Charley and Joshua Consult ORACLE
Michael
So on Thursday Roger comes by la petite écolière's laboratory to ask about possibly speaking with ORACLE.
Bill
Roger comes into the lab breathing a little hard — looks like he ran down. But as he catches his breath, he holds up a hand, then says, taking deep breathes after ever sentence: "Hey, Charley. Sorry. No emergency. Just on a schedule. Lots of places to be. Started running. To give more time. To talk." He gets his breathing calmed down, and sits. "Hey. Do you have time to talk?"
Mel
Charley is surprised and delighted to have Roger’s company and says, “You want to talk to me?? Sure what do you wanna talk about? Magic??”
Bill
"Well, something like it. If this were right old magic, I'd be asking you for a prophecy. Or some prophecies. You up for speaking prophecy?"
"You know we're trying to figure out this thing with the properties that SRI guy is buying up, and we think it has something to do with the future. Like, this ex-cop guy can see the future. So to understand what's going on, we kinda need our own view into the future. And, well, you've got a piece of that, right?"
"I'm not great with this stuff," he waves around at the various computer boxes, "well, except maybe with the wiring. But I remember being a person from the future, and some of the stuff he knew, was working with, well, it feels like stuff this guy, or conspiracy, might be seeking. It was powerful stuff. So I wondered if we could do it again, with the bits you have left, and the bits," and here he taps his own head, "I have left." (Roger absolutely does not get the pun he's making on 'bits.')
Mel
“So you want to use the program I developed from Grail Table?! I call it ORACLE to predict how he knows what he knows or something like that?”
“It’s still under development Roger. It might not work that well. But we could try, like an experiment.” Charley pauses briefly to think. Then continues, excitedly. “To start I’m going to need all his information, all the data on him that we have available. Oh, and the area! Hmmm what else?”
Bill
“The maps and files are up in the boss’ office. But I was thinking you might need more. We need some of the words, the vocabulary, to speak the language, to form the questions. That’s where I think having a native speaker could help.”
“It’s funny, I kicked myself after the first time in the tank, letting the simulated man ride me. But now, I don’t know. Seems like that’s just what we need.”
Mel
“But I didn’t develop a tank? Mine works differently.”
Bill
“That’s good. I didn’t really want to get back in one again. But I don’t think we’ll need a tank to talk to a future man. There’s still one in my head, at least his memory, and I do have some practice letting folks in my head work my mouth to answer questions.”
Mel
“Oh! So. So. So. So! You want me to talk to future guy in hopes he can give us clues to how our guy has his powers in knowing the future? Roger, I’m a little busy. Can you just tell me everything you’re hoping I can do and then I’ll do my best to do that?”
(Charley is due for a nap)
Bill
“Yeah, faster, got it. Good for me too. I’m gonna go into a trance and see if I can bring up the persona from GRAIL TABLE. You ask him about technology companies or maybe government agencies around these properties. And what kind of tech stuff it is. Does this stuff make us easier to sway or control? Then you feed questions into your computer here, and get it to tell us more, esp how to stop anything bad!”
“Is there anything you remember from sitting in the captain’s chair about getting the personas to sit up and talk? I could use all the help I can get getting Joshua to reappear.”
Michael
I might call for a roll here actually, if Charley wants to help summon up Joshua. Mel, Charley can give me a Computer Programming-15 roll to recall how/from what variables the GRAIL TABLE program created Joshua.
>>>> SUCCESS
Charley remembers what was behind the initial role-assignment in GRAIL TABLE: the simulation had posited that dissatisfaction with the computer-run orthodoxy of 2020 would naturally result in rebels, and that for GRAIL TABLE to be useful, it should be seen what impact a single person could have on a system that was about to be hijacked and co-opted globally by the Anunnaki. That person was Roger's character, the computer artist Joshua, and his stand on the roof of the Republican National Convention to stop the deployment of a glyph by Red King terrorist catspaws.
Now, ORACLE contains all that GRAIL TABLE programming. And so ORACLE would know what personality traits, skills, talents, and personal background would make the best rebel against such a system. Moreover, GRAIL TABLE's simulation proves that rebellion is possible in a world ruled by computer networks and media companies. This future system can't crank out 100% of its citizenry as computer/TV zombies hyped up on rage against their fellow citizens. The extremity of these conditions will create rebels. And ORACLE can predict where they might show up and who they might be.
Possibly most important for Roger's question about our present-day problem, ORACLE contains all the simulation information on how these monopolistic networks formed, using all the present-day data that was input from 1973. Now, Joshua was born in the year 1995. For him, a lot of this was ancient history that happened before he was born. But with the help of ORACLE, and Roger's natural ability to channel other personae, Joshua could, with his computer expertise and, again with the help of ORACLE, look at our world in 1973 and plot out what specific series of events might lead to a future that looks like GRAIL TABLE's apocalyptic 2020.
Mel
“Okay, if you want to start meditating I’m ready. And if he doesn’t show up? I could try electro shock.” Charley moves to her headphones . “Just kidding. Put these on I’ll play some of that choir music Grail used. It helps me to think of things sometimes.”
Michael
With all this information and background from the old GRAIL TABLE files and system, Roger feels closer to his persona from the simulation back in May. (That was really only seven weeks ago, wow.) Roger uses Autohypnosis-18 to call Joshua forth (+1 for Charley's roll, +2 for the choir music), to bring him the forefront of his mind, so that he can help ORACLE tell the story of how his world fell... and how our world (using Roger's memories, knowledge, and personality) still might.
