Viv and Mitch Talk Irruptors
Mandy
Viv comes out of the stacks a little cross-eye and beaming. "Oh, hey Mitch. What's the skinny?"
Michael
I was thinking that Viv's coming out of the Secret Stacks of the library at that moment might trip Mitch's Serendipity (even though he just used it a couple of hours ago) in, like, a minor way; like here Viv is doing intensive Irruptor research and out comes the one member of URIEL with more Irruptor Minutes logged than anyone else.
Jeff
"There's a thing at Stanford, psychic research I wanna check out. It might be nothing but I got a sense it might lead me to something big. And the Librarian's taking a break apparently. "It's been a big morning I guess. No rest for the wicked. You?"
Mandy
"Oh, hey, yeah Jo and I were talking about this. I know Russell Targ, my husband has done some work with him and I know him from Esalen hangs and dinner parties and some psychology crossover connections. Mostly just a professional acquaintance but it could be an in to get you up there...
"I've been reading about monsters, Mitch … in the tremblor I … think I remember you said you met one? Some? Of these … creatures? "
Jeff
" ... I've met a few monsters, yeah. Kusarikku, the demon bull. I don't think they have a particular affinity for hotels, but both of the ones I've talked to recently, they were in hotels."
Mandy
"You talked to them! What was that like? What is their energy like? Their minds?"
Jeff
"It's odd," Mitch says seriously, like he's been waiting for a chance to talk to somebody about this. "Like, they're not real people, they're … it's like … you ever been to Disneyland?"
"They do this thing where people walk around in costume, right? And like, the fox guy from Pinocchio is there, and if you try to talk to him he'll sort of gesture — can't talk in the costume — but there's like a Peter Pan and Snow White and they're, uh, verbal?"
Mitch looks perturbed. "And if you converse with them they act like they're the part they're playing, they … improvise, that's the word I was looking for. They aren't really themselves, they're playing a part."
"Of course the guy being Peter Pan has a self, he's just not using it right then. Which is the difference."
Mandy
"I need a minute … at least, to think about this, but that is so much more important and interesting than anything I read in the locked stacks. It's like these suits don't know how to ask questions about things if they can't measure it."
Viv is in a nice lilac pants suit, so, kinda funny.
"This costume character stuff is amazing. What about the tremblor … did you get a sense that maybe … maybe that was like a dark ride? I have this experience sometimes, in meditation, of being in the meta, where I'm fixing the machinery. And then … in the tremblor it was like being pushed along in someone else's hollow vision. Snow White and her adventures. "
"And they were in the meta."
Jeff
Mitch considers. "I never thought about quite like that, but, well, that's all History-B really is, right? A bunch of recurring motifs. Symbols. Like a ride, something curated. It's not a whole big complicated world, even if it seems like that sometimes. That's all smoke and mirrors, amplification. Like a storyteller drawing on all his tricks to keep us guessing."
Mandy
Viv opens up her folio and starts taking notes. "Who do you think the storyteller is?"
Jeff
"Uh … " Mitch winces. "I didn't say there is a storyteller, just, that's what it's like … I dunno we want to pull that thread, if it leads anywhere helpful."
Mandy
"I'm not sure there are unhelpful questions at this point, at least not for me, trying to get a bird's eye view. But maybe there are dangerous, or forbidden ones." She's thoughtful for a second, reading how firm the "no" is around the topic. "So what do you think makes one of these dark rides or costume characters blossom into, irrupt, our reality?"
Jeff
"It's just … the world is a pretty gnostic place sometimes … " Mitch doesn't care for the topic. When Viv asks her second question though he latches on. "That's the sixty-four thousand dollar question, right? Why stupid Babylonian mythology enjoys such a special position that Norton and MARPA somehow open their door?"
Mandy
"Do you know about phonemes? They're, like, the smallest sonic unit of language. A Chomsky thing. And morphenes? Those are the smallest unit of meaning. Maybe these are like the … smallest unit of memetic distortion and in the context of irruption they loop on themselves until they become something"
"like the grit in an oyster that makes a pearl"
Jeff
"So, what, the Red Kings are just the lowest-valence … thing … because something has to be?" Mitch shakes his head. "Might as well say that the Red Kings are what they are because Greek mythology was too played out and Babylon has a little obscurity-cool going for it but it's similar enough to what we already know … it's just not a useful way to frame the problem, I don't think."
Mandy
"How would you frame it?" Viv is clearly delighted and ready to follow your thread attentively.
