to do the job: run our HQ, monitor the memetic landscape and the various tech readings. He will send some young memeticists out to interview any nearby UFO witnesses, posing maybe as local journalists doing a story for the newspaper of the next town over. (Unless Marshall wants to do this.) But we agreed we want to set up a meeting of Team URIEL, right? I don't know where we've landed on what is safer: using the Sophie back-channel or the newfangled ARPAchat the GM keeps pushing.
You can get members the Point 7 team in on the UFO witness action in Xenia, coordinating with the folks at Point 8, absolutely: either the junior buzz boys or one or more of Archie, Marshall, and Morris. I might need you to pull Rank but that depends on who you want to send.
More details on the Xenia sighting: the two witnesses in Xenia were a pair of 12-year-old kids who told their parents they had seen a "spinning amber ball of light" dashing to and fro above their suburban neighborhood at an estimated altitude of about a thousand feet at around 9 pm Tuesday night. Both the kids' parents, who took their kids seriously—they seemed really scared—called the cops who of course couldn't do much but did report it up the chain to the boys at Wright-Patterson AFB as a possible bogey which, of course, set off alarm bells at SANDMAN. Wright-Patterson, where teams are getting ready for the big Israeli airlift and where support for the ongoing ALLOCHTHON aerial surveillance is partially based, didn't see any unknown craft on radar or by eye last night.
There were corroborating witnesses in the kids' neighborhood that say they saw something in the sky last night but it was only the boys who got interviewed in the Xenia paper and had the details. Local newspapers, always thirsty for something charming, human interest-related, and "weird" to gobble up column inches, are going to be important to keep an eye on, Archie realizes.
Michael
As for the URIEL team communication, the options are arrange a conference phone call among the four points' HQs (opsec likely not secure against SANDMAN), use the secure ARPANET channel that Charley has set up (opsec presumably much better than phone lines), or have everyone send reports to Sophie (opsec suspect at both the Sophie end and just purely on the phone end as well). Or some kind of mystical communication, which seems to be Jo's bailiwick at the moment, and has the best opsec but is not reliable.
Brant
(Have we been told how long we're expected to stay in Ohio? Like, do we know if we're going back to Huntsville at the end of the week? Are we staying here until we solve the subduction zone? Is the assignment, on paper, indefinite?)
Michael
(The assignment is indefinite but I feel like both Archie and Marshall can sense in the communications from Huntsville that there's a shift happening given the unresponsiveness of the subduction zones to stimuli, that there may be a regroup at Huntsville to discuss next steps. Marshall guesses those discussions are probably happening with Control today. If nothing radically changes (either for the better or worse) in the next 24-48 hours once the "no fear" memes have had a chance to effect "symptom relief" across the affected areas, there's going to need to be a change in strategy. These teams expected to be able to go in and do something, shoot something, shore up History A specifically somehow. Sure, the folks patrolling the zones and soaking up local history and esmology are getting some broader clues: the fact that the taishers and other mystics found a consensus about the mass fear of war and instability being a common "vibe" among all 12 zones in the first 24 hours was actually a big deal if Marshall is reading between the lines correctly.)
If neither Archie nor Marshall is going to interview the Xenia UFO kids personally themselves, you all can send the junior memeticists head out there under cover as journalists and I can report back what they've gathered for intelligence. Not sure if you want to send Morris out there with them to scan for History B traces or keep him close because of the fear of the possibility of ["ignore the moundbuilders"] memetic contamination.
Rob
(That almost feels like a nudge from the GM, but no, Archie's content with sending the (least callow of the) junior memeticists to interview the 12 year olds. Not Morris — keeping him away from the memetics team.)
Michael
Right on. Will get you a late-afternoon report from the field in Xenia in a little bit.
