Mind Diversion

Charlie Fieldstone killed the wife of a doctor who treated him for cancer then later explained to the police that someone placed a computer chip in his brain. This chip, he told the police, caused him to commit the murder by giving him a mix of great pain and tricky suggestions for relieving that pain. The police had x-rays taken of Charlie's head , but the x-rays showed no sign of any computer chip in his head, whereupon the police concluded that Charlie's explanation was wrong. The police felt, as did many other people, that the results on the x-rays was sufficient to establish that there was no chip in Charlies head. After all, many thousands of tests have been done, over many years, on many thousands of different kinds of computer chips. However, not one kind of chip was found that was capable of giving pain and suggestions and of being invisible to x-rays. Thus. Charlie, being by this time the only person implicated in the murder of the doctor's wife, was faced with a cruel predicament. He often thought long and hard about what he could do to show that a chip, or something equally malignant, goaded him to murder somebody.