Living and Dying in Cairo, Illinois
Leonard
After her intense trip last night, Jocasta sleeps in before collecting the debriefing from HQ. She gives it a read and decides to follow her previous tactic of doing (wo)man-in-the-street interviews in Cairo, once again with the intention of cultivating anyone who seems especially receptive or especially hostile to her questioning to observe and investigate. If Charley wants to tag along Jo is more than happy to have her, but if she wants to bike around on her own and/or check in on her surveillance rigs, that's fine as well — Jocasta will requisition some walkie-talkies.
In the afternoon — preferably out in the field, at a park or maybe the local library or a diner or something, she'll quietly write up a for-URIEL-eyes-only report on the stuff she found out with Charley yesterday, and a possible plan of action slightly more coherent than what she was babbling on her LSD tele-trip. She'll also do a little research (with SANDMAN materials) on any obvious disruptive belief triggers nearby: classic cult activity, major racist violence in the last year or so, any particularly organized movement among the locals.
In the evening, she wants to try to catch a minute or two with Mildred (or any of the other SANDMAN higher-ups on this mission), partly to just register what she's learned in her HUMINT-gathering, but also to suss out if there's any competing agendas or divided loyalties happening among the staff.
Finally, she'll catch up on the news, and then park herself on the roof of the Holiday Inn and, more or less just for the hell of it, crack a cold Budweiser, and watch the skies in case any UFOs show up.
[This can all be taken as read as just stuff she's doing, but if any rolls or narration or random encounters are necessary, let me know. It's entirely possible nothing will come of any of this.] (edited)
Michael
follow her previous tactic of doing (wo)man-in-the-street interviews in Cairo, once again with the intention of cultivating anyone who seems especially receptive or especially hostile to her questioning to observe and investigate
Empathy-13
She'll also do a little research (with SANDMAN materials) on any obvious disruptive belief triggers nearby: classic cult activity, major racist violence in the last year or so, any particularly organized movement among the locals
Research-14
Leonard
Empathy.
>> SUCCESS by 7
Research.
>> SUCCESS by 4
Michael
Okay. Jocasta goes a level deeper than the superficial "this was essentially a slow-motion five-year race riot here in Cairo and now the town is dying" analysis that SANDMAN and Mildred gave her at the outset of the assignment. There's more to that to why this town is dying, Jo thinks to herself, not necessarily spooky shit, just something I haven't noticed yet, something under the surface that's important. During the morning Jo gets to see a slightly different view of Cairo; the people who are still going to 9-5 jobs in the downtown area. There are still municipal jobs, there's still a courthouse, still a public library: the basics of civic society are still working more or less here. And Jo notices that even in this part of southern Illinois that might as well be the deep South, there are women working these jobs. Behind the counter at the diner, in the library and the public schools, the local clinic. Jo also sees more than a few rummies sprawled across doorways in the downtown at 8 in the morning; Jo wagers there's a "nightlife" here on the streets at night that would be highly illuminating, if somewhat dangerous to someone like her.
In talking with the diner ladies, checking in at the library, buying some stamps at the Post Office, Jocasta canvasses the women of Cairo and notes while plenty of them are overtly or covertly racist, none of them seem too happy about what their little town has become after the past five years of active and covert removals. Most of them are still concerned about violence—Black violence, sure—but what's left unspoken is that there are very few Black people left in town or even working in town, yet there's still a feeling things are a powderkeg. One of the diner waitresses says, "There are shots fired downtown seemingly every night, it's a wonder there hasn't been a full-on gun massacre yet." The librarian notes that the town seems to be seeping in petty crime and vice lately; there's rumors some of the young kids in town are into heavier drugs—pills and horse, maybe. "Where are those coming from?" the librarian asks rhetorically. Probably the same place the illegal booze came from in the '20s and the untaxed booze comes today. There are all kinds of after-hours clubs here, where you can buy the aforementioned booze, and pills, play poker or craps, and even get loose women. The good wives of the town are sure that now that their husbands, the White Hats, have gotten rid of the racial element, they'll tackle those greasy criminals bringing in their drugs and gambling from St. Louis next. But no one seems too convinced of things getting better in Cairo, even in their fondest dreams of anti-Italian violence. Maybe they suspect their husbands the White Hats might be some of the customers drinking all that cheap bootleg hooch, pulling one-armed bandits and fornicating with jezebels at all hours.
What Jo is most concerned about is all this nighttime gunplay leading to a mass killing event this close to a subduction zone.
Leonard
Jo writes up some notes and observations but is still too far from a conclusion. Should SANDMAN bring in the troops? Or would that make things worse? Not for you to decide, Joey, she figures.
