The Blurt of Richard Davies

Chapter Eighteen

October the 6th.

On my way back from the Zone I'm at a loss to make sense of the day I've just had. I thought it was just going to be a round table kickabout of campaign strategies, but once I was back inside the Column's secure area I realised things had become far more serious.

It began with the downloading of a new, and apparently cutting edge encryption wurdle to our scrolls. The MaggieSist has been updated to use it as well so our terminals should be just as secure.

From what I understand of it, the application constantly generates a constant stream of uniquely encoded blurts into which parts of our messages are inserted. Only the recipient should be able to separate the content from the background chatter. Any surveillance system would have to constantly decode the entire stream before it could even begin to read the blurts; and then it must defeat a very slippery encryption algorithm in advance of any attempt to piece together the fragments of an individual communication. This should supposedly overload any eavesdropping system with more work than it can handle. We were told that while it is theoretically possible to read a blurt, the chances of it happening are infinitesimal. Nevertheless, we shouldn't rely completely on it. Some things are only to be spoken of in person in this room.

I was amused by the thought of those deep bunkers full of hypercomputers in Utah, Düsseldorf, or Cheltenham overheating under the strain; but we were informed in no uncertain terms this technology is on the very edge of legality, so it's really not a good idea to boast about it or be caught using it. It being covert it is designed not to show on system logs, but this kind of thing is always a leap-frog race. At the moment the lead has shifted to us, but at some point, and no-one knows when; we may find ourselves on the back foot once more.

Then we were instructed as to the security protocols we must use when communicating with each other. If that wasn't startling enough, the briefing on personal security which followed soon made us realise we were no longer involved in a polite contest: This is now a deadly serious affair.

We didn't get involved in any real hand-to-hand fighting but our instructor - a man who radiated the understated self-assurance and quiet authority of someone who had spent his career doing this, and untold more for real - gave us some eye-opening theory lessons about situational awareness, counter surveillance, and threat identification; along with a few easily remembered basic self-defence strategies. If it ever comes to the point where we are under direct physical attack from the organised Connies the game is lost, but it's still useful to know how to deal with a lower level goon trying to throw their weight about.

Then, after lunch, we were armed.

They are known as non-lethal weapons but as our anonymous teacher explained, in the wrong hands they could cause a great deal of harm, and not just to the intended victim. Micro sprays of tear gas and electric stun pens have been around for decades, though they are illegal to own or carry. But what really caught our attention was being shown how to use a pen torch sized Blinder.

These are a new development, though the principle behind them is an old one. A capacitor delivers an intense pulse of energy to one of the new generation of light emitter chips, with the result anyone looking at the wrong end of it suffers an extremely painful and temporary blindness. Extremely painful as defined as having a red-hot poker thrust through your eye socket and into your brain, and temporary as not being able to see much for several hours, and "severe loss of visual acuity" for a number of days.

There are anecdotal reports of longer term and even permanent eye damage in cases of people exposed to Blinder flashes. Needless to say we are instructed only to use them in situations where we believe ourselves to be in imminent danger, as they are to the old laser pens what a flintlock pistol is to a modern assault rifle. A point further reinforced when we watched a vid of them being used on a live subject. This film was used in the immediate post-ceasefire stage of the Second Korean War to frighten the few North Korean officers who were captured alive into cooperation.