FoolishPeople

[ARCHIVE RETRIEVAL 777/6/42BRAVO/QUINN-HARRY-L/2016-11-05]

[BEGIN TRANSCRIPT:]

Bonfire Night. No fireworks for me, except for the ones I see when I close my eyes. You couldn't hear them anyway, not down here in the guts of this place. I haven't been outside in a week. Just run after run after run.

 Sometimes I'm not entirely sure what time it is, or how old I am. I feel like I'm ninety, but Blake informs me I'm just shy of 25, just like I ought to be.The INDEX is coming together nicely. Initial estimates were off – it'll probably be up and running First Quarter next year.

Everybody underestimated the human capacity for connectivity. Not just externally, but internally. The truth is, outside of the confines of limitations, raw Experience is always in flux, metamorphosing from one thing into another.

 Dream-logic's the most obvious way to describe it – when you're dreaming, you don't question the shifts and paths. You don't question a dog turning into a man turning into the moon turning into your lost love swimming in a silver sea, beckoning you Down.

 The INDEX is going to have to be constantly updated. We always knew that, but I don't think anybody understood just how realtime it would have to be. I think Blake did, insofar as it can know anything, being just a computer programme.

We're at war here, but we're at war with something that keeps changing form. A fire that keeps burning, whatever we do; a dreaming night that is always different. Always Novel. You can't just wipe out the icons, or sanitise a portion of it, because they'll always re-emerge as something else.

Frantzen lent me The Art of War by Sun Tzu. I'd never read it before, but I'm glad I did now. I like Frantzen.

There's going to have to be eternal vigilance. Except, if you go Down deep enough, you know nothing is eternal. Nothing is constant, nothing endures. You can't fight Novelty. There, I said it.

[Five minute pause]

Well, look at that. I've not been arrested.

So yeah, we can't fight Novelty. But we can fight Virulent Novelty. Because they're not the same thing, not at all. Something I'm beginning to understand, something hiding in the centre of my brain. Something in my heart. Something I'm Sure of, no pun intended.

Maybe Frantzen would say the thing in my head is my pineal gland or some such [EXPLETIVE DELETED] but he works in Pharmacology and likes his subject.

The Thing, though – The Thing I can feel, hidden but moving? They checked me out in Medical but didn't find anything, said it might be psychosomatic. I couldn't stop grinning, because they're right – it is exactly that – but they don't know what it means.

Maybe I've gone Down too far, but I don't think so – I'm not going to pull a Campbell. Maybe I just know what the Enemy is, now. Dusty was right, we are hunters – though Dusty's gone now, sidestepped into politics. I'm told it's rather common. Next time I see him, he'll probably be a Minister Of Something Or Other.

 And you know what? Good luck to him.

[END TRANSCRIPT]

[ARCHIVE RETRIEVAL 777/6/42BRAVO/QUINN-HARRY-L/2016-06-19]

[BEGIN TRANSCRIPT:]

Well, Campbell's gone. Took a dive from Blackfriars Bridge this morning, no note, nothing. Can't say I'm surprised. He's been increasingly twitchy the past couple of weeks – I tried to take it up with Dusty, but nothing was done. So now we're a man down and we've got a rollout deadline at the end of the month. I think they want to show Blake off to some bigwigs.

Honestly, I can't say I'll miss Dave Campbell one bit. Ever since he came back he's reminded me of a damn lizard. I never caught him blinking, not once. Still, maybe he'll find some peace, sleeping with the fishes?

Legge's put in for a transfer. Did it as soon as he heard. The rest of the team's spooked, but pretty much everyone's holding it together. Seems like Frantzen was right – psilocybin helps you fly. One of the boffins down in Neurology said it had to do with filters and bloodflow. Whatever, I don't really care.

I'm not risking it in the testing rig – it might queer up the data, and the last thing we need is Blake registering a Virulent Novelty upsurge with one of us instream – those protocols aren't entirely debugged, or so I hear from the techs. I really don't want my brain to leak out of my ears, y'know?

Of course, the problem with Campbell deciding to cark it is that it'll be at least three months before we can get someone in-post. Not to mention the [EXPLETIVE DELETED] interview cycle. Asking the same questions over and over again for days at a time? If I wanted to do that, I'd have transferred into Psych instead of Indexing.

I heard they've started calling us [EXPLETIVE DELETED] DWARVES down in Payroll, on account of all the mining we have to do. If someone calls me an elf, I'm going to punch them, I'll tell you that for free.

Some bright spark suggested outsourcing the other day, just so they could resurrect some old 'Psychic Driving' technique the CIA used in the 60's! Can you believe it? I mean, all right, I pulled everything Blake has on the damn stuff, just to check, in case it might help us out, but it's ridiculously crude.

You can't just hit the deep stuff with a hammer. It needs to be a precision extraction, otherwise there's no way for the database to integrate it, and all you've got is an orphan-fragment. Why they can't leave it to us professionals is beyond me.

I should probably pay a visit to Medical. All the usual veins have collapsed, and there'll be hell to pay if we can't fit the cannula for tomorrow's testing run. Some of the boys down at QinetiQ we had drinks with last week are talking about basic neural jacks. Years away yet, of course, but it'd make the work so much easier if we could just plug in to go Down.

I reckon we've got about another nine months to a year before the first INDEX run is complete. Blake's extrapolating where he – it, can but in the end, the source material has to come from us. So that means more runs, and an Experience budget that would make the Treasury cry if this wasn't the MOD.