Michael
[I'll just assume Mildred got a quick report from Jo Wednesday afternoon and she got the highlights above, we can talk about that for a bit and then Jo can try to suss her out a little bit in the process. For the purposes of this conversation, please feel free to picture Mildred Wilcox as Esteemed Character Actor Margo Martindale. Also feel free to interject as you wish in this rant; I just wanted to get some stuff out there to chat about.]
"These are all good observations, Mee-nos," Mildred Wilcox says, looking down her bifocals at the brief typed report. "Admittedly, this place is a powder keg. These people have been beaten down, threatened, and largely deprived of their livelihoods the past few years. The reports I've gotten from the historians, just as I suspected back on Monday, are no better. Preventing bloodshed, especially as the tension over the way the country is headed ratchets up," she nods over at the television sets in the Point 9 comms center, all tuned to special reports about Agnew, "will be a challenge. I'm making some discreet inquiries and requests of Control to make sure the folks in Cairo and Mounds don't lose their access to gas if the supplies get cut off by the Arabs, because nothing's more likely to get these people reaching for their shotguns than taking away their ability to work and live freely, after everything else they've been through. You can expect the Italians to try to move in on that business too, like they have on everything else around here, and that adds another complicating factor. I've read your file, and I know I can depend on you if things get rough around here. That's likely why the computer picked your file for this spot," Mildred says, condescension and irony dripping from her voice when she says, "the computer."
"Memetics... well," Mildred points to the morning report featuring the anti-fear memetics and the afternoon white paper from Kendrick Mead on the UFO stuff, "I've never been a big believer in these grandiose nationwide memetic campaigns. What speaks to some hippie types in California—no offense, of course—isn't likely to speak to folks in southern Illinois and Missouri. I think campaigns need to be narrowly-focused. When I worked on influencing populations in Germany after the war, we found regional differences among the Krauts that would absolutely floor you. A meme that hit in Frankfurt would go over like a lead balloon in Cologne, just a hundred miles away. I have our memetics team working on some smaller, bespoke memes to supplement the larger memes. This UFO report is Greek to me; I don't deal in fairy tales, I deal in results. But speaking of the mystical horsecrap," Mildred says, smiling mordantly, "what did you and Helix 'feel' out at the mounds?"
Leonard
Jocasta lets the would-be gotcha slide; she won't give Mildred the satisfaction, and besides, she assumes she's being watched all the time anyway. "Well, it's the underside of what's happening out there," she says, her voice short and brusque, back in milspec briefing mode. "And it's part of the problem of keeping the peace around here."
She shuffles out a few papers, notes, and stuff that she picked up at the library. "You're right that the Mob are trying to make some plays around here. It's too small-change for Chicago, but Giordano just got sent up in St. Louis for making a push into Vegas, and what's left there is in disarray; they might take some big risks. Normally I'd recommend a show of force — Cairo is as strategic a hamlet as anywhere around here, and the locals would probably be happy to see the, er, Italians get theirs. But that's the thing. Those mounds, those are all burial sites. Whether you believe that means something other than what it means to you, it means something to all the Indians who still live around here, and I'm sure I don't have to tell you they're already mad as hell and ready to fight. The white border population have managed to drive a lot of the blacks out, but not all of them, and the ones who are staying are even less inclined to leave. I'd be willing to bet my next pay slip from Uncle Sam that if you look in the white graveyards and the black ones around here, you'll find the same thing — in kind if not in degree. That is, if you haven't already," she adds, returning the grim smile.
"This whole place is...an absence, Mrs. Wilcox. A void. There's something very wrong with it -- something missing, something deliberately taken away. More than just Rust Belt decay. Someone has engineered the disappearance of a thing that connected people here, and they can all feel it. It didn't create the tensions here, but it's making them all worse, and it's made the conditions perfect for a blood-hungry irruption from one end of this state to the other. Naturally you can count on me if we need to start playing rough, but all due respect, memetics are what's going to stop this from spiraling out of control. And they can't just be directed at the people we might like to think matter. It can't be just an early roll-out of the Bicentennial stuff; that leaves too many people out of the picture. We need something that makes everyone here feel like they have at least some kind of common cause, and that whether the past they're feeling the loss of is real or not, that it's not gone forever."
Michael
Two rolls (I just made an Empathy roll secretly, will assess as necessary): Diplomacy-14 and Hidden Lore (History B)-17.
Leonard
Diplomacy.
>> SUCCESS by 2
Hidden Lore.
>> SUCCESS by 5
Michael
Mildred nods, takes a few notes. "I want to kick this theory up the chain... with all credit due to you, of course," Mildred says. "If we do make this series of assumptions, that something has been taken away, that it's caused all esmological balance to go out of whack, then the next set of questions becomes: what was it that was taken away, and can it be returned? Any thoughts on that? The closer we can get conceptually—memetically, I mean—to the nature of whatever's missing, the easier it will be to eliminate the subduction zone, correct?"
