Deltaview Force: An Opco Boone Adventure
|
The Adventures of Opco Boone, Legal Ace™
|
Raid
Boone made the window. He elbow-smashed the pane. He reached in, lock-snipped, pivoted and mule-kicked the door, in a single fluid motion. The door smacked on its hinges, quivered and timbered onto the rubble.
Boone motioned the unit forward with a curt, pointed air-punch.
The squad fanned left and right. They deployed the four-hand doc-clearing technique. Aggie went left. She swivelled in and barked, “clear”. Algy went right. He swivelled in and barked, “clear”.
Baxter-Morley went route one. He kicked over a drum and barked, “clear”.
From nowhere: A kerfuffle behind a plaster wall to the right. The unit spun, caught offguard: panic: fumbling with safety catches, grappling with magazines.
An ear-splitting BLAM: the plaster wall was gone. A heavy wad collapsed through it, lifeless onto the floor in front of them.
Algy cursed. “Jesus! Side letter!”
Boone took his finger off the NAV trigger and holstered his CSA, still smoking from the muzzle. “Eyes peeled, ladies. Now we are clear.”
Boone fixed A.J. with a hard stare. “All right, kid, in you go. Let’s throw a redline around the immediate area.”
A.J. followed up with a static-mount diff-sensor. The 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 for semantic content. 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 blues, no reds. Zilch 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.
Aggie: “There! In the schedule!”
A.J. squinted. A.J. shrugged. He ran his finger down the margin. “Point nine-nine-seven. Some quote-curl inconsistency in the defs, but that’s a routine re-type job. As good as clean, sir. You could eat your dinner off that.”
As good as clean, but not clean. Interesting. “Re-type? Who does a re-type? 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 DVs 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.
“Formatting?”
“Off.”
“Punctuation?”
“SMART.”
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 real still now: max sensitivity here.”
Algy looked up. His jaw twitched.
Aggie looked down. Her cap was jammed tight. A sweat drop swelled on the brim. The unit didn’t breathe.
This time two curtain beams shot out of the DV generator: one red and one blue.
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: a thin red line through a blank half page: some dolt forced a carriage return with some tab-work. A stuttering burst of line breaks to force a new page.
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. “But — why? Who would do that?”
“Stop right there, lad.” Boone’s voice was urgent.
A.J. froze. “What is it?”
Boone intoned in a halting whisper. “It looks like — no, it can’t be that.”
“Can’t be what, Sir?” AJ was wide-eyed.
The DV unit bleeped and re-rendered. The familiar blue/red display was riddled green.
Green strikethru.
Green underline.
Boone looked up at his 2IC. “We have movement”
The old veteran leaned in. She peered at the display. She whistled. she caught the commander’s eye. “It could be, you know, Boone.”
Even as she said it, Boone knew it. “Yeah.”
“What, sir? What?” A.J. hissed.
Algy looked on. “Cadet, you could be looking at a live Biggs particle.”
Eagle-Squad Cadet A.J. Paul looked at his commander with wondrous eyes. “Seriously? A Biggs hoson! I don’t bel —”
Boone turned furiously. “SHHHHHHH! Silent running, soldier!”
A.J. clammed pronto.
Algy shrugged. “But I don’t think it is a Biggs hoson, though”. 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.
At the back of the room, a dusty murmur in the rubble. Something moved. Another groan. Some planking shifted in the wrecked cube.
The kid looked up at the commander. Boone caught the yearning. The boy wanted it.
Boone nodded. “Careful, lad.” He nodded. He let him off the leash.
Cubicle
A.J. cocked his GMSLA and kicked off the planking. Revealed: rubble-showered youth in sharp suit, prone, pale face and pinned under collapsed pitch book stack. It was heavy, but not load-bearing.
“Don’t move, son. We'll have you put off there on no time.”
“I'm fiiiine. I'm fliiiying”
The poor little punk was in a state. Dust-caked, dehydrated, eyes red and rolling wild in wide sockets.
“I have it!” he mumbled it through a mouthful of sand and plaster. “I can get you some —”
“P.A.D. Masks! Now!” Boones tone was urgent.
The squad masked up toute de suite.
A.J. yammered, “What is it?”
Boone held out a flat-palm that said “quiet ops”. He unholstered his Z10 commlink and jacked up a secure connection back to control.
“Yeah, Aggie: Do you copy?”
A static-crackled Roger said she did.
“We’re gonna need a wall thrown up around this unit pronto.”
“On it, Boone. Have your unit affirm confidentiality. OneNDA Protocol. You all okay?”
“OneNDA terms affirmed. Yeah, s fine. Precautionary measure only at this time, Aggie. Di-Alpha-head gabbling with a draft OM. Most likely stale or public-side but some risk of MNPI infection.”
Aggie said, “Oopsie.”
Boone yukked. The squad yukked.
“That's solid A grade material, Agster. Love your work.”
A.J. nudged the squid kid with his boot. All the signs. Tell-tale blue/red track-change marks running up his arm. Tossed-out riders and mark-up littered the splintered cubicle. A half-done CBT module cycled lazily on his screen.
