Call me Cluck, Cluckminster Fuller. It’s not my real name but it will do for these little messages of ours.
I may look like a chicken but trust me—I’m no bird, man. Sometimes we agents have to go in disguise when we are deep undercover.
You’ll be hearing a lot from me over the coming weeks. I’ve been given a mission in two parts and asked to share it with you.
The first part seems pretty simple. I must attempt to explain how spies use science to get their job done. You see, Science World's new exhibition for the summer is called Top Secret: License to Spy. The exhibition is set up like a big game—you find clues and gather information to solve the mystery. It’s lots of fun for kiddies and armchair agents. To gather the clues, you’ll use laser listening devices, tap phone lines, crack computer passwords, and even intercept messages from a satellite uplink—all the fun techno toys of the modern espionage agent. We’ll be looking at those in more detail in future messages.
The second part of the mission is harder for me to wrap my head around: I must try to explain how scientists use spy techniques to get THEIR job done! That’s a tougher nut to crack and I don’t usually eat nuts—not with this beak. When a real agent, like me, is out in the field, I spend a lot of long boring hours just watching, gathering information. As I gather clues, I try to put together a story that fits all the information I have to see if I can crack the case. How that relates to some egghead in a white lab coat, I just don’t know. If you have any theories, maybe drop me a line at [email protected].
To all of those agents in training: there are going to be times when I need to send a message to you that not everyone gets to read. Your first mission is to build yourself a code wheel. As I dig deeper into this mission, I feel like there may be a bigger mystery to uncover. Something… sinister. Another agent might be scared by this prospect but like I told you from the beginning...
I’m no chicken.
Your mission: Top Secret: License To Spy, should you choose to accept it, begins May 7 at TELUS World of Science. As always, if any of your party is captured, the agency will disavow any knowledge of you. This message will self destruct September 5, 2016.
Read Cluckminster Fuller's next blog post here.