Wonderland - Jags

gauge-energy experiment had something unexpected happen: they made
contact.
The government in the midst of a cold war had made contingency plans
for the discovery of a superior intelligence. They had analyzed what it
might be like and the conclusions were not good. History, the advisory
teams told congress (you can imagine them too: serious gray-suited men
meeting to discuss matters of grave importance in an era where it wasn’t
a breach of etiquette to smoke cigars in a conference room) details several
encounters between less advanced and more advanced cultures: the
less advanced culture is usually destroyed (cf. The Conquistadors).
The decision had been made that should such contact be established (and
since we were going into space—those Red Bastards had orbited Sputnik
just last year—it seemed possible) that no one but the government
should be told until the populace was judged “ready.” With flying-disks
in the public mind already, media leaks would be controlled by firewalling
information: the team that made contact would have a single point of
contact to an analysis team, which would in turn have limited points of
contact to congress and the president.
When Pilgrim made contact, the entire chain of command was restructured
to an Inner and Outer Committee. The Outside Committee were the
men that communicated with Congress, the President, and the military.
The Inside Committee were the men (and one woman) who met in a secret
facility above the shaft which housed the Pilgrim station. They (the
Inside Committee) were under orders to shield the Outer Committee and
the government from any information that was deemed too dangerous to
spread.
Imagine a wood-paneled meeting room, deep within a nameless government
building in New Mexico. Scrambled cable lines run black and white
pictures and scratchy sound—like pictures from deep space—to the men
in the Inner Circle. They wear no insignia and they sit before lit partitions
so they appear as shadows. They don’t even use their real names—
there is supposed to be nothing that links them to each other. In the event
of Exposure the group is to be dissolved and there is to be no connection—no
external collaboration. The room is swept for listening devices
before each meeting (and each enters through a separate door in the
building). There is a sense of giddy excitement—they are at the vanguard
of humanity’s contact with what appears to be a superior intelligence.
They may be leading their nation to the gates of heaven and supremacy.
November [a large bearish man of military bearing]: Well (clears
throat) we’ve all had a look at initial report. Can someone tell me why
we don’t think these signals might not be coming from our own backyard?
September [a narrow-framed man with glasses]: A—an enemy nation,
November?
Most readers picture only
Tenniel’s illustrations when
they summon up concrete visual
images of the Alice books.
Those delightful illustrations
have become so integral to a part
of the institutionalized literary
experience we call “Alice”
that Tenniel’s renditions of the
adventure constitute for most
people the “official” ones; the
ones that shape their perceptions
of the verbal texts/ Carroll’s
drawings, however--naive and
primitive as they might seem-
-often better illustrate both the
original and the published book.
They do so mainly because they
better reflect the horror comedy
that pervades both texts.
--Donald Rackin, Alice’s
Adventures in Wonderland and
Through The Looking-Glass,
Nonsense, Sense, and
GameSpy: What inspired
you to transform Lewis
Carroll’s whimsical fantasy world
into a gothic circus of cartoonish
morbidity? Why was this an
appealing setting in which to
create a game?
American McGee: Why was it
appealing? Because the original
books and characters are actually
pretty dark to start with. This
felt like a very natural extension
that the existing characters and
fiction.
--Interview with American McGee,
creator of “Alice”
13
Introduction