Official

Official page for the San Bernardino County Department of Hypnoeconomics

[sbcdh]

In 1967 the government discovered that specific syllable structures combined with specific vocal tones and ultra-low-frequency sounds could speed up the process of unconscious internalization by over 1500%. This became particularly useful for teaching low-level employees large amounts of information, as "hypnophonic learning" could be done while the subject was asleep.

Hypnophone use became standard for new employees of the IRS and SEC, as it made large scale memorization of tax code and financial law significantly cheaper and easier than traditional conscious education.

However, long term use causes the subjects long term memory to atrophy, requiring nightly repetitions of hypnophone use. Some enterprising employees found that the effects could be counteracted with low dosages of LSD to preserve neuroplasticity.

Roughly 1 in 7 employees encountered a strange phenomenon: Mild financial clairvoyance.

One in roughly 50 employees experienced more significant effects, generally those ensconced in large isolated IRS warehouses, which seemed to replicate the monastic lifestyles of historical sages, depriving subjects of ordinary stimuli in favor of becoming attuned to minute changes in the sub-finantial background grid.

Once it was learned that these "enlightened" employees could predict market trends before they happened, the technology was bathed in funding, patented, and made the soul property of the IRS.

Now, these "Plutophants" are kept in nigh-perfect sensory deprivation at all times, fed a constant hypnotic fugue stream of psychic conditioning in the form of "radiosonic neuro-induction" which contains a special form of the United States Tax Code modified for recursive hypnophonic induction, as well as a ticker tape wired directly into the users spine.

The effects achieved are nothing short of stunning. The invisible hand is no longer invisible to us. The market can be fine tuned with surgical precision. The price of bread has maintained a perfect 0.002% +/- variance for over 25 years now, and those who attempt to disrupt the guidelines are regulated by the SECs crack psychonautics division, who are now able to hunt market manipulation via their disruption in the financial dreamscape.

Very rarely, a Plutophant can become so attuned to the guidelines that they achieve a sort of catastrophic neuro-depatterning, their synapses begin to produce a counter-signal to the neuro-induction frequencies; jamming, and eventually overpowering the machine. Study is still ongoing, but it is believed that they somehow perpetuate their own neurological fingerprint into the financial causal background grid itself, literally becoming "one with the market."

Study is ongoing.

[sbcdh]

Professor Imanaga was scared. I don’t think he really understood what he saw. 

Was he prone to visions? 

No, not at all. I mean, not that I know of. I worked with him back in the 90s, when he was still writing The Final Republic. I did hypnoregulatory work for like half my professors, but I didn’t become friends with them. Professor Imanaga was different. He was always such a friendly, level-headed guy. You know, I don’t think he really understood what his book would do. 

What it would do?

You know, all of it. Intellectuals don’t get attention like that. You might publish something that gets cited in congress. If you’re lucky, you might get interviewed on the news, but you don’t stick around. I don’t think Professor Imanaga was expecting to be –I dunno– elected? As the representative for Equilibralism. 

Public attention can be stressful. How did he handle it?

I think he liked it, in his own way. He was used to talking in front of people, and he could handle an interview. Even back in the 90s he was the type of guy to answer “I don’t know” or “let me think about it.” He would start every conversation with “well, let us define our terms-” that sorta thing. He’s always had that whole thoughtful grandpa vibe. I think that’s part of why he handled the success of Final Republic so well.

I imagine the professor has a complicated relationship to his work. 

Eh. I think he stands by the thesis. You gotta remember, he wrote Final Republic back in 94. The wall just fell. Everyone was liberalizing. Liberalizing and hypnoeconomizing. Before that, damn near every intellectual was saying that some system would eclipse liberal democracy. It really did seem like the future was gonna be liberal democracy hooked up to a hypnoeconomy. I don’t think he was wrong. The world is still mostly equilibral systems. Most people seemed to agree.

It must have been a strange time for him, getting so much attention as a professor. 

Maybe? It was kinda sweet. He would call me every weekend and tell me stories of all the talk shows and panels and dinners he was asked to be on. Half the time I already saw them on TV, but it was nice to hear him talk. He was so excited! Sometimes he would even invite me as a plus-one when he needed a hypnoregulatory specialist. He was always more interested in the sociological side of things. He left the nitty-gritty of hypnoregulation to the doctorate students. 

Dinners?

Oh yeah. People were always inviting him to stuff. You know one time, we were in Cambridge, just wandering around looking for a bite to eat. So we walked into some restaurant. Waiter asks if we have a reservation. We say no we don’t have a reservation. Hes about to turn us away when –get this– Henry fucking Kissinger walks up to professor Imanaga, shakes his hand, and invites him to come sit down for dinner with the owner of the restaurant! The whole time we just kept looking at each other like we just got a free ticket to Disneyland. Food was great too. Thats where he met Krauthammer. 

That is journalist Charles Krauthammer? 

Yeah. Pretty soon he was hanging out with all those guys. Kept inviting the professor to state dinners. Lotta country clubs. All that stuff. Every friday I’d get weekend updates about the people he met and who he was talking to. It was like getting a whole second education in American politics. He’d tell me how many politicians loved his book, how popular it was. 

If I recall correctly, professor Imanaga has attempted to distance himself from Equilibralism as an ideology. 

Oh he hates the term. He never used it himself. It was some columnist from the New Left Review who actually came up with it. The principle is more or less the same; liberal democracy hooked up to a hypnoregulated economy. Actually…no. Now that I think about it, he wouldn’t use the word hate. He would always say he “strongly disliked” stuff. He’d say equilibralism is imprecise. It implies a see-saw relationship rather than symbiotic relationship.

I see. What would you say turned the professor away from contemporary Equilibralism?

Iraq. 

You sound very sure. 

Iraq. He called me up one night. I think it was 2004. I think he had been crying. Like, he wasn’t crying on the phone, but he had been crying earlier. I’d never heard him like that before. Not until, well, you know. He told me about this dinner. He told me “They were all cheering.” you know, cheering for the war, for the whole new “unipolar” world. He said it was all one big blunder. He hasn’t talked to Wolfowitz or Cheney or any of those guys since. 

I see. 

I think it was, I dunno, sudden for him. It was a surprise. He sounded like he just learned an old friend had fallen off the wagon. Or like- Nah I dunno. I dunno. I can’t tell you what was in his mind. But he felt confused and betrayed. He said he was gonna head out to- Oh my god. Oh my god he said he was gonna go to his house in Reno. 

Reno?

Yeah. He had a little desert ranch way out in Reno. He’d go out there in winter when he needed to relax. You know, I think- yeah. Yeah he invited me out for Christmas that year. I remember he didn’t seem 100%, but having people around seemed to help his mood. I remember it was late and we’d been drinking wine. Once the sun had set he asked me about religion. 

Was he religious? 

Well, thats the thing. He didn’t really go to church but his father was a minister. I was just surprised because he never talked about it. He never seemed remotely interested in religion. He never brought it up again I just- I think thats when he had his vision. He didn’t tell me until years later but I think thats when it happened. Oh my god, that’s when he must’ve wrecked his car too. It has to be. He told me he wrecked his car on the way to Reno. 

Slow down. Start at the beginning.

Okay. Okay. I think, in February of 2004, Professor Imanaga goes to this dinner. It upsets him, and he wants to go out to his house in Reno to calm down. He totals his car and has a near-death experience. He sees something, but he keeps it quiet. Later he invites me to Christmas, and he tries to tell me but hes nervous about –I dunno– being seen as crazy? Then a few days ago, he left me a voicemail where he tells me the story. So I come to you people.

He didn’t tell his children? His wife?

No. I think…I think he was worried he would come off as crazy. And you know, I was his touchstone for hypnoeconomic matters. Its kinda intimate, doing someones taxes, its kinda like being in their brain. 

Do you have the voicemail with you?

Yes, here give me a moment. Here.