So the kids have already been through a couple of local news interviews out of Dayton; the Sandmen posed as newspaper reporters from over in Richmond, Indiana. The two 7th graders—James Kern and Kenny Beasley—are eager to talk about it; they had a busy day Wednesday getting mobbed in junior high by their classmates asking about the encounter. The parents are being sort of protective of their kids getting in the newspaper, but mostly are along for the ride; fame, even petty, local, small-scale fame, is a hell of a drug for most ordinary Americans. The Sandmen used some light hypnosis in the interview process; nothing as heavy-duty as ikoters, just the barest edge of hypnotic suggestion, mainly just wanting to get more info than the mere facts of the physical manifestation of the UFO. (The Sandmen do learn something that wasn't in the overnight newspapers: that the shape of the UFO was not a ball precisely, but instead octahedral, an eight-sided regular solid, but glowing so brightly amber/orange that neither Kenny nor James could tell what material the UFO was made up of. One of them had told a reporter last night that with the intense glow the object was "like a ball of light" and they just ran with that.
The Sandmen ask what were their feelings while viewing it, did they feel like they lost any time or memories, that sort of thing. They were both pretty scared, but thrilled at the same time; it seems like both of them are kind of scifi nuts, nerdier types. Kenny, a budding engineer, ham radio nerd, and a suscriber to Popular Mechanics even had some theories on propulsion ("magnetic levitation, like the trains they're testing in Japan!") because of the peculiar humming sound the object made. James, on the other hand, heard the buzzing as a kind of transmission, like an AM radio when you're trying to tune into a station and are just a bit off the frequency. James felt like he might have heard someone speaking in the buzzing. This, of course, piqued the Sandmen; when asked about it, James said, "It wasn't English... or Russian, or even, like, words or a language. It was more like the buzzing was... a tone of voice, like someone making soothing sounds, like they were concerned for us." James definitely looked and sounded spooked saying this. Neither of them felt like they missed any time: the sighting happened at around 9 pm when the two of them were stargazing on James's house's slanted roof and the entire sighting, from arrival, to hovering, to sudden departure, took a couple of minutes.
The report from the field agents says that the kids might have been exposed to some form of source code, meant to nudge them emotionally and bring them onto the UFO's "side," as it were (essentially with NLP). The field agents are also fairly sure that the UFO encounter isn't a screen memory from a NING.LUL glyph or some other kind of brute force memory alteration of the Kings' doing; the Sandmen are confident the light hypnosis would have uncovered that and gotten to the deeper core memory. They actually saw what they saw (corroborated by the handful of other witnesses, whose description of the UFO matches). The Sandmen left James with a light post-hypnotic suggestion to "not worry about how the sounds from the UFO made you feel" and left the kids and their parents with a card to call the "newspaper" (a fake phone number wired to Point 7 HQ) if they remembered anything else.
Brant
Around 4 PM on Wednesday, having spent the day observing the team they've been assigned, Marshall goes into a private office. He pulls his little notebook out of his jacket pocket and flips to a page which contains the longitude-latitude coordinates of the three subduction zones to which URIEL has been assigned. He dials Russell Targ at SRI.
"Russ. It's Dr. Redgrave. I have several coordinates I want you to put to Price. Do you have a pen and paper handy? I'm going to read them to you. I want you to put them to him along with an equal number of meaningless, randomly selected coordinates. Destroy these coordinates once you've given them to Price. This is time sensitive. I want the results ASAP. Do you understand?"
Michael
"Got it." Russ grabs pencil and paper. "Go ahead."
Brant
Marshall reads off the three sets of coordinates for Points 7, 9, and 10. He also gives him the Telex number for the HQ in Newark. “Send me the results as soon as you have them. Put them under classified cover, my eyes only.” Unless Russ has any questions, he’ll let him go.
Michael
Two hours later, the Telex chatters to life (not sure if Marshall has been hanging out waiting for the response) and the cover sheet says, "Marshall Redgrave EYES ONLY" and then a scroll of seven paragraphs emerges. They were written up by Russell Targ, taken as a transcript of Pat Price's words while reading the coordinates.
