The Cradle

**The Cradle** was a group of people who lived outside the rules of the Society. They were described as both a commune and a cult by different parties, and considered themselves a family. They were against the dissolution of families, the banning of personal weapons, and in some ways embodied everything the Society abhored about "tribalism".

## The Original Cradle

### History

After the Great Reckoning and during the formation of the Society, Brigette was a French activist against the Family Dissolution Act and related legislation which was being proposed at the time. When her daughter, Freya, was born in 1949, she persuaded her husband, Louis, and some of her fellow activists to leave the Society, and they migrated to the woods near Sundsvall, former-Sweden. Rather than go quietly, they decided to proclaim their opposition to the Society, and racked up large amount of media attention. The organisation, which they named the Cradle, grew in numbers and in publicity, but on 7 September 1954 the Internal Investigations Division conducted a raid, claiming that they were stockpiling illigal weapons on a military scale and making plans to revolt. The Cradle would later deny these claims, saying that their weapons were for hunting and nothing more.

Twelve people died in the raid, including Louis, and Brigette was arrested. Ten people, among them five-year-old Freya, managed to escape and were smuggled into Stockholm. She shared a room with five other girls, and none of the children were allowed to leave the house. The IID did not have sufficient warrants to detain the people they had arrested, and Brigette reunited with Freya and quickly reformed the Cradle in central former-France. At some point before 1993, the Cradle moved to Hedmark in former-Norway.

Freya's daughter, Sigrid, was born in roughly 1974. When she was two or three years old, she got intense seperation anxiety when her mother was away from the group. When she was four years old, Brigette died.

While in Oslo in early 1993, Freya was brought in for missing her government-mandated check-in, which functioned as a sort of census, and then refusing to answer their questions. She was arrested for obstruction, but managed to escape with the help of a small fire before she was transferred to a higher-security prison. Not wanting to lead any pursuers back to the Cradle, she decided to travel and throw the IID off her trail before returning to Hedmark. Knowing she would be away for a while, she sent a cassette to Sigrid via post somehow, briefing her of the situation and asking her to step up as the group's leader until she could return home. She advised her to move the group further into the woods, nearer to the lake. They hoped that this would keep them safe, as the people of the Society were purportedly supersticious about it. They feared monsters like River Serpents and the Bergkonge, which Ole liked to use in his stories, scaring the children and some of the adults, too.

Despite the outside view of the Cradle as a cult, both Brigitte and Freya were strictly athiest, and the rest of the Cradle seemed to share the sentiment. Freya raised Sigrid to believe that practicing religion was a waste of time and they should not rely on anybody but themselves, including a god figure, to help them. However, in Summer 1994, Freya became enamoured with the idea of communal faith and ritual while visiting La Palma in Mexico. She was convinced that the Cradle was destined for a higher purpose and encouraged the "congregation" to participate in "sermons".

In winter of 1994-95, Freya sent word that she was meeting with people from the Society who might be sympathetic to their newfound cause - to bring the ways of the Cradle to the Society at large with sympathy. Usman, a lawyer with connections on the Societal Council, could not help, but he introduced her to a man named Jure, who had been born in a group inspired by the Cradle. His commune was dismantled and he was reprogrammed at the Institute and presently ran a company as an upstanding member of Society. Still sympathetic, he - and his company - were interested in helping the Cradles.

Freya arranged for Jure to visit the Cradle in Hedmark on February 26, but it did not go well. The congregation who received him were guarded or outright hostile, with Lisette refusing to converse with him and Ole barring him from entering the classrooms. Freya was present during Jure's visit, but did not stay long after he was made unwelcome. She was unhappy with the group's reaction, and tried to assure them that Jure had her full confidence. She insisted that the congregation must trust her judgement, even if they did not understand it.

Freya sent Jure back to the Cradle in the 1996, with instructions to Sigrid to ensure him a much warmer welcome this time. She told Sigrid to use a firm hand - utilising *The Hand*, her manifesto for the Cradle. Sigrid seemed to express in her letters that she was unhappy - Freya believed she was unhappy with how the Hedmark Cradle was behaving under her leadership, and that her mother was not there to guide them though the teachings of the Hand. Freya doubled down on the importance of *The Hand*'s guidelines, and advised Sigrid to follow her lesson plan closely. During this time, recordings of Freya's sermons and a copy of *The Hand* were turned in to the Western European police, apparently from the Hedmark Cradle.

