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| “OK, Dee — let’s take it to forty thousand.”
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| Digital Voice Assistant Denning’s broad brogue resonated in Boone’s earpiece. “Roger that, Commander.”
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| Instantly, Boone felt his weight shift back as the wingsuit’s ailerons self-trimmed, its leading edge adjusted, and power surged to the flanks. Exiting a flush of endorphin, the Eagle Squadron Commander soared, bursting through a gossamer skin of cirrus and into a vaulted dome of vivid cobalt.
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| He whistled softly to himself. “Excuse me while I kiss the sky.”
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| “Altitude reset confirmed: forty thousand feet level, Commander. Transferring control back to your fulcrum.”
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| As the power surged back to his core, Boone swooped and dived towards cloud-base, cork-screwing in, flattening, skimming the meringue cloud-tops then arcing back up into the sun, just to feel the exhilaration. The ''freedom'', just to soar, glide and gambol, unshackled from the earthly bonds of administration. Here he was a mature legal eagle, at the height of his capabilities, set free and empowered by the unlimited, free capacity to compute, ''to do as legal eagles do''.
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| The view was spectacular: the mares’ tail patina was just enough to render the terrain with a glamour-glow, through which its sunlit uplands glinted and sparkled like sacred crystals on a crown of green velvet. He could see ''everything''. He was master of it ''all''.
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| A [[SaaS]]-generated four-dimensional risk matrix overlaid the gently undulating topography below. Boone’s vision was lucid. He ESPERed in the resolution on his risk radar. The jewels expanded to neat geometric grids, each one systematically tended by pristine white hover-bots, the whole field in each square radiating a unique pastel hue ranging from lime to rich racing green.
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| “Looking fine to me, Dee. What are you seeing?”
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| As ever, Denning was a master of west-country understatement. “RAG indicators in a tolerable range across the board, Commander. Exceptions queue correctives administered in line with [[playbook]] edition 5.09.6 revision 8.”
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| “Okay, Dee, and is the playbook certificate up-to-date?”
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| “Certified fit for GC use 4 days ago, confirmed valid and in good standing. Holo-signed by General Commander Carpenter herself.”
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| “Thank you, Dee.”
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| Boone ESPERed in further. He zeroed in on a gleaming off-white arbitration droid gliding above an agro-sector. The grid’s colour-grade oscillated between lime and burnt lemon — this indicated some hostiles, but operational threat controlled. Boone could even see them, hovering above the grid-sector, sparking and fizzing as if the grid were alive with starlight: this was how disputes rendered on the electro-forensic frequency spectrum. The arb-bot trailed the sector, its exo-skeletal booms extended behind it, as delicate as dragonfly wings, methodically harvesting the glitter, plucking it out of the air, and on-the-fly quantifying the yield per hour on digital readouts with real-time syncs to his display. Boone still found it breath-taking: risk management in the singularity was beyond the wildest dreams of a terrestrial.
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| “Hey Denning, can you prepare my [[MIS]] stack?”
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| Boone’s trusty chatbot replied instantly. “Nothing to do, Commander. I established a secure real-time uplink to the [[steerco]] [[dashboard]] this morning. It pipes data from your [[service catalog]] monitors directly into the RAG batteries.”
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| “Hell’s bells! Isn’t the raw data noisy?”
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| “Thanks to our compression techniques, no. The system automatically Pareto-biases the raw outputs. It then cross-triangulates against regional risk-reports to smooth out kinks in the overall global risk envelope. The charts look ''fabulous''. Have a look.”
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| A three dimensional XY scatter-chart, with the risk envelope surface-plotted on a secondary y-axis, popped up on Boone’s holo-view.
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| “''Whoa''. That is amazing, Dee. Those risk decays are a thing of beauty. How are they so smooth?”
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| “The [[algo]] suppresses outlier frequencies using state-of-the-art SNAFU-sculpting. The resulting feed is Gaussian-normalised. Total harmonic distortion is sub 10 basis points running. The global executive ''loves'' it.”
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| “I bet they do. But, tell me, what is something is actually active down the tail? You know, a real problem?”
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| “Relax, Boone: frequency-cancelling algorithms ensure that sort of thing can’t happen any more. We have now implemented comprehensive live risk monitoring across the [[Taxonomy|taxonomic]] spectrum. Any behavioural anomaly, anywhere in the grid, that crosses a minimal threshold is tagged, monitored and moderated long before it can disrupt operational integrity. That is why there hasn’t been a single GCHQ intervention in four years. There’s simply nothing to do, Commander. Enjoy the view!”
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| Sure will! Boone flipped onto auto and looked down range. There were GC insignias out in force: there were literally dozens of Eagle Squadron pilots floating lazily below him on the thermals above their coverage sectors.
