He played his role well. He showed no sign that he knew what was going on behind his back. He could be truly satisfied with himself. And when Bennet and Yossi Cohen told him why they had called him in, he feigned surprise. He had cooperated with the Mossad in the past, but for him, until today, Yossi had been only a voice. He recognized his captivating face from pictures that had appeared in the media. Yossi turned his blue eyes to meet his, an enticement that made him tense. Don Yossi – yes. Without a doubt – Don Yossi.

“Guarantees. What guarantees can you give me that when this is all over I won’t be the scapegoat of the story.” His nasal voice echoes slightly through the space of the empty room.

Bennet smiles. He stands facing him across the narrow metal table, the only piece of furniture in the bare room in the basement of the Mossad. “Breathe Gregorius, breathe. This is not an interrogation room. It’s a meeting room. This is going to be smooth and simple. No complications, right Yossi?”  

“This is Gregory, from Gregorovius, one of Cortázar’s protagonists. My mother loves him.” He smiles a lunar smile.

“Gregory, you’ve got an opportunity to soar here.” Yossi steps away from the wall he was leaning against. “Spread your arms as wide as you can, Gregory, and embrace everything possible.” As if trying to illustrate his intention, Yossi faces him and spreads his arms wide. “These are wings. Sometimes I flap them and fly high, and when I return my thoughts are clear and I know the world is mine.”

Bennet closes his eyes and spreads his arms, flapping them gently. “Believe him,” he says, trying a meditative tone. “As Director of the Mossad, he knows something about your future. About the future of all of us.”

“And how to direct it where we need it,” Yossi adds in his raspy bass voice, rolling the sleeves of his white shirt up above his elbows. “We’ve been following your ideas and you’re your work, and those of N.S.O. But you disappear on us quite a bit, if you know what I mean.” He closes one eye, lifts his arm, and forms his hand into the shape of a pistol. He takes aim at Gregory. “Bingo!” he lets slip.

Gregory looks down. “Yes, some of my time…but it’s not what you think,” he says in a grating, apologetic tone.

“It’s okay, it’s okay.” Bennet reassures him in a fatherly tone. “We know, we know.”

“I control it, although I don’t know completely how it works…” says Gregory in the voice of an embarrassed child, biting his lip and shrugging his shoulders, giving the appearance that his head is growing directly out of his rounded shoulders.

“It’s a simple matter of exchanging information. There’s nothing to apologize for. The country needs you, Gregory. It’s an honor!”

“Gregory,” says Yossi in a soft voice. “This is not an interrogation. Not at all. It’s a friendly negotiation for cooperation, okay? He drags over a chair and sits down across from Gregory, leaning toward him a bit. “You’re among friends here. We can do this nicely.”

Gregory’s thoughts are galloping in a different direction altogether, and he taps out a fast-paced rhythm on the table with his fingernail. “I wrote the algorithm, and even though algorithms are logical structures, something went wrong. It just disappeared. It’s hard to explain…” He hangs his head. “It’s all based on the premise that each of us is built from a repeating loop with infinite feedback, and we are therefore constantly becoming more sophisticated. Actually, we are all systems of identification and representation. Our ability to represent the reality around us for ourselves is what enables us to get along in the world. Now, imagine if were to introduce an algorithm to this loop that’s able to read this representation.”

He rubs his forehead and presses on it, making long, increasingly frequent movements from his forehead back to his neck. The room is narrow, and the walls appear to him to be moving, slowly reducing the space between them. Inside his skull, calculations of volume and air capacity are running. He thinks he feels an attack of claustrophobia coming on. For as long as he can remember, he has felt as if the world is closing in on him, imprisoning him. There has always been an invisible screen between him and those around him. He has attributed this limitation to some fault within him – a deep flaw that could not be seen; a partition that, at the same time, cultivated within him an inner sense of superiority and distance and gave him an active fantasy life and internal stories that occurred with the same intensity as the experience of reality itself.

