Talk:Enigma Variations: An Opco Boone Adventure

Vibe somewhere between Thermopylae and LOTR

Escalation circle Diffusion Grandfathering of consents 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. forensic are like an elite group of trackers who can trace and follow anything in the organisation based on its formal structure. They are like Tonto. Oppo discovers their weakness to be that they cannot see anything unexpected.

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

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.”