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| ==Thots==
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| Hello! it’s [[Kaylene Trangle]]! — New Zealand contrecta
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| Algy and George take out the gunships
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| The Battletruck carried on, blamming left and right. A crump in the prolixity reservoir, it collapsed to one knee and emptied itself all over the forward Reg relations team.
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| “they’re going to a baffled for weeks!”
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| A sprint burst to the right which took out a discombobulation stack. ''The defences weren't holding''.
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| The GC wailed: “I don’t understand! They’re not listening to our careful arguments! I don’t understand!”
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| Outer perimeter fails
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| You got to speak a language they understand.
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| ===The Farm===
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| {{Smallcaps|The oldest portal}} into, and out of, the Settlement was the Moor’s Gate. It opened out onto a region beyond the city walls they called The Meadow and, beyond that, the dark forest of [[Bretton Woods|Bretton]].
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| {{indent|The Meadow was a wide flat, low-lying mud plain. It turned briskly to swamp whenever it rained, which wasn’t often, but often enough that the itinerants who for generations had maintained it had created narrow plank walkways around the miles of rows of cages that made up The Farm. These “boards” ran from the Gate all the way to the Woods, and along every row and aisle of The Farm where they raised and cultivated clients. Such a feature were they of the propagation and cultivation of client relationships that were the principle business of The Farm the itinerant travellers who walked them in the service of milk production were called the “on-boarders”.
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| Just now, a cross-eyed, black-toothed, puck-faced peasant limped along the boards with a pail of slops, tossing chicken bones left and right and ladling mouldy porridge to grasping beasts who slobbered through the slats.
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| A slight ginger lad stepped carefully along the board that ran from the Gate to the Farm until he caught the boarder’s attention and then stopped. The boarder stopped her round, too, eyeing him carefully. She held his stare for an a beat too long, weighing him up, as if undecided between amusement, irritation or malevolence. At length, she settled on amusement. She said, “Whatta fucka ''you'' wanna? Wanna-you some chicky, ah?”
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| She fished a chicken bone from her bucket and tossed it at the boys’s feet. He couldn’t tell if she was being serious until she roared at the joke.
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| Just as he began stammered out an oily yuck to move the vibe along, she ''stopped''. “Well, amigo, whatta you gotta?”
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| [[Ramsay Punchface]] held out his tote bag. “I just caught these.”
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| The onboarder snatched the bag and up-ended it, dumping a handful of a small, rabbit-like animals into the dust. Their legs were loosely bound and they wriggled and whimpered. She grunted, and turned each over carefully with her boot. “Littl’uns, innit?”
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| “They’re segregated cells. J ... J ... Jersey. I think.”
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| The onboarder grunted again. “Feeble.” She looked over her shoulder. “Hey, Quasi. Whatta do you makea these?”
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| A old hunch-back, naked but for a sacking tunic and a dirty loincloth, scurried out of the farm on all fours. Despite his apparent age, his eyes glittered, though he gripped a monocle in one. He moved nimbly with a nervous, muscular energy. He regarded the onboarder, and the boy, and squawked. “What is it? What is it? What is it? HEY?”
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| “Heh. Lil runty fellas.” The boarder poked the animals with his foot. “Any good?”
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| “Any good? Any good? It’s all good. Any good is all good is every good boy deserves football —” The old man snatched up the rabbity thing, sniffed it, drawing its aroma deeply, an action from which he derived no small pleasure, inspected the animal’s fur closely through the monocle, taking it in his fingers, picking out fleas, or dirt, or imperfections. “Meh.”
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| He peered into its ears, yanked open its mouth, inspected its teeth. Finally, he pulled, a stout wooden device from his tunic and held it up against the animal. “Heh. It’ll do,” he said, “but it’s not exactly going to make the quarter. It’s a bit scrawny.” He scratched his chin. “Call it a three. Yes; a low priority three.” He tossed the first one in the smallest pen.
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| “A ''three''?” Ramsay quailed. "But Jersey [[Oik]]s are a key business priority!”
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| “That they are, so they are, so I gather, soldier blue, but there are no oikeys here. That’s an SGPS, my young lad. Sociedade Gestora de Participações Sociais, to give him his full regalia, if you please, and he hails from —” he snatched up the beast again and began riffling through its fur “ — Porto? Lisbon, I wonder — oh! Madeira! Of ''course'' it is, my dear, Madeira, my dear. ''Similar'' to Oikey Oikses, they are, but — oh! — just not the same. It’s their milk, see? The yield is poor and it’s a bit thin, and sour, but it will nourish you juniors all right.”
