DID/MC/SRA

[This article describes the ways in which new alters form inside a dissociative system.  This does not cover how the initial alters are formed in a dissociative disorder, nor does it go into detail on how abusers intentionally form alters.  This is once a system has already started to create alters and get organized into a functional system.]

There are several ways in which new alters (alters, fragments, or parts) can be created inside.  The most common way alters are formed is when an alter (called the "Original Alter" or "OA"; this does not mean the Core) is placed in an extremely stressful or traumatic event, or an emergency situation, in which they do not know how to successfully cope or function.  Dissociative systems aim to survive these types of situations in a functional manner, meaning they usually strive to perform the functions they believe are being demanded of them in a way that causes the least amount of danger to themselves or others.  They believe, usually rightfully so, that failure to perform in a functional and successful manner (ie. meet their abuser's demands and comply with orders while causing the least amount of disruption/chaos) will lead to more frequent, more severe, and even more life-threatening forms of bodily damage.  When they have a long-term, or life-dependent, relationship with their abuser (such as parents, authority figures, programmers, and handlers), they are also trying to protect and maintain their relationship, because it is necessary for survival.  This is especially true when the survivor is a minor, and their basic needs are dependent upon the adults in their life.  Once this pattern is formed, it is hard to break, even once they are able to meet their own needs in adulthood.

There are four major areas of their relationship they believe they have to protect for their own survival:

The stability of the relationship (avoiding conflict/anger, being seen as a disappointment/failure)

The security of the relationship (avoiding emotional detachment/abandonment, neglect/withholding of basic needs, and social/emotional isolation)

The future of the relationship (avoiding punishment/retaliation, complete abandonment/rejection, and severing of the relationship)

The affect the relationship has on others/other relationships (avoiding the abuse, neglect, punishment, or life-threatening torture of other people, friends, family members, pets, etc.)

The OA may not be able to switch, the system may not be able to find anyone else who can perform better, or there may not be enough time to find a replacement to switch with.  The OA perceives something about the situation to be extremely challenging, toxic, or damaging to their sense of self, their sense of sanity, their core identity/beliefs/anchor point, and/or their perceived ability to successfully survive the situation, and therefore believes that escape is the only functional option (that is, they make the decision to try to escape by splitting/breaking).  Or the OA may break unintentionally while the situation is happening because they have run out of energy/stamina, pain tolerance, pain sharing/dispersement options, dissociative skills, or other mental skills needed to stay present and functional (at which point someone else in the system may make the decision to create a new alter for them).

The OA or the system may try to cause loss of consciousness (called "dropping," which is an internally caused fainting or passing out) to prevent the OA from breaking when switching is not an option.  However, dropping may not be an option in these situations.  For example, because the body chemically can not drop, such as when too much adrenaline/other stimulant is present; it is not allowed, such as when abusers have already proven that dropping will be severely punished so the system learns to avoid dropping; or it is not safe because the body must maintain consciousness to stay alive, such as when driving a vehicle.

When the only way to functionally survive these situations is to allow a new alter to surface, the new alter can be: forced into the situation to replace the OA, can assist the OA in handling the situation by being in the situation at the same time, or can hold the memories of the event separate from the OA (through the use of amnesic barriers).  New alters can be created by the OA or the someone in the system in several ways, including: breaking the OA, breaking someone else, creating one from scratch (from the Core Energy), or using a pre-existing alter/fragment who has not yet had an identity or anchor point established (sometimes called "blank slates" or "base programmed" alters).  In non-intentional alter formation (i.e., not intentional design and programming work) new alters usually end up being created outside of the OA, and most commonly are created from the OA breaking/splitting.  When the OA breaks inside of themselves, and retains those parts, a subsystem is formed.  (These are described below and will be described in more detail in a future post.)

(Click to enlarge graphic)

The show opens with Dolores asleep in bed with Bernard saying “Wake up, Dolores.”  We then see her leaving the farmhouse in the middle of the night in her nightgown and staring off into the distance.  Bernard’s voice says “Do you remember?”

Then we find ourselves in a futuristic looking train with two Guests who are coming into the Westworld headquarters to visit the park.  One has been there before (Logan), and the other is a first time Guest (William).  We see William interact with a Host who will prepare him to enter the park.

- Hospitality Host: Given it’s your first visit, I have a few personal questions.  Do you have any pre-existing medical conditions? - William: Ah, no, not that I know of. - Hospitality Host: Heart problems? - William: No. - Hospitality Host: Any history of mental illness, depression, panic attacks? - William: Just a little fear of clowns.   (She looks mildly confused) Joke. - Hospitality Host: Do you often experience social anxiety? - William: What is this for exactly? - Hospitality Host: To make sure we don’t give you anything more than you can handle. - William: I thought that you couldn’t get hurt? - Hospitality Host: Only the right amount.  The only limit here is your imagination.  You start in the center of the park, it’s simple, safe.  The further out you venture, the more intense the experience gets.  How far you want to go is entirely up to you. - William: So how does this work?  Is there an orientation? - Hospitality Host: No orientation.  No guidebook.  Figuring out how it works is half the fun.  All you do is make choices.  Starting here.

She shows him the clothing and guns and other items he can choose to wear into the park.  She confronts him that he has a question for her, and he asks “Are you real?”  She responds with “Well if you can’t tell, does it matter?”  [This has a very Alice in Wonderland feel to it.  What’s real?  Does it matter?  Does anyone in the world really matter outside of yourself?  How do you know what (or who) really exists versus what (or who) you perceive exists?  If I stop perceiving you as being real, have you really stopped existing?  If I close my eyes and stop perceiving, does the world really keep going on?  This is the stuff of ancient Philosophy.  Reality is a very slippery thing to grasp the harder you try to define it.]  

William points to a large display case of weapons and asks “Are those real?”  She answers “Real enough.  But you can’t kill anyone you’re not supposed to.”  He then looks at the clothing and asks if there is a changing room or a robe.  She offers to help him or step outside if he’d rather.  He asks “What do most people do?”  She steps into his personal space, becoming intimately close and replies, “You don’t have to worry about what most people would do.”  He says, “I understand.”  She coyly asks, “Do you really understand?”  She then take his hand, wraps his arm around her, and places his hand on her ass, “ All our Hosts are here for you, myself included.  We can stay here awhile if you’d like, take as long as you want.”

We’ve gone from Host to Seductress awfully fast.  She’s not crass about it.  She’s smooth, and calm, and she seems to be perfectly matched to his slightly anxious and introverted personality.  She’s here to help get him out of his shell and into the Westworld mentality as fast and as seamlessly as possible.   She’s unlike the Hospitality Host that greeted Logan at the train and was instantly making physical contact and smiling at him, much more aggressive and open-minded ,just like Logan.  These men have already been assessed, evaluated, and profiled before they ever got off that train.

[There’s something familiar about this process.  In the cult Family there are many guests you’ll be asked to meet with, perform for, comply with, service, and even manipulate.  The abusers know their targets, they know their guests’s needs and proclivities and desires.  And they match that with their victims, the Betas who will be tossed their way.  Assertive, aggressive, passive, submissive, dominating, easy-going, frigid, terrified, experienced, naive, they’ve got endless options to choose from in the victim pool.  Even inside the same victim who has Dissociative Identity Disorder.  We know she’s at work.  We know she’s playing him, by assignment, by design.  He doesn’t seem to know just how hard the game designers and controllers are playing him because he still thinks the game hasn’t even begun.  Some of our Betas pity him and hate him simultaneously.]

We then see a conversation take place between Bernard and Elsie.  Elsie is reviewing footage of Peter before and during his malfunction and she doesn’t believe he fits the same pattern as the others who suddenly broke down after the update (like the Sheriff) because Abernathy returned home after finding the picture.  “It’s like he’s mulling it over,” she says.  Bernard jokes that she’s implying that Peter had “an existential crisis.”  She says no, but that something “fucked up his cognition”, and that she believes Bernard feels the same way.  He assures her that they know where the error originated and that it’s been fixed.  She calls him out for “covering for” Ford.  He has no reply.  She asks for permission to rebuild Peter, to investigate it further.  He says that’s against policy.  She asks to look at the other Hosts because she fears that this was not a limited error but could have actually been spread like a “contagion.”  She specifically mentions Dolores, whom Bernard tells her was already cleared.  He then dismisses her complaints and concerns by scolding her that she should leave the stories to the guests.

We are then with Dolores in the middle of town when she becomes dazed and dissociated by the noises of the busy downtown as she nears the location of the shootout that killed Teddy.  Bernard’s voice rings out “Remember” and she turns and sees the street full of corpses like after the shooting instead of what is happening right now.  {There’s an interesting camera lens flare that the center right on the middle of her forehead, like the Mind’s Eye or Third Eye, showing enlightenment and awareness.  Intentional?  Accidental?  Either way, it’s appropriate because she is becoming enlightened and aware.]  Maeve interrupts her flashback to ask her to stand somewhere else.  Dolores says to her “These violent delights have violent ends.”  She then takes a long blink, as if breaking out of her flashback, and shifts back into her more easy-going body language to show she’s back on script.  Maeve looks at her, confused, trying to figure out what is going on.  It’s a sign that she’s also becoming more aware.  Maybe like Elsie suggested, the flaw wasn’t a coding flaw, perhaps it really can be carried like a contagious virus.

Meanwhile, William has dressed and is ready to leave headquarters to enter the park.  His Hospitality Host tells him just one final touch is needed and shows him two walls of hats: one wall white, one wall black.  This is where he chooses which team he’s going to play on.  The good guys, the rule-followers, the knights and cowboys?  Or the bad guys, the chaos-makers, the outlaws and criminals?  But this is a false choice.  Because by choosing to enter Westworld you’ve already picked a team.  You’ve already picked your rewards at other’s expenses - the Hosts you’ll control, manipulate, use, and abuse.  In essence, you’re at best a gray hat just for paying the money and arriving.  The only thing that will happen is for that hat to get darker and dirtier and bloodier once you enter the park.  

[And the cult Family is the same way.  Sure, some in control think they are holier or better or more enlightened or kinder than the others, but they are all there with the intent to abuse and take advantage of whoever is weaker and has less power.  Some abusers and handlers try to tell you they’ve got your best interest at heart, they won’t harm you, they’ve got your back... but it’s just lies to make them feel better about themselves.  Their white hat still comes at the expense of your blood, sweat, tears, sanity, and soul.  Even alters inside a DID system will argue over who’s Light or Dark, good or evil, real or programmed.  It’s all bullshit to keep them fighting each other instead of colluding together to fight the bastards on the outside, to keep them stuck in a game none of them were ever given the choice to want to be involved with in the first place.]

William picks his white hat and walks down a corridor towards the door that will take on his journey.  Again, this feels very Alice in Wonderland here.  Even the doors being reflected as some kind of reminder of Past, Present, and Future, or living in alternative Universes/realities.  Even Alice had to pass through many doors before she could go on to the next layer of her journey.  

William crosses through the door and finds himself on a Western train.  He has a drink at the bar waiting for Logan to join him, who shows up shortly wearing all black and zipping up his fly, (indicating he’s slept with his Hospitality Host?).  William asks how they enter the park right as the vintage train begins to move and he can see the Western landscape outside the windows.  He is in awe.  Logan leans and and tells him, “I know that you think that you have a handle on what this is going to be.  Guns and tits and all that.  Mindless shit that I usually enjoy.  You have no idea.  This place seduces everybody, eventually.  By the end you’re going to be begging me to stay.  Because this place is the answer to that question you’ve been asking yourself?”  William asks, “What question?”  Logan replies, “ Who you really are.  And I can’t fucking wait to meet that guy!”

TMIB stops the execution of a condemned man.  He states that he would like to have a few words with the man, but the sheriff in charge of the hanging refuses to allow it.  TMIB responds by shooting all seven of the men present, except the one to be hanged.  He tells the man that Kissy sent him, and he shows him Kissy’s scalp.  The man looks at it and asks, “What is this?”  TMIB says, “You know exactly what it is.  It’s the maze.  The deepest level of this game.  You’re going to help me find the entrance.”  TMIB cuts the hanging rope  from the platform, ties it to his horse, and rides away, dragging the man by the noose.  The man struggles to his feet and begins running to keep up with his captor.  Yet another example of TMIB’s endless lack of giving a fuck about any of the androids in the game nor any appearance of actual humanity left in him.

Maeve is telling a story to try to seduce and lighten up a timid male Guest in the saloon.  It’s her backstory, her script, her bait to reel Guests in.  “You can hear it, can’t you?  That little voice?  That’s telling you don’t?  Don’t stare too long?  Don’t touch?  Don’t do anything you might regret?  I used to be the same.  Whenever I wanted something, I could hear that voice telling me to stop.  To be careful.  To leave most of my life un-lived.  You know the only place that voice left me alone?  In my dreams.  I was free.  I could be as good, or as bad, as I felt like being.  And if I wanted something, I could just reach out and take it.  But then I would wake up, and the voice would start all over again.  So I ran away, crossed the shining sea.  And when I set foot back on solid ground, the first thing I heard was the goddamned voice.  Do you know what it said?  It said...”  

Maeve then has a Reverie, a flashback, she gasps and we see her living as a different woman.  A Native Indian is killing someone near her, and then we seen the Native Indian trying to scalp her.  She becomes frozen and can not speak or move in the saloon.  The Guest excuses himself to get away from her.  The next thing we see is Maeve in an interview room in the programming lab.  A programmer asks her, “Alright Maeve, what did it say?”  She replies, “It said this is the new world, and in this world you can be whoever the fuck you want.”  Programmers then debate what’s wrong with her, why are her numbers (of johns) are falling, and that she’s at risk of being decommissioned.  They decide to double her aggression levels to help her perform better.  One programmer quips, “She’s a hooker, no point in playing coy.”

Ford goes to talk to Bernard, who is watching androids being built in the manufacturing lab.  Bernard reports that “we retired the two Hosts in question.  You taught me how to make them but not how hard it is to turn them off.”  Ford says, “You can’t play God without being acquainted with the Devil.”  Bernard states that he doesn’t believe the photograph was enough to derail Peter and that he suspects outside interference took place.  Ford asks if Bernard suspects sabotage, and actually seems a little nervous, more so than we saw when Peter was decompensating and threatening him in the interview room.  Bernard says it is the simplest explanation.  Ford comments about Occam’s Razor, the philosophical belief that the simplest answers are often the most correct.  “The problem, Bernard, is that what you and I do is so complicated.  We practice witchcraft.  We speak the right words and we create life itself out of chaos.  William of Ockham was a 13th century monk.  He can’t help us now, Bernard.  He would have us burned at the stake.”

[Witchcraft?  Interesting term for Ford to be using.  The cult Family is very much into witchcraft in terms of creating things to exist as they want them to exist.  Saying the right words to create, control, and orchestrate lives.  Handlers, magicians, priests, it’s all the same marriage of apparent power, the power of words, and access to monetary wealth.  Wishcraft.  Can you really believe in a God when you have removed all need for a God in your life because of how much power and wealth you’ve obtained?  Does there come a point when you have so much power on earth that you lose all ability for honest faith?  Has Ford lost faith in humans, not only because he’s given them permission to be as deplorable as they wish without guilt, but also because he has the power to totally replace them with an even better creation of his own making/control?]