“-eant to tell you a long time ago. It was early in the morning. The sun hadn’t come up yet. I was driving in from Tahoe and there was something in my headlights. It was some sort of reptile, a big fat iguana or something like that. I swerved to avoid it, and rolled the car bad. 

I think I was thrown. The next thing I know, I was lying facedown in the dirt. I couldn’t feel a thing. To- to tell you the truth I thought I might’ve died. I could’ve sworn I wore my seatbelt. That was my first thought, honest. I could’ve sworn I wore my seatbelt. I never drive without it, but I was thrown clear. I think I was in shock. I couldn’t move, or speak, or call for help. All I could do was lay there and watch the car burn. But then- 

I wasn’t thinking straight. I couldn’t have. But I remember it so clearly. Sitting there on the burning undercarriage. It was a lamb. It had a little golden bell around its neck like they have in cartoons, and it- I swear on my life it was smoking a cigarette. Just…balanced there in its little hoof. I remember it so clearly, like it’s still right there in front of me. Everything else is so hazy and the lamb just, isn’t. 

It talked to me. It said –and I remember this clearly– It said “A storm is blowing from Las Vegas, Thomas. It’s blowing so hard the planes can only fly one way.” And it kept looking over its shoulder. I could see over its shoulder. There was nothing there! So I asked it. I asked “What are you looking at? What is back there?” And the lamb looked at me. I think it was crying. It looked at me and took a long drag on the cigarette and it said “Everything, Thomas.”

I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Good god, its like I’m back there again. I’ve never told anyone about this. Not one. But I have to tell someone. The next thing I remember is the ambulance. The lamb was there. One of the paramedics was holding it like a child. It said “Don’t worry Thomas. You’ve done nothing wrong.” I- I don’t think I’ve done anything wrong. Have I done something wrong? I just don’t understand. 

I’m sorry. I don’t know why I’m telling you this. I thought this sort of thing would fade with age. But it hasn’t. It just hasn’t. I swear on my life this was the first and only time. That morning in the ambulance. That was the last time I ever dreamed like this.”

That’s where it ends. 

Have you spoken with Professor Imanaga about this? 

That’s part of why I came to you. Probably hasn’t hit the news yet. I went over to Thomas’s house just this morning. He passed last night. Peacefully, in his sleep. 

[sbcdh]

Dad wasn’t a nice guy. I don’t think I need to tell you that. But don’t believe the media. I don’t think he was evil. People give him a bad rap, or, they gave him a bad rap for the wrong reasons.  They didn’t know the man like I did. 

Tell me more about that.

He loved Emmett more. Told me himself, straight as whiskey. Emmett was tall, went to Harvard business school. Helped dad out in the oil fields. Well, helped in the oil fields at first anyway. He was clever. Had a melon like a jackknife and a nose like a bloodhound for finding tar sands. I never really knew how he did it. And well, look at me. I definitely took more after dad. Short fat and bad tempered. Ha! I really took after dad. I went to Harvard too, of course. But I went for geology. Fuckin’ geology. Yeah I knew dad better than any other man on earth.

Why do you say that?

Theres a way of knowing that only happens when you need someone to notice you. You need that like the air you breathe. You know everything about them. Learn the things they like, when their moods swing round, what they want and fear and dream about. Emmett didn’t have to care about stuff like that. Emmett was a golden boy. 

He was quite skilled at finding oil wells.

You know he damn well was. Never did figure out how he did that. You know doc, now that you got me on the couch, you got me wonderin’. You reckon it was somethin’ hypno-economical? It always did seem like he could sniff out tar sands from over the damn horizon.

It is possible. I would like to talk more about you, and your relationship with your father. 

Bet you do. Emmett was the key to everything. Dad made a lot of money early on. Said he was real good at cards. Said he made money cheating loggers at table games up in Canada. Who the hell knows? Point is by the time I was born he was already speculating in land. WWI was a great time for that shit…You know… You know that reminds me. You know what my earliest memory of dad was? It was him, covered in fuckin crude from a new well. Painted head to toe like…like a doll. One of those old ones you only see in antique shops these days. He was smilin wide with big bright teeth and big bright eyes. He was shoutin to Gert about something and they were both real excited. 

That would be Gertrude Jager, your m-

Emmett’s mom. 

Yes, of course. Apologies. Please continue. 

We were outside. It was early in the morning and I could feel the sun on my back. I had this blanket Gert made me and I was holdin’ it in my little fist. Just like this. Hey doc what are you writin’ there?

Notes on our conversation. Was there any sign of his…

Ascension to the throne of the god-pharaoh? Ha. I was wondering when you’d bring that up. You know, I think it was Emmett.

Emmett?

Yeah. Well, it wasn’t nothin’ Emmett did per se. He just. Well, its a big family, lotta big personalities you know? Dad wasn’t the best about keepin a lid on his temper, but Emmett. He was a bit funny. He’d work for hours on end. I seen him spend eight whole hours out in the fields, writing in some little notebook, come home to the house, and then spend eight more hours writing at the dinner table while the help brought him hotdogs. It was the same thing every time. Hot dogs, shredded cabbage, and beer. He’d eat nothin’ but that for days on end. Then he’d get all quiet. Lock himself in his room, drink himself to sleep. 

You weren’t concerned? 

I was 15. And the family’s got a lotta big personalities. 

What changed?

It was the Wolf Basin lode. You gotta think about that for a second. One million barrels of oil, right when uncle sam is at his thirstiest. Daddy had always hobnobbed with politicians, but they were practically lining up outside the door. They were buyin’ him dinner, and he would up and tell em to take a hike! Imagine that! He would come home late at night, I never seen him happier. He tell me about all the things he said to those men. Made him happier than a pig in shit. 

The success is what changed him? 

Maybe. It weren’t just the money. It was the power. The letters he got. Official United States letterhead. Comin’ in from the governor and senators and once or twice even president Truman. Sometimes I’d see him at his desk just starin at em, not opened or nothin’. He just looked at em. That’s when he started readin’ about Egypt and whatnot. Told me he wanted to know about the old kings. Wanted to rule his domain properly. Read all sorts of things about the middle kingdom and Ptolemy and Ramses II. He’d ramble for hours if you let him. Then one day, he comes back from the Rio Grande in a homemade Nemes. 

Nemes? 

Thats the crown of the Pharaohs. He told us that. I think he made his outta old flour sacks. Said he was chosen by Aten to build a new kingdom-o-the-dead right here in Plano. 

That seems quite sudden. 

It was. It was sudden. Well- Well it was kinda sudden. I think it had somethin’ to do with Emmett. This was around when his funny moods were gettin’ bad. Real bad. He was workin’ himself to string. He weren’t eatin’ or sleepin’. Dad had politicians comin over every damn day to look at the oil fields and Emmett was like a ghost. He couldn’t work! I think dad was scared, because he knew Emmett was the key and none of it would work without him. He started wearin the Nemes more. Wore it round the house with a collar and a robe and whatnot. Started carryin’ a scepter. All that. The politicians and the media thought it was a hoot. They thought he was just bein funny. Or like it was some freemason thing. He could get a laugh back then. They just thought he was bein’ funny. 

You don’t seem to share the sentiment.

No ma’am. He’d go into these rages. They were kinda like Emmett’s but, I dunno. Different, but the same. Ranting and raving about the english language “defiling” sacred hieroglyphics, navigatin du’at, securin himself a place in the field of reeds. He even made the help carry around palm fronds to fan him with. Even bought that purple Rolls Royce so he could travel around like Cleopatra did. Said it was the color of empire. It was around then. Yeah. He wanted to tear down the western guest house, and rebuild it on the north side of the property, so he could build a temple to Aten on the western side of the property. He and Emmett got into one hell of a fight. They’d gone at it before but not like that. It did somethin’ to Emmett. He locked himself in his room, wouldn’t eat or sleep. Sure as hell couldn’t work. A month turned into two, then six. There’d be a day when it seemed like Emmett was his normal self then, well then he’d fall right back down into his mood. Then, well. 