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| Ramsay sighed and motioned at the other two espiecies. “What about the others, then?”
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| The old man examined the first one briefly. “This one — nah, Qatari: won’t net.” He tossed it away. His dog, a mongrel bull terrier, chased it under a fence. “Bosun! Bosun!” he screeched, at the dog.
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| He picked up the third, gingerly, turned it over in his hands and looked doubtfully in its ear.
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| Suddenly, violently, he threw it down, kicked out at it and scurried into the dark recess from where he had originally come. The boarder squawked in anguish and grabbed a spade and hid behind these nearest cage. Bosun leapt at it, but the man swiftly yanked on the dog’s chain to pull him out of reach.
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| “Get away, Bosun! Get out of it! JESUS! What do you think you're playing at, bringing that nasty little blighter in here? Take it away! Get rid of it! QUICKLY!”
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| Ramsay flapped his arms. “What’s wrong with it?”
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| “Just get rid of it before anyone sees you with it!”
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| Ramsay gingerly picked up the frightened little thing. It was barely bigger than a hamster and hand beautiful, soft, golden fur that shone auburn in the sunlight. It seemed so harmless. So pure. It trembled in the palm of his hand. “It’s okay, it’s okay little one,” Ramsay soothed.
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| The inspector was screeching and shaking the cage, screaming “GET RID OF IT! GO! GO! GO!”
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| Ramsay put his hands on his hips. “Well, I’m not leaving here without my commission.”
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| “Get rid! GET RID GET RID!!!” howled the inspector.
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| The old man strode over and snatched the animal, which was still snuggling on Ramsay's palm, hiffed it powerfully, into the sky.
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| “Hey! What did you do that for?”
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| As the [[espiecie]] arced towards the ground it it exploded in a ball of fluff and guts.
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| “Jesus wept, lad!”
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| “All right, all right — but what about my — for the other two?”
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| “Strike a light!” The onboarder fished in his pocket and tossed a couple of quarters towards Ramsay, into the dust.
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| “Half a stinking credit??!” Ramsay looked distraught and fished them out.
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| “Think yourself lucky kid. And let this be a lesson to you. Know run along with you and take that nasty little thing with you, before Quasi here has a goddamn ''aneurysm''.”
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| “What’s ''wrong'' with it?”
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| “Panamanian variant. Just take it away okay?”
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| Ramsay’s eyes widened, he retched and bolted for the Wood.
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| The onboarder looked at the two scrawny mammals in the cage, and let out a deep, existential sigh. “Lean times, indeed,” he muttered, and tossed a bone into the cage, where the little espievies fell upon it.
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| The inspector had calmed down by now, and just chuckled darkly.
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| ==Random thots==
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| [[Bretton Woods]]: a dark forest beyond the mythical settlement of [[the Settlement]], where combat sales units would hunt [[espievie|espievies]] and other prey which they would domesticate and farm for [[commissions]]
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| Sales details ride in with captured [[espievie|espievies]] and toss them into a holding pen.
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| Evaluates and sorts them, tossing out the runts. A junior sales squire gripes about his treatment. The office manager tosses him a couple of credits and tells him to scram. "Too small". "Won't net". "No track record taste awful."
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| There's a commotion in the fields as a hunting party comes back in. It is Charlemagne, the celebrated sales guru, leading his retinue, leading in an elephant-sized beast by a velvet rope.
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| Sidemutter: "He got it from the forbidden fields. There are none of these in our territory. They don't exist."
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| Capture the docs team leader who is too weak to resist the onslaught
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| Coo people trying to break in in and tame master agreements.
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| Capture small ones
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| So the lawyers treat them as as pets, and horse whisperer them etc comma believing this is the only way to to control the danger they present and harness their power. The Theo coming like the child catcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang force the agreements into a framework controlled by Romanians reading instruction manuals.
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| Bigger ones bust out of their glcages destroying everything
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| Apocalyptic scenes where tiny little cages ISDA s, all confined in small rectangular pens like battery hens suddenly all explode at once overwhelming the management systems.
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| Giant monsters called Goks housed in luxuriant pens, where teams rub their skins with champagne and Keep them supple and milking them of commissions. Good are free to come and go. There are several Gok pens around the city. To encourage the gearbox to go into them they need to be b-complex fully invisible 2 to city residence other than those charged with managing the pen itself.
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| Feed smaller stick with Vega and they grow larger
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| Conan the barbarian riff with isda jocks captured and tethered to the mill in a mountain training camp where they train school leavers in the ninja arts. School leavers keep running away. Escaping for a better life
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| the Settlement is the elven home on earth. The settlement is an offshore centre.
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| }}
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