“So what do you say?” Bennet stands behind him, massaging his shoulders. “Yossi, do you have some relaxing music? Perhaps something Buddhist?” 

Yossi produces a small remote control, and a moment later the sounds of burbling water and chirping birds can be heard. Bennet whispers in Gregory’s ear: “Loosen up. Let yourself be a marionette whose strings have been detached from its head.”

The three begin a long moment in a meditative state. When the music suddenly goes silent, and as if coordinated in advance, Bennet grabs Gregory’s skull and shoves his tongue deep into his ear. Gregory’s eyes open wide. He tries to shake his head free, but Bennet holds onto it forcefully.

“There’s been a fundamental error!” Gregory screams.

“Now you’re talking business!” Bennet let’s go of his skull. “You know how complicated it was to push through the decision to cooperate with N.S.O. without a tender? There’s a one-time offer on the table. Be a partner. We’ll share the information and we won’t disrupt your business. Fair enough?”  

Saliva drips out of Gregory’s ear.

Bennet’s repulsive breath hangs in the air, and Gregory ponders the condition of his gastric juices.

“I think that’s a generous offer,” Yossi says, shaking his head.

“We know what you’re capable of, Gregory. We supported N.S.O. for years. We turned a blind eye to the Trojan horses you created and that you all rode on. You made tons of money. But this is a time of national emergency – a time for joining forces!” Bennet clenches his hand into a fist, raises it in a Maciste-esque movement, and flexes his bicep.

For a long moment it is silent.

Gregory gathers his strength and stands up straight. “Wait a minute, wait a minute. I need to put things into perspective for you,” he pants. “The coronavirus is a serious virus. And it’s not a matter of epidemiology. Vaccines are not our business. For us, a virus is a horse. We discovered the coronavirus back at the end of 2015. We identified its high level of communicability, but we weren’t able to mount on it the algorithms we had developed at the time. They were too unwieldy for such a noble steed. I was mesmerized by it. At first it was a game, a fantasy,” he looks dreamily at Yossi. “You must understand – the world of fantasy is a place of release, a place for maneuvering and for practicing tactics. If we free ourselves from the prison of time we can move freely throughout the space of fantasy, where one can design complex structures for observing the reality that lies beyond consciousness, for getting to know it. It’s a matter of practice, of the intensity of the fantasy that’s developed.” Gregory takes a breath of air and Bennet interrupts. “Yossi, it’s like we’re in a lesson about delusions by Bradbury or Huxley. Listen Gregory, Gregorius, Gregorovius – your active fantasy life doesn’t interest us. Get to the point!”  

“The point, uh…” Gregory removes a black leather-bound notepad from his pocket, opens it, and lays it on the table. “It’s all here.”    

Yossi picks up the notepad and leafs through it quickly. Each page contains diagrams and dense handwritten lists of numbers. He tears out the first page and lays it down in front of Gregory. Gregory gets up from his chair, stands in the corner of the room, and casts a worried gaze at Yossi.

“In your world,” Gregory says, formulating his words in a quiet tone, “actions of sophisticated listening and control are performed by physical means and devices. You accumulate information emitted in speech, movement, and facial expression, and you analyze it using complex processes. But you have no idea about the intentions of the mind, about what occurs there before intentions and thoughts are processed into words.”

Gregory takes off his sweatshirt and sits back down in his chair.    

“The most effective way to penetrate anyone is with a virus. Viruses are the best and deepest penetrating carriers. That’s what we’re doing: we’re mounting a sophisticated algorithm on the virus, which carries it in. The beauty of it is that when the virus is killed by the antibodies, the algorithm, which is actually a keen sensor, remains in the body and continues to transmit. We achieve an immensely high level of mapping by analyzing the sounds within the body. We are able to translate contractions of the intestine, beats of the bladder, movements of fluids in the kidneys, and even sounds of joints that are indicative of ligaments, tendons, and muscle tension. We listen to, sense, and analyze everything that occurs in the sack of skin in which we are all packaged.” A broad smile appears on his face. “In certain situations, when required to do so, we have the ability to take control of internal organs…I’m sure you can appreciate the significance of this trajectory.”

