How to Dance
Wednesday, November 7, 1973.
Michael
Ambrose O'Connor got the call at the Peak a few days ago to come out to San Francisco and have a face-to-face with Roger and catch up in the aftermath of ALLOCHTHON. Ambrose himself was at Granite Peak during the fortnight of UFO madness out east; there was a lot of work to be done with the new chevals that was deemed essential, given the vast majority of the chevals being trained are still not quite ready for field work. Ambrose drives his rental car into the Mission District, and as he comes around the corner towards the old crumbling Saltine box Gothic mini-cathedral that is St. Peter's, he sees the schoolkids out for recess at the St. Peter school run by the Sisters of Mercy, playing, laughing, yelling at each other in Spanish.
Ambrose turns onto Florida Street, pulls in across from the church, parks, and heads inside. In the entry to the church, he reads a little bit of the church weekly (in English and in Spanish) and looks at the church announcements and historical clippings, paying close attention to the yellowed clippings behind glass about Father Peter Yorke, advocate for Irish republicanism and workers' rights back in the 1900-10s, before dipping his hands into the stoup and making the sign of the cross as he heads to the pews, where Roger awaits. He dips his knee at the entrance to the pew, sidles into the row, kneels for a moment and says a silent prayer, before seating himself alongside his protégé. Roger and Ambrose have the church to themselves at the moment on this Wednesday morning.
"Morning, son. You all did some amazing work last month, it's all anybody at the home office is talking about. They're saying you've got friends in very high places, and frankly everyone is wondering how you managed it. Faith moves mountains, I guess." He smiles.
Bill
He smiles back. "I do. I do have friends — we have friends — very powerful ones. And I count us very lucky there was at least one open channel to them so they could be there when we needed them. When this whole War needed them..."
Then he frowns. "Pardon my French, Ambrose, but SANDMAN nearly fucked it all up. The boffos with their math nearly undid millennia of struggle all because they were blind to those friends. The higher powers, the greater intelligences, whatever name works for you. I think it says something pretty big that their math, when it didn't count for souls and spirits and powers and principalities, added up to doom. But you add them back into that math, and we pull off 'amazing work'."
"Ambrose, you and me, we have to open up those channels, wider, make more of them. Now we've seen what happens if we don't. This program — it can't just be soldiers wielding a new kind of weapon. We have allies in this War we need — we can't afford to ignore them anymore. This program, it's got to change."
Michael
(I know you're not trying to intimidate Ambrose per se, but this is definitely coming in strong and hot, urgent and radical. Ambrose has been happy to play with the idea of True Faith coming to save the Project and humanity, but Roger isn't playing, he's saying the spirits were the only thing that saved the Project and humanity's asses last month. So can you give me an Intimidation-16 roll to start off please (I assessed a +2 for your relationship with Ambrose, the reference to the spirits, and the RP)?)
Bill
>> SUCCESS by 7
Michael
Ambrose swallows, a sick look crosses his face. He actually goes a little pale. "I have... I have been at this a while, you know. This... insistence that we take the disciplines of faith seriously in the Project. I brought it to people's attention in the American sector, after the war."
Ambrose looks around the church sadly, tears welling up behind his eyes. "Do you know the legend of the Werwölfe? It was a supposed 'stay-behind' network of elite SS officers, meant to marshal resistance to the Allies under deep cover. These esteemed German citizens would be helpful collaborationists during the day, aiding the Americans and Brits and French... and at night would become the titular werewolves, leading daring raids, organizing assassinations, committing acts of sabotage. Eventually the, er, meme came around among Germans who longed for the return of the Reich that they were actual werewolves, of course. Official history says this Werwolf insurgency was all a failure in the Western sectors but I can tell you, they were real. These people, their faith in Nazism outlived Hitler, and it allowed them to be two different people. After the war, they retained a version of themselves where it was always 1940 and the Reich was on the march. They had effectively used the trauma of losing the war to splinter their personality. Whether this was something the mad scientists of Nazi Germany had planned as a contingency or not, we were never able to confirm."
