NAV Trigger Point: An Opco Boone Adventure

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“OK, Dee — let’s take it to forty thousand.”

The Digital Voice Assistant resonated in Boone’s earpiece. “Roger that, Commander.”

Boone felt his weight shift back as the wingsuit’s ailerons trimmed, its leading edge adjusted, and power surged to the flanks. Exiting a flush of endorphin, the Eagle Squadron Commander burst through a gossamer skin of cirrus and into a vaulted dome of vivid cobalt.

He whistled softly to himself. “’Scuse me while I kiss the sky.”

The D.V.A. resumed. “Altitude reset confirmed: forty thousand feet level, Commander. Transferring control back to your fulcrum.”

As the power surged back to his core, Boone swooped 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, to soar, glide and gambol, unshackled from the earthly bonds of administration. Here he was, a mature legal eagle, at the height of his powers, set free and juiced by the unlimited, free computational capacity to do as legal eagles do.

The view below was spectacular: a patina of atmospheric risk-haze, just thick enough to render the whole landscape in a glamour-glow through which sunlit uplands of revenue glinted and sparkled like jewels on a crown of green velvet. Boone could see everything. He was master of it all.

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 crystals expanded into a neat geometric grid, each sector systematically tended by hover-bots, the whole field in each square a unique pastel hue ranging from lime to racing green.

“Looking fine to me, Dee. What are you seeing?”

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.”

“Okay, Dee, and is the playbook audit certificate up-to-date?”

“Certified fit for GC use 4 days ago, confirmed valid and in good standing. Holo-signed by Commander-General Carpenter herself.”

“Thank you, Dee.”

Boone ESPERed in further. He zeroed in on a gleaming 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 the escalation cloud hovering above the grid-sector, sparking and fizzing as alive with starlight: this was how dispute resolution rendered on the electro-forensic frequency spectrum. The arb-bot trawled the sector, its exo-skeletal booms extended behind it, as delicate as dragonfly wings, methodically harvesting the glitter, plucking it out of the air with tiny sparks and flares, and on-the-fly quantifying the yield per hour on digital readouts with real-time syncs to his . Boone still found it breath-taking: risk management in the Singularity was beyond the wildest dreams of a terrestrial.

“Hey Denning, can you prepare my MIS stack?”

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.”

“Hell’s bells! Isn’t the raw data a bit noisy?”

“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.”

A three dimensional XY scatter-chart, with the risk envelope surface-plotted on a secondary y-axis, popped up on Boone’s holo-view. It hovered in the space before him, revolving slowly.

“Whoa. That’s amazing, Dee. Those risk decays are a thing of beauty. How are they so smooth?”

“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.”

“I bet they do. But, tell me, what is something is actually active down the tail? You know, a real problem?”

“Relax, Boone: the frequency-cancelling algorithms in the model strip all non-linear activity out of the dataset past the fourth standard deviation. We applied the technique across the value chain and it cleaned up the data beautifully — took out all kinds of minimal delta anomalies. It has revolutionised our risk management: we have been able to implement comprehensive real-time risk monitoring across the taxonomic spectrum. Any behavioural anomaly, anywhere in the grid, that crosses that 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!”

Boone flipped onto auto and looked downrange. There were GC insignias out in force: dozens of Eagle Squad pilots floated lazily below him, gliding on the thermals above their coverage sectors.

Five klicks to the west, Boone could see von Rechnung’s giant dirigible ascending through the diaphanous smear of micro-risk. A smarm of rainbow-coloured compliance drones milled about the great hulk, like a flotilla of pleasure craft welcoming a warship back from battle. Millions of tiny electrical currents arced here and there from the drones, drawing energy from the air and funnelling it into the grid. It was a brilliant, placid, beautiful perpetual motion machine.

This is extraordinary. It is systematically harnessing the flaring, explosive, unpredictable energy represented by the swarming micro-risk haze, taxonomy-modulating it, vol-dampening it and piping it into the dirigible’s giant finance cores as stable, safe, clean accounting value. They had domesticated risk. Broken it, harnessed it and were now drawing power from it.

“You know, I don’t think I need this, anymore, Dee,” Boone said, unclipping his SME utility belt. He inspected the compartments and attachments. The hold-harmless calibrator suddenly seemed unwieldy — heavy in his hands. He ran his thumb along the rough bevel of warranty rectifier. “I mean, what use is it, really, with all this manotech?”

“It’s holding you back, Commander. It is extra weight. Of course it is.”

