Ficlets

The Chinese Room

The military could have spent billions on missile guidance systems, or non-lethal microwave emitters, or high-resolution spy satellites. Instead, they spent it on me.

I’m the one they found in a hole in Vietnam all those years ago. Who didn’t speak a word of any language, but had a natural knack for pattern recognition and cryptography. Who could decipher any code without understanding the message it contained, just by recognizing constructs and rearranging them in logical sequences that told these people what they wanted to hear. I was a counterintelligence dream come true.

What they don’t know is that it’s all a lie, and I really work for the Enemy. They’ll find out soon enough.

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