Agent Orange - Inconsequential

Episode 6 - DELVE

FROM THE JOURNALS OF AGENT ORANGE:

The world is filled with information. Our body’s sensors constantly receive data about heat, light, sound, pressure and movement. That data is “present data” or “local data”. It’s what’s happening in the here and now. Everyone near us is “sensing” similar information, this information is shared information. But what about people a mile away, or ten miles away, or on the other side of the planet? Each of those places has their own present/local data.

In previous times, local data stayed local or travelled at an extremely slow pace (as fast as a man on horseback, a carrier pigeon, or a semaphore) and the farther the information travelled, the more loss it experienced with each “re-transmission”. Claude Shannon's noisy-channel coding theorem, which states that “reliable communication is possible over noisy channels provided that the rate of communication is below a certain threshold, called the channel capacity” came into play long before his birth in 1916.

For instance, if Paul Revere had gone around yelling “British coming!” instead of “The British are coming!” we can be pretty sure that everyone would have still interpreted the message correctly. Even if he had just said “British!” many of the colonials probably would have gotten the idea, whereas if he had just said, “Are coming!” history might have turned out quite different. On another note, the entire story of Paul Revere, as taught in the classroom, has much “noise” in it. The fact that he never said “The British are coming” in the first place is little known, though he did warn the colonials. So at this point the noise has not been significant enough to block the purpose of the communication.

CHAPTER 6

After leaving the DEMON office, Orange felt more helpless than informed. Kathleen had helped him understand what kind of forces he might be dealing with but knowing that at least one other department had their hands in the situation made him reluctant to pursue it. As an agent of DORK his jurisdiction crossed all domains but if an event was obviously in the domain of another department he could be refused access. 

As far as information gathering went he had one more option. He would call in the experts, the big guns, the maestros of data investigation. These guys made Google their bitch. They parsed data like prodigies, wrangled wisdom like wizards, and laughed at limitless lists of links. They didn’t care much for alliteration but they were geeks so they took praise where they could get it.

Orange sat down at a park bench and got out his lamp. His nostalgic attachment to the device allowed him to overlook its clumsiness. He opened up a web browser. He typed the letters “D”, “E”, “L”, “V”, “E”, into the search window, each letter having a space after and before it. He clicked on the maps button and a window popped up with two text boxes but no instructions only an “ENTER” button. He typed in the word “orange” in the first box and then the letters “DOAD” in the next. He clicked on the “ENTER” button.

The screen flickered and a map appeared. On it there was a flashing circle of red. That would be his destination. Then there was also a green dot which was his current position on this spinning globe of rock that most people called Earth. He was only three miles away.

He memorized the address, 122 W 26th street, and put his lamp back in his backpack. He hailed a taxi and within five minutes he was at his destination.

 The area was much more populated than the area the DEMON headquarters had been located in. The address brought him to what looked like a professional office for a company advertised as Delve Associates. Their logo was the silhouette of a stick figure with a shovel digging into a small hollow Earth. Within the center of the earth was a question mark. The “company” took up only a quarter of the frontage of a large building many stories tall. To either side of it were legal offices and directly across the street there was a Holiday Inn.