What happened?

Some doctor said we oughta try lobotomy. You know, to fix Emmetts moods. Get him back to work. Dad jumped at it. With Emmett out of the fields he wasn’t making money half as fast as he used to. Practically dragged him to the doctors himself. Couldn’t get the pick behind his eyes fast enough the bastard. It broke him doc. Broke him ways I didn’t know a man could break. He- 

Take your time.

He wouldn’t touch the table when he ate. Thought it would shock him like the doctors shocked him. He would break down crying and screaming if you asked him any sort of question. Ask him what he wanted for dinner and he wouldn’t know, and that would scare him, and it would scare him so bad he would tear out his own hair. Sometimes he’d just go quiet. Sometimes he’d just wander around the house. Then there were the nurses. 

Nurses?

Yes Ma’am. See, dad got Emmett right back to work. But Emmett uh. Lord. He couldn’t focus. You couldn’t leave him alone for two minutes without him abusin’ himself in front of everyone. Hands down his pants, primin’ the pumps. So dad hired a bunch of fancy whores to follow him around dressed as nurses. If we had good company over, and Emmett started to get the itch, they’d just pull him into the next room like he was havin’ some kinda medical episode. 

I- really?

Hand to God doc. Tell ya the truth its nice to tell someone about it. This psychotherapy shit is pretty nice. God. I remember one day. Drivin out to the basin in dads big stupid purple Rolls. He brought me along just to take notes. I was shotgun with all the papers, dad in the drivers seat in his Nemes, Emmett in the back seat playin’ hell with the whores. We got out, miles and miles from any other living souls. I remember gettin’ to check one of the dericks. Big ol mean dinosaur lookin’ thing, high heat middle of summer. It was dad and I glarin’ up at it. I was trying to actually check the damn pumps, dad was sermonating loud n’ proud about the rays of Aten while one of the whores was tryin’ to suck off Emmett. And its like I didn’t even care. I didn’t care one bit doc. I was just tryin’ to check the sediment. 

I- Well, you’ve done very well for yourself despite everything. 

Nah. Dad was fallin’ apart. I was just there to pick up the pieces. He couldn’t handle what happened to Emmett. Its like someone cut off dad’s own legs. It unhitched him from the world. 

How so?

Well, he got convinced the Jews did it. Somehow, he got it into his head that the Jews were poisoning all the food in texas, and that uh -Jew poison- was makin’ Emmett like that. It was dad’s thought that the lobotomy woulda worked if it weren’t for the international bolsheviks. He would only ever eat food he grew on the family farm. Even turned a bit of the chemistry division of the business into that vitamin company. 

Yes, its in my notes. Vitazon. 

Vitazon! That’s the one! Said every pill had a bit o’gold in it, straight from the rays of Atem. Said it- Oh what the hell was it. Said it only worked if you… There was some funny little jingle he wrote for it. Ah hell. The point was the pills only “worked” if you ate em every meal, and that meant subscribing to the company. A whole month’s supply of Vitazon, that was all you needed to purge the Judeo-Bolshevism from your body. Buncha nonsense. Made good money though. 

I see. Did you and your father ever reconcile before he passed?

Nah. He kicked the bucket before I got my big deal with the Saudis. Good riddance. You know what the last thing he said to me was? He called me while I was on a fishing trip up in big bear. I pick up the phone, and he starts rambling about how he wanted to be mummified. He wanted a full new-kingdom funeral. He said catholics weren’t allowed because they were a “semitic people.” I had him cremated, the bastard. But Emmett technically owns the estate. I think his ashes are kept in the temple of Aten, in one of those funny jars with the animal heads. 

What about Emmett?

You know doc, I don’t really like thinkin’ about Emmett. He’s living at the old house. But he’s got proper doctors to take care of him now. I saw to that. They send me letters every few months. Apparently he’s better than he used to be. Calmer. They say he just shuffles around the house wearin’ dads old Nemes. I think it makes him happy.

[sbcdh]

From the diary of Sophia Xafa

I cannot shake the feeling that I have forgotten something. I am tangled around an absence, a skein of brief and livid market activity twirled around a hollow rod and by god I can feel that absence within me. Something terrible does not lurk at the edge of my thoughts. It started simply enough. Pins of ethical quandaries placed into thoughts for later. Half-formed marginalia doodles in old notebooks like torn pieces of a yellowed jigsaw puzzle. Comments on lecture tours. It nags at me. Decades upon decades of study, and yet it nags. My papers are strewn about the floor. Leaves of scribbled and printed economic theory, torn from the pages of my own work, fanned in promenade like prayer rugs aimed to the old kaaba of my ignorance. The far walls of the apartment seem an ocean away. I feel adrift in a great dark sea with only this island of paper as a raft. Somewhere, buried beneath it all, perhaps swimming in the depths of that great dark sea, is an implication. In 1720 a man, a murderer and thief of stock slips, was put to death in the name of keeping the share price of the Mississippi company afloat. He was broken on the wheel in the center of Paris for his crimes. I never learned how many people saw him die. My eyes wander to torn pages of Confusion of Confusions, they waltz with its stilted and rabbinical prose. I draw the pages close. You, Joseph. What did you see?

The facing page bares only the following text:

I cannot sleep

[sbcdh]

It is said by those of a mythopoeic hermeneutic that Sofia Xafa began writing Economics of the Unconscious in the shadow of the Parthenon.

One can picture a young and dolorous Xafa, wandering the streets of a postwar Athens, arms stuffed with books on Jungian psychology, Indian anthropology, and handwritten papers baring her frustrations to only herself. Perhaps she finds respite in the shadows of the ancient marble, and in that oasis of antique dark she finds serenity. One can imagine how the sunlight would filter through the weathered attic pillars and come to rest upon a blank page. A clearing in the idealogical woods upon which to build a home.

How can we blame Xafa? Disageeements aside, If the past decades proved anything to her, it was the weakness of democracy's grip on the reigns of history, and long term instabilité (to use her own terminology) of fascism. Her home lie in ruins. Trust in social institutions was routinely betrayed. One could not afford bread.

There is, I think, an empericality to capitalism that attracted Xafa. Not to imply an empirical truth per se, but the mathematics of trade provided to her a quantification to psychology. Yes. I think perhaps Xafa saw herself as a cartographer of the psyche, and the mathematics of gross domestic products and annuities were her compass and rule.

I think Xafa understood that this was a path she must not err from. Analysis of her drafts and unpublished manuscrips reveal a careful and circuitous avoidance of many implied issues with hypnoeconomic theory. She became increasingly frustrated with the ideas which metastisized from the attempted purity of her theories. There is no small amount of private chastisement of what she came to see as foolish and naive points from her earlier work.

By the end of her life she was plagued with a terminal disasstisfaction with Hypnoeconomics. She wrote of her own theories as vestigial, even disgusting. There was a yearning for capital-t Truth, a true and empirical bedrock of analytical tools with which to understand the world. Yet, she repeatedly found them inadequate, and she found that inadequacy disgusting. Her sleep was plagued with nightmares she would not describe.

[sbcdh]

Sophia Xafa solves the main problem of Carl Jung, yes? The problem of Jung is that he wishes for some underlying, material, substrata for culture. He is a Democritus, a natural philosopher digging to find the atom of the mind, the smallest meaningful idea. He wishes to find the building blocks of philosophy in the mythology of a culture.This is nonsense you understand. He searches for the mind-atoms in stories of dragons and floods. In this, he mistakes popularity for universality, and universality for the material. 

