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I DREAMED I SAW JOE HILL LAST NIGHT--PAST SIMULATIONS
[A MURDER IN CRIHLOTH, SPRING 2007]
ESSENTIALS
WISE WORDS
"Argument brings conclusions and compels us to concede them, but it does not cause certainty nor remove doubts that the mind may rest in truth, unless this is provided by experience."
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-- Sir Francis Bacon
READINGS
CURRENT WORK
PAST
SIMULATIONS
A MURDER IN CRIHLOTH
Spring 2007
The setting for A Murder in Crihloth (which takes place in the year 2023) is a ten-level undersea city, hidden off the northeast coast of Iceland, in which humans and humanoid visitors from another planet have lived with each other for several decades. Although the landmass that stands atop Crihloth (that word is an anagram of the instructor's name, Rich Holt) is visible as an uninhabited island, with ninety-nine percent of it underwater. Visitors from the far distant planet Moreah had arrived on earth sometime in the latter part of the twentieth century in search of an unspecified object or process (called a "DAJEC") that their scientists and religious figures had determined was essential to the survival of their entire race, and which had been left on Earth millennia before.
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After several years of living together harmoniously, the peace between humans and Moreahans was shattered in the "Cit' Wars" ("Cit'" a truncation of "Citizen") of 2017, effectively separating Crihloth into two domains, the Core (comprising the elite and privileged of Crihlothian society, primarily humans, literally at the center of Crihloth) and the Periphery (with the marginalized societal members, primarily Moreahans, as outliers).
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Then, on the night of May 1, 2023, beloved diplomat Thiry LaPaz is found murdered, her throat slashed in four precisely parallel cuts, in one of Crihloth's most crime-ridden areas, the "Dead Cits' Alley" near a memorial to the search for the DAJEC. Unknown to just about everyone, LaPaz was on a top secret mission for the Prime Minister and her murder leads to speculation that a far more sinister secret concerning Crihloth exists. Students in the class were assigned to one of three teams (government, the media, and the aliens) and worked to defuse the fallout over LaPaz's murder.
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A Murder in Crihloth presented students with "the mother of all public image problems": how do you manage a crisis between two groups of entities who aren't even the same species, in a sealed environment whose survival depends on being completely unknown to outsiders? As an additional difficulty, the fact that the simulation takes place between aliens and humans in 2023 led to the invention of not-yet-extant channels of communication such as telepathy and remotely sensed information for the propagation of news. The class was superb in defining the cultures and media practices that served as the final setting for a Byzantine configuration of power plays which involved the defection of one member of each group to one of the other groups.
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Fun Facts and Trivia
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-- The class included two romantically attached couples (both couples eventually married!): Chance McWorthy (Macish Hyss) and Emily Honchar (Honem Anfre); and Falon Kartch (appearing as herself) and Jeremy Adolphson (Donal Glaskey).
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-- The dramatic battle scene ("The War of the Telepaths," Scene 7) between General Kroiker (Dan McGuire) and Mer'Gab'Shall (Andre Smith) was staged by Dan McGuire as a Javanese shadow puppet theater performance (a specialty of Mr. McGuire's), with the shadow puppets representing the avatars in the Moreahan Psy-War Emulator.
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-- The dancing and music for the funeral of Honem Anfre (Emily Honchar) was staged by local professional musician and class member Betsy Petrie, based on "Hide and Seek" by Imogen Heap.
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