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==[[NAV Trigger Point: An Opco Boone Adventure|NAV Trigger Point]]== | |||
===The boobytrap=== | |||
Boone snaps out of his reverie as the whizzkid excitedly tells him there is a scramble briefing. Babarazza 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. Babarazza 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. Babarazza 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.” Babarazza 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?” | |||
Babarazza 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. | |||
Babarazza froze. “What is it?” | |||
Boone intoned in a halting whisper. “It looks like — it looks like we have a Biggs hoson.” | |||
Eagle-Squad Corporal J-P Babarazza looked at his commander with wondrous eyes. “Seriously? A Biggs hoson! I don’t bel —” | |||
SHHHHHHH! silent running soldier! | |||
Babarazza 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: An Opco Boone Adventure|Enigma Variations]]== | ==[[Enigma Variations: An Opco Boone Adventure|Enigma Variations]]== |