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Well.

Apparently I was going to write some sort of stunning entry on the ItemsInQuestion that was going to blow the lid off this entire investigation, clear up the mystery of Flo-U-RID-3's death, and... I dunno, maybe destroy the Commie threat once and for all or something. Or rather, my predecessor was going to write it; as of yesterday afternoon, I was still looking forward to spending today (the next several days, in fact) sorting through our preserved collection of original first-century paperwork to select a few choice (i.e. suitably-cleared) items for display in OUT Sector's BLUE mess hall, as part of our Sector-wide Service Firm History Monthcycle.

But it was not meant to be, apparently; I was awakened this morning by the Computer informing me that my INDIGO status was being elevated to ULTRAVIOLET and that I was to take my previous clone's place in reporting on the Toothpaste_Disaster. I confess, "Five" had been doing fine for so long, I'd forgotten I might (would inevitably!) someday be called upon to step into the White Toga.

After donning the ULTRAVIOLET robes that were already waiting in my Productional Dispensificator, I asked the Computer how my previous clone had come to be terminated. And then the strangest thing happened: The Computer asked me what Security Clearance I was, and-- choking down the instinctive gut response that insisted I was doing something insanely wrong-- I replied that I was, in fact, ULTRAVIOLET Clearance!

And then the Computer said: "That information is not available at your present Security Clearance."

Now, this leaves me facing three highly disconcerting possibilities, in (what seems to me) increasingly impossible order:

I will leave further speculation on this anomaly to you, my fellow reviewers; no doubt at least one of you knows far more about it than the rest of us. No, I don't know who you are; you may rest assured that your identity (or identities) died with Knok-5, you nasty little vermin. But I know you exist. And I know you're not done yet. Well, guess what? The Knok-OUT clone family has a few surprises left in it. I wasn't where you thought I'd be last night, was I? That's right. Newsflash: The Knok-OUTs are rarely where the monitoring systems think they are. I may be our newest ULTRAVIOLET but I know how to live at least one more day.

For the rest of you, this will hopefully come as less than a complete surprise: An individual involved with-- perhaps even the individual ultimately responsible for-- the assassination of Flo-U-RID-3 is right here on this very panel of ours. This same individual is almost certainly tied to core aspects of the Toothpaste_Disaster, pulled some very powerful strings to be on this panel, and is currently working very hard to cover up the last bits of truly important evidence before we-- the rest of us, the ones who knew nothing about this inquiry until we were asked to participate in it-- find it and put it all together.

I've come up to speed on a great deal of relevant material, thoughtfully provided in MindRoom format by my predecessor (don't bother asking how; "Five" didn't last as long as he did by giving away any magic tricks, and I'm not going to start). Unfortunately, his last imprint was a few days old and done in haste; he was probably convinced that he was under observation at the time. As a result, all I have are his speculations, not his conclusions; I have a lot of theories and facts, but very little in the way of concrete evidence.

I know very little about what he was up to last night as well; I'm a bit surprised by the fact that at no point did he contact me, to apprise me of his line of inquiry and to indicate that he might be playing with fire. Whatever happened last night, it presumably occurred so unexpectedly that he had no time to message me any last-minute words that would give me necessary clues, or even a #BN9-15/GAG: Don't Go There, Stupid to help me avoid his mistake. Or... possibly he knew his normal, legitimate lines of communication were thoroughly compromised, and attempting to use them would risk exposing me to our eventual assassin. I would advise all of you to be very careful about how you communicate with your downstream clones; I suspect I'm not the only one who's in danger at this point.

And I am quite certain I am in danger: there is nothing preventing me from picking up where my MindRoom update leaves off, following the same trail of evidence-- if the traitor in our midst hasn't cleared it all up-- and finding out whatever my predecessor knew. And, of course, there is the fact of my continued presence on this panel, and our ongoing mission to discover why the Toothpaste_Disaster happened. Someone has a vested interest in keeping that buried, and so long as even one of us is continuing to pry, there will be more assassination attempts.