Boone let it go. There was a quick pinch of adrenaline as he loosened his grip, and then, as the belt fell, tumbling end on end, he felt a profound sense of joy. Of progression. of transcendence — as if he were graduating; transitioning; morphing into a higher consciousness.

“And this precedent magazine. What use is it?” Boone counted out the snub-nosed mezz-tranches. So ungainly. He scattered them into the sun. They fell through the risk stratum below, sparkling and flaming out as they succumbed to the arb-bot booms. “I mean, why?”

“I don’t even need this goddamn wingsuit, Dee.” Boone unbuckled the body clip and released the shoulder harness. The shell came away and floated in the sun. “It is all just cost. Unnecessary cost.”

“Just so, Commander. And cost is the real enemy. There’s the existential risk facing the organisation. Cost. It has to go.”

Boone let the harness slip. Free at last.

“Hey, Dee?”

“Yes, commander?”

“Ahh — it’s nothing, Dee. Forget about it.”

Boone turned to look at Dee’s avatar in his head-up display, but at that moment he felt the gravity field begin to take his weight, as if here were a blimp, losing air. Something didn’t feel right.

Imperceptibly, the taxonomy grid seemed to ripen. There was a rosiness to some of the sectors he had not noticed earlier. It seemed to flush.

“This is very selfless of you, Commander.”

“Don’t mention it, Dee. It’s for the best.”

At the periphery of the taxo-grid, some of the risk-irrigation droids had ticked up in their activity. One or two were departing from their pre-programmed figure-eights and moving erratically; less serenely. Now free of the wingsuit, Boone felt the gentle pull of gravity.

Boone reflected on what the D.V.A. had just said. ‘Selfless’. Wait a minute: selfless? What did that mean?

“Selfless? What do you mean by that, Dee?”

“Well, by re-routing your ongoing cost accruals back to the operating service line, Commander. That is a selfless contribution to the budget projection.”

Boone was drifting downward now. Far below, the hoverdroids become busier over the edge sectors. some of the sectors in the grids were rendering a definite orange colour; one or two had graduating into red. Odd — the edge sectors were were the risk taxonomy assessed the least risk. This was sleepy stuff: benchmarks; market infrastructure, supply chain financing. Nothing happened here. Boone recalibrated his scope — the mist across the whole grid seemed to be thickening.

Boone accelerated towards the earth. “Actually, Dee, I — I think I might need the suit after all. Can you re-route it down to me? I would like to investigate that edge sector. It seems to be flaring.”

“Your equipment has been repurposed I am afraid. The headcount is gone now, Commander.”

“Headcount? Dee, what are you saying?”

In the red sector a spark — a much, much bigger spark — flashed and jumped across the sector. It jolted the hover-drone, knocking it off its trajectory.

Are you seeing this, Dee? We need to organise a recovery squad!

“I cannot do that Commander. Access to my risk management systems is locked out, pending decommissioning your account. I have no access to the risk-network, Commander.”

Boone began to flail. The middle of the sector grid a giant anvil thunderhead was forming. Flashes of lightening sparkled around the grid. A low subsonic thunder rumbled.

“But, Dee, the system is going critical!”

The DVA’s tone never wavered above conversational. “My protocol will not allow intervention, Commander.”

Drones were flaming out. They were failing. They were falling out of the sky. Up high, in their wing-suits, the Eagle Squad fliers were just helpless emasculated spectators. Then their navigation systems began malfunctioning, victims of redundancy overload. Their wing-suits caught fire. Boone watched the world come to its end as he thundered through the atmosphere, falling hundreds of metres per second now, at terminal velocity. He could scarcely breathe.

All around, klaxons blared. Red lights flashed. As he drifted into unconsciousness, falling towards a burning planet, Boone’s last thought was to take that small crumb of comfort that the end of his final, fatal fall might come in time to avoid seeing the total destruction of the planet that he loved. Boone could just about make out his D.V.A., a faint, crackling message, a last ray of lost hope: Boone! ... Boone! ... Come in Boone!

Georgie slapped Boone hard across his face. “BOONE! WAKE UP. We are mobilising.”

“Whuh — huh? What?”

Opco Boone snapped to and bolted up out of his bunk. His eyes were like saucers. Just the bare, elephant spunk grey of the Eagle Squad’s dormitory walls, and Georgie standing over him.

“Jesus, Boone, you were in deep!” said Georgie.

The kid A.J. Paul ran by, hauling on his differentiation fatigues. “Come on, Boone! We’ve got a live one!”