In 1998, people's possessions started going missing, there was tampering with equipment and pipes, and people spotted shapes moving in the dark. Bern claimed to have been capsised by a monster and almost dragged to his death while fishing on the lake. Stories of monsters had pervaded the group, and Sigrid believed they were in danger. Her attempt to seek guidance from Freya saw her ridiculed as an imaginative child who should know better.

Just before the turn of the millennium, Freya sent Sigrid a cassette warning the Cradle that there was an IID raid planned on Hedmark. She said that there were weapons on the way from KR Development, and they should stand their ground instead of hide. Freya claimed to have intel that the government was prohibited from using lethal force, but she also expressed the value of martyrdom, and asked the family to go down in history and help to revolutionise the way the Society saw the Cradle.

It was later rumoured outside the Cradle that there was never an outpost in Oslo or Hedmark, as the Society team sent to investigate them found nothing at the alleged campsite.

### Members and Roles

Everybody in the Cradle had a role.

* Bern and Anya handled food storage and the curing and preservation of meat. Anya needed occasional prompts to keep her on task, which she would not appreciate, although canning and salting were apparently her passions. Bern was kinder, but would not challenge Anya when she needs to be challenged.
* Lisette offered guidance and was a helpful right hand to Sigrid, primarily because she would like a leadership position and believes she could replace Freya.
* Mark and Yelena had an excellent catalog of seeds.
* Chotsani was a gifted caregiver, especially with newborns, and Ji-Yeon needed her help to care for her two-month-old twins.
* Ole was a teacher.

When moving the camp further into the woods, Ole and Nell were instructed to take charge of loading the trailers for the horses. Anybody over the age of 15 and under the age of 50 was expected to be in top physical shape.

## Other Cradles

As Freya found in 1993, the 1954 Sundsvall raid had roused sympathy with the Cradle's cause. After flying from Paris to New York, she met a woman named Melissa, who told her that there were other Cradles scattered across North America. One such Cradle was at Lake George, New York, and was comprised of three families on a vast orchard and farm, a herd of goats, and a brood of chickens. They even sold their fresh produce at a farm stand in town on weekends.

Freya next met a couple in Madawaska, Maine with four children, who wanted to start their own Cradle. She stayed with them for a week and taught them how to recruit covertly, how to budget, and how to structure leadership. Freya also implicitly met other Cradles while travelling to Chicago, then Bismarck, North Dakota, the upper Missouri River, and then to Sandpoint, Idaho.

At Sandpoint, she met a woman named Rosie Morales, who had left the Society with her husband, David, after finding out she was pregnant. In the mountains, she gave birth to her daughters, Elizabeth and Silvia, and they lived in peace for four years, hunting birds, growing tomatoes and gourds, and keeping chickens. However, men with unpleasant dogs came to find them, and pursued them for the next four years, forcing them to move a total of seven times. Rosie eventually confronted David, and although he denied reporting their location, he agreed to leave. Knowing he would report them as soon as he returned to civilisation, Rosie held him at gunpoint and tied him to a tree by the river, in a fashion that she hoped was tight enough to hold him for a while but loose enough that he would be able to escape eventually. She never returned to check that he got free.

There was a woman named Helene who looked after a campground full of children in the forest bordering Lac Saint-Pierre, and sometimes adults in her Cradle would not pull their weight to save food for the winter. According to an account in *The Hand*, one autumn Helene nursed her infant son and asked Freya for advice on the subject. As they talked, they were found by a hungry black bear. It approached them, appearing ready to attack, but when Helene's son, Jean, started crying, the bear sniffed at Helene's arms and then turned and walked away.

In 1996, a Cradle on Sunday Island successfully warded off a police raid without any casualties. They had been provided with a boat by KR development which they were warned to hide, and after they deterred the police with KR rifles, they evacuated in the boat and headed towards Jones Bay to search for a new home.

In 1997, a group of Freya's deputies in North America decided to go public. They aired adverts on cable TV that showed groups of people farming, eating, and living a peaceful life in nature. They did not show their children or their rifles, but they offered a phone number to contact. Another was an anti-Society ad depicting a childhood centre and conflating the carers with sentries. One of the groups held a demonstration in the nearby town square and others were planning similar events before Freya shut them down. She appointed new deputies to each Cradle that she was confident would not make the same moves.

There was a Cradle in Port Arkansas, which was vulnerable to hurricanes. In the winter between 1997-98, their huts and cabin were torn apart while they fled to higher ground and shelter. They lost two of their sons, Jamie and Raja, in the storm, and in the aftermath were starving, without clean clothes or fresh water. KR Development sent a truck of supplies to them from Houston.

After the Hedmark Cradle, the other Cradles planned for martyrdom in 1999 were Utrecht, Wiesbaden, and Albertville.