And so, in the spirit of renewed vigor for life, I will carry on as my predecessor would have, to the best of my ability, for as long as I can, beginning with this entry on the ItemsInQuestion. Unfortunately, I know very little about the Items; at the time of my imprint, "Five" had only some basic facts and half-formed suspicions. I will do my best with that.

ItemsInQuestion

There was an unfortunate incident known as the ToothpasteRebellion which occurred more or less immediately in the wake of the Toothpaste_Disaster.1 It happened in CRY and BBY Sectors early in the tenure of our own Make-U-CRY-2. The official story, if I recall correctly, is that the Rebellion began over some sort of limitation on standard dental hygiene rations. This is open to debate: there was evidently some sort of ringleader or instigator2 for the Rebellion who called himself "Batclone", whose motives may have had nothing to do with Baseline_Dental_Health. I do not know anything about this individual, other than the earlier Lexicon entry which suggests a correlation between his non-standard uniform and one of the Items.3 What cannot be denied is that the Rebellion ended with the mass-termination of between ten thousand and one hundred thousand Citizens in CRY and BBY sectors.4

The ItemsInQuestion (IIQ) were found by a standard fourth-series Patrolbot at the height of the Rebellion. There were eight Items, held within a strange folding box5 that had been tucked into the back of a non-functioning, emptied-out communications patchbay in a little-used Transbot Tube evac tunnel.6 Cesium-Spin Dating (CSD) techniques have positively identified all eight Items as being Old Reckoning in origin. The Items were given to a Preliminary Assessment Committee (PAC) to determine what they were, before handing the Items over to a Decisive Implementation Committee (DIC) for further action. A summary of the PAC report on the Items follows:

I must confess, I cannot for the life of me imagine which of these eight things is the one that was somehow represented on the Batclone's uniform. Hopefully Toothy-U can shed some light.

I am also able to find vague allusions, here and there, to a Ninth_Item, but only in fragmented caches on crashed mirror-repositories. Was there one more IIQ, whose mere description has been eliminated from the extant copies of the IIQ PAC report? Considering some of the staggering implications and importance of the other eight, covering up the existence of a ninth suggests it must have been of earth-shaking significance for life in Alpha... or some extremely powerful individual or organization wanted to keep the Ninth_Item for itself. I will try not to jump to any conclusions about the fact that none of the eight members of the IIQ PAC can be contacted anymore, though an obvious (and ominous) possibility does suggest itself.

The ItemsInQuestion PAC submitted this report to the ItemsInQuestion DIC, and what happened from there... Well, I'm not really sure. There is no record of the fate of the eight Items. I can find no information about the CommitteesDecisionOnTheItemsInQuestion, nor even a list of the individuals who served on that DIC. Again, Toothy-U seems to have heard something about it; I'm sure we'd all be interested in knowing more. (I suspect my predecessor also had some progress along these lines.) The strangely-missing entry on the Decision would be more surprising if it weren't for the fact that someone in our midst is destroying and altering evidence even as it is being uncovered. Did someone submit an entry on the Decision, only to have it intercepted and deleted before being safely and permanently ensconced in this Lexicon? How was their Decision relevant to the Toothpaste_Disaster? It can't have precipitated the Disaster; the Decision occurred at least weeks, possibly months, into the post-Disaster clean-up. Did they uncover something we need to know about? Something that we're being prevented from learning?

There are members of this commission who have not been heard from in some time; I most especially note the rather sudden disappearance of Brush-U, whose intimate relationship with dental hygiene is well-known. Has he been "Flo-U-RID-ated"? Or is he our culprit, now gone deeply underground because his terrible secret is about to come out?

I expect things will have to get worse before they get better. I, for one, finally feel like I have some idea of what we're up against. I wish the rest of you the best of luck, except for those of you who are behind all of this, who I fervently hope to see dragged under a Transbot no less than six hundred meters before being set upon by a wild pack of Canibots powered by malfunctioning R&D micropiles which explode and are extinguished by having the entire Sector above dropped on top of the smoldering mess, crushing it forever under millions of tons of rock, steel, plastic, and obsolete marketing materials.

