“All of these ideas are fine, gentlemen,” the Doctor had erupted from his round seat, “if what we are trying to do is hunt a buffalo. The crucial issue missing from your considerations so far is secrecy: how can we make sure that the creature is dead, and that no one knows there was ever a creature?”
”I think it unfair, Doctor,” I intoned, “to restrict ourselves to thinking of him as we would a ‘creature,’ as you are foremost among us of the school of thought that categorizes him as something else.”

The panel froze. We had been collected to make an engineering decision, perhaps the worst of my life. Ordinary engineers are concerned with form, function, affordability, and if they have no marketing staff or a poor one, marketability. Our engineering panel was concerned with the aspects of engineering that the schools leave out of the lessons, the aspects you hear about in spy novels or radio dramas, and if you are as unfortunate an engineer as myself, from experience.

I should qualify my malcontent formally as an opposition to that very outcome I was supposed to create. As panel manager, all decisions were ultimately mine about how to do it, and the decision that it be done was out of my hands, which is a horrible thing to do to a man.

But what is it?

It is subterfuge, one of the virtues of engineering, part of the post-production extra steps that no one tells you about. Before I describe what horrible task drove me to write this, I should expound these steps. Consider it a post-graduate lecture to budding engineers.

Subterfuge. Even when you design a product that is not secretive by nature, you must make pains to exclude people from knowledge of the inner workings of the product. Trade secrets are a common method for securing intellectual property where a copyright or patent might fail. This is one reason for developing many working prototypes. Even if a corporate spy gets all the pictures, how will they know which are good and which are a ruse? Make puzzles. The practice of science is to unify all minds: math is a language of absolutes. The practice of engineering is to unify a few minds, and leave everyone else out of it: esoteric symbolism even within a common mathematical language can easily resemble more closely gibberish than thought. Equally baffling is the technical papers that accompany the product. These are to be made as difficult to understand as possible, all while claiming to affect to the style presented in a trade organization.

Even the secret can fail, though. No matter how much good work you do, it will all come to nothing if your client doesn’t like it. This is unpredictable, so instead of trying to plan for failure, an engineer plans for success and accepts failure.

Rejection. This sounds like less of a virtue than it does a coping mechanism. Understand this: you will be rejected. Like the pretty girlie in high school, your client will turn you down someday. She had no good reason, and neither do clients; it just happens. This is the last part of the process where something beyond your control can go wrong. Think about it like something going right. Rejection gives you an opportunity to correct the design, or worsen it, or do more work, or become closer to pure engineering (designing a product for no client, or for the product as the client) or to advance to another of the hidden virtues.

Revenge. The sooner your anger at a specific client evaporates into a cloud of general revenge, you’ll feel an extra motivation to accomplish everything. If you’re worried about the psychological or philosophical troubles with vengeance, consult another book. For now, revenge is a virtue, and without it you will have no reason to improve design specifications beyond expectation. All great inventors had something to prove, someone to hate. Rivalry has defined engineering, and mostly kept to the good. Promoting yourself instead of lessening others. But what happens when you reach a practical limit on your own advancement?

Sabotage. This is a natural and highly cogent iteration of the design process. When success can come in terms of failure, sabotage is an option. Sabotage needs an explicit purpose, as does any part in your process or your product. Reckless sabotage, like reckless product testing, accomplishes nothing. You’ve worked hard to be exacting so far, so why throw that away when you need to break some kneecaps?

In a way, my project shifted the focus from the original design steps (idea generation, specification, development, etc.) to the ladder, “hidden” steps.

I had to cut in, “Excuse me, corporeal?”

“That’s right, our preliminary testing and observation of other subjects has led us to believe that the energy he uses to perform a “blink” as we call it comes from an insubstantial collection of energy. He has a ghost that follows him so closely, we have considered it another part of his body.”

“What about a high-energy accelerator? Wouldn’t that take care of his ghost, too?” Another of the panel chimed in.

“I have to veto that on practicality before the Doctor even begins to tell you about how well or poorly it will work. Every time we meet for something, you say ‘high energy accelerator’ but what you mean is ‘death ray’ and I am not in the business of death rays.”

