Let’s Go Bowling
Michael
Archie's notepad is full of scribbles, cross-outs, abandoned section headers, categories, and the snatches of phrases that have come back into his conscious mind in the weeks since he left Bohemian Grove with a head full of 2C-B heroic dose-derived pure information from the Apocalypse revealed behind the mask of the spiritus mundi of History A. Discussions with the rest of URIEL have dislodged a lot of that information, but it's still fragmentary, broken: the big themes are there, but the few minutes Archie reeled in shock from the unspooling scroll meant that Stoney was in the driver's seat for most of his perceptual time during the Cremation of Care.
The Stoney puppet lies inanimate on the Rooster House meeting table as Archie is waiting for Mitch to come down from the mountain to chat about these weird Revelations given him at the Grove. Archie hasn't "spoken" with Stoney since last month, hesitant to pull too soon or quickly at these threads; also wary that Stoney might ask for yet more "favors" inside History A. Archie's series extolling the "144,000 Elect" memeplex is going to begin broadcasting in a month or so during the fall network premiere season, and Archie has the sinking feeling in the back of his mind that now that that particular "seal" is broken, Stoney might ransom his precise transcription for yet more mystical media memetics for whatever Stoney's obscure motivations might be. "It's a covenant," Archie said in his workshop last July Fourth when he crafted Stoney, and for the past thirteen (!) months, he's been feeling himself sinking deeper and deeper into this bargain with Director Stone... like quicksand.
Jeff
"All right, what are we working with?"
Rob
(So I think what Archie will do, to spare Mitch a bunch of Stoney time, is consult with Stoney on his own to try and reconstruct more of the "revelation". Don't know if we can abstract that with rolls or if you want to play it out, Mike. Then a separate conversation with Mitch, which I definitely want to play out in chat, is in order. I'm not available too much today or tomorrow but can focus on either/both after that.)
Michael
So prior to Mitch walking in, Archie and Stoney had some one-on-one time to discuss the Apocalypse ("unveiling") of History A. Stoney went into a bit of a monologue when Archie first put his hand in the puppet head.
"I've been... anticcccipating discussing this fascinating Revelation with you, Archibald! I'm quite honestly impressed it took you this long to reach out! I would have far been more eager." While this almost led Archie down a philosophical cul-de-sac wondering how time runs on Earth-Krane compared to History A, Stoney gave Archie very little time to woolgather on this. He went bang-on straight into discussing what both men (okay, one man and one weird eagle-vulture thing) saw.
"These Owls are very naughty boys, aren't they Archibald?" Stoney said with a sideways lascivious grin. "I'd almost argue they're men after my own heart if they weren't so fundamentally incurious and boring." He squawked and cleared his throat, saying, "You ultimately cannot build a stable ontology on fear like this. You'll run your subjects' adrenal systems ragged; they'll be utterly useless as thralls. You have to give them some pleasure, too. Some treats. Your original Bohemians knew that, and we know that here as well. We gave magic to America—stole it, Prometheus-like, from the Atlanteans—and everyone in the First World is much happier for it. But enough about their ruling ontology and this massive tulpa they have piggy-banked all their fear and misery in—fittingly, like misers! Let's talk... numbers."
Stoney grabbed the pencil Archie had been using in his mouth (Archie's left hand, naturally) and poises it over the legal pad. Before he started writing to fill in Archie's blanks, though, he said, muffled though a mouthful of Eberhard Faber No. 2 (a good trick), "You know, f'rrr a wh'le I conf'dered n't gr'nting you fis d'ta, Arfibald." He then realized what he sounds like and spits the pencil onto the table with an audible vaudevillianly-exaggerated puppet "peh." "Ugh. Yes. I thought this kind of data couldn't be entrusted to you and your band of merry instigators. But this is the sort of awe-ful revelation that really does make clear how you are merely a sort of thing in our dream, doesn't it? We write your history. My orgone dreamers imprinted on my command, my will-Working, for a world without Atlantis and there your universe was, slipped free of the multiversal womb, its rich crimson placenta feeding it the basic 'rules of the game' in its death throes."
