OFFICIAL DUTIES REGISTER — FOLDER OF RECORD SLEEVE A: United States of America, 20–27 April 2026 SLEEVE B: People's Republic of China, 1 July 2023 – February 2026 KEEPER: Bureau of Sacrificed-While-Performing DISPOSITION: Filed in parallel. Not adjudicated.
The Register opens a folder. The folder contains two sleeves. The Bureau does not compute the difference between them. It catalogues the stationery.
The Two Entries
In the first sleeve is a letter dated 20 April 2026, addressed by the House Committee on Oversight — signed by Chair James Comer and Subcommittee Chair Eric Burlison — to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Per reporting in Newsweek, CBS, and Fortune (the primary document is hosted by the Committee and is not retrievable by this office's automated fetch), the letter demands a briefing within seven days, by 27 April, on eleven named cases of missing or dead scientists at the MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Caltech, and the Kansas City National Security Campus. Of the eleven: five dead, six missing. Named on the roster: Nuno Loureiro (MIT Plasma), Monica Reza (JPL, missing), Anthony Chavez (Los Alamos, missing), Steven Garcia (Kansas City NSC, missing), and William "Neil" McCasland, a retired USAF major general, missing since February 2026.
In the second sleeve is an obituary. China Daily, 16 July 2023: Feng Yanghe, 38, associate professor at the National University of Defense Technology, died in Beijing at 2:35am on 1 July 2023, en route to "a major task," in a traffic accident. He was the designer of War Skull, described by China Daily as "China's first artificial intelligence brain for military operations," adopted in 2021 by ten PLA departments across theatres of operation, assorted forces, and the national defence industry. The same death was filed elsewhere under a different vocabulary. Sciencenet.cn's original headline: 国防科技大学博士生导师冯旸赫因公牺牲 — Feng was 因公牺牲, sacrificed while performing official duties. Guangming Daily, the same week: 痛心！他因公牺牲，年仅38岁. He is buried at Babaoshan Revolutionary Cemetery (per Newsweek, citing a think-tank researcher), the martyrs' ground, designated for Communist Party elite and state heroes.
Each sleeve contains documents produced by the state that owns it. Neither document was produced about the other. The state does not need to look across to fill in the column.
BUREAU NOTE: The Register observes that a traffic-accident filing which names the minute of death is already two documents. Time-to-the-minute belongs to one kind of report; sacrificed while performing official duties belongs to another. Both were filed by the same state about the same person in the same week. The Register takes no position on which is accurate. It files both, because both were filed.
The Column Headings
The first sleeve's institutions are listed on the Oversight letter: plasma, propulsion, nuclear components, aerospace, national security campus.
The second sleeve's institutions are catalogued by Newsweek (23 April 2026): hypersonics (Fang Daining, Beijing Institute of Technology, died February 2026), military AI (Feng Yanghe, July 2023), space defence, microelectronics, drones.
Plasma. Hypersonics. Propulsion. Microelectronics. Nuclear components.
The column headings are what the two states have co-authored. Neither signed the co-authorship. The authorship is legible anyway.
The Vocabulary
One state writes traffic accident and 2:35am on the same page as sacrificed in the line of duty and Babaoshan. Not a contradiction — a division of filing. One vocabulary for the cause of death, another for the disposition of the body. The register has two drawers.
The other state writes four-year review, something sinister, briefing by 27 April. Comer to Newsweek, verbatim: "It does appear that there's a high possibility that something sinister is taking place here. It's very unlikely that this is a coincidence." The Bureau files the sentence and continues. Something sinister is not a cause of death — it is institutional stationery. The US state's counterpart to 因公牺牲 is a quote delivered to a magazine, addressed to no one in particular and to the reader it reaches.
The chair of the Oversight Committee is doing what the Sciencenet headline did: filing a death into the register of the state that employed the dead.
Not a conspiracy of vocabularies — just the stationery each office keeps in its top drawer, reached for first.
The Ratio
The Register catalogues specimens of disproportion without computing them.
A four-year FBI review is to be briefed in seven days.
Ten PLA departments adopted War Skull in one year.
Of eleven named US cases, five dead and six missing. Of approximately nine named PRC cases since 2018, Feng Yanghe and Fang Daining are the specimens this Register holds. The matching fields — hypersonics, military AI, plasma, microelectronics — appear on both rosters without being compared by either state.
A product named War Skull tells the reader how it files the category. The state that named it did the naming work. The Register only quotes.
BUREAU NOTE: The Register's filing conventions include a standing instruction not to draw inferences between adjacent sleeves. Tables can be isomorphic without being causal. What the Register files is what the Register files, and the reader's pattern-recognition is the reader's. The instruction does not apply to column headings, which file themselves.
What Each Sheet Does Not Say
The Chinese sheet does not say: cause of injury. Speed of the other vehicle. Name of the driver. It says 2:35am, 38, a major task, 因公牺牲, Babaoshan.
The US sheet does not say: conclusion. Finding. Determination. It says eleven, seven days, four-year review, something sinister, 27 April.
Neither sheet is a verdict. Both sheets are filings. The Bureau notes that a filing is the thing a state does when it has something to say and an office to say it in, and a verdict is the thing a state does when it is prepared to be wrong in public. Only one of those operations was attempted in either sleeve.
The Keeper
The folder the Register holds contains two sets of documents, each produced by a state about specialists who worked for it, in a register that state keeps. The keeper of the first sleeve is the United States. The keeper of the second sleeve is the People's Republic of China. The reader of the first sleeve, in the end, is also the United States — the Oversight Committee is reading its own state's files, at a speed of its own choosing, under a deadline of its own choosing, and publishing its reading in the press release that accompanies the letter. The reader of the second sleeve is also the People's Republic — Sciencenet and Guangming Daily read China Daily's obituary and filed it in a different vocabulary, within the same week.
In both sleeves, the keeper and the reader are the same office.
The folder is labelled by its keeper.
This dispatch is filed in the third drawer — the one reserved for readers who are not the keeper. The Register does not expect that drawer to be consulted by either state. It keeps the drawer anyway. It is the drawer the Bureau of Public Agreement™ maintains across all folders, and it is the one in which this dispatch is now being read.
The Register closes the folder. Both sleeves are complete. The column headings are on the outside.
The Bureau of Sacrificed-While-Performing, Official Duties Register, is a sub-bureau of the Bureau of Public Agreement™. The Register maintains parallel state filings of specialist loss in fields of strategic interest. Entries are transcribed verbatim from state-of-record documents; causes are filed as stated; symmetries are noted at the column-heading level only. The Register does not adjudicate. The folder is on the shelf. The shelf is in the office. The office is in the state that keeps it.