In a certain English town, on almost any day of the year, you can see a man sitting on a bench watching the ducks on the duck pond with a vacant half-smile on his face. Sometimes people sit next to him while their friends take photographs, and he doesn’t seem to mind. If you observe him carefully, you’ll notice that nurses check on him several times a day, bringing him food or taking him to lunch. In the evening someone collects him and takes him home, wherever that is.
He is, in fact, considered a national hero, and his name is known even in places far and wide across the globe. Some say Western civilisation would have fallen without him, although others say this is an excessively grandiose claim.
Who is he, and how did he end up there, watching the ducks with that blank expression?
Rob Richley had to fire up three different bits of software to access the site on the dark web. Once he was in, a smorgasbord of illegal drugs presented itself. He added 3g of Fat Toad to his basket and 20 pills of Purple Rain, then began to browse randomly to see what else he might try.
An advert caught his attention. It was entitled simply “Truth Serum”.
“Truth Serum?” muttered Rob. “What the hell is that?”
He clicked it.
The page said that each tablet contained 20mg of telepathine.
“Telepathine.” murmured Rob to himself. “I know what this is.”
When Western investigators had first encountered the South American shamanic brew known as ayahuasca and had determined dimethyltryptamine, or DMT, to be the active ingredient, they had named it telepathine, since ayahuasca often gave people the eerie sensation that they had become telepathic. Modern science, of course, has found no evidence of genuine telepathy, but it was for this reason that Rob assumed, wrongly, that the tablets contained DMT.
Aside from the tablet’s ingredients being listed as telepathine, there was no indication of their expected effect or use. Neverthless, Rob added them to his basket and checked out, paying for his purchases with an obscure cryptocurrency.
Then he sat back in his chair—a deluxe gaming chair that was, unfortunately, too big for him—with his hands behind his head and said to himself, “Sweet.”
His new stash arrived two weeks later.
Even holding the Purple Rain tablets and the bag of Fat Toad in his hands gave him a curious sense of comfort. Now, instead of spending his evenings and weekends stressed and anxious, he could tune out of the world of the mundane, the world of unreliable and fractious people, and tune into a new world that looked almost the same but felt entirely different.
However, it was to the tablets oddly labelled “Truth Serum” that he turned first. These tablets, of course, evoked a greater curiosity in him. Supposing the tablets to really contain DMT, he imagined they might provide a subtle hallucinogenic experience, lasting some hours.
He took one of the tablets, washed it down with some water, and took up his guitar, with a view to playing some of his favourite songs and riffs while the drug took effect.
After half an hour, with nothing apparently happening, he was still sanguine that some effect would manifest itself. After all, even paracetamol might take a good forty minutes to do anything.
After an hour, with still no effect, he became a little more uncertain, but still optimistic. He had once previously ingested psilocybin only to find that nothing had happened for an hour and ten minutes.
After an hour and a half, he began to wonder if he hadn’t been ripped off; parted from his money under false pretences. Then it came to his mind that DMT is deactivated by oxidase enzymes in the stomach, and he reasoned that it would therefore likely be necessary to take a monoamine oxidase inhibitor with the tablets. He rummaged around in his stash drawer to see if he still had any Syrian rue, but drew a blank.
Frustrated, he made a coffee and sat down in front of the TV news.
The news was as depressing as always. Stony-faced newsreaders recounted recent occurrences with an intonation that suggested some underlying depressive disorder, but passed for normal in Britain, and probably, for all he knew, other countries too.
Someone else had been arrested for criticising Erasmus Huber, the country’s leader, and several people had been imprisoned for spreading hateful memes.
Then one of Huber’s subordinates appeared on screen; the Home Secretary, Mike Delworth, talking about immigration.
It was a curiously contradictory facet of Huber’s regime that the leadership continually extolled the virtues of all kinds of immigration while simultaneously pledging to reduce it.
“We will continue to refuse to issue e-passports to any who do not have a legitimate reason to be in Britain.” said the MP, but the extraordinary thing was, he said it in an exaggeratedly sarcastic tone.
Rob sat up, surprised.
“We will cut immigration by over 10% during the following year.” said Delworth, in a tone of voice that suggested he thought the idea nothing other than a risible joke.
“We are absolutely committed to ensuring no-one enters Britain without proper checks.”
This latter sentence he added with an absurd arching of the eyebrows and flushing of his cheeks, rather as though he was taking part in a pantomime performance in which he was being forced to say things by a pantomime criminal.
Rob watched the rest of his speech with rapt attention, transfixed.
When it was the turn of the woman interviewing the MP to speak, he fully expected she would laugh, or comment on the MP’s extraordinary performance in some kind of a way that made sense of it.
