The Wizard, the Guru, and the Killer
Michael
Thursday, August 30, 1973. Early afternoon. Figure that Marshall and Jo cleaned out Butler's office of any interesting reading material while they were up there; they could probably fit the really interesting stuff in a handful of document boxes. The double-locked filing cabinets in Butler's office were completely emptied and picked clean (not to mention left completely unlocked and open). One has to imagine a lot of the black budget basement stuff was in this set of cabinets. But a lot of Butler's more mundane business records, i.e. the work he did as a public relations director, are here. Receipts to Venture Toons, to Beale Farms, to other third-party companies, ad agencies, radio and TV buyers, and the like, are all here amidst the material he left behind. Basically you all have the story of young Butler's rise to prominence in the organization and when we've got it all back at Livermore, we can do some Research and Intelligence Analysis rolls to piece together much of Butler's job history. Who knows, maybe some elements of the black budget and/or how he made all these connections with cutting-edge scientists and researchers will reveal themselves upon poking through the files.
Leonard
Jocasta is smoking and making a few notes on a memo pad.
- PAT PRICE - VISIONS - TIME TRAVEL
- BUTLER FAMILY - KIDNAP?
- KILL REINHARDT ASAP
Jeff
Mitch is also smoking. "Hey, Marshall. Got a question for you."
Brant
“Shoot.”
Jeff
"After the St. Francis event you were, uh, you tried to figure out where our failure points are, as a team. You spent most of that mission separated, outside, so you had a different view you could apply … You were closer to the center, this time. What's your perspective?"
He glances at Jocasta as he speaks.
Brant
He stomps out the remnants of his cigarette and exhales. “I don’t know. Well, maybe I do. I don’t know. You throw a lot of the math off — your abilities, the coincidences. No offense, of course. But you know what I mean. We rely on your instincts heavily and could anyone fault us for that? Not really. And yet.” He pauses for a second and looks up at the Agrigenics building.
“And yet. We rely on them and they work, of course they work, but do they really work? If we are being led around by coincidences and your sixth sense, we are still being led around. I get the impression that someone else — something else — is leading us around in a way that ‘makes sense’ but which is not to our best advantage. Or on our terms, perhaps.”
“We came here, you know, because you thought this would be the place to go. And you weren’t wrong — but why now? And not, say, Butler’s house the day before he met with Reinhardt? Why did we zero in on Fry and not Butler?” Marshall briefly looks around, as if confirming that yes, we are outside and there’s no way anyone could hear them.
“That would’ve been serendipitous. But it didn’t happen that way. Have to ask ourselves: why? Are your abilities leading us to preordained conclusions? Are we being moved around like chess pieces by whatever it is that’s in your head that tells you, ‘yes, go here now’?”
“It’s hard to see the lesson to learn from this failure — we can quibble about that word but this one was a failure — besides ‘next time, violence.’ Is that the right lesson, though? Every time we identify a player, we black bag them and put a bullet between their eyes? It seems too blunt, too cruel, but it is a way of thinking differently, to just refuse to play the game They — the Enemy, and now OZYMANDIAS — are setting up for us and kill their pawns every time they surface.”
He waves a hand. “Whatever. I’m prattling. It’ll take a while for me to fully digest my thoughts on what happened here.”
Jeff
"No, no, I think you're onto something. I could... push harder against the grain. After what happened with the Oldtimer, and in Colorado, I said I wasn't going to just go with the flow any more." Mitch's voice shifts into a slightly different register, and when he speaks again his Alabama accent is briefly much stronger. "But I been falling back into old habits, maybe, and maybe pulling y'all down with me, since I sold y'all on my being a magic man with wizard ways."
Brant
“To be clear, I don’t think any of this is your fault — or anyone’s fault. Your ‘magic’ is magical. But … well, remember that party in Colorado I hosted? In the hotel suite? And we were talking with Ricky Jay? And he said that thing about how card tricks — magic tricks — are as much about showing the audience something so that they don’t look at something else? That’s what I’m thinking right now. Your … abilities, or whatever it is you do, they can show us things. Have shown us things. But what are they trying to hide?”
Leonard
"Everything," Jocasta hisses unexpectedly. "They're trying to hide everything. What's inside our heads is leading us because of who's inside our heads. They've been manipulating us longer than we can remember. We found the chip in Charley's head but we haven't even looked in our own heads. We only know that f...that fucker Reinhardt isn't in here with us right now because there's not enough room."
She swallows hard in a terrifying access of self-control. "And, and what are we supposed to do other than take the fight to them? Build a Rooster House as big as the world?"
Jocasta crumples up the notes she was making and carelessly drops them on the floor of the van. She looks at Marshall, avoiding Mitch's line of sight as if she's ashamed to look at him. "I keep thinking of Winnicott, about the true self and the false self. I don't know if we have true selves, not anymore. You remember, Marshall, he used to ask patients: Who are you when you're alone? And we're never alone. So who are we?"