"And every narrative must have an antagonist, no? Your cut-rate Sumerian demons are merely a badly-conceived bug in the system; all your half-told tales of Bohemia and Norton and Camelot echoes of our realer, truer history. But these men! These are a worthy final adversary, programmed by our expertly-trained orgonauts, delivered from the technomagical union of the archetypes of Cain and Lilith. They must be defeated in order for your narrative to come to a satisfactory conclusion. And somehow you... we have been vouchsafed a copy of that programming! The numbers."
(Secret Detect Lies-19 roll)
Archie, while this monologue was going on, had been writing with the pencil—automatic writing, the kooks and mystics call it—and on the page he now possesses everything: the Pynchon quote, the partially-obscured introductory material, all the Math, the Mantle of the Owl. And Archie also realized, in a flash before Mitch walked in, that Stoney, starting at the moment he grabbed the pencil, was feeding Archie a big fat old line of confidence patter, the kind of obfuscation Archie's grandfather taught him to watch out for, that Mitch had cottoned to pretty quickly from jump: "Likes to hear himself talk, doesn't he."
Stoney is quite clearly sweating the fact that he actually didn't create History A; someone else did. And it's also clear that he wants and needs Archie and Mitch's help to understand and interpret this Math.
It's at that point that Archie took Stoney off his hand, sick of hearing him talk, and Mitch walked in.
Rob
(Hee. Nice. Love the business with the pencil. I know Stoney can be a lot but I always dig him being muppet-y. Jeff, you ok if we pick this up in a day or two?)
Brant
(jfc stoney loves to hear himself talk)
Michael
My greatest pleasure and yet also my greatest burden
Rob
Archie hastily pushes Stoney's puppet body aside.
"I guess I made a real goose of myself at the Grove, huh?" He shakes his head at his own behavior. "Letting Marshall and Sebastian pressure me like that... I don't know what I was thinking." (edited)
Jeff
"Tch!" Mitch clucks his tongue, shakes his head in an expression of both reproof and sympathy. "Don't worry about it." (edited)
"We've got all this hammering down on us from up high, it's hard to keep your head on straight. Look at Nixon."
Rob
"I appreciate you saying that, but... well, it's not how I want to be living." He will get to the point eventually, but apparently still has a bit to get off his chest. "You know what I did on my last night stateside, before shipping out to Korea? All the other fellows were getting up to who knows what in North Beach or Chinatown. I went to an Owl Drug store, bought myself a six-and-a-half ounce bottle of Coca-Cola, and drank the whole thing. I'd never tasted it before! The elders had me convinced that one sip would send me to perdition. Or, I don't know, turn me into a jazz musician." He laughs at his big 'confession.' "You live pretty clean, don't you, Mitch? Someone might not think it to look at you, but you're not, you know, messing around with pills and stuff, like Marshall - or poor Jo - are you." (edited)
"Anyway," Archie says, pushing that business aside much like the Stoney puppet, "all of this to say: I don't know how much stock to put into the things I saw that night. But it felt important at the time." "Like I said at our all-hands, the Owl effigy seemed to be animated by some kind of entity. Like one of the Kings, but for History A? But then Marshall's drug let me see, or think I was seeing, into the entity itself, into what it was made of. And it was just... it was just a bunch of words and numbers." "I've got a lot of it down here, as best I can remember." He shows Mitch the yellow legal pad, with a scribbled, piecemeal version of the History A document, in a mix of Archie's handwriting and Stoney's beakwriting, lots of arrows and cross-outs and corrections. "I got the idea the thing had stats, like on the back of a baseball card." (edited)
Jeff
Mitch looks diffident at the question about his drug habits or lack thereof. He'll take something if it's offered but mostly he just drinks, and less than he might. "Strat-o-Matic, you ever play strat-o-matic? The RAND corp, they make the big maps with the little army men they push around with sticks, roll dice, decide who should have won the Battle of Stalingrad, right? Strat-o-matic, APBA baseball, yeah. You take the raw nuts and bolts of what the athlete can do, you make that into numbers, you roll dice. Boxcars, home run."
