Opco Boone Idea Bank

People and places

Places

• The Black Rock
• Bretton Woods
• Alpha Dens
• The Iron Mountain

People

• Opco Boone
• Algernon Farquhar
• Georgie Flame
• Columbina Cavalier
• E.J.P. Barbarazza
• Ramsay Punchface
• Steerco Boone
• Heinrich Kurzweil
• Walter N. Buggs
• Maxine Blitzer
• Genevieve “Chip” Fryer
• Imelda Skanks
• Cliff Chance
• Janice Henderson
• Pimco Van der Saark
• Dan Grade
• Kaylene Trengle

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:

• Controller group triage
• Inclination and similar plausible deniability ruses

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

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.”