Mitch Climbs Loma Prieta
Loma Prieta.
“Hey, Mitch has used the image of humans lining up to be eaten, or lining up to give their children over to be eaten, by the inhuman servants of the Red Kings as a sort of synecdoche for History B horrors ... quite a few times now, is that an actual History-B thing or is it Mitch engaging in colorful metaphor?”
“I think once I said the horror of the Anunnaki being rulers again is that you don’t know if they’re going to leave you to live your life or enlist you as their agent or make you sing songs to them or make you into a pet or eat you. The relationship of Them to Us as Humans to Herd Animals is intentional and hey, veal and lamb, am I right?”
Michael
So the hike … .are you planning to do some meditation at elevation for some of that liminal top-of-the-mountain energy we talked about vis-à-vis Shasta, et al.?
Jeff
Yes, exactly. The hike itself isn't that appealing — uphill in the summer sun the whole way it looks like — so Mitch drives as close as he can.
Michael
Yeah, and as you noted, the telecommunications infrastructure up there blanketing Silicon Valley and the South Bay with radio and TV signals also don't exactly vibe the same way as Mount Shasta but needs must, of course. Probably just a few hikers up there, a few people up there for the view; it is a weekday after all. Care to give me a Meditation-17 roll?
Jeff
>>>> CRITICAL SUCCESS
It's reasonably convenient to his house, compared to most mountains, so, Mitch figures he's leaving money on the table if he doesn't give it a shot.
Michael
That's a fuckin crit.
Jeff
Now and then Mitch crits.
I toyed with suggesting Mitch brings Mary-Lynn along but decided against it as a) not a very fun-looking hike and b) meditation is a pretty lousy date activity
"You can watch me take a nap! It'll be a blast."
Michael
Mitch fades into a meditative state staring out over five miles towards the southern side of Silicon Valley. It is a clear day, and he can see forever, and he thinks of Mary-Lynn singing the Streisand hit at the Skyline (he can make out the San Jose airport faintly in the distance) as he goes into theta mind. Yes. On a clear day one can see forever … Maybe it's the influence of Pat talking about his remote viewing techniques which he can apparently project all around the globe, but Mitch envisions the whole of Silicon Valley — the roads he drove yesterday, the vista he just saw from the mountaintop, the EM radiation beaming out from the broadcast towers, the map on Archie's corkboard, the deep History B energy lurking on the campus at SRI … and extends his Detect (History B) ability. Further than he ever has before.
To the entirety of Silicon Valley.
Like the Brockengespenst phenomenon, when a figure standing on a mountaintop will cast an aura-shrouded shadow over an entire valley, Mitch's power extends far beyond himself, and circles Silicon Valley as fast as those radio and TV signals, at the speed of light … or thought. Mitch sees the beating heart of History B energy at the Engineering building at SRI, the suffused aura of potential irruption throughout the rest of the campus, carried to and fro across all the buildings through the electrical and telephone (and … some other kind of wiring? Mitch isn't sure what that means at the moment). And in that moment he is granted a vision of that energy expanding, piggybacking on the chips being manufactured and the wiring being laid and the towers going up and the people being hired and trained all across Silicon Valley, a process he can only see accelerating over the next few years in his mind's eye... and Mitch wonders what will happen if that nascent irrupting entity at SRI ever gets loose. It does seem hedged in by something or someone at SRI, an active measure meant to give it a nest — a cocoon, if you will — within which this Irruptor will pupate and metamorphose and grow and find its Final Form. What rough beast, etc. etc. But in this moment Mitch realizes that the rest of Silicon Valley is being laid out, created, shaped — drawn, if you will — as a giant glyph through which this Irruptor can circulate and grow and expand. The future is being written right now in Silicon Valley, and what it bodes is every promise and potential that the computer scientists and futurists at SRI are promoting... but conversely and perversely also a great way for the Red Kings to do their work as well.
The next day, at the Mission …
Jeff
"Hey, man. I had a thing happen yesterday, I needed to wait until now to talk to someone about it, and you're available. You are available, right? I'm not keeping you from Jack Lord or something?"
Brant
Marshall shakes his head and sort of subtly leads Mitch for a walk so that they aren't overheard by passing guests and staff. "I have a policy of making time to talk with wizards whenever they drop by. What's up? Archie dead? Livermore in ruins? Must be something for you to come here."
Jeff
Mitch has zero problem with being led out of the public eye. "You're looking sharp. I like the robe. The whole Silicon Valley thing is worse than I thought. This world that's coming … I dunno, man."
Brant
Marshall says nothing, he just keeps walking.
Jeff
"So I told Roger about it and he said he'd pass it on, what happened on Wednesday at SRI. Irruptor in the light fixture, looking at me. Not a real thing, just a potential thing, but everything's potential until it's not, right? That spooked me, I admit. I'd thought that it was all … nascent, I guess. Too far in the future to start flexing. And then, no, there it was.
