The Enigma Ignite

Arletta Krumhunter tapped the microphone a couple of times to get the participants settled down for the meeting. The audio technician wasn’t paying attention to the settings and when she uttered her greeting the high pitch squeal and audio feedback sent the room into auditory shutdown. Everyone placed their hands over their ears. The net result was it took more time to get everyone settled down before she tried to speak again. One of the attendees suggested that she should try it again only not to use the volume setting reserved for the Voice of God.

After a setting that was hopelessly too low, the volume was properly adjusted.

Arletta opened, “Good morning, all. My apologies for the false start, but hopefully we can begin the briefing. As you know our Battlefield Communications, or BC, project received some funding setbacks. The government’s appetite for funding leading edge projects is being questioned because of the amount of funding needed to keep the existing military running.

“The attitude of the funding committee is that we don’t move off our current technology fast enough so too much is going to just keep the ships floating and planes in the sky. They don’t seem to understand that without large investments in future technology we will fall behind our competitors.

“Be that as it may, we are taking steps to partner more with friendly sovereign partners to share costs as well as results in order to reduce our spending. At the same time we have been trying to keep an eye on the adversarial sovereigns to see if we are indeed falling behind. We have sources that now tell us we may be falling behind