Instead, she adopted the same ridiculous manner, or closely similar, replying, “I’m sure the people of Britain have every confidence in you, Minister.” in a tone of voice that quite definitely suggested the exact opposite, and exaggerated to a ridiculous degree.
The channel returned to the newsreader, who seemed similarly inclined towards absurdism.
“Must be a skit.” said Rob, and he changed channels.
On some other channel he found a version of one of his favourite films being played, except the acting was completely over-the-top, unbelievable and downright silly, to an extent that rendered it unwatchable.
He racked his brains to try to remember whether today wasn’t some kind of special comedy day, perhaps aimed at raising money for starving children or some such thing, but nothing came to mind.
After finding similar fare on several other channels and streaming services, he spent another hour watching inexplicably comedic news programmes, before finally finding a TV series that seemed approximately normal.
The following day at work, he asked several people whether they’d seen the TV the the previous evening, and several had, but none seemed to have found anything unusual about it.
Then it dawned on him that perhaps the Truth Serum tablets had, in fact, exerted a hallucinatory effect upon his mind, with the unusual result being that perfectly ordinary behaviour had taken on qualities of acting more typically found in a bad amateur play.
At this, he felt relieved, and he recalled the vaguely similar instance of a time when he had taken a certain hallucinogen while out with some male friends, and had become convinced they were all wearing makeup and were planning to take him to some outlandish drag bar.
A curious fact about Rob which, to some, would appear to contradict his willingness to swallow substances of dubious purity purchased from illegal websites, was that he was a very fussy eater. His fear was not chemical contamination, but human contamination. At work, where he spent his days adjusting database code, he never ate in the canteen, fearing that someone might have handled the food with unwashed hands, or might have even deliberately contaminated it.
Instead, when the weather was fine, he purchased sandwiches and coffee at considerable expense from a nearby cafe and ate them sitting on a park bench, watching ducks and geese on a duckpond. The cafe, he felt, after long and careful observation, successfully attained his hygiene standards.
On that particular day, the weather was overcast but warm, so he purchased lunch and went to eat it on the bench as usual.
He’d started on his second sandwich when a man sat down next to him. For reasons that he couldn’t explain, the man immediately made him feel uneasy.
The man’s appearance was certainly a little unusual, but not so much that his mere presence should have inspired unease. He continued eating his sandwich, pretending not to notice the man, even though all his attention was now unwillingly drawn to him.
“Did you enjoy the pills, Robert?” said the man suddenly.
Rob looked at the man, who was staring calmly at the geese on the pond.
“What?”
“I asked if you enjoyed the pills we sent you.”
Rob got up to leave.
“Let’s talk about telepathine, Robert.” said the man, as Rob began to walk off.
Rob froze and turned around. The man was still staring at the geese.
“Who are you, police?”
“No, not police.” said the man.
The man turned and looked at him for the first time, and patted the bench by his side.
“Come and sit down.” he said. “We’ve much to discuss.”
Rob eyed the man dubiously. He was enormously large and wore a greenish overcoat. He possessed massively loby ears and a huge nose. He resembled a kind of obese eagle.
“Like what?” said Rob.
“I’ve an offer to make you. A very lucrative offer.”
Rob hesitated.
“Come.” said the man. “There’s no harm in at least hearing me out.”
Rob reluctantly sat down.
“You’re the guy who sold me the pills.” said Rob.
The man laughed.
“Well, sort of. Let’s say, I was involved peripherally in the sale and manufacture.”
“Who are you?”
“I’m Dr. Albert Holden. You may call me Dr. Holden. And you are Robert Richley. At school they made you see a psychologist because you were disruptive. Your IQ was found to be 163. Yet you waste your time taking illegal drugs and you work at a job that can hardly even be using a fraction of your abilities. Why is that Robert?”
“How do you know so much about me?”
“I’ll answer my own question. You’re very bad with people, Robert. Since you cannot gain satisfaction from normal human interactions, you struggle to see a point to your life and you choose to escape instead. You work only to pay your bills. It’s pathetic.”
“I don’t have to listen to this.” said Rob.
“I’m here to offer you an alternative. The substance you ingested has certain very special properties. You seem to have tolerated it well, which tells me, together with your history and your high intelligence, that you would make an ideal candidate for our program—which, by the way, is extremely well-paid, and involves work of the utmost importance.”
“What kind of work would that be?”
“You will take the drug and perform certain tasks for us while under its influence. I can’t be absolutely specific until you sign a contract with us. What I can tell you is that the work is not physically arduous, the hours are not long, and working conditions are, in general pleasant. You will simply take the drug, view certain … occurrences, and tell us you impressions. That’s all. In return you will be compensated extremely generously.”