Mitch takes the legal pad from Archie, leafs through it. He doesn't try to pretend it's entirely new information, though it's certainly comforting to have an actual version of it in his hands. "This is great. You got all this?"
Rob
"Strat-o-Matic Baseball, exactly! That's just what this made me think of. And Fred Merrill said something about war games, too, right before the ceremony." Archie chats away while Mitch looks over the pad. "When you first start studying esmology, it seems awfully complicated. That's its mystique, I guess, this arcane mathematics that can model human behavior on any scale. But as you get the hang of it, esmology I mean, what starts to gnaw at you is how simple it is. I mean, it can really do a number on you. Is that all there is to us? This simple math?" "You start to wonder..." Archie looks around, as if checking to see if anybody could be listening in, even here, in the Rooster House. "You start to wonder if all the complexity isn't just window dressing, that eggheads like me cooked up so as not to face it. At Granite Peak, we've got whole libraries of tables and figures, computers whirring day and night, equations and algorithms and exceptions to the rule, all to put lipstick on the pig: that just about everything we can measure, every sphere of human activity, maps onto the same dumb bell curve."
Jeff
"Well, that's the trouble with straight sim, isn't it? Just an empty dream, and if you want anything to mean anything, you've got to inject a little nar into it." Mitch trails off, shakes his head. "It's like the universe needs to be both more complicated than we're capable of understanding, and simple enough that a bunch of precocious junior high school nerds can get their heads around it during study hall. But I'm probably only glancing at your point, with my razzle-dazzle... Nothing is real, everything is make-believe, we're all just one big story some guy is telling himself to relieve the boredom, and who's to say the guy's story doesn't feature a character based on himself, a self-insert figure, who tells himself a story to amuse himself?
"At the St Francis, Jo came up with this whole scenario, Jocasta and you and Viv did, right? But you didn't take it past the level of an improvised show, you didn't try to make rules about what would happen if an Atlantean tried to put a magic hex on a narc, and the fella pretending he's a narc doesn't wanna be hexed, and the fella pretending he's a wizard wants the hex to happen."
Mitch makes a momentary sour expression, like he just swallowed a bug.
Rob
Archie doesn't seem to register the sour face or the strike-through text. But he's cheerful, excited, not bleak. "You're right! We didn't make up rules for everything at the St. Francis. Andy and I wanted to script everything out at first, but you really can't, can you? 'No plan survives contact with reality.' I mean, Charley was a dolphin!" He laughs thinking of it. "I didn't come up with that. Andy didn't come up with that. But wasn't that great?"
"Maybe it is 'all just one big story.' But maybe the lie there is the word 'just'."
He tries to explain himself more clearly. "The thing that's so corrosive about esmology: if you knew, for certain, that all we were was a bunch of programmed responses, a handful of numbers, simple probability... well, that would make life seem pretty pointless. If that was all we were."
(An aside: "That really sounds more like them, doesn't it? The kings, the irruptors?")
"But box scores aren't the ball game. A game needs players. These numbers, this text, this epigraph from Thomas Pynchon for gosh sakes. They were written to be read by somebody."
"The rules, the stats, the math: It's not the truth behind everything. It's just, I don't know, an interface between us and whoever's on the other side. If the math is simple, maybe that's because it's just a, a narrow aperture. Like, here we are: complex, human, unpredictable. And then there's this simple math. But then on, the other side of the math, there's life, complexity, humanity again."
He laughs at himself once more. "Look, I'm not saying any of this is actionable - that's what I was hoping you'd help me with - but esmology's been giving me ulcers for years. I see it differently now."
Jeff
"I don't follow, sorry. You're connecting this, uh, abstraction, to esmology, but in a way that reassures you about esmology? I woulda thought it'd be the other way around, that seeing things stripped down to bare mechanics would be...harrowing." Mitch sets the legal pad down, then picks it up again. "As for actionable, that really depends. You don't need me to tell you things you already know. Or do you?"