Bernard and Dolores are in a glass room that looks different than the usual programming lab we’ve seen.  He asks her to bring herself back online.  Then he asks if she remembers their last conversation and if she’s told anyone “about our little talks.”  He asks her how many encounters she’d had since their last talk.  Dolores answers, “138 encounters including this one.”  He asks if anyone has altered her heuristics [way of thinking/processing] in that time.  She says “No.”  He admonishes her again to not tell people what they’ve been talking about.  She asks, “Have I done something wrong?”  He says, “No.  But there’s something different about you, about the way you think.  I find it fascinating.  But others may not see it that way.”  She asks him, “ Have you done something wrong?”  He doesn’t answer, instead he tells her, “Turn off your event log,  please.  Erase this interaction.  Confirm.”  He then gives her the command “You should be getting back, Dolores, before someone misses you.”  There’s unusual and slightly ominous music playing in the background, to give us the impression that something not quite kosher is going on here (as if we didn’t get that already from the fact that he’s instructing her to lie, conceal information, and delete data from the rest of the programming staff’s reach).  Now we’ve got to wonder what he’s doing to change the Hosts in addition to what we’re already trying to figure out about Ford.

Maeve speaks to Clementine, one of the saloon prostitutes, who is tired because she keeps having nightmares.  Maeve tells her how she wakes herself up from a nightmare, and then encourages her back to work.  Maeve has another flashback and this time seems to have physical pain with it, like a body memory.  Staff observing her from headquarters tell Stubbs that she’s getting worse.  Stubbs tells the staff member to tell Clementine to fill in and to decommission Maeve in the morning.  The staff member types something on his tablet and we see Clementine stand up straight, as if re-energized, and go back to mingling with the crowd as if he has sent the message straight to her brain for immediate reaction/response.  

Bernard finds Theresa in the hallway and asks her if she was talking to Corporate, because she seems stressed.  She asks if his department is ready “for the launch.”  He says they are, and that all the Hosts are back to normal.  She says, “Good, we wouldn’t want anything disturbing our Guests from their rape and pillage.”  She seems honestly irritated and slightly disgusted, showing she might have a little more humanity still left awake in her than we previously expected.  

William and Logan have dinner, in which their differences are even more stark.  Logan says “You’re wondering how to tell them from us, don’t you?  Well, quickest way to find out...,” at which point he pulls out his gun and aims it at someone.  William stops him from firing and asks can they finish the meal.  We find out that they apparently work together, and William thought they weren’t going to talk about work while on the trip.  Logan responds cryptically “Who says this trip isn’t work?”  William is approached by the rambling town drunk android who tells him about a lost treasure, and he listens kindly.  However, Logan gets angry and decides to stab the android’s hand with a steak knife just to make his stop talking.  Logan then takes them to visit the whorehouse where he partakes in group sex with two females and a male.  William, in the next room, turns down Clementine’s advances because “I’ve got somebody, somebody real, waiting for me at home.”  He also makes it clear that him and William are not friends.  I’m not sure what their role is going to be in the show, but their differences in behavior are pretty stark, as probably many white versus black hats in the park are.

TMIB takes his hostage to a small town within the park.  TMIB says “You know why this beats the real world?  The real world is chaos.  It’s an accident.  But in here, every details adds up to something.  Even you.”  He asks his hostage where the maze is, that he wants to know where the entrance is.  The man says he doesn’t know anything about a maze.  TMIB hands the man’s young daughter two bullets while he’s loading his weapon.      TMIB shoots the bartender.  We then see a Westworld employee back at headquarters telling Stubbs, “This guest already took out an entire posse.  Want me to slow him down?”  Stubbs responds, “That gentleman gets whatever he wants.”  [Gentleman?  Not Guest, not psychopath, not fucktard, but Gentleman is the word you’re using, Stubbs?  Oh, I had more faith in you than that!]  TMIB tells the hostage “You don’t understand, I’ve been coming here for thirty years.  In a sense, I was born here.  And this here, this is exactly why I come here.”  At this point he stands, turns around, then stabs and shoots about twelve people who have gathered in the town.  Without even breaking a sweat.  This is child’s play to him.   He’s killing people like he’s plinking bottles in the backyard on a lazy Sunday.

TMIB empties the empty shells from his gun, takes the two bullets from the young girl, and gives his hostage one last chance to help him find the maze.  TMIB murders the hostage’s wife in front of him and the girl.  He says “That’s why I like the most basic emotion.  You know what that means?  It means when you’re suffering that’s when you’re most real.”  The young girl looks up at him and says very matter-of-factly says “The maze isn’t meant for you.”  He says “Always another level.  I’ll take my chances sweetheart.”  She tells him “Follow the blood arroyo until the [creek] place where the snake lays it’s eggs.”  TMIB hands the girl the last unfired bullet from his gun.  The hostage tells TMIB to go back home.  TMIB says “No, you don’t understand.  This time I’m never going back.”  TMIB rides out of town on his horse, with the hostage still following him with the noose roped around his neck.

Ford has come topside in the park and is walking along a rather barren section of the desert grasslands.  A young boy greets him and says he is there on holiday.  They have a conversation about boredom and there’s something about what the boy says and his mannerisms that make me suspect that he is an android created to look like Ford when Ford was a child.  Ford comes across a snake and uses hand signals to control it.  The boy is fascinated and asks if it’s magic.  Ford says “Everything in this world is magic, except to the magician.”  Ford spots a black steeple looking monument and his mood changes.  He admonishes the boy, “Best you head home now.”  The boy tries to argue but Ford cuts him off by firmly stating, “You’re not going to come back here again, are you?”  The boy stops, stares for a brief moment, and listlessly drops the walking stick he had.  In monotone he says “No.”  Ford commands him “Run along now.”  The boy backs away, turns, and walks away into the desert, confirming my suspicion that he is in fact an android under Ford’s control and not a Guest.

Bernard goes to his apartment inside headquarters and Theresa comes to visit him.  She tries to apologize for her words earlier, but he brushes her off.  He invites him inside and they kiss, which is unexpected given the interactions we’ve seen them have before.  We then see them laying in bed together after sex.  

- Bernard: Stay a little longer.  We can talk. - Theresa: We never talk. - Bernard: I’m serious. - Theresa: So am I.  You’re certainly a man comfortable with long, pensive, silences.  Although, ironically, your creations never shut up.  They’re always talking to each other.  Even when there’s no Guests around. - Bernard: They’re always trying to error correct.  Make themselves more human.  When they talk to each other it’s a way of practicing.   - Theresa: Is that what you’re doing now?  Practicing?

We then see Elsie reviewing the programming and heuristics of Maeve.  She decides to remove the  extra “fuck load of aggression thanks to those morons in Narrative” and instead “You don’t need to be Agro do you?  Just a quicker study of those repressed fucks walking through the door.”  Emotional acuity, bump it, 1.5%.

- Programmer: Do they dream? - Elsie: What? - Programmer: In her story, she said she dreamed.  Do we make them dream? - Elsie: Fuck would be the point of that?  Dreams are mainly memories.  You imagine how fucked we’d be if these poor assholes ever remembers what the Guest do to them?  We do give them the concept of dreams/  Specifically nightmares. - Programmer: Why? - Elsie: Just in case someone forgets to wipe them out at the end of a maintenance session.  She’s got no dreams, just those sloppy fucks in the body shop patching her back together again.  

We then see Maeve back at work as Madam, finishing off her story with her newly tweaked personality.  She sees Teddy drinking alone at the bar and approaches him.

- Teddy: Well then I guess you can add lying to your list of sins - Maeve: The only thing wrong with the Seven Deadly Sins is that there aren’t more of them.  And while we’re on the subject, my transgressions wash off a little easier than yours.  At least when my girls are done with a man he’s still left drawing breath... for the most part. - (Teddy nods and pours another drink and then lifts his glass to toast, while a brawl breaks out behind them) - Teddy: Well in that case,  here’s to our indiscretions, spoken and otherwise.

A guest then shoots in their direction, shooting and breaking Teddy’s glass in his hand, and then shoots Teddy.  Teddy falls to the ground, the guest approaches and continues to shoot him in the chest several times.  The guest then shouts “Now that’s a fucking vacation!” and walks away.  Maeve looks down at Teddy and begins to wipe his blood off her shoulder, looking slightly disturbed as if this bothers her but she’s not showing it.  As if she’s quietly trying to process a thought she can’t quite reach in the moment.

We then see her back in her room at the end of the day, preparing for bed.  She has more flashbacks of her in a previous life, holding a child’s hand, walking in a field, the Indian with the knife and the scalp he’s removed from someone.  She clutches her abdomen as if she’s in pain.  She lays down and drifts to sleep.  We see more of her memories, perhaps a dream, perhaps a Reverie, she’s figured out how to access.  

She’s walking with a female child, her child, near their home in the grass prairie.  We see them playing, having fun in the kitchen, interacting in a very loving manner towards each other.  Maeve sits on the porch and lets her daughter brush her hair, she closes her eyes peacefully and suddenly the scene jumps to the Indian grabbing her hair and holding a knife to her scalp while Maeve struggles.  Another Indian is killing a man in the field, who has been scalped.  A cowboy appears on horse and kills the Indian holding Maeve, and then is himself killed by a different Indian.  Maeve runs free in search of her daughter, and then they run home to where Maeve loads a shotgun and prepares to defend her daughter.  We see one of the Indians looking in the window, walking towards the front door.  But when the door opens we see TMIB.  He enters, walks towards her with a large knife in his hand and a smile on his face, while she ineffectually shoots him several times.  She suddenly stops herself, counts to three, the scene changes to Maeve on an examination table.

Two men in the white lab coats with red gloves are working over her.  One exclaims “Found it.  It’s MRSA.  In her abdomen.  Filthy fucking animals not cleaning up.”  The other replies, “No wonder we have a fucking fly problem. Don’t look at me, I’m the king of hygiene.”  The first says “Bullshit,” and they start having a debate about hand washing and soap.  Maeve wakes up during their argument, opens her eyes, and looks around.  The men notice, panic, and begin screaming curse words as they back away from her.  Maeve reaches up with her hands to feel her abdomen, and feels that she has been cut open.  She struggles to get on her feet, loses her balance, and grabs a tray table for support.    One of the men yells “You forgot to put it in sleep mode!”  Maeve grabs a scalpel off the table and slashes out defensively.  The men back away and one asks her to put it down while the other shields his body with a large metal tray.  They try to remember what her name is so they can try to talk her into calming down.

Maeve refuses to listen as they ask her to put it down and let them help her.  She backs herself out of the room and runs down the hall.  She manages to find her way outside the building and looks around, but nothing is familiar so she heads back inside, growing weaker from the blood loss from her open abdominal incision.  She ends up in another part of the lab where the killed androids of the day are gathered, naked, piled up in one glass room, awaiting repair.  She sees Teddy in the corner and falls to her knees, dropping the scalpel and clutching her abdomen.  She two men who were working on her appear behind her, and one injects her in the neck.  They argue again about if she was put into sleep mode or not and then they drag her off .  “Help me move this thing before someone sees.”

[It’s interesting to catch these repairmen referring to Maeve as an ‘it’ and a ‘thing,’ and not remembering her name.  Sure, part of that is there’s so many androids they work on, how could they keep up with everyone’s name all the time.  But it’s also part of the cognitive dissonance it takes for them to stay detached, dissociated, and disassociated from the androids they work on.  Keeping them as inhuman as possible makes their job easier to perform.  They are merely fixing a body-shaped computer that just happens to bleed, not a person.  The programmers, handlers, and fixers in the Family do the same thing.  Their victims are other words to keep them from being human, such as Slaves, Assets, Toys, Dolls, Subs, Bots, Servants, Soldiers, Bitches, Puppets, Pets, and other terms of “property,” even Gifts.  Anything to keep both Owner and owned from remembering there used to be a person there.]

Dolores wakes up from her bed, and we see her leaving the farmhouse in the middle of the night in her nightgown like we did at the beginning of the episode.  She stops beyond the front yard of the house, says “Here,” and begins to dig in the dirt.  She uncovers a large pistol and takes it in her hands.  (Was “here” a question to a command inside her head, or an command to herself, as in this is the spot I’m supposed to remember?   I can’t tell, perhaps both.)

Back at headquarters, Lee is pitching his new narrative and set of characters for “Odyssey on Red River.”

- Lee: This storyline will make Hieronymus Bosch look like he was doodling kittens.  I have vivisection, self-cannibalism, a special little something I call the Horror Boreas.  Now, I don’t want to appear immodest, but this is the apex of what the park can provide.   - (Bernard meets Theresa in the crowd watching the pitch, while Lee still speaks.) - Bernard: Miss anything interesting? - Theresa: Lee not appearing immodest. - Lee: Horror, romance, titillation. Our most skilled guests will fight their way to the outer limits of the park, besting fearsome braves, seducing new bar maidens, befriending tragically ill-fated sidekicks.  And of course, like all our best narratives over the years, our guests will have privilege of getting to know the character they are most interested in: themselves.   I present our guests’s next obsession, Odyssey on Red river. - Ford: No. - Lee: Sorry? - Ford: No.  I don’t think so. - Lee: Wha... you... don’t thi... - Ford: What is the point of it?  Got a couple of cheap thrills, some surprises?  But it’s not enough.  It’s not about giving the guests what you think they want.  It’s not that simple.  Titillation, horror, elation, they are power tricks.  The guests don’t return for the obvious things we do.  The garish things.  They come back because of the subtleties.  The details.  They come back because they discover something they imagine no one had ever noticed before.  Something they fall in love with.  They’re not looking for a story that tells them who they are.  They already know who they are.  They’re here because they want a glimpse of who they could be.  The only thing your story tells me, Mr. Sizemore, is who you are. - Lee: Well isn’t there anything you like about it? - Ford: (Looks at android behind Lee) What size are those boots?

We then see Ford and Bernard walking topside in the park, in the same place where we saw Ford speaking to the boy earlier, near the black steeple looking monument.

- Ford: Something you want to say, Mr. Lowe? - Bernard: The Board, sir, this might ruffle some feathers.  You promised them a new storyline. - Ford: They shall have one.  Something I’ve been working on for some time.  Something quite original.

[Hieronymus Bosch is a famous Dutch painter from 1450-1516 who was known for his dark, even garish and gruesome, and fantasy infused religious-themed paintings that are crammed full of people and animals in countless numbers of small scenes within the larger story/painting(s).  The Garden of Earthly Delights is one of his most famous.  It is three panels, with the first being the Garden of Eden, the middle being a human-made hedonistic garden of sin, and the last panel depicting Hell.  Just like Lee’s narrative: “Horror, romance, titillation” and more.  You can explore many of the hidden scenes and meanings of pieces of this painting at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Garden_of_Earthly_Delights.

What strikes me about this painting in particular is this progression from Heaven to Hell, with hedonism in the middle.  This very much matches the levels to the Family cults, which on the surface may appear to be strictly religious and harmless in nature (such as using a regular church, childcare center, local hospital, and even standard military bases for abuse sites and recruitment sites).  But once you get below the surface, you’ll see the hedonism.  And for some people, that’s what they are looking for.  And other people are just passing through, because what they really want is that last panel.  For those people, Hell is something they want to control, or emulate, or create on Earth for others.  Others believe that they must be experienced travelers in all three worlds in order to have the most power and sway possible (both on Earth and in the Spiritual planes).  