Time to go down to Pharmacology. Again.

[END TRANSCRIPT]

[ARCHIVE RETRIEVAL 777/6/42BRAVO/QUINN-HARRY-L/2016-05-01]

[BEGIN TRANSCRIPT:]

I suppose it's running. That's what the techs say. It's a little unnerving – just talking to the air and knowing that everything's being recorded, but I suppose I'll forget after a while. I'm not looking forward to the Broadmoor trip tomorrow to gather data.

If you told me the basis of saving the country would mean talking to psychopaths, I'd have balked and never taken this job in the first place. Some of them just seem so...nice. Then you read their files and suddenly you're not sure it's the same person.

Still, it beats having to reconstruct genocides for input into Blake. There's only so much you can take before defence kicks in and you go numb. Legge and Campbell have been signed off by the doctor for a fortnight. I think they should be rotated into a less stressful positions. I suppose I could always go above Mark – talk to Dusty, but going to the Project Manager seems a little too much like bringing in the guns, if you ask me.

I dunno. Maybe. I'll give Legge a couple of days, see if his emails seem less like a bad script for Brian Blessed. I mean, I get that you're under pressure and might be cracking, but ALL CAPS ALL THE TIME is getting tiring.

So yeah, three days at Broadmoor, then the whole of next week talking to ex-squaddies with PTSD. Joy.

….Ah...bugger it. Blake, pause recording.

[Sound of a bottle being opened, liquid being poured]

That's the stuff...You're kidding me...? No pause? [EXPLETIVE DELETED] had better not go on my [EXPLETIVE DELETED] file.

...Whatever. Just...whatever. They can't fire me. Probably can't fire Legge or Campbell either, can they? Proper vetting takes too long – or it should do. They better not be cutting corners on that. I can't have a team that's going to go insane on me.

“Sorry Harry, half your team's gone psycho because we couldn't afford full depth psychology evaluations. Budget cuts. You understand.”

“Sure Dusty, sure. We'll dance like the marionettes for the Mandarins in Whitehall. Doesn't matter if one gets broken or tangled in his own strings. We're only trying to stop the country eating itself a[EXPLETIVE DELETED]live.”

Idiot...OK. Deep breath.

Right. Testing rig at 3pm..factor in the comedown, then debrief...Hmm...Another night in the barracks then. I hate working Bank Holidays.

[EXPLETIVE DELETED]

[END TRANSCRIPT]

#VirulentExperience

 

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[ARCHIVE RETRIEVAL 777/6/42BRAVO/QUINN-HARRY-L/2016-05-21]

[BEGIN TRANSCRIPT:] 

 

I actually think I might fall over. I suppose I could always requisition something for Pharmacology but I think coffee with a nip is probably best. I'm not doing the upper-downer merry-go-round again. We're approaching 74hrs straight uptime and everything's a little...wobbly here in the office. We've had to shut down the external feeds, just in case the readings are off. 

 

Blake assures me they aren't, but seriously, I'm not sure taking the word of an invisible ubicomp progamme hovering in the information soup is entirely wise. The first batch of kids seem to quite happy with propagation – their responses are coming in five by five. The upload rate is amazing. 

 

It's so strange, y'know? Watching their whole liiestreams on the monitors. It's so...ordinary, compared to the rest of the source material we had to mine. I still have nightmares about Kosovo run. I mean, I saw it on TV the first time around, but I was what..six? Seven? 

 

But to map and sim it, then run the damn thing again, modeled off the aggregate from survivors? [EXPLETIVE DELETED] me that was bad. And Blake keeps streaming it, and there's nothing you can do until the cycle ends. Some of the guys in Pharmacology suggested some orange juice to replace electrolytes – it feels like the inside of your brains have been stripped out. I was joking in the canteen that 'shrooms aint got nothing on plugging into Blake in debug cycle, and Frantzen looks me straight in the eye and said:  

 

“They'll help.” 

 

How in hell are they supposed to help? Frantzen muttered something about 'navigating trips', but I pretty much bit his head off right there and then. I think that was the sleep dep – Dusty's been running us harder than usual – but I'm not sure. 

 

Hah. Damn Dusty – calls us his hounds, coursing after prey. What the hell are we supposed to be hunting? Enemy combatants in our own heads? I hate this military [EXPLETIVE DELETED].  

 

Campbell's back in – the doctors have given him a clean bill of health, but I was sitting across from him at morning briefing, and there's something up still. I can see it in his eyes, just something not quite right when he smiles. Even Legge knows it – he's keeping his distance and those two used to be tighter than a wet-t-shirt in a gay bar. 

 

Come five, I was walking past his desk and he was reviewing cannibalism footage – the 2012 stuff in Miami – accounts of the Siege of Leningrad, that Japanese guy who got a book tour out of it. It's within our remit as deep consumption metaphor, but I swear, the way he was sitting, you could almost imagine he was licking his lips. 

 

Creepy as hell. I think I'm going to keep him out of the testing rig for a bit. 

 

There's some symposium on Novelty down at Goldsmiths next week, and the memo says we're 'Strongly advised to attend incognito.' What, do they expect us to walk up to the speakers and say: “Hello, I work for the Ministry Of Defence on a secret project to monitor and contour human experience so that the country doesn't revolt?” 

 

Idiots. Mind you, if you'd have told me I'd be working for the government back in '12  I'd probably have laughed in your face. History's funny like that. 

[END TRANSCRIPT]

WTF?!

                  

                 

                  

                                

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