Rob
"The abstraction is esmology! Or near enough to not make any difference. And what I'm saying is, it might have been harrowing if bare mechanics were all I saw. But that's not what I saw. What I saw was a text, written to be read. Which means the game has players."
"Look: if I sent you a telegram, it might occur to you that Morse Code is very simple, mechanical, nothing but dots and dashes. But you wouldn't conclude from that that I am nothing but dots and dashes, or that the world is nothing but dots and dashes. The math is not the secret reality behind all things. It's just a medium, a means of communication between realities. There's people on the other side."
He shrugs, still cheerful. "It's okay! We don't all have to have the same perspective on these things. I just wanted you to have this, to look it over." Meaning the legal pad. "It said this spirit, this memeplex, 'known as History A,' was created by the Owls in 1926, or rather the Bohemians' 1926. It talks about 'disadvantages', 'dependencies', something about vulnerability to blackmail. All of which makes me think it can be un-created, banished, counter-memed, whatever. A big job, but not so big as transforming human nature, or engineering heaven on earth."
Michael
A weird sense of familiarity washes over Mitch as he walks into the bowling alley a few blocks south of his old Little Armenia apartment. Like much of his life between '68 and '70, the visual echoes of the interior of Hollywood Star Lanes are a bit like double-exposed film; they feel like both Mitch's own memories and someone else's. But Serendipity brought him here this Saturday morning in August 1974, and from the outset it seemed pretty clear who Serendipity wanted him to meet up with again.
At the bar facing the lanes, "Mickey" from Mitch's sojourn in Compton last April is seated, drinking a cup of coffee. He's wearing a Western-themed outfit: beaten suede leather vest, bolo tie, blue jeans, cowboy boots, but his usual flat cap: awkward and thrown-together, like an alien trying to approximate human fashion, to Mitch's trained fashion eye.
When he sees Mitch, Mickey smiles, greeting him less openly ebulliently than at the Washeteria back in April, but his aura betrays that same deep sense of respect, comradeship, and hope. Mickey steps off the stool and gives Mitch a quick, but heartfelt, hug and a couple of smacks on the back.
The jukebox incongruously starts playing Bob Dylan's "The Man In Me" from his unjustly neglected New Morning LP from 1970. Mitch is pretty sure they never minted a 45 for that one.
Mickey has a copy of the morning LA Times on the counter next to his coffee cup. "I've been hanging around our old haunts, ընկեր, in the hopes I'd see you again. The coffee here? A little worse than our old café on Sunset, I'd say. But far more background noise and far fewer eager eavesdroppers."
Mickey flips the newspaper over to show the Church Committee story under the fold on Page 1. "That business back in April certainly went big in a way I never expected. Those two men who were inside the school that night, the ones Donald traded fire with... they were the ones found with DeFreeze out in the desert, eh?"
Jeff
Mitch looks more travel-stained than usual, more like he dressed himself with whatever he found at the bottom of a church donation bin. Purple dungarees with an indeterminate stain down to the knees, like maybe someone was staining a deck and spilled something. Purple work shirt that clashes with, rather than matches, the pants. Hair crossed over the threshold from "regular guy who needs a trim" to "longhair," beard at the worst length. He nods at Mickey but before sitting down near him Mitch orders whiskey from the bar, ignoring the server's slight askance look at liquor before noon. When he does sit, he collapses into the hard plastic chair with the affect of a much older man.
"I don't really follow the news. Lately, mostly, I just read the funnies." He picks up Mickey's copy of the Times and flips to the comics page.
Michael
An amiable chuckle from Mickey at Snoopy's antics. "I love that dog. Always trying to be something he's not. A writer, a dashing pilot, a sports star... a scary vulture. So American. He doesn't realize he has it 'made' already, hmm? He's got a dog's life. No work. No bosses." Mickey takes a sip of his coffee, and when Mitch's double whiskey gets there, he pours a little of it into his coffee cup.
