10.4 A Task from Sabrina

Want to confirm;

Dissolve = The final reduction happens with the LA crew
Absolve = They remain within OSDM but just moved?

What happens if Bryan declines to vote and start things off? Or if there’s a tie?

@daela, seeing how OSDM works, my guess would be that they would just automatically dissolve if something like that were to happen.

I guess this answers the question some were asking of what would you choose if you knew what the consequence would be. Even knowing what I want to vote, it’s still going to be a difficult decision.

Confirm, please the order of the vote – do you choose who votes 2nd?

My understanding is Bryan votes. He then either elects to stop the vote, or pass the vote on to the next person. That person then makes the same two decisions. Dissolve / Absolve, then Stop / Continue.

Dissolve reminds me of the limetown podcast *SPOILER *

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where they legit dissolved people to clear the area ???

• This reply was modified 7 years, 2 months ago by Kristin.

If @bcbishop wants to, he can decide their fate. He can vote and end it there, absolving anyone else of any responsibility. But either way, it’s on him first and foremost now.

@bcbishop

You do what you think is best and I’ll support that decision.

• This reply was modified 7 years, 2 months ago by Twan Intarathuch.

I’m still confused about what means what. What dissolve or absolve means in this instance.

I’ll post this here as well as in CONJECTURE, because I think it relevant to the Sabrina call. This references today’s quote and painting.

The quote is from one of the first Black Congressmen ever elected, Adam Clayton Powell Jr. (NOT of U2, and way to go for continuing to dishonestly post quotations) who did a ton of great things for civil rights, but is a hypocritical statement because he himself became corrupt over time.

The painting is “Invitiation to a Coup” by Wolfgang Lettl. Lettl’s painting (he was a German comms officer in WWII) is up for analysis, because I can’t find any online. To me, it seems that people can be two-faced when it comes to seizing power. One side is locked up and proper when things are all well and good, but when the time comes to seize power and one is invited to participate in an overthrow, the more deformed, crooked, puzzle-shaped pieces of the person are revealed — the darker side i.e. The Shadow.

This suggests that we are seeing the theme of Shadows reappear — two sides to Sabrina, a suggestion of Stephanie as a double agent.

[Also: I have no other information regarding Stephanie’s allegiances since the meeting.]

Bringing this from slack, why not be the wild card and go the unpredictable route? Obviously they think we will make a decision, otherwise they would have already made it for us. They want us to bicker and divide, but the unpredictable route would be to leave it up to them. It may benefit us in the long run if we start changing our methods of making decisions as a whole. Regardless, we need to stand together and stay focused.

No matter what happens with this vote, it guarantees that everyone that participates is going to feel responsible, everyone that’s active is going to be held responsible, and everyone is going to be upset at everyone else.

Those that weren’t able to vote will be upset that they didn’t have a say in the decision.

Those that vote one option will be upset at the person that shuts it down when the vote is leaning the other way.

Whoever shuts this down will be seen as public enemy #1, and that’s their goal. And it’s up to the community to self-regulate and understand the context of these decisions (lol)

Sabrina. You are an evil genius.

@shankfx22 I don’t think we get to get out of this one. If anything, trying to get out of it is more predictable than anything. They know how much we hate consequences. The only way out is through. A choice will be made. I’m pretty sure there’s no third option here.

@chelsea I’m thinking the exact same way. If we try not to make a decision, they’re going to make the worst one for us, and then hold us responsible because we tried to lawyer our way out of it.

I’m thinking not making a decision means they will do their worst. It doesn’t feel like there is a way around it.

What, in everyone’s mind, would “their worst” be?

More murder? I honestly don’t know what they are capable of when they are really angry. But I do think that if we try to get around making a decision they’ll be furious.

It looks like an interesting way to see how many spineless jellyfish pass the buck before someone has the balls to make a decision.

Bryan, if you don’t make a decision, Sabrina may have you shave your legs and wear a dress 🙂

@mouse, Shut the fuck up with that shit.

So I’ll just say this once and then I’ll be back for the vote.

If you vote dissolve, the OSDM shuts down for good, the CONSEQUENCES of which are that The Lust Experience comes to an end. WE, the PARTICIPANTS, will have to live with those consequences.

Is that a consequence that you are willing to accept?

We have to vote absolve.

Love, Cassandra.

There’s no doubt in my mind that this is a hard decision for some people to make, but from my perspective, the choice is pretty clear. I’m voting for dissolve. I voiced my feeling on this on Slack, but I’ll reiterate them here: fuck the OSDM. Personally speaking, I’ve no reason to be considerate of their livelihood or safety. I’ve no reason to show them humanity. I’ve no reason to show them mercy. Sure, I’ve been detached through most of these goddamned occurrences, but you know what? I’m in no way particularly obligated to give a flying fuck about them. There’s no reason for me to carry any sort of “moral obligation” towards their safety. If the decision is reached to have them dissolve, and the logic is “dissolve = death”, so be it.

