This topic has 42 replies, 20 voices, and was last updated 6 years, 6 months ago by 
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Mason went live on Facebook. He’s in Dearborn Park. @kevin is on his way.
Here’s a link to the video: https://www.facebook.com/thelustexperience/videos/1951766401810728/
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Mason covered in blood, face mask, boiler suit. Thanking Bryan.
The insurance fraud idea from yesterday?
Briarberg are the cleaners. They’re making that money happen. Dude’s killing people and that’s why he’s thanking Bryan.
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What does Fuckface mean “thank you” @bcbishop???
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By the gods, there’s a psychopath on the loose. That’s a TES IV: Oblivion reference for those of you that don’t know. But more importantly, this is kinda… what’s the word, sketchy? It’s sketchy. Something tells me those 91 that were “absolved” got a little more than a decent payout and a paid mortgage in their “severance package”.
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Important things to note from this: what did Mason mean when he pointed out the insect that we didnt notice because it was “playing dead?” Is Joyce too easy of an answer? You have to admit, its not a bad way to get someone out of the OSDM when theyre so deeply involved.
Also Mason had thanked Bryan, presumably for giving him the opportunity to have his little “appointments” with the other 90 former OSDM employees.
Kevin has a USB drive, too. Let’s see what else we learn.
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Mason gave me a USB drive when I met him at the park. Here’s the file:
I’ll write up a post in a little bit and try to cover anything I might have missed in the Periscope.
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Dude may be f’d up to the extreme, but he does have a nice singing voice ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
@mkarrett, yep he is. -
Just to fill in any holes and some things I’ve remembered in the mean time.
As I was driving to the park I was flipping through radio stations and landed on a Katy Perry song. Was fitting given Mason’s predilections for pop music.
Got to the park and wandered around for a while until Mason went live again, if you listen real close you can hear me calling him near the end.
He led me over to a spot near some bushes and had me look at a lovely butterfly. He knew exactly what type it was, and that it would still get bigger. He then had me look around the bushes some more, but I couldn’t see anything specific until he finally pointed out a bug that looked like the sticks. Was much smaller than what I think of as a stick bug, but similar coloring. He explained that I couldn’t see it because it was playing dead. After he handed it to me it fell on the ground and I picked it up. He said he wanted to go sit down and talk because he’d had a busy day and I said I wanted to put the bug back. He acknowledged that and then said it would probably be dead soon anyways because we had scared away its food (the butterfly).
As we were walking over, he mentioned that he wanted to save the world and that maybe I could help. When I asked him how, he said it wasn’t time for that just yet. He mentioned that he’d been running around all day (as he said this he took his sweatshirt off to reveal an actual running shirt underneath) and wanted to slow down. So we just chatted for a few minutes. He then said that he needed to get going and rifled through his sweatshirt until he found the bloody envelope. He handed it to me and then said he needed to get going. He’d met with one person today, but still had ninety appointments to get to.
As he walked away, I told him that I wish he hadn’t killed Joyce. And fuck, I can’t remember exactly what he said now, but it was something along the lines of “you’ll see soon enough” or “you’ll know soon enough” (or maybe not even close to that. damn it.) with a sort of shrug. The sense I got from it though was that it was something that he just had to do.
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Random thoughts:
@wanda102 My first thought when he mentioned the bug was playing dead was Joyce too.Something tells me those 91 that were “absolved” got a little more than a decent payout and a paid mortgage in their “severance package”.
Mason never gave the indication that he was doing this on OSDM’s orders and the recording doesn’t support this either. Unless Briarberg and OSDM are actually connected, OSDM appears to have lived up to their end of the bargain.Even though I don’t like Mason, he’s quite…charming? in person. Seemed important to him to actually chat with me about life for a few minutes. Makes him all the more dangerous, I suppose.
I am very intrigued by how he thinks he’s saving the world (and how killing another 90 people fits into that).
He knew a lot about the butterfly and stick bug, another sign of his intelligence and/or varied interests.
I was worried for a second while I was opening the envelope I was going to find a finger or ear or something.
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Mason never gave the indication that he was doing this on OSDM’s orders and the recording doesn’t support this either.
@kevin Yea, this is weird. It looks and sounds like a cleanup job, but everything we know so far contradicts that. Why would Mason suddenly be doing work for the OSDM? He supposedly hates the OSDM and wants them gone. He/Briarberg wants to be the alternative. Something doesn’t add up. Maybe this is a piece that falls into the, as he said, “we’ll know soon enough” category. -
@chelsea Yeah, it’s all so strange. I don’t understand why Briarberg even put up a front of wanting to “deprogram” people. The OSDM referred to most of these folks as “pencil pushers”, it looks like they’re out of the organization, and then Mason goes to kill all of them. Nick was celebrating being laid off by the company and was cool being out, part of that was his severance package, but he was done. Why kill him and plan on going after the rest?
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@mkarrett of course he is!! I rather like his singing voice.