>>>> SUCCESS
Okay, so this is a bit of a different experience for Roger. Usually Roger "goes away" when he channels a loa. Joshua is definitely not a loa. But he's also more than just a set of memories. There are faint traces of things that were part of the Joshua subroutine in the simulation rising to the surface now—trivia about the history of the world of the simulation, the history of computing there, how Joshua became estranged and alienated from the futuristic world of wonders he was born into.
Charley sits at the keyboard attached to ORACLE. She starts up her special laser-reading cassette player, within which sits the tape that brought Houdini to URIEL from the Stanley Hotel. The interface on the monochrome green monitor in front of Charley is asking:
INPUT SIMULATION PARAMETERS
At which query Charley responds by loading the GRAIL TABLE data.
Data flies across the screen, and Roger/Joshua looks over the Indigo Child's shoulder. Part of Roger, the part that's Joshua, laughs at how primitive the interface is—this is like a trip to a computer museum!—but eventually with Joshua's help Charley identifies, isolates, and saves the data files that specifically talk about how computers came to rule Joshua's world.
Charley then goes back out to the input simulation prompt and does some nifty on-the-fly programming to get ORACLE to run two sets of simulation data in parallel, using additional computing resources from elsewhere in Building 451. One set of data is the history of Joshua's world from GRAIL TABLE; the other is the current state of play in Silicon Valley in History-A, 1973. And here is where ORACLE's cassette drive really starts raring up. The energy of the reality shard feeds into ORACLE and the shepherding presence of Houdini-ORACLE begins sorting through the different probable worlds that will result from this current set of data about the computer industry and computer networks in our world.
Charley will give us an Ontomancy-15 roll. Mel, Corruption is available to improve this skill rating, but keep in mind since ORACLE is fueled by a reality shard you will also incur 1d6 Corruption just by using ORACLE's power.
Mel
(Feeling like she could have done better. Can this be a re-roll, using Second Chance?)
Michael
YES
Mel
I got 13 for 1st roll.
Michael
I think first you have to activate it, one sec
Okay, roll to activate Second Chance at a 14.
Mel
It’s activated at 10. Then got a 4 for Ontomancy!!!
Michael
Wow! That's a crit. You get ANOTHER reroll with Second Chance, Mel, and take the best of all three. You can roll Ontomancy one more time but a 4 is a crit
The only way you can do better is a 3.
Mel
Nope a 6
Michael
Damn. Okay. Give me a minute because this demands some proper narration.
>>>> 3d6 IQ-20 … 8
As Charley analyzes ORACLE's output on seeing where Silicon Valley will go in the next 50 years, it becomes clear to her that ORACLE's first round of output is just regurgitating exactly what GRAIL TABLE estimated. The ARPANET, the backbone of the electronic computer network being built slowly at universities since 1969 with Defense Department money, will be the future basis for a consumer, not university, computer network that will arrive sometime in the early 1990s. Soon computers will get small and cheap enough to be bought for the home, and then from there it's a small step to phone connections providing networking with other computers, and then the ARPANET's successor systems will have spread so far and made its protocols so universal that any computer anywhere can connect to any other. Simple. It may even be on the conscious minds of some of the men behind ARPANET at universities, research institutions, and at the Pentagon. A far-off possibility, but one that can't be denied.
Charley sees these results come across the screen and is not impressed. Boring! Way too general! Nothing really that new, thanks ORACLE! So Charley nudges causality a little bit, sending her consciousness back to the split-second a few minutes ago right before she put in the input parameters into ORACLE and she makes a slightly different timeline. A timeline where she asked for detailed near-future data on ARPANET. Specifically, Charley figures, it doesn't matter asking ORACLE where we're going to end up if we're always going to end up with the Future Full of Screens. What's important for URIEL now is to know who the crucial people are who are making this future possible now. Who is inventing the primitive ancestors of those communication protocols, the user interfaces, the technology to make computers faster and smaller, all that stuff. And the answer is, well, quite a few! ORACLE gives a scatter chart of hundreds of nexuses of technology, research, and individual computer scientists that will contribute to the eventual worldwide computer network. Six of the most important (there are dozens) match up to the spots on the map that Pat Price marked down on the files in his trailer.
But ORACLE also gives a definitive answer based on the information it has pulled from the input provided by Roger and Archie and Charley... and, Charley can see, by some information Houdini liberated from the SRI computer systems. On the green monitor the following text appears:
---ORACLE PREDICTIVE ALGORITHM: ANALYSIS COMPLETE---
PROBABILITY OF WORLDWIDE ARPANET DEVELOPMENT PRIMARY SOURCE:
SRI AUGMENTATION RESEARCH CENTER (ARC): 99.1%
The "99.1%" flashes on the screen. It's well outside any margin of error for ORACLE. The worldwide communications network that will lead to America and possibly the world falling apart at the hands of Anunnaki 50 years from now is currently being born at SRI's Augmentation Research Center.
This text about SRI stays on the screen for about 30 seconds, and then ORACLE spits out some more output. A secondary, crucial source for the global computer network.
PROBABILITY OF WORLDWIDE ARPANET DEVELOPMENT SECONDARY SOURCE:
DUGWAY PROVING GROUND, GRANITE PEAK, UTAH: PROJECT SANDMAN: 82.7%
Michael
Charley needs to roll 1d6 Corruption.
Joshua sort of settles back a little bit in Roger's head, his work nearly done, but his personality leaves with a snide little laugh, as if to say, "Hah, you all are screwed too, just like we were." With that Roger realizes, while some of the specifics of GRAIL TABLE's predictions might have been wrong, the larger, macro-contours were right. But now Roger knows why Granite Peak didn't want to listen. Advanced SANDMAN tech is going to end up helping to create this network too.
Mel
Rolled a 1.
Michael
Houdini-Cassette did most of the reality shard dirty work there it seems.