Opco Boone Idea Bank

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“You came in just now, and then I saw—”
She stopped.
“What?”
“A monster. A nice one, an especially nice one to have around when you're in trouble, but a monster just the same, without any human foolishness like love in him, and—What's the matter? Have I said something I shouldn't?”

— Dashiel Hammett: The Dain Curse (1929)

Identified the murderer because he said eye-ess-dee-aye.

Bartholomew Gould

Antagonist and Protagonist: Apparent Antagonist: Opposition legal eagle units. In fact elaborate set pieces and military strategies and massive engagement, no-one gets killed from either side and the warring legal eagles all seem to be actually rather enjoying themselves. Business as ineffectual victims of bamboozelry.

Battle of Bretton Woods: a conventional trench war between the massed armies of two legal departments shelling each other’s indentures with heavy artillery and a neutral trust keeping force of trained rentiers keeping the piece with hold-harmless agreements, liability caps and general field indemnities.

Delta-force penetrates a badly reinforced side-letter

Actual Antagonist: the Double-Oh unit. Sending out the troops into battle underpowered. Underlying concern: what do you all actually achieve? Underying irony: whatever it is, it is more than you do.

People and places

Places

People

Scenarios

Putting the band back together

A.J. Paul manages to lure Edd Sweeney out of his office by calling from reception as a tax driver. Also they discover a way of communicating by transporting down a wormhole into another dimension in the time-space-tedium continuum. They key is to find a portal — these are usually negotiation oubliettes — which you have to slingshot yourself around, but if you miscalculate your trajectory you get sucked into it forever. Edd and AJ do this but work out that the must fundamental particle in space-tedium continuum does not collapse - indeed, the negotiation oubliette is a field constructed out of these fundamental particles — so the key is to find one. You have to reopen the portal and “knee-slide” out of it, using a legal weapon of inarguable, petulant, infinitesimal objectionability that no-one can object to it, at which point a brief window opens through which you can knee-slide or jet-plane out of it.

Where Legal Eagles Dare

Comte Ziffer Vermessung von Rechnung - head of the double-oh metrics division, and part of the ancestral Romanian nobility. It is a Germanised name.

Hello! it’s Kaylene Trangle! — New Zealand contrecta

It is after the war. Please keeping squads are are scouring the markets wiping out resistant pockets of libor it is not glamorous work bad it pays well. Farquhar has been demobilised and signs up for a remediation squad just a pay the bills. It is a ragged bunch of reprobates a la heart of darkness or Moby Dick.

Caning out ceremony

A crump in the prolixity reservoir, it collapsed to one knee and emptied itself all over the forward Reg relations team.

“they’re going to a baffled for weeks!”

A sprint burst to the right which took out a discombobulation stack. The defences weren't holding.

The Last SPV

Bretton Woods: a dark forest beyond the mythical settlement of the Settlement, where combat sales units would hunt espievies and other prey which they would domesticate and farm for commissions

Sales details ride in with captured espievies and toss them into a holding pen.

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."

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.

Sidemutter: "He got it from the forbidden fields. There are none of these in our territory. They don't exist."


Capture the docs team leader who is too weak to resist the onslaught

Coo people trying to break in in and tame master agreements.

Capture small ones

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.

Bigger ones bust out of their glcages destroying everything

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.

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.

Feed smaller stick with Vega and they grow larger

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

the Settlement is the elven home on earth. The settlement is an offshore centre.