Rob sat and thought for a few moments.
“Sure, why not?” he said.
Rob signed a one-year contract the following day, tripling his wage. Under instruction from Dr. Holden he left his job immediately, skipping the notice period and forfeiting his last month’s pay.
The following week he found himself sitting in a room with four other people: three men and a woman, all of a similar age to himself, while a scientist by the name of Dr. Asquith commenced an introductory presentation on their proposed work.
The windows of the room, in an inconspicuous office block in central London, were completely white and allowed through some sunlight while completely rendering the interior of the office invisible to all outside observers.
“You are all here because you took a pill. A pill which you believed was a drug of dubious legality. In fact, those pills were supplied by us, and we are part of the governmental apparatus of this country.
“There’s something else you all have in common. You are all highly-intelligent underachievers. That’s part of why we selected you.
“The drug you took has certain very special properties. Namely, it allows anyone under its influence to instantly detect whether anyone they observe is lying, or telling the truth.”
All five inadvertently gasped.
They were sitting at the front desks of the small lecture hall.
Rob sat on the left-hand side of the room. On his left was only Alex, a studious-looking young man with thick spectacles, brown curly hair and a number of pimples. Alex had a rather high-pitched voice and seemed strongly inclined towards sarcasm.
On Rob’s right was Steve, who was thickset, had spiky blond hair, and seemed to regard himself as the voice of Reason. There there was Kelly, with black hair containing purple ribbons, and rather gothic-looking makeup. She seemed rather cynical and morose. Finally, Simon, with steel-rimmed spectacles and pale skin resembled a typical office administrator, and seemed like the sort of person who would conscientiously climb a career ladder that would bore other people to death, except that a certain nervousness about him made Rob think he was probably a stimulant addict.
“How is that possible?” said Steve ,raising his hand while speaking.
“We don’t know.” said Asquith. “At least, we don’t completely understand it, except that it stimulates certain areas of the brain involved in the perception of faces and mannerisms. We will test each of you individually, but our subjects so far have demonstrated an uncanny ability to divine lies from truth 100% of the time. Out of tens of thousands of trials, we have had only three failures.
“You will become human lie detectors, performing valuable work on behalf of your government.”
“What do you need us for?” said Kelly. “Just take it yourself.”
Asquith laughed.
“I wish I could. After a period of about a year, tolerance develops, and it seems to be very long-lasting. For this reason we anticipate requiring a constant stream of volunteers, of which you are the first. You will, naturally, be compensated very highly for your work during this year.”
“And after that?” said Steve.
“After that you are free to return to your previous life, or to do whatever you wish with your savings. Meanwhile you will live in accommodation supplied by us, and all your requirements will be fully met, including three meals per day of excellent quality.”
Rob was assigned a room in a building that resembled student accommodation, along with the other four. Indeed, they were expected to share a kitchen (which they only needed to actually use to make themselves tea, coffee or snacks) and two bathrooms, but he didn’t mind. A year of being a student again, except that his pay would be well into six figures and he would be able to save almost all of it, struck him as quite a good deal.
They gathered in the living room, which was upstairs and looked out onto a wide lawn surrounded by a fence, to get to know each other and discuss the situation.
“One thing’s clear.” said Steve. “We’ve been selected because we’re the best untapped talent they could find.”
“Or because we’re useful idiots.” said Kelly.
“What do you mean by that?” said Steve.
“Let’s not get paranoid.” said Simon. “This seems like a superb opportunity.”
“Seems like.” said Kelly.
“For the amount of cash they’re paying, I’d gladly shop my own grandmother.” said Alex.
Over the following week, the scientists tested each of their new employees one by one. Rob found himself facing a succession of plausible characters, including Dr. Asquith himself, all making various statements, the veracity of which he was expected to determine via careful observation of the subject.
Without the aid of telepathine, the task was extremely difficult, and he scored only a 56% success rate. After ingesting telepathine, he scored 100%. The task became ridiculously easy; anyone who lied seem to do so with absurdly exaggerated pantomime mannerisms.
His first actually important task involved a man who had posted an image online that simply said “Huber is an idiot” and depicted Erasmus Huber with crossed eyes.
They pushed him into the interview room with a distinct shove. Opposite him sat the police interrogator, and next to the interrogator sat Rob.
The interrogator began by staring the man in the eye. The man, who wore a shabby beige polyester suit, reddened and cast his gaze downwards uncomfortably.
“Look at me.” said the interrogator.
The man shifted his gaze upwards with enormous difficulty.
“Do you hate Erasmus Huber?” said the interrogator.