Xafa is a student of Jungian thought, but instead of nonsense stories of lobsters, she mines for the mind-atoms in the market. Ahh yes, here we have something. Here we have the web of material connections. Here we have the mathematics of not only value, but the perception of value. A difficult thing to quantify, yes? Xafa attempts this, and I think many argue she fails, but her words for hypnoeconomic philosophy get the…the –what is the fucking English phrase– get the ball rolling. 

Xafa I think begins from a place of frustration with Jung. It is difficult to spend much time with Jung before kicking over discussions of dreams and motifs and other nonsense. I think Xafa desired material application for Jungian theories. She is a woman who grows up in Greece as the fascists take over. I think Sophia Xafa is disillusioned of many things. Ideology, politics, art, religion, and so on. She comes to hate these things, or some element of these things. She rejects what she calls the “illusions of modernity.”

What makes art good to Sophia Xafa? How much one can pay for it. Art is purchased for 100 dollars, it is one hundred dollars good. Anything beyond this is an illusion of modernity for Sophia Xafa. What is more –I will repeat her Einstein metaphor here– just as a steel ball will warp a stretched fabric of silk, and just as the moon will warp the fabric of space-time, a painting worth 100 dollars will warp the fabric of market-neurology. 

[sbcdh]

I believe the English phrase is “odd duck.” Yes. Jan Kargad was an Odd Duck. He was born in 1922, right after Georgia joined the Soviet Union, in a commune outside of Batumi. But this was not a normal commune no. His parents were strange people. A small group of Dutch fuckers, very protestant people, started a winery in the countryside where they could read their bibles. You would think they did not get along with the Marxists, but you would be wrong. They loved work. The bible loved work. There was no problem.

Well, that is not entirely true. Jan was a bit of a problem. He was born with a “weak constitution.” We do not know what that meant exactly, but farmwork would give him seizures and very high fevers. He was not a good child for farm work. So, they taught him arithmetic. Young Jan was in charge of counting grapes and bottles of wine and so on. Maybe the Apparatchik did not mind a child doing all the counting, maybe he was bribed, maybe he did not give a shit. I do not know. But Jan was in charge of all the counting and, what is the fucking word- logistics. Yes. Logistics. And he was very good at logistics. 

There are theories as to his upbringing yes. Studying the bible alongside Marx and Lenin and so on. But I do not believe this. In Chechnya in those days many studied the bible and Marx like Jan Kargad, but we did not become like Jan Kargad. I think perhaps it was the fevers. One sees things with a fever when it is bad enough, yes. 

Kargad also studied the capitalists. He was very good at this. He read Adam Smith, but also Issac Newton, the South Seas bubble, and most famously the Tulip Panic. They say his journals were filled with pressed tulips. He was a bit of a, what is the fucking English word- pervert. A pervert for organizing things and numbers and so on. Jan Kargad loves logistics like a man loves his wife, and tulips are a symbol of this for him. They became a microcosm for him. You see how the bud unfolds into many petals, its is very similar to how capitalism unfurls into its many aspects in the world. But, I am getting ahead of myself. 

One day, after all of his schooling, Kargad has a terrible fever, more terrible than any fever he has ever had. This is in the early 1940s some time. After this fever he becomes strange. Well, stranger than he already was. He speaks of men with golden dog masks, their necks chained to the sun, tulips growing from their eyes, all of that shit. He never goes outside again. He becomes fearful of the sun. He does not let it touch his skin. 

He writes intensely for the next three years. I have seen his original notebooks and they are stained with sweat. This man is not well, but he writes. He does not get help, because he is very good at analyzing agricultural output. I believe it grounded him some how, to spend days without sleep, reading spreadsheets about grapes and wheat and so on. 

He is no longer christian. He throws out all of the crosses in his home, and replaces them with grape-cutters. They are similar to a sickle, but with a long handle, for reaching up and cutting off high bunches of grapes. He becomes obsessed with this idea of the grape cutter, and he begins to paint. And this is where many first learn of him. He influences a group of artists who become famous in the southern soviet union, though they are occasionally derided as being “mystical.” I personally? I love the drawings. Many figures reaching up to pluck grapes from the sun. It becomes the central theme of his work.

Here people discover his strange writings. But first he is considered a strange mystic. His early writings are still very christian yes, and this influences how he is read in the west. Many think he is speaking of hyper-economics or whatever fetishistic bull shit the americans are calling it. But I do not think so. His work is very soviet. There are stories yes, of good soviet men drinking coffee and loving spreadsheets like a man loves his wife, and in this they become a little bit like Jan Kargad. They are –you do not have an English term for this– cutting grapes from the sun. But this is not a serious phrase you understand. These men are perverts.

[sbcdh]

“Oh gosh the fire. Yes it was truly a tragedy. You know, HECA79 was the prototype for the new regulation model. Well, haha, new for the time. It was the seventies after all. It really is fascinating. She was the first one we put in the class N tanks. Fascinating technology for the time, clever as the dickens. You see, the insides of the tank were to be lined with a thin layer of magnetically laminated gold calcite particles that formed a reflective lattice under electrical stimulation. A gold plated one-way mirror for brainwaves! I’m sure you understand, it was the best we could do for 1983-”

“So you subscribe to the, uh, equipment malfunction theory?”

“Huh? Oh! Oh. Terribly sorry. Equipment malfunction? As I recall, it functioned quite well.”

“So you believe the fire was caused by something else?”

“The fire? Oh. Well, I’m not quite sure. I don’t know the exact specifications, but if I recall correctly, there were all sorts of firebreaks and engineers and junior-engineers stationed all around –all helmeted, mind you– to make sure that sort of thing never happened.”

“And yet.”

“And yet. Indeed…Well, between you and me, I think It was one of the junior engineers.”

“Is that so?”

“Oh yes. We were a bit of a maverick bunch back then. Reagan gave us all that research money, but, well, its always a bit different when the wheels hit the pavement haha. Oh. Oh. I hope I haven’t gotten anyone in trouble. They were nice lads all. Well, some of them were Germans, but nice lads.”

“We are more interested in your observations of HECA79. I was told you were able to directly observe her during the incident. If there is anything you can tell us, please, speak loudly enough for the tape to hear.”

“Oh! Oh gosh. You know, I completely forgot we were being taped haha! And you caught all of my rambling! Well, I think I can help you out. Oh yes. Now. You must understand. A good half of this is going to be embellished. You know how memories go, you always get more heroic looking back as time goes on haha. But yes, I think I can help you out. Ah, where should I start?”

“What was the first thing out of the ordinary that you noticed?”

“Her lips were moving.”

“Is that out of the ordinary?”

“By gosh for a plutophant yes! At full emmanation, there is no part of them that is not the market! Every neuron soaked in hypno-amphetamine rocket fuel! Most of them –if you’ll pardon my language sir– shit their tanks the moment their Id touches the sub-finantial background grid! What do you think half those tubes are for! A plutophant in full emmanation doesn’t have a braincell to spare to keep their sphincters closed, much less perform something as complex as speech!”

“I see. Could you make out what the asset was saying?”

“Oh no. No, I’m afraid not. I can’t read lips. Back in those days, they were hooked up to a helmet, and then the helmet read the delta-wave patterns, and then printed that on magnetic tape. That way, we could feed the tape to some lob-, ah translators, and have them interpret the feed.”

“When did her lips start to move? What time of day?”

“Funny thing, almost exactly at 12:03. I should have been off at lunch, but I was procrastinating. I had a crossword I was right on the edge of solving. It was one of those big words that goes all the way across the page. TIMEPIECE. I remember that clear as day.”

“Interesting. I have here that equipment registered the fire almost exactly seven minutes later.”

“Oh dear. Do you understand what that means sir?”

“No, please, enlighten me.”

“Is that a schematic of the N class tank you have there? Hand it over. Thank you sir. So. Back in 1983, we didn’t have any of the fancy digital equipment we have now. Well, we did, but not to the same degree. Most of our equipment was good old analogue. You see this module here? These weren’t part of our system. No, we were waiting on the replacements to show up.”