Leonard
“Given what you think about fairy tales, take this for what it’s worth: it’s the spirits of the dead. It’s souls. They’re cultivating the souls of the dead, for what I don’t know, but that’s what it is.” She pauses for a moment. “I thought it might have something to do with the ghost dance, that spirit ritual those Indian revolutionaries did at Wounded Knee a few months ago, but now I’m not sure. It’s too big for me to see still.”
“Anyway, that’s what they’ve done. Can it be undone? I’ve no idea. But it’s not a coincidence that it’s happening here. This is the dark heart of this country in so many ways — a crossroads of culture, the place where the slave states began or ended, depending on which direction you were heading, a hotbed of half a dozen religious sects and traditions, the gateway to the west, the place where all those books by Berlitz and Von Daniken and Lindsey sell by the truckload. They may not be able to articulate how losing their dead makes them feel, but they feel it.” She rolls a cigarette inside her purse, feeling a little antsy.
“Anything you want me to work on specifically moving forward? Or just keep pulling HUMINT in town?”
Michael
Mildred looks wide-eyed, shakes her head like she can't believe it, but of course, being in SANDMAN means needing to keep an open mind about stuff like this, no matter how rational you pretend to be when the lights are on. Mildred puts on her esmological/anthropological hat and slides this information into her paradigm. "Okay. Respect for the dead and speeding them along to an afterlife with prayer is one of the oldest human beliefs, of course. It existed even before the Enemy came along. It's a strong pull. People—especially people of faith around here, white, Negro, Indian, doesn't matter the race—would feel a loss like the one you're talking about on a gut collective unconscious level." She seems to buy Jo's argument. "It ties into the Anunnaki desire for blood and death too, and the fear component we're seeing nationwide as well."
"If you and the little girl can act as," Mildred scoffs but in a resigned way, "'mediums,' to find out where this thread of the... spiritus mundi has fled, then that's your new assignment. Not human intelligence, then... ghost intelligence? In the meantime, I'll see if Control or Huntsville can engineer us some religious revivals among the major populations locally, memetically focused on the dearly departed to shore things up. Veterans Day is coming up in a few weeks, we could use that." Mildred pauses for a minute, smiles to herself. "October. Halloween. Ghosts and goblins. Tsk."
Psychology-14, please.
Leonard
>> FAILURE by 2
Damn your impenetrable façade, character actress Margo Martindale
Michael
she's good in everything
Mel
Charley will be looking for any of the kids of Cairo to play with.
Michael
While Jocasta is doing her own ethnographic study of the women workers of Cairo, Charley sets out on her SANDMAN-supplied little-kids' bicycle to get a sense of what the other kids in town are like. As school lets out, Charley finds some groups of kids in the 9 to 11-year-old range to latch onto down at one of the remaining municipal playgrounds, right down the street from the main elementary school and across from a Baptist Church.
It seems clear from the outset to Charley as she hangs around the periphery of these social groups as an outsider that these kids, despite outward appearances of them playing just like she figures normal kids play, are haunted. Many are periodically quiet and withdrawn in the middle of animated conversations and most if not all seem to not make a big deal about Charley being a "new kid." A couple of them do approach Charley and ask where she's from, but it's clear they're used to changes in their fellow students with people moving away. All are white in this central part of town; Charley and Jo drove through the remaining Black section on the outskirts on the way in from Cape Girardeau this morning and found it mostly abandoned.
Charley notices the playground contains far more organized games than she might have expected; a quick game of sandlot baseball breaks out, and even the girls are playing a very strange version of hopscotch which involves chanting a rhyme:
Home, one, two, three
Here on earth is the place to be
Four, five, six, seven
Miss out hell on the way to heaven
Instead of throwing their lagger (the lid off a mason jar), they kick it along the ground one-legged, from square to square, avoiding the penultimate square before the top of the hopscotch diagram. One girl doesn't aim quite right and her jar lid skids into that square; the other girls gather around and taunt her with "you're going to hell! you're going to hell!" until she cries.
Charley looks over to the baseball game, where even more odd things are happening: before each boy comes up to bat, he makes a series of gestures that kind of look like someone making the sign of the cross, but involve a lot more motions and areas on the body being touched. Before the pitcher can pitch, even with the bases empty, he stands at the peak of the pitcher's mound and gestures with his ungloved hand open, counterclockwise along the baseball diamond, to first, second, third, and then home.
Occultism-14, please.
Mel
>> CRITICAL SUCCESS
Michael
(Just a warning: some of these observations may stray into the anthropological and/or memetic but given Charley's increasing awareness of the realms beyond this one, I wanted to edge into spiritual/occult territory slowly and from multiple directions.)
