Page 34 - Deception at work all chapters EBook

Prologue: The Advantages of Finding
the Truth

Monkey waves

In the summer of 1999, Herman Snooks, a sandal-wearing, ginger-haired research scientist
from Newbury, Berkshire – in a moment of extraordinary genius – invented an electronic de-
vice which was about the size of a ballpoint pen and emitted what he called ‘monkey waves’.
These invisible and silent surges concatenated, reversed and redirected the brain’s alpha and
beta waves, thereby compelling human targets to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing
but the truth, regardless of the consequences.

Revealing the truth

It was an extraordinary invention that gave new meaning to the phrase ‘to get on the same
wavelength as someone else’. Victims who were enveloped by the waves had an unfailing
reaction: they blinked hard four times, scratched their noses twice and then exploded with
the truth. There was no stopping them and honesty would pour out like a raging torrent.
Once removed from the beams, the victims reverted to deceptive normality but, as if in their
worst nightmare, they remembered every word they had said while under the influence. The
way they tried to recover and explain away their eruptions of unexpurgated truth was piti-
able and the panic-ridden aftermath was the most disturbing of all. Grown men turned into
blubbering imbeciles.

The truth really hurts, especially when you had no intention of telling it

Herman tested the device on his neighbours, friends and family with astonishing results.
His wife pleaded guilty to voting for New Labour and is now in a mental home, his teenage
kids admitted to being multimillionaire drug pushers with massive real estate investments in
Highgate and his mother-in-law confessed that she was undergoing sex change therapy and
planned to become a professional wrestler. This last disclosure did not surprise Herman, but
the others were shocking.

Clever investments

Other successes followed quickly, including sudden, unexplained bursts of honesty by car
salesmen, pension advisers, social security claimants and, to everyone’s total amazement,
even estate agents and accountants. People could not stop themselves from telling the truth
and Herman soon became very wealthy by making astute investments in all manner of honest