A few minutes before the scheduled fireworks display, Marshall gives the high sign to Roger to grab the Dom Perignon and some glasses. He then subtly gathers up the rest of the team to meet with Archie. Once he has corralled the team, Marshall approaches Andy and Viv. Bright white smile: "The Big Man is ready for you. Come with me."
I expect the party has thinned out some by 9 pm. Once the fireworks start, and most people head up to the balcony for a better view, and we gently shoo away Terence or any other hangers on, we coalesce as a group in the backyard. I'm picturing URIEL plus Genevieve and Andrew in a rough circle, some standing, some in lawn chairs or at the picnic table with the red-white-and-blue plastic tablecloth. Maybe Charley's sitting in the grass, playing with the cats or (given the fireworks) soothing the dog, so it's not so obvious she's in a meeting with nine (?) random adults.
Archie waits until the first fireworks go off before he starts. A big boom across the bay, that whistling rocket sound, and the backyard is suddenly awash with shimmering red and gold light. Archie looks abashed. "Well, gosh. Everyone's probably expecting me to make some kind of a sales pitch."
Archie's standing, still warming up into pitch mode. "I guess I could talk about the holiday, and how a brave band of rebels once struck a blow against tyranny, and brought forth a new world, conceived in Liberty. But my daughter implored me not to get too corny with the Fourth of July stuff."
He addresses Viv and Andy directly, sincerely. "Andrew. Genevieve. Thank you for being here tonight. We are all truly in your debt for stepping up and helping us out with... that whole pickle at the St. Francis. And I think it's fair to say you have each really impressed us all." He pauses, lets anyone else chime in or assent to this.
Archie says: "So, I could give you the hard sell but my heart wouldn't be in it." Now he's switching into his familiar I'm-going-to-tell-you-a-little-story mode:
"There's an old trick, used by con artists and stage magicians, called the one-ahead. It means the trick begins before the performer introduces it to the audience or the mark. But it's the most fundamental trick there is, because it leads the audience to misperceive the whole situation."
"And every sales pitch is a bit of a con job, isn't it? Sort of like the make-believe we all put together on Friday. The salesman has his lines, and so does the mark -- sorry, the customer, ha ha -- and just because the customer doesn't know their lines doesn't mean they won't say them at just the right time. Sure, every sales pitch has a moment where the customer thinks they're making a choice. But it's a poor salesman who puts the question before they know what the answer's going to be. Truth is, when the time comes to sign on the dotted line, the real moments where the mark could've walked away are usually long past."
"I can remember when our organization put the question to me. In that moment, I felt like I was making a choice, but now when I look back, I realize I was already in all this, up to my neck. And I'll bet some of the other folks sitting here feel sort of the same way."
"So there is a choice to be made here tonight, but I'm not certain who the choosers really are."
"Genevieve, Andrew: you are both neck deep in something now, and I'm afraid you were long before any of the people sitting here picked up either of your files. So the choice isn't really whether you're going to be in or out of our game. I'm afraid that choice has already passed. It's more: which layer do you want to play at? Up on the top picnic blanket where things look pretty normal, like the life you know? Or down below, where things get... strange." "I hope you can see that we're not super spies or monsters." Here Archie tousles Charley's hair. "We're not the secret masters of the world. We're just ordinary folks, doing a tough job the best we can. But we know some things about the world, and we carry that knowledge, so that nobody else has to carry it."
"There's work to be done and we could use your help. But it's the very definition of thankless work. Sign up with us, and you'll learn the truth about things, but you'll also find that truth is awful slippery. You'll get to make a difference, but you won't get any glory for it, and if you succeed, the world should look pretty much as it does now." Archie meets Mitch's eyes there for just a second. Archie turns up both hands in a palms-up shrug. "That's it, I'm afraid. That's my whole pitch."
"Marshall, do you want to say anything about what's behind Door #2?"
Marshall is seated with his legs crossed -- not a meditation, just one leg over the other. He smiles. Or maybe he just keep smiling. Maybe he's been smiling this whole time.
"The particulars of ... our work ... make your situation difficult. Your other option – your other choice – is to return to your regular lives and attempt to leave this all behind. I say attempt because Archie is right; you are neck-deep in this already. Neither of you will ever truly be free now. But we can ... make you forget all this. Clear your mind. Restore you to your lives as they were a week ago. None the wiser."
Marshall looks to Andy and fixes him with a terrible stare. "For you, Krane, I will advise this would be a most invasive experience. You are special. We cannot allow you to ever be truly free. Given your ... unique qualities. But we can try. If you want. If you think you want that. We can ... try."
Marshall goes quiet.
Andy looks to Viv in a flash, very quickly, but turns back to Marshall. "I can't say I completely understand what these qualities entail, and maybe you don't either. But if I've got an h-bomb in my head, better that I'm conscious and able to resist and keep it out of the hands of the demons than get... I'm guessing you're talking brainwashing? Than get brainwashed and be oblivious if the bad guys try to come and get me." Andy takes another hard pause, gulps down his fear, and says plainly, "I don't want to forget. I want to be of use. And if I'm going to have cultists and crazies chasing me to the end of my days, I want the protection and foreknowledge that you all can hopefully provide. I don't want to be a sacrificial lamb waiting for the sledgehammer. I want to be able to fight back."
"And you know, Andrew, what this means for your work, yes? Your writing. About Atlantis, and MARPA. All that. We have ... people who would be supervising your work, guiding it, editing it. For our purposes. We call them esmologists. 'Bee-keepers,' sometimes. Archie here," he gestures toward Archie, "is among the best. He would need to monitor what you write. To protect people. You understand?"
