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espionage-artifacts
The Department of Collections displays a surreal array of espionage tools and trophies, blending the grotesque with the magnificent to symbolize the strange world of spying.
1 chapter across 1 book
Memoirs Found in a Bathtub (1976)Stanislaw Lem
Chapter 5
The narrator, newly assigned to a secret mission by General Kashenblade, is escorted through a vast, opulent Department of Collections filled with bizarre espionage artifacts, illustrating the surreal and labyrinthine nature of the intelligence world. After the tour, he is taken to Department N for a briefing that is repeatedly delayed, leaving him alone with an open safe full of classified documents, heightening his anxiety and confusion about his mission and the opaque bureaucracy surrounding it.