Yossi’s facial features tighten somewhat. “That sounds fantastic,” he says.  

Gregory wrings his fingers. “But then we discovered that this coronavirus kills our algorithm. Drowns it. It’s horrible.” He reaches over and grabs the black notepad, tears out some more pages, sets them down in a jumble, and puts them together again and again, like assembling a jigsaw puzzle.

“Have you seen this shit?” He turns to Yossi. “It’s all messed up. I need to make another journey to the future in order to retrieve the necessary information.” He sits up straight, looking pensive.  

“You can fly to the moon as far as I’m concerned,” Bennet exclaims in a partial shout. “The important thing is that you return immediately, and that before you go you sign the contract!”  

“Shhhh…Shhhh…” says Yossi. “Let me try to understand this in peace and quiet.” He looks at the pages and screws up his brow.

“Look, Yossi. It’s a virus like any other virus, a product of the bang. It’s easy to map its movement, like we map astronomical objects. But with this coronavirus…it’s as if something went wrong and all the nano astronomy projections are invalid. We discovered that every unit of the virus follows its own separate path, like a life-loathing creature seeking independent survival.” Gregory breathes heavily, like an asthmatic. “We’ve never seen such behavior. Just try to map it. It’s impossible.”      

Bennet pulls a small nail file from his pocket, leans his elbows on the table, and concentrates on filing his nails.     

“Don’t pay any attention to him,” Yossi says to Gregory. “He’s depressed. It’s an awkward situation, isn’t it Benito?”

Bennet stops filing for a moment. “Gentlemen, I need to get back to the Big Boss within an hour. Is there a deal or not? We simply can’t afford to find ourselves on ‘the day after’. Do you understand what I mean? The state of emergency won’t last forever, you know. If you think there’s a court of law in the country that will allow us to map people in this manner, you’re mistaken, gentlemen. We’ll be majorly screwed.” Bennet turns to Yossi. “Will you please explain to him what this means? He can travel wherever he likes – to the future, to the past, to Serum Norvera X. But in an hour at the latest, he signs and we get to work. Okay, Yossi?”

“Calm down, Benito. Calm down.” Yossi takes a handkerchief out of his pants pocket and offers it to Bennet. “Wipe the sweat off your forehead.”

Gregory pulls a pencil out of his shirt pocket and starts making quick calculations on one of the pages in the notepad. He leans back in his chair and sighs. “I don’t understand what’s going on here. I don’t understand it! I could have sworn we copied the maps exactly from the eternal source.” 

“The guys in my labs say that you erred in converting the measurements,” says Yossi, pointing at the small earpiece inserted in his right ear. “They suggest you rethink the cybernetic route to the bronchus. They think you made a mistake in checking the Polymerase Chain and converting the base units from the cosmic macro to nano-units.”

Gregory chews on the end of the pencil, leans over the pages of the notepad, and begins to quickly cover them with numbers.        

“Wow!” Bennet utters in amazement. “Did you see that? With such mathematical ability, it’s no wonder he can fly to the future.”

Gregory tosses the pencil onto the table, and with a sigh of despair he pushes his chair back, stands up, and begins pacing back and forth. 

“These routes were fed into the algorithms to enable them to disconnect in time, before the virus attaches to the cell and we lose it. We’ve already lost tens of thousands. Tens of thousands!”

Silence.

“Gentlemen.” Bennet folds the nail file and puts it back in his pocket. He looks at the clock and then looks Gregory in the face. “I don’t give a rat’s ass about the algorithms you’ve lost. The same goes for the psychic-cybernetic structure of the virus. If Yossi wants to take part in this disgrace, he can be my guest. I’m leaving now, and when I get back…”

“There’s something you don’t understand,” Gregory interrupts. “Yossi, explain to him what a sleeper agent is! Explain to him what can happen when a sleeper agent awakens and operates uncontrolled.”

