Embedded Files
Mitch and Archie
⪋ JACKSON POLLOCK WAS A CIA ASSET
⪋ JACKSON POLLOCK WAS A CIA ASSET
Jeff
Jeff
So Mitch flags Archie — Archie is Mitch’s first choice for this — in the hall and suggests they take a quick walk over to get a bite in the cafeteria or something. That’s how he says it, “get a bite or something.”
Once they’re in a state of relative privacy, which I assume is accomplished fairly easily: “There’s something been troubling me. With Mansa, the Houdini thing, and now this bad time up on Mount Shasta. It’s got nothing to do with the current unpleasantness. I’m pretty sure it’s got nothing to do with that.”
Mitch doesn’t wait for Archie to respond. “What the fuck are they trying to do, man? I mean, to hear them tell it, they’ve got their own little garden-prison-timeline, where Zeb was born and where Marshall and I went for a terrifying little nothing, and we’ve got our timeline, our world here, and they seem to think that they’re both equally real, and I don’t want to get into a whole big thing about how nothing is real, or none of this is real, shadows and whatever’s real is outside the fucking cave, blah blah, but if you look at it from what they claim to be their perspective, what are they trying to do? If they’re unreal ghosts that want to exist again, okay, that’s at least poetic. But take them on their own terms and they’ve got their own perfectly nice hell dimension over there, why they gotta come here and mess ours up? It’s not like we’re launching strikes into their timeline, distributing, I don’t know, Adam Smith and Jackson Pollock.”
Rob
Rob
Archie's first answer is automatic, like it's completely noncontroversial: "What are the Red Kings trying to do? They want to re-enslave us. They hate our freedom. They hate ... our creativity, our pioneer spirit, all the things that make us more than cattle."
But he takes the question seriously, and continues: "This stuff is hard for me to wrap my head around, and I know I don't have the intuitive sense for it that you do, Mitch. But I don't think they do have a ... dimension of their own. I've said this before: History B isn't a place we can get to, through the back of a wardrobe or by clicking our ruby slippers together. There's just one Earth, just one human race. That's why, ah, peaceful coexistence isn't possible."
Jeff
Jeff
"Yeah, yeah. They're monsters, they hate good things and love bad things, they want to make everything bad. But ... setting aside the question of whether it's 'real,' accepting the premise that peace is impossible, because they're monsters and stuff ... setting all that aside, the win condition for them is pretty clear. They insert the bad stuff into the timeline, bull demons eat everybody while we cheer them on and talk about how it's an honor to get eaten. Whether Zeb's homeland is real or not doesn't matter, they win if they mess us up enough. But they must have a loss condition, too, right?"
"If we're, like, say I've got a patio and every spring I have to pull up the weeds that start to grow up in the cracks... the weeds win if I don't pull them up fast enough and they expand and crack the concrete, right? But the weeds lose if I pour enough Agent Orange on my yard so that nothing in the neighborhood can get its seeds into my patio cracks. Or if I roof the whole thing over, plunge it into perpetual darkness so nothing can grow. Or if I seal it up in plastic and pump out the oxygen. Or whatever, right?"
"Setting aside feasibility – setting aside feasibility – what would us going on the offensive look like?"
Rob
Rob
"Oh, you're talking about how we win!" Archie brightens at this topic. "Well, they're not indestructible. The Red Kings can be killed. And we have the Bomb, after all. But that's awfully extreme. And there's a real possibility of blowback. Nobody wants to destroy the village in order to save it, ha ha."
"So, as long as cooler heads prevail, I think the reigning paradigm at SANDMAN is one of patient, vigilant containment. Then the battlefield shifts, as it were, to hearts and minds. Which is where fellows like me come in." Archie gestures emphatically with the cafeteria donut he's eating. "What's the source of their power over us? It's what they did to our heads, right? They had centuries to muck around in there. But if we could... tear out all the trip wires and punji stakes they laid in our heads, if we could build all our minds back better, healthier, more whole ... why, then they'd all lose their power! Then we could show them up as the phantoms they are."
"Are you saying you want to go on the offensive, Mitch? Do you have some kind of plan, or idea you're working on? Because if you do, I'm all ears. I know you see things differently than, well, than just about anybody. And that can't always be easy for you. But I'm sure glad you're part of our team."
Jeff
Jeff
Mitch shakes his head. “I think we’re talking past each other, man. Show them as fake to who? You think they don’t know they’re fake?