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Thinking about this… it seems Mason has given us a glimpse into a bigger plan… but something is not right. Sure, he’s got 90 names and addresses to go… but one man would never be able to do this “clean up” job alone. I am sure some of these people talk outside of “work” or are at least minimally aware of each other, right? Word of this deed will travel quickly through their ranks, I bet… but what will they do?
Will they hide, will they reach out to each other… to us??? If I get a request to help someone with something they need a hand with at their car… I would certainly be suspicious… and it might now be one of those 90 names asking us for help… right?
@kevin I am very curious as to his reaction about you bringing up Joyce. It sounds (even in your scattered memory) like he has a bigger idea involving her… what she set in motion… on a more grisly note, perhaps even doing something with her body. If Sabrina and Joyce were such good friends, Sabrina may become a fresh target of his actions.Yeah… this just seems like a first step of some kind to me.
No idea which direction Mason is heading, though. -
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Not sure, @coryphella Maybe he just likes to create…
wait for it… Tension.
Quietly backing out of the room now… teeheeehee
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@kevin and @wanda102 Faking Joyce’s death to get her out of the OSDM is interesting, but I’m struggling with the pieces not adding up to that. Why would he? She was his ex and, according to him, very involved in the organization he wants to replace. He then went looking for a new mom for the kid. There is the chance that telling us these small details is part of the cover.
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@chelsea I think the Joyce Lives(?) theory comes from a combination of not really knowing Mason due to his unpredictablity, and a bit of wishful thinking.
His behavior before and after her death could just be to reinforce the type of person he wants us to believe he is, contributing to the cover in the opposite way. Then again, he’s unpredictable, so we can’t really know either way.A lot of this admittedly wishful thinking is likely coming from latent guilt over Joyce’s death, for me at least.
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@chelsea @wanda102 @kevin She WAS his ex, but going along with this theory, perhaps he put on quite a show to make it seem like he didn’t care about her. The OSDM ruins families, tears people apart, removes free will, etc. So what if Mason played this to his favor, “turned” on Joyce to “save” her. Said she was dead to him, wanted nothing to do with her and only cared about his daughter, yet truthfully, he was planning to fake her death to SAVE her. Love makes us do crazy and unpredictable things, maybe Mason did this as the only way to keep his family together? Or attempt to? It’s not rational, but then again, if we are dealing with love or devotion, nothing ever is….
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@wanda102 and @shankfx22 I can definitely smell the wishful thinking and welcome the possibility that you both may get to pull an “I told you so!” in the future. I don’t share the guilt or optimism, but I understand that that’s there for you. If she is alive, where does that put Michelle in all of this? She was there for the beating (that may or may not have happened based on your theory). That would put her in on the cover up. If this “Jack” is the same Jack that she was on the phone with way-back-when, it suggests there could be a level of trust. There are so many holes. The biggest one plaguing me right now is still why Mason was doing the “clean up” of these 91 for the OSDM. I can’t help but feel that we are missing something huge. Maybe we just don’t have that piece of info yet.
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This would be the most boring and straightforward of explanations for Mason performing the 91-person “clean up” but: he’s OSDM. Always has been. Everything he has done has been to either create extreme emotional responses or divisions within the community. The 91 situation was put together in a way so that OSDM would always be able to collect data on guilt (something focused on with Joyce as well).
If “dissolve” won the day, the guilt would be direct. “Absolve” was the fallback option, with Mason doing the dirty work (and the false success of Sabrina providing even more data).
Does this possibility mean we should stop engaging emotionally with Mason. I don’t think so. Frankly, we cannot risk that —- and as someone actively seeking emotional self-realization, I wouldn’t want to in the first place. But it is the cleanest answer.
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The only problem with the “Mason is OSDM” theory is: why have him do the dirty work, without giving him a false motive that would cover up his being OSDM? Or, alternatively, why not give the job to someone whom we already know to be OSDM? It seems like there’s much more going on than simply clean-up.
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@bcbishop Ok, so I feel like there are two main options here that each have their own little branches.
Option 1: Mason is Briarberg. Briarberg is supposed to be the alternative to the OSDM. What if he’s playing cleaner because it fucks with the OSDM campaign of doing good shit? It makes us question them more. Maybe a deal was made with some number of that list to come to Briarberg for safety. “Relocation of assests” sticks out here for me.
Option 2: Mason is OSDM. Briarberg is a sham, a cover, a something else that we don’t know or understand. He was hired by the OSDM to go clean up this mess, but I agree that it doesn’t fit yet, unless it’s officially time for the gig to be up and we are about to learn what Briarberg really is. Where is Joyce in this theory? If Joyce is actually dead, then that makes her death an inside job by the OSDM.
Ok I lied. Option 3: What if they are the same thing? What if there is no “Alternative to the OSDM”, and the “alternative” is death. What if Briarberg *is* the OSDM cleanup crew? Then we have the quote from the painting today: “No man can discover his own talents.” Mason supposedly grew up in the OSDM. What if this is what they decided his talent is?
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Yeah @chelsea, I’m absolutely leaning towards option 3 right now.
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@chelsea Oooooooooooooooooh.
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOH.