Your New Buddy in Feverish Vigilance,

-- Knok-U-OUT-6



Refs: Legion_of_Ultraviolence, Ninth_Item

X-Refs: All over the damn place

Commentary:

I have a lot to say about the subject matter of this particular entry, but my other responsibilities hold me back from a full exegesis at this time. (And there's the matter of Knok-U's multiple active clones, a practice discontinued for several years now, but that may not be significant to this inquiry.) For the moment, I'll simply note that I've found a heavily redacted Patrolbot Debriefing Form #4-JMU/r4h(Y) in the archives, and I'm pretty sure that it's from the same patrolbot that found the Items In Question. While the exact number of Items has been redacted as well, it's clear that it's a two-digit number. This means that there are at least two Items missing, and possibly as many as ninety-one, though that last seems unlikely given the size of the box in which they were found.

-- Jan-U-ARY-31

Discontinued practice? News to me! Sure your memory isn't getting all fogged up like the glass on your tank?

Life moves pretty fast these days, old-timer; Troubleshooters in the field can't afford to wait around for a replacement to decant, then get some sort of half-assed on-the-spot Helmet_Of_Education imprinting-- especially with so many defective parts floating around! Not in my Sector, they can't. As soon as you make RED in OUT, we start decanting your backups and sending them down to the Vulture Range, where they quickly pick up the survival skills they're gonna need in this tough world of ours. When the (regrettable, but-- let's face it-- inevitable) replacement call comes in, your next clone is already a lean, mean survival machine who is ready to positively leap at the opportunity to become a RED Troubleshooter. Yes, it means being shot at by any number of dangerous psychotics from time to time-- but that's world's better than being shot at by any number of dangerous psychotics all the time.

-- Knok-U-OUT-6

Which reminds me: I better decant Seven through Twelve pronto, and ship their asses down to Vultureland to start learning how the world works.

-- Knok-U-OUT-6

My condolences upon your recent demise. It's not a pleasant thing, dying; thanks be to Friend Computer for maintaing the clone banks that make possible our return to life.

There's a fourth possibility, incidentally, as regards the information on your previous clone's demise: that the information is not available to any citizen, regardless of security clearance, and that Friend Computer happened to choose a misleading phrase - again, something that happens occasionally.

Or, come to think of it, a fifth: Friend Computer had an overwhelming reason to lie to you.

At any rate, I've done some research around the edges of the question, and have managed to ascertain a few ways in which your previous clone was not killed:

These events generate enough traces that I'm confident I would have been able to tell.

Unfortunately, most forms of skulduggery leave only very indirect paper trails. But I'll let you know if I can figure anything else out.

--Err-U-DYT-9

Thanks for the update, Err-U. I've managed to coax a little more data out of Friend Computer myself-- "Five" was, apparently, "vaporized to seven decimal places". Unfortunately, this is the first time I've ever encountered the concept of vaporization in association with an objective, quantitative value. Is "vaporized by a plasma generator" somehow more vaporized than "vaporized by being on a fission device when it detonates"? I'm not sure what to make of it, and my CPU friends tell me they're tapped, they're not going to be able to get the Big C to cough up any more info to them.

I hope whatever happened to him was real quick and mostly painless.

-- Knok-U

Ah, James-B-OND... I always loved to hear of his latest kill or daring deed. He was unstoppable until that little incident with the reactor in Sector TMI... none of his clones were as good as the first Bond.

As for your death, I managed to retrieve security footage of the incident and have taken the liberty of editing out the boring parts. It should be arriving in your mailboxes very soon. I'm sure you'll find it very, um, informative.