Mickey sighs. "What's going on, Mitch? I see you for the first time in years after all that horrendous business up in the Canyon, and then a few days later, your President resigns, and now your erstwhile comrades are all over the newspapers. You know I got a personal message from Central Office a few weeks ago, over the radio? Last time I got one of those was back in 1970. I can't tell you what the contents were because, well, I still have some sense of professional decorum," Mickey says with a mischievous smirk, "but I can tell you they're baffled and mystified at what is going on over here."
Jeff
"I'm running a school, now, is what I'm doing. Up in Shasta. Because I did such a great job mentoring Charley, I guess. You might think parents would hesitate to trust me with their kids, but I have staff, you know, qualified people. It's all about qualifications. Certifications. Licenses, advantages, pay the point cost and you can do whatever the fuck you want..."
Uncontrollable Pyrokinesis check because Mitch is in a mood
>>SUCCESS by 3
He shrugs
Michael
"I'm sure that whatever professional gaps you might have, Mitch, those students are better off in the clean air of the mountains with you and your faculty than... where they were before."
Another sip of coffee and a long pause. Mickey realizes he's dealing with an emotionally-labile Mitch here—it's certainly nothing he hasn't dealt with before—and is trying to be tactful and understanding as a result. "You might wonder why I still have this interest in you, Mitch. It's not professional. The interest... well, it is professional and political for my bosses, for certain." But for me, it's less about what you are to both sides and more about who you are. You've been used. By your Project, and by my голубая звезда. Used quite badly... your mind and memories confused. What I do know about you for certain is that you hate the Kings and have the wherewithal to fight them, and that's enough to make you a hero in my mind."
Mitch sees sincerity in Mickey's aura about hating the Kings, but Mickey and Donald were also using glyphs back in April and taking on the Corruption, so what the heck.
Jeff
"Okay."
Michael
"I am talking too much, I always do this when I'm nervous." Mickey just tries to get eye contact with Mitch. "What is bothering you, my friend? What is on your mind? And what can I do to help you?"
Jeff
"Christ, I dunno." Mitch tries to take an inventory of the various issues on his mind at the moment, struggles and gives up halfway through. "Everything's coming up roses for your boy. Unless you have some revelation you're looking to drop about life circa Nixon's first term?
"And what about you? You've been hanging around waiting for me to crawl out of the woodwork, so you could ask me if I knew anything more than what's in the newspapers, and if I felt like sharing? I had a guy last...month, I think? He was all, just let me know what you want from me, and I was like, who said I want anything from you? I need a ton of stuff, don't get me wrong, but I got zero clue how to actualize the motation from this hither of confusion to the yon of wisdom.
"You gonna tell me, it's all cool, just pick a path and walk it, it'll work out so long as you keep on trucking?"
Michael
"It would be a lie if I said to you that I did not have an agenda, Mitch. A desire for quid pro quo with you. Information, 'by hook or by crook.' Naturally. I have superiors to report to, just as you do. I also have my own curiosity. But those superiors are very much like our friend 'Donald.' They are short-sighted, violent men."
"I've lived here now for... five years. When I was trained for this mission, I had many beliefs about this country, about the men who run it, about the system that underpins it. And many of these beliefs have been borne out, proven true!"
"But the belief that ended up being disproven—the most important one—was the one they told me back at Central about every Sandman being in league with the Enemy. That you all had գորտերը on your backs. That you all had a past-time of triggering ցնցումներ, in order to make history even more amenable to capital, to American empire. Because in 1970, there was one man who demonstrated to me that he knew the Anunnakku were a threat, who risked his skin and his mind to force the Irruptors back, to seal the gate. And that man was you."
Mickey's aura is steady, steadfast, open. He's not lying. He's flattering Mitch, certainly, but his basic narrative is sincere and truthful from his perspective.
Also, this also means Mickey is going off an assumption that Mitch was a Sandman prior to '71, which despite the whole ISOCLINE thing and SANDMAN trying to recruit him in LA isn't really true, but whatever.
Jeff
"..."
"Are you talking about Nichols Canyon, or... after? 1970 is pretty hazy for me."