NAV Trigger Point

The Secret Calculation Agent

“G... g... guys?” stuttered Edd. “I th ... th ... think we better get outta here.”
Roly snorted. “What’s wrong Eddy-boy? Scared like a — ” The tubster yawped and clucked and duck-walked around Cadet Sweeney, a fierce, brittle enjoyment squalling in his pink little eyes.
“I’m not yeller!” Edd squeaked.
“Are too! —” Roly’s little apple cheeks flushed with brimming petulance.
“Cut it out Roly,” barked AJ. Don’t pay him no mind, Sweeney. You carry on.”
“Lads! Quiet!” hissed Squadron Leader Opco Boone. “I have to finish this determination dispute trigger. I need bit of quiet. It’s — fiddly ... multi-lat ... ” Boone jabbed his screwdriver into the mechanism, and spluttered as a shower of rust sprinkled his face.
“Don’t forget the double counting, Opco,” said George.
Boone wiped his face and adjusted his goggles. “I got it, G. Just a little further —”
The Eagle Squad leader reached into ancient contraption again, but as he did so, deep in the bowels of the ETS there was a deep, subsonic moan, as if a God, or a monster, was finally stirring from the slumber of aeons.
What the fuck was that?
Nearby, a vigorous flutter, an explosion of limbs, like a scrambling bird escaping from its predator’s clutch.
“Roly! Roly! Come back! Where are you going?”
But the young squadsman had gone. A righteous sneer curled A.J.’s lip.
Boone stood up. “C’mon gang, this is a dead end. No-one will read this, or understand it, much less ever use it. We better find Roly. Let’s get out of here.”


The boobytrap

Boone snaps out of his reverie as the whizzkid excitedly tells him there is a scramble briefing. A.J. slapped his hands and rubbed them together with glee, his eyes fiercely aglow. “This is it, Boone! This is it! I’m finally going to see action!”

The air crackled as Eagle Squad filed into the briefing room. E.J.P. gawped. All the legends were there: Bundie. J Algernon Farquhar, D.S.O. The banter-pulse was flat. Fryer took the rostrum.

“All right people, listen up.”

In a CDO warehouse on the edge of town there is a booby-trapped FWMD. Boone goes out on his comp-cycle but finds his weapons hamstrung by new protocols. Stamps on the cross accelerator.

Throws a netting field around it and it implodes


History lesson at at crustards about the first men. Algy and George roleplay reg margin and Oleg paripassu


Boone motioned his unit forward. They fanned left and right. They deployed the four-hand room clearing technique.

Georgie barked, “clear”.

Algy barked, “clear”.

Baxter-Morley barked, “clear”.

“All right, kid, in you go. Let’s throw a redline around the immediate area.”

E.J.P. followed up with a static-mount differentiation sensor. He rookie unclipped the stabilisers and set the unit on the floor. He punched in the coordinates and it emitted a sheet of red light.

Okay, everyone hold still now.

The diff-sensor swept the semantic content of the room. A.J. watched the display. The hourglass flipped. It flipped again. After a few moments it rendered: zeroes across the board.

“We’re clean, sir. No material alterations. The text-field is Delta-1 as we left it.”

Boone looked concerned. “Odd. To what significance?”

“To one decimal place, Commander.”

“Okay. Run it to three, soldier.”

The kid re-ran the analytics. The diff binoc whistled and beeped. A.J. shrugged. “Point nine-nine-seven. As good as clean, sir. You could eat your dinner off that.”

As good as clean, but not clean. Interesting. “Recalibrate it, lad. Let’s go find those missing diffs.”

“Whatever you say, sir.” A.J. twiddled dials and hit RENDER. “Okay, team: Stand by. All material deltas should now show up.”

The redline swept a red sheet over the text-field. It burped a negative.

“Nothing, Commander.”

“What are your settings, Soldier?”

“Text deltas down to individual ascii level, sir. Can’t get more granular than that.

“Moves?”

“Marked green. Formatting off. Punctuation off.”

Boone shot the rookie a quizzical look. “Why so?”

A.J. smiled. “This way I pick up all syntactically relevant amendments while filtering out the noise. I’m sure we would have caught anything that made a difference. Sir. The text-field is clean.”

“Run it again, Soldier, but this time include the noise. Let’s have a gander at that formatting and punctuation delta.”

“But —”

Boone shot him a stern look.

The rookie blanched. “Okay, sir. On the double sir. Okay folks; hold still again.”

The unit snapped back to attention.

This time two curtain beams shot out of the DV generator: one red and one green.

They swept back and forth. The sensor chirped. The lights doused.

“Ok, lads, at ease.” The men chilled.

The DV re-rendered on the HUD.

This time some changes showed up: some straight-to-curly action on the quote-marks round a definition. Something — or someone — had tampered with the docscene.

“That explains the point oh-three deviation, I guess, Commander.” The kid holstered his DV unit and moved forward.

“Stop right there, lad.” Boone’s voice was urgent.

A.J. froze. “What is it?”

Boone intoned in a halting whisper. “It looks like — it looks like we have a Biggs hoson.”