Point 7:
PRICE: "A large building complex, simultaneously contemporary and futuristic; has an obvious industrial section (smokestacks, chemical tanks, etc.) along with a five-story office-block. It stands amidst dying trees and fallow fields, maybe cornfields. A sign out front says, 'new life re-orientation center,' in lower-case type, with a graphic of a flower. Vans and trucks are constantly coming into and leaving the complex, which is fenced off with electrical fencing and barbed wire. Inside the vans are mostly elderly men and women, unhealthy, many seem to have skin cancer, missing teeth. Some young people are among them, mostly Black or Chicano. They are greeted by smiling young people holding futuristic glowing clipboard/pads with which they check in the arrivals. The arrivals are led into the office block. [Subject PRICE hesitates.] I … can't see inside either the office or the industrial building; I am being actively blocked [emphasis by Price] by another intelligence. What comes out of the office building, into waiting vans, are cleaned-up young (and a few elderly) people; some seem to have glowing pods inside their ears; they don't seem wholly in control of their bodies. What comes out of the industrial zone of the complex are huge tankers and trucks, their cargo marked with biohazard warnings. A couple of the trucks bear legends that indicate they are private fertilizer companies."
"Before I lose contact with this site, something stomach-droppingly awful happens; the entire scene—buildings, vehicles, ground, sky—seems like it flips over, like a pancake [emphasis by Price, evident emotional distress]—and what's left afterwards I cannot read at all [emphasis by Price]. I lose my vision of the site."
Point 9: "A peaceful, fertile, alluvial plain. Two rivers meet here. A large (abandoned?) primitive temple complex is up on a giant hill. Native peoples (Indians?) are living there, I get the feeling this small group is a group of refugees from some amazing catastrophe. They arrive here starving."
"A new group, differently-dressed and equipped, much healthier, move into the area. They are also native-looking but bear axes and blades of copper and some obsidian? They gather the local population into the grounds of the pyramidal temple complex and set them to work in the fields, cultivating corn and beans. I sense the newcomers are eyeing the refugees for human sacrifice to please the gods. It's all I see before the vision fades."
Point 10: "I see Mitch Hort in an old abandoned graveyard among empty graves and moss-covered obelisks. He is standing watching a bunch of floating red orbs dance around him in mid-air. The vision tells me these orbs are the souls of the dead. They want Mitch to ferry them to the next stage in their existence, but Mitch is just standing there. Eventually he slumps into a tree and the vision snaps out." (The three sets of random coordinates for control, interspersed among these coordinates, were much more picayune and uneventful than these three subduction zones' readings. All seem nominal to Marshall considering the geography of the control coordinates.)
TARG: "Subject PRICE mentions without knowing which were which that the three coordinates you sent were much harder to read for him; in fact, three of the most difficult and fragmentary RV sessions he's had since working at SCANATE. He apologizes for the brief time he was able to remain in trance with them, but in the case of (Point 1) he was actively resisted and in the case of (Points 7 and 10) it felt like there was ambient difficulty in seeing any further; both visions were very brief. After the readings Price told me he felt the same vertiginous feeling pushing against him at (Points 7 and 10) that he felt when the 'world flipped over like a pancake' at (Point 1), but milder."
Brant
(Even if Marshall wasn’t standing at the Telex, we can assume a junior agent brought it to him.)
Marshall reads the report a couple times and then brings it to Archie. “From Price over at SRI. Not sure what to make of it.”
Rob
"Past, present, and future," Archie muses. "And the world flipped over like a pancake — I guess we know what that means."
Brant
Marshall hasn't slept well since his abortive attempt to use acid and Buddhist-Hindu mysticism to resolve the subduction zone. In his waking hours he has made a mental list of things he wants to do, and wants done. He will knock at Archie's bedroom door at 5 AM on Thursday. His cultivated California guru air is gone; he seems, to Archie, like the cold and brooding CIA officer who first appeared at Livermore back in '70.
(1) There are two cemeteries within 2.5 miles of the subduction zone: Hall Cemetery and Hartford Cemetery. Marshall wants to dispatch a couple of agents there to confirm that nothing has been disturbed, no graves emptied, etc.
(2) He wants to contact Donna at Granite Peak to obtain Morris Parks' file. OOC, I'd love to get a better sense as to what his "powers" are -- like, can he just use Detect (History B)? Or does he have other abilities? He recognizes she likely won't be able to get him anything same-day, which is fine. Whatever she can do. I'll roll and see what happens.
