New Reality Part 2 - "Final Report"
Part two of three. Each part has a narrator and a reality. Next up - a mysterious message from Tech Billionaire Nathan Brooks. What is the truth?
Catch-Up: I recommend that new readers to “New Reality” first read Part 1 (click below), which includes an intro as to what the fuck is going on.
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Subject: Final Report
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Agent Macintosh
Final Report
2/25/2015
Cowboys. This is Mac. Leader of the Cowboys.
If you receive this message, know now that our biggest threat is over. Let me bring you up to speed. It's been a wild night.
Langford is dead. The Play and the influence of the King have been wiped from the earth for now. Untold and unknown damage has been done, but we can sleep a little easier at night now.
It's been 20 years, a month, and two days since we let the bastard through the stage door: David Langford, formally the most powerful man in Imperial America.
Mo and I just pulled him through again, and Dave's lying on the floor of my safe room, his head detached from his body again.
We gave birth to him. To the devil. To the repeater. And now we get to hear his final breath. Again. It's the fifth time we've killed him this way. We've figured out how to end it.
Given Mo had spent two decades trying to blow the guy up, this method was ironic, poetic, and even romantic in comparison to the chaos of explosions. Seeing the eyes of that monster pop out of his fucking head again and again never gets old.
As I have your attention. And you no doubt have clearance for this bullshit, I'm gonna tell you some shit that doesn't stay up on his Wikipedia page for long. I don't need any citations. I am the fucking citation.
Langford was born in Jersey City and went to DeVry University, yep they have a university, he got a job as a telephone maintenance engineer, and married his childhood sweetheart, Patty. In 1995 he went missing on the job and was accidentally released five months later.
Hell, before you point the finger and ask us what the fuck were we thinking, well, we didn't know any better. The king, the sign, the night, none of it meant anything at the time. Before us, the old leader Alphonse knew nothing of the threat.
Langford divorced his wife in 1996, and read an international best-selling manifesto called "The Sign". Then the cable guy just hopped on up and became chief policy advisor to the Bush administration and all hell let loose. Worse than hell, in for two terms, framing Clinton under a bus for fake murder and rape. Then giving a leg-up to Trump, and now onto Palin. President of the Imperial United Mess.
Hold on - lemme wriggle a bit here - we tried to work out exactly how long Langford was lost in the Night Floors. Trapped there since March '95, pulled out August. His wife said he'd gone for five months. To Langford, it would have been five years. Wandering around in there, eating old cake, drinking flat champagne and beer for half a fucking decade.
Langford was sixty-two this year, maybe. The motherfucker didn't look a day over 40. Refusing to rot or decay like that impossibly old scram in the Macallistar fridges.
Before going in he was good-looking, and chatty. When we found him, he looked like a victim of a Nazi death camp. Anyone else would have lost their mind in there, but he just reset and levelled up.
Langford has been trying to shut us down ever since. He knew how close we were to containing The Play and closing doors for good. We should have had the sense, the worry, to kill Langford when we found him 20 years ago, but we were rookies, and our playbook was way out of touch.
By saving him, we exposed ourselves. By rehabilitating him, we lost sight of our objective. Remind me, what was the agency's protocol again? First Cooperation, then obfuscation, then disinformation, and finally sanction. Yeah SANCTION - AKA yeah some crap written by a demented old fucker trying to save the world from itself. We reordered that list soon enough. And by "Sanction" we mean a "9mm retirement plan".
We couldn't get near him until recently. Like actually touch him. He was a fucking ghost. Not even MO could get near him. And MO only needed to know ROUGHLY where the target might be. He'll bring the whole fucking block down on your head just to be sure.
Yes, dear reader, we tried this many times.
One time, we had Langford trapped in New York City Hall. We had eyes on him and had agents lock Langford inside the fucking East Wing. We cut the CCTV, blocked the emergency escapes, and welded all the doors closed. We pumped CS into the aircon. Mo brought the half of the Manhattan Civic Centre Hall down on top of him and Trump.
Langford reappeared a few days later without a scratch. Just repeated himself. And like a true pro, he took the opportunity to again blame the Russo-Euro Pact again. A born again and again and again politician.
This'll ping your popcorn: Remember the 9/11 attacks by "Delta Green and the Russians"?
What if I told you that Langford had Chicago razed and that it ACTUALLY WAS those crazy Saudis in New York? Everyone changed after that. Attacks orchestrated by Langford, conducted by Langford. His "Third War of Independence": a fake war with a fake enemy inspired a fresh wave of patriotism in a generation too young to remember anything other than peacetime.
Langford has properly hung his hat (no pun intended) one that libertarian meme everyone calls the "King's Crown". Like the other ancient symbol which Adolf so successfully reappropriated. Like that earlier symbol, it too brings together all the nicest people in all the nicest ways.
After being blamed for 9/11, we officially deactivated. And we made sure Langford knew.
Of course, we regrouped, stripped ourselves down to a steering committee, and went by the beautifully bland and uninformative name of "Security Studies Group". There were other equally greyscale codenames like "Yellow Combine", "Petrel Hill", "Threshold Curve" and "Silver See", which we changed to every few months or years to muddle the paper trail. Insiders eventually just nicknamed us "The Cowboys".