Eagle-Squad Corporal A.J. Paul looked at his commander with wondrous eyes. “Seriously? A Biggs hoson! I don’t bel —”

SHHHHHHH! silent running soldier!

A.J. clammed pronto.

I don’t think it is a Biggs hoson, Barbarazza. It just looks like one. Hosons are not stable. A hoson would have degraded into entropic tedium by now. This has a much longer half-life.

Enigma Variations

Vibe somewhere between Thermopylae and LOTR Themes:

  • Escalation circle
  • Responsibility diffusion
  • “Grandfathering” of approvals given by persons departed. Good in that it is a permanent siphon for responsibility; bad in that it is an ossified skeletal

Everywhere they turn members of Eagle Squad find they are losing attritional battle: outlying villages of peace-loving legal eagles, starlings and so forth have been captured imprisoned and changed to this monumental unforgiving operational beast. Elsewhere, eagles are being replaced, a la body snatchers with chatbots.

Detachments of blade runners track the chatbot interlopers down and retire them using the Babbage-Turing test, but there is a concern a senior member of Legal Squad may have been “turned”.

IA Scouts

The D.I.A. forensics is an elite group of audit trail scouts who can track any approval trail in the organisation, based purely on the “stutter signature” of its approval. They have developed a working body of knowledge about how decisions are made and can be traced back to individuals, and are constantly vigilant to the diffusion tactics that can be deployed by hostile actors to thrown them off the scent, such as:

During Bretton Woods, Opco came to learn their dark ways through bitter experience and knows they have one weakness: genuine unpredictability: they cannot trace communications of any kind not contemplated by the formal hierarchy. They cannot see anything anything their model does not expect them to see.

“But Opco, the DIE swap teams have telescopic scopes. They are risk-radar synced and loaded with the latest pre-beta releases of the risk taxonomy. They could bullseye an authorised derriere-xerox at the Christmas party in 1997. I’ve seen them do it.”

“Georgie, that’s the very point. All we need to do is structure our network to run crosswise to that model. Find the pinch-points — soft joints in the taxonomic superstructure, and jam those channels, relentlessly.”

Hare interrupted. “How the hell are we meant to do that, Boone? How can we find what doesn’t exist? They have all the data. They have monstrous computation machines, running linear extrapolations to five decimal places. The taxonomy is SOX certified to six significant places. We wouldn’t expect an exploitable weakness in literally hundreds of millions of years.”

Boone held up a hand. The room went quiet. For that exact reason, my friends. How have they built the model?

“Data, Boone. Data. Big data.”

“Okay, and where did they get the data?”

“Everywhere, Boone. They have terabytes of data and they are accumulating more every day. Networked MIS munition dumps — there are at least forty of them positioned around the territory. Reticulated staff sentiment surveys. Eight years of calibrated 360° PM stacks. Aggregated steering co—”

“Not where physically; where temporally: you know: when.”

“Like I said, eight to ten years worth of the stuff —”

“— in the past.”

Hare looked at Boone like he was a moron. “Well, yeah, duh. How are they supposed to get data from the future? These guys are good. They’re not freaking clairvoyant.”

“Exactly my point, Commander Hare. The taxonomic model is 100% backwards-facing. We may not have that data, but we can approximate it.”

In any case the trick is do be unexpected. Create destructive diversions by creating non-linear connections between low-delta facilities with no apparent interaction. That is where the defences are weakest — where they least expect attack.

That’s brilliant. But where will they be focusing their defensive efforts?

Credit Derivatives. Family Offices. Benchmark

DIA on the trail

Kimo Sarbey crouched down and inspected the track.

“Is it —?”

Sarbey held up a palm, to indicate silence. He raised his nose and sniffed, left and right, hoovering in the atmosphere. He proceeded forward, and then to the right.

“Interesting.”

He side-stepped to the right. He did it again. He crouched. He pointed a finger, and scurried ahead four strides.

Thermopylae

Opco is called to a situation where a detachment of legal eagles are cornered, fighting their way out a narrow canyon.

The commanding officer, Hare, is struggling: he has tried a precedent fallback formation, but none of his men have any experience in similar situations.

