Isfahan. Khet (ח)

Digital Calligraphy

13 Aban 1401 (November 4, 2022)

History hung in the air. 13 Aban. Student Day. The day the country celebrated the takeover of the American embassy, the expulsion of the “Great Satan” from its home. And on this very day, Zahra Musavi was preparing to knock on its door. The irony was so thick and bitter it could be drunk like strong, unsweetened coffee.

Friday. The house was empty, and the silence within it was not calming but ringing, like the vacuum before an explosion. Amirkhan, having fulfilled his fatherly duty, had taken Zeynab to the zoo. Nasrin, ever elusive like an unstable isotope, had gone to a friend’s house to “do homework.” The lie was obvious—her eyes held that particular excitement not brought on by school assignments—but Zahra didn’t press the issue.

Zahra was alone. She had a couple of hours at her disposal—an eternity and an instant.

The first ritual: burning bridges. She took out the old laptop. Opened the game. Inbox. There it was, the message from JagdpanFer_83, a line of text like a crack in the monolith of her old life. She didn’t reread it. She copied the forum address onto a scrap of paper—wotrandom.com/forum/mods-world-of-tanks—in the calligraphic script she had been taught in school. It was strange how childhood skills returned in moments of extreme stress. Then she methodically deleted all history, cookies, and cache. Digital amnesia, a voluntary lobotomy of the machine.

The second ritual: consecrating the weapon. She took the new netbook from the first-aid kit. It was light, anonymous, devoid of a past. She connected it to the network using the neighbors’ Wi-Fi, whose password Nasrin knew. The first thing she did was install a VPN. Surfshark. The name was absurd, almost childish. But behind the bright shark icon lay a key that unlocked invisible doors on the global network. An invisibility cloak in a world of total surveillance. The irony: a technology created to bypass censorship was now serving to bypass her own conscience. She chose a server in Malaysia. Distant, neutral, unpredictable.

Now she had to choose a location. Not home. Never home. She slipped the netbook into her bag and went out.

A small park near a popular coffee shop on Abbasi Avenue. The perfect spot. She sat on a bench, far enough away not to attract the waiters’ attention, but close enough to catch the weak, temperamental signal of their Wi-Fi. Life bustled around her: students laughed, children cried, old men read newspapers. She was invisible in this stream. The perfect disguise.

She opened the netbook. The screen came to life. Connected to the Malaysian server, she typed the copied address into the browser’s address bar.

The forum was the epitome of banality. An outdated design, faceless avatars, discussion topics: “Best Camouflages for the IS-7,” “How to Increase Shell Damage?” A library where the shelves held not books, but simulacra. The perfect refuge.

Registration. A pseudonym. She thought for a moment. Zahra_K_1982 was compromised. She needed a new one. The name came to her on its own, like the single correct solution to an equation.

Hafiz_114.

Hafez. “The Guardian.” One who knows by heart. She was becoming the guardian of a secret. And 114—the number of surahs in the Quran. A perfect, complete number. Her personal code, her talisman in this digital looking-glass world.

She found him, JagdpanFer_83, in the user list. His status was “offline.” She opened a private message window. Her fingers froze over the keyboard. What does one write when standing on the threshold of betrayal? She couldn’t be emotional. She couldn’t be verbose. Only facts. Only intent.

“You know who I am. I work in the program. I believe that under the current circumstances, its development is leading the country to disaster, not security. I can provide information that will help prevent this.”

Not a single extra word. As cold as an experimental report. She hit “Send.”

The reply came in seconds. Inhuman speed. As if it wasn’t a person on the other end, but an algorithm.

“Thank you for your message. Follow the news on this forum.”

And that was all.

Zahra sat, staring at the screen. She had expected anything: instructions, questions, even words of support. But not this. Not this dry, impersonal text, like an auto-responder message. The chill of disappointment was replaced by another thought, one that came from the depths of her analytical mind. This wasn’t neglect. It was a form of tradecraft. A test. They were testing her patience, her ability to follow orders. The lack of emotion in their response was the most important message of all. The game was being played by rules she had yet to learn. Just like in physics: sometimes, to understand a system, you have to observe not what is happening within it, but what is absent.

She closed the netbook. Children played around her, old men fed pigeons with crumbs of sangak bread. Normal life flowed on, unaware that on a bench under a cypress tree, an invisible Rubicon had just been crossed.

That evening at dinner, Amirkhan talked about how Zeynab had fed a camel. Zeynab, laughing, showed her drawing—a camel with three humps. Nasrin sat in silence, engrossed in her phone.

“And what were you up to, janam?” Amirk-han asked, serving himself some rice. “It was so quiet at home.”

Zahra looked up at him. Her gaze was calm. Her voice, even.

“Cleaning. I organized the wardrobes. And then I took a little nap. I was terribly tired.”
“And you, Nasrin? How was homework?”
“Fine,” Nasrin picked at her rice, avoiding her mother’s gaze. “We… we finished almost everything.”
“Mama, you’re not eating,” Zeynab observed.
“I’m just tired, azizam. Cleaning… you know how exhausting it is.”

Tet (ט): Statistical Noise