There was a Cradle operating in Halifax which Jure was raised in. When he was fifteen, his Cradle was raided and his parents were sent to the Institute while he went on the run.

### Ouachita

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The Pilot's wife, Coleen, left them when she was several months pregnant because she said she could not stand to lose the memory of their baby, named Sam, as per the rules of the Society. She said she would rather keep Sam and keep the memory of her husband, untainted. Years later, while in Little Rock, Arkansas, the Pilot was scheduled a delivery of crates into the Ouachita Mountains with no recipient address and almost no other information. The shipment was from KR Development to, he believed, the Cradle, and he remembered seeing "Ouachita" in Coleen's planner. He asked Karen Roberts personally for a favour, and was told the road to take into the mountains. When he followed the directions, he was met by two guards, one of which was a one-eyed woman named Helen. The Pilot was escorted to a barn than had been converted into a two-storey dormitory with room dividers made of twigs and twine.

The Cradle had taught Coleen to knit, sew, hunt, and farm, and she felt connected to her body in a way she never had before and felt connected to nature. The Cradle had people who checked the adults in with the government on their behalf every few years, as was mandatory, and kept them safe from the police. The oldest of the children were allowed to carry rifles and guarded the young ones when they played. The Pilot observed that parents mattered in the Cradle in a way that they couldn't in the Society.

Not long after the Pilot left, the Cradle was seemingly attacked by IID agents, and Sam escaped. The Pilot was sent an urgent message from the SCL control tower saying that his wife was in a serious accident. This led him to pick up Sam, but she did not tell him about what happened or explain how she had known to contact him, or how to do so. He did not pressure her to speak, although he was worried about Coleen. Since he couldn't take Sam back to the Cradle campsite and the whole area would be crawling with IID agents, it would be difficult to find anyone she knew from the Cradle even if he knew how.

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## Outside view

In the mid twentieth century, public knowledge of the Cradle was wide but not overly specific. It was commonly known that they resided "in the woods" and grew crops, raised children, and made art. They were described by some as a "commune", though others were not so kind. The Pilot thought of them as a cult who built weapons such as rifles and bombs. They said the Cradle looted and raided the honest rule-following people of the Society for food, clothes, and cars, and even killed people sometimes. Likewise, Michael Witten believed the group were a cult who lived in a "woodsy commune", and that they would be willing to deliver a baby off-the-books. He scolded himself for seriously considering the possibility of sending his wife Vivienne there, and told himself that they were probably stockpiling rifles manufactured by KR Development.

Roimata Mangakāhia makes hopeful reference to a commune in Halifax where Claudia Atieno might be, in the years following her disappearance. It is possible what she referred to here was a version of the Cradle that she knew of.

A lawyer named Usman who met with Freya in 1994 claimed that the Cradle had been considered a headache by the Societal Council for years, as they could not agree on what to do about them. Some believed military intervention was necessary to stop the threat of armed insurgencies, while others wanted to integrate the Cradle outliers back into the Society.

The Sundsvall incident was taught in most Development Centers as a cautionary tale against tribalism and natural family orders, but copycat Cradles mentioned being inspired directly by that event to start their own groups.

In 2008 one of Indra's students was working on a piece about the Cradle.

## References

1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 Season 4, Cassette #2: Autumn 1993
2. ↑ Season 3, Reel #9: September 13, 1954
3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 Season 4, Cassette #1: Spring 1993
4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 Season 4, Cassette #3: Summer 1994
5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 Season 4, Cassette #4: Winter 1994-95
6. ↑ Season 4, Cassette #5: Winter 1995
7. ↑ 7.0 7.1 Season 4, Cassette #6: Summer 1996
8. ↑ 8.0 8.1 Season 4, Cassette #8: Winter 1997-98
9. ↑ Season 4, Cassette #9: Autumn 1998
10. ↑ 10.0 10.1 Season 4, Cassette #10: Autumn 1999
11. ↑ 11.0 11.1 Season 5, Episode #1: March 2008
12. ↑ Season 4, Cassette #7: Spring 1997
13. ↑ 13.0 13.1 Black Box Cassette #3: MDW to YYZ
14. ↑ Black Box Cassette #7: MSY to HOU
15. ↑ Black Box, Cassette #9: SEA to TIL, TIL to ABQ
16. ↑ Black Box Cassette #10: ABQ to SCL, LIT to ???
17. ↑ Season 3, Reel #8: April 20, 1954
18. ↑ Season 2, Cassette #2: Ulster Museum (1973)