Jeff
"There's something about History-B that elevates it over, like, Norton's world, Andy's books, et cetera. It wriggles in whenever there's a toehold, other histories don't do that. So there's something about it. But the something isn't what the demons claim, it can't be. If it was the ontoclysm couldn't have happened. Fascism isn't what the human mind bends inevitably to. So, what is it, then? I don't like the answer that says 'something has to be on top, it's them by chance,' that can't be right. Don't have a better idea, though."
Michael
Viv can give me an Anthropology roll?
Mandy
>>>> SUCCESS by 5
Michael
Genevieve gives some thought to a few competing (and wild) theories. "The Sumerians were aided by ancient astronauts and put their ideas into Sumerian and all successive cultures?" Eh, maybe a little too cute and of-our-current-moment. Besides, if what Viv has read over the past afternoon is true, all of that history before 535 AD is just a weird retrocreation, or even an illusion. "How about the linguistic theory, that language itself is a virus from outer space, as William S. Burroughs has theorized in his Nova trilogy?" Maybe that alien language—the women's language, eme.sal Sumerian, from her dream—allows the Irruptors to appear. But Viv knows that homo sapiens had the capacity (and likely the inclination and ability) to use language long before the Bronze Age. The Anunnaki aren't spontaneous emergent structures from the linguistic centers of the human brain; that's also too cute by half.
Mitch is strenuously objecting to the idea, professed by several Irruptors and History B cultists to him in conversation, that the human mind (and soul!) is pre-programmed to worship the Anunnaki and spontaneously form patterns of social organization well-suited for the Anunnaki to rule over. The chicken-and-egg problem of humans' tendency to worship/retrocreate the Anunnaki gets very thorny here. And ultimately Viv doesn't believe this either, even considering whatever briefs she's read today on the basics of esmology or memetics or glyphs being phenomena that hit ordinary humans on some very deep neurolinguistic level.
But what if the Irruptors' and Anunnakis' age is itself the reason they're the most powerful of all the possible lettered Histories out there? They've just had more time to exist parallel to us in History A than Norton's America or Krane's America. If we're looking at this in terms of science fiction alternate histories, History B's breakpoint isn't 535 AD, after all; that's just when History A managed to wrest "existence" back from the Red Kings by SANDMAN's reckoning. If there is a historical point where the quantum timeline branch that contains Mesopotamian animal-demons walking freely among their cattle breaks off from what we consider real history—History A—it would be way back around the 4th millennium BC. That's 6000 years to exist in the shadows of history, and stew, and plot, and find ways back in. (Viv also wonders if this is one of the reasons those old 17th century theologians posited "4004 BC" as the first day of existence; more reverberations from History B.)
Mandy
"Well, if we are perceiving time, more things don't exists than do exist right now, things that have existed, things that could have existed, things that will exist but don't yet, a host of failed or potential or deselected unperceived worldlines moldering in the un-manifest, running their timelines in parallel process out of the activated quantum eye of the universe." She pauses.
"Maybe some of them have more gravity — gravity is a pregnant word, it means meaning, but also possibly the universal force … ambiguous — in relationship to ours. More potential to exist by virtue of how much of them is not existing and the ties of all the ideas that feel like they are where they could have been, coming in from the back of the fabric of spacetime incarnate. Flipping ones and zeros until it … " Another pause.
"Maybe that's crazy."
Jeff
"I don't know. So many things don't exist … If this were, like, an easy question, somebody would have answered it by now. Maybe there isn't a real answer. It just is. Screw around with alternate histories, conjure bull-demons and snake men that wanna eat your brains."
Mandy
"I hear you, I hear you … maybe no one will ever know if the crystals that project the universe diffract into Nine in the Halls of Amenti and then use our own infrastructural monsters to haunt or punish us. Thanks Mitch, I really appreciate your perspective"
Jeff
"Sorry, what? Could you unpack that?"
Michael
I've been wondering if Mitch maybe at some point shouldn't shove a spare single point into Hidden Lore (Mt. Shasta) or something given this exposure at this point.
As it is, you've got Occultism if you want to make a roll to determine what Genevieve is referring to?
Mandy
"It's the Emerald Tablet, an ancient alchemical text. In the introduction there's this idea ‘as above so below’ now, you may be familiar with this because the Wiccans got a hold of it and have used it to tell the story of the holographic universe. But they've bent towards an autopoietic solipsism. I create my reality. In the introduction to the Emerald Tablet it is implied, it is heavily implied, that what is meant by this is actually that our witnessing participation in the below creates the essence which projects us, the above, and that this is the stone, and contemplating the stone extends into a type of awareness where the relationships of space and time are inverted, a time-space from which all, really all — all potentials and worldlines — are already known and projecting like a film, selected by our witnessing participation from all possible outcomes. A non-deterministic determinism, inter-causality, fate becoming fate because you did the thing and not the other way around."
