“He left a note.”

“What does it say?”

“It says, ‘They’re gonna tell you that they found me, and that I am dead, but don’t believe them, even if they show you a body.’”

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If you’ve spent any amount of time talking to me, (and I mean any amount – I open conversations with strangers by bringing this up) you know that I’m pretty obsessed with the hyper-realistic face mask technology utilized by the CIA.

I’m also pretty sure this is where George R.R. Martin got his inspiration for ASoIaF’s “Faceless Men.” The thing is, though, this is real and not actually magic. People would be freaked out if the government confirmed the Federal Reserve Bank sent lieutenants out to enforce its will, using face stealing magical murderers, but nobody cares if intel agencies wield a similar but somewhat more mundane version of this ability.

Well… if you acknowledge that this tech exists, then its potential uses are enormous. You could use the masks for the purposes for which the CIA openly admits to using them – namely to allow spies to hide when cornered in a tight spot. But a little creative thinking opens up other possible uses, too. If you’re thinking altruistically, you could give burn victims their old face back – in a manner of speaking, anyway. You could use them to create a wider range of body double options for famous people. A nefarious group could use a person’s face, on someone else, to outright replace that person if he/she is becoming inconvenient. (I assume this is cheaper and more effective than cloning people.) You could put one of these masks on a dead body and convince even a person’s loved ones that he/she died, when in reality they just buried a mask of their loved one’s face on some other person’s body. (Maybe in that scenario their loved one is permanently off the grid of society now, for one reason or another.)

We know this technology exists. Yet almost nobody builds the knowledge into how they view what might be happening around them, in the world. Maybe it’s just easier to take what we see at face value, even if we know that it might be false. You probably can’t convince your friends and loved ones to switch from handshakes and hugs to pulling on each other’s noses, as a greeting, to make sure nobody is someone else in disguise.