“No.” said the man.
“False.” said Rob, as he had been trained to do.
“Don’t lie to me.” said the interrogator.
“I’m not lying!” said the man indignantly.
“False.” said Rob.
“Have any other of your friends expressed approval of this image?” said the interrogator, with a distinct air of menace.
“No!” said the man.
“False.” said Rob.
“Your friend—” the interrogator checked his notes ostentatiously “—Gemma. Does she approve of this … meme?”
“Certainly not!” said the man. “Neither do I! I just posted it by mistake.”
“False. False. False.” said Rob.
The man began to cry.
By the time the session had finished, the man had implicated eight of his friends, including three people he had never physically met but had corresponded with online.
“What will happen to him?” said Rob, as the man was dragged away, shaking.
“Nothing bad.” said the interrogator. “In the old days he would have gone to prison, but these days we understand that he has a mental disorder. He doesn’t need punishment. He needs treatment. We have extremely good surgical techniques that can effectively treat brain disorders these days.”
A pulse of horrified adrenalin shot through Rob’s veins, but he said nothing.
Over the following month he watched over fifty people being dragged away after he caught them in multiple lies. Two people were dragged away for treatment even after Rob confirmed they were telling the truth. It was felt that these people were so far gone as to believe their own lies, and were therefore particularly in need of careful handling.
At the end of the first month, all of the employees except Alex were quietly expressing profound reservations over their work.
Alex didn’t seem bothered at all.
“It’s not for us to decide how the guilty should be treated, or what constitutes a crime.” he said. “Our job is only to ensure the truth is told. That’s a good thing. Truth is good.”
“So are you telling me you wouldn’t lie even so save your wife from murderers who wanted to kill her?” said Steve.
“I don’t have a wife.” said Alex.
“Yeah but what if you did?”
“I wouldn’t get myself into that situation.” said Alex.
“What if you were in that situation?” Steve persisted.
“Irrelevant, because we’re not working for murderers. We’re working for the government.”
By then they had realised that they were separately seeing the same suspected criminals repeatedly. An individual suspect would be checked by at least three of them before being sent for treatment.
“In case one of us starts lying.” said Kelly.
“Why would we do that?” said Simon.
“Because our work is fundamentally corrupt.” said Kelly.
“Nah.” said Steve. “They’re just being pragmatic. I’ve worked in science, yeah? In science you double-check everything.”
“It’s not corrupt.” said Simon. “Someone’s got to do it. It’s necessary for ensuring the stability of society.”
“If we weren’t doing it, someone else would.” said Steve.
“And then we wouldn’t get the money.” said Alex.
“Is that all you care about?” said Kelly.
“I’m not here for my health.” said Alex.
The following day, Rob went directly to Dr. Holden and told him he wanted to quit.
“You signed a year-long contract.” said Dr. Holden, smiling pleasantly.
“Contracts can be broken.” said Rob. “I sort of broke my last contract. I was supposed to give a month’s notice.”
“Rob.” said Dr. Holden. “I don’t think you understand. What you’re doing here isn’t just another job. You’re working for the government, in an area of vital national interest.”
“You’re saying I can’t leave?”
“That’s exactly what I’m saying. Now you get it.”
“And what would happen if I did actually leave?”
The smile dropped from Dr. Holden’s face.
“For your sake, I recommend not putting us to the test.”
Two months after starting his new job, something strange and disturbing occurred. Rob awoke in the middle of the night, jolted out of his sleep by a loud bang virtually next to his head.
He hurried to switch on the light, and upon illuminating the room he found a rock wrapped in a paper. The rock had evidently been thrown through the window that he liked to keep open at night for some fresh air.
He unwrapped it with trembling hands, still not recovered from the shock of his sudden awakening.
The paper was covered in text, written in a neat, precise hand. But not, he thought, the hand of someone overly preoccupied with form. No, this was the handwriting of a technician of some sort.
The message said: “The drug you are taking causes brain damage. After eight months you will start to forget words. After a year you will struggle with arithmetic. When you leave the program, the damage will progress further. You will die within three years. They are listening to you. Do not trust anyone. There is a mole in your ranks. This message is written on rice paper. Eat it.”
He sat staring at it, shocked.
Then, after absorbing its contents thoroughly, he tore it into pieces and ate it bit by bit, physically digesting it. Then he threw the rock back out through the window.
Over the following weeks he thought continually of the message but he couldn’t decide what to do about it. His colleagues asked him what was wrong, and he told them only that the stress of the work was weighing on him. They too, except for Alex, now wore perpetually anxious expressions.