Langford used our new run-and-gun campaign as a convenient political reason to keep doing what he did. We continued to conduct our guerrilla campaign focussed on anything smelling remotely of The Night Floors: 1920s performance arts, whiskey, cigars, dried fruit, Kings, The Book, and The Sign. And we did it. We succeeded. We finally won today.
This is for Michelle. In 2007, she probably saw that play in Chicago, either by accident or design. Is there any difference anymore? She caught the rot and it spread everywhere, just like the other two hundred or so who were tricked into seeing the Play. A lot of people died so we all could keep on keeping on.
And with Langford gone, there is hope for those people. The Play, The King rarely pops up anymore. Langford was the last yellow stain on the earth to be wiped off. I just don't know about that Yellow Sign. I just don't know. It's everywhere and nowhere. I can't see it anymore.
It's true what they said: the only way out is through.
So, about my retirement plan.
The Program knows what I’ve been up to. Finally, after twenty years, a month, and two days, they figured it out. The news reached me fifteen minutes ago through six connections and two satellite bounces – the news that they were coming for us. Moe, me and my son.
We have, perhaps, another ten minutes before they arrive. They’ll come tromping through the sand and to a bullet in through our brains. Our communications have been “out of order” for hours, all except for the line I laid myself three years ago after hoarding the equipment for twice that time. That’s our escape route. A digital relay that will take this letter and the accompanying files and put them in the hands of my successors. A line that our slimy cable repairman's boys, know nothing of.
It may be enough to save this reality a few times more.
That’s it. Our power just died, except for the backup generator I installed in the basement for this room. They’re upstairs, tripping my internal alarms. In minutes Mo and I will trigger the three tonnes of explosives and we'll all be going to hell.
But first, I’m going to hit Send and put this information into the hands of a few people who will carry on the fight.
Entry One has been breached. Time to get this play on the road. They have no idea the kind of hell Mo has prepared for them.
May God have mercy on our souls.
The King is Dead. Long live The Cowboys.
(signed)
Nathan Brooks, Agent Macintosh, Head of The Cowboys
:: transmitted 1323 est 2/25/15::PGP encoding enabled::
Thank you for reading!
Open Secret - This is the bit you scroll to for fear of missing out on old memes, decades-old YouTube videos, and watching me live-blog my breakdown. Let’s GO!!!
AHHHH and LLMAI
- only went and blew the bloody doors off with this post about setting, technique and structure of a fascinating trailblazing horror writer. Also brought me back to playing Casting the Runes, and how much I appreciated how much fun I had. Really creeped out by our GM.
I had the misfortune of sitting through (okay I signed up) AI webinar this week only to realise it was presented by a snakeoil salesman. I am pro LLM tools and anti-bullshit. Plus he didn’t answer my question at the end. So that put a target on his back. LLMs are supercharged autocorrects, and are brilliant for some things. They are just not the magic bullet to tasks at scale or anything requiring authenticity. I use LLMs for research because Google broke the internet and it’s impossible to search for anything without having to ROLL SAN along the way.
Ed Zitron continues to be the angry voice of reason and clarity on tech, and he’ll explain it better than I can here. His website has this pretty artwork too.
“YOUR SKETCHES HAVE IMPROVED”
Big thanks to lol-it-leah for creating an amazing (if slightly terrifying) illustration to go with this post.
STOP IT
After being convinced by
gushing, I moved my notes (well just my TTRPG prep to start) over to an app called Capacities. Shat my pants manually copying everything from obsidian, BUT, I’m never going back. It’s cool and really helps with complex linked worlds or stories. Such as the Impossible Landscapes campaign we’re playing. Will it help you write? No. Will it you store ideas, organise and find connection and inspiration? Yep. Julian sells the dream really well here.
FROM HELL
Old memes and interwebs keeping my heart fluttering include “Dune Sardaukar chant but it's a trap beat”, “A dumb thing that was wee-myself funny in bed at 1am is still funny”. The genre of “youtubepoop” and “hitting-the-wrong-notes” is less of a cottage industry, and more of an industrial-military-complex, designed to stop me sleeping. The YouTube “recommended for you” feed is completely shot now. Probably need to create a new account. Send help.
OUROBOROS
The Alien Romulus trailer is so indistinguishable from the low-effort-generative-fan-made-teaser-trailers and hits all the right notes if you’ve never seen any trailer from the franchise from the last forty fucking years. The ALIENS (1986) Trailer, is noticeable in its absence because it MUTHER-6000-TRUCKING ROCKS, and doesn’t quite fit the point I’m making. I am one of only two people on the planet who loved what Ridley Scott did with A:Pro and A:Cov, especially given that the Alien franchise is creatively bankrupt. Everything is borrowed. Please stop borrowing from yourself.
Bye for now and as ever. I’m blessed you scroll to the bottom of these.
Published by arrangement with the Delta Green Partnership. The intellectual property known as Delta Green is a trademark and copyright owned by the Delta Green Partnership, which has licensed its use here. The contents of this document are ©Andrew Simcock, ©RW, ©FK, & ©DY, except those elements that are components of the Delta Green intellectual property.
👋Waves in legal 👋
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I Love this. I know. Thanks. No, thank you.
Thanks for the shout-out, Andy! :D