Andrew sighs, raises his eyebrows in a sort of 'I sorta knew this moment was coming' kind of expression. "Dr. Redgrave, I've seen in vague shadows and visions what you all in MARPA ... sorry, SANDMAN, have been up to. Even before Atlantis, honestly. I saw it in vague forms in all my Sixties stuff. In The Arm From The Screen there's a vignette about a bunch of happy drunken sitcom writers whose notes from the network in the near-future keep getting more and more esoteric and surreal until their sitcom looks more like a Dadaist play... but it keeps the masses under control."
Andy clears his throat.
"Anyway." "So far in my life I've had the freedom to publish what I want; Ace doesn't really provide a hell of a lot in the way of editorial guidance. But ultimately now I'm realizing, kind of how Archie said, in the end there actually wasn't really any choice in what I was writing all those years. My antennae were just picking up stray waves and radiation from your world." Andy pauses.
"So I'm not worried about my artistic integrity, such as it is." He laughs ruefully. "I had some ideas about how the message of the roleplay we did at the St. Francis could be the basis of the next Atlantis novel, of bringing hippies and straights together to fight demonic alien slavemasters, but ... the Atlanteans have been the baddies in my novels for so long, even with all the somewhat sympathetic touches... it might get memetically confusing." Andy looks to Viv longer now, almost like he's scared of her disapproval, as he says the next bit.
"All I ever really wanted was to explore what it means to be human—and in some smaller way American—in this time and place by extrapolating the things I saw into art." Another portentous sigh. "I do not want my writing to create more Carls and Riches. That reflects pretty fu-" he pauses from cursing in front of Charley, "pretty poorly on me, if I'm being completely honest about it. It's been bugging the hell out of me the past five days." Andy nods slowly. "Your request on my writing is absolutely fair, if it's going to get me and Viv support and protection on the back end of things."
Marshall looks to Viv. "Our nation turns its lonely eyes to you, Ms. Abeille."
Viv looks over the assembled group, this group of trauma-bonded souls of good intention and ill repute and a ghost of a smile crosses her face. "Marshall, You said these esmologists are also called beekeepers?" A pause, a breath, a centering. "Did you know that's what my last name means?" She looks directly at Archie " ... Bee."
Her attention shifts back to the group, lingering on Jo and Charley who she already feels a tremendous amount of care for ... "I'm in. I'm here. I'm in for all of it. I have questions, especially about my family, but I assume that will be answered as we get the details on this..." She gestures vaguely "process." A devilish smirk flashes across her face. "You know ... It's a good thing I'm not 'special' the way Andy is. Because you'd have to kill me before I'd let you change my books."
She adds thoughtfully "If Archie can do this with his lovely family's safety in mind, so can I."
Andy's bemused smile cracks a little, betraying a flash of stomach-curdling self-recrimination to anyone with decent Psychology at the table that he has really ceded something essential of his creativity and self, and the fact that Viv's obviously a little disappointed in him is harshing his high of being suddenly accepted as "part of the club."
Psychology roll will tell you she isn't disappointed and he's reading shit into it that isn't there.
Andy's Psychology, if it exists, is probably not great.
In the past Viv might have given Andy a withering, "oh god why are you doing this now," stare but she's matured beyond that and instead squeezes his hand and says quite clearly: "I don't think I'm better than you I'm literally less dangerous mimetically. Not because the themes aren't there, rather probably because my stuff is so weird and feminist. The world isn't capable of holding that conceptual form and animating it into meaningful action, creating the potential for a rift. It's actually devastating to recognize."
Andy gasps audibly, and gives Viv's hand a quick squeeze back. "Oh ... oh yeah. I suppose that is true." He's really not able to say much more than that right now, and gives a bit of a shifty/guilty look at URIEL and grimaces a little bit.
Marshall looks to Archie as if to say, "anything else?"
Roger will come over and shake Andy’s hand, and then turn to shake Viv’s. But then, in the shake, he’ll put his other hand over hers, and say “This makes it official, but for me, I’m counting from the moment you answered my call for help. I see now that you almost can’t stop yourself from stepping up. But that doesn’t make me any less thankful you did.”
Jocasta raises her wine glass. "This is a hard job, and you will both see things that are hard to understand. I can't imagine what it's going to be like, seeing the world you know turn into something stranger than the world you dreamed," she says, almost hazily. "But it's a job we all do better when we have more people on the team that we can count on. Yiamas."
Archie looks grave for a second, like he'd almost hoped this would, somehow, go another way. (He's happy to have Viv & Andy join the team but pulling two civilians into the secret war is not entirely something to celebrate.) Then he turns his smile back on. "Huzzah! Wonderful news. Welcome aboard, both of you." To Viv's remark, about how her questions about her family will be answered in time, he says: "Yes. There will be, I'm afraid, a terrible number of briefings in the days ahead, and all manner of red tape. Government work, ha ha. But your questions will be answered, and we will do everything necessary to keep you, and your families, safe."
Marshall will nod to Roger to pop the champagne and start pouring drinks. He'll force one into Archie's hand, even if he won't drink it. Someone gets Charley lemonade. Once everyone has a beverage, Marshall lifts his glass up and says, smiling: "Well, enough of all that for now. Cheers, ladies and gentlemen. Here's to saving the world."
Viv indeed can't help herself and pulls Roger in for a quick hug, her eyes soft, voice quiet. "Thank you for saying so. Thank you for seeing that in me," and then to everyone, "and thank you all for being there to save our lives, to save everything, the pure land and the charnel ground of this realm and this realm alone. The con would have been absolutely lost, and where goes the con, apparently, there goes the whole world..." She trails off. "Thank you." She takes the champagne and holds up her glass "Yes, cheers."
"Oh, that's very good," Archie says, noticing for the first time the pun of "con" like a sci fi con and "con" like a con artist. "As goes the con, so goes the world." He raises/clinks his glass as appropriate, but doesn't drink.