“We are designing something to kill it, right?”

So you see the pickle I was in. Utterly forbidden from considering the ethics of pre-planning an assassination of an extra-terrestrial sentient, I had to adjudicate the methods and design of a situation in which we could deep six Mr. Brown without letting on that he was ever here. Yes. We were designing something to kill it.

The doctor was one of the top research men concerned with Mr. Brown. His calling Brown a ‘creature’ unsettled me. If he could approach a situation like that with a feeling of superiority, he was a dangerous man indeed. He had the information we needed, though. “If you please! Although his corporeal body has the same sensitivities as our own, we cannot expect to be able to gun him down for the very reason I stated earlier. Even a sustained pyroclastic event is predicted to have a limited effect. He would die, but not before some registered voter with a video hobby caught his transfigured corpse on the next scoop of the century. We have powerful methods of limiting the effectiveness of that kind of information, but what if it’s a film class? A movie set? A thousand bystanders? No. If he dies, the job is total. The use of an annihilation ray is the best idea I’ve heard so far from you gentlemen, but I’m afraid our current technology still limits us to accelerators the size of a small village.”
”I am not building a particle accelerator beneath the pentagon.”
”You could advertise it as part of the science program of George Washington U, no one would suspect-“

“Let’s at least listen to alternatives.”

“Of course. I have been working with another research and development group on a project that appeals to me. If we were to somehow sync with Mr. Brown’s temporal dilation, we could ensure he was vaporized, even with conventional weapons.”

“So…what are you saying?”

“I am saying you could retrofit a missile with a temporal rocket launcher…erm…the missile would arrive before you fired it, and would appear to be flying backwards.”

Believe it or not, the next part was all me.

“That’s…perfect! We were told to take into consideration what the real event would look like to the public, right? If the missile appears to travel backwards, we could direct the device toward the outer ring from the inner, and make it look like someone attacked the pentagon from the outside. Call it a terrorist attack. It will be in the renovation wing, so all the corpses in the freezer will add to the feel of tragedy. It will be right here in the Pentagon, so no one will bat an eye at our eagerness to lock things down. We can minimize casualties…”
Another panel member piped up, “But who is doing this? Will people believe that terrorists can launch a missile at the Pentagon? Do we want them to believe that?”

“No, you’re right.” A pause, not long. “What if we added extra spare parts to the chaff? We could make it look like a plane crash.”

The panel erupted in approval. And I didn’t even realize what I had come up with. I guess I was pleased I had been so eloquent in design, and also I trusted the fact that this was to be a security mechanism. I never expected what happened months later.

We continued the design. Part of the team was a group of sociologists and psychologists. Ordinarily, an engineer is concerned with the way a product fits into the clients life. Ergonomics, economics, aesthetics. Here, our aesthetic was how the product will not fit in, and how no one will make it try to fit in. We performed routine testing, which was, amazingly enough, filmed and shown to anyone who asked. The videos look like the rocket is flying normally and hitting the target as planned. If you look for it, you can make out the man with the rocket launcher who looks like he’s pointing directly at the path of the missile. Who would ever think to look for that, though?

Then Mr. Brown decided to demonstrate his sentience.

Our device had been in place long before Brown tried to make a break for it. Who knows how he managed it, either? Nothing is foolproof, which is why we make things redundant, and so like magic, like nothing about the event could be questioned, our device assassinated the sentient Mr. Brown. He was vaporized. The limited footage of the event makes it look like a foreign object, a plane, is on a collision course, and then hits, just like the test reel.

The part of the event that I did not engineer was the extra coordinated event. Apparently, someone had gone over my head and had decided that simply making our event look like a plane crash would not be enough to convince people. They had to be damn sure it was terrorists, and what better way than to actually use some? I could see the elegance in employing one’s alleged enemy to one’s benefit, but that’s the last objective thought I ever had about the design process.

Mine is a job from which there is no resigning, but after all, I am an engineer, and finding practical solutions to complicated problems is what I do. I had the deaths of thousands of innocents on my head, and one captive. Someone will know. Even if my employers find this note before the police, someone will know. And that is how I will resign, the last step a designer ever takes.
Suicide.