Isfahan. Pe (פ)

The Unintentional Singularity

1 Bahman 1401 (January 21, 2023)

The morning at Fordow began with silence. Not the resonant, working silence filled with the hum of centrifuges, but a different kind—tense, expectant, like the calm before a storm. Breakfast in the canteen was silent. Rezai ate quickly, looking at no one. Rustam crumbled sugar into his tea but didn’t drink. Zahra could feel the air vibrating with the unsaid.

At 9:00, they were supposed to meet the inspectors at the entrance to Sector B-7. But an IRGC officer stopped them in the corridor.

“Orders from Tehran. The three of you are to remain in the laboratory until further notice.”
“What does that mean?” Rezai asked sharply. “We are supposed to accompany the inspection.”
“Orders,” the officer repeated, his gaze as impenetrable as a concrete wall. “The laboratory has everything you need. Wait.”

The laboratory, their scientific sanctuary, had become a prison. The monitors showed the dead graphs of yesterday’s measurements. In the corner, a surveillance camera, its red eye unblinking. Was it off, or just disguised? But there was a window, made of armored glass, that looked out into the main corridor. Through it, they saw what they were not supposed to see.

At first, everything went according to plan. The inspectors in their blue vests, accompanied by guards, proceeded to Sector B-7. They removed yesterday’s tamper-evident seals, checked the numbers, and went inside. The door closed behind them.

An hour passed. Then a second. The silence in the corridor became almost palpable. Rustam paced the lab from corner to corner, like a caged animal. Rezai sat silently on a metal chair, his arms crossed. His face was a mask of calm, but Zahra could see the vein pulsing on his temple—a metronome of anxiety.

And then it began. The sector door burst open. Weber emerged, his face red with anger. He was saying something sharp to the head of security, gesticulating. Dubois was holding a sealed container with the samples as if it were an unexploded bomb. New people appeared in the corridor—more guards, IRGC officers. They didn’t threaten. They just stood there, forming a living wall, physically separating the inspectors from the rest of the world.

“What’s happening out there?” Rustam muttered.
“They found something,” Rezai answered, and there was no surprise in his voice. Only a cold statement of fact.

The argument in the corridor continued for another twenty minutes. Then the inspectors, surrounded by a tight ring of guards, walked past their window toward the exit. They did not look in their direction. Their mission here was over.

An hour later, the same officer came for them.

“You are free to go. You may return to Isfahan. The helicopter is waiting.”

In the guesthouse room where Rezai had questioned them the day before, the same senior officer they had met in Isfahan was waiting for them.

“The inspectors have left the facility,” he said without preamble. “They found what they were not supposed to find.”

He placed a printout on the table. It was a preliminary report from their own security service.

“Uranium particles with enrichment up to 83.7 percent. Taken from the pipes connecting two IR-6 cascades. They also recorded an undeclared change in the piping configuration.”
“How did this happen?” Rustam asked.
“Reconnecting the cascades,” Rezai spoke up. “They wanted to speed up the process, but…” he shrugged. “Sometimes centrifuges work too well. A concentration occurs in the system’s nodes. Microscopic quantities, but the IAEA’s detectors can find even individual atoms.”

The IRGC representative listened in silence, then, after a long pause, said:

“They left without signing the final protocol. This means one thing: in a couple of days, there will be an emergency meeting of the Board of Governors in Vienna. We will be accused of violating every conceivable protocol and of being one step away from creating a weapon.”

He looked at the three of them, his gaze shifting from one to the next.

“We need a story. An explanation. A legend. The official truth that we will present to the world.” He looked at Zahra and Rustam. “You are the best scientific minds in our program. You must create this truth. You are given forty-eight hours to prepare a joint report for the AEOI, which will form the basis of our response to the IAEA.”
“What kind of explanation?” Rustam asked.
“It must be plausible. Scientifically sound. And irrefutable.” He stood up. “They are asking whether this was done deliberately or if it was an accident. Your task is to prove that it was unintentional. An accidental accumulation of isotopes in the system due to a pressure failure. A technical glitch. An error in the experiment. Whatever. You must create a narrative that they can, if they wish, believe.”

He walked out. The three of them were left in the echoing silence. Create a narrative. Rewrite reality. Paint a new picture. A picture that would hide the truth. The truth that she herself had helped to uncover.

On the way home, in the vibrating cabin of the helicopter, she looked down at the mountains passing below. Her scientific objectivity, her faith in the purity of fact, had finally given way to a spy’s paranoia.

What now? she thought. I gave them the lead. They found what they were looking for. Is my mission complete? Or is this just the beginning?

She was certain that 83.7% was no accident. It was a deliberate, carefully planned experiment. Rezai and his men were testing how quickly they could reach weapons-grade levels. Testing the technology. And now that they were caught, they wanted to blame it all on an “unintentional accident,” a singularity.

But what if… what if this whole inspection incident had been orchestrated? Not by her handlers, but by her own leadership? To create an international crisis? To get a pretext for withdrawing from the Non-Proliferation Treaty? What if she, Zahra, had been used not as a source of information for the West, but as a catalyst for the plans of the hawks in Tehran?

What now? The inspectors had found what they were looking for. More than that—they had found something Iran could not explain without effectively admitting to the creation of a nuclear weapon. This was the end of the “peaceful atom” game.

Her scientific objectivity, which had been her shield for so many years, shattered like a crystal lattice under neutron bombardment. She felt reality fragmenting into an infinite number of versions, each one as possible and as monstrous as the next. She was not just a pawn in a two-sided game. She was a pawn in a game where there might be three sides, four, or where everyone was playing for themselves, creating and destroying alliances.

She was no longer searching for the truth. She was searching for the least painful lie she could believe in to keep from going insane.

At home, her daughters were waiting for her. Nasrin with anxiety in her eyes, Zeynab with open arms. Amirkhan gave a silent nod—he already knew. His sources worked fast.

“What happened?” he asked when they were alone.
“The inspection did not go well.”
“How unwell?”
“Enough to change everything.”

He looked at her for a long time, and in his gaze, she read the question he didn’t dare to ask: Were you involved? But he didn’t ask. Because some answers are better left unknown.