Brant
Marshall picks up the crumpled piece of paper — perhaps the first thing anyone has seen him do himself all day — and skims it over. Then he holds it out for Mitch in the off-hand way that a beautiful woman expects a man to light her cigarette.
"I've never been much for Winnicott. His true-self, false-self dichotomy, it presupposes the existence of an authentic self when, I think, the more correct framework is to assume that our entire concept of 'self' is manufactured. An aesthetic. Something we craft over a lifetime. I think the only true self is the Atman, the subjective observer that perceives the world."
He sighs. "Christ, I sound like a blowhard sometimes. But it is a good question, Menos." Marshall takes off his fur coat and tosses it in the van.
"You're right: they've been in our heads forever. You could think of it as a game — they are playing a game with us. But that wouldn't make sense. It'd be pointless, for one. We've talked about this before, but I'm pretty sure of it now. I think we're an experiment. They're watching us — us specifically — to see what happens."
"So how do you flip the tables on that? How does a rat escape when the lab coats running the tests can kill it at any moment? I don't know. I don't know. But lately ... after what happened to Roger, I've been having these dreams." He pauses for a moment and looks down; a rare thing, Marshall almost always makes direct eye contact, like a rattlesnake watches prey. "Dreams, memories ... memories from my early days in 'Nam, before I was even on SANDMAN's radar, and you know, I was there that day, the day Thích Quảng Đức burned himself alive. Awful to see. Awful to watch someone ... get burned alive." Marshall glances up at Mitch then looks away.
"And then after that, so many more burnings. So many more monks. Protestors. There was even that one boy, son of an Army officer, lit himself up in front of the Saigon Embassy. Company had me running around like a maniac trying to figure out what was going on, how to stop it, why they were doing it. And I'll always remember one Buddhist monk I interro—interviewed. I asked him, do they do it because they think it will make them free? And he said, no, they do it because they are already free."
Jeff
Mitch pretends to misunderstand Marshall's gesture and snatches the paper, reading it quickly before dropping it back to the floor. "Y'all are getting very abstract very fast. I've wondered before if my... hunches is a dumb word but 'applications of serendipity' doesn't roll off the tongue … I've wondered before if they're the result of the Enemy fuckin with me. Fuckin with me in an ongoing way, I mean. Years ago they fucked with me so I can burn stuff, so I can see stuff...Count Jerkface said it was all to set me up to assassinate … Charley's father. If that's true or not true, there's nothing I can do to change it. It's like Dune. Dune Messiah, I guess. Seeing the pieces on the board, knowing you can't move them."
Brant
Eventually, Marshall picks up the note with a sigh and ignites it with a gold Pierre Cardin cigarette lighter. He drops it once the fire reaches his fingers and stomps out the ashes.
Jeff
"I do think you're right about one thing, though. I mean, you could be right in most or all of what you say. But I know you're right that they're watching us specifically. That's what being in the club means. The club of people they decided to keep tabs on. The club of people they made, the club of people thrust into situations they magicked into existence."
Brant
“Then, what of Abeille? For a time she was in the club. Did … was she, maybe … maybe she was part of the experiment, too. But then they stopped including her in the experiment. They were keeping tabs on her in some … grand esmological sense, not as a person but as a … variable? But then the math changed and she wasn’t part of the experiment anymore.”
Leonard
"Sometimes people just disappear," Jocasta says absently, staring intently at the Agrigenics loading area.
Jeff
"What do you mean, Jo?" Mitch looks intent.
Leonard
"You know. They just disappear. We make them disappear," she says, glancing for a second at the back of the van, "Why wouldn't they? They dropped her into our lives as part of their experiment. After a while the rats didn't like the bait anymore and they disappeared her."
She looks back at the loading dock, still speaking as if from a mile away. "I mean, I know there's still someone out there with that name, who looks like she looked. But the part of her that we thought was...a part of us? Disappeared."
Jeff
"Yeah. Hhm. Yeah." Mitch looks around for something to drink, remembers he's in the back of a ops van. "They..." He chuckles as a thought strikes him. "They're History-C, you know that? Under our noses all along. I mean, they aren't part of History-A, they aren't allied with the Enemy … History-C. History-C decided we should visit the basement but only after Ozzie cleared it out. Just to see what would happen, how we'd react." He frowns. Mitch is thinking out loud. "But no, that doesn't hang together, because they're outside time. They know how we react, they make us react that way, they see us doing it before and during and after..."
"Maybe I'm just not drunk enough right now."
Brant
“Outside of our time. But not outside of time. Things must change for them, or else they wouldn’t need to run the experiment. The nature of an experiment is that you don’t really know what will happen.”
“Which means we do have a choice.”
Leonard
"I was trying to be less paranoid for once, guys," Jocasta says with a quick smile. "I've got to start hanging around with a better class of people."
She looks back at the exit. "We should have put a wire on them," she says, voice receding again.
Jeff
Mitch inhales and exhales very slowly. "Are you positive we didn't?"