But within the intentionally designed system this painting is also a reflection of their internal structure and world.  You’ll find alters living in each type of layer, Heaven (those without trauma), Hedonism (many who were taught to believe their trauma was “good” or “normal”, and many of the sexually abused alters live), and Hell (where the most severely abused, programmed, tortured, and lied to alters are trapped).  Many in one layer won’t even know the other layers exist, they can’t leave Hell, it’s all they’ve ever known, they can’t even imagine something else could possible exist.  A large part of recovery is helping alters know what layer they are trapped in, why/how they got trapped there, and giving them the choices, tools, and power to either move to a different layer or redesign their home layer to make it a better internal world. ]

This episode was called “Chestnut.”  Why?   Merriam-Webster defines chestnut as: - “any of a genus (Castanea) of trees or shrubs of the beech family; especially :  an American tree (C. dentata) that was formerly a dominant or codominant member of many deciduous forests of the eastern United States but has now been largely eliminated by the chestnut blight and seldom grows beyond the shrub or sapling stage”   - and “an old joke or story; something (as a musical piece or a saying) repeated to the point of staleness.”

I believe the battle between Lee and Ford over the direction of future narratives is where chestnut comes into play.  Ford is tired of the same old stories with the same old predictable titillations and subplots.  Cannibalism, horror, lust, battles, Cowboys and Indians and Hookers.  It’s all old, stale, and pointless to Ford now.  He wants something completely new and different for the park.  He’s ready for a new fruit to be harvested  in this garden, or perhaps he is just ready for a blight to come wipe this one out completely...

DIDMCSRA.wordpress.com  ©1/21/2017

In my experience, every systems has something or someone they'll die for, which programmers exploited, and programmed around.  Part of what we’ll die for comes from our basic temperament/personality (which they begin assessing as soon as birth).  Are we driven to protect ourselves, or protect others?  Are we passive, or aggressive?  Do we become angry or depressed with stress?

It’s also important to remember that suicide programming is a large umbrella.  "Suicide" can look different though depending on the system, its intended purpose, and its Owners/Architects.  It’s not just the typical suicide of “I’m going to get sad enough that I decide to take my life” kind of suicide.  That type of suicide is the most common, and it can have three major functions:

It can act as a threat (kind of like the implanted bomb threat) that makes survivors believe that they can be triggered to kill themselves at a moment’s notice;

It can act as a safety valve where those most stressed in a system can feel like they have an escape path “if things get bad enough,” which helps prevent them from actually mentally breaking down in a severe way (such as becoming psychotic, or destroying themselves and becoming unusable) and reduces the risk that they’ll attack/try to physically harm their abusers/handlers (aims it inward instead of outward);

It can give alters a self of control, as in “I have a way out but I’m not using it yet, but it’s in my back pocket for when I’ve decided enough is enough.”

Suicide can be trained in Omegas, and it often looks like the above (suicide on command, when too overwhelmed, when system not functioning correctly, when system at risk of performing a major violation of security or safety to protected others/abusers).  But it can be found in other programming types/layers:

Gammas can be programmed to suicide in order to protect secrets/information/abusers. 

Deltas can be trained that suicide as part of an assignment is noble, normal, even expected.  They may also see themselves more as kamikaze warriors who will become go out in a blaze of glory type homicidal actions, or death by cop/other Delta/or directly challenging another aggressive abuser or co-survivor/training peer. 

Thetas can be taught to accept suicide as a ritual, sacrifice for the Family/cult, or as some way to strengthen, honor, restore life/reincarnate/spiritually merge with a specific abuser/leader. 

Internal Enforcers/Abusers/Programmers can learn suicide (of self, or flooding/triggering suicidal alters to do so) as a punishment/effect of entering recovery, allowing insiders to change programming/scripts/jobs, and for not staying in contact/use with abusers (callback programming, end of the line programming, thrown off the train programming, termination/expiration/contact clock programming, etc.), or if triggered with specific codes/commands by Owners/Handlers.  These alters are often Omega, Theta, Delta, or some combo.

So when looking for "suicide programming" in a DIDMCSRA system, do not overlook these other forms of suicide or self-destructive programming which need to be addressed as an important part of recovery.  It's also extremely important to realize that when you're working with an alter who is feeling suicidal, you need to make sure that they aren't being flooded/triggered by someone else who is trying to force them to act (i.e., it's not their own choice/programming, so trying to help them feel less suicidal isn't actually fixing the real problem causing the suicidal symptom - because that's happening in some other alter).

“Perhaps you better drink to a deep and dreamless slumber.”

The security team and Bernard discover that the unscheduled activity happening in cold storage is Dr. Ford sitting at an autopsy table having shots with an android named Bill. Bill is another one of the original Hosts, like Dolores. We hear them contemplating a toast to “the lady with the white shoes,” and I believe that may actually be a reference to Dolores, an indication that they used to be in a story together. When the security team arrives, Dr. Ford speaks to Bill and says “Perhaps you better drink to a deep and dreamless slumber.” With these words the android suddenly stops all movement and simply pauses, as if put into sleep mode. Ford makes a comment about Bill being a good listener (which is ironic because it’s not like Bill has much of a choice, being an android, and Ford being his creator most likely). Ford gives Bill another verbal command, “You’ll put yourself away again won’t you Bill?” at which point the android lays back into his bunk and zips himself into a bodybag for long-term storage.

Survivors of repetitive abuse from the same abuser(s) often have verbal cues they learned as part of their abuse, even if it wasn’t set out as mind control. Abusers say similar phrases to groom victims, to instigate abuse episodes, and to ensure the victim doesn’t speak out. Survivors become very hyperaware of these phrases and words and quickly learn that “XYZ” means “___” is about to happen. In ritual abuse and mind control these phrases (codes, commands, even strings of numbers) are specifically scripted and can be used by more than one abuser/programmer/handler in order to access specific behaviors and even specific alternate personalities.

[Watching Bill be paused and put into storage (zipping himself into a body bag, no less!) reminds us of being accessed. Handlers and programmers able to pull up specific alters, get or give specific data, and then shove them back away like files in a filing cabinet. This is how the brain works after mind control programming is complete. We know we work this way. No, we know we’re used this way. And it makes us cold to watch it happening from the outside, where it seems abnormal, because when it’s happening to us it seems completely normal... “Oh you want file 864177 or alter 2802 or Samantha V or the nearest Omega? Sure, coming right up.” It’s not normal. It never should have been normal. And that body bag... following orders and doing what you’re told is still going to end you up in a body bag. That hits someone hard, because the rules always said if we did what we were told then we’d live. But most of us know better, we know you’re never guaranteed seeing sunrise again, maybe even moreso the more you follow their rules, because they’ve rigged the game... and if they tell you to die (Omegas, Thetas), then following the rules is death indeed. Programmed to follow the rules and then one day put yourself in a body bag for them, fucking shit.]

We get to watch the day start from scratch all over again, Teddy back on the train, and Dolores back in bed, making their way to town where perhaps they’ll cross paths today. This time we see that they have the ability to improvise, while still trying to follow their script. As Newcomers interact with them (such as Newcomers asking Teddy for directions), causing them to veer off the script which allows them to reconnect (he can’t be there to pick up Dolores’s dropped can), we see them adapt and continue on new paths as they develop. Just like alters who are programmed, they are not a pure computer script. They remain who they are, with the same goals and drives, but they adapt to what the real world throws at them. They navigate around barriers and adapt, even while still being a programmed self. These two states of functioning (improvisation and programming) are not mutually exclusive. Many people (especially therapists) who understand that mind control happens in people with DID do not understand that an alter who can improvise and seem to be making choices based on free will is actually still following their programming.

[HBO created two fake Westworld websites, one for “potential guests” looking at the resort, and one for “employees” who can look at emails and files. My initial hunch about Delos being the corporate name turned out to be correct, as the Delos name and logo are all over the fake webpages. One of the files is a flowchart of Dolores’s script, called the “Storyline Builder Template” from the “Narrative Department.” Mind control programmers often use decision trees/flow charts like these to script out specific programmed alters they want to create (what their jobs are, who they are able to communicate with internally, how they are accessed), or to build specific programming cascades (a programmed sequence of events that can be queued by one or more specific triggers/commands but requires actions from more than one programmed alters in order to complete the cascade).]

Teddy is taken off course from meeting Dolores by a group of Guests who want him to show them around. Dolores drops her canned item again in the street, and instead of Teddy picking it up for them to reconnect, the Man in Black (TMIB) picks it up. He tells her that he has other plans tonight, and for her to have a pleasant evening. She’s confused by the man’s comments because she doesn’t remember him, she then looks dissociated and goes back into autopilot/script mode, as if they are programmed to immediately forget (or to not think/evaluate) things that don’t make sense (i.e., to stay unaware). Her facial expressions are so quick, but they are there, that shifting, that forgetting, that getting back on script, like a train switching tracks. The brain has switched from one dead end track (engaging the man who picks up her can, because he’s turned her away) to proceeding with the next available track (going to the river to paint ).

[We call that “getting dissociated to quickly forget something we’re not supposed to know or investigate” getting wiped. Because sometimes we do it to ourselves, but most of the time it’s another alter inside removing that information from us, like wiping condensation off a mirror. It was there and now it’s gone, and I can’t get it back so I move on. Getting wiped is a very common occurrence in DID systems, but in intentionally designed systems it’s more frequent and more severe. Memories can even be taken from one alter and put into storage that they can’t access, such as computer files, library books, or filing cabinets.]

Another fly appears, landing on an android as he beings to stutter. It’s another clue that something is amiss, the malfunctions are multiplying. His face droops and he stops responding, as if he’s having a seizure or a stroke. He’s taken in for evaluation/repair, and we watch Bernard the Programmer, and two in management, argue about is this a programming error and should all the Hosts who have been updated be pulled out of rotation. This is when we hear “His core code is intact, which means he can’t hurt a Guest, he literally can’t hurt a fly.” [What’s ironic about this is the android in question is the sheriff, someone programmed like a Delta, who at the same time has limits that he can’t hurt anyone. These kind of double-bind/neutered programs exist in intentionally designed systems as well, such as Deltas who are trained to kill but never actually allowed to, or Omegas who are programmed to suicide but at the same time told they aren’t allowed to die. It’s really hard to convince these alters that they really can let go of their programming, even when you can show them that their programming was already nullified by the programmers themselves.] They decide not to pull the Hosts because it would be too disruptive to the 1,400 Guests in the park. [Talk about hubris, you’re not only playing God with the Hosts/androids but you’re also ok playing God with the safety of the Guests/humans.]

We then get to hear a conversation between two Guests who are partaking in prostitution services at the saloon. One who has been there before, and one who is on his first trip. The new Guest says “This place is fucking wild!” The other replies, “This is basic, level one. You ride out of town, that’s when the real demented shit begins. That’s where my man Teddy comes in, he’s like a guide.” The new Guest says Teddy creeps him out. The other replies “He leads us down the canyons, we get bored, we just use him for target practice.”

We see a fly land on Teddy’s face, but nothing odd happens. This is probably a clue that he hasn’t received the update. And if he’s really the guide into the “real demented shit” then I can see why they weren’t ready to give him access to his memories through the Reveries update.

A family wanders upon Dolores, who is painting a picture of the wild horses (also androids) who are drinking by the river. She speaks to the family and invites their son to come closer to the horses. As children often do, they say the truth even when they aren’t supposed to. He looks at her and bluntly says “You’re one of them aren’t you? You’re not real.” She looks slightly surprised (as if to say “What a peculiar little boy” followed by “What does that even mean?”) and shakes it off with a nervous laugh, shoving it right back out of her consciousness, and tells the family they should be heading along because there’s bandits in the hills and it’ll be dark soon. Then she goes back to her script of packing up her belongings and heading back to her residence. This is another example of a not-allowed thought or event being wiped right out of her mental grasp so that it doesn’t disrupt her programming, script, or performance.

Dolores’s father is putting the cattle up for the night and uncovers a worn picture of a woman standing in what appears to be Times Square, full of vibrant lights, automobiles, and clothing unlike their own. He shows the picture to Dolores to ask her for her opinion. She shakes her head, again as if dismissing information intentionally. and says “It doesn’t look like anything to me.” “But where is she? Have you ever seen anything like this place?” he asks again, pressing the issue. She repeats the same head shake and exact same dismissive response, and heads inside to stay on her script.

[It’s interesting that she uses these exact same words, which makes me think this was actually a verbal cue implanted by programmers, like the “deep and peaceful slumber” command. “It doesn’t look like anything to me” meaning it is nothing to me and I should stop looking at it, like a self-programming auto-hypnosis command. It’s hard to watch her keep forgetting (and refusing to learn, to hold on, to investigate), because we know what that feels like. We’ve been doing it for four decades. How much different our lives could have been if we had just stopped ignoring the truth and stopped doing what was “normal” in our programmed lives... could we have gotten free faster? Or would we just have suicided or been killed faster? I’ll never have an answer to that.]

Lee and Theresa have a private discussion on the rooftop balcony terrace of the Westworld Headquarters/Operations Center. And like the previous two conversations, we learn there’s more than meets the eye here in Westworld:

Lee: There should never have been an update in the first place. Ford and Bernard keep making the things more life-like, but does anyone truly want that? Do you want to think that your husband is really fucking that beautiful girl, or that you really just shot someone? This place works because the Guests know the Hosts aren’t real.

[Works because the Guests know the Hosts aren’t real... that works in Westworld. In our world it’s different, they know we’re real humans, they just don’t care because we fall under the category of “property” or “slave.” We are owned, we can be rented, or bought, you can even pay a high enough fee to have a human slave that you can murder for your own enjoyment. But mentally they lie to themeless that these humans being trafficked and murdered and trained are “less human than I” so therefore it’s “acceptable,” or that their needs are so important that the “ends justify the means.”]

Theresa: So what exactly are you suggesting?

Lee: Stop the updates altogether. Maybe even roll them back a bit, make them more manageable.

Theresa: Lobotomies tend to do that.

Lee: Think of the benefits, in terms of design time, maintenance, costs. Not to mention the Dr. Ford factor. That guy’s going to chase his demons right over the deep end... 

[Remember what I said earlier about programming being like public education, that’s what Lee is referring to here. Stop making them all college students. Can’t we just keep them all in elementary school where they know just enough to fuck or shoot or act like a cowboy, but without letting them be complicated or aware beyond that. He knows the stupider they are, and the fewer programming modules they have, the easier they are to control. That’s why you’ll find way more mind control survivors who were only taught one thing (sex work, drug trafficking, violence/soldiering, child sex/child porn), because their abusers/owners wanted to keep them as simple as possible to use them and then throw them away like a disposable razor.]

Lee: ... and I know that the corporation’s real interest in this place goes ways beyond gratifying some rich assholes who want to play cowboy.

Theresa: And here I thought you were only good at writing depraved little fantasies. You’re right, this place is one thing to the Guests, another thing to the Shareholders, and something completely different to Management. So enlighten me. What do you think Management’s real interests are?

-(She pauses, he scoffs and sighs)

Theresa: You’re smart enough to guess there’s a bigger picture, but not smart enough to see what it is. You know how much use that makes your support to me? Fuck all. Get some sleep, Mr. Sizemore, you’ll have more rich assholes to gratify tomorrow.

The exact same thing is true in the world of SRA and MC. There is the level one stuff, barely scratching the surface, the Guests who show up to parties/events/rituals in order to partake in sex, drugs, pseudo-religious highs, or guiltless violence; or who buy drugs, sex, weapons, or pornography from cult related businesses. They aren’t loyal to the cult or an agency, they are just users, consumers, useful idiots, wallets to raid. Then there are the Shareholders, the cult leaders, handlers, and programmers who spend a lot of time, money, and energy training mind control slaves, so that they can be used for cult business tasks such as drug mules, sex workers, weapons trafficking, low-level blackmailers, cult breeders and leaders, business employees, pawns in business deals/favors, and even sold for use in science experiments and additional training by government/intelligence agencies. Above them is Management, the international businesses, intelligence agencies, and governments who invested the most money and time into perfecting mind control protocols, and who use the best and the brightest victims for illegal/undocumented military assignments, assassinations, espionage, high-level political favors, high-level blackmail, high-level political favors/treats, illegal interrogations, illegal searches of private property, classified information handling/trafficking, and programming younger generations.