Eventually an idea came to him. The scientists only gave them carefully controlled quantities of pills, exactly when the pills were needed, but Rob began to make a habit of, whenever he received a pill, scratching a little bit under his thumbnail. This he then scraped out into the foil of a chewing gum wrapper at the first possible opportunity.
After another two months he had collected enough to form an effective dose. He took it one evening, when they were all sitting together. Then he tried to cautiously sound them out. When Steve said he had a headache, he seized his chance.
“Maybe it’s the pills.” he said. “Isn’t anyone else worried that these pills might have side-effects?”
“It’s not the pills, mate.” said Steve. “It’s this bloody job.”
“I’m worried.” said Kelly. “I feel like my mind’s foggy since I started taking them.”
“Your mind was probably already foggy.” said Alex.
“Not as much.” said Kelly.
“Aren’t you worried, Simon?” said Rob.
“Why are you asking me?”
“You had a bad stomach last week.”
“That was nothing to do with the pills.”
Rob looked from one face to the other.
Simon seemed to him the most likely to be the mole. He was very quiet, clearly had enormous respected for authority, and seemed weak, as a person, both in mind and in body. He was exactly the kind of person who most enthusiastically embraced Huber’s so-called democratic dictatorship.
Kelly was too anti-establishment in her attitude. On the other hand, that could be an act to throw any suspicious party off the scent.
Alex was an obvious choice, but too obvious. A mole would never sound his mouth off like that. Alex was too cynical, too overtly willing to do the bidding of whoever paid him.
Steve, he thought, was too transparent, too bluff. He lacked the sophistication to be a mole.
He was turning it all over in his mind when the guilty party abruptly gave himself up.
“There’s absolutely nothing wrong with the pills.” said Alex, and from Rob’s medicated perspective, he seemed to radiate guilt.
“Fine, OK.” said Rob.
“Are you feeling unwell?” said Alex suspiciously.
“Yeah.” said Rob. “Stressed.”
“Can’t be the pills.” said Alex. “They’ve tested them thoroughly. Trust the science.”
There could be no doubt. Alex’s words had been innocuous, but his manner had clearly demonstrated that he himself did not believe them. Alex, unless suicidal, could not be taking the pills.
There was a further possibility that had occurred to him. The note itself might be a lie; a kind of test, perhaps. But in that case, why was Alex lying?
That night, Rob lay awake in bed, wondering what to do next. Alex had lied professionally and plausibly, but he was no match for the medication. Without a doubt, he was the mole.
The following evening after work, during which time he assisted in the condemnation of a mother of three children who had made an unwise statement on a popular social media site, he began to quietly confer with the others, explaining what he had found out, taking care to render their speech inaudible to anyone listening by playing loud music.
In the end, it was Simon who volunteered for the task. The man who had appeared the greatest of conformists and the least likely to rebel, reacted like a spurned lover when he understood that he had been sold up the river.
The next day Simon approached Dr. Holden, in his office.
“Alex has been trying to persuade me to incriminate you in a plot.” he told the doctor. “He says he’s a double agent. He claims to be working for you in some kind of secret way, but he actually wants to destroy you, and he’s working for the Americans.”
Holden reacted with incredulity.
“This can’t be.” he said. “What has he said to you? I want to know everything.”
Simon proceeded to relate a full catalogue of Alex’s supposed crimes.
When he had finished, Holden made a phone call.
“Send Kelly in here.” he said.
Soon Kelly appeared.
“You’re medicated now, aren’t you?” he asked her.
“Yes.” she replied.
“Good. I want you to determine veracity while I interrogate your colleague, Simon.”
And so it went. The team of medicated truth-diviners convinced their handlers that Alex was guilty of plotting against them. Blinded by faith in their own work, Dr. Holden and his team were never able to even suspect that they themselves had become the victims of a plot by their own subjects; subjects they had selected because they considered them worthless addicts and hedonists.
Soon they were able to implicate Dr. Holden himself in an alleged revolutionary plot, but Holden’s institute did not collapse immediately as they had half-expected. In fact, it was considered only to have further proven its value.
What happened next was certainly the result of careful planning by the five truth-diviners, but they acted with the recklessness of the condemned, and were taken by surprise by the astonishing effectiveness of their plan.
After only five months of further misdirection, they were able to implicate the second most powerful man in Britain, Home Secretary Mike Delworth, in an alleged plot to unseat Huber. A month later, Huber and his government fell amid a series of chaotic incriminations, and freedom was restored to the peoples of Great Britain.
The five subject were given the very best medical treatment available as soon as the chaos had settled, but three years later, only one of them remained alive.
These days Rob spends his time watching the geese on the duck pond, a vacant but satisfied expression on his face, his material needs amply provided by a grateful populace.
