SEE SPOT SPY

Children’s books activate agents!

A recent study has shown that some popular children’s books contain a hidden code that, if activated, can turn ordinary parents into sleeper agents. 

“Let me start by saying that this is implausible but true,” says Sharon Ferkins, a former librarian who now heads up the Association Against Books Containing Covert Sequences (ABCs). “I wouldn’t have believed it, but it’s true.”

According to Ferkins, several popular children’s books, when read aloud, alter the brains of the parents reading them and transform them into agents who can be used for everything from surveillance to wet work. “Wet work means assassination,” says Ferkins. “I know it’s hard to fathom. But true!”

The agent-activation operates almost silently. The parent reads the book, tucks in the child, and then returns to whatever he or she was doing before reading—dinner, watching television, an elliptical machine. “But the brain is different,” says Ferkins. “The brain! Then sometime the next day, that parent carries out his or her orders. Maybe it’s installing a bug in a co-worker’s car. Maybe it’s a dead-drop, taping an envelope to the obverse of a stop sign. Or maybe it’s a rub-out. It’s difficult for me to even understand what I am saying. And yet every word is gospel.”

WHICH BOOKS?

Ferkins cannot reveal which books contain secret messages, due to security concerns, but she says that her organization has uncovered many. “Some are with animals. Some are with kids. Some are about ghosts. Some rhyme. Some don’t. That’s all I can say.”

The ABCs have traced at least seventy-four discrete acts of espionage to operatives created and activated by Message-Embedded Children’s Literature. And Ferkins doesn’t see it stopping any time soon. “Since we can’t shine a light on the exact titles responsible for this kind of thing, we can’t end or even slow this kind of thing,” she says.

Ferkins, formerly a child actress, starred on the early 90s sitcom “Soup Du Jour,” which followed a sprawling family that ran a diner in New Orleans. “The joke was that the soup was jambalaya every single day,” she says. “That wasn’t the only joke. Old Uncle Lucius was hilarious. Remember him?” The show went off the air in 1996.