“And, what is that part?” 

“Think of it like the uh, ah yes, the carburetor in a car. It keeps everything balanced. Keeps the subjects metabolism steady so they don’t chew through the drugs too fast, keeps the tank at the ideal temperature for chemical reactions, without boiling the subject like a lobster haha. But the key is, it was completely mechanical. But at the end of the day, it's just a bunch of tubes full of fluid that move based on pressure differentials.”

“Which means?”

“Well, heat would throw it off.”

“Here, I think we have a schematic. Now, doctor, this is very important. I need you to explain to me exactly how the machine malfunctioned, and how it would affect HECA79.”

“Well technically, it wasn’t malfunctioning at all. It was functioning correctly, just under less-than-ideal circumstances. Oh, haha. Yes, haha, but thats not what you’re looking for haha. Yes. Well. What side did the fire hit it from? Do you know?”

“This one here.”

“Fascinating. Well. Then, the apparatus would have uh, hm. Oh dear.”

“Doctor.”

“It would have spiked the hypnostimulant feed, while introducing impurities.”

“Which means?”

“I- I haven’t the slightest idea. It would've been deadly, I can assure you that. But its as if…Its as if you had a car, coasting in neutral, downhill at terminal velocity, and then you switched gears to high gear, and then slammed the gas while spraying rocket fuel into the intake.”

“Could we ask you to write a full report on your speculation?”

“Frankly sir, I am as intrigued as you are. You would have to hold my wrists to keep me from writing on this. Fascinating.”

ENCLOSED: FINAL READOUT OF HECA79

"BUY GOLD BUY GOLD BUY GOLD BUY GOLD BUY GOLD BUY GOLD BUY GOLD BUY GOLD BUY GOLD BUY GOLD BUY GOLD BUY GOLD BUY GOLD BUY GOLD BUY GOLD BUY GOLD BUY GOLD BUY GOLD BUY GOLD BUY GOLD BUY GOLD BUY GOLD BUY GOLD BUY GOLD BUY GOLD BUY GOLD BUY GOLD BUY GOLD BUY GOLD BUY GOLD"[Phrase repeats over twenty thousand times.]

[sbcdh]

Xafanian economic theories eventually made their way to the Soviet Union, where they were met with a mixture of derision and confusion. Broadly speaking, the idea of treating the market as a transcendent mind, capable of making descions and exerting will, was incompatible with Marxist economics.

Few writers even dedicated the time to respond to Xafa's work. In fact, the brunt of soviet responses came from local state-sponsored humorist columns, who mocked Xafa's meandering theoretical writing, and frankly strange greco-american jingoism. Even the title "A Theory of Hypnoeconomics" was mocked by satirist Fyodor Babkin as "a fitting name, as it requires being asleep to believe."

This is not to say that criticisms of Hypnoeconomics were popular. The reality is quite the opposite. The heyday of Xafanian economics were highly specialized. Most Soviet citizens were not even aware of such a niche writer, much less any mockery of her work.

This changed during the Regan years, with the widescale roll out of Hypnoregulatory practices. Soviet intelligencia had a veritable field day. To quote Babkin:

"The state religion of America has always been money. Now, they can afford to pay a priesthood."

The concept was even mocked in a popular Russian sitcom Sashka, in which the titular foul-mouth jokes:

"Take a piss on that [nonsense, referring to hypnostimulant JVH-1], does it make you "One with the toilet?""

However, this came on the back of more significant criticisms. More than nineteen Soviet economists collaborated on an internal documentation, recently declassified, detailing their research into hypnoeconomic practices. These are notable, in that they do not engage with the parapsychological elements of Hypnoeconomics in the least. Their criticisms are strictly material.

"The poor are still poor, the bourgeois still bourgois. Small market collapses have still occured, and while the Americans call this intentional, these claims are unfalsifiable. By any material measure, the Hypnoeconomics program is a profound waste of money, resources, and capital. Any potential benefits to market analysists enhanced with mind-altering substances are hampered in that their regulatory arm ultimately answers to existing financial apparatuses of bourgeois power."

This sentiment was perhaps better summarized by Babkin:

"If the Americans did have psychics who could predict the stock market. They would not listen half the time."

[sbcdh]

"You're a pervert."

"I'm sorry?"

"Your brain. It's tens of thousands of tiny cocks and holes fucking each other in a line. Take a deep breath and hold it, it's a neurochemical orgy busting a million little nuts an hour. There's no bottom buddy. It's cocks all the way down."

"Sure."

"Sure. Fuck off. Pervert. That's all you are. Youve never been on the rough stuff."

"Pervert? You keep using that word."

"Yeah. Pervert. You like to watch. World is full of people fucking each other. That's the whole economy. Our great nation. Just a bunch of dicks and holes and eyeballs takin' it all in. It's nervebag shit. Weighing your options, thinking about the future. Opportunity cost. Shit makes me hurl just thinking about it. You know why? You're edging yourself big man. Letting those nerves run hot. So, so hot. But you're not buying. Just lettin' em sit there, idling right on the runway. Blast off, Major Tom. Live a little."

"I will take that into advisement."

"Rough shit."

[sbcdh]

"You saw it?"

"For a second. Yeah. I saw one."

"Start at the beginning."

"Hoo. Okay. Uhhh... It was 77. I think. I was air force. Or, hypnoengineering support staff contracted to help out around St. Louis."

"That's how you came into your supply of JVH-1"

"It was JVH-11 actually, and yeah, the fuckin, uh- the requisitions officer at Scott was an old buddy of mine. We used to fuck around in college before I, you know-"

"Yes I understand."

"I worked records for Sears-Roebuck, I had all the accounting expertise, as well as a ready supply of LSD."

"How did you start?"

"Oh it was easy at first. Really just selling off phials of the new experimental stuff to finance guys. They'd go nuts for the stuff, pay top dollar for it too. Hell, I could get 100$ for a milliliter. Made it easy to keep my contacts bought in and re-invested. Honestly I don't think the req office would even know that we were skimming if they weren't in on it.

But, you know how it is with hypnoregulation. Transchronological market data is worth it's weight in diamond. It started with the odd photo of a 2q-week readout, then biometric data, then, uh- then. Well, we decided to try it ourselves."

"You attempted full sub-finantial emmanation?"

"No no god no, what're you nuts? No, see. We figured if one person can meld their brain with the market, we just had to get as close as we could to that guy, and mark the twain, hypnologically speaking."

"Mark the twain?"

"Yeah, see, okay. A plutophant in full emmanation isn't like us. We exist at a single point in time, an R1 rational market actor. But they exist in multiple points in time, back in 77, I think the government could hit R6 with that analogue tech. Most people can hit R2 with a single hit of JVH-1, with practice you can hit R3, but anything higher than R3 takes a pretty serious support team. But here's the thing, I had a whole cadre of co-implicated members of a military grade hypnoengineering support team. All we needed was the space."

"The warehouse. Schaeffer Marble and Tile was it?"

"Bingo. See here's the thing. You know why the government had to start building those special regulation temples? It's not just for security. Once you crack the R6 barrier, Plutophants start leaving what's called a wake. You know, like a fuckin, uh, like a boat. They're imperceptible to normal people, but if you have sensitive enough instruments or, say, a person in the edge of sub-market emmanation.

See the government didn't know at the time, but if you balanced the drugs just right, and kept someone right on the edge of R4, you could actually read the plutophant's interpretations by their wake rather than their direct neurofeedback. It's not nearly as precise, but if you have a good team and you know what to look for, you can get some really, really valuable market data that way."

"And your co-worker?"

"You mean Mills? Fuck. Yeah...Mills. Right."

"Take your time."

