Meet Me at the Clock

Michael

Wednesday. June 27, 1973. Sophie spends the afternoon finding whatever she can about the history of the Magneta Clock at the St. Francis Hotel. At the end of the day, she presents to the rest of the team what she could find. She seems a little freaked out.

All the hotel's promotional material says the clock was manufactured in 1856 in Vienna and then shipped to San Francisco at great expense "around Cape Horn" in 1907, after the earthquake, to manage all the clocks in the hotel as the St. Francis's master clock. But that simply can't be because the Magneta Company didn't exist before 1900. The master clock technology grew out of telegraph-time technology, of course, where a central highly-precise clock would send out pulses to slave clocks throughout an area to synchronize scheduling for railroad times, for example. But the master clock technology that kept a single building wired up to a master clock was only developed in the first years of the 20th century. Magneta was an innovator because their clocks didn't require a battery to send pulses as a telegraph-style master clock would; it uses, unsurprisingly, powerful magnets.

Now, obviously this could just be a bit of myth-building by the St. Francis's amateur historians and promotions people; after all, the Magneta Clock is now famous as the place for rendezvouses and makes the St. Francis a nexus of human connection. But … but I can't help but wonder why these particular lies. Why go to the trouble of creating such a specific myth — one involving anachronism! — that is intentionally and obviously debunked to the most cursory inspection?

Sophie also notes that there is something "sticky" about the idea of "Meet me at/under the clock," which is a common phrase used by guests and staff and has been in the popular imagination since at least the 1940s and the war. Of course, it makes sense that a meme of return, safety, and comradeship would establish itself during the war and a time when so many were displaced. But Sophie can't quite figure out who started it, if it grew up organically or was planted into the collective unconscious by a good marketer or memetically-aware "patient zero." With further evaluation, she determines that the pure idea of "meet me at the clock" isn't much of a meme; it's way too vague about which clock, just for openers, and people use it in all kinds of big cities for all kinds of big clocks. And in the San Francisco of the first quarter of the 20th century, there was no shortage of landmark clocks!

So how did the St. Francis's Magneta clock become the "one" associated with this saying? A lot of PR, Sophie reports. And that PR grew out of the publicity hit that the hotel took during the '20s … starting of course with the Fatty Arbuckle scandal. Sure, the St. Francis had always been a haven for the elite of San Francisco, but the Arbuckle scandal darkened the hotel's name for quite a few years; the St. Francis became known more for outsiders from Hollywood and New York staying there — the nascent concept of the mass media celebrity, let's say—for all the good and ill that denoted, rather than being a place for you to hold your civic banquet or wedding or whatever. So how to re-establish the St. Francis as a civic landmark and not just a celebrity one? Get something wholesome going, like our lobby and our really old clock is the place to meet with your sweetheart, your civic group, your tour group, whatever! So the hotel really started pumping out the message of "meet me at the clock" in the '30s. Of course it was tough for the St. Francis to dislodge that Hollywood reputation, so for a short time in the '30s they brought in a more innocent brand of Hollywood star to focus attention on the clock.

The really important question is: does Sophie detect any Anunnaki source code on this meme? And the answer is: she's not sure. It has been remarkably successful, especially since 1941, it's almost part of the brand of the hotel itself now. That success could be down to the original meme, wherever it appeared — in a newspaper or spread by word of mouth, perhaps — in the late '20s/early '30s having a source code implant in it. But Sophie can't find any evidence of it in the media mentions since 1940. Of course it would be great to be able to find out who was handling PR for the St. Francis in the late '20s but sadly Sophie doesn't have a clue. “Once you're on site,” Sophie says, “if you see anything in their mini-museum in the lobby area that seems hinky memetically, please report it back to me.”

The team debates how to proceed. Ultimately it is decided that URIEL will send the field team to the hotel that night. There they will set up a bivouac suite on one of the top floors and do general recon. They will attempt to steal the Magneta Clock while posing as horologists. Sophie prepares a couple of SANGUSH glyph to further conceal their activities. Marshall calls ahead to the hotel and uses neurolinguistic programming to convince the night manager that this is all a routine thing that someone else on the management team arranged for.

Before departing, Mitch heads out to the retaining pond on the Livermore campus to practice some of the zazen meditation techniques he picked up at Shasta Abbey. When he finishes, he comes to a realization: he’s met, by this point, several people who share with him with an ineffable sense of being “clued into things” in a way that “normal” people are not. He thinks, in particular, of Pete Kraus, Nola Van Valer, and Zeb. He doesn’t quite understand the significance of this connection, but what he’s realizing now is that his desire to make this History C thing happen will find its root in whatever it is that makes him special.

The team spends the rest of the afternoon coordinating their insertion at the St. Francis. Jocasta largely supervises, personally handling delivery of URIEL’s voluminous eavesdropping equipment and recording devices, which she and Roger set up in a suite on floor 12. Marshall dispatches his Special Ones to act as his eyes and ears. They take up residence in an executive suite on floor 11.