“Benito, Benito! Control yourself.”  

“Our algorithm is like one of Yossi’s sleeper agents.” Gregory’s eyes sparkle. He looks into Bennet’s eyes. “Imagine a world in which an algorithm is implanted in everyone – sleeper agents transmitting everything going on inside them when we need it. And they can also be activated!” He shakes his head. “A perfect world! Perfect! We could even divert people’s fantasies, create internal feelings. Now can you understand how dangerous an out of control sleeper agent is? It’s an algorithm that does as it pleases and that can cause fatal damage.”    

“I think we all need to calm down,” Yossi says, turning his head to the left to face the wall. “Bring us three espressos and a bottle of cold water.”

“Tea,” says Gregory in a reconciled tone. “Natural green tea, please. I’m strict about such things.”

“Did you hear that, guys?” Yossi calls to the other side of the wall.

“Can I get a sandwich, too? I’m hungry.” Gregory turns to the wall and continues apologetically: “Just make sure its vegan, alright?”   

“Ha, ha, ha.” Bennet leans back. “Did you hear that? The guy embarks upon deadly adventures with the bodies and minds of others and is a ‘strict’ vegan.”

“To me, it actually seems quite romantic,” Yossi says. “It’s nice. I appreciate romanticism. People need a non-destructive way of letting out their frustrations and their conflicts with reality. It’s a question of wise usage,” he smiles toward the wall. “Romance stimulates creativity.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Bennet grumbles. “What’s happening to you, Yossi? The next thing you know you’ll want to fly to the future too,” he chuckles. “Don’t get carried away. I’m reminding you what the Big Boss wants, what he’s expecting.” He bends over to Yossi and whispers something in his ear. “Leave that to me, Benito, okay?” Yossi says with resolve. “That’s our responsibility.”

“Is something wrong?” Gregory puts the question out there.     

“Everything’s fine,” Yossi says. Benito here has to go, don’t you Benito?”

“Okay. I understand,” says Bennet and turns to face the wall. “Open up, guys. I’m done here.” He pushes back the chair, and then he walks toward the wall and is swallowed up by it.   

“I’ll give it to you straight, Gregory – I like you. It looks to me like we’re embarking on a joint path. We’ll share the victories and the disappointments. Sound fair to you?”

Gregory blows on his tea and takes a noisy sip.

“I think as you do on this matter. Fantasies sometimes come true.” Yossi laughs. “You know what I mean?” He touches his finger to his earpiece, pressing on it lightly. The psychologist from oversight whispers: “That’s a great direction, Yossi. Tactics from the good old days. Two or three more rounds and he’ll be with us completely.”     

“You know,” Gregory says, fixing his gaze on Yossi, “before I started the company I dug deep into the vast system of what we call fantasy. I was sure I’d be able to crack it, but the deeper I dug, the more the roots branched out to infinity.”

“Go with it, Yossi,” the psychologist says enthusiastically in his earpiece. “The fantasy, it’s there!”  

“Ever since I learned to read I’ve been a fan of science fiction,” says Yossi with quiet and contemplative candor. “A friend of mine introduced me to the magazine Amazing Stories, and I developed a boundless passion for the stuff. That is, to my parents’ consternation…” he laughs. The psychologist in the earpiece: “Perfect, perfect. Let him respond.”

“Yes, yes. I understand perfectly.” Gregory takes a bite of his sandwich and chews slowly. “My parents would also look at me in despair whenever they entered my lair and saw the piles of books I was engrossed in. Wells, Stapleton.”   

Yossi stretches out his legs and relaxes serenely in his chair. “In my youth, I investigated the semantics of cybernetics. I thought I would become a scientist or a mathematician, but I was recruited to here.” He laughs aloud. “Now they’re only hobbies – philosophy, advanced mathematics, astrophysics.” The psychologist in his ear: “Be careful there. We’re analyzing facial movements and expressions. It looks like you’re taking him back too far. His past is complicated, nightmarish, and problematic. Make sure not to slip into it.”   