"No, no I'm good. It's... It's uh, It's dangerous. Brains aren't meant to take that much JVH-11 all at once. We could stay on R4, but what we didn't have was a recovery team, or a medical team, or recon team. It was me, Mills, Israel, Connaught, and Marsh. The five of us were the only ones in the soup. Bruso was running the machines and Lasker was monitoring the readout."

"Can you tell us what happened?"

"Yeah. Yeah. It was a normal intrusion. Hypnogrid emmanation is pretty simple with our tech and support. Sedation was all green, hypnoinduction was green. Smooth as silk. Landed about 40 minutes from our work location. We had the codes from the IRSAW people that morning, all we had to do was maintain hypnoinduction for 40 minutes while traversing the colon and we'd be able to-"

"I'm sorry, colon?"

"Oh come on. Colon. Collective Unconscious. Col-Un. Colon."

"I- of course. Continue."

"Hey, have you ever been on a dive before?"

"Can we focus on your statement?"

"It's important. I need to know if this next bit is gonna make sense to you or not."

"I've undergone basic anti-intrusion training standard for IRS investigation task force officers."

"So you've done safe dives. White room? Castle training? Putting up the wall? All that jazz?"

"That's correct."

"Did they ever tell you why it's dangerous to perform off-site hypnoincursion in meta-unstsble hypnospace?"

"They did."

"Well they're lying...don't look at me like that. I'm not bullshitting you. They're lying...there's...there's shit out there okay? There's things out there."

"Mills?"

"Yeah. Mills. Uh..."

"Take your time."

"Yeah yeah. Quit interruptin me. Mills... Uh, yeah so we were T-Plus 30 into the dive. Bruso gives us a heads up that some hypnoflora is headed our way, but can't get a read on mass. Says we should steer clear, but we are so close. Israel had handled some hypnoflora before, so we weren't worried. But it was... I dunno. I can't explain."

"Do your best."

"Like. Okay. Meta-unstsble dives are fucked. They're acid trips. The St. Louis hypnoscape already doesn't look normal, but Scott Base looked like some kinda bastard lovechild of a medieval castle and a seashell, all twisting up into itself. The streets were a chessboard, and all the streetlights we're these tall kinda mannequin lookin' things holding a tiny sun in their hand. Everything is fucked, it's all topsy turvy. But it's okay, because it's meta-unstable hypnospace, its not SUPPOSED to be normal. And then there was a Red Sock."

"Like for the feet?"

"No. Like. In the middle of this fucked up dreamscape, there's suddenly a batter for the Boston Red Sox. He's standing there, maybe 50 feet away. He's got a bat in one hand and a mitt in the other, and he's just kinda walking towards us. Nobody really knew what to do. It didn't look dangerous, but something wasn't right. It didn't fit. We just kinda stood there, looking at the thing. Israel starts talking to Bruso, asking him what to do. Suddenly, Bruso is screaming at us, telling us to book it. He's screaming into the com, telling us to prepare for de-emmanation. Nobody knows what's happening. Israel is suddenly standing between Mills and the Red Sock, and..."

"Any information you can recall could be of use."

"It's...it's mostly feeling at this point. You ever been having a normal dream? Like, a good, normal dream? And suddenly you realize that something is really, really wrong? There's signs. For me? It's that the lights go out. Suddenly day turns to night, and something about this batter just makes me want to curl up and hide. Suddenly, moving through the world is like trying to swim through molasses. I try to run, but nothing moves, and everything is dark. The world is shifting. There's shadows under the bathroom door that can't be happening. A man who looks like Jesus. An old and terrible house and an old man with no name whose face I can't remember. The batter swings at Mills and she just...vanishes. Shes gone. Bruso pulls us out a second later."

"So this, batter killed Ms. Mills?"

"No."

"No?"

"No. We get out, she's comatose. Whatever that thing did to her, she was still in hypnospace. I gave her a hot shot of barbiturates. Her brain activity slowed to R0 after about 90 seconds."

[sbcdh]

"It wasn't one thing, you know, it was like, everything. Everything just kinda happened slow. It wasn't fast. It was slow.

It was, uhh... 1964, I think. LBJ was in office. Yeah, 1964. The government rolled out the whole hypnoeconomics thing in uh, sophomore year. Something like that. I didn't really watch the news, but I remember everyone talking about the election. I remember it being a big deal but, you know, seems like every time the government does something it's a big deal, you know? It's always like, fine. It's always fine.  

 I had just graduated from UC Santa Ana. I had a degree in photography. What do you even do with that? Photography. It was hard at first, shopping a portfolio around, doing weddings. I had a gig going for some real estate company. That was alright. Taking pictures of empty houses for speculators. Something like that. I didn't know the specifics. I was good at it. It's not hard once you know the equipment, and what the client wants. But you get tired of it, you know? You get tired of it.

My mom wasn't the nicest lady. She's my mom but, you know how mom's are. The only thing to do in west Texas was go to church. I was raised really Christian, and Santa Ana was just so different. I didn't know many people. I had a job that didn't feel right, no friends, no family, no church. So I was looking for a church. You got all sortsa stuff out here, you know? You know the Navigators right? That big megachurch? The first chapel was like, a 20 minute drive from student housing. There were always people out preaching in the quad.

It was a girl. Uh, Nadine. Nadine Galt. We had a 101 class together. Math, I think. We really hit it off. She was just funny, you know? She said she was from out of state too, had a really pretty gold cross necklace. I think she polished it. We had similar upbringings you know? Small Town girl, big city, not many friends. That sorta thing. She invited me to a party. A jewelry party.

I asked her "what was that" and she explained the whole concept to me. How she was an independent seller, how she had all these friends, how she was gonna buy us wine and food and show us the stuff she had this month. I liked her. It sounded fun. It was fun.

She said she did that every month. I didn't know too many people, and it was a good way to meet people, you know? I may have paid a bit much for some bracelets, but hey, she was good at selling bracelets. I looked forward to the jewelry parties. I did. Every month I looked forward to them.

I had been going for maybe a year, year and a half, and she asked me if I wanted to become a seller like her. She did it slow, you know, every once in a while she would ask me to stay after the party. I didn't think I could do it. I had a degree in photography, what did I know? But she layed it on thick. Told me I was just what she was looking for. And, well, she said the money was good. I needed money. Or, I had money, but I needed more you know? She made it sound so, well, important. Said we needed to do this, that a market needed competition, you know? That the hypnoeconomists couldn't really track people like us. She said we were "essential to a free financial dreamscape." She made it sound like we were a pair of cowgirls out on the open range together. She said I would be a natural.

And you know what? I was pretty good. At first at least. At first it was just helping out Nadine with her stuff, but she taught me how to talk, introduced me to her distributors, even taught me how to look for new clients. I held a party for some of my clients in real estate. Bought out a whole section of a fancy restaurant and invested in nice cases from the distributor. It didn't go well. I didn't make much profit at all. I think they were mostly pity-buying. I didn't make a cent.

All gold. Yep, all gold. And that wasn't a lie either. It had to be gold, or it wouldn't work.

Nadine went missing in, uh, 67 I think. I was heartbroken. And worried, you know? I was worried sick. Everyone was reaching out, asking if I was alright. Hell, excuse my language, even my mama reached out. Called me on the phone, said I was in her prayers.

The distributor reached out too. Colin. I didn't get another name. Just Colin. Called me one day to express his condolences. He had a nice voice, over the phone. Smooth. Kinda timid, but in a way you liked. I dunno how to describe it. You know what else he told me? He told me I was responsible for 89% of the profits for his channel. Eighty nine. Thinkin back now, I shoulda known that was a bunch of bullshit. He said he wanted to meet with me at the company headquarters in Pasadena. Once I was ready of course. Said he wanted to "talk shop." It was a bright spot, you know? A bright spot in a scary and lonely time. I went. Got a hotel and everything.

What was it like? You mean like what happened?...oh,  you mean like, the inside? Like of the building?

