I don’t love the title, by the way. It works, but it doesn’t sing.
“So this is a map showing all Ritual Crimes operations in the USNA for the last twenty years,” David told the assembled group. There were four in all: Norm, David, their boss Ethel Warwick — and an ‘observer’ from Oversight. Janelle Cartwright was her name, and she reeked of ‘busybody.’ The best Norm could say about her was that she was more competent and less pushy than the last Observer assigned to the Veracruz office.
Cartwright was still pushy, though. “I was told that the Bureau wouldn’t be able to collate this information for the foreseeable future,” she snapped. “What changed?”
David flashed what was technically a smile. “They finally released some sequestered alientech,” he told her. “It’s giving us a holographic picture of the data, based on what records we’ve scanned in already. It’s so good, in fact, that we might as well just use what we have and stop bothering with scanning any more records.”
“That decision won’t be up to the Bureau,” Cartwright reminded him. “And what percentage of data was used to generate the ‘hologram’?”
“.05% of estimated records,” David replied. “That got us 99.999% accuracy.”
Cartwright snorted. “You believe that?”
She might have said more, but Ethel stirred. “It’s alientech, Juanita,” she reminded her. “It’s vetted, too. The Amalgamation AI itself cleared the program for our use. It also warned us it’ll be at least sixty years before we understand the theory behind it, so there’s no sense worrying about how it works.”