Option 3. Yes. After all, a clean-up crew’s job could technically be articulated as getting people “out” of the OSDM, couldn’t it?
As for OSDM being a charity, I think that might be a misread. Nobody said they were giving out money to be nice.
What does OSDM do? They collect data. What to do when trying to jumpstart a recently-deleted data storehouse? Begin with a group event that will lead to a wide spread of emotional ramifications. Like a group vote.
Let’s say OSDM decided to capitalize on The Reduction to start their collection on us again. What Sabrina tasked me with was going to generate emotional reactions of one sort or another from everyone in the community. If we all voted, we’d all be invested in the outcome. If somebody cut it short, those that voted would have been invested, and everybody else was going to have feelings about not having a voice. And no matter what anybody chose, the 91 would die — an attempt to generate guilt. (And if absolve was the pick, as it was in this case, there’s also a spike of joy in there for collection as well.)
This could very easily just be OSDM killing two birds with one stone. God, they’re good.
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I really like the idea of option 3, but don’t really think it lines up with Briarberg’s actions to this point. I can sort of see a scenario where it all points to them being the cleaner wing of OSDM, but it feels like a reach. And if Briarberg is really a wing of OSDM, that has even bigger implications for BOS than when we realized Mason had been at the TMC events.
On the charity note for OSDM, we’ve seen them give away a money, get someone into a school, and pay off a mortgage. Two of those definitely could have been accomplished through some kind of blackmail based off information that they have. It could be charitable, just in a twisted kind of way.
I’m really wondering about the quote too. @chelsea brought up them fostering talents in people, which wouldn’t make a ton of sense to discuss regarding Mason who appears to be at work dismantling them and killing their former employees. That said, he either regained access to the Lust FB account on Friday or has never lost it. If he’s never lost it, it could be a strong indicator that he is still tied to OSDM in a real way.
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@coryphella Actions was probably the wrong word there. I was thinking more about how they posed as a group researching ethics in immersive theatre and then had a meeting where a board member was present and claimed to be about deprogramming cult members. They also don’t seem to have a problem Mason’s behavior, ranging from strange or creepy phone calls to helping kidnap and murder Joyce. Finally ending up at, what appears to be, the violent murder of former OSDM employees. They haven’t really taken many direct actions so far (and they’ve been kind of vague or misleading about what they’re actually doing), but I don’t think what they have done fits with being a cleaner crew for OSDM.
The idea of Briarberg, or Mason, with a God complex or mission based on killing a few to save many is interesting though.
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@chelsea I’m also still stuck as to why the OSDM is doing the whole charity gig. Because I think we all know that’s got to be some kind of bullshit, right? Mason’s sabotaging that but is it at his own behest? I guess we have to ask what Mason/Briarberg gets out of 91 deaths?
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This is a stretch, but I’m trying to piece together why Mason/Briarberg and assumingly, Sabrina are involved in this.
What if Briarberg is basically a suicide squad of sorts? At the Briarberg meeting, we met a few of the Ascension cast who all had horrible stories about how they got involved and what had happened with their time. Myles even said “Just kill me”, so it’s possible they have nothing to lose anymore based on whatever OSDM has on them. If they try to change things and end up dead in the process, at least that would (hopefully) protect their loved ones.
What if they’re doing this for revenge? They want to hit the OSDM where it hurts because OSDM ruined their lives and they can now put a huge dent in their armor by “deleting” their data as well as ours.
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I think we’re seeing a new emotional data gathering process, but to what end??
Briarberg, aside from some words, hasn’t actually DONE anything. We don’t really know Mason’s role, or anything concrete about the organization.
I’m also curious as to what’s behind OSDM’s “charity.” Is it actually legit?? It it just another ruse to get us emotionally invested in these 91 people we know nothing about?? I don’t think Briarberg = OSDM. I believe Mason’s hatred for OSDM is genuine and that wouldn’t make sense. I did wonder for a moment if the charity WAS actually genuine, and Mason is killing these people to try and discredit the OSDM, pin the murders on them. But then why would he send Kevin the recording?
IN OTHER NEWS I AM CONFUZZLED AND DISCOMBOBULATED.
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@mike I think we might be thinking on a similar wavelength here…
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Mason’s just getting stranger and stranger with every day.
I’m left wondering just what the hell Briarburg is doing letting a guy like him stay in their midst and on their payroll -unless they’re ok with him and his…methods.
Why go after the people who are being let free? Why kill them? Is that his job? Or is that something he’s doing out of his own free will-he wants to kill them for some reason?
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I am very intrigued by how he thinks he’s saving the world (and how killing another 90 people fits into that).
One word. Ozymandias.
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Ok, so I’m tired and pretty sick so this may just be delirious ramblings, but… Leaving a cult is hard. Sabrina showed us how easy it is to return, no matter what has been done to you and how much of yourself you lost… So maybe Mason, in his mind, is saving the 91 from themselves? Maybe his intentions aren’t to kill all of them – maybe he will only kill the ones that don’t have it in them to stay away? Much like @mike’s suicide squad theory I guess… I know that’s a lot of maybes, but Mason is tricky…
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