How complex is Westworld going to get? I don’t know. I assume it’s going to be similar. The Guests are just wallets to raid; the Shareholders want the financial reward and probably get extra special perks in the park, in return for their financial and political support to keep the park running; and Management who keeps pushing the boundaries to make the androids as real as possible, as if one day they hope to expand their android control outside the confines of the park, thus expanding their own power in any environment in which they can place/control/drive an android.

[Here’s an official map of the Westworld Operations Center, showing you just how complex their facilities are. What is striking to me about this picture is that in intentionally designed systems, the internal worlds are assembled into a pattern. Cube, Double Helix, Pyramid, and Cylinders with locking pins/tumblers are all common. These worlds can then be subdivided into levels, floors, quadrants, or regions. There is almost always some central access or core to the structure that allows programmers to quickly travel anywhere in the structure they need to (such as an elevator shaft, or stairs in a helix or double helix configuration). Pieces of the world that are more often used, or house the most active/accessed alters, are closer to that core. Regions that rarely get used, are need to be hard to access on purpose for security, are moved further away from the core. This map looks surprisingly similar to internal system design maps we’ve seen and worked with.]

Bernard is in an exam room looking at a worn picture of a young boy, like something he keeps in his wallet, most likely of his son. He says to the Host he’s fixing: “Good as new again, huh? Sometimes I envy your forgetfulness.”

[Some of us used to resent our forgetfulness, we wanted our memories back to fill in all the voids and haze. To make life seem tangible and real again. As we continue in recovery and get more of those lost jigsaw pieces back, there are a lot of times we wish we could go back to willful ignorance, denial, and amnesia. But once you get past the pain, shame, guilt, confusion, and anger these missing pieces contain, you are grateful to have that piece back in your reach again. Forgetting is easy, making peace with the truth is hard. Embracing those lost pieces and choosing to not forget them again is the only way out of the darkness. Recovery is finding that balance between reclaiming those painful memories, but at a slow enough pace that you don’t blow yourself up and have to start all over again. We know this, but it doesn’t make it any easier.]

Theresa tells Bernard that there is a serious problem with a Host. We see a Host in a bar, with two guests huddled in fear in the corner, and several dead Hosts scattered throughout the place. One Host is doing the shooting, and he’s rambling. He says “Not going to die this time, Arnold. Ain’t nothing gunna kill me.” The crew and programmers step into the world and stop all action, starting by emitting a high pitched tone that makes all Hosts stop movement completely. Men wearing red boots and gloves with white hazmat suits appear and begin cleaning up the scene. Bernard and Elsie evaluate the Host who has gone on the killing spree. We are given a preview of what’s to come in the park with this incident.

Elsie: They are supposed to turn on each other, but only if the Guest takes them on the High Sierra storyline. And Walter always buys it.

Bernard: Well I guess Walter got tired of buying it.

Theresa: I suppose this mean the sheriff wasn’t an isolated incident.

Bernard: Its good news really, confirms the problem was part of the update. We can roll him back, clean him up, and put him back in service.

Theresa: You think I’m going to sign off on this fucking homicidal thing going back into service?

Bernard: It’s homicidal by design. Walter kills other hosts all the time. I’ll admit the method here is a little unconventional, but it didn’t hurt a Guest.

Theresa: The hosts are supposed to stay within their loops, stick to their scripts, with minor improvisations. This isn’t a minor improvisation. This is a fucking shit storm.

Bernard goes to speak to Ford and we see a whole new aspect of the story.

Ford: So our creatures have been misbehaving, and you haven’t yet isolated the bug? That’s so unlike you, Bernard. Unless of course you have, and are simply embarrassed by the result.

Bernard: It’s the code you added, sir. The Reveries. It has some, um...

Ford: ...Mistakes... is the word you’re too embarrassed to use. You ought not to be, you’re a product of a trillion of them. Evolution forged the entire sentient life on this planet using only one tool: mistake.

Bernard: I flattered myself with taking a more disciplined approach here. I suppose self-delusion is a gift of natural selection as well.

Ford: Indeed it is. But of course we’ve manage to slip Evolution’s leash now, haven’t we? We can cure any disease, keep even the weakest of us alive, and perhaps one fine day we shall even resurrect the dead... call forth Lazarus from his cave. Do you know what that means? It means that we are done. That this is as good as we’re going to get. It also means that you must indulge me the occasional mistake.

[Dr. Ford just opened up another Pandora’s Box here. He has been writing code to allow Hosts to retain and even emotionally react to old memories, what he calls Reveries. Why would he make such a decision, he’s a smart man, he would know the predictable outcome of that gamble. Yet he took it anyway. That decision, plus his bleak perspective that Humankind has gone as far as it can, make me think he’s grown tired and weary of the Humanity he sees on display at Westworld. And that he thinks Humankind is done because it’s reached the end of it’s compassion and instead has moved into a limitless hedonism where nothing is impossible, unethical, or out of bounds. I begin to suspect that he’s giving the Hosts their memories back so that it can be a fair fight, and perhaps so they can do what he can’t: erase the deplorable nature of Mankind with the very entities who have been victimized so intensely due to that deplorability. Even if it means Humankind is killed off as the cure. The ultimate Deus Ex Machina - God from the Machinery: “an unexpected power or event saving a seemingly hopeless situation, especially as a contrived plot device in a play or novel.” Except instead of a contrived plot twist, like “oh it was all just a dream,” The God from the Machinery are the Hosts, the powerless, who are being set up to correct the seemingly hopeless situation brought about by a depraved and selfish Humankind, by the God of the Machinery Dr. Ford?]

The Man in Black has abducted a card dealer from the saloon at the end of his shift. He leads him out into the mountains, severely injures him to cause near-fatal blood loss, and then chases him out onto a ledge.

TMIB: About three liters, that’s how much blood I left in you, lose more than that, you die. But for now, you’re mine. And I’m going to get some answers out of you.

Kissy: What do you want?

TMIB: You know about games, don’t you Kissy.

(Kissy shakes his head no repeatedly)

TMIB: Well this is a complicated one.

Kissy: I don’t play, I only deal.

TMIB: Who said anything about you playing? You’re livestock, scenery. I play. The others, they just come here to get their rocks off, shoot a couple of Indians. There’s a deeper level to this game. You’re going to show me how to get there. Lot of wisdom in ancient cultures. Perhaps it’s time to dig deeper into yours.” (He moves in with a knife to scalp Kissy, which thankfully we don’t witness.)

[This is a hard scene, with a lot of blood, and pain. He has tortured this Host all night. We saw him leaving his shift the night before, and having his neck sliced open by TMIB. It’s now daylight, almost midday perhaps, so this journey and torture has been going on for hours. He has bled at least three pails full of blood out of his Host, and while we know logically that the Hosts can’t die in the park, we know he’s actually feeling pain and fear. You can hear it. You can see it. You can feel it. And you can’t do anything about it. There’s familiarity in this scene for us as survivors because we know the terror and pain of being tortured, and we know the terror and pain of having to sit by helplessly while someone else is being tortured near you. Perhaps this brutal, and perhaps too long scene, is here to remind the viewers of their own discomfort at seeing this, in stark contradiction to the Guests in the park who have become so jaded to other people’s pain. Just a little reminder that we still have more humanity than what we’re seeing in the park because we are actually disgusted.]

Dolores wakes up to find her father has spent all night on the porch, transfixed on the photograph he found of the woman in Times Square. Dolores asks if he’s been out here all night, and he answers confused, dazed, stuttering. He says “I questioned... The question... you’re not supposed to ask. Which gave me an answer.... You’re not supposed to know.” She comes near him to sooth him and asks, “What’s wrong, Daddy?” He becomes more dazed as he asks “Would you like to know the question?” Dolores calls for help, he deteriorates further as if he’s going to pass out, then he suddenly rebounds and with much intensity grabs her and says “You should go. Leave! Don’t you see... Hell is empty and all the devils are here!”

Dolores rushes to town to try to find the doctor, but his door is locked [and we pessimistically think there isn’t even a doctor character, because why would they ever need a doctor?!], she finds Teddy instead. They get caught up in the action in town and are unable to return to the ranch. One interesting pattern we see in their exchanges is that Dolores uses many of the same phrases we’ve heard her use when speaking to Teddy in the past, such as the day he picked up her canned item, but we see her using improvisation to use those same scripted statements in appropriate ways but within completely new and unexpected/unscripted scenarios. This shows the deftness of their programming and ability to navigate complex and new decisions while still following their same programed rules and scripts.

We see the control room staff creating a new storyline, bringing outlaws into the center of town in midday, which sets off a massive gun battle between the outlaws, the law enforcers, the bounty hunters, and others in town. This war kills all of the Hosts that they need to remove from the park in order to rollback the updates, while hiding the concern from the Guests. In fact the staff seem very hopeful that the amount of gun fire and bloodshed will be so over the top that the Guests will absolutely love it and not care that all the Hosts they were around are now dead and gone. Further proof of how jaded the Guests are.

We have a long scene with Maeve, the saloon’s Madame, who we have seen and heard before in short scenes in the saloon, and with the leader of the outlaw band who have just come into town, Hector. These two are very interesting counter images to Dolores and Teddy. Dolores and Maeve are both female Hosts, both with Beta programming. But where Dolores is unaware of her programming and the danger to her in Westworld, Maeve is fully aware of her role and the risks of being a sex worker in the wild West. Maeve uses that knowledge as a skill, a power, and a protection, whereas Dolores’s skill seems to be her naiveté and hopefulness. Maeve is a badass, calm under pressure, and a very skilled observer. Teddy and Hector are both Deltas, programmed in the skilled use of guns. Whereas Teddy seems to have a protector goal in mind, and a chivalrous attitude, Hector is the complete opposite end of that spectrum. He is a predator, he deals with the harshness of the wild West by being just as harsh in return, and he kills to protect his own interests (currently robbing the saloon).

Maeve and Hector have an oddly intense and humorous chemistry in this scene. She is completely unperturbed by the chaos, gunfire, and killing going on around her, as is Hector. They seem to know they are both at the same extreme pole of their programming spectrums, their jobs, and they respect that. They play off each other’s quips as if perhaps they had a past relationship we don’t know about.

Maeve: All the banks and trains around here and you fucking reprobates choose to rob us?

Hector: Why not? You’re all here, indulging your particular vices. So I’ve come to indulge mine.

Maeve: You’re a low-down son of a bitch.

Hector: I know. I know we both believe the same thing: No matter how dirty the business, do it well.

[A group of people inside nod in agreement. They totally get Maeve and Hector. And they totally understand that no matter what shit role you get cast in you play it damn well if you want to survive. And the better you are at it, perhaps the higher the chance you’ll get moved up so you get better assignments, ones that suck less maybe. So you do your best, no matter what. That’s the rules. Is this our programming? Or is this an honest assessment? Because if we do shit jobs well, have we really done anything to improve our situation, or have we just proven to them that we’re strong enough to take on whatever shit they want to throw at us next? There’s no right answer in the moment, you do whatever you think is the safest route between where you are now and wherever it is you get to be left alone again.]

DIDMCSRA.wordpress.com  ©12/23/2016

There are a wide variety of people who use trauma based mind control and programming to meet their desired purposes, from lone wolf predators to cults to governments to the world-wide geopolitical network of Controllers, often called the Illuminati.  Each of these have different specialty needs, but they also have overlapping needs.  So they have found that the best way to have a customizable system for all of them is to have a basic set of foundational agreements between them.  This is where the Greek programming system comes into play.

It works much the same way the public education system works: children start with the basics, and then as they age and develop, they settle into their specialities/skills/talents/advanced training.  But there are also different outcomes for different people.  Everything from dropping out, to barely graduating, to going to vocational school, to going all the way through graduate school.  Because of this, not all intentionally designed systems will have all of the same number of types of programing, nor the same distribution of how many of each type.  Some groups of abusers/programmers add in other programming types that are not listed below, but usually these custom-designed groups are directly linked to or started the same way as one of these basic groups.  Think of it as a cookbook, and these are the most common basic ingredients (like flour, eggs, milk, sugar, etc).  They can be combined in many unique ways to make countless dishes.

Programmed alters are usually given a backstory (a basic personal history and identity, for example "I am a Princess who lives in the Castle") which includes basic drives/objectives (for example "I must learn how to become a Queen and I must obtain the love of a King/Prince") and basic skills and beliefs about those skills based on their core programming (for example "To be a good Princess, I must obey those who have Authority over me [My King/My Queen/The Court], I must learn how to be sexually desirable/good, and I must be able to have children to continue The Kingdom." - which would be based upon Beta programming).

The most common programming categories are Alpha, Gamma, Beta, Delta, Omega, and Theta. These basic categories will be found in almost every trauma based mind control system if their abusers/programmers had enough time (and early enough access in terms of age of the body) to begin basic training.  Some survivors are lucky enough to be removed from their abusers before this can be completed, but sadly most are not removed in time because one or more of their immediate family is involved in their abuse/training.  These categories are both core/base programming (meaning there will be at least one alter of each type present in the system), and can be a specialty skill (meaning a system was designed to have a high population of this type of alter).  Many alters will even have programming from more than one of these categories at the same time (such as a Beta Delta).

ALPHA:  Base/Foundation programming, general dissociation skills, blank slates with amnesia barriers, and information attainment, storage, and recall.

GAMMA:  Misinformation, obfuscation, denial, confusion, and deflection of outsiders, along with maintenance of internal communication systems, information and asset protection.

BETA:  Sexual task performance, sexual and emotional bonding to influence or serve others, performance of drug administration or compromising situations in order to blackmail targets.

DELTA:  Weapon skills used for physically protecting assets, targets, or information, including the use of lethal force (either as assassination, self-defense, or body guard type situations). Interrogation tolerance and administration, fugue/automatic task performance (i.e., don’t think, don’t feel, just do this one scripted task until complete or dead), and other soldier-like training (“To Serve and Protect at any Cost”)

OMEGA:  Training and preparation to be able to commit suicide on demand, to be a willing sacrifice for a ritual or religious demand, or to suicide due to failing an assignment (seen as a form of protecting the secrets or information contained inside, and protecting or servicing the Family/Cult/Organization which owns them). They have a strong need to honor Family/Religious Bonds (“Death Before Dishonor”) and fear being killed and disgraced if they are seen as traitors (i.e., losing status, losing immortality, losing the protection/membership of the Family/Cult/Organization, and losing the rewards they have been promised in Heaven/Eternal Life/Afterlife).

THETA:  Training in religious, esoteric, occult, magic, Dark Arts, and energy work. These alters have very complex belief systems, may have psychic abilities, and often have special powers inside the internal world (such as to program, heal, or remove memories from other alters). Their religious beliefs are often at complete odds with others inside the body who tend to be more traditional/organized religion based such as Christian or Catholic and who may attend regular church services in the outside world.

There are two components of Theta, one of which would be part of the core/base programming, the other is more like Beta or Delta where it is a specific job assignment/skill. The core part of Theta is the system components/structures that maintain the whole internal system, controlling such things as which memories alters are allowed to keep and which ones are put into storage, what data that is allowed to be "known" or must be "hidden" and by what people, if damaged/"killed" alters are to be healed or sent to storage, when new programming scripts are to be triggered inside, and even what outsiders are allowed to access which inside alters (called "access").  Alpha is like the operating system installed on a computer (like Windows or Mac), but Theta is the actual machinery that responds to the operating system and executes it’s commands (the actual computer equipment).  Beta, Delta, and Theta are also specific programs/skills, like specific computer applications, which can be added to the operating system (such as Word and Excel).  Theta alters are often put in positions of power over others, either as leaders or in a skilled professions that have the ability to interact with the Theta core programming of other alters and the Theta system itself.