Charley has, of course, felt the spiritual malaise that's at work in Cairo and the surrounding area. She's seen with her own eyes now the vacant, emptied Inner Astral and the likely disappearance or theft of the long-dead inhabitants of the mounds. That spiritual landscape is clearly being reflected in these kids. In response to what's happening here—over the past few days, the past 5 years, the past 100 years, the past 300 years, the past thousand years, even—they are spontaneously developing ritual behaviors that allow them to protect themselves from the fear of the subduction zone, of the historical violence and loss that has created it, and the very real possibility that when these kids grow old and die (or die young, as Charley begins to worry some of them might), that their souls will not be taken or sunk into the darkest part of the Inner Astral as fuel for the Red Kings. These playground games that revolve around looking for dangers from the tops of mounds, or around avoiding being trapped in hell on the way through life on Earth to heaven: Dad would probably say that they are spontaneous defensive memetics. That mean Mrs. Wilcox at field HQ might call them something like "parasocial reactions to socio-economic instability." But Roger would call them protective rituals, and Charley can see clearly that's what they are.
Protective rituals are good! They're there to keep bad spirits and powers away from us when we're feeling especially receptive to the bad energies out there, and Charley guesses these kids are feeling a lot of that right now. But if you do them too long, too habitually, those habits can become set in stone and turn into prejudices, small-mindedness; in other words, the kind of behavior that fuels the way these people have been since they stole this land from those dead and lost pre-Columbian inhabitants who used to live around the mounds.
What this also means is that children here can sense what's happening. Not on a conscious level, of course, and not merely thanks to the mundane political and social stuff their awful parents are raging about, but these kids can actually sense the loss of the dead from the mounds, in a way their parents cannot. On some level, the hopscotch and the baseball rituals show that the kids here are also afraid they'll be next, that they'll be stolen away. They're all potential receivers of that message of loss from the mounds; they feel the void. But this also means, if properly trained, tested, and marshaled, that these kids could do more than just receive those wavelengths from the empty mounds. They could act as transmitters too. Again, in terms of Dad's memetics, the kids of Cairo could be the source of a meme that maybe finds those dead and brings them back. After all, who believes in the things that go bump in the night more fervently than a little kid? Charley would just need some way to focus their belief in the same direction, to get them out of running these constant loop-the-loops of fear and protection. It would require them to be brave, and to let down their armor, and really try to get in touch with the dead.
Mel
Charley goes over to the girl that was crying and introduces herself. “Hi I’m Amy. Are you ok?”
Michael
A defiant pout, a rubbing of the back of her hand across her tear-stained face, and a quizzical look at young "Amy" follows as Charley introduces herself. The young girl, dark-haired and blue-eyed, wearing worn, hand-me-down overalls, says back to Charley, "I'm Bethany," sullenly.
Mel
“Nice to meet you.” The two sit on the ground quietly watching the other kids play. And as Bethany continues to calm herself Charley abruptly asks,”Do you believe in ghosts?”
Michael
Bethany was indeed watching the next hopscotcher get ready for her "trip from Earth to Heaven" as she sat down next to "Amy," intent on discovering what she'd done wrong with her own kick of the can lid. When "Amy" brings up ghosts, Bethany looks at her seriously. "I think so. I don't know for sure, but I... feel like they're real. Sometimes I think they're just stories that grown-ups use to scare us... for fun, or to teach us a lesson. But other times... yeah. There's a feeling you get."
Mel
“So you’ve never seen one? I heard that there are A LOT of them around… Especially near the Indian hills. Julie said she saw one and it helped her find her lost dog.”
Michael
Bethany looks askance at Charley, not sure who this new kid is talking about or what ghosts have to do with lost dogs... but despite this, Charley does try to put an idea into Bethany's head. It's easy, Charley thinks to herself. Once you know what the spiritual terrain is like, and how it affects the people around it, you can find out what motivates them. It almost feels a little like what Dad does with memetics, but on a more spiritual level.
Avoid the "Hell" spot on the hopscotch diagram, the voice in their heads says, echoing across the empty streets of Cairo and in between the mounds along the Ohio River. Fear the fate of the emptied-out soul-villages. These playground games remind the children that on some level they don't want their souls to be lost. So what better way to help the living bring the dead back to their resting places than to tell the living that the dead still care for us and want to advise us, that they are still here as part of a great ecology of souls: not lost, not damned. It may be a lie right now, but if enough of these kids believe it, maybe that belief will break through their hardening ritual armor and help receive the dead back where they belong.
A roll of IQ-15, please.
Mel
>> SUCCESS by 3
Michael
Bethany lets the idea of ghosts helping the living sink into her head. "That's scary, I'd be scared if a ghost helped me find my lost dog... but it's also kind of cool." Bethany smiles. Charley can tell Bethany seems less sad at having "fallen into Hell" now. Bethany asks Charley, "Do you want to come play?" while looking over at the hopscotch game, still going strong.