Yossi straightens up. “Listen Gregory, we’re making an offer here. I’m putting it on the table as frankly as possible. Work with us. We’ll give you complete freedom of operation. Our labs will be at your disposal, along with our people and anything else in the world that can be acquired.”

“I’m sure I didn’t make an error in the calculations,” Gregory mumbles. “I’m sure of it. This virus is developing such complex, almost quantum movements… It attaches to a cell, sucks out the RNA, and reproduces like crazy. And then before my algorithm understands what’s happening, it suffocates.”

 “You better wise up, Gregory. If you continue with such fervor, your imagination will take you on a journey that will be difficult to return from. Believe me. I have a few here who are on that track. The game becomes a contest between dark forces of the mind. I’ve been there. When they recruited me, they activated an instinct of self-preservation within me so that the part of my brain that was still lucid could serve as a life preserver if I had to fight the temptation of fantasy.” The psychologist: “That’s great. The indicators show that it’s working. Let’s take a break. We’re sending in another cup of tea. And an espresso for you…”     

A young man with a waiter’s apron around his waist emerges from the wall and places a tray on the table. “Right on time, Termite,” Yossi says. “And also bring in some of those savory cookies for me. Would you like some too?” He addresses the question to Gregory, but Gregory is absorbed in chewing the remainder of his sandwich. His gaze is fixed on the tower of notepad pages that have piled up before him.

“What stage have you reached in the decoding?” Yossi asks.

“Decoding? What do you mean?”

“Of the internal sounds. The ones the algorithm is listening to.”       

Gregory shifts in his chair. “Oh, yes. I believe we’re at stage five, according to your criteria. Seventy percent statistical significance, based on the adjusted calculation of intestinal contractions, kidney compressions, liver vibrations, joint sounds, and saliva indicators. When we integrate all of this with the definite indicators for blood oxygen and pulse rate, we reach 95 to 98 percent. It’s hard to hide things from us.”     

Yossi rolls the espresso cup backwards and forwards between his hands and then takes a sip. “Listen Gregory, I’m sure you know that the Big Boss considers me his successor. It’s already appeared in the media and he’s never denied it. But you can never know with him. You know what I mean? For the time being, I’m working with analytical restraint and sticking to the myth of immunity. I can afford to. And all the more so if you join me – that is, join us …” Yossi rotates his forearm in circles, his finger pointing at the ceiling. “From here, we look realistically at everything that’s happening. Our prediction ability may seem outdated to you, but it gets the job done. You know what I mean. Together we can create something wonderful.”        

Gregory rubs his face with his hands. “This is the moment of resistance,” the psychologist whispers. “You’re leading with almost 70 percent toward a positive outcome.”

Yossi folds his arms across his chest. “Gregory, don’t misunderstand me. This all has the Big Boss’s approval.”  

“And what if he changes his mind? What if something snaps and his obsession intensifies? What happens to me?”   

“You mean, what if I’m removed?” The psychologist in his ear is troubled: “Smile, Yossi. Smile.”  Yossi smiles. “I can’t imagine we would allow that to happen, can you?” Yossi locks onto Gregory’s eyes and, without a word, the two men begin a game of ‘who blinks first’.

“Let him win,” the psychologist in the earpiece instructs him. Yossi blinks.

An embarrassed smile spreads across Gregory’s face.

Yossi gets up. “I’ll inform Bennet that it didn’t work. I’ll tell him that you’re not there yet, that is, not in a technological sense. I’ll tell him that it’s not all ready yet. I’ll tell him that in principle you are willing to sign, but that first you need to be sure that the problems with controlling the algorithm have been solved.”

Gregory rises heavily from his chair.

Yossi reaches out his hand. “You are the ambassador of the land of magic, Gregory.”

They shake hands. Gregory gathers up the pile of notepad pages from the table and buries them in his pants’ pocket.

“I’m dying to piss,” Gregory says, sounding somewhat ashamed. “Of course you are.” Yossi smiles. “After all, we’re only human.”