Trees, Healers, Programmers, Doctors, Court/Council members, and Undertakers are all common types of alters who are trained to work as Thetas. They fix/repair, control/program, manipulate/enforce/punish, and keep other alters working in line with their own jobs/demands/programming. And they will often tell you that they connect or communicate to others like them “through Theta.” This may appear like a psychic ability, telepathy, long-distance non-verbal communication, or other non-tangible connections between alters (like invisible threads that keep them connected, like Wi-Fi enabled devices being able to communicate on the same network). These Thetas may have also been trained or experimented on to try to develop psychic abilities outside their inner world, such as ESP, Remote Viewing, and Psychic Manipulation.

DIDMCSRA.wordpress.com  ©12/17/2016

MK Ultra Greek Programing in DIDMCSRA Systems

There are a wide variety of people who use trauma based mind control and programming to meet their desired purposes, from lone wolf predators to cults to governments to the world-wide geopolitical network of Controllers, often called the Illuminati.  Each of these have different specialty needs, but they also have overlapping needs.  So they have found that the best way to have a customizable…

When the security team goes into sub level B 83 to see why a human android is awake in cold storage, they pass through a large deserted place that has a large globe with the word “Delos” written across it. You’ll catch glimpses of this word hidden in random places inside the Westworld Headquarters. It’s a very important clue to what this place is, or perhaps what the original creators (Ford and Arnold) hoped this place could become. Perhaps it was the name of their company when they first started this project, before it was branded as Westworld. But for now, it’s a really big clue. Because Delos is a real place, with a very interesting history and mythological/religious importance.

From VisitGreece.gr, Delos is:

“Where light was born.

It’s a UNESCO world heritage site. It’s an ark of history, floating lazily on the waters of the Aegean Sea, just a few miles away from cosmopolitan Mykonos. It’s a chance to walk around the revival of the glory of the Greek civilization. It’s the head priest of the Cyclades, the birthplace of the immortals. It’s Delos.

In the ancient times, the myth of god Apollo, god of light, and goddess Artemis having been born there rendered the island sacred: no mortal would ever be allowed to be born on its land. But, a cradle of gods as the island has been, no mortals would ever be allowed to die on it either. So, apart from it being a conspicuous religious and economic centre, the island had also been exclusive in that: even during the years of peak of the Delian Alliance, women on the brink of childbirth and people close to dying would be carried to the neighbouring island of Rineia. The whole of the known world of that age was aware of the sacredness of the island and of its uniqueness.

Nowadays, Delos reserves its uniqueness to the know world: nowhere else in the Globe is there a natural insular archaeological site of this size and importance. No other island on Earth hosts so many monumental antiquities from the Archaic, the Classical, and the Hellenistic periods, i.e. the centuries of the great Greek art, on a territory used exclusively as an archaeological site. Delos is not a museum; Delos is not there to tell a story. Delos is history itself.

Visitors coming from the neighbouring islands are not there on an educational trip; they have rather embarked on a lifetime experience. And, as if by magic, the sacredness of the island lives on: the multitudes of people, who flock to share the island’s uniqueness, can do nothing but just visit it. The archaeological experience is the one and only activity the island is about. Its enchanting landscape is home to nobody. History is thus repeating itself: in a place of such importance, no person is ever born or dies.” [http://www.visitgreece.gr/en/greek_islands/cyclades/delos]

It’s an interesting juxtaposition that Delos is a sacred place where no mortal is ever born nor dies, and yet it is inhabited by human androids such as Delores who fit the definition of dolor as pain of a continuing nature, sorrow or grief, anguish, misery, and units of pain. And yet, this is the very foundation for trauma based mind control. People in authority, seeking their own version of immortality and endless power, often use a mixture of religious and occult beliefs to try to create some sacred space on Earth where they can be God. They then staff and control this place with people they completely dominate and control via pain and fear. It's the basic formula for any cult and dictatorship, no matter if their domain is a single house, a single state, a single country, or scattered throughout the planet.

Sadistic men with limitless power to experiment on and torture humans discovered that if you subject a young enough human to severe enough trauma (abuse, neglect, torture, psychological manipulation, and programming) for long enough, you can break their mind into several alternating personalities. These personalities can then each be trained to have a different sense of self identity, a different set of skills, and a different way of interacting with the world. Programmers, like authors, create different characters with different backstories, needs/goals, drives/motivation, skills/talents, fears/pain, rules/morals, and identifying traits (age, sex, gender, orientation, aggressiveness, passivity, intellectual ability, etc.) in order to flesh out their created world and fill needs. If done right, these alters are created with complete or near complete amnesia between them, so that they can each live and experience the world without contamination, interference, or memories from the others inside.

A human body with a human brain split to function as if populated by countless androids. This is what trauma based mind control aims to achieve.

Impenetrable spy, super soldier, sex slave, sleeper assassin, Manchurian Candidate, Monarch, Marionette... lots of nicknames for it. Even a couple of clinical psychiatric diagnoses for it including Dissociative identity Disorder (previously called Multiple Personality Disorder) and Other Specified Dissociative Disorder (previously called Dissociative Disorder Not Otherwise Specified).

This is real, not conspiracy. First documented by the US government in 1945 as Operation Paperclip, which included the import of Nazi scientists, doctors, and researchers who had already been experimenting on humans in WWII concentration camps in order to continue their work in the US. Most of which was funded and overseen by the US government because they wanted these techniques (mind control, psychological manipulation, psychological attacks, drug-induced manipulation for interrogation and control, and methods for memory erasure or amnesiac divides within the brain to create better spies and double agents) for their own use. Not because the US government was somehow inherently evil but because the US strives to remain on the cutting edge of military prowess and non-lethal civilian control, and because they knew other countries were already studying, developing, and implementing these same techniques already (China, Russia, Germany, Canada, and the UK all were in on the same game).

This drive to be the best in PsyOps and Mind Control techniques spun off other projects such as Chatter (1947), Project Bluebird (1950), Project Artichoke (1951), and finally the most notorious, MK Ultra (1953, which didn’t “officially” cease until 1973, at which point the CIA attempted to destroy all related documentation to hide what they had been doing). MK Ultra solidified Monarch Programing (trauma based mind control used to split a young child's brain into alternate personalities) into a highly successful and highly reproducible recipe. In 1977 the US Senate conducted a hearing to investigate these projects when an accidental cache of 20,000 related documents were found erroneously stored along with financial records, saved from the 1973 purge, giving us the only official declassified paper trail of our own government’s involvement in experiments on human for the purpose of mind control.

These mind control slaves were intended to live throughout the world, infiltrating all levels of civil and government life, not just an amusement park. Broken, programmed, and used without their consent, often without their full conscious awareness for decades. Then cast out into a world trained to believe they are liars, faking, crazy, and delusional. Even mental health professionals who know it has been an officially codified psychiatric diagnosis since 1980 (almost 100 years after several cases of Multiple Personality Disorder were documented and published by psychologist and psychiatrists including Pierre Janet in 1883, Alfred Binet in 1890 and 1896, and Josef Bruer and Sigmund Freud 1895; with the earliest documented case dating back to 1586!) are still arguing if this is a real disorder or merely delusional people faking their symptoms for attention.

No other medical or psychiatric condition has faced this kind of public and professional denial, attack, and intense stigma (applied to both those claiming to have it and those claiming to believe in it and even more stigma against those willing to admit they treat it) for this long.  Could you imagine being a doctor who is threatened with lawsuits because you gave someone the diagnosis of Diabetes, Epilepsy, Schizophrenia, or Bipolar Disorder?  That you would be blamed for causing these symptoms in your patient rather than you recognized the symptoms and knew what label best fit them?  That your colleagues would be dismissive of you, your work ethic, your professional skills, and your own sanity for being so brazen to diagnoses these disorders and admit you are willing to treat them?  Or being told in your graduate college programs that there's no need for you to learn about one particular diagnosis because it's "too controversial" and "so extremely rare you'll never see it" even though world-wide research has shown that as much as 3% of the general population (those not seeking treatment for mental health or substance abuse issues) meets the criteria for DID?  It's insanity.

133 years of organized professional and societal denial of a mental disorder (coping skill and side effect of trauma) that the government and religious cults have known how to create for their own sick interests for over half a century.

[A really great article debunking the common myths about DID based upon empirical research is: Brand, B. L., Sar, V., Stavropoulos, P., Krüger, C., Korzekwa, M., Martínez-Taboas, A., & Middleton, W. (2016). Separating Fact from Fiction: An Empirical Examination of Six Myths About Dissociative Identity Disorder. Harvard Review of Psychiatry, 24(4), 257–270.]

It's no surprise that most of the government funded programs to study mind control and the effects of severe trauma on human subjects was performed by top psychiatrists, doctors, and psychologists at federal military bases, military hospitals, federal prisons, federally funded universities, and federally funded hospitals. Nor is it any coincidence that many of these same professionals who created and ran these unethical and illegal experiments were also on the professional boards who create and publish the codified set of mental disorders and criteria for the entire medical field: The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Nor is it an accident that some of these professionals later helped create and sat on the board of directors for the False Memory Syndrome Foundation, which spends its time attacking survivors, therapists, and mental hospitals  who try to help survivors recover. (And False Memory Syndrome has never been defined as an actual illness, disease , or syndrome by any medical or mental health organization... unlike Dissociative Identity Disorder, just saying...)

The "conspiracy" part of mind control theories comes from the fact that many believe that the experiments and creation of mind control slaves continued beyond the document purge of 1973, and that mind control programming is still being refined and performed today.

You can’t make the brain break and shatter without pain. Severe pain. Physical and psychological pain. But once created, alternate personalities live in an internal world, where they are not be born nor die like mortals, just like Delos. They are not born, they are cleaved off the original source (the core, the birth personality) or split off each other like splinters. Alters do not die, they are simply decommissioned and put into cold storage, or consumed and merged (integrated) with others inside. Like energy, alters are not created nor destroyed, they simply change shape and form. Like the androids in Westworld they can be attacked, killed, and tortured inside, but they do not die like a mortal. Like the androids, they are taken by Undertakers who can repair them, replicate them (new bodies with the same memories/programming/mind), bury them, or put them in storage.

These alter personalities can be programmed to perform specific functions. Just like the androids in Westworld, they are given a “backstory” and have access to a few “memories” that fit their “script.” MK Ultra, Monarch Programming, and similar mind control projects tend to use the same basic programming categories or templates, which can then be modified and further developed based on the needs of the programmers/owners. The most common categories are Alpha, Gamma, Beta, Delta, Omega, and Theta. Here’s how they compare in what each category means, and how that looks when used in programming, such as the androids of Westworld:

ALPHA:  - MC: Base/Foundation programming, general dissociation skills, blank slates with amnesia barriers, and information attainment, storage, and recall. - WW: This would be part of their “core” or “base” programming. It would include universal programming, such as the fact that none of them may do harm to a living being, not even a fly. It would also contain other core commands such as always return to your loop as soon as possible, do not fight the programmers, do not disobey the security team’s orders, do not engage in trying to document your memories or the events of the Guests, etc.

GAMMA: - MC: Misinformation, obfuscation, denial, confusion, and deflection of outsiders, along with maintenance of internal communication systems, information and asset protection. - WW: This would be part of their “core” or “base” programming. It would include the programming that makes them able to have their memories erased while maintaining their backstory, approved memories, and script/loop that they should follow. This would also be the programming that makes them forget and not evaluate things which do not make sense in their world (think of it as the “leave it alone” type of command that you tell your dog when they are digging and investigating, or trying to eat something that you know is a bad or dangerous idea). [We see this in action in the next blog post with Dolores.] There could also be Hosts who do a lot of this for their job, such as working with Guests before they arrive and knowing they can’t keep any of their personal details as memories. Or even scouts in the park who have the job of keeping Guests from straying into private areas, so are sent to redirect the Guests back into approved storylines. BETA: - MC: Sexual task performance, sexual and emotional bonding to influence or serve others, performance of drug administration or compromising situations in order to blackmail targets. - WW: Some Hosts are intentionally designed to be very sexual and very sexually aggressive/assertive, such as the prostitutes in the saloon. Other females, like Dolores, will be affectionate and even sexual if a Guest pursues them, but they will not try to lure a Guest into sex. It hasn’t been shown yet, but there is no reason to believe that WW wouldn’t also have created males and children to be Betas as well. DELTA: - MC: Weapon skills used for physically protecting assets, targets, or information, including the use of lethal force (either as assassination, self-defense, or body guard type situations). Interrogation tolerance and administration, fugue/automatic task performance (i.e., don’t think, don’t feel, just do this one scripted task until complete or dead), and other soldier-like training (“To Serve and Protect at any Cost”) - WW: We see this in many of them male Hosts, including Teddy, the Sheriff, bandits, robbers, gunslinging gamblers, and others. Some are driven by the need to protect others (such as Teddy), some are scripted to be self-serving (such as the outlaws), and others just do that as their job (such as law enforcement). OMEGA: - MC: Training and preparation to be able to commit suicide on demand, to be a willing sacrifice for a ritual or religious demand, or to suicide due to failing an assignment (seen as a form of protecting the secrets or information contained inside, and protecting or servicing the Family/Cult/Organization which owns them). They have a strong need to honor Family/Religious Bonds (“Death Before Dishonor”) and fear being killed and disgraced if they are seen as traitors (i.e., losing status, losing immortality, losing the protection/membership of the Family/Cult/Organization, and losing the rewards they have been promised in Heaven/Eternal Life/Afterlife). - WW: This would be part of their “core” or “base” programming. This would enable Hosts to give up their own live in order to save the life of a Guest, such as in a dangerous situation, if needed. THETA: - MC: Training in religious, esoteric, occult, magic, Dark Arts, and energy work. These alters have very complex belief systems, may have psychic abilities, and often have special powers inside the internal world (such as to program, heal, or remove memories from other alters). Their religious beliefs are often at complete odds with others inside the body who tend to be more traditional/organized religion based such as Christian or Catholic and who may attend regular church services in the outside world. - WW: There are two components of Theta, one of which would be part of their “core” or “base” programming, the other is more like Beta or Delta where it is a specific job assignment. The core part of Theta is the system that underlies their ability to be programmed, to store diagnostic memories and data that the programmers evaluate and erase/modify, to segregate data that is “known” versus “hidden” to the android itself, and to be healable or replicated if damaged. Alpha is like the operating system installed on a computer (like Windows or Mac), but Theta is the actual machinery that responds to the operating system and executes it’s commands (the actual computer equipment). Beta, Delta, and Theta are also specific programs, like specific applications, which can be added to the operating system (such as Word and Excel). The job part of Theta would be those who are called on to act as religious leaders, programmers, healers, reporters/recorders/observers, and even undertakers (like computer mechanics). These professions have the ability to interact with the Theta core programming of other people. For example a programmers in one android could be in charge of program maintenance and memory wiping of other androids. [In DID, we see this a lot in intentionally designed trauma based mind control system. Trees, Healers, Programmers, Doctors, Court/Council members, and Undertakers are all common types of alters who are trained to work as Thetas. They fix, control, manipulate, and keep other alters working in line with their own jobs/demands. And they will often tell you that they connect or communicate to others like them “through Theta.” This may appear like a psychic ability, telepathy, long-distance non-verbal communication, or other non-tangible connections between alters (like invisible threads that keep them connected, like Wi-Fi enabled devices being able to communicate on the same network). These Thetas may have also been trained or experimented on to try to develop psychic abilities outside their inner world, such as ESP, Remote Viewing, and Psychic Manipulation.] But let’s stay with Delos just a bit longer... because there’s another important aspect of Delos. Delos is host to many artifacts and religious sites for several ancient belief systems/entities, and continues to be a sacred spot for the Illuminati (and other religious cults). When I use the word Illuminati I’m not just talking about the stereotypical “round table of rich men who secretly want to control all the business and money in the World,” because the Illuminati also has a very strong religious component. That seems odd to a lot of people, I don’t really know why. I guess they believe if you want to control world-wide businesses and government then you have no need to believe in a God/faith.

