Mutant Plaque Residuals
It is commonly known among High Programmers that mutants differ from us on a very fundamental level - that their aberrance extends downwards into every fibre and cell of their being. It is not merely that they are filthy mutants, but every part of them is also mutated and twisted.
Particularly their plaque.
On average, a mutant's plaque is 5914.4% as warped as the mutant itself. This does, admittedly, seem a bit strange, but they're mutants - "normal" doesn't really enter into it. It's not normal to be able to crush a WarBot with your bare hands. It's not normal to move things around using only the power of your mind. (I suppose it could be argued that Jan-U does this, but then, she's not exactly normal, either.)
This localized dental concentration of abnormality has been a boon to Alpha Complex. The simple "bite into DENTAL RECORD box" seen on Series 6 Forms has resulted in the detection of 63% as many mutants as the other top two methods combined. The Mutant Plaque Residuals left behind from the bite allow for easy idenfication of mutant status, and frequently even the type of mutation.
A major side effect of this detection technique is that the more savvy mutants pay somewhat obsessive attention to their dental hygiene. (This is directly counter to the more general trend of "treason begets treason", from which one would expect mutants to have particularly poor hygiene.) If a mutant doesn't have any plaque, they won't leave any Mutant Plaque Residuals. At least one of the motivations behind the founding of the Zero_Teeth_Movement was an attempt to obfuscate mutant detection, and recent evidence points to the Pearly_Whites_Tea_Club as having been somewhat of a haven and informal club for mutants.
One other (figurative) outgrowth of Mutant Plaque Residuals was the development of Dentagrip. Apparently, someone at R&D jumped from the notion of "filthy mutant mouth teeming with particles of matter-eating plaque" to "self-replicating particle-sized 'bots scrubbing matter from citizens' teeth". Yegch.
References: Dentagrip, Pearly_Whites_Tea_Club, Zero_Teeth_Movement
-- Err-U-DYT-9
Commentary:
Ironic, that our own values-- which hold hygiene in such high regard-- can be used by the enemy to disguise itself.
As shocking as this sounds, perhaps we shouldn't be encouraging such clean teeth. Maybe we should be allowing Citizens to let their teeth get dirty-- at least a little bit, just enough that the mutants become obvious again. As a side effect, if dental hygiene were de-prioritized... and I don't even mean a huge amount, but maybe it no longer needs to be considered more important than stemming arterial blood loss... maybe if dental hygiene were de-prioritized even 10%, the consequent reduction in demand for rapid-response Toothpasty_Supplement_#5 and such would reduce the risk of another Toothpaste_Disaster in the future. Maybe it's time to relax the QwalitieStandard for Baseline_Dental_Health in favor of identifying Mutant Plaque Residuals.
-- Knok-U-OUT-6
Wouldn't it be easier just to collect a few teeth from every citizen and grow plaque samples on them to test? In order to cut costs, we could limit teeth collection to the few citizens with perfectly suspicious dental hygeine. We could say we're collecting prime examples of dental hygeine to teach The_Children. Yes, that'd work!
I'm sure there's plenty of IntSec troopers willing to help in the collection.
Records indicate that this notion was tried for a while, and deemed a failure - perhaps prematurely, perhaps not. There were evidently two major problems:
The teeth needed to be kept properly segregated, lest they contaminate each other. While there is precedent for organizing stray teeth (see Lenin's_Tooth) the attempt to create a more robust filing system led to some witless clones developing a filing system - that is, filing citizens' teeth down with a metal rasp. This not only annoyed citizens of GREEN clearance and higher, but removed the very Plaque Residuals being tested for.
- A number of mutants managed to get innocent citizens executed by framing them, using their teeth. Personally, I find the reports of "Matter Eater teeth chewing through locked cabinets" and "Teleporter teeth re-filing themselves" rather dubious...but the High Programmer in charge of the program chose to believe them, and deemed that the experiment's successes did not outweigh its failures.
-- Err-U