We Need to Talk About Oh-Five-Five

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"Good morning, Auditor."
He supposes that it is morning. But 0155 hours is still, at least by his personal reckoning, particularly late at night. Not that time is of any consequence, not in a site this far away from its system's sun. On the surface, every hour of the day may as well be midnight, while this deep within the facility there is plenty of artificial light to go around. Either way, he sits down. 
The man sat opposite has not yet looked up from his reports. He has always enforced that his subordinates commence any engagement five minutes early, regardless of whether he is able to address them at that time. All in all, a relatively minor managerial quirk, at least by the standards of the Office. 
The Auditor sips a cup of water, idly. The woman that sits beside his superior is a relatively new appointee to the position, or at least a fresh assignment here. He can tell by her impatience. She is not yet used to the five-minute rule. It shows.
Minutes pass. At 0200 hours the man sitting opposite him looks up, face an indecipherable blur. 
"Auditor. Yes." A statement, not a question.
In response, the nonexistent man, sat in the bowels of a nonexistent site, looks down from his superior's nonexistent face. He lays down his files, spreading them evenly across the table before him. 
They are regarding a woman who, apparently, exists too much.
-----
"Director. We need to talk about oh-five-five."
The man sitting at the other end of the table chuckles gently; with any details of his face obscured by Office holographic hash-scramblers, his laughter seems to emanate from the room itself.
"Uncharacteristically pointed of you, Auditor. Please, clarify." Even with the security measures hiding his superior's features, the voice carries itself with the tone of a raised eyebrow. 
"My team was made aware of significant discrepancies in the tracked survivors of Gamma Company by one of our record-combing AIs, Jackson. We ran it by two others for confirmation, after which it was passed on for review by a human analyst. Three of my team proceeded to check the relevant data more closely, and after-"
"Spit it out, then. What do you have?" The Administrator speaks for the first time, her voice possessing surprising bite.
"There are too many of her."
In the quiet that follows, the Auditor senses another raised eyebrow. Perhaps two, this time. After another sip, he continues. 
"Across all Office records, we have found no fewer than seven instances of the individual recruited into the Spartan-III programme as Harriet McVey." The Administrator looks surprised for a moment, perhaps expecting a veil of codewords and numerical designations instead of a single, candid name. But this deep into the Office, beneath a dozen layers of redaction, they would only be theatrical flair - something neither Director nor Auditor has time for.
"Where historic or biometric records are available they are identical, and where she has images on record we have heuristic pattern-matching overseen by Jackson that calls it at ninety-one point six four percent." 
"That low? Barely over ninety doesn't seem perfectly confident given the resources available."
"Administrator, the last file photographs-" Of the girl? The candidate, the Spartan? 
"-the last confirmed file photographs we have of oh-five-five are from shortly before augmentation, and the last verified off-site ones are of recruitment intake on arrival at Onyx." A pause from the Auditor. "To clarify, that was when she was approximately six, seven years old. Please understand that some extrapolation was required." 
The Director's head cocks to one side, somewhere between bemused and amused by the starkness of the response. Not quite a riposte, but almost. 
"Off-site?"
"Given the secrecy of the Spartan-III programme - and the particularly sensitive nature of Gamma Company's augments - the majority of programme-critical data was stored on-site. Following the Onyx crisis and the declaration of Bloody Arrow, camp AI Endless Summer prepared and launched an emergency core-snapshot dump launch. This has been our primary source material for attempting to reconstruct events."
"An emergency core snap-"
"An eCSD-L - a log buoy, so to speak." He steals a glance at the Administrator momentarily, then back to the Director. "A rather corrupted one, at that."
"Yes, I do recall that particular after-action report." The Director's faceless voice carries the faintest hint of mischief, if only briefly. "So the Navy's nuclear mines were woefully inconsiderate of our data integrity, say you?"
"Not solely that," the Auditor admits. "EM emission from the combat going on in orbit, the Slipspace portal to the shield world, and passive solar radiation are all factors to consider. While not my field of expertise, I have been told that after over two years of that kind of radiation exposure, we were lucky-"
"Two years?" The Administrator's voice opposite rises half an octave, tightrope walking between indignation and fury. "It took the Office two years to find its own data, even compiled in a buoy with a locator beacon-"
"Administrator." The Director speaks softly. "The war was only just over. We all had bigger fish to fry."
The Auditor waits for the Administrator to sit back in her seat, temporarily placated, before continuing. "To our understanding, the discrepancies can all be traced back to an unauthorised breakout attempt by the candidates in mid-2548. It took a significant amount of time to find and recover the candidates, and during the breakout a number of teams approached the border of Zone 67. We believe that oh-five-five, and potentially other members of her team, entered the Zone. 
"Oh-five-five is recorded as having been initially recovered at least two days after the rest of her team; they were then all transported back to Camp Curahee as one unit. Following this, search-and-capture teams are also recorded having recovered candidates matching her description from various exits of the Zone's subterranean portion, over the course of the next week or so. It's unclear what was done with them following recovery, but cross-referencing with further Office records has allowed us to identify and partially trace the aforementioned seven iterations."
"And the Zone created copies of her. Somehow."
"Previous Office expeditions into the Zone encountered geometric and spacetime anomalies, consistent with expected failure modes for Forerunner reality-manipulation architecture. That much was known already. The idea that one such anomaly led to her duplication is... not inconceivable."
"So. Seven that we know of." More that we don't, is the Director's unspoken question that follows.
"Yes." On both counts. "Two of them are on record as deceased, which is what led to oh-five-five being initially flagged when reporting on her assistance handling the New Alexandria Superintendent a few months ago. But given the fragmentary nature of our records, we can't be sure how many others there are."
"But we definitely know there are others?" The Administrator, on the other hand, clearly lacks her operational counterpart's economy of words. "We just have no clue where, or how. Or anything about them."
"There are a number of security reports from Onyx - five, I believe - regarding intruders on Camp Curahee and associated staging areas, recorded over the next two-to-four months following the so-called 'JAILBREAK' incident. Their descriptions, broadly speaking, match that of a wounded or malnourished candidate."
"Camp Curahee was a significant distance away, no? So these other McVeys supposedly found their way back after depleting all supplies and equipment?"
The Auditor struggles to not express aloud how the Administrator's observation is not as astute or implausible as she thinks it is. "This is correct." 
The Administrator turns to one side. Not a look or a glance; she spins her chair bodily towards the man sat beside her. "Director. This is not something I find particularly believable. If true - if a preadolescent child was magically cloned in some dusty ruin, with some of her copies being carted back to safety and others simply wandering their way back home, before vanishing from all record - it represents concerning gaps in our data integrity policies exacerbated by unfortunate circumstances. 
"But it is of the opinion of myself, and thus the body I am acting on behalf of, that this is simply an attempt to cover up more significant failings in monitoring and protocol of our data-trawling procedures. A charade, intended-"
The Auditor's voice hardens to stone. "A charade-?"
"Absolutely! To conveniently discover this now, during a Section Zero investi-"
"Is an analyst simply supposed to ignore-"
"-rather than fabricate-"
"Auditor." The Director's voice quiets the others. 
"Do we know the fate of the intruders you were discussing?"
A pause. 
"They were shot, and then disposed of. As per protocol." Silence. No raised eyebrows. "We have records of that, if Section Zero is concerned about the veracity of events." 
The Director keeps his gaze up as the Auditor slides the relevant images across the table. He knows better. He does not look down at them.
The Administrator does. She stands up, and leaves the room. She returns two minutes and forty-four seconds later.
The briefing goes rather more smoothly after that.
Category:The Weekly