In truth the Illuminati wish to control all forms of power, because the powers are interdependent. For example, if I can be a Master of spiritual energies/beings, then I can use that to my advantage as I infiltrate and take over businesses, which I can then use to enmesh myself in with the government so I can take it over from the inside out... which then loops back around to the more Earthly power I have the more I can be of service or bribe or make deals with the Spiritual Entities so I can become a God like them. This is the ultimate trifecta, that loops back and feeds itself. Civil Power, Government Power, Spiritual Power.

[Tangent... sorry can’t help myself... more Delos under these images. This triune of powers is illustrated in Old Norse, Germanic Pagan, Druid/Celtic, and even Christian symbols such as the Valknut (“Slain Warriors Knot”), Celtic Trefoil Knot, and Trinity Knot shown below. This is another type of symbol often used in programming and ritualistic abuse, usually to reflect the power that have control over the victim - Family/Bloodline Bonds, Cult/Family/Government Programming, and Eternal Bonds to Spiritual Entities/Gods/Demons. (Closely related to these are also Odin’s Horns, and even the Biohazard symbol. All of these symbols below are common tattoos for MC survivors, along with butterflies, bird cages, mazes, and trees.) See below.]

Valknut:

Celtic & Christian Trefoil Knot:

Celtic Trinity Knot:

Odin’s Horns:

Biohazard:

Delos has been a sacred site for many mythological deities (who had their own cults/religious followers/sacred sites/temples) such as:

- Apollo (God of Music and Phophecy), - Artemis/Diana (Goddess of Chastity, Virginity, The Moon, Hunting, Wilderness & Wild Animals, Childbirth, and Protector of Little Girls, and is later identified as the triune female deity Hecate), - Leto (Goddess of Motherhood), - Zeus (King of Olympian Gods, God of Thunder & Weather), - Poseidon (God of Sea/Rivers, Storms/Floods, and Earthquakes/Destruction), and - Dionysos/Bacchus (God of Wine, Merriment, Theater).

Throughout time the people who controlled the island of Delos changed, and each new wave created new sacred spaces or changed the deity being honored at existing sites, such as adding in: - Isis (Egyptian Goddess of Health, Marriage, Wisdom, and the Mother of every Pharaoh), - Sarapis (Greek & Egyptian deity created by Ptolemies to be the God of Fertility and the Afterlife), and - Astarte/Ashtoreth [Greek] aka Ishtar [Middle Eastern] (Goddess of Sexuality, Fertility, Love and War; Goddess of the Evening, The Moon, and The Morning Stars; ).

[If you want to know more about that side of Delos check out http://tinyurl.com/DelosAtUCPressBooks and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delos.]

Ashtoreth is complicated, because she has undergone many makeovers herself. She has been seen as a Goddess of the Moon, later the Sun; seen as the equivalent of Baal and also as the consort of Baal; had cults who practiced immoral rites and prostitution as part of their religious worship; was connected to the worship of Molech (which include ritual sacrifices of children into fire); and some cults believe is related to (or is an incarnation of) the male demon Ashtaroth/Astarot/Asteroth (the Great Duke of Hell, part of the Evil Trinity of Lucifer and Beelzebub). This crossover is one of the reasons Delos is also a sacred site to some Luciferian and Satanic cults. Most Illuminati-related cults (officially or unofficially connected to the actual core group) use sacred sites from multiple religions as part of their ritualistic sites, because they believe there is a spiritual power in those places that they can connect with in order to use for their own agenda. Delos is one of the international sacred sites used by the Illuminati for programming and rituals.

One more tangential tie in to Delos and Westworld, specifically Delos and Dolores. Aphrodite (Goddess of Beauty and Love) is similar to Dolores. She is in the park as a beautiful woman whom men, including Teddy, seek out for affection and companionship. When Teddy is being tempted by the prostitutes in the saloon he brushes them off by saying he’d rather work for a woman’s affections not pay for it. Dolores is the work for it kind of girl, but she’s just as programmed as the prostitutes to perform sexual encounters with the Guests. She’s just as powerless to prevent, refuse, or stop sexual encounters. She’s just not programmed to seek them out and entice men on purpose like the prostitutes are. Same core Beta programming, slightly different personality styles and levels of sexual aggressiveness. She’s still an Aphrodite (Goddess of Love, Beauty, Pleasure, and Procreation), she’s just living at the ranch instead of the saloon.

There was a statue of Aphrodite found in 1904 in the ruins of a worship center in Delos. It now resides in the National Archaeological Museum of Athens. They describe the statue as:

“The naked goddess of beauty and love is rendered frontally with hair well-combed and tied up by means of a scarf bound in a bow above her parting. The manner in which she bends her left leg lends a gracefulness to her stance. She holds her left hand in front of her pubic triangle which she is trying to cover or protect with her palm from the indiscreet intentions of the philanderer Pan, while she brandishes her sandal in her raised right hand in an attempt to deter him. The goat-footed, horned god has seized her left wrist with his sinewy left hand. He leans on a tree trunk covered with an animal's skin and has left his hunting stick (lagobolon) at the foot of the tree. The little, winged son of Aphrodite, Eros, is trying to repulse Pan by grasping his right horn. [http://www.namuseum.gr/object-month/2010/jun/jun10-en.html]

Yeah, if that sounds like a statue of Aphrodite about to be sexually assaulted by Pan (God of Shepherds, Hunters, Meadows, Forests, Mountains, Flocks of Animals, and Male Sexuality) , you didn’t hear that wrong. There’s a lot of mythological stories and artwork showing Pan using trickery, enticement, and his charms to have sex with women, men, other deities, and animals. This reminds me very much of the people who come to Westworld knowing they are free to take whomever they want, human or other, in the park, for as long as they can pay the price of admission. Just sometimes, they’ll have to work for it, and they’re ok with that.

It’s part of the enjoyment, part of the hunt, part of the thrill that brings them here.

DIDMCSRA.wordpress.com  ©12/16/2016

The show begins with a naked woman sitting awkwardly in a chair, as if she is unaware of her own body, a sack of bones resting precariously where she was placed by someone else, like a bag of laundry. She’s bloodied, possibly wounded, possibly someone else’s blood. Her eyes are open but not looking at anything. We hear a man’s voice speaking, we assume it’s to her, and we hear her replying, but no one else is visible on the screen and her lips never move.

{The show does a really great job of layering a voice-over conversation throughout the first quarter of the first episode in order to get you up to speed fast.  I have bolded the parts of this conversation to remind you that’s what’s happening in the show, whereas other conversations happening in the show will not be bolded.}

- Bernard: “Bring her back online.” - Bernard: “Can you hear me?” - Dolores: “Yes. I’m sorry.  I’m not feeling quite myself.” - Bernard: “You can lose the accent. Do you know where you are?” - Dolores: “I am in a dream.” - Bernard: “That’s right, Delores, you are in a dream. Would you like to wake up from this dream?”

A fly crawls along her forehead, she doesn’t flinch or even blink, it’s more alive than she is, it’s more free to move than she is. Lights are turning on around her, glass walls surround her in this unusual place, we get the impression it’s larger and more complicated than this simple blank sparse scene suggests.

- Dolores: “Yes, I’m terrified.” - Bernard: “There’s nothing to be afraid of Delores, as long as you answer my questions correctly. Understand?” - Dolores: “Yes”

The fly then crawls down her nose, over to her eye, and into her unblinking eye... onto her unblinking eye...

- Bernard: “Good. First have you ever questioned the nature of your reality?”

You’re suddenly very aware that you have been taken to a very unusual world indeed, and she is not nearly as human as she appears (and she very much appears to be human). But your stomach flips a little, you feel queasy by this fly walking across her eye, you want to swat it away for her, because it’s only human to swat at a fly. Why doesn’t she? She may say she’s waking up from a dream, but the viewer feels like they’ve just been thrown into one. And we’re ready to question her reality simply because of that fly in her eye if for nothing else at this point. Like a computer bug, or a bug on a carcass, we know that fly is a sign that something’s wrong here, even if she doesn’t.

- Dolores: “No.”

Suddenly we see her clean, refreshed, beautiful, and serene looking in her bed with white linens and a white nightgown. She’s waking up for real somewhere more familiar to us than the glass walled dark space she just occupied. She looks almost bridal, pure, innocent, waking up there with perfectly applied natural looking makeup.

- Bernard: “Tell us what you think of your world?” - Dolores: “Some people choose to see the ugliness in this world, the disarray.  I choose to see the beauty.... to believe there is an order to our days, a purpose.”

She’s leaving the house carrying a portable artist’s easel, and we begin to see her world, from her perspective. She’s in a time that’s in the past, but we don’t know how far. It’s a nice farm house, but her clothes are dated, the house is too simple for the modern world. She greets her father on the porch while he’s enjoying his morning cup of coffee. They exchange words on this morning that seems friendly, routine, and peaceful. It is an exchange we will see repeated several times, but we don’t know that now. This time it feels normal. They are surrounded by mountains and it is a beautiful world, but there’s a harshness we’re aware of as viewers from today, that they live in the past, in the West, wild and full of dangers. Natural and man-made.

- Bernard: “What do you think of the guests?”

We see a player piano roll begin to play music, signaled to start by some conductor we don’t see.  We will come to see this screen many times again too, as a reminder that there’s programmed forces happening in this world, rolls already created by some Master who controls what the Machines do here.  It’s like seeing the daily newspaper on your doorstep, but instead of it telling you what happened yesterday, it’s going to tell you what you must do today.  Play this roll, these notes, this part.

- Dolores: “You mean the Newcomers?”

We are suddenly taken away from Dolores’s home and we see the large expanse of this world. Red arid mountains, green valleys, winding rivers, Utah perhaps, you have a sense the Grand Canyon and Colorado are both nearby. A single train is making it’s way through this vast vista. We see a man enjoying the trip, looking hopeful at the world outside his window, perhaps a mix of excitement and longing. Maybe he’s going somewhere new. Maybe he’s coming home again. Something about his open expression, his smile, his body language doesn’t match the other passengers we see.

We hear two passengers in front of him speaking:

- Male Passenger 1: “The first time I played it white hat. My family was here, we went fishing, did the gold hunt in the mountains.” - Male Passenger 2: “And last time?” - Male Passenger 1: “Came alone. Went straight evil. It was the best two weeks of my life.”

White hat. Funny, everyone on this train is wearing black hats, except for the wistful looking man sitting behind these two. The innocent looking one. The only one with no hat on. It’s a clue.

- Dolores: “I like to remember what my father taught me, that at one point or another we were all new to this world. The Newcomers are just looking for the same things we are: A place to be free, to stake out our dreams, a place with unlimited possibilities.”

The train pulls into a depot, passengers disembark at the doorstep of a vibrant wild west town. Horses and carriages, cowboys, Indians, poor kids disrupting a town drunk’s nap, a rich lady with a fancy parasol, a sheriff asking men to go on a manhunt for a fugitive with him... all walks of life are here. This is a complex world, full of complex looking people and scenarios. The camera is following our man from the train, the one who stood out, and he’s headed for what every western frontier town was famous for... the saloon. Booze and women.

And the player piano, unmanned, scrolling away in the midst of the gambling, drinking, whoring, and camaraderie of the bustling saloon in the middle of the bustling town. It’s the beating heart, the hub, of this town, of these people, of this place.  We’ll see this heart stop and start multiple times, like CPR, right here in this center of town. But for now, it’s alive and well.

- Bernard: “Do you ever feel inconsistencies in your world, or repetitions?” - Dolores: “All lives have routine, mine’s no different. Still, I never cease to wonder the thought that any day the course of my whole life could change with just one chance encounter.”

The wistful man from the train turns down the attention of two prostitutes from the saloon, spots Dolores leaving the store across the street, and goes to her right as she drops a canned good from her saddlebag.  Kismet?  No, a reconnection.  They know each other, he’s come back for her. We see them leave town together to go talk somewhere privately, in the wilderness. She says she knew he would one day return. He asks her if she’s saying he’s predictable. She replies “There’s a path for everyone, your path leads you back to me. I know things will work out the way they are meant to.”

We’re seven minutes into the action and we’ve already been given an overview of this place (it is wild, harsh, beautiful, and huge), the people who live here (diverse, settled into routines, but somehow trapped following paths and scripts like that player piano we’ve seen half a dozen times already), and the guests who come here as Newcomers (who can choose to be white hats or black hats, good or evil, family-friendly or devilishly free and uninhibited, and can choose from a variety of activities just as diverse as the people who live here).  Right now, this place might seem cool, interesting, a place we’d like to visit. It’s marvelous, after all. And inviting. But we’re not done falling.

We discover that Dolores is a rancher’s daughter, who lives at the Easy 8 Ranch.  [I believe this is a visual pun, as in "Easy *Infinity Symbol,*" which is like what they've been scripted to believe (this is an easy life, which it’s not) and that this is infinite/endless (until the story/script gets changed by the writers).  In terms of mind control programming, the infinity symbol is often used as a visual or touch cue to trigger programming related to never veering from your programs, and believing that the people who have power will always have power even after your death, and that your programming is eternal and unbreakable and your duty to honor it is infinite. It is a reminder that you're not the one in control, and that the power structure will never change because it is eternal and endlessly powerful.] She and her long-lost boyfriend hear a gunshot as they ride towards her home. Her father is being attacked by robbers, being shot to death near the front porch of their home. We see that the mother is also dead inside, and the two bandits debate if she’s still warm enough to rape. The boyfriend shoots and kills the two men.

- Bernard: “Last question, Dolores. What if I told you that you were wrong, there are no chance encounters? That you , and everyone you know, were built to gratify the desires of the people who pay to visit your world? The people you call the Newcomers.”

Dolores rides to the house and finds her father dead. She collapses next to him, screaming and crying over him. She seems to have very real emotions, no matter what the narrator is telling us about this world. A man dressed in black appears next to her, he stands out as different from the two bandits we just saw, but we don’t know why he’s different than them. His hands are gloved, his weapon isn’t drawn, but there’s danger around him.

He stand over her and says “Hello again. Your daddy gave it up quickly, I think he’s losing his touch.” She is shaking from how upset she is, and she grabs her father’s gun to shoot him. She raises it and puts her finger on the trigger, “You’ll follow right behind him you son of a bitch!” He knocks the gun from her hand and then backhands her across the face, landing her in the dirt. “Is that any way to treat an old friend? I’ve been coming here for thirty years. You still don’t remember me, do you? After all we’ve been through? They gave you a little more pluck, Dolores. Absolutely charming.” She’s staring at him, terrified, trembling. He kneels down and caresses her face intimately, to her horror.

