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| Boone motioned his unit forward. They fanned left and right. They deployed the four-hand room clearing technique.
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| Georgie barked, “clear”.
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| Algy barked, “clear”.
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| Baxter-Morley barked, “clear”.
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| “All right, kid, in you go. Let’s throw a [[redline]] around the immediate area.”
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| 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.
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| Okay, everyone hold still now.
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| 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.
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| “We’re clean, sir. No material alterations. The text-field is Delta-1 as we left it.”
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| Boone looked concerned. “Odd. To what significance?”
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| “To one decimal place, Commander.”
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| “Okay. Run it to three, soldier.”
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| 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.”
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| ''As good as'' clean, but ''not'' clean. ''Interesting''. “Recalibrate it, lad. Let’s go find those missing diffs.”
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| “Whatever you say, sir.” A.J. twiddled dials and hit ''RENDER''. “Okay, team: Stand by. All material deltas should now show up.”
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| The [[redline]] swept a red sheet over the text-field. It burped a negative.
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| “Nothing, Commander.”
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| “What are your settings, Soldier?”
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| “Text deltas down to individual ascii level, sir. Can’t get more granular than that.
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| “Moves?”
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| “Marked green. Formatting off. Punctuation off.”
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| Boone shot the rookie a quizzical look. “Why so?”
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| 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.”
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| “Run it again, Soldier, but this time include the noise. Let’s have a gander at that formatting and punctuation delta.”
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| “But —”
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| Boone shot him a stern look.
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| The rookie blanched. “Okay, sir. On the double sir. Okay folks; hold still again.”
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| The unit snapped back to attention.
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| This time ''two'' curtain beams shot out of the DV generator: one red and one green.
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| They swept back and forth. The sensor chirped. The lights doused.
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| “Ok, lads, at ease.” The men chilled.
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| The DV re-rendered on the HUD.
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| 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''.
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| “That explains the point oh-three deviation, I guess, Commander.” The kid holstered his DV unit and moved forward.
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| “Stop right there, lad.” Boone’s voice was urgent.
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| A.J. froze. “What is it?”
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| Boone intoned in a halting whisper. “It looks like — it looks like we have a Biggs hoson.”
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| Eagle-Squad Corporal A.J. Paul looked at his commander with wondrous eyes. “Seriously? A Biggs hoson! I don’t bel —”
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| SHHHHHHH! silent running soldier!
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| A.J. clammed pronto.
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| 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.
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| ==[[Enigma Variations: An Opco Boone Adventure|Enigma Variations]]== | | ==[[Enigma Variations: An Opco Boone Adventure|Enigma Variations]]== |