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Operation “Stray Dog”. Chapter 1
Yoga vs. Apocalypse
14:41 EST, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Lincoln Laboratory
The snow in Cambridge fell so quietly it seemed you could hear the ice crystals grazing the black waters of the Charles River. It wasn’t the snow I remembered from childhood—not the prickly, vicious snow of the Zagros Mountains that sliced your face like the sand of the Dasht-e Kavir desert. This snow was soft, sterile, almost weightless, like a Democrat’s campaign promise. It swaddled the MIT campus in a white blanket of oblivion, erasing the corners of brutalist architecture, dampening the city’s sounds, turning the world into a Japanese woodblock print where there is no past, no future, only an eternal, frozen “now.”
I sat in an ergonomic Herman Miller chair that cost more than the annual budget of Abyaneh village, positioned by the lab window, while the air conditioner hummed overhead with the monotony of a Buddhist monk. I sat and watched life pulsing on the monitor screen—not my life, but a mechanical one. A tiny hummingbird drone, Project “Nano-Hummer,” perfect in its diminutiveness, beat its carbon-fiber wings at a frequency of forty hertz. Its body was the size of my thumb, yet the camera in its eye could read a license plate from two hundred meters up. The Department of Defense paid us to make this little bird fly quieter and longer.
I watched it and thought about how strangely memory is wired: it stores not events, but tactile sensations. The roughness of a clay wall. The stickiness of dates. The cold steel of Father’s pistol, which he’d accidentally left on the dinner table. And the feeling of dust in Aunt Nilou’s house. All that remained back there, on Side A, in a world that nearly burned down, yet whose radioactive ash I still carried in the pockets of my starched lab coat.
Here, on Side B, everything was different. Safe. Hypoallergenic. My life now resembled this snowfall—beautiful, ordered, and cold. I had learned to sort trash into four separate bins, drink matcha lattes instead of thyme tea, and smile that polite American smile that bares teeth but hides the soul. I had built myself a glass castle out of DARPA grants, burning deadlines, and weekly sessions with Dr. Goldberg, who taught me the art of letting go.
“Zee,” she would say in a soft voice akin to the rustling of a dollar bill, “family trauma isn’t a prison; it’s an experience. You are not a tree, you are a bird. You have no roots, you have wings. Fly.”
And I flew. Or pretended to. I listened to indie-folk where suffering felt cozy, read Sally Rooney novels where there was no war, and diligently forgot the language where the words for “life” (zendegi) and “prison” (zendan) sound almost the same. I became a master of mono no aware—the pathos of things, the gentle sadness of transient life passing by without touching the heart. I looked at the snow and felt like a snowflake—unique, solitary, and slowly melting on someone’s warm palm.
On the screen, the hummingbird drone hovered in mid-air, perfectly still. Forty beats per second—and a complete illusion of peace. Just like me.
And in that moment, the fragile silence of the laboratory, this symphony of melancholy and intellectual repose, was brutally violated by a sound.
Not an air raid siren. Not the roar of an explosion. Worse.
It was my ringtone. BTS’s “Dynamite.” A cheerful, idiotically life-affirming pop anthem from the night my world collapsed. I had set it specifically—as a reminder that even in hell, disco can play.
I flinched so hard I nearly knocked over my cup of lukewarm tea. The illusion shattered. The watercolor turned into a dirty puddle.
A photo flashed on the screen: “MOM (TOXIC)”.
Followed immediately by a second line, a Telegram notification: “DAD (IRGC)”.
And then, a machine-gun burst of WhatsApp messages from Nasrin:
“Zeynab, pick up the phone, damn it!”
“They accidentally dropped the world again.”
“Answer, bitch, we’re all going to die!”
I stared at the phone like it was an unexploded shell that had suddenly materialized amidst my blueprints. My heart, which had just been beating in the rhythm of the falling snow, broke into a panicked gallop.
“Oh God,” I whispered to my colleague, Kevin. Kevin had hair as pink as dreams of socialism and a T-shirt that read “Anxiety Is My Superpower.” He sat at the next desk modeling turbulence while eating a vegan croissant. “They’re doing it again. They’re violating my personal boundaries again.”
“Who?” Kevin asked, lazily stirring his oat milk latte with a digital stylus. “Republicans? Your landlord?”
“Worse. My parents. They only call in two cases: when I forget to wish Second Cousin Fatima a happy birthday, which is a mortal sin, or when an intercontinental ballistic missile is in the air. And judging by the fact that Aunt Fatima was born in March…”
“Listen,” Kevin yawned, not looking up from his monitor. “If the world blows up, our paper for Nature still won’t get accepted, right? Deadline’s Monday.”
“If the world blows up, a reviewer will survive anyway,” I answered automatically. “And he’ll write that the methodology wasn’t transparent enough.”
“Haven’t you tried more radical methods of domestic separation?” he asked, biting into the croissant. “Maybe you should get a tattoo? You know, something edgy. Might make them back off. Parents from the Middle East hate it when you desecrate the ‘temple of the body.’ My Catholic mom didn’t speak to me for a month after I got Pikachu inked on me. Best month of my life.”
I looked at him with pity. Kevin thought in categories of the Ohio suburbs, where the biggest problem was an improperly mowed lawn.
“Kevin, my father is a colonel in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. He won’t be scared off by a butterfly stamp on my lower back or Pikachu on my ankle. To make them back off, the tattoo would have to be ideological.”
“Like a US flag?”
“Not radical enough. Yeah. Maybe only a Dachau number on the wrist. That would be checkmate.”
Kevin choked on his latte. Drops of oat milk sprayed onto his keyboard.
“Dude, that’s… that’s very dark. Even for you. That’s cancel culture level.”
“Welcome to my world,” I grinned grimly. “Where I come from, darkness is a national resource, Kevin. We export it. Like oil.”
But the phone was still vibrating, bouncing on the desk and slowly inching toward the edge like a lemming decided on suicide. It demanded attention. It screamed in the voices of Jungkook and Jimin. It stretched its invisible tentacles across the Atlantic, through years of cognitive-behavioral therapy, through my new identity as a successful engineer, trying to drag me back into that red clay, into that house of ghosts and the smell of fear.
“Daughter, drop everything, we need to talk about the end of the world, and you have to fix it because you went to MIT, and we paid for your education with the nervous system of an entire nation.”
I sighed. All my Japanese poetry, my entire new life, all my “wings” were crumbling under the onslaught of this persistent, ancient, Persian demand: duty.
I reached out. My finger hovered over the screen. The green “Answer” button or the red “Die to Family” button.
I pressed “Decline.”
“Not today,” I told the phone firmly. “Today I choose myself. That’s the only thing our family apocalypse taught me: you can’t save anyone else anyway. Besides, I have hot yoga at five. I need to open my chakras, not a bunker.”
In that moment, I felt like I had done something incredibly adult, therapeutic, and right. I had protected my inner child from an external geopolitical threat. I remained a snowflake, untouched by the mud of history. Forty seconds of silence. Forty seconds in which I almost believed I had won.
But the phone rang again. The melody changed. It was a standard, harsh trill. A number flashed on the screen. Not Iranian +98. Not American +1.
It was +850. The country code for North Korea.
Kevin stopped chewing.
“Zee! Is that… is that the DPRK? Is Kim Jong Un calling you? They have your number? Zee, are you a secret agent? You said you were from Iran!”
I felt a twitch under my left eye.
“Kevin,” I said in an icy tone. “It seems personal boundaries are canceled. And yoga too. If I’m not back in ten minutes, delete my browser history.”
I grabbed the phone and ran into the corridor.