(3) He wants to send Archie to the Columbus Historical Society in order (a) to get an expert opinion on the glasses he found at the subduction zone (e.g., their age, likely provenance, any interesting details, etc.); (b) identify the region's leading expert on the local mounds -- most specifically, the Newark Earthworks and the Alligator Mound. In re: the Newark Earthworks, he will show Archie a local brochure he somehow obtained which says that the Earthworks are sometimes called the "Octagon Earthworks" due to their layout. "The children said the UFOs were octahedral, under hypnosis," he'll remark.
(4) He wants to take the expert, Archie, and Morris to both mound-sites; the expert under the pretense of a guided private tour, or something like that. Whatever works. We can just hypnotize him / her if we need to. At the mounds he wants to see if Morris detects anything.
(5) Thursday evening, he is taking a computer-aided design SANGUSH glyph — we have those, right? at least one? — and going, alone, to this house. If anyone is home, he is knocking on the door and then letting himself inside. He will use hypnosis to assume control of the family: he wants to occupy whatever room has a window that faces out toward the subduction zone, and he wants to know, from the family, if they've observed anything strange the past few days. He's bringing his luggage; he lives there now.
Michael
1) is easily done and I will report back on the game calendar if and when there's anything noteworthy to report
2) I'm going to give you two Donna rolls to reflect having tried this on Tuesday and Wednesday and if she's too busy with ALLOCHTHON requests (i.e., you fail both rolls) we can do it on Thursday too. So give me two Contact (Donna Montanari)-9 rolls.
3) If Rob is down to do this as an actual QUICK scene sometime before Thursday night, that sounds like loads of fun That sounds like an NPC I'll want to inhabit a little bit if they're going to become our "local guide."
4 and 5 are also great ideas and I will unfold them once 1-3 above are resolved.
Brant
>> SUCCESS by 0
Well I guess that negates the need for the second roll?
Rob
I'm down for a scene whenever (local history nerds are Archie's beat, go figure) but keep in mind what Brant just said about beautifully written bespoke answers complete with fully-fleshed out NPCs. "Make a roll, get one lead if successful, yadda yadda the rest" is a perfectly respectable approach.
Michael
Well I guess that negates the need for the second roll?
It does.
I mentioned when Marshall first came to Ohio that Morris's powers of perception were first discovered in Korea in '52. As Marshall reads Morris's file, Telexed from Donna at Granite Peak, he discovers that Morris got Section 8'd after a particularly heavy bombardment of Chinese artillery at Heartbreak Ridge, a month-long battle where thousands of Americans and tens of thousands of Communists were killed. Apparently Morris, a young infantryman, was arrested for shaking his superior officer telling him to aim fire at "the giant vultures hovering over the battlefield." A debrief by the very young Project SANDMAN confirmed that Private Parks had personally witnessed multiple šedu being retrocreated due to the mass death event of the battle. Morris was taken back to the States to recuperate mentally and to be trained by SANDMAN. The Project did not clear his dishonorable discharge from the Army, in the hopes of keeping him desperate enough to remain on with the Project as one of its small stable of postwar taishers; a Black veteran in 1953 without military benefits would be easily suborned, they figured. But instead he just went back to the streets of his hometown of Detroit, and lived on the streets a stewbum and a junkie for a few years, until he wandered desperate into Mosque No. 1 of a rising religious Black nationalist movement called the Nation of Islam. SANDMAN made stronger efforts to bring Morris back under Project control, this time as an infiltration agent into the NOI movement to confirm whether their esoteric philosophy was connected to the Kings.
