#midcon

[gatespage]

Gates McFadden - Midcon (Nov 1989)

Holiday Inn, Leicester

[agentgrange]

Office of Vertical Intracity Development (OVID)

The Office of Vertical Intracity Development is a subdivision of the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development that manages curtailing urbanization and population density. On the surface, they exist to enforce suburban development, maintain a reliance on car-dependent infrastructure, and reverse urban proletarianization in the name of civil security and municipal efficiency. Underneath their slavish devotion to capital is a deeper, more pressing influence-- an all-consuming fear of "The Labyrinth", an apocalyptic vision bestowed onto them of runaway urbanism creating dense pockets of psychic energy eating away at the fabric of reality. A city that, when left to grow organically, develops pockets of cysts and tumors where any sense of direction gives way to non-Euclidian architecture that defy the laws of space time. Train stations funneling unfortunate commuters into impossible miles of empty liminal terminals, never to show up for work. Apartment high rises that begin to grow down  and sideways twisting into the earth like a spider's den, undermining entire city blocks. Studio apartments whose internal volume falls well outside the bounds of its external volume, threatening to significantly destabilize the property market. And at the heart of all the insanity, an entity that stalks anyone who slips through the thin membrane that separates America's cities from the vest maze that runs parallel to the mundane urban sprawl. 

OVID has attempted to ascertain what threshold a city meets before it creates a psychic bridge to The Labyrinth, but all results have proved inconclusive. Thus OVID has developed a fell-hand in brutally limiting the expansion in urban density-- be that through legal means, or more direct methods. 

[agentgrange]

Field Notes: NOAA Corps & MIDCON-RED

The smallest uniformed service in the United States, the NOAA Corps was created in 1970 as a direct successor to the Environmental Science Services Administration Corps and the Geodetic Survey Corps. The NOAA Corps legacy and relation to MIDCON-RED remains contentious, due to the lasting consequences of the Nixon administration and an interagency battle that still rages today. Originally the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration seemed a natural sister-organization under the Department of the Interior, with MIDCON eager to utilize it as an intermediary when working with the Department of Defense. White House staff and the Office of Management and Budget, ignorant of MIDCON's hidden objectives, were heavily in favor of merging it with the Department of the Interior to ensure NOAA's nominal mission of resource conservation remained intact without increasing the scope of the at-the-time-nascent Environmental Protection Agency. All the stars seemed aligned to provide MIDCON the front-facing uniformed agency it needed were it not for an unlikely stumbling block-- the war in Vietnam. 

The legend persists in the halls of government to this day. Facing increasing protests and domestic opposition to the war, Washington began stationing troops (up to 1500 at a time) in government offices across the country. Officially, they were there to protect federal offices from an increasingly militant anti-war movement. But anyone that knew Nixon chaffed at the concept of the increasingly paranoid commander-in-chief stationing armed forces within the halls of what seemed, to him, rival agencies flushed with political enemies. No one, especially MIDCON, wanted their offices garrisoned and heavily scrutinized-- much less ground zero for the next Kent State if protestors ever attempted to confront them. With pressure from MIDCON, secretary of Interior Walter Hickel sent a letter to President Nixon demanding that he "listen to the youth" and deescalate the situation. The letter leaked to the public, circulating in publications around Washington. Nixon, ever spiteful, torpedoed the Department of the Interior's bid for control of NOAA and assigned it to the Department of Commerce-- a move Washington insiders called "putting the fox in the hen house.” Not only was MIDCON robbed of its prize, but NOAA was placed under a department that would operate it in the name of commercial interests.

For everyone but Nixon, it seemed like an unmitigated disaster. Even the head of the Department of Commerce was taken aback, saying in his memoirs "I asked why we were so intent in winning this battle- and wouldn’t we be more focused on our essential mission if NOAA were placed elsewhere? The answer I received from those far more experienced than I in the governmental agency game was: 'Expand or die.'" In a latter passage he would write "Hiding my reservations concerning the headaches we would be inheriting, I congratulated the Secretary on his great victory. I grabbed a copy of the Stratton Commission Report and read the highlights on my way. I had never considered the possibility of our winning seriously enough to have really looked at the document. Fortunately the White House people with whom I was meeting had not read it either."

NOAA struggled severely under the Department of Commerce, who lacked the budget or interest to properly manage it. Largely left to languish in administrative hell, it was only a matter of time before the Office of Management and Budget audited the organization. With some political wrangling, MIDCON was able to sow anti-Commerce sentiment and convince a handful of key administrators of the necessity of an inter-agency taskforce to get NOAA back on track. Unofficially, it allowed the Department of the Interior to get their foot in the door and create an in for the Office of Mitigation and Defeat. It was an imperfect solution for an imperfect time. Even after the crisis had ended, MIDCON wouldn't soon forget how Nixon slighted them and the man's propensity for wiretapping anything and everything made having a frank, candid conversation with him on the nature of MIDCON impossible. One way or the other, he would need to be dealt with. So in 1972, a MIDCON agent under the cryptonym Deep Throat delivered confidential information on the Watergate Hotel break in to The Washington Post, taking precautions to make sure any investigation would lead back to an unaffiliated member of the FBI. 

Today, MIDCON remains one of the major contributors to the NOAA Corps despite the agency falling outside of the Department of the Interior. Acting under the guise of an inter agency taskforce, MIDCON will send agents to NOAA Corps training to receive a uniformed service rank before having them shuffled into US armed forces units around the world as "technical specialists." Without the (unknowing) aid of the NOAA Corps, MIDCON's ability to operate alongside US troops or outside of the continental US would be severely inhibited. 

