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IN A SUBBASEMENT HALLWAY deep under Building 451– the heart of the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory – past the rows and rows of computer banks which whir and spin endlessly, is a simple wood-paneled door.
IN A SUBBASEMENT HALLWAY deep under Building 451– the heart of the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory – past the rows and rows of computer banks which whir and spin endlessly, is a simple wood-paneled door.
Scotch-taped side-by-side to the door at roughly eye height are two yellowing Xeroxes taken from a 1901 edition of Milton's Paradise Lost–the one with the Gustave Doré engravings. It's a passage detailing the responsibilities of the archangel Uriel, the Almighty's eye on creation, a fitting and suitable namesake for the team who works behind the door:
Whether Operation URIEL was informally named after this little impromptu piece of installation art or the Xeroxes were chosen to enshrine URIEL's presence on the new Royston Plan campus in 1968 no one can quite remember five years on. Behind this door are a suite of cubicles, a cozy glassed-in reading room and library, and several TMDS terminals hooked into the Livermore Time Sharing System and, as of February of 1973, the nascent ARPANET. In the LLL internal directories, this suite and its phone number are marked down as "Independent Geopolitical Research (Classified)." For those with the right clearance, of course, this modest office is none other than the West Coast headquarters of Project SANDMAN.
Also, what I'm envisioning occupying the conversation-pit like library unit for URIEL (I'm sure you can picture the mod, angular, slightly Brutalist post-Eames couches and chairs from your own 1970s childhood/university libraries) is an up-to-date collection of periodicals on the occult, paranormal, and alternative religions, from the academic (Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion) to the popular (New Scientist) to the pulpy (Fate). Locked up on microfiche are copies of some of the rarer grimoires found at top American and European universities, along with important SANDMAN-specific resources on the ancient Near East, History B, and so forth. There's also a small closet with (again) shelves upon shelves of microfiche, a tachistoscope, and Ganzfeld-type equipment where members of Operation URIEL can get "renshed" (use the Renshaw Method to "download" mission-specific skills).
The only other glassed-in area in the Operation URIEL suite is Archie Ransom's office.
SCENES
SCENES
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