Lieutenant Hare is under enormous pressure to deliver. Resentful as overlooked and publicly humiliated by Fryer, who plainly does not rate him. Opco and Boone have a bit of form.

“All right, chaps: we are going to have to escalate our way out of this.”

The men dubiously looked up the sheer, smooth rockface.

“Piggy, Blighter: you prepare the first pitch. We will need a group of stakeholders. Form a working group. We’re going up.”

Piggy and brighter with a strong men of the unit. They did not shirk from their task and before long they were hammering stakeholders into whatever fissures they could find in the wall of sheer verbiage.

“it is dense, sir — highly granular — but we can do this.”

After an hour the two men had made it 50 m up the face and completed the first pitch of the escalation. The rest of the unit scrambled nimbly up the rope line they had created.

The next pitch was a horizontal traverse for some 70 metres across the silo into a credit chimney. They laboured across it. Cracks in the accountability face were few and far between. The men made it, with a clever compliance arbitrage, belayed the leader into a deal committee approval subroutine.

Hare had the men pull up the rope after them. “We’ll need it for further escalations, lads. And besides, we don’t want any of those IA blighters following us. Safety first,” he said, tapping his nose. It’s all about plausible deniability here.”

Jiffy, prepare some slides outlining the business case. Tatts; prepare a briefing for the joint chiefs.

Piggy said, “the stakeholders are occupied, sir. We can’t reach them.”

Tatts said, “sir the supply line to the joint chiefs is cut off. There is no signal.”

2018

Veteran of ww2, saw action in the xxx lost good men there. Has flashbacks. Sharp tongued wise cracker. He fears becoming like the old man, a shell with no human feelings whatsoever

Private investigator I used to turn tricks just like any other John, but I noticed one day that all was not right with the world. One too many knuckleheads and frauds got away with it and they let me go from one more gig and Well they say necessity is the mother of invention, and I tell you how u dreamed of telling them all, the whole kitten caboodle, to go straight to hell

=BlackBerry

I dreamed about it. I stood with my toes across the edge of a great cliff, and I roared, and I howled, and I hurled that infernal organiser, with all my might, out over the glittering waves. It spun and arced out in a graceful curl and fell, curling down until it spritzed on the black rocks below.

Jesus.

Black rocks. Before now, I never made the connection.

I must be in deep.

The BB shattered. It atomised into a billion particles as fine as the elemental dust of which we are all made. The dust. The dust rose, and I could see it even over that distance and it gathered and rose up before me and it assembled if conducted by an invisible plan and it said I have a plan for you, I have a plan —

Then the fucker woke me up. The ’berry, still there, still corporeal, animated by no greater intelligence and bearing news of no greater moment than the legal and compliance workstream of the target operating model steerco buzzed at that very moment, its winking red eye and bustling ring tone. I had action points and I did not know what they were.

But I felt it, just the same. It was more than just a dream. It was too real, too coherent, too indicative of a greater purpose. I began to dig.

And the dreams kept coming.

And I dreamed that the bank went up in flames and collapsed, and a great halo of joyous light raised up to the heavens and the people said hosanna and then I saw this McGuffin in the ruins and it didn’t burn and it didn’t deteriorate, but it rose up and spoke to me and it showed me a bigger plan. It called my name. Well, my sleeping self – I was called Clint in that one – knew it was some kind of a dream (a dream in a dream?) and I snapped back – and there they were, saying my name, and I was in a call and the subject was the target operating model of this or that

When the end came for real I didn’t suspect a thing. They called me to a meeting room with a guy on the door.

I thought I’d rent out a place close to the city. I wanted easy access to snoop around. There were some recurring landmarks and I knew I had to be close. They showed me around a floor on the cheese grater. No good. I looked at a mobile office space just off Finsbury Circus. I stayed there for a week. They tossed me out. I wound up in a draughty flat above a derelict station running east. Downstairs they sold soup and upstairs a Turkish family watched daytime TV. It was Shoreditch, so really quite a la mode, but it wasn’t glamorous. The landlord was a gammon slob in a singlet. He turned up weekly and took the rent in cash and didn’t write receipts.

There was a desk there, and I found a chair they were throwing out from an office supplies shop. I had my stuff set up in a half hour, and I put my sign up on the door.

I had some savings and I set about burning them.

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