1          Soul Bound

1.2        Taking Control

1.2.2      An Awakening Epiphany

1.2.2.26   Gaming tower defence

Terah: {Miss Sabanagic, we have arrived at an acceptable compromise.}

Heather: {We’re concentrating upon four main scenarios.}

Heather: {In the event of an imminent full-scale attack upon your kafana, that we haven’t a chance of stopping, a loud air raid siren will activate.}

Wellington: {In response to which DDF will try to get everyone swiftly out of the kafana and a safe distance away from it, making no threatening or suspicious moves. If the authorities or any opposing force gives them orders, they’ll cooperate. Primary objective: minimise DDF casualties. Secondary objective: minimise friendly casualties. Secrecy and misdirection are irrelevant.}

Heather: {In the event of an encroachment upon our village defence zone by a bot, drone or vehicle of unknown capabilities and allegiance, I will be sending drones to use passive (and, if necessary, active) scanning to intercept, whose primary objective will be see what it is up to and react accordingly, and whose secondary objective is to not let on that this is what we’re doing. I’ll also use the rings to alert selected members of the DDF that there’s an encroachment in progress.}

Wellington: {In response to which those selected members have the option of helping maintain the plausible deniability of our drones’ movements by activating pre-arranged covers, such asking for a drone to be sent to a particular field to look for and fetch back a particular sheep that’s recently been poorly, or starting a game of drone-tag.}

Terah: {I will be talking with Huntsman (that’s Master Sergeant Bahrudin), about setting up covers later today, if you sign off on the plan.}

Wellington: {We’ll also need to establish ongoing patterns which will make the covers not stand out as unusual. By the way, “Wicked Queen” or just “Wicked” is the code for the opposition force and their leader. “Mirror” is code for any surveillance asset that Wicked have access to, leading to “Floating Mirror” for satellite, “Buzzing Mirror” for surveillance drone and “Crawling Mirror” for bots and bugs.}

Heather: {In the event that Wicked send human spies to local villages to plant bugs, look for unusual activities, news of exceptional Soul Bound players or learn what any local singers are up to, I’ll alert the DDF via the ring.}

Nadine: {What’s the code for a spy? A “Poison Apple” ?}

Heather grinned: {It is now. We didn’t have one.}

Wellington: {The first problem is identifying which apples are poisoned. I’ll be setting up an expert system to pattern match the behaviour of visitors to the village against the normal behaviour of tourists and the others you’ve had in the past. We’ll also keep them under surveillance, use passive scanning on them and detect if they use active scanning.}

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Terah: {So the game will be to have someone innocent ask them what they’re here for, and use voice analysis and other stuff on them, before they get a chance to meet and ask inconvenient questions of Snow White or one of the DDF who knows Nadine plays Soul Bound.}

Heather: {I’ll be setting up passive analysis stuff in and around the kafana, and the DDF ring will let the wearer know when they are safe from unfriendly surveillance, to aid them in sneaking around. The objective will be to look like a normal village, not one that’s trying to be evasive, while planting misinformation upon the poison apple which will cause them to tick this off their list as a possible match. That’s going to take practice. Ideally, the situation will never arise. I had ideas about putting in a juke box or noisy space invaders machine, that might help fuzz Wicked’s attempt at voice analysis, but Terah vetoed it.}

Nadine, putting a lot of sincerity into her voice: {Thank you Terah, thank you.}

Terah looked pleased.

Nadine: {So what’s the fourth scenario?}

Heather: {That’s “all clear”. Business as usual. The DDF keep their eyes open and their mouths closed. They try to keep the kafana a fun low-stress home for you that requires as little effort from you as possible. Team building, training, stopping other villages finding out. And in return they go to the top of the repair queue, get to feel useful, and we can probably manage to find Burrow members who’ll aid their characters off in Novograd. There’s also beta testing stuff from the Burrow like Bosnian Bots.}

Wellington: {In order that such activities are not without explanation, we’ll be setting up one of the local players as an overt active member of the Burrow, and ideally introduce changes first in other countries or at least in neighbouring villages, so this village appears to be copying, rather than a prime epicentre of innovation.}

Nadine: {That’s… that’s really quite amazing. I’m used to you both, and I even spawned Terah myself, yet I’m still astonished at the care and thought you’ve put into this. Thank you, all of you. You’ve taken a weight off my mind.}

Wellington: {Much of the credit goes to Huntsman. What we did just now was little more than adjust things to take into account adding capabilities to the DDF rings.}

Nadine: {I’m sorry Tlaloc didn’t have this sort of support network.}

Wellington: {He was a student living in a city. It was impractical to set up a defensive perimeter. His friends, fellow students, had arranged for a drone to be nearby that could carry him away, but it was trivial for the Immortals to put him under surveillance and then track the drone.}

Something about the story made her mind itch, like there was an idea lurking somewhere if she could get it to form. If she was allowed time to get it to form. She shuddered at the idea of failing again. To lose one precious thought was happenstance. To lose two of them, in a single hour, would be a habit. Should she drift along, paying only half her attention to the process in her head as before, but hoping it would work this time? Was she willing to risk feeling stupid for not even trying to learn from her previous experience. Was she willing to prove Minion correct, when he mocked her ability to use logic instead of instinct? No way!

She set her jaw.

This time she was going to do this 'thinking' thing properly. No half measures, no excuses, no timidity.