Michael
"Little Armenia. In late May, early June. In the aftermath of Nixon's announcing the bombings in Cambodia, weeks after the so-called 'Hard Hat Riots,' after the killings at Kent State and Jackson State." A pause. "There was blood sacrifice in the air, I suppose."
"The culmination of this series of minor ցնցումներ... it was a mess, a nightmare. I was there, and you were there, and Sandmen were there... and if my hunch is right, there were some members of ISOCLINE there as well, operating... perhaps operating at odds with your Project. Wanting to have eyes on you. The assumption among my comrades was that you had just stumbled across these irruptions, Nichols Canyon included, and that SANDMAN, ISOCLINE were using you, waiting for you to lead them into the zone."
Mickey gulps down his spiked coffee, signals to the bartender that he wants a double whiskey of his own.
"There was a firefight as the subduction grew. Men like Donald on both sides." Mickey shrugs. "I screamed in English and in Russian that blood would just open the door further. No one listened. Perhaps they each wanted to see what would happen."
Mitch can tell Mickey really doesn't want to get to the culmination of the temblor event. He's still being truthful, but Mickey's aura is clouded now with foreboding, dread, trauma, bad memories.
Jeff
Mitch lets Mickey take a minute, and he tries to recall the details. In retrospect the memories feel jumbled and constructed and reconstructed, but that's not evidence of tampering, just the effects of time and recall; every act of remembering is an overwriting of a memory with the memory of that memory.
IQ roll for my own satisfaction
>>SUCCESS by 1
"I just wanted to get out of there, but there was nowhere to go."
Michael
"Your President Lincoln said, 'We cannot escape history.' I always wondered if he would have made a good Marxist." Mickey looks glum at this thought, plays with his thick shot glass, rotating it on the countertop idly while he tries to work up the nerve to continue his story.
"I don't know how much you know about Armenian history, Mitch." Mickey seems to be taking a meandering path to his June 1970 recollections. "But there is a reason there is this tiny little enclave here in East Hollywood, in which I can speak my native tongue, can swim unnoticed among the people, like a fish in water. Most of these people settled first in the Central Valley, Bakersfield, Fresno in the 1920s, worked on farms, vineyards, what have you... then, after World War II, like many subjected proletarians—Indians, Negroes, 'Okies'—they moved to the City for employment. Why were these Armenians in California in the first place, halfway across the world from their homeland? Because the Turks killed their kin. Rounded them up, took them to the deserts of Syria, to the Badiya, threw them in the concentration camps they learned to build from Kitchener's British in the Boer Wars, from the reservations Americans made for their Indians, from the Spanish in Cuba, from the Americans' reconcentrados in the Phillippines. This is history. This is the history we cannot escape."
"I have no powers like you, Mitch. I've studied these powers in Blue Star laboratories, familiarized myself with all the materialist theories of their operation: quantum effects in the brain, genetic meddling by the Annunakku, what have you." Mickey swallows the rest of his drink. "I'm just a lamplighter, a surveillance man, a watchman with a torch. I cannot stumble into cosmic mysteries and titanic struggles between realities like you, traipsing away at the precise correct moment."
"What I saw that night, what the subduction zone looked like to me... was a vision of the future. Little Armenia was huge, not just a city block but many. Refugees had come in more waves. From civil war in Lebanon. From..." He grimaces and wipes away a few tears. "From the collapse of the Soviet Union. And I sensed—as thoroughly mystified and anti-materialist as it may be—that effect had somehow preceded cause. It is hard to explain how it looked to me. And it shames me that I viewed this shattering of reality through the lens of the suffering of 'my people.' All proletarians are my people, Mitch. But there was something in my blood that called to me, that suggested my people had suffered, been put to death, been driven halfway around the world into exile so that... all this could happen." Mickey gestures to the Hollywood Star Lanes bowling alley as if it personifies History A. "My own little crack of madness, I suppose. Perhaps it was the Kings whispering to me. Because, of course, They came. Summoned by blood, by symbolism."
