The day started out like any other Monday morning. I fell out of bed trying to snooze my alarm, slept on the floor until I had finally persuaded myself to wake up, and started to get ready for work. I was extremely tired—I had stayed late at the lab last night trying to finish an experiment—but simultaneously excited. After all, my research on reverse engineering the brain to develop more effective artificial intelligence algorithms was incredibly fascinating, and the Secretary of Energy had personally called me last week to commend me for the strides that I, and by extension Oak Ridge National Laboratory, had made.

I left my apartment and started to make my daily detour to Starbucks. I parked and walked in, but accidentally bumped into someone. I, of course, exclaimed, “I’m so sorry!”, but the person into whom I had bumped replied, “Fine it be.” I assumed that he was trying to say “It’s fine” but simply had horrible grammar—he used the wrong form of the verb “be” and really terrible sentence structure—and so I thought very little of it. I stood in line for a few minutes, checking my email and generally pretending to be busy, and then ordered my usual coffee and muffin. The cashier who took my order didn’t speak, instead gesturing to ask the requisite questions. Again, because it wasn’t too difficult to decipher what she was trying to convey, I didn’t think much of it beyond thinking that it was a bit strange.

I continued on my way to work, and, after passing an unusually empty checkpoint, scanned my badge and entered the guarded facility. There were very few cars in the parking lot—the Superbowl was last night, and, though I hadn’t watched it, I suspected that many of my colleagues had—but I parked and proceeded inside. I again scanned my badge and entered the main building. I greeted the receptionist, who looked especially stressed today, but she cut me off with, “There’s an emergency. The Secretary of Energy wants to see you in Conference Room A.”

I tried to ask for more details, but she was adamant that I should go see the Secretary of Energy. I ran to the Conference Room, both out of worry and eagerness, and saw that the Secretary of Energy, like the receptionist, was especially stressed. He started talking immediately, and told me that one of my papers—on language processing in the brain, and playing short sequences of video to improve different aspects—had been turned into a malicious Superbowl commercial. Essentially, I had discovered that playing each sequence in reverse could actually destroy a certain aspect of language processing in extremely unpredictable ways, and noted this at the end of my paper. Someone had replicated and combined several of these reversed sequences, and added certain clips of normal video at nonessential times to form an ostensibly benign but actually extremely dangerous Superbowl commercial. By taking advantage of the Superbowl’s vast viewership, whoever had done this had almost completely destroyed the language processing of hundreds of millions of people, including the President, the two people with whom I had interacted at Starbucks, and a majority of my colleagues, who were apparently too embarrassed to come to work.

I was shocked. I had considered the implications of my research when I published it, but decided in the end that it was my obligation to do so. I remembered publishing it under the top government security clearance, meaning that whoever had done this was a senior government official. In any case, the publication was clearly a mistake.

However, I quickly devised an obvious solution, stemming from the fundamentally twofold nature of the video sequences. More specifically, we could easily reverse these negative effects simply by broadcasting a reversed version of the malicious commercial. After assuring the Secretary of Energy that this would work—I assured him that it was virtually impossible for anybody else to have modified the sequences to make this impossible, as I was the sole expert on the topic—I walked back to my lab and got to work. Our internal network had a copy of the commercial, which I downloaded and started to reverse.

I was especially intrigued, and started to study the commercial further. Something about the sequences used in the commercial seemed different than those I had used, but I couldn’t place it. I ultimately decided that it was just a poor memory and continued reversing the clip, but, as I was walking back to the Conference Room with my laptop, accidentally clicked the play button. I paused to watch it—after all, this was the reversed version of the clip, so watching it shouldn’t have had any negative effects. Just as the clip finished, however, I realized what was different about the sequences—they were somehow palindromic, meaning that that they were exactly the same reversed as they were normally. I was starting to admire whoever had done this—they must have been some sort of genius—and ran to the Conference Room to tell the Secretary of Energy what I had found. However, what came out of my mouth was different that what I had intended to say: “Must be I had mistaken!”