“What would we bomb, exactly? Or, hearts and minds, what does victory look like? Some society that’s completely free of everything History-B tainted, which includes Christianity, Buddhism, fuck, it includes irrigation and bronze working, the wheel, ceremonial burial, all that pre-ontoclysm stuff?”
“Do you think it’s like smallpox, once it’s gone it’s gone, if they ever manage to get rid of it?”
Rob
Rob
"Well, you didn't hear it from me, but we have bombed them, more than once – Cambodia, in North Africa – did you ever hear of the City of Brass, back in WW2? But you're right, there isn't anything to bomb, except when they make an actual irruption. I mean, that might have even been the thinking in Algeria: let them manifest, flush them into the open where we can bring our weapons to bear. But you see where that got us." Archie gestures around him in a way that's somehow supposed to indicate "society today."
"It may just be like smallpox! You know SANDMAN is working on artificial languages? Computer-generated languages, 100% free from Anunnaki taint. They're miles better than Danbe. Who's to say we won't inoculate everybody someday, eradicate them once and for all? In the meantime, we have to keep our minds healthy, build up our immunity."
"As for the gospel, well – Archie looks embarrassed, looks at his watch. "Maybe we should be getting back?" But he doesn't get up.
Jeff
Jeff
“Sure, sure.” Mitch nods and tosses his hands up in gesture of surrender. “Not to open that can of worms. But it seems a lot like we’re ... I don’t know a good analogy. Pruning back the vines without going in and hacking out the roots? Just waiting for yet another catastrophic manifestation, we take care of it, move on to the next one ... there’s got to be a better way. And rebuilding society from the ground up, language and all, feels like a lot of unnecessary throwing out alongside the bathwater. I just ...
“If that’s all they are, is this memory of an idea that only exists in the most retroactive way possible, and all the coherence that they seem to have is getting imputed on them post hoc? Then why is it the same thing, over and over again?
“Why not Lemuria? Why not Bigfoot? Why bull-demons and their frog-demon buddies, over and over and over again?”
Mitch is looking down at the table and the untouched little bowl of Sugar Smacks in front of him, shaking his head.
Rob
Rob
"Well, I mean ..." And now Archie's really embarrassed, but he plunges ahead, quoting: "'It must needs be that the devil should tempt the children of men, or they could not be agents unto themselves, for if they never should have bitter they could not know the sweet.'"
"God's plan demands that man be tested and tempted, otherwise what's the point of human agency?"
"As for why it has to be bull-men and frog monsters, maybe that's just... memetic residue?" Archie points to the frog on the Sugar Smacks box. "Some kind of template laid down at the time of our original programming and enslavement? If the Red Kings actually exist anywhere, I mean if these 'roots' you're talking about exist anywhere we can actually get at them, it's got to be in our minds."
"But believe me, if there was - if there is - a way to finish them for good, I'm all for it."
Jeff
Jeff
"I know. I know, that's the ... conventional wisdom. But I don't know if I still think it holds up. Shasta is this... nexus point, for all kinds of seekers. But somehow the only thing they find is the goddamn Comte. The agents of the Red Kings," Mitch adds, clarifying. "You'd think that, place like that, if there was a History-C to reach, that's where it would be. And if that's all B is, is the loudest and the angriest, then there ought to be a C."
Rob
Rob
"You think there could be a ... History C?" Archie doesn't say this in a dismissive way. He almost sounds enthusiastic.
Jeff
Jeff
Mitch looks quizzical, because he’s spent enough time with this theory that he forgot for a second it wasn’t more of the aforementioned conventional wisdom. “Sure. C, D, E ... if the world of the Red Kings isn’t real, if it’s just a story, if there’s not anything special about it that gives it some kind of existence ... then it stands to reason that all the other imaginary worlds should be out there, too. Maybe there’s a priority order: A is real, B isn’t real but it’s next in line, C is a little more unreal than B, and so on and so on. Bigfoot sightings, UFOs, fairy hills are all the History-C or -D or -E equivalents to what we saw in Oakland, maybe.
“If Red-King-sylvania doesn’t have any reality to it, then there should be others because the Kings don’t have a monopoly on not existing.
