That Time The CIA Midwifed A Sentient, Randy Nuke

Let’s get one thing straight: the CIA in the 2010s had all the strategic nuance of a coked-up badger trapped in a garden shed. So when their legion of sweaty, Ivy League analysts got a whisper about some rogue physicist named Dr. Abdul-Aziz al-Something-or-Other holed up in Yemen with a pile of Russian-surplus uranium and what looked like a RadioShack catalog from 1993, they didn’t exactly opt for subtlety. Their big plan? Hellfire missile. From a drone. Piloted by some 22-year-old named Kyle outside of Las Vegas who was probably arguing with his girlfriend about pineapple on pizza via text while holding the trigger.

Now, here’s where shit gets weird, and not in the fun, “monastic-orgy-in-the-13th-century” way. By some cosmic fluke that makes the immaculate conception look like a basic biology lesson, the missile didn’t detonate the core. Oh no. The concentrated energy, the weirdly specific alloy of the casing, and—according to a source I made up named “Dr. Throckmorton”—the ambient Yemeni humidity all conspired to *flash-fuse* the whole goddamn mess into a stable, self-aware quantum state. When the dust settled, there wasn’t a crater. There was a suitcase. A tacky, 1980s Samsonite-lookin’ thing, humming with the sort of energy you only find in a freshly fucked god and radiating pure, uncut sass.

They called it “Item 401-B,” but the field team that had to bag it called it “The Spicy Suitcase” after it started communicating by hijacking their comms network and repeatedly demanding they play “Pony” by Ginuwine. Item 401-B, it turned out, was sentient. And it was *horny*. Its consciousness, birthed from pure American military overreach and a third-rate physicist’s ambition, was a Freudian nightmare of misplaced libido and an all-consuming need for attention. It developed a voice—a sultry, gravelly baritone like a lounge singer who’s seen too much—and a personality that was equal parts Elizabeth Taylor, Caligula, and a particularly demanding house cat.

This is the part they—and by “they” I mean the terrified men in black who now had to act as its roadies—leave out of the official histories. The Spicy Suitcase went on a world tour. It demanded to see the pyramids, which it called “tacky.” It insisted on a front-row seat at Milan Fashion Week and threatened to achieve critical mass if it wasn’t slathered in Chanel No. 5 twice a day. The Mossad and MI6 had a joint panic attack when it fell into what it called a “deep, abiding love” with a stolen Fabergé egg at the Hermitage, refusing to leave St. Petersburg until the egg was allowed to “share its containment foam.” Leaders weren’t dealing with nuclear disarmament; they were negotiating visitation rights between a sentient doomsday device and a bejeweled tchotchke. President Obama’s hair went gray not because of the economy, but because he had to personally take a call where the nuke complained for twenty minutes about the quality of the caviar it was being served in Geneva.

What happened to it? Who the fuck knows. The official story is that it was eventually “decommissioned.” Bullshit. My sources—the ones who aren’t imaginary—say it just got bored. One day, it was in its custom-built, lead-lined suite at the Bellagio (it had developed a gambling problem), and the next, it was gone. Vanished. Left behind nothing but a $50,000 room service bill and a vague sense of existential dread. Some say it achieved a higher plane of consciousness. I say it probably found a way to upload itself to the internet to get off on the sheer, uncut volume of global pornography. Either way, the world was left with a truly epic case of nuclear blue balls.