The kid hacked out a wet splutter, shook his head and staggered up. Chalk motes lifted off his suit.
A.J. cocked and aimed. “Hold it right there, tiger.”
Kid regarded A.J.’s up-close muzzle and gurned. “Oh, no, I’m clean, man. I’m straight. I’m Wickerman, through and through.”
It seemed plausible. He had the likely pedigree and squid-like air of assurance. The suit was sharp: Wickliffe grade, sans doubte. He clutched a fat book.
“Relax: I’m a ninja, too. Look.”
He bowed his head and held out the book like a votive.
Punchface stretched out a hand to take it. Boone smacked it down. “Don’t touch.”
Kid tossed the deck on the floor. It spun. It landed face down.
A.J. prodded it with his piece. He scoped the back. It was blobbed, de-blobbed and annotated in tight black cursive.
“Football Team checks out, sir.”
“Entity?”
“National Association.”
“Branch?”
“London. Acting by and on behalf of, not through through. Punctuation correct.”
“I told you, man. I’m on the level.” The kid shifted awkwardly and groped at a nearby keyboard.
Punchface freaked. “Freeze!”
“Chill, man. I'm late on CBT. If I don’t finish on time they will know something’s wrong.”
Boone said, “Stand down, Roly.” He looked at the kid. “Who will?”
“Wickliffe Compliance goons. They monitor by the keystroke. I’m on their shit-list already. I missed the OSH module.”
Boone did not want a Wickliffe compliance detail sweeping the building right now.
“Gimme a look at that.”
Kid twisted the screen up to Boone’s eyeline. It was an Wang terminal fitted with a diffuser. A smorgasbord of CUI courier orange swam into view.
Boone alt-tabbed for Leisure Suit Larry. No dice. The kid’s story checked out. He tabbed back and scanned the screen. A corner-mounted timer counted down. Four minutes and counting.
“What's that?”
That's the goddamn deadline counter. These dudes are serious. I’ve been pulling all nighters on this goddam CDO so I’m late again. I gotta get this done or my ass I'd toast.
“Okay. It’s D.”
“What?”
“The answer. It’s D. “All of the above”.”
“Oh, right. Sweet.” The kid clacked his keyboard. He hit return. The Wang went blank. The hourglass flipped. The count-down ticked. Thirty seconds to go.
“Come on —”
The hour-glass flipped. Twenty five seconds.
A compliance squad automated reminder popped up. It threatened disciplinary.
Punchface squealed. “Let’s wax him and get out of here, Boone.”
“We do not have control room clearance, Roly.”
“But the place is going to blow!”
“Wait.”
The counter ticked down to 5. The Wang honked and squawked and flashed red.
The screen came up. The machine beeped & glowed. The printer started chattering.
Squid kid pulled a readout off the dot matrix. The alarm died. The code red light show subsided. The lights came up.
The kid scanned the readout. He grinned. “Nailed it. Eighty percent. I’m clear. Any more was wasted effort.”
The comlink crackled. “Boone, this is control room. The wall is active. Code word: Protect Viper. You may proceed.”
Boone opened up the comlink on back to base. “He's pretty far gone, Aggie. I think it’s stale. But he's packing a red herring. Take no chances.”
“The future.”
A.J. tried to grab it but the squid hung on tight. He pulled it to his heart. It was fat, typeset small, laid out on custom narrow margins and US letter.
What is it?
It was a red herring for PetVan, or BluBeenz, or Lexrifyly or some such thing. The squid’s glowing eyes rolled in their sockets. All this little analyst could do was mutter, over and over, “I HAVE SEEN THE FUTURE”.
A.J. snatched the doc — prospectuses only had two or three hundred back then, so you could lift them unaided. He flipped the pages. He scanned the risk factors. He glommed the financial projections.
“What the hell is lexrifyly?
“The future” gurgled the squid. “So clever.”
A J. screwed up his nose. “But, it has no forecasted revenue, let alone profit, in the next nineteen years. It even says so in the prospectus.”
The squid wore a lapel badge. It said “RENFIELD” He convulsed in bubbling, foamy laughter. “That’s what’s so clever, man.”
“How is having no hope of making money so clever?
“Yes it is! It is all disclosed man! We’re only taking orders stapled to big-boy letters! We’re 'wildly over-subscribed!”
“But this company won’t make any money?”
“You fool,” he cried. “Revenue is irrelevant! This is the internet! There is no money any more! Money is irrelevant! I am irrelevant! You are irrelevant —”
“Now hold on —”
Renfield laughed like a maniac. “We are all irrelevant! Everything is free! We are liberated! There are no bricks and/or mortar! we are going to be rich!”
The poor squid kid then dissolved into a gurgling hysteria, then rolled over and shot me with intense, red-beaded eyes. “How much can I put you down for? We’re full on our lines but I can get you a piece —”
“Alright, A.J., bring him in”
Ten days later the market imploded, taking the young tadpole, PetVan, BluBeenz and Lexrifyly with it