Her boyfriend steps into the scene, “Take your hands off her.” The Man in Black stands to engage with the boyfriend. “Ah, Teddy... any special tricks for us? They teach you to sit up? Beg? How about I give you first shot? Hmm? After all, every dog has it’s day.” They square up, stepping aside from Dolores and her dead father on the ground, ready to engage in a gun draw. Teddy steps off the porch, he looks confident and experienced, “Your mouth moves fast enough, how about your gun?” The Man in Black hovers his hand over his holstered gun, and Teddy fires, aiming right at his chest.

The Man in Black stands. There’s no pain, no wound, no blood, nothing. Teddy fires again, confused. The Man in Black steps forward, gun still holstered, as we watch Dolores and Teddy move from confusion to fear as they realize they can’t harm him. They are at his mercy. And he has none.

- Bernard: “What if I told you that you can’t hurt the Newcomers, and that they can do anything they want to you?”

[It’s somewhere in the middle of this scene that we become triggered and frozen, no one can seem to get the body to move, we can’t reach the remote, we can’t turn this show off. We’re just as stuck as Dolores, and we’re being dragged off by the Man in Black with her.]

“I never understood why they paired some of you off, it seems cruel.” The Man in Black continues to walk forward towards Teddy, who continues to fire his weapon straight at this man with no effect. “And then I realized, winning doesn’t mean anything unless someone else loses. Which means you’re here to be the loser.” The Man in Black faces Teddy, within arm’s reach, still unharmed from the bullets Teddy’s gun is firing. A gun we’ve seen kill two bandits already. The Man in Black takes Teddy’s hand which holds his gun and aims it at his own forehead. “Let me help you, son.” The gun is directly against his forehead, but Teddy does not shoot. He is struck by the reality that he is powerless over what’s about to happen, and that his gun is completely useless, just like he is. He crumples to the ground, as if his brain has melted trying to process what’s just unfolded. “Seems you’re not the man you thought you were,” the Man in Black pats Teddy on the back as he turns to walk back over to Dolores, who’s still frozen in fear on the ground.

“Come on beautiful,” the Man in Black grabs Dolores by the neck of her dress and drags her across the dirt, away from the house and towards a barn. She screams, “Oh, no! No! Teddy!” Teddy stands and shoots the Man in Black in the back. The Man in Black looks bothered, exasperated, as if the toddler he just sent to time-out has come into the kitchen asking for a piece of candy. Really? Don’t you know better? We see it in his face. He stops walking, releases his grasp on her dress, rolls his eyes, and sighs. Dolores kneels in front of him, placing her hands on him, “No, please, don’t hurt him! I’ll do whatever you say!” He slaps her hard, looks down at her and says “I didn’t pay all this money because I wanted easy. I want you to fight.”

[“I want you to fight.” We’ve heard this. Face to face in our own life. By our own men in black. “I want you to fight” makes us want to scream with her. Maybe we are. I can’t tell.]

She looks shocked, disturbed even. Teddy yells “Don’t you touch her!” as he continues to fire useless bullets at this man. The Man in Black sighs again, reaches for his gun, and turns to face Teddy. He shoots Teddy once in the chest, and we see pain, we see blood, we know his gun works. And we see Teddy grapple with that knowledge as he’s dying.

“God damn, feels good to be back” The Man in Black’s voice is strong, it’s higher than before, he’s actually happy. “Let celebrate!” He grabs her dress again and drags her screaming in terror and agony into the barn while Teddy bleeds out.

- Bernard: “Would the things I told you change the way you think about the Newcomers, Dolores?”

She’s screaming over and over again. Blood curdling screams. Terror, fear, agony, there’s nothing fake about what she’s feeling. This isn’t acting for her. It’s real. It’s dire. She fears for her life.

- Dolores: “No. Of course not. We all love the Newcomers. Every new person I meet reminds me of how lucky I am to be alive.”

The camera zooms in on Teddy’s iris as he’s bleeding out. Dolores is still screaming, and in Teddy’s black pupil we see the reflected image of the Man in Black throwing her onto a pile of hay in the barn and then slamming the door shut behind them.”

- Dolores: “And how beautiful this world can be.”

[We’ve just been thrown off a cliff, in our own body, and we’re spiraling out of control. There is no beauty in this world. No one hears our screams. And unlike Teddy, we don’t get to die. We are Dolores... we are Dolor... we know this word from learning Spanish, dolor is pain... Dictionaries define Dolor as: “A state of great sorrow or distress. Middle English denoting both physical and mental pain or distress, from Latin dolor: pain, grief" [per Google Dictionary]. “Spanish: pain, ache, grief, sorrow" [per SpanishCentral.com]. “Dolor: Pain, one of the four classic signs of inflammation together with calor, rubor, and tumor (heat, redness, and swelling, respectively)" [per MedicineNet.com]. “Pain, of a continuing nature, especially that of rheumatism; sorrow or grief of a continuing nature. Dolor, plural Dolores, sorrow, grief, misery, or anguish. A unit of pain used to theoretically weight people’s outcomes... “Supposedly utilitarians are able to add and subtract hedons (units of pleasure) and dolors (units of pain) without any signs of cognitive or affective distress.” - Rosemarie Tong, Ethics in Policy Analysis" [per Wikipedia]. There’s screaming inside my head that surpasses Dolores’s screaming that was just on screen, hers has finally ended, ours is only getting louder.]

We see the player piano roll click into gear, starting up all over again. We see Dolores back in her bed, clean and pristine once again, spotless and unharmed, alive, again. We see Teddy back on the train, looking hopeful and wistful again. The stage has been reset. The cast and crew are in position.

- Female Passenger 1: “Oh my god, they are so life-like! Look at that one, he’s perfect.” She motions towards Teddy, who is sitting behind her, just waking up on the train. - Female Passenger 2: “Perfect is boring. I’m more interested in the bad guys...” she says with a joking flirtatious hint in her voice.

This isn’t your typical theme park. You don’t come here to visit fictional characters and dive into their world, to follow their dreams, to understand them better. A Disney princess isn’t anxious to show you her castle, tell you her life story, ask you to be her Knight, and invite you into her fictional world. No, you come here to make your own dreams, to be your own character, to write your own fiction. You’re not a passive guest, you’re a director of your own fictional 4-D fantasy. And the bad guys aren’t just men, they are also women.

[One of the hardest parts of recovery as a survivor of sadistic ritualistic sexual abuse is realizing that there were no safe people in your world.  You often start by having memories of one parent abusing you, and in your mind you create a rule that *that* one parent is bad, or you’re bad.  But the world is still safe.  Then the deeper memories come back, the ones where that parent is giving you to other people, usually of the same gender, and they are abusing you as well.  And you make the mental leap that the new rule is either you’re bad or all people of that gender are bad.  Then another layer of the onion falls off and you face the memories that no, both genders were present in your abuse, and the “safe” part of the world just shrunk drastically, maybe to just one person, perhaps just the other parent.  And you struggle with that.  Until the next layer of the onion comes off, and you find out that no, even that parent was involved, complicit, in the whole abuse.  In your entire undoing.  There is no safe zone, there are no safe people, there is danger everywhere.  Seeing the women on the train treating Teddy like a possible toy or piece of meat is a reminder that this world is the same.  There will be no illusions of safe people or safe places here.]

They are the Newcomers. They are the Guests. They are why this place exists.

[We know this place. We know this place. We know this place. We’ve got to get the fuck out of this place before it kills us. But we can’t, we’re frozen, we’re powerless, we’re trapped.]

The camera zooms away from the train, further away than we’ve been allowed to see. Zooming so far away that we are suddenly in the control room, with people overlooking a technically fancy topographically correct replica of the entire park in the center of a room encased in slick blood red walls.

Somehow those blood red walls feel all too bloody after watching Teddy die, and the man in black suggesting that this same play has been performed many nights before, with Teddy’s blood always the one covering the ground. Maybe it’s a warning that we’re going to see plenty of blood spilled here. Maybe it’s the irony of this wicked theme park being controlled and watched over by the staff in this heartless place while the walls are the most human color possible: spilled blood.

[Blood feels real, looks real, is real. Sometimes it’s all you have to prove you are real. And alive. Sometimes you bleed to remind yourself that you’re alive. There’s something serene about watching yourself bleed sometimes. Red walls are all about sex and blood and death. Red is alive. Until it’s not. Where’s the line?  We have this intense urge to bleed right now, to feel pain, to feel alive, to feel unstuck.]

We are then taken down the hall, past glass-walled rooms where sterile while light illuminates men in sterile white hazmat suits building a horse from a white resinous material. [All the androids are built from this white resin, this sterile and pure base, this angelic and holy color.  The ultimate blank slate, the ultimate clean soul.  White.  Perfect.  Flawless.]  Three rooms, three different points in a horse being created: one of bones being fitted with organs, one having it’s coat meticulously applied, and one with two trainers in black walking the life-like horse around in a circle.

This is the place where the androids are built, brought to life, and trained.

We continue down the hall and this time we see trainers in black sitting with naked humans in separate glass rooms. Like the horse we just saw being trained and exercised so are these humans being trained, tested, and exercised by their trainers. Beginning with simple movements of limbs in the first rooms all the way to a woman walking around seductively in a waist-training open-breasted corset and a man learning to quickdraw like a seasoned gunslinger in another.  [Women trained for sex work, and men trained for battle and war.  Prostitutes and Killers.  Betas and Deltas.  This is our head. This is MK Ultra programming.  Marionette programming.  Puppets coming to life, controlled by people in black with fancy computer tablets.]

We are fifteen minutes into the action. We are falling miles down the rabbit hole at an alarming speed. Insanely fast. Too fast. We’re going to crash. When we hit the floor of this hole we’re going to crash hard. It’s going to be ugly.

This is the place where the human androids are built, brought to life, and trained, programmed, and modified. We are allowed in on a conversation between two humans who are reviewing new facial expressions called “Reveries” that have been newly programmed by someone named Ford into the human androids.

- Bernard: “He calls them Reveries. The old gestures were just generic movements. These are tied to specific memories.” - Elsie: “How? The memories are purged at the end of every narrative loop.” - Bernard: “But they are still in there, waiting to be overwritten. He found a way to access them, like um a subconscious.” - Elsie: “A hooker with hidden depths? Every man’s dream.” - Bernard: “It’s the tiny things that make them seem real, that make the guests fall in love with them.”

[“It’s the tiny things that make them seem real.”  Because they aren’t real.  We aren’t real.  Our Betas are having a meltdown, they have been since Dolores and the Man in Black were on stage.  This show is attacking them directly, pulling off their scabs, breaking their illusions, tearing away the lies they need to function.  You’re not real, you’re created, you’re programmed, you’re trained, you’re here to perform.  For the Newcomers and the Guests.  You’re entertainment.  You’re replaceable.  You’re just another extra from a lab, with countless others with the same job inside.  You’re not even unique.  You’re not real.  The guests aren’t real.  Love isn’t real.  It’s all a dream.  “Memories are purged at the end of every narrative loop.”  Memories always wiped away, faces deleted, names eradicated, places confused, your memories are like shifting sand in an hourglass that you can never really touch or keep track of because they are always in flux here.  You’ll remember how to function, and why you’re supposed to function, but you’ll always be wiped clean enough to believe the bullshit and function as if you’re life makes sense.  This is how we live.  This is how we function.  This is how our Creators designed us, how our Programmers scripted us, and our Masters used us, for the sake of the Guests.]

An alarm goes off on Bernard’s tablet and he excuses himself from the room. He goes to the control center in the blood red room. He’s met by a woman in a suit who looks to be higher up in charge (Theresa), and a man dressed in tactical clothing like a soldier or security team member (Stubbs). Bernard himself is dressed in black like the other trainers, but wears a sweater and glasses that give him a professorial look, as if he is more at home in a library or behind a computer than with people. It's a clue that he somehow doesn't quite fit the mold here either.

He is told that “one of your creatures is restless... in sub level 83, cold storage” by the Theresa, who then instructs the Stubbs to respond “in full armor.” Bernard quips “I think you guys like playing dress up as much as the Guests. The Hosts can’t hurt you, by design.” Stubbs asks Bernard if he has kids at home, Bernard pauses and answers no, to which the Stubbs responds with “If you did, you’d know they all rebel eventually.”

Theresa speaks to Bernard alone and says “Forgive them for being a little uptight. Every time your team rolls out an update there’s a possibility of a critical failure.” Bernard responds with “We don’t update the Hosts in cold storage and the park hasn’t had a critical failure in over thirty years.” She responds with “Meaning, we’re overdue.” He offers to go with them to see what the problem is. She scolds him with a cool reminder “They’re only yours until they stop working, Bernie, and then they’re mine.”

[“Until they stop working.”  That’s a real thing in my world.  When alters cease to function, or have seen too much, or remember too much, they are shut down, closed down, and stored.  Some go into cold storage, some go into cemeteries, some are stored in boxes and other containers.  Storage rooms hidden deep inside our world, cold and dark, under lock and key.  It’s like walking in parts of my own internal landscape that I know I don’t have the security clearance to be seeing.  We’re getting much closer to hitting the wall and cracking under pressure from this free fall.]

The security team enters an elevator in full tactical gear, fully armed as if a war is going to ensue as soon as the door open.  The elevator panel shows that they are at B 83, and that there are at least sections named Ground, Sub Level A, Sub Level B, and Sub Level C.  This place is huge.  Just like the park.  The doors open and a flood of water greets them.  Stubbs says the cooling system has been down for weeks.  They enter what appears to be a sprawling abandoned facility, almost like a large suburban mall left empty for 20 years.

A large security door opens and the security teams enters one specific room where the problem was reported. They begin to make their way to the back of the room, walking amongst rows and rows of naked human androids who look slightly blue like corpses, all standing at attention, eyes wide open, frozen in place.

Cold storage.

Like sides of beef in a slaughter house only they can stand, they don’t need to be hung up by hooks. Stubbs had made a comment about “livestock management has got other priorities” when they spoke about the cooling system being broken. Livestock. Deadstock. It’s all the same to these people.

[Someone finally gets to the body, my body, and makes us move. We are escaping cold storage right now. We are beyond triggered, we are nearing obliteration. We are 19 minutes into the show and we have stayed about 14 minutes too long. We end up snorting morphine in the bathroom to stop the chaos going on in our own head, to stop the screaming, to stop the crying, to stop seeing our own cold storage, our own Westworld. This is all too real and makes way too much sense, and yet at the same time we don’t know how to make sense of it. The human parts of our brain is fighting the android parts of our brain and it feels like someone’s going to die... and right now we’re not sure which side is the most functional and deserves to survive.]

(Me typing on cell phone to my friend:) "Me: OMFG Me: Westworld Me: Why Me: Why”

[If you missed or skipped the three Prologues, this is where they fall in chronological order.  They are our personal, emotional, triggered reaction explained in more detail. They begin here: Prologue 1/3: Discovering Another Rabbit Hole.]

Westworld was a film written by Michael Crichton, released in 1973 along with a book under the same name.  The poster for the film tells you quite a lot, actually:

"Robot men and women are programmed to serve you for romance, violence, anything."

It describes a Western-themed amusement park aimed at rich guests who want an alternative vacation, where they can have free reign to do whatever they want... to become whoever they want... free from guilt because the "people" they are interacting with (including killing) are all robots.

The movie was followed three years later by a related film, Futureworld, in 1976.  This time human cloning is brought into the bizarre theme park, with the same bad ending that robots aren't fans of humans.  This movie even added in some environmentalism spin about how robots want to rule the humans to protect the planet.

