Operation Mannequin (short story)

Operation Mannequin, also prefixed as Operations Board: Operation Mannequin on the story's page, was the seventh short story and eleventh release published exclusively on the U.N.I.T. website on 18 April 2005 by the BBC webteam. Operation Mannequin was the first release in the Operations Board series of in-universe chat logs between UNIT personnel, although it would later be ordered after the second story, Operation London.

This story tied into the television story Rose and was set concurrently with the short story UNIT's Position on The London Incident.

Plot
Just after midnight, in the first hour of 27 March 2005, Staff Sergeant A. Frederick reports on an operations board that the information-based clean-up of Operation Mannequin has been set up, finishing by asking how footage of the incident will be dealt with on the internet. About forty minutes later, Lt David Judd states that footage of the incident had been identified and measures have been put into place to corrupt any copy of the footage that is on the internet.

An hour later, Capt Panos Karpidas regretfully tells the other officers that debriefing of those affected, despite how careful UNIT had been, was not successful due to the staggering amount of widespread casualties. Karpidas hopes to contain the situation through manipulation of public information.

Four hours later, Sgt Catherine Petts writes about the cleaning of melted plastic off the streets, and puts forth a triage of casualties. About fifteen minutes later, Frederick shares the false theory she's trying to seed the press with, though she doubts anybody would actually accept the theory.

Characters

 * Staff Sergeant A. Frederick
 * Lt David Judd
 * Capt Panos Karpidas
 * Sgt Catherine Petts

Referenced only

 * The Consciousness

Worldbuilding

 * Frederick mentions that "press speculation [was] mainly contained", "simple truth acknowledgement and standard position [was] maintained", and she confirms that shop dummies were "animated", there were casualties, and that the London Eye "did glow with a halo".
 * Frederick believes that it would be best to direct the news in favour on covering casualties and homeland security, among other things.
 * She also belives it would be best to de-emphasise the "exact nature of threat and potency of clear-up".
 * The footage online that was of the attack had a "bandwidth squeeze" placed on any attempted downloads of them and that standard interference patterns had been placed on satellite retransmission of the footage.
 * Judd mentions that it is "advantageous" that the activation trigger doubled as a "cross-frequency jamming wave", disrupting global communication, which Judd speculated was due to the Consciousness being weak to certain signals.
 * Despite the jamming wave, mobile telephony continued to work, though it did eventually "s[i]nk" under the sheer weight of the amount of calls placed.
 * Many cameras also stopped working, resulting in a smaller amount of footage captured than expected.
 * Karpidas hopes to use a combination of misinformation and exaggeration.
 * Karpidas mentions that field officers have already called Radio Phone-Ins and bombarded websites with misinformation-filled accounts, with common themes, including claims that the mannequins talked and that there were waxworks involved, among other things.
 * Karpidas tells the other officers that he was launching operatives simultaneously to claim that nothing had happened. He also told them to avoid linking the incident with genuine terrorists.
 * Despite the severity of the situation, Petts and her personnel enjoyed an early breakfast and strong-yet-sweet tea.
 * Petts found found the removal of melted plastic off pavements to be more difficult than expected.
 * Petts's triage documents: two hundred and forty-seven individuals afflicted with cases of shock, grief, and disorientation; five hundred and eighty-three individuals with common wounds, such as cuts by glass and burns; twenty-six individuals with unconventional, but non-fatal wounds, such as internal burns; and at least four hundred and thirty individuals who died from unconventional causes, such as being imploded from mannequin fire.
 * Petts joked that at least the implosion of the deceased made the clean-up easier.
 * Frederick's theory, which she believes has the most chance of being accepted by a broadsheet science correspondent, claims that the incident was caused by certain display dummies being manufactured with a batch of faulty plastic which contained bubbles inside it, which, combined with a gas explosion, caused the air inside to expand, giving the contorting dummies the illusion of movement.

Continuity

 * The story is set directly after TV: Rose.
 * Communication over phones was largly impossible during the incident. (PROSE: Rose)
 * Radio transmissions can affect Autons. (TV: The Big Bang)