Babcia and GRAIL

For most of the world, the reach of the British Intelligence Ministry’s G.R.A.I.L network seems almost inescapable. But for some, the all-seeing eye of the Watchman State is also a window into the cold inner workings of the great protectorate.

On a cold but relatively calm morning in the conflict-torn Mediterranean, off of the western coasts of Italy, a Neo-Byzantine fishing trawler ventures out, seemingly unaware that it has drifted out of its safe territory and into enemy waters. A nearby British submarine, having been activated in the aftermath of the Vancouver Raids to intercept enemy vessels, surfaces briefly to intervene. After a brief, confused conversation in a mixture of Greek, Italian, and broken English, the crisis is averted, and the trawler returns to Byzantine shores. The submarine, breaking off briefly to make certain it has not been detected, deviates from its planned course by a few miles, before returning back to its assigned post.

This miniscule, tiny interaction, one of hundreds of thousands being detected and processed by the scouring eye of the elaborate network of machines and transmitters that looms beneath the catacombs of England known as the G.R.A.I.L, is carefully analyzed, every detail of the submarine’s altered course dissected and calculated. Soon, the suspicious eye of the Watchman State’s mighty machine spits out an answer; ALL CLEAR. Its decision made in a matter of microseconds, only a scarce few personnel operating the machine are even aware that it detected an anomaly in the first place, the ALL CLEAR blending in with a dozen other ALL CLEAR responses that are whisked away for the Ministry of Intelligence to skim over as they continue to guide the mighty empire’s vast war machine into the fray of the Great War.

Meanwhile, unbeknownst to anyone other than a few British sailors who now lie in graves deep in the Mediterranean, the intelligence networks of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth celebrated an incredible breakthrough, as a strange contraption deep in the heart of a fortress beneath the earth began to whirr into life with a steady, but arrhythmic, pinging sound. Though for the moment, the pinging provided them little other than an annoying noise, unbeknownst to the cheering team of Polish engineers, they had just begun taking the first steps in what was about to become Poland’s greatest contribution to the Great War, and perhaps, by extension, human history itself.

For as long as the British Empire has been utilizing its strange and terrible automata armies to control its holdings and suppress revolutions, and its network of cameras and transmitters and computers have probed every corner of the world for every little bit of information their grasping tentacles can reach, the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth has seen a challenge worthy of its vaunted intelligence agencies. For years during the leadup to the Great War, those who worked in intelligence considered the Polish and British to be the only peers. While Poland lacked the G.R.A.I.L, what they had was just as valuable; a direct line to Konigsberg, the city of secrets; and a network of the most veteran spies that could be had.

Babcia, as the organization was called, was formed within the PLC’s intelligence agencies with the primary goal of officially tipping the scale in Poland’s favor once and for all, by taking the necessary steps to interface with the G.R.A.I.L and thus have full access to the greatest source of intelligence data on the planet. Though they had initially run into several problems with the fabrication of a G.R.A.I.L Receiver, the operation in the Mediterranean had allowed them to secure not only the details needed to construct one, but the necessary interfacing codes to receive signals without alerting the G.R.A.I.L to the existence of an unauthorized “listener”.

While the Babcia’s device, affectionately nicknamed the Echo, currently only received encoded transmissions (the “pings”), it would only be a matter of making the right connections in Konigsberg to begin the process of decoding them. G.R.A.I.L was watching, but Babcia was listening.