Enigma Variations: An Opco Boone Adventure

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Synopsis

• Into the command HQ. Blinkenlichten.
• Fryer is hunched over the taxonomy map. Hare is pushing units around with a stick.
• Boone back from a routine patrol with news — had to dig a unit of regulatory relations team out of a scrape during routine market enquiry. Hare is fractious, as he went without authorisation.
• Boone brings back sample captured communication. They run it through the discombobulator (a room of clerks). Nothing.

Background

For years GCHQ has protected sensitive communications with a carefully calibrated syntactic scrambler code language, meaning vital defensive strategies have been communicated around the various command centres without compromise. Arrayed with sophisticated defensive systems such as prolixity dumps and syntactical contortion arrays — GCHQ has forged an impregnable iron dome of textual impenetrability that has permitted vital communications to take place uninterrupted, un intercepted, in real-time.

But in recent weeks there has been an upsurge in enemy activity — it is as if they can anticipate our every move. We have had Legal Squad agents getting in all kinds of scrapes and firefights during what should have been routine courier drops.

And at the same time the double-oh command has changed up its own encryption, and the central interpretation units have been struggling to decipher communications. Until now this has been trivial, but suddenly there is a problem.

The problem with our Enigma machine... whatever we run through it turns up something either banal, random words, or cancels down to nothing at all — like there is no content in the message at all.

We thought they may have encoded it somehow into another dimension or interleaved the genuine transmission data in the message envelope somehow, but nothing we try checks out. For months engineers work on the codebreaker but nothing we can do can improve the results. the double Ohs have developed some brilliant, impenetrable channel through which they are managing to communicate with free abandon, and we can't do a thing to stop them.

The core code is utterly unbreakable. Everything we run, Boone, every differentiation we apply, everything we try to crack their communications just returns utter, face-slapping, moronic gibberish, however we render it.

WAIT A MINUTE said Boone. Suddenly, the scales fell from his eyes. Boone realised the overwhelming scale of the challenge that faced the team. “Lines and lines of utter gibberish...That’s... it. That’s exactly it. It’s .... GENIUS”.

Boone barked into his wristcomm. “Algy! George! Let’s go!”