On another note, there’s a funny little idea itching around in my brain. Call it apathetic, but who’s to say that our decision, this little straw poll… who’s to say any of it matters? People can say anything about anything. Option 1 leads to Outcome A, Option 2 leads to Outcome B and so on/so forth. Who’s to say, and furthermore guarantee, that our decisions will actually warrant the outcomes provided? We don’t know if they will. Counterintuitively to my point, nothing says that they won’t. Fact of the matter is that we don’t know, and there’s no proof of either. What we decide could produce something radically different from what we’ve been told it will. Just a thought.

Going off of the logic that our decisions potentially don’t matter raises the question of “Okay, so why are we doing this then? If it doesn’t matter, what’s the point?” I’m willing to wager that this might be some kind of test. See where we stand and all that. I know some of us have predilections towards particular groups… this might be a way of seeing where we stand. Outcome-wise, anything’s possible at this point. Food for thought.

Seems rather premature to assume that “Dissolve” means the total end of everything, eh?

Have we ever received positive confirmation that this is a total burndown and not just the dissolution of an arm of the OSDM? For all we know this is only the burndown of all data centers, with entities responsible for running things somewhere else

Sensing a lot of people who assume they have this all figured out today. Just saying.

I’m with @thegilded on this one. I’m not buying that this wiuld be the end all to the experience

91 is such a specific number. Is there a correlation between how many active participants there are and this number? Maybe this is a trick and we’re the pencil pushers.

If it’s about data, who else would be doing this work besides us?

I agree with Hannah. It’s highly unlikely that dissolve means the end of the “Lust Experience”.

It just means the end of the OSDM. Let’s keep the Lust Experience plot fresh. Vote dissolve and dump the OSDM. I trust the creators to come up with a new and more interesting antagonist.

I feel like absolve is the right way to go. Aside from dissolve possibly ending all of this it’s also choosing to possibly end 91 people’s lives. I can’t choose to end potentially innocent lives

I’m stuck on what @daela said.

How would shutting down their last standing chapter and eliminating the 91 be in their best interest?

This isn’t like some Walking Dead, “Cut your son’s arm off or I’ll kill you” nonsense. She’s letting us decide if we want to cripple the organization that backs her. No one else finds this INCREDIBLY fishy?

Like if it doesn’t really matter to her whether or not these 91 peons get fired or thrown into a fire, then why are we listening to her at all?

So about the “relocation and resources in a different field” if we absolve, what if that means Briarberg? All of their resources are shifted to Jaime and Mason and co? They’ve made it clear in the past that Briarberg was formed as an “alternative” to the OSDM, and it’s likely they share many of the same goals, just with a different approach.

Some don’t even know what the numbers mean. They have a nine to five and benefits packages. Do you get that?

As we move forward, this piece of information is vital. Not everyone who works for OSDM even knows what they’re working on or who they’re working for.

Like I said. People’s lives are at stake. Do we want to be the reason they die?

I assume that if the choice to dissolve was the majority vote, more than 91 people will be affected (aka the families). But I’m very curious if the OSDM would kill the entire family, or if the employees have kids, take those kids and raise them to whatever standards or beliefs that the OSDM has. If the OSDM is as powerful and far reaching (or was), I don’t think this would be a great stretch. Mostly bringing up that idea because talk of children and bloodlines keep popping up every so often.

The major players in the OSDM will not be affected other than having to restart whatever plans they have in motion. I’m not entirely sure how dissolving this data center will do much of anything except hinder them for a while.

I really think that in any situation it’s a good idea to consider worst case scenario and whether you’re willing to accept responsibility for that. I know that to many that sounds like overreacting, but have a drink with me sometime and I’ll explain to you how it’s worked for me so far, especially insofar as Tension/Lust, and you might change your mind.

It’s also a good idea to not complicate things. The simplest explanation is the most likely. We were given a recording that – by the simplest explanation – indicated the killing of an entire family, including a child. Why complicate it? Why try to parse that and make it into something more palatable? The child died. Period. If we dissolve the OSDM, children will die. They will not be spared.

The OSDM runs The Lust Experience. The simplest explanation says that if we dissolve the OSDM, there will be no more Lust Experience.

Those are your consequences. TPTB *love* their consequences and making us live with them. They are giving us the rope with which to hang ourselves.

I’ve had some thoughts since before the THEONE vote but I wasn’t as open with them as I should’ve been, so here goes again. Our existing data means very little in the grand scheme of things. No data? Start over and get more. Impeded by the shininigans of the LA group? Get unwitting people who are less rowdy to give them data. The body of the OSDM is the data centers and the everyday people that man them, perhaps unknowingly, but the head is what we need to strike at if we want to do any permanent damage.