[agentgrange]

FIELD NOTES: POLL UPDATE & OD URANIDES

Long time no see. Apologies for the radio silence the last few weeks, agents. Had to make an unexpected dead drop in Las Vegas. Had a lot of fun *finally* playing my way through the full ARG experience at OmegaMart and visiting Zak Bagan's Haunted Museum. I have some hot takes on both, but walked away with some new ideas on fleshing out MIDCON more and the sort of Black Science threats they'd face.

Anyway, updates below where I discuss the poll's winner (OD URANIDES) and what agents should expect from this faction.

Poll came out to a tie between INCASTLE and Project Uranides, but only if you count my own vote which I only placed to see the results. That means URANIDES just barely ekes out ahead, which will be a unique challenge compared to the others. OD URANIDES, as the name implies, is actually a compilation of *twelve* networks across multiple agencies. Each have developed separately in the wake of the U.S. government's first contact with the "intraspace" entities known as the Lam in the late 1940s. Of course, this all should sound very familiar to anyone with even a small amount of Delta Green experience or cursory knowledge of Majestic-12 myth. Depending on how you want to use my writing though, OD URANIDES can either be an alternative re-imagining of the historical Majestic-12 legend or as something to add to and augment existing Majestic-12 lore in Delta Green. Instead of reacting with unity and enthusiasm for a new power to exploit, what if the twelve members of MAJESTIC reeled in horror and revulsion when faced with something they could never truly understand? What if they go their own ways hoping to forget what they saw but they can't? Imagine those arrogant "men of science" so confident in their domain over the world after their triumph of the atom, faced not with something nuts-and-bolts to scrutinize but something intangible, subjective, and abstract. Taunting them for ever deigning to think they were in control of anything. There's no putting that toothpaste back in the tube. To face the Lam and blink is to be forever drawn into their web of synchronicities while your own anxieties are made manifest through your obsessive need to find some form of closure for what you've seen. In MIDCON twelve men walked out of that meeting in 1947 in frustration and fear, and returned to their respective organizations carrying the seeds of something sinister-- a permanent gnawing urge to gain a better understanding of Intraspace. Once its planted, it grows out horizontally like a rhizome sprouting out in far off places seemingly separate from each other but if you dig just under the surface you'll see it's all still connected to where that seed first took root. From these seeds, twelve distinct memes grew to propagate American research and development in the latter half of the 20th century.

OCEANUS

THETIS

HYPERION

THEA

COEUS

PHOEBE

CRIUS

MNEMOSYNE

IAPETUS

THEMIS

CRONUS

RHEA

These URANIDES aren't coherent subprojects so much as they're twelve strains of the same virus, each mutated by the host it used to break containment. They're a predictable trace-route of otherwise impossible synchronicities that tie together seemingly unrelated Black Science projects. Its reoccurring patterns of dogs that don't bark but should have. Its impeccable circumstances that connect mad scientists and neurotic benefactors by one degree of separation because of a conversation someone just so happened to remember at just the perfect time. Its the elevator pitch for a "very good idea" pulled from thin air that some intern, who until now has been nothing but a sycophant, suddenly has the nerve to share with the executive that's been spending hours trying to think of a solution to the same problem. It's the order to the entropy thats driving humanity closer to the Lam, worming its way through the government. Agent, it's what MIDCON gets when we take the deluge of Black Science threats coming out of the world's skunkworks and learn to separate the signal from the noise. All of these projects, they're all building to something. Something great and terrible set in twelve separate places with twelve different methods all at once. Twelve parallel lines, all inexplicably pointing to one nexus. Whats that nexus? I don't know. We can't know. Not until we arrive there, not until we accidentally build it. For now, its beyond our conceptualization. Its trapped in the realm of Black Sky Thinking, until it falls from the stars into our lap like a tungsten rod.

Look, I don't mean to freak you out. Lets take a step back here Agent. Think of the rhizome again. We have to rip each of these up from the roots, and to do that we need to know where they've all branched out. The best way to do that is to find where it started, what member of Majestic-12 each came from, and work backwards from there. We haven't found out which is which yet but these URANIDES seem to have their own "personalities" and symptoms that we think came from the subconscious of the original host. Preferred pathways they use to take ideas from being a spontaneous glimmer in someone's eye to an after action report. Maybe with a bit of digging you'll get a feel for what each URANIDE is like, how to track it, and who it came from. That's our best chance to untangle this mess that's infecting the world before it all reaches that nexus.

[agentgrange]

MIDCON-RED Agent Fit Idea

[agentgrange]

MIDCON-RED FIREWATCH Outfit Idea (Off Duty)

[agentgrange]

For the sake of breaking things up into chunks, nearly all MIDCON agents can be broken into four groups:

Field Agents (Investigations and Espionage)

ITAP "Dangerous Game" Unit (wetwork strike teams)

FIREWATCH / Red Skies Limit (air support, rescue, smokejumpers & containment)

Case Officers (Research, Administration, & political intrigue)

I'm currently about halfway through writing FIREWATCH which I hope to turn into a one-off PDF as a sort of proof-of-concept demo for what a larger MIDCON resource will probably look like.

[princeje07]

Cochaella Party 😄 #latepost #fellowshipnight #chc #midcon #buhaymedrep (at Pico de Loro Beach & Country Club, Hamilo Coast)