=6=
When Markman arrived at the office, his division chief was waiting for him in his cube.
"Hi Boss!"
She scowled. "Good morning. I need your help. I got a call at oh-dark-hundred that we have a VIP coming today and I have to brief him on that ... what did you call it, U-TARP?"
"OOPART".
"Right, the OOPART document that NARA sent over. Apparently, a SENTCLAVE already looked at it and returned a 100 per cent confirmation. So, we can start here. Why does a group of asocial types seeing colors mean anything to us?"
Markman couldn't resist a half-smile. The first time he had heard about "Sensitives Conclave", he was skeptical as well.
"Technically, the SENTs are not asocial but autistic, and not just any autists, but a very small percentage of their population who happen to have a unique ability. After OOPARTs were detected, we realized we had a Hell of a problem -- how could we confirm they were truly anomalistic and not just the product of someone's faulty memory? By chance, one of our operators had an OOPART on his person when he encountered an autist he knew. The autist wanted to know why the OOPART document was glowing with an odd color. Except it wasn't, only the autist, who happened to be a SENT, "saw" the color. Well, that guy was -very- well examined and the conclusion was that he had an unusual set of physical and mental characteristics that only occur in something like one-one thousandth of the autist population. It tooka couple of years, but a collection of SENTS was identified and ... eh ... persuaded to perform services for us. The 'conclave' is just having a group of them indivdually examine a suspected OOPART and to tell us what they 'see' in terms of color. We look at the individual reports and determine if a majority of them are seeing the same color."
She sighed. "Okay, Markey. The meeting is at ten-thirty. I want you there."
=6=
When Markman arrived at the office, his division chief was waiting for him in his cube.
"Hi Boss!"
She scowled. "Good morning. I need your help. I got a call at oh-dark-hundred that we have a VIP coming today and I have to brief him on that ... what did you call it, U-TARP?"
"OOPART".
"Right, the OOPART document that NARA sent over. Apparently, a SENTCLAVE already looked at it and returned a 100 per cent confirmation. So, we can start here. Why does a group of asocial types seeing colors mean anything to us?"
Markman couldn't resist a half-smile. The first time he had heard about "Sensitives Conclave", he was skeptical as well.
"Technically, the SENTs are not asocial but autistic, and not just any autists, but a very small percentage of their population who happen to have a unique ability. After OOPARTs were detected, we realized we had a Hell of a problem -- how could we confirm they were truly anomalistic and not just the product of someone's faulty memory? By chance, one of our operators had an OOPART on his person when he encountered an autist he knew. The autist wanted to know why the OOPART document was glowing with an odd color. Except it wasn't, only the autist, who happened to be a SENT, "saw" the color. Well, that guy was -very- well examined and the conclusion was that he had an unusual set of physical and mental characteristics that only occur in something like one-one thousandth of the autist population. It tooka couple of years, but a collection of SENTS was identified and ... eh ... persuaded to perform services for us. The 'conclave' is just having a group of them indivdually examine a suspected OOPART and to tell us what they 'see' in terms of color. We look at the individual reports and determine if a majority of them are seeing the same color."
She sighed. "Okay, Markey. The meeting is at ten-thirty. I want you there."
=6=
Fire In The Hole