Brevity is the width of soul.

Sunday, May 27, 2007

P

They don't keep him as a prisoner, but they don't let him leave the Special Unit's lab. Or perhaps he just doesn't want to go anywhere, and they couldn't stop him if he wanted to.

Of course, if the security measures are strong enough to rein him, then he has no value, and the measures have no point. But if he has, if he is who he might be, then no expense would be too much.

So, naturally, they have him caged, but only up to an arbitrary and highly variable point. It's military logic, which looks a lot like magic thinking.

Which is also the point.

His guards call him Emperor, and attribute to him varied and changing powers in matters varying from sexual diseases to the Super Bowl. The base doctors call him Subject P, and have diagnosed him with a complex, combined form of aphasia and synesthesia.

In any case, seven times the base commander asked him for some strategically relevant outcome, and seven times it has come to happen, without him ever leaving his home-which-is-also-a-cell.

They know it could all be a coincidence, but that never stops them from asking again.

.finis.

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