You know what? Now that I think about it. Weird. It was weird as hell. Lotsa gold and concrete. Like the jewelery. It was like every room was like, I dunno. It was like they were too big and too small at the same time. And there was a LOT of gold, in all sortsa patterns.

No. Yeah. Yeah I'm okay, I can talk about it. I'm okay to talk about it. I wasn't there long. I've heard the stories, you know. I don't know what you know, you probably know more than me, being the government and all, but lemme say that if you heard a story about something happening in 11414, it's probably true.

Anyways, Colin met me in his office. No windows. We talked shop. They asked me to arrive early and I skipped breakfast to get there on time and, it seems like every time I tried to bring up lunch he would wave it down. I had to damn near demand to get up for lunch. He invited me up to the cafeteria. The nice one, the one the distributors got to eat at.

It was nice, like, real nice. The plates had those same gold patterns on them. It was after that-

The pattern? Uh, I'll try, do you have a pen? It was really complicated. I'll do my best. It had all these criss-crossing... Hm? Yeah. Yeah you know what? That's exactly what it looked like.

Yeah, you know? I actually did ask him. I asked him about the pattern and he just kinda looked at me like I was in on a joke and said put a finger to his lips and he tapped on the back of his head. You know, where they put the plugs. And he said "you know, so they can't listen."

Yeah he offered to let me try one. He got all quiet, brought me to the lounge behind some curtains. Yeah they had the gold thing too. Started talking like he had a secret. He must've had fifty, sixty pills in a fancy little case that had the same pattern on it.

No I wasn't surprised. How else would they make that much money without hypnoregulation? It was kind of an open secret, you know? I didn't want any of that. But you can't say no, you know? Then you're implicated. You can't leave. I agreed to take one.

I still think about that, you know? How I got out of that. What a dodged bullet. Oh my god. It's kinda embarrassing, now that I gotta say so, but when I was little, I used to do magic. You know, card tricks, sleight of hand, all that stuff. I palmed the damn thing. Slipped it right into my pocket.

I sat there for a bit. Tried to copy him, you know. The lounge had a bunch of sub-finantial cortical wires hidden in the coffee table. He gave me one and told me to watch what he did while he fed it up his nose into his head. I sat there for a bit, trying to stay calm. His eyes rolled into the back of his head and he had the gold scalero, uh, scaleri, no, uh the white parts of his eyes...

Scalera! That's it. They were gold and everything.

I didn't know he would convulse so much. I thought something might've been wrong, but eventually they died down. I gotta say, I was so damn scared I couldn't move. I coulda been there for hours. I probably was.

I have a good memory. So eventually I worked up the courage and just...walked out.

Yeah. I walked out. You walk like you're supposed to be there, and you're kinda mad, you know? Like you're late for something and you can't talk right now. It's all about confidence. Nobody hassles you if you look like you know where you're going. I even said thank you to the secretary in the lobby. Nadine taught me that you know. It's all about confidence.

I made it to my car, got the engine going, and the moment 11414 was out of my rear view mirror I just started crying. Cried myself to fits. I didn't even know at the time. What was it? Six weeks later? How many dead?

Yeah, too many. Too many. I guess it doesn't matter.

I drove to a McDonald's for some food and at some point I turned on the radio. You know what was playing?

Yeah. It was that fucking Tremeloes song. You know the one."

[sbcdh]

You know where the word cocaine comes from? Its Quechua. Just the name of the damn plant. I think it was 1971, maybe 72. I dunno- 

Could you start at the beginning?

Huh? Yeah, sure. Course. Uhh. Lets see…

Take your time. 

Woof. Lets see…I started in uhhh, 72. Some tiny little bottle-rocket firm sweatin for talent, head broker was this big red fatass named Ron Spade, hell of a guy, but the place got bought out by Bear Stearns in 73 when the shit really hit the fan. It was a rough time to be on a trade floor. IRS just put out the whole hypnoeconomics thing. Half the big firms were runnin’ around with their hair on fire, the other half felt invincible. Every day was a party. Party party party. 

Was that your first interaction with hypnostimulants? 

I guess. Its funny. First guy to give me quori was a cop. 

You mean an agent of the FDA? 

No no, like an old fashioned NYPD beat cop. Met him in the bathroom at Pink during a bender. Moron was so faded he thought I was his informant. Just gave me a phial. 

And you tried it?

Not right away no. To be honest I thought it was kinda faggy. Sorry. Its just what I thought at the time. The shit was sparkly, you know? What kinda drug comes in phials? Shoulda known something was up. 

Would you say hypnostimulants were popular at the time? 

At the time? Depends what you mean by popular. People didn’t know about that shit yet. You heard stories, dudes shooting up in the woods upstate, gettin found with their eyeballs exploded. It was early days, ya know? But like, that didn’t happen. That was urban legends. You know who was actually fucking around with the early stuff? Accountants. 

Accountants?

Yeah, you know, the bookkeepers. See,  I’m really just a plumber. I move money from one pipe to another pipe. But instead of wrenches and sprockets or whatever, I use charm. Its pretty easy if you ask me. Imagine if you could just tell water where it already wanted to go. You’re water’s best pal. Nah. It was those nerds in the basement, the spreadsheet guys that figured out how to expense shit so the IRS couldn’t get ya. Those were the fuckers who really dove in. 

What got you using regularly? 

Same shit as everyone else. Makes the job easier. 

How so?

You can feel the money in their pocket. Its like, I dunno how to describe it. Its like…Its like, a turd sitting in a hammock. You can feel how the money bends everything around it. You can see it, smell it. You can hear it over the phone. You can’t ignore it. Shit is nuts. You take enough, and its like you can’t see anything else. Or. No. Its like…You see that you don’t need to see anything else. Money is everything. You’re money. I’m money. Its all just rivers of money flowing through everything. 

By 1973 you were a regular user yes?

Regular makes it sound normal. But yeah I know what you mean. “Regular user.”  76 was the sweet spot. The drugs were good, but the regulators hadn’t stepped up yet. You and some buddies could set up in a club bathroom with nothing but a blindfold and a pile. You ever seen a stock floor with a headfull of that fancy government shit? 

Would you like to discuss the raid? 

No. Not really. 

I understand you were the only one in a sub-emmanation state when Hypnoregulators arrived on the scene. 

I don't want to talk about it. 

Very well then, my associate will be happy to take you to prison as per the agreement you signed. 

Alright alright, Christ. 

Please. In your own words. 

From what I understand, you pulled spade outta bed. Got a confession and everything that morning. 9 fuckin AM, and 200 IRS agents come busting in the doors. I was in the bathroom seeing shit. It's marble lined, lots gold filigree. All that jazz. Special made. Listen. I'm serious about the stock floor shit. Whatever you guys have, it's different than what we had back then. I mean, the shit was still cut with cocaine. A stock floor wasn't a stock floor, it was like…

The raid, please. 

I'm getting to it! You gotta know this shit okay? I need you to understand what you goons fuckin wrecked. It was perfect okay? A garden of Eden . Ripe fruit. Everything just works. You don't have to worry about shit. You're a hunter, a killer, the great fuckin god pan, and the floor is your field of delights. It's like being a beating heart, like being struck by lightning. You can feel the sun in your pocket, and how it's all flowing through everything. And then you fucks showed up. 

It was cold. I felt it first. Like I just threw the biggest party, and mom and dad were coming home early. But you know what I saw? You know those Chinese dragon dancers? Or, lions, or whatever they are? You know how there's two guys in the costume? I saw a dragon, a beast with eyes like the sun, teeth dripping gold, a bunch of IRS suits holding its pelt on their shoulders like you carry your baby home. 

Your statement alluded to some additional information. 

Yeah…there was something else… I dunno how to describe it. The fuckin…eyes, like the sun. Thats how you feel when you're on this shit. You're seein’ gold. I looked into the dragons eyes, and it's like, it's like I saw me. Like I was the dragon, and I was looking at me. Or…no. I was the sun. I was looking at myself. It was like, in that moment I knew something. I learned something. 