It was a delicate dance throughout much of '57, with the few Black Sandmen available to use as handlers trying to get Morris to return to SANDMAN by betraying the movement that had gotten him to clean up his act and gave him a ontological, spiritual, and political framework for what he'd seen in Korea. But Morris himself saw the corruption at the center of the movement in the behavior of the Honorable Elijah Mohammed. The movement wasn't infected by History B, but it was a cult of personality overlaid on a political vehicle for Black nationalism and liberation. Morris eventually landed on the side of the "angels"—SANDMAN and the FBI—and much of the intelligence he brought back from inside the NOI ended up informing the public television documentary series The Hate That Hate Produced in 1959, one of the first times white America had heard about the Nation and a major propaganda/memetic operation to forestall the broad civic unrest that could come from an ascendant Black nationalist movement.
Morris spent the Kennedy years as a full member of SANDMAN domestic ops. He was still considered somewhat politically and spiritually "compromised" but his skills as a taisher were indisputable. He'd not only be able to give information on the nature of subduction zones, but had an uncanny ability to sniff out the retrocreation of Irruptors. The cults SANDMAN was dealing with in the early 1960s in America were often part of the various movements for Black liberation. Morris's work was essential in helping astrologer, UFO contactee, occult bookstore owner, and History B-influenced cult leader, Fred Ahmed Evans, self-destruct in Cleveland in 1968. While city-wide deadly riots followed (riots where Morris was out in the streets looks for Irruptors), the op was considered a huge success by the Project. Similarities between Evans's and Morris's life paths and the directions each took them are left as an exercise for the reader.
In 1964, Morris participated (as a citizen, not a government infiltrator) in the Freedom Summer movement, doing street networking and clerical volunteer help to get Detroit-based activists get transportation down South. It was around this time that he first encountered the Louhelen Baháʼí School in Davison, Michigan. A few Baháʼí were part of Freedom Summer in Detroit and Morris had finally found a home for his spiritual and political inner turmoil after having betrayed/become disillusioned with the Nation of Islam. Conveniently, SANDMAN had long been interested in how the syncretic, synthetic theology of Baháʼí could be used as a weapon against the Kings (as a post-Ontoclysm faith). Morris's powers grew by leaps and bounds after his brain neurolinguistically installed the Baháʼí "programming"; Morris is thus just not merely an active taisher, he's a test subject, encouraged to bring Baháʼí thought and philosophy to the fight against the Kings.
I'm down for a scene whenever (local history nerds are Archie's beat, go figure) but keep in mind what Brant just said about beautifully written bespoke answers complete with fully-fleshed out NPCs. "Make a roll, get one lead if successful, yadda yadda the rest" is a perfectly respectable approach.
Licking County Historical Society sounds like a good source for a local history expert not involved with the government, either county, city, state or federal. They moved TWO historic homes to their public park to be used as historic homes and HQ for the society!
I do note from Brant's research on the Newark Earthworks and Alligator Mound that the early early Smithsonian produced archeological research on these as part of their very first publications. BUT given the existence of the "just don't look (at the mounds)" meme, maybe we shouldn't go digging into the Smithsonian records too deeply yet.
Brant
(Mission 8, Session 4 — the opening salvo of URIEL's war against the Smithsonian)
Michael
When Archie gets to the Licking County Historical Society (we can waive the need to do a really detailed cover identity given Brant's said we're willing to use hypnosis/NLP to make sure this person doesn't remember us) and asks about local experts on the mounds, the folks there give him the contact information for a young local historian named Eileen Gill. Eileen is a graduate student at the Ohio State University and is working on her PhD on the mound builders. She's also a Newark native who's lived around the mounds her whole life. She teaches at the Ohio State annex at Newark that I referred to earlier upon your arrival at Point 7 and she volunteers at the Historical Society as well. She's got good mound and local history credentials and would be found at the campus on Wednesday. If Archie gives her a call Wednesday (Reaction roll made off-screen), she'd be more than happy in her capacity as a Historical Society volunteer to guide your "group" at both Alligator Mound and the Earthworks early on Thursday. Which I will do once I am able to move the calendar along.
Brant
(In light of the Thursday morning report from HQ, Marshall will forego his plan to take up residence in the house at the subduction zone a la Hawley Griffin).
Michael
(twas a very awesome idea that can be redeployed if we find ourselves with UFO zones going forward)
Brant
(Oh I am absolutely not foregoing it as a general matter; just no need to do it right now.)