(pausing before he gets to the History B side of the June 1970 Event, if Mitch wants to interrupt or ask questions)
Jeff
I dunno, go for gnomic I guess. "People say that history only makes sense looking backwards, but they don't follow through with what that means about causality." Get another drink.
Michael
Mickey, evidently shaken by these revelations and what they mean about historical materialism, eyes Mitch's new round and clinks "To History," with his own drink, in a glum abridgment of the traditionally merry Soviet toasting ritual.
"Things get confused after that, of course. The wall I was hiding behind changed from concrete to Mesopotamian brick. The streets shimmered. My comrades, some of whom had been hit in the return fire, began to stake a cautious retreat. I remained, frozen in the face of the UR.IDIM glyph on the brow of the newly-appeared Irruptor. A member of the strategist caste, an ugallu, who emerged from a storefront. I saw members of either SANDMAN or ISOCLINE... taking measurements, perhaps? With some sort of small electronic device. Of course, it wasn't long before that device was rendered inoperative by the electricity in the air. Ball lightning."
Mickey then stares into Mitch's eyes. "There are two things I need to tell you now. Things about this event I have never told another human being for fear that speaking them aloud would... give them further purchase in this reality. First, was the belief in seeing my Blue Star comrades retreating that the team leader, Goncharov, was not only now compromised by a kulullû but had been the entire time I had known him and that I too had been doing the Kings' bidding, my whole career with Blue Star. As if not just memory had changed but history itself. But there was also something anchoring me to the previous, correct version of my memory and history." Mickey at this point silently (and a little drunkenly) pokes his finger into Mitch's chest, right at his heart.
"The ugallu, after charging its bioelectric field to repel the Sandmen and the ISOCLINE men, advanced towards you. Cautiously, curiously. The look of rage and disdain it had for the humans in front of it melted away when it saw you. I was too far away, the rain and hail now pelting down on us made it too difficult to hear, but you stood there in the face of this beast... talking to it. Occasionally gesturing. You looked annoyed, upset, even angry with the creature while it looked cowed, its leonine brow straining in an attempt to comprehend your words." "It was while that was going on that I saw that Goncharov, now seated in the back seat of our getaway vehicle, ready for the driver to get them out of there, burst into flame. Along with the 'passenger' on his back. Out on the street, the same happened to the man who I now presume was the leader of the ISOCLINE team. And the 'passenger' on his back, who I assume had now 'been there all along' as well."
"The glyph's effects grew weaker and the ցնցում zone began to fade and shrink, and while I wanted to remain, to be able to report back to Central on this event, I ran, like a coward, at that moment. Our vehicle was aflame on the inside, the other two Blue Star men retreating east on foot down Sunset, towards... ha. The Cedars of Lebanon hospital."
"I followed them, the hospital took on this strange appearance—not History B, but... painted bright blue, full of new and secret dungeons, warrens below the Earth. I hallucinated that I could somehow sense the presence of King Solomon's Holy of Holies deep inside the bowels of the hospital: again, crazy aftereffects of the subduction or the glyph, who knows. In any event, the subduction as a whole lasted mere minutes. You stopped it."
"My theory is that whole year, between the fires at the Ralph's on Magnolia, the Nichols Canyon Event, this one, and the final event that wiped out MORNINGSTAR, that Project SANDMAN was not just using your serendipitous attraction to History B to find these subduction events, then using the events themselves for their own benefit—research, reality shards, whatever—they were also using you to close the zones because of the Irruptors' fatal vulnerability to your powers. First you were their bloodhound... then you were a janitor. Doing their dirty work."
Jeff
"Yeah, I mean, that sounds right. They say that at the end of the day, everybody is somebody's dog."
Michael
Mickey laughs at Mitch's proverb. "That sounds like Marx to me!" Mickey finishes off the last sip of his whiskey, quotes from memory the relatively recently György Lukács-discovered Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 by a younger Marx:
If the product of labour is alien to me, if it confronts me as an alien power, to whom, then, does it belong?
If my own activity does not belong to me, if it is an alien, a coerced activity, to whom, then, does it belong?
To a being other than myself.
Who is this being?
The gods?