"Yesterday I went up Loma Prieta, you know? The summit down by my house, there's a TV antenna on it. It wasn't much of a hike but I sat up there and looked down at the whole thing, San Jose, Silicon Valley, and all … and from that vantage point, up on high, I saw, and what I saw frightened me.
Mitch sighs. "I'm sounding way too poetic about all this, sorry. There's a thing that's coming, right? A big thing, a world-changing thing, a technological thing I guess, and it's being built at SRI and at all these little nodes in San Jose and around, and it's like it's a nest for the Kings. Like they're coiled up inside it, waiting for it to open up so they can strike."
"And the really troubling bit is, I can't tell if someone's making it like that on purpose, or if it's just the nature of the technology that's being developed, or if they're already at work warping things around them."
Brant
Marshall looks at Mitch and raises an eyebrow, now walking the grounds outside. "MJ, I don't understand a single thing you just told me."
Jeff
"Okay, that's fair."
Mitch stops and stares up at the cloudless sky. "You know something is coming, something big and transformative. We weren't there for GRAIL TABLE but I've read the reports, and so have you, and, shit, we've both met Charley. She's a citizen of the future, listens to Kraftwerk. I never listened to Kraftwerk and I'm not about to start. But her generation, and them who'll come after, the computers are going to be all around them all the time, right? We all kind of knew this, going in."
"But what's frightening to me is that this computer-future, where Colossus is breathing down our necks and playing whatever music we want before we think to ask for it, or whatever … it's dripping with Red King energy. There's an irruptor just sitting there at SRI, waiting to exist. I don't know how to stop it from existing. It's baked deep into the whole computer-future-Forbin-Project project. And I don't know if that's by deliberate design, or if it's like the supposed glyphs embedded in supposed every Indo-Eurpoean language and others, and it's just human nature bending naturally, or if the Kings have some greater warping power than we knew and they've already twisted the whole Bay Area to be a cradle of exactly the version of the computer that'll be best for them and their takeover."
Mitch waits for Marshall's response, gives him a do-you-understand-now sort of look
Brant
Marshall tilts his head to the side and thinks a moment. "So, there is enemy activity at SRI? That fucking woman (plainly referring to the Librarian) was right, again? Guess I'll just add that to my laundry list of times she's humiliated me. Anyway. This information seems too heavy for me to give you any immediate direction. I've lost the thread here. Let's bring what you have to the team on Monday. Or, I guess, sooner, if you think this is urgent? Like, do we need to be bagging Price in the meantime? Is that what you're saying?"
"Let me put it this way, I guess. Is this a Rich and Carl situation?"
Jeff
Mitch stops short at that. "No," he says quickly, then thinks about it. "No."
"This is different from the St. Francis. That was a … there was a dramatic, immediate, coming-together that Carl and Richie were the catalysts of. This isn't like that. Silicon Valley isn't going to suddenly warp into a, I dunno, big temple complex where lion-headed demons are enthusiastically fed children by those children's eager mothers …"
Mitch loses his train of thought for a second, then picks it up again.
"It's like there's an egg. A cocoon, is how... it's incipient, it's coming, it's not here. It won't be here for a while. Not until everybody's got a wrist-computer that plays top 40 hits. Maybe they'll pare it down to Top 14 by then … But it's not going to do anything tomorrow, or this year. I don't think. I don't think so, anyway.
"At St. Francis, I had this sense of... something was going to happen, there was a ticking clock from the moment we picked up those RFK posters. I didn't know what was coming, but I felt that pressure. And you know, I messed it up. I was the guy who should have stopped it before it started. So I take this seriously, you know? But this isn't like that, this is... this is inexorable. This is Europe in, I dunno, 1935, '36, people could see it coming but it was still a ways off … "
Brant
Marshall blinks.
Jeff
"GRAIL TABLE predicted, what, a fifty-year timeline?"
Brant
"I think so?"
Jeff
"So no immediate time crunch. I just wanted to... you're, uh, you're keyed in to that whole … " Mitch gestures. "The CIA is funding Puthoff and Targ and I guess a lot of SRI, right?"
Brant
Marshall looks even more confused. "Well, I mean … yes but I can't — I don't have that kind of pull—" but he cuts himself off.
Marshall looks down at the ground for a moment, his hands behind his back. "OK. I, uh … I don't really … I mean we used ARPANET to track the VC through the jungle but this, I don't … I thought we were doing something else. I don't — " he cuts himself off again. Takes a deep breath. Mutters something under his breath in a language that sounds Asiatic.
When he looks up, his eyes are vacant and he is smiling. "If it's not urgent, we can bring it to Archie and the rest of the team on Monday. See what they have to say. I appreciate you bringing this to me, MJ. Walk you back?"
Jeff
"Sure, yeah. I'm supposed to head over to SRI in a bit."