MANY WISHES
January 1974, Granite Peak
Michael
In between assignments with the new chevaux, Roger has been given—by the grace of Control in the aftermath of ALLOCHTHON—access to Project SANDMAN records (and legends) around the Project's knowledge of and interaction with the dead. Now, Roger is no computer whiz, but he's found it interesting that most of these records aren't on good old paper or microfiche like the books and journals in Sophie's library. Most of this stuff has been, for some reason not vouchsafed to Roger upon being given access, computerized. Curious.
So Roger struggles with the hunt-and-pecking of using the decidedly non-friendly text interface on these computer terminals, as the magnetic tape reels in the next-door lab spin to-and-fro like Fortune's Wheel. Ghost stories, legends, after-action reports from the pre-SANDMAN, pre-WWII days. Roger can give me a Hidden Lore (Project SANDMAN Legends)-16 roll.
Bill
>> SUCCESS by 8
Michael
What Roger's able to glean from his first cursory set of searches through these interminable (and quite honestly explicitly technocratic, these annals are lacking in any real spirituality or respect for the dead) records is that the reason why they're all computerized is because the Continuity Working Group demanded it, used their weight within the Project to get researchers, clerks, psychic experts, and the like to gather together the Project's history with the dead to weigh in on what the continuing existence of ghosts might have to do with human belief, Anunnaki influence, subduction events, and so on. There's no real record of why the CWG was so interested, but Control did say, in the ALLOCHTHON After-Action Report, that "The CWG believed that small communities, within a wholly psychically and memetically-sealed ecosystem, including the fostering of psionic or 'shamanic' powers among the populace and a commensurate respect for the community's dead as a wellspring of collective cultural and memetic memory and authority, could indefinitely stand against the Kings, even in an ontology where the Kings had retroactively always ruled."
A lot of these records—almost all of the records from the early, pre-SANDMAN era up to 1926—are co-signed by or otherwise feature one Erik Weisz, a.k.a. Harry Houdini, as a subject-matter expert.
It seems Houdini's interest in life-after-death wasn't limited to his gracious debunking of grifters who used people's mourning over the dead as a way to swindle and con the credulous. He was honestly interested in scientific investigations into hauntings. Houdini's own powers over his own body, his ability to precisely control his molecules, had put him in contact with the collective unconscious, the Astral Plane, as Charley would have called it... or le cimetière, the territory of the Gede, as Roger's mother's people might have thought of it.
As the green monochrome screen spits file names, reference numbers, newspaper stories from the 1920s, Roger's eyes ache. It's as if this torrent of data is trying to actively tell him something, and the medium for this data—the computer screen and keyboard—is fundamentally incompatible with Roger's way of understanding. But something urges him onward. Squinting now at the green bubble of the screen in front of him, Roger tries to trace the CWG's records on Houdini to a source, a central repository. Roger's fingers suddenly fly over the keys instead of cautiously tapping. A transportative pull comes over Roger, as if he is growing smaller and the computer screen growing larger. For a moment, a vague memory from a dream from the night of the Ransoms' Christmas party flashes before Roger's eyes: Charley, and a cat, at a vet's office. And then, just as Roger is about to find and open the central OZYMANDIAS file on Harry Houdini, the screen goes blank.
A prompt and a cursor appear at the top of the blank screen. The following words appear, as if typed live by someone at some other terminal somewhere.
>I HAVE MANY WISHES
IN MY WISHING WELL
IT'S FILLED TO THE TOP
STILL I JUST CAN'T STOP
WISHING FOR ONLY YOU
Current Affairs (Popular Culture)-15, please.
Bill
>> SUCCESS by 5
Michael
Roger recognizes the lyrics, they're from an old Dinah Washington tune Roger's mother used to play over and over back when Roger was little; unsurprisingly titled "Wishing Well."
Roger waits for more words from this mysterious interlocutor over the computer; none are immediately forthcoming. Roger feels that preternatural skill at the computer terminal begin to wane a little bit, the "opening" he felt, that feeling of falling into the computer slides away. But while Roger may not feel that weird impulse of computer expertise right now, he still has the ability to talk back to whomever is jiving him by spitting song lyrics from his childhood at him.
Bill
Roger turns over his main question in his mind, and then it just clicks. He painfully types:
I WONDER, WONDER, WONDER,
WHO
WHO WROTE THE BOOK OF LOVE
Michael
>WHO WROTE
>THE BOOK OF
>LO
And then the screen suddenly goes completely blank for about three seconds. The... spiritual presence Roger could vaguely sense is gone now. But when the screen flares to life again, the monochrome monitor fills with information, data, internal SANDMAN records from one Operation WISHING WELL, a Continuity Working Group skunkworks in Palo Alto, California, in a warehouse not too far from SRI. WISHING WELL's project mandate was to reverse-engineer certain... advanced forms of computer technology, technology gained from subduction events and other esoteric experiments. Roger's eyes pass over primitive ASCII-based schematics for particle accelerators, robotic arms, cranial chip implants and brain-computer interfaces, computer memory storage on magnetic media, solid state laser-read disc media, and eventually extreme micronized integrated circuits.
Like a Renshaw tape, the data is read by Roger's bloodshot, squinting eyes. It's getting to the point where Roger's vision is severely distorted; the green characters are floating in and out of his vision and consciousness. But one of the final pieces of data he is able to glean from this torrent of information is that our Houdini, the Houdini copy that was on Charley's chip last year who volunteered to be taken back to OZYMANDIAS by Reinhardt... he's on a storage server at WISHING WELL. Along with a king's ransom of advanced future technology.
As Roger's fingers fly over the keys once more, unleashing a worm that will devour the records of his access of this data, he takes a moment to memorize the onsite security systems in the WISHING WELL files. The Opener of the Ways will appreciate this information. A bargain could be struck. And perhaps the Agent could be convinced to infiltrate a top-secret laboratory of the enemy, dealing with whatever OZYMANDIAS security might still be onsite, protecting their ill-gotten gains.
Roger finally logs out of his terminal, and as the screen goes dark for the final time, it's the Phreak who looks back at him in the screen's dull-green reflection. He adjusts his (invisible) glasses and smiles an uncertain smile at the body he inhabits.