"Uh, that's what I mean by crystals projecting the universe. Diffracting into the Nine into the Halls of Amenti? The nine are maybe literal entities, or maybe forces like gravity who look like entities to the human mind when the right distortion is in place... is considered the highest distortion from that crystalline oneness … actually, one second."
Viv retreats to the stacks and returns with a slim folio, the Isacc newton translation.
Jeff
>>>> SUCCESS by 5
“Well, that’s a thing.”
Mitch has gotten so used to just intuitively understanding shit that now he’s double-confused: nonplussed, and nonplussed by his own nonplussed-ness.
Michael
Diffracting into the Nine into the Halls of Amenti? The nine are maybe literal entities, or maybe forces like gravity who look like entities to the human mind when the right distortion is in place … is considered the highest distortion from that crystalline oneness …
Mitch's travels over the past few months can definitely give him some good context for the Emerald Tablet and all its successor Hermetic texts, leading straight into the mystics, hermeticists, and ancient civilization-believers of the last three centuries of Western esotericism — Swedenborg to Blavatsky to all the folks who congregate in 1973 at Shasta (New Age, Wiccans, etc.). Mitch still doesn't know what Mt. Shasta is, or what the myth/memecycle around it is serving — History A, B, or Other — and whether the mountain is a forward base for History B, an embassy, or a home for the Masters of the Seven Rays who maybe come from a complete different worldline altogether … Genevieve's interpretation runs counter to a lot of the Theosophists and their successors, who (Mitch knows) assert that there are Ascended Masters who sit within the mountain and, essentially, invent the universe. In Viv's formulation, it seems the Masters might not be literal men (and women) whose intents might be tainted by human desire: they might be instead the threads of fate and determinism and Being that hold the universe together, and, as Viv says, they only look like Morya and Saint Germain and Master Jesus because of, well, a filter that we see through, a glass through which we see darkly. Oddly this feels like it's looped back around to the Irruptor conversation in a strange way: i.e. why they look and act the way they do: maybe it does all boil down to who's observing them. Maybe Mitch could talk them out of existence. Maybe he was closer with the Arbuckle Kusarikku than he ever knew.
Jeff
"This whole thing puts me on edge. It's one thing to say the world is dreamed into existence by a small cabal of beings we can only comprehend as ineffable cosmic forces that may or may not be essentially human, it's another to unspool what-all that implies about, uh, teleology.
"In the past I've worried that if I successfully conveyed my understanding of the true nature of reality, imperfect as it is, I would either destroy the world or else--I don't know if this is more likely — suddenly become a lot less interesting and compelling as a free-willed human being.
"Or just slip into an irreversible coma, I guess.
"After the last couple weeks, I'm less worried about that. Reality is a little more resilient than I gave it credit for. But really, it's not a thing that people don't already know, when you come down to it. I was talking to Jiyu about that. I should pay her another visit some time. Labor Day, maybe."
Mandy
"Jiyu?"
Jeff
"Master Jiyu-Kennett of the Shasta Abbey. Zen monk. Good egg."
Mandy
"Mitch, would I be able to tag along if you do go? That sounds like a fascinating convo."
Jeff
"Sure. I know Charley expressed an interest. I mean, that's a little tricky, with … " Mitch tilts his head significantly.
Mandy
Viv nods and lowers her voice conspiratorially: "As a child-haver in my own right and actual family therapist, I just might be able to move that needle … "
Jeff
"Yeah … I was just there a couple weeks ago, though. No rush. I mean, I'm sure Jiyu would be cool with it, but I don't wanna overdo anything."
Michael
So given that the Charley-Jo-Roger scene is ready to proceed, can we close out Viv's first day at Livermore? Mandy, I wanted to find out how you picture Viv balancing out her MRI and Livermore days from here on out … I also know we need to talk as a team about the SRI investigation and what direction we're going to go in, but also Viv has that contact with Russell Targ through Esalen and can contact him anytime.
Mandy
Viv does everything based on interest. With Charles' income she doesn't need to work, and I got the sense she was at MRI three or four days a week because it was fun. She will scale back to two or three, maintain her obligations to existing clients but she will likely take herself off the roster for new patients and may transition down to a day or two as this becomes the more interesting and resonant life path for her