
Hint: extremely marketable.
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Reading Thoughts and Intentions.

While the Department of Dream Thievery up there may be ominous enough to feature as villains on
Reading Rainbow, theyâre not much of a threat as long as you donât go around vividly picturing what dissidence would physically look like. For abstract thoughts such as disloyalty, intended violence or just thinking your boss is kind of a dick, the Dream Thieves canât see jack. But thatâs okay, there are whole other departments dedicated to solely to tapping into your thoughts,
like the United States Army, for one!
Because hey, if there has to be a division of the government monitoring your thoughts, why not make it the armed one, with a penchant for breaking down individuality in order to instill a sense of complete obedience?
The army has recently renewed a $4 million contract with researchers at the Universities of California at Irvine, Carnegie Mellon and Maryland to do exactly that. Ostensibly, the aim of the project is developing a âthought communicationâ helmet that would relay troopâs commands and reports silently, but Iâm not exactly Fox Mulder over here when I imply that maybe the âmind-reading helmetâ will do a tad more than facilitate quiet chats when you put in the hands of the military industrial complex.

âI want to believeâ¦that this shit isnât true. Seriously, this is fucked.â
Right now, itâs just a helmet with 128 electrical sensors strategically placed around it. The sensors work as a kind of EEG, tuned to monitor the speech centers of the brain, so it would only pick up words, and even then only words you formed carefully, and held onto mentally. The researchers assure us that, for the time being, thereâs no actual danger of it reading your mind against your will. You have to be specifically trained to operate the equipment in the first place, and even then, the communications would have to be very forceful, very simple and framed very carefully to be picked up at all.
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