"When the Project and Tavistock boffins managed to get their hands on one of these legendary Werwölfe, they discovered through lab analysis that his entire brain activity changed when he was invoking his hidden nature, his secret identity as a nighttime avenger of the Reich. Real-life Jekyll-and-Hyde type stuff." Ambrose inhales. "They asked the prisoner how he did it, but his daytime personality couldn't tell them and his nighttime personality wouldn't. I looked at the interrogation reports differently." Ambrose's face grows somber. "I had taken anthropology at Fordham, I knew that shamans, medicine men, and, yes, chevaux all throughout human history had created an ego scaffolding out of the various rules and tabus and strictures of faith and wider tribal belief. What was this SS werewolf but another type of shaman, possessing a faith—as odious as we might have found it—with rules, mythic figures, an ontology and eschatology, saints and devils, a whole religious system rivaling any in human history. I brought it to their attention, and over the next 25 years, SANDMAN lab coats slowly turned faith... into a science."
"And as the program grew, I insisted upon that lens of scientific obfuscation! Because I was afraid what faith—true faith, unmuddled by questions of merely human morality or reason—might do to our prospective chevaux. Because of what I saw in Germany. There have to be a bridle, reins and blinders on these horses, Roger. Or else they might run truly wild."
Bill
“Jesus!” Roger says, a little too loudly. “Do you believe in God or not, Ambrose?” He realizes what he’s said, and tones it down, quick, giving the priest by the altar an apologetic wave. “No, I’m sorry, I don’t get to say that, sorry man. It’s just… all I’ve heard, endlessly, from the brass is about this man and that man, the individual— his brain, his belief, his ‘personality constructs’. You’re so busy about the horses, you aren’t picking the right riders! Of course there’s a danger with opening yourself up. There’s bad shit out there— don’t you think the religions have been working on picking right for centuries? Of course Hitler’s followers found the darkest spirits— they’d rejected every message from God. But bridles? Blinders? You want to make the ones who speak to the Holy Spirit bound to human ways? You’ve missed the whole point. You’ve missed the forest for the trees.” Roger stops, sputtering out, clearly exasperated. “Shit, man— transcendence. Higher powers. Elevated beings beyond us. The Divine. You’re stripping it out for fear? When those powers would be our greatest allies? When God is once again calling us to Him? Well, not anymore. No sir. Hear me. Hear the Spirit, the voice of those intelligences greater than man, but that love us. Hear the first thing the angels always say: Fear Not.”
Michael
"I believe," Ambrose says in a croaky, cracked voice. "I'll never stop believing the Lord loves us all and wants what's best for us." He stays silent for a few seconds, and just when Roger is ready to jump back into conversation, Ambrose finds the courage to say what he needs to say next.
"The loa choose you. That's what you've always told me. What if the wrong ones find one of our chevaux? Or the wrong ones wear masks, to fool us into accepting them into us? Why all the ritual, why all the tests to make sure the cheval is worthy? Because it's like working with plutonium: the power we hold is earth-shaking but so is the raw material we need to handle to tap into it." Ambrose then says quietly, "I do have a healthy fear of what we aim to do with this program, if not who we are possibly inviting to the table. The New Testament uses the word phobos to describe that fear of the Lord. Not awe, but terror."
"Roger, I know the play now. I can read the writing on the walls. I know shit has happened at higher levels of the Project than I'll ever see. I know you and URIEL have won the ideological war over who whispers into Control's ears on the bleeding edge of research. And as a result I'll support you all. Speaking of phobos." He smiles mordantly. "But please at least listen to my advice here, if once, for old times' sake. Don't rush headlong into this new ontological framing. Test your hypotheses. Rigorously. Or this could all end up very, very badly, for all of us."
Bill
“I got you, I got you now. Just… when something’s been dammed up for so long, it wants to come out in a rush. And that rush— it can be the push, the kick to take things to the next level. I hear you, the lab coats, careful testing, it’s all part of the caution, I really get that. I get engineering, man— I’d never throw up half-assed bridges and send troops across them, untested. That shit got you blown up in ‘Nam, I saw it. But you gotta see what the lab coat caution is doing— it’s hollowing out the core. All this measuring and competing— it’s drawing types looking for power, not connection. This has to be about soul, man.“
“You like a little caution, tests, OK. I’ll make you a deal. Give me one of yours, and I’ll find one of mine, and we’ll mix our methods. See what works. I’ll be there with them ever step of the way, and we’ll bring them into the boffos regular-like. Bit of the old, watched by the new? New watched by the old? ¿Está bien?”
