The Dud Sergent Jones yelled at the top of his voice.

Through his commands and orders, he expressed a surprising amount of urgency from his normally calm demeanor. "Harrison! God dammit, what in the hell is going on here?" Keith Harrison, a 20-year old security expert, fumbled at the blinking buttons on his command booth, not unlike Homer Simpson at his nuclear plant before a meltdown. "Why, I don't know Sir," he stammered. "I've never received a message quite like this one." "You mean you can't crack it?" For the first time, Harrison saw a small bead of sweat trickling off Jones's forehead, which was shaped like a tomato. Sergent had never been this worried. Harrison's code-breaking instincts told him that this was a new kind of code. Every time there was a new, unbreakable message like this one, Harrison always pictured a super egg, almost impossible to crack, yet so tasty when the shell is finally split open and the gooey morsels inside spill out. But this was no Easter, and Harrison needed to get to the yolk out of this egg as quickly as possible, as it could cost him his job. He went through the standard procedure, quickly scanning in his head a list of possible senders of this cryptic message. The frequency count of the letters in the code surely did not match English dialect. Let's see, he thought. The only possible countries this could have come from are Swaziland, Vatican City, or Qatar. Harrison remembered learning that just 50 years ago, at the turn of the millennium, Qatar was a small, nothing of a country. Now, after taking over Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and most of the Sahara desert, it had expanded its size well past the U.S.'s. We did not have good relations with Qatar at this time, and Harrison had recalled Abdul Nasir, the prime minister, making a subtle threat to America just two days earlier. "I hate America, like a lot," he had said in Qatanese, the relatively new national language of Qatar. There may not be much time. Quick as lightning, Harrison applied his prodigy talents, constructing a mental picture of Qatar's cryptographic history. They had developed 2-block singular frequency streams, then 3-block analytical pragmatic ecosystems, then 5-block LSFR feedback shifts, and finally, their most recent innovation, 8-block pancreatic sonic nodules. Ah hah! Harrison almost laughed at the simplicity. Their block size was merely increasing relative to the Fibonacci sequence starting on the 4th term. Why hadn't I thought of that earlier? When he was younger, Harrison had failed during an attempt at a front-flip, landing headfirst on a screwdriver that was sticking up. Ever since that fateful day, there was a deep indent in his head in the shape of a bolt. There was obviously much ridicule, as the unnatural dent was accentuated by his natural baldness, but for the most part, perhaps due to the permanent brain damage caused, Harrison regarded it as a stroke of luck. He ignored the people who taunted him and called him Phillips or screw-head, and instead reaped the benefits of being able to use his head to unscrew what most people had to use their hands for. Now, his freakish nature would finally come in handy (or should I say, heady). With the swiftness of a car running over a bunny, Harrison jammed his screwy head into the main computer console. There was simply no time to grab the screwdriver in the drawer ten feet away. After thirteen full body rotations, the dizzy Harrison sighed in relief, watching the dinky screw finally fall to the ground. Only 59 screws to go.

Sergent watched Harrison go, his tomato head turning even more red in the intense pressure of the situation. He thought to himself, Either he's going to screw everything up, or he's going to unscrew everything up, but God almighty that Harrison's a fine fellow. When the last screw finally came undone 40 seconds later (he was exceedingly fast using his head), Harrison pulled the slab of metal connecting the beast computer together. Since reprogramming the machine would take too long, he would have to use his uncanny coordination to reposition the transistors in the main CPU. He grabbed two wires, sparked them together like a defibrillator, and then, with the adroitness of a brain surgeon, began reconstructing the electronics. The computer was not too happy at its violator, and it began steaming and fuming out the air vents. But Harrison was persistent, and he eventually aligned the last capacitor on top of a resistor to prevent the cathode ray tube from a state of bio-luminescence. Satisfied, he turned away from the computer and walked back into the main room with sang-froid, even though the computer may have detonated at any given moment. Sergent gazed in awe at a figure emerging from the dark cloud of smoke, and out came Harrison, looking as if he had just caught the Golden Snitch. The computer monitor flashed back on, and the screen lit up with the now decrypted message, the yolk. The message was in Qatanese, so Harrison opened up his web browser. Come on, Google Translator. Go faster! Harrison read aloud the poorly-translated text to Sergent, who was now very shaken and uneasy. "Hello from Qatar. This is good friend Abdul. Just wondering how it was going in America. You guys are the bomb." Shit. Did they mean the colloquialism "you're the bomb," or did they mean they were going to bomb us? Just then, a loud beeping filled the room, getting progressively louder and more demanding. The bomb was going to go off! Beep-beep-beep-beep-beep. Harrison awoke with a start, sweating and breathing heavily. Beep-beep-beep-beep. The bomb was just a dud. It was his alarm clock.