“I really wanted to think those posters, the Kennedy ones, that they were detritus from a C. But somehow, I don’t know, it feels like the fuckers are able to co-opt everything else. I can imagine... I can imagine taking a C and strengthening it, somehow, making it displace the fuckers on the priority list. I don’t know how we’d do it, but I can imagine it being a thing that could happen. And maybe that C is a little less aggressive and hostile and populated by assholes who shit in your mouth and call it ice cream.
“Sorry, sorry.” Mitch looks abashed, he doesn’t usually swear quite so much, certainly not in front of a square like Archie, but this is a topic he feels strongly about.
Rob
Rob
"Golly, Mitch. That is really something." Archie ruminates on that for a while. "'The Kings don't have a monopoly on not existing.' I mean ... golly."
"You know, it was a bit of a put-on for us to call the time when the Red Kings ruled 'History B.' Like calling the competition 'Brand X.' Because, after all, their history was here first. But being here first doesn't make their story the best or most true. And when I think of a third history, I guess I like to think of a story that's more true than the one we're living in now. Skipping over B to get to something weirder still, a whole line of History D, E, Fs, doesn't that seem like going in the wrong direction?"
"In the Mormon faith, there's no Hell, really. But there are three kingdoms of glory: the telestial, the terrestrial, and the celestial. Each one is higher or holier than the last. The simple Sunday School explanation is that these are like levels of the afterlife – first class, business class, economy--but what my Pop always said is that the three kingdoms are three stories we all must pass through."
"Now, maybe it's like you say, maybe Christianity is just tainted. We can argue about the Book of Mormon, but the first two testaments, they're definitely pre-Ontoclysm. In History B, they didn't happen, right? So even the life of Jesus Christ Himself is just another retro creation. A false memory, a collective delusion, like one of those Kennedy posters."
"But what should we call a false memory that saved the human race? A collective delusion that literally freed every soul on earth from bondage? And one that continues to keep us free, just as long as we keep faith with it? I know it sounds corny, Mitchell, but to me, History A is the Good News. It's the Gospel, in a way that's realer than any Sunday School teacher even knows."
"And what does the Gospel tell us? It tells us there's another world to pass through after this one. That there's a Story that's more true than the one that used to enslave us, more true than the one we're living in now. Jesus taught us to call this the Kingdom of God, but it doesn't matter what you call it. It's The Story that's always true, whatever faith or culture you come from. That's what History C is to me. And I guess it is how we win in the end."
"At least, that's how Hobo Stan explained it to me."
Jeff
Jeff
Nonplussed, Mitch blinks a few times, then chuckles awkwardly. "Sure, man. I ... sure." His train of thought is pretty well disrupted, at least.
"There's the idea that the world was created in, what, 4004 BC, right? And the dinosaur bones and, like that, they're just Satan's tricks. Or God put them there because when He created the universe in 4004 BC He included all the details that would match up to it being created, like, billions of years ago. That idea exists.
"But, you know, you can apply that logic to anything. Universe was made in 4004 BC, looks like it's way older. Universe was made in AD 535, just seems like it has older stuff it. Maybe the universe was made some time earlier this year. Maybe it's just been made right this second. That's another idea, right? That's out there, the idea that universe is constantly getting destroyed and remade and that's what the passage of time is.
"So ..." Mitch trails off. "Christ, man, I don't know. But that's what retrocreation is, right? JFK isn't alive right now. King Arthur isn't alive right now. Jesus Christ isn't alive right now. Are they not-alive-right-now in two different ways, three different ways? Or is it deep-down all the same thing and we're just putting labels on different ends of the elephant?
"I ... sorry, man. I'm getting afield, here. It's just, uh, 'collective delusion' feels like kind of a loaded term. Which, I know, your point ..." He shrugs.
Rob
Rob
Archie points a finger gun at Mitch. "All terms are loaded. The question is, who loaded 'em?"
He mimes re-holstering the gun without firing it. "Sorry. Some of this stuff is above my pay grade. If you ever wanted to talk to one of the real eggheads at Granite Peak, I'm sure we could arrange it."
Archie looks at his watch again. "We really should head back. But listen: I can't tell you how much I value getting the Mitch Hort perspective on things. I'm serious."
"We are on the side of the angels, Mitch. You know that, right?"
Jeff
Jeff
Mitch nods a little, either to the comment about the time or the assertion that he and Archie are white hats.
"We're definitely better than the Red Kings and their ... servants."
He flips the box of Sugar Smacks face-down and stares at it a second before busing his tray.
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