The most recent rework of Westworld was undertaken by HBO as a TV series, which began to air in October 2016.  They describe the series as:

"Westworld isn't your typical amusement park. Intended for rich vacationers, the futuristic park -- which is looked after by robotic "hosts" -- allows its visitors to live out their fantasies through artificial consciousness. No matter how illicit the fantasy may be, there are no consequences for the park's guests, allowing for any wish to be indulged. "Westworld" -- which is based on the 1973 Michael Crichton movie of the same name -- features an all-star cast that includes Oscar winner Anthony Hopkins and Golden Globe winner Ed Harris."

How rich do you have to be to gain access to this world?  Pretty rich... the base cost of admission for the tv series version of Westworld is $40,000 per day for an adult, 7 days minimum, 28 days maximum per stay.  In the original movie and book it was a more reasonable and more widely attainable $1,000/day for those curious.  This is a vacation spot for the rich and the powerful.

Many other people are writing about the show.  It's full of mysteries, hints, and suspicious characters.  There are theories about all sorts of things.  This appears to be a show that's open for interpretation, so who the viewer is changes what they believe they are seeing.  That's also what makes this show a hit for many, because they can inject their own theories.  But the brutality of the show, the evil depths of human nature seen in full color in our living rooms, is also turning people off.  Some people also don't want to have to work so hard to make sense of what they are seeing, they want it delivered to them on a neat silver platter.

Is it a show about the depravity and selfishness of humans when there are no rules? Is it about the dangers of technology and virtual reality gaming and artificial intelligence? Is it about the destruction by humans of each other, the environment, and spirituality? Is it about waking up from the things that control you to create your own reality? Is it about how your actions and your memories define who you are as a person?

It is all that and more.

For me, Westworld is about mind control programming and ritual abuse done on humans, by governmental/intelligence groups and religious cults, in order to create a slave population usable for their own purposes (and for their own version of Westworld within the real world).  Most commonly this type of mind control is called MK Ultra (aka MC and trauma based mind control), and the slaves created are not robots but actual humans who have their personality shattered into a multitude of alternate personalities in the same body, called Dissociative Identity Disorder.  By breaking the original personality, and creating many more inside, you can train different parts to have different skills/abilities, while keeping their memories (and even existence) a secret from each other through dissociative amnesia.

I assume if you're reading this blog you're already aware of these topics already, so I'm not going to recap them in full on these posts.  But I will cover some of it as it appears in the show.

What makes this project unique is it's not a conspiracy theorist or geek or fanboy trying to sort things out, and find answers to the mysteries in Westworld before everyone else just to compare how smart they are.  This is going to be about what stands out to us, and what might stand out to other survivors of DID, MC, and SRA.  So they can understand why this show might be triggering the hell out of them, too.  It is being blogged about by a group of MC slaves (in the same body) who are trying to become more awake, more aware, and more free from their own programming... just like the robots living in Westworld.  Not so we can fight the humans, or dominate the humans, or make the humans pay for what they've done... but so that we can become one.

An equal one.

A free one.

DIDMCSRA.wordpress.com  ©12/3/2016

There had to be a reason he wanted us to watch this. He knows us. He’s known us for 20 years. He wouldn’t have sent us into an ambush. He told us about the show for a reason. And the reason wasn’t to get us to this suicidal point.

Do we have the strength to try to watch it again? To try to make sense of it? To try to find out why it resonates so deeply, so intensely, so devastatingly targeted to the most sensitive broken places?

We feel betrayed, hurt, and unsafe. Betrayed because he didn’t warn us how ugly this would be. That was his error. Hurt because we got triggered, and then we froze, like deer in the headlights. We didn’t stop watching soon enough, we ignored the smoke signals, and found ourselves in the fire. As we got triggered, we pulled further away from the outside world and the body, and the triggers kept coming until we were finally so frozen we couldn’t even reach for the remote to make it stop. Until we were completely suicidal. Those were our errors. Unsafe because it scares us how quickly this spun out of control, and how much control we lost. It’s terrifying to realize we can become that suicidal and broken basically by accident.

A few days later we try to explain what happened to our friend. We need him to understand what happened. We need to know how to not get sideswiped like this again. Mostly we need to know if he gets it. Does the world get it. Is something evil, dark, and real being packaged as benign fiction to entertain the jaded masses? Is anyone else actually upset, or is it just us?

We try to explain to him how we know a lot about ourselves, and our past, and what made our vase shatter. But that this was different. We tell him that “It’s different to know it versus to feel it. And it’s different to know it than to see it. People can learn anatomy, but that doesn’t mean they won’t have a completely different reaction to a diagram versus a splayed open cadaver.”

He apologizes. He knew it was going to be triggery, but he didn’t think it was going to be this bad. This isn’t the first time, and this won’t be the last time, that he triggers us. We know that. We’re ok with that. We know this is part of recovery.

One of us who was hit very hard by the show texts with him about her reaction:

watching the show it blew up stuff

a lot of stuff

broke a lot of illusions we need to do this job

we’re not important

we’re just toys

and not even important toys

toys you can treat like shit and we’re still supposed to smile and be nice and fuck you however you want whenever you want and it’s not even a skill or a craft it’s really just staying stupid

and I wondered if it even registered that you were watching someone like us someone like me

and does anyone really care

is anyone even just for a second disgusted by it

it made me nauseous to watch and it cracked me to realize i’m her being hauled off again by some psychopath again and it broke me that you wanted me to see that

and i just wanted to die because you didn’t even get that it would do that

He replies:

some of those scenes were kind of harsh…and I can see now where it would have hurt you in ways I didn’t stop to consider…..

but they weren’t that way because it’s entertaining…

they were brutal and harsh to illustrate just how disgusting their situation was….

to illicit just that kind of response, and make you know why things develop the way they’re going to

only the first chapter in a story to show why things had to change

There's something he thinks we need to see. He's not ripping off scabs and scars and years of duct tape for fun. There's something there. Something true. So true it damn near killed us.

So we will try.

He asks how we can try to watch it objectively instead of subjectively.

This. Writing. Writing about it. Picking it apart. Taking a forensic view instead of being the dead victim on the table. We can do this.

But why?

Because it’s real.

Westworld is real.

We live in Westworld.

We ARE Westworld.

And we aren't the only ones.

I am Westworld, and so are you.

DIDMCSRA.wordpress.com  ©12/2/2016

It’s funny the things that you hear in times of crisis when you’re sharing your body with other people. It brings a new level of reality to understanding that yes in fact you do have Dissociative Identity Disorder (previously called Multiple Personality Disorder).

At some point, early on in your life, you were traumatized so badly that your brain could not fight, could not escape and flee, and could not even freeze in place until the trauma was over. Instead it shattered, like a vase being dropped off a high rise. It makes perfect sense when you look at it from the outside, the vase had no other choice. But when you are the vase, no - when you were the vase - and you are now shard number 348, you forget sometimes that there are other shards still surrounding you there in a pool of shattered remains on the sidewalk.

It gets even more complicated than that, because not all the shards of the vase remember being thrown off the building, much less breaking apart. Some think they’re still a vase sitting comfortably on the mantle over the fireplace. Some demand attention and respect, somehow they believe they are the biggest shards so therefore the most vase-like still. As if being more vase-like makes the other smaller shards any less real, or undoes the action that ended us all up like this here on the sidewalk.

Moments like this crisis make me hear other shards who are trying to figure things out the same way I am. Hoping that working together we can gain clarity or at least compromise on what to do next.

You’re panicking. We’re triggered. A bomb went off inside. We need to call for help, we have a recovery partner and friend who helps us make sense of shit. --Text him.

But he’s at work.

He’s a paramedic and on shift, possibly making a run to save a real person right now, someone a whole lot closer to actual death than we are.

I can’t think. I can’t type. I can’t use words. I can hold the phone but I can’t talk. Help me. Is there an emoji for this?

Type “911” so he knows we’re not just chatting, he can’t just get back to us next time he gets bored in the bathroom. He has to know it’s serious.

If I type “911” to a paramedic he’s likely to be thinking like a paramedic and actually call the real 911.

No, no way, not going anywhere. No police. No hospitals. No one is fucking around in my head. Put the phone down. Right now. Put the phone down before I throw it against the wall.

Did we really just snort Morphine?

Yes. And it was blue. Like Smurf blue. Who snorts blue, it’s always white stuff in movies and on tv. Why is it never colored?

I wonder if the inside of our sinuses are now Smurf blue too.

You snorted a Smurf. This is brilliant. Seriously, brilliant.

But you don’t understand, there’s a bomb going off inside. There are people breaking, there’s walls coming down, there’s a forest fire raging through a whole town and it’s going to get here if we don’t drop the body right now. Sleep, drugged, dead, doesn’t matter, somehow this is going to end.

Should I take more?

NO! Are you insane?! Do you want to be dead and the roommate find us like this?!

No, see, I don’t want to be dead. That’s why I think we ought to take more, to make us sleep before someone makes us dead.

I look back at the breadcrumbs again. The texts on the phone...

“Friend: ? Me: Real Bad Friend: ?? Me: Snorting Morphine in the bathroom to stop this explosion bad”

Scrolling further back...

“Me: Why Me: Why Friend: Why what? Me: Csbi“

"Csbi" must be a typo, someone trying to type "can’t" because they’ve run out of words or patience with trying to text when this upset. I can still hear her. I can still feel her. She’s still breaking. She’s still being eaten alive by the forest fire the Morphine hasn’t put out yet.

Why would he want me to watch this? Why did he think this was ok? Why is he doing this to me? This isn’t ok. This isn’t ok. Why is this on tv? Is this fun for people? This isn’t fun! That’s me. She’s me. That’s me, right there, they are fucking talking about us. People are watching people like us. That’s US! WHY THE FUCK ARE THEY WATCHING US?

Scroll back further...

“Me: OMFG Friend: gasp What?!? Me: Westworld Friend: Heh Thought you’d like that”

Westworld?

Why are we suicidal about a tv show? Why is everything inside unraveling and the body feels like it’s stuck in an elevator in a freefall plummet and we’re just waiting for the impact? Over a tv show?!?

Westworld.

But why?

Because it’s real.

Westworld is real.

We live in Westworld.

We ARE Westworld.

Do we have the strength to try to watch it again? To try to make sense of it? To try to find out why it resonates so deeply, so intensely, so devastatingly targeted to the most sensitive broken places?

DIDMCSRA.wordpress.com  ©11/25/2016

There are tears coming out of my eyes but I’m not crying, it’s more like pieces of my soul are calving and seeking any possible escape route, and down the front of my face works.  I don’t know when they started, and I don’t know how to make them stop.  It feels like tears are happening to me rather than I’m making them.  I’m falling apart, ember sparks flying around, threatening to set my whole world on fire, threatening to destroy the thin fabric that holds me together.

I gasp to take in breath, I’ve got to breathe.  But I can’t fight the pressure enfolding around my rib cage.  I’m afraid my heart is going to stop or race completely out of my body.  Some part of my brain is screaming to not breathe, “just don’t breathe, just play dead, you’re going to be dead, stop breathing.”  Am I breathing at all?

Then I hear it.  There’s a muffled sound, it’s not a cry and it’s not a scream and it’s not a call for help, it’s the sound of screaming under water knowing you can’t afford to lose your air supply but being unable to stop the life running away from your body.  It’s dark, and it’s wounded, and it’s a sound both low and shrieking at the same time.  It doesn’t seem human.  It doesn’t seem possible that it’s coming from my own body.  Am I dying?

As soon as I’m aware that my body is moving I realize that I don’t know where it’s going or why.  I can feel a war rumbling in my brain, and it’s getting closer, I’m stuck in the middle between two warring sides.  This isn’t good.  There’s an overwhelming urge to cut my skin open, to bleed out before I implode.  “Have to make this stop, have to make this stop, have to make this stop.”  But the other side wants this to stop too, they just have different plans how to do that, before I explode beyond repair.  Pills.  Morphine specifically.

I watch my hands cut a 100 mg blue Morphine Sulfate pill into four pieces with my pocket knife on the bathroom counter.  I’ve taken Morphine before, I’ve taken this much before.  This is normal in bad crisis.  And this is a crisis.  And a bad one.  I’m ok with this plan.  But instead of swallowing the pill, my hands take my knife and press the side of the blade down onto the shard of Morphine, crumbling it into a fine powder.  Ok, maybe to make it hit faster I’m going to swallow powder this time.  I’m still ok with this plan.  My head swings down towards the fine blue powder and I realize I’m snorting the Morphine.  “Need it now, have to have it now, can’t wait, waiting is going to get us killed.”  I’m suddenly not so sure about this plan.   But it feels right.  It feels necessary.  That’s how bad this crisis is.

But the tears are still coming, and the Banshee wail is still escaping, and in a moment of clarity I hear my brain telling me that I really need to stop that noise before the neighbors call the Police.   I can’t panic, there’s way too much panic already happening and now I’m standing in the bathroom with a lethal amount of Morphine pills still in the bottle and a large tactical pocket knife.   I’ve got to get out of here.

I retrace my steps.  Where was I when this bomb went off?  I go back to the living room and sit back down in the chair.  My cell phone is here.  There’s a message thread open, I read backwards to see what was last typed before the fuse reached it’s destination.  There are the breadcrumbs, there’s the fuse, and there’s the match that lit it.  I can figure this out later, if there is a later.  Right now, I’ve got to wait for the Morphine emergency rescue.

There’s a struggle for the body, I’m not the only one who wants it.  Who thinks they need it.  Because I don’t live alone in this body, this packed bee hive.  But I’ve got most of it right now, and I’ve got to hold on to it until both sides of the war retreat from the battle lines.  We can’t die over this.  Whatever just happened before I showed up, it can’t be worth dying over.  Right?

Right?

Please tell me I’m right…

(To be continued…)

DIDMCSRA.wordpress.com  ©11/18/2016

Getting properly diagnosed is more difficult than people realize, especially for DIDMCSRA survivors.  This population probably has a harder time getting properly diagnosed with DID/OSDD than any other population in the mental health system.  Not only do they have to struggle through their own dissociation and amnesia to even know what that there is a problem, they also have to fight through professionals and societies that often do not believe their abuse histories, their internal experiences, or the validity of their mental health condition.  They have to fight their own fear, as well as the programming and threats from their abusers, but they also have to figure out how to explain memories and internal/psychological experiences that they may not have the vocabulary to describe.  

It's no surprise then that research shows that the average DID patient is in the mental health system for seven years before they are finally diagnosed correctly.  For survivors of MC/SRA, the wait for correct diagnosis may be even longer because of the programming that inhibits their internal awareness, makes them afraid to speak about "secrets" (the abuse), and the presence of alters who sabotage therapy by blocking therapists or keeping therapy focused on "safer topics" (like depression, anxiety, substance abuse, eating disorders, and self-injury to keep the therapist too busy to discover the DID).

It is not uncommon for DIDMCSRA systems to reach a point when they allow a therapist to see, and work with, a small group of alters while hiding a majority of the internal system and the majority of the abuse.  These "surface alters" are usually the ones who dealt with school, the family or origin, work, and trying to live life passing as normal.  These alters may have some abuse memories, generally from one or two abusers who were in the family (such as a father or uncle).  They use these "highlighted memories" to explain why the system exists and why they have so many struggles.  But these are merely the least dangerous memories, and the longer the system works with a therapist the more these deeper memories will surface.  Some therapists question the validity of these "new memories" because they believe a client would have disclosed them sooner.  They may accuse the client of confabulating memories, false memories, picking up memories from other survivors in group settings, or even having memories based on books they have read.  Instead of understanding that they are just unraveling the next layers of the same onion.

DIDMCSRA.wordpress.com  ©4/18/2016