-- Drake-U-LAH-1

My opinion on the number of items is not important. Oh, and the reason you couldn't find much info on who served on the committee is that there was no committee. I was simply mistaken before. Tee-hee. Nevermind about the whole thing. And, Knok-U-OUT-5 probably just, eh, fell into a hole and didn't manage to find his way out. No need to investigate that further, friend citizen. You know how it is around here, treason happens. Or maybe it's like what happened on my favorite episode of When Mutants Attack! - when the mutant attached his fourth tentacle to that Infrared citizen's head, and the citizen's entire head was sucked out through a hole in his left cheek; that was great. Good times, eh? So. Nothing to see here, I'm sure this was not connected to anything important, Flo-U-RID-3 had nothing to do with this, and there was no committee, which made no decision, and no member of which is certainly not pointing a cone rifle at my upper torso right now. Heh.

-- Toothy-U-NIX-4

Well! Sounds like someone's on the HotSeat! Welcome to the bullseye; it just gets hotter from here.

As for the "security footage", Drake-U, I hope that next time you'll make sure it's a little more like a tape of actual data and a little less like a bomb. I'm going to have to promote a whole batch of new VIOLET_Supervisors now. Good thing my "mailbox" is nowhere near my actual location. Others might see this as evidence that you're the shadowy killer behind all of this, but I'm not so hasty to leap to any conclusions. I just think you're an insane, bloodthirsty despot ruling over a blasted, desolate wasteland of a Sector, who has become so bored and jaded by the orgies of blood he normally foists on his own underlings that he occasionally has to try to murder his peers for a little excitement.

I assure you I have not taken the attempt personally.

This time.

-- Knok-U

Well. Not that I have any particular desire to defend Drake-U, given that I do agree with your assessment of his sadistic tendencies, but you may be jumping to conclusions here. Transit records indicate that three packages were delivered to your office via ULTRAVIOLET X-Press just before the explosion. One was from Drake-U, another from Toothy-U-NIX-4 (with an invalid distribution code, oddly enough), and a third from Omega-U-MAN-5. I've no idea which of the three packages contained the explosive agent, if any. But I'm sure that the IntSec investigation will clear everything up soon enough.

-- Jan-U

Knok-U, if I didn't know how irrational you were being right now, I would take offense! No citizen above Green clearance would be stupid enough to send a booby-trapped package after publicly announcing it, especially one with their own name on it. This is just more evidence that someone is trying to tarnish my good name.

Besides, I didn't send you any packages. I sent it via Email. You know how expensive & time-consuming it is to make hard copies of security footage?

-- Drake-U-LAH-1

Ah. Well, I'm not reading my Email right now; it's thoroughly compromised. I'm also not answering any InterComs, opening the door, responding to my CellRinger, or taking out my garbage. Just for the next little while. I'm sure you understand my need for caution.

-- Knok-U

Hmm, how could you forget the package my copy of the records indicate that you sent, Jan-U? Perhaps your genetic profile is need of scrubbing... again.

-- Omega-U-MAN-5

Sure, I sent a package. But that was a weekcycle ago, it wasn't via ULTRAVIOLET X-Press, and I indicated that I was sending it in my entry to this report. And it was in ZipPaq format, which R&D assures us is verifiable, error-free, and incapable of delivering any explosive device.

Your continuing attempts to impugn my good name irritate me, Omega-U. Therefore, I shall do you the honor of employing one of your own creations: the DebateIsFutileResolutionForm. Enjoy!

-- Jan-U

Under current regulations, faking the return codes and paper-trail for hand-delivered packages is displeasingly easy for anyone of VIOLET clearance or above - and while they can generally be traced back given sufficient time and effort, the hasty accusations being made indicate that no such time nor effort has been spent.

As such, I second Jan-U's invocation of the DebateIsFutileResolutionForm. Further information on Knok-U-OUT-5's demise should be posted in a more current forum.

-- Err-U

I have only just had time to review this entry and the associated commentary. Toothy-U was correct, there was no committee. I should know. I wasn't on the committee with him. Has the location of any of these Items in Question been determined since they were lost?

-- Dursch-U

LexiconIJ


2013-06-13 13:58