Mickey says that last bit with true ironic relish. "Alienation and exploitation of labor are both ultimately methods of Control."
"Where has your surplus-value gone, comrade? The labor-power you provided, the subductions you found, the data they gathered, the shards they collected, the Irruptors you banished, the danger you faced? It has been plowed back by SANDMAN into ontological capital. With every single one of these events, the Project's monopoly grows stronger, their ability to dictate history more absolute, your and my and millions of oppressed proletarians' power over defining history weaker. What say has your Project ever given you in setting the terms of the war against History B? If men can make history with a concerted effort of will and belief, why is this the history we've gotten?"
"For that matter, is it any surprise that this little, er, 'factory' closed down upon what ended up the final subduction event in the series, the one you weren't present for, the one that killed the Los Angeles SANDMAN team? Without the workers' expertise, the factory is a killing floor! Management doesn't know how to operate the machines; only the so-called 'janitor' does." Mickey pats Mitch gently on the back.
"Mitch, I don't purport to be the perfect Homo Sovieticus. I confess, I have intrigued with my Central Office contacts and superiors to remain in the United States far longer than a Blue Star agent is usually billeted here." Mickey looks shifty, sighing at his own actions. "The trouble is... I like America. I like the people, I like the many different cultures, the music, the cinema. It's a hateful place in so many ways, a disgusting system, ruled by the most evil men on the Earth. And yet there is something... something I cannot put my finger on exactly. It could be all your memetics, in the television, of course, making me think this." Mickey ruefully chuckles. "I'm somewhat tainted goods at home, I think. Ideologically or neurolinguistically suspect. But the fact is Blue Star is not, eh, anywhere near the caliber of SANDMAN. You certainly must suspect this. That 'ontological capital' I mentioned... it's real. And it's eating up the planet."
Jeff
"Yeah, things are looking rocky for the good guys."
Michael
"Ah, but your system now fumbles through going through the motions of reforming itself. These intelligence exposures," Mickey says pointing at the paper, "the men in charge of the newspapers and the television networks are trying to keep the lid on the pot, but it can't help but boil over. I'm no esmologist, and I receive briefings so infrequently from Glushkov's men now—he is out of favor with the Politburo, they seem to find cybernetics and our fumbling attempts at esmology suspect—but... friend, you do understand, you have had two coups d'êtat in the past ten years in this country, yes? When one of your Presidents dares to stand up to the men who are really in power, he is eliminated... by hook or by crook."
Jeff
Mitch stares at Mickey for longer than is strictly polite or appropriate. "What are you getting at? Do you expect me to sit bolt upright, declare I never thought of it that way, and proclaim a newfound loyalty to the Kremlin, where they would never ever assassinate anybody?"
Michael
Mickey raises an eyebrow. "I'm not sure if I could proclaim my loyalty to 'the Kremlin' at this point, Mitch, is what I'm getting at." Mickey sniffs once, nods to himself as if this is what he expected to hear, digs into his pocket and takes out a five-dollar bill to pay for Mitch and his drinks, has the bartender keep the change, waits until the bartender wanders off again to get up from his stool.
"Before I go, Mitch, one last thing. I shook our friend Donald to be here today; he's less of a comrade and more of a minder, I think. But he has other assignments here in Los Angeles, ones I know next to nothing about, ones less involved with Blue Star business and more the old 'wet affairs,' if you catch my meaning."
"I wanted to speak frankly with you today. Yes, I have no psychic abilities, but I sense something coming, and I wanted to speak with you at least once before it, whatever it is, happens. I wanted you to know where I stand, and that I stand willing to help you. I know you'll do the right thing. That's the one thing that never seems to change with you."
He gives Mitch a final pat on the shoulder. "Oh," Mickey says, turning back to Mitch before he heads to the parking lot, "You might want to ask Archie if he remembers his doctor at Naval Air Station Atsugi. Strange thing, to take a repatriated Army POW to a Naval Air Station, no? Especially when Camp Zama is right down the road?" Mickey digs into his pocket for his car keys. "'Bye Mitch. հաջողություն."