Isfahan. Tet (ט)

Statistical Noise

29 Aban 1401 (November 20, 2022)

Two weeks—fourteen Earth rotations, three hundred thirty-six hours, twenty thousand minutes of waiting. Zahra checked the forum with a methodicalness bordering on obsession. Every morning, before waking her daughters, and every evening, after Amirkhan had fallen asleep, she performed the ritual: she turned on the netbook, activated the VPN, chose a server somewhere in Oceania, and entered the library of shadows. The wotrandom.com forum lived its own life. Players discussed the merits of German armor and complained about artillery balance. In this stream of banality, there was not a single word for her.

The absence of a signal was worse than any order. It bred entropy in her thoughts. Had they understood her correctly? Or had they considered her a provocateur? Or, worst of all, had her message simply been ignored, drowned in a sea of equally desperate, useless spam? She felt like a radio astronomer who had sent a message to a distant galaxy and was now doomed to listen to the endless cosmic noise, trying to discern a meaningful response within it.

And the noise began to take shape.

First, it was a gray Peykan. She noticed it on Monday on her way to work. It stayed two car lengths behind her, neither overtaking nor falling back. She turned onto a side street, pretending to bypass traffic. It followed her. Her scientific mind immediately offered a dozen logical explanations: coincidence, the same route, paranoia. By evening, the car was gone.

On Wednesday, a white Samand appeared. It followed her from the facility all the way home. She memorized the license plate numbers. 43. The next day, it was gone. On Friday, the gray Peykan was back, but with different plates. She began to see a pattern where there might have been none. Her world, once composed of clear laws and predictable trajectories, was turning into a quantum foam, where the observer’s fear created reality itself. Was it surveillance? Or was it her own mind, poisoned by guilt, projecting a threat onto random cars, turning statistical noise into a sinister signal? She didn’t know. And this ignorance was the most sophisticated form of torture.

This is a classic symptom, Zahra told herself. Apophenia—the tendency to perceive meaningful patterns in random data. Her brain, trained to find patterns in the chaos of quantum fluctuations, was now finding them in the movement of cars and the gazes of passersby.

“You’ve been a bit on edge lately,” Amirkhan observed at breakfast. “Is everything all right at work?”
“Equipment inspection. An audit is coming up,” she said, sipping her tea, trying to keep her hand from trembling.
“The IAEA again?”
“It’s always them.”

But on this day, the silence was broken.

On the forum’s main page, between the threads “Guide to the T-54” and “Account for Sale,” a new pinned announcement appeared. It was formatted like a clipping from the Western press.

“Reuters: IAEA Demands Immediate and Full Access to Iran’s Nuclear Facilities, Including the Underground Fordow Complex. Agency Sources Claim to Have Data Indicating a Possible Deviation from the Declared Program.”

There was not a single comment under the news. It hung in the void, like a solitary mark on an endless white wall.

Zahra’s heart skipped a beat. This wasn’t an answer. It was a question. An order, disguised as an informational message. They didn’t write to her personally. They changed the surrounding reality for her, adding a single element to it. They didn’t say “bring it.” They said “Fordow.”

The next day in the laboratory, she approached Rustam. He looked tired from his trip, but pleased.

“Rustam, I need your help,” she said, trying to make her voice sound casual, professional. “I’m seeing anomalies in the latest cascade simulations. Small, but systematic deviations in the product output.”
“A miscalculation?” he raised an eyebrow with interest.
“I think it’s the source data. The parameters of the raw material may have changed. Or it’s fluctuations in the power supply that our sensors aren’t catching. I need to compare my models with your latest field data from Fordow. Just to calibrate the system.”

Physics—the universal language of excuses. Rustam nodded, moved aside, giving her access to the documents.

“Good thought. Let’s take a look.”

The data was beautiful in its precision. Enrichment levels: 19.75%, 20.1%, 19.9%—a dance around the 20% red line, beyond which lay the territory of weapons-grade uranium. The number of operating centrifuges: 2,804 IR-1s, 1,044 IR-2ms, 174 IR-6s. The coordinates of the underground halls, the depth, the thickness of the concrete ceilings.

Zahra couldn’t take pictures or write anything down—cameras monitored every movement, every file was logged. But her brain, trained to hold long chains of equations in memory, worked like a biological scanner. Here was an abnormally high yield from the IR-6 cascade. Here was a power consumption spike that didn’t match the standard model. Here were traces of isotopes that shouldn’t be there. She memorized not the numbers, but their anomalies, their deviations from symmetry. Like a musician memorizing a false note in a flawless symphony. She created mnemonic links: 2804—her father’s birth year plus her age in months. 1044—her childhood apartment and building number. Each number was tied to a personal memory, embedded in her neural network. This was not espionage. It was an act of remembrance, where each number became a part of her identity.

“An interesting distribution pattern,” she muttered, pointing to a graph. “Here, in sector B-7, there’s a deviation. See? Right here. And here. My models didn’t predict this.”
“Strange,” he agreed. “Looks like resonance. We’ll have to check the rotors. Thanks for noticing.”

B-7. Another coordinate on her mental map.

She nodded. Forty minutes. It was enough.

On the way home, she no longer looked in the rearview mirror. The cars behind her had ceased to matter. The real threat was no longer outside. It was inside her. The data from Fordow lived in her head like a radioactive isotope that had entered her bloodstream. It had its own half-life. If she didn’t expel it from her system quickly enough, it would kill her from within.

Oppenheimer’s dilemma: in creating a weapon for defense, you give the world a tool for self-destruction. But what if you give information to those who claim to want to prevent the weapon’s creation? Don’t you become an accomplice to a different crime? But she wasn’t thinking about betrayal. She was thinking about surgery. Sometimes, to save an organism afflicted by a tumor, you have to inject it with poison. Precisely, in a measured dose. She was ready to mix the reagents.

At home, Nasrin was doing her homework. Zeynab was watching a cartoon. Amirkhan was reading the newspaper. The normality was almost palpable, like a thick cloth draped over an abyss.

“Mama, can you help me with physics?” Nasrin asked.
“Of course, azizam. What is it?”
“Radioactive decay. I don’t understand half-life.”

Zahra sat down next to her. Half-life—the time it takes for half of the atoms to decay. A metaphor for her own life: with each passing day, half of her former self was decaying, but what would take its place?

“Imagine,” she began, “that you have a thousand identical atoms…”

Yod (י): Double Sanctity