What exactly is that?

I dunno. It doesn't fit into words. But like. You aren't regulating shit. 

I'm sorry? 

Yeah. All this shit. The dragon. The field. The dancers. It's all just the sun.

[sbcdh]

On the morning of August 19th 1966, the merchant marine vessel Pelican unloaded its cargo into the port of Los Angeles. Recently declassified information about the Pelican’s ship manifest confirms that the ship was carrying experimental materials for a nascent project Clover. Of the 425 drums of material, only 424 were accounted for. 

While government officials have not confirmed exactly what was in the lost barrel, its contents are believed to be approximately 55 gallons of an experimental substance similar to LSD. 

To anyone with a passing interest in the 1970’s music scene, this will not come as news. Tall tales of a lost ship full of experimental drugs were as common as disco, though the stories have been exaggerated. The most common form of the story features a drunk crane operator loading a shipping crate onto the wrong train, though in reality it was only a single barrel that went unaccounted for. The more outlandish forms of the legend include everything from a daring heist by a crew of rocker-pirates to shadowy government entities vanishing the entire ship for their own nefarious purposes. 

The reality was a simple logistical mixup, a mistake that can be tracked back to a simple addition error on an inventory sheet, an ordinary yet deeply embarrassing mistake on part of the government. Additionally, The information that revealed the lost barrel came alongside a report detailing project clovers lost asset tracking protocol. Protocol that reads as comically naive in hindsight, with guidelines including “monitoring local jazz bars” or keeping an eye out for “feminist thought.” With the benefit of retrospective, it is no surprise that agents were not able to track the barrel. 

Declassification of the Pelican’s manifest prompted an unexpected crossover with another niche legend of the 1970s Los Angeles music scene: the disappearance of the Knights of Altonia. 

Even today, many consider the Knights of Altonia to be a myth, but scant references to their existence can be found. According to a review from a 1977 issue of Jam! Magazine, the Knights of Altonia were a “D-List psychedelic glam metal outfit with more style than skill, known more for their disappearance than their music.” Though a 1997 retrospective from Tempo calls them “A band too ahead of their time to be properly appreciated” noting their flamboyant stage costuming and its significant influence on the aesthetics of the genre. 

To the frustration of music historians seeking to separate fact from fiction, the band featured an elaborate mythology, with each member claiming to be a “Wizard-Knight of the Mystic Tower” who traveled from their world to ours “on a journey through the Nine Realms to find the secret stone.” This has been the source of innumerable urban legends around the band. A common joke among hobbyist historians at the time claimed that the Knights did not vanish, but simply “returned to the Nine Realms.” Information on the band is so muddled that many music historians doubt their existence entirely. In fact, the only confirmed, physical evidence of the band’s existence is a photograph at the bottom of the Jam! Review, it features:

Lead singer and guitarist Donald Hawkins as his stage persona “Zozimos the Wise.” He sports a mane of dreadlocks, and a classic blue wizard hat and robe decorated with yellow stars.The robe is worn open to reveal Donald’s bare chest, along with velvet short-shorts and a pair of thigh-high leather boots. The article states that the glittery bright purple guitar in his hands was named “Excelsior.”

Rhythm guitarist Jon Todachine as “Wan the Witch King.” He wears a deerskin jacket, also open at the front, decorated with what appear to be crow feathers and small animal bones. The theme of bones continues to his belt buckle, which features an as-of-yet unidentified animal skull. This figure is presumed to be Jon, although it should be noted that the broad hat he wears features a curtain of beads that obscures his face. 

Bassist Riley Knox as “Chulainn the Horned.” He wears a full deer skull, along with a lit candle that appears to be slowly melting down over the mask. Most of his upper body is obscured by what appears to be a cloak of leaves. Beneath the cloak he appears to be wearing a pair of Nike Blazers. 

Drummer Marcus Wilson as “Magnus Fire-Weaver.” He wears a viking helmet over intricately braided red hair, a chain-maille loincloth, a pair of medieval bracers on his wrists, and nothing else. 

Most notably, a speaker on stage left is placed upon a large steel drum identical to the ones used by project clover. 

Study is ongoing. 

[sbcdh]

The discovery that hypnotic states could be used for market regulatory purposes was nothing short of a revolution for the Federal Reseve. in June 1968, Initial experiments with "financial clairvoyance" were conducted.

The original methodology was fairly simple: fully trained subjects would be placed in a sensory deprivation tank and undergo hypnosonic neuro-induction to the point of sub-finantial emanation. Subjects would remain attuned for 24 hours, at which point they would be de-emanated, and their experiences recorded via interview.

This methodology proved to be an expensive disaster. Repeated cycles of emanation and de-emanation had a catastrophic effect on mental cohesion. On average, subjects would begin to show signs of neuro-depatterning within the first 50 dives, and would slip into permanent catatonia by 350 dives.

Additionally, recovered documents from the period show that information from a single Plutophant was only accurate to within a 2.2i Murdoch deviations, and the interview method introduced a further 5.1i of uncertainty. While experimental attempts to record brain activity directly were underway, technology was primitive, often harmful to the subject, or necessitated invasive surgical modification. Even then, transchronological brain activity proved uniquely difficult to record.

Then, a breakthrough.

The 1960 nationwide upgrade of the minuteman nuclear system was underway, which created a surplus of IBM Drum Storage Drives. Drives that were largely donated to research institutions under the purview of project Clover. With some modifications, the cyclical nature these drum drives proved to be ideal for recording changes in transchronological neuropatterning.

These "Radio-Magnetic Neurological Sensory Arrays" were the predecessor to the modern neuroscope. The first production example, the IBM Y-2, was the size of an entire room, requiring enormous amounts of power and several trained technicians to process the thoughts of a single Plutophant into a human-readable form.

Study is ongoing.

[sbcdh]

In order to foster adoption of commercial analogue phone technology in the 1960s, telecommunications companies were engaged in a PR race to be the first into every American home. Bell Systems found a novel approach in publishing their internal schematics as a monthly technology newsletter.

The practice did well, attracting the attention of both home technology hobbyists and government officials alike. Bell Systems phone technology was marketed with a no-nonsense, wave-of-the-future attitude. Tomorrow was here, and it could be purchased at a convenient retail outlet.

An unintended side effect of the practice was the subculture now known as Phone Phreaking, some of histories first hackers.

The accessibility of blueprints and technical specifications, along with detailed descriptions of the analogue communication network allowed phreaks to do everything from eavesdrop on conversations, to evading charges for calls, to the creation of false identities.

Phreaking was, naturally, a rewarding pastime for those with sensitive hearing. Additionally, Phreaking something that could be done without the need of eyes. It is rarely stated in many historical accounts of Phreaking, but many phreaks were blind.

Phreaks have assumed a nigh-mythical place in niche cultural spaces, especially among hacking communities. Phreaks were the blueprint. The OG. Legendary exploits of phreaks were told by many an early computer scientist while hunched over pegboard in darkened university basements.

70s counterculture did little to downplay these legends. Experimental psychedelics we're added to the mix. Tales of blind anarchists speaking to machines was a popular trope in folk stories. The cocktail of psychoactives would always change depending on who told the story. Sometimes it was LSD, sometimes it was Psilocybin, sometimes a sinister or mysterious research chemical. Sometimes they didn't need drugs at all. Regardless, the archetype of the "bakelite oracle" has maintained a strange persistence.

Recently declassified court testimony has revealed these rumors to even have penetrated the echelons of the legal world. Perhaps emboldened by a red scare in full swing, prosecutors we're known to occasionally attribute the ability of wanted activists to vanish into thin air to Phreak collaboration. Preternatural elements are often implied, if rarely outright stated. It is unclear how seriously authorities at the time took such claims.

Study is ongoing.