None of us want pencil pushers to die. What the reduction did to the other data centers we can only guess, but assuming the worst-case scenario, someone up top gave the order to do it. Let the body walk away. We have to turn our attention to the head.

We’re all kidding ourselves if this is the last piece of OSDM and if we choose to dissolve it, then that’s the end. There’s no way.

Organizations as powerful as that would never let that happen. They have backs ups in place. They have plans in place. People like Michelle and Horace and whoever else don’t go to the office on Monday morning and work until 5. They’re much smarter than that.

OSDM will, unfortunately, live on and keep on destroying sacred books and people’s lives no matter what happens today.

I agree with @coryphella in that I think we have to look at this in the simplest way possible. We dissolve, people die, and that’s on us. Aside from, ya know, death, there’s a strong possibility that the Experience, all this, is done. We all go back to our lives without this, and the knowledge that we very likely may have caused people who have no idea what’s going on to die. And like @daela & @candaceisstuck pointed out, this won’t affect the big players. OSDM will likely go on in some other capacity. I’m sure they have contingency plans.

They are giving us the rope with which to hang ourselves.

Exactly. Either we allow OSDM to continue whatever the fuck it is they’re doing, and MAYBE eventually find something resembling answers, or we don’t, people die and all this is over (for us, anyway). Even if we “win” it isn’t really a win is it?

@thegilded – When you take something that was promised, that means so much to me, and destroy it, then yes….top o the shit list 😀

Sabrina’s clarification to Bryan hones in on the fact that we are behing asked to decide the fate of real people, and whatever we chose would be no skin of the OS/ODSM’s back. If “dissolve” means “put to death,” which a lot of us are assuming it does, then it feels like we’re being deliberately pushed to choose “absolve” as the empathetic choice. Why? It couldn’t be so cut and dry, nothing here is. Remember when Mason led @bcbishop to believe he had a chance to save Joyce? That chance never existed, as we found out.

As tempting as “absolve” is from a moral standpoint, I doubt it’ll turn out to mean what we think it does.

I agree, @mike. OSDM does not live or die based on what is decided today or yesterday. Yet more to the point, I personally have not seen any direct evidence of OSDM as having done anything concretely harmful — certainly nothing on the level that would permit anyone to sit in judgment of 91 individuals + kin, and certainly nothing that has apparently resulted in the deaths of far more.

It seems the choice is very clear for a number of reasons.

Were I @bcbishop, which I thankfully am not for many reasons having to do with looks, I would ABSOLVE and end the voting right there.

The message from Sabrina was clearly intended for him. He abstained earlier and is being forced into a decision. He’s an “influencer”. And frankly, I wouldn’t want the burden of this decision, so he’d be showing the rest of us a kindness by taking on said burden himself.

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Tangential note: The leaked text exchange makes it seem as if Sabrina infiltrated OSDM of her own accord, and doesn’t need saving (You hear that @111error and everyone else who insisted she did?), and was working on her own operation, and the BoS “attack” fucked up those plans. This is the equivalent of bumbling local cops busting an operation w/o realizing that someone might be on the inside — which is why they should have instead tried to make contact with Sabrina instead of insisting she needed saving and had to be out of her mind.

Theme repeated: No forethought. No overall strategy. Just “burn it down”. Nice job. Getting better and better by the minute.

• This reply was modified 7 years, 2 months ago by Lawrence Meyers.

@nothenrygale, that’s an interesting take. If we vote to dissolve, they could be killed. If we vote to absolve, they could be relocated and repositioned to Briarberg and harm more people. This is like that Joker/Batman dilemma. Damn…

Copied from Slack discussion:

I think this vote will be important but not for the reasons people think it is. This is a chance for Sabrina and OSDM to collect more data. See who we all forward the vote to. Will the PrOSDM crew only pass it among themselves? Who will have the balls to end the vote? Will people send the vote to someone they know will vote differently from themselves?

If this truly had the consequences they want us to think this does, they wouldn’t leave the decision to us. They’d just do it.

With the clarification that a lot of these “pencil pushers” are only looking at numbers and don’t even know what they stand for, I’m very confused why they would feel the need to slaughter them? The call @addisonborn received made it seem like those two knew what the deal was, but if these people don’t… then what the fuck?

Exactly @rizzzoooooo. Moreover, people keep saying that Briarberg is equivalent to OSDM. As mentioned, I see nothing broadly and concretely harmful that OSDM has done, so given that we know next to nothing about Briarberg, why is even so quick to render judgment on them?

Hasn’t anyone learned that rendering judgment without forethought or information leads to DEAD PEOPLE?????

Personally, I hope to see everyone vote just to see us start a fire.