Michael
Still riding the adrenaline high from the earlier dressing-down his former protégé delivered, Ambrose doesn't even deliberate when Roger presents him this deal. "All right. Yeah. We can do this. You bring in someone who hasn't been given directive one from the Project, someone off the streets, who's learned the Old Ways. And I'll... hell, I'll give you Rick Hazen from CIA. He's been responding exceptionally well to the Agent 00 persona since you first trained him back in September and he's essentially been under lab conditions the whole time: no field work, detached from his day job on the Soviet/East European desk at Langley."
"You're in charge of this evaluation process, Roger. I can stay on as outside advisor, move my operations to the Bay Area if you want, but... it's clear whatever I would report up the chain is gonna meet your report and I think we know whose is gonna win at this point. I'll get you Rick's dossier and we can see if he and his wife would relocate to San Fran. I get the feeling after duty stations in Ankara and Mexico City, he and his wife would be enthusiastic about being out here. They're both agents, after all."
(reminder that Ambrose did intimate he'd seen members of Control face-to-face, and now he's saying Roger and URIEL have the ears of "higher levels of the Project than I'll ever see," so some profound change definitely had to have happened at the Peak after ALLOCHTHON)
(he also claimed to have wanted there to be a human factor in the cheval program, being afraid of SANDMAN "programming" people, but now he's saying he wanted to keep that aspect in there as a safeguard? also curious, but it seems to jibe with what Roger's seen of Ambrose since Roger got shot; he's got that doubting Thomas thing hanging over his head, the true Catholic intellectual problem of how to square faith, both his own personal faith and faith as a concept)
Bill
Roger nods, then his serious look breaks into a smile again. “This is good we’re doing here, Ambrose. This is the groove.“ He shakes his hand vigorously. “One step at a time: yeah, good idea, I’ll take Rick out into the world, y’all back in the labs keep us honest. I’ll vet my candidate with you personally. I think I can ease your doubts. And come out and visit more often. I’m sure the father here would like to see you more.”
Michael
"It's a strange world and it's getting stranger. I'll try to keep up." Ambrose smiles uneasily, and takes the Bible out of the pew back in front of him. He turns to John and reads aloud, quickly, softly, abashedly.
Bill
Roger nods along. “Too true— we’re all there. I thought it was hard enough knowing one taisher, then I went and met a whole bunch. All that they can see… but even they don’t see it all. It’s all in a glass darkly, for all of us mortals. But better to know that, then think it’s all figured out. We just gotta keep on truckin’, putting all our doubts together, believing there can be an answer, and then we maybe start to see.”
Michael
"I definitely feel trapped between wanting to dive in head first and measure the deep end a couple dozen more times just to make sure I don't crack my head open," Ambrose says.
"I had wanted to ask you what other projects are on URIEL's agenda now, and how I might be able to help, but I have a hunch I might not even be cleared for the information anymore. Keep me in the loop if you can. Especially if it has to do with faith, or SANDMAN's history dealing with faith and religion."
Bill
“I’ll do what I can. Could be a while before we know what all the agendas even are. But I think you get mine. Ambrose— I wanted to say: thank you. Thank you for coming out to my ‘house’ and being a mentor— and friend. Oh— Jesus, sorry— that sounds like an ending.“ Roger looks at the altar, crosses himself. “Father is gonna sting me in confessional for swearing again.” He winces, then smiles. “No, Ambrose, I meant it. Before any more complications come in our lives, I just wanted you to know it. I try to do that since ‘Nam— too many I never got to thank.”
“Now let me get you a drink, somewhere we can swap stories.”
Michael
"Thank you for opening up my eyes... and keeping them open. I spent that time being your guardian angel out there in The Shit, welcoming you back to The World, getting you that gig with the Project in LA... that's a lot of years under the bridge when you add them all up." Ambrose pauses. "'Mentor,' hell, kid. You're calling the numbers I gotta dance to now. Keeping this old man in the game is about the best way you could pay me back for anything I might have accidentally done to help mentor you."
Bill
“Ha, be careful what you wish for! In the game is right. We’re in it now. And if I’m calling the numbers, I hope you know how do dance merengue. “