I hate cats. If I ever made a list of things I despise, cats would win second place. Immediately below them would be the croupiers who carry themselves like the Pope. And when such a croupier is wearing a shirt embroidered with tiny black cats, then there’s only one thing to do on a sixteen. You draw. A three. The guy looks at me, baffled. I smile at him.

“Hit me again.”

A two. He picks up the cards. Pays up. I gather up the chips. A friendly hand will tap my back. It does. I know what he is about to ask.

“How do you do that, man?”

A red-haired young man with an even redder face.

“I can see the future.”

He bursts out laughing.

“I wish I could do that, too.”

“Don’t be so sure,” I tell him and start walking toward the till. I get my money, it’s not much but greed has never been the best advisor. I cross the Parnetha Casino quickly, slip past the slot machines, barely resisting the temptation to play. Their electronic sounds are maddening, the slots like sirens’ mouths inviting me to feed them a coin, pull the lever, gather an easy hundred euros more; but I resist. Others around me have surrendered, trying to change their fate with a roll. Somebody should tell them fate doesn’t change, or rather, it won’t change on the roll of their die.

I get out, breathe deeply, the real world enters my lungs. It’s less palatable than the casino’s world, but at least it’s real. People walk by me fast, maybe in a hurry to get to their destination. I can almost guess where they’re going, I feel it on their aura, the boredom at their job, their desire for a lover, their anticipation for a trip, the lust for vengeance.

The way home is predictable to the last second. At the beginning, it had been fun. I was trying to guess whether the driver in front of me would stop for the yellow light, whether the bike would try to swerve between the cars, whether the dog would cross the road or be hit by the truck. Sometimes I’d change my course on purpose, just to curb the river of reality; I like dogs after all, cats I don’t care for as much. Nowadays I don’t bother; sooner or later a careless dog will die. I won’t always be there to save it. If I’ve learned anything, it’s that the future carries vast inertia. It’s like pushing a mountain with your bare hands and thinking you moved it because a rock happened to roll.

During the night I only wake up twice. Not bad, my record is much higher. In the morning, I drink two espressos one after another and set out for work, the Athenian traffic predictable as ever. At the Agency everything looks the same as always, as if nothing changes day after day. Same suits, same hairdos, Ermis making the same stupid jokes. As I while time away, my screen flashes: a briefing on a new mission. It was about time; we had gathered cobwebs playing poker and exchanging stupid jokes about premnemons.

The computer takes ages to load the briefing file. We hadn’t gotten any new equipment in months. All kinds of rumors have been circulating: that we were put on ice after the event with Letta, that they’ve been poring over the archives to find what went wrong, that the other side had found a way to combat premnesia, but personally, I believe  none of it. A year ago, when we were on ice again, I heard that they had created a digital premnemon who took up three thousand square meters and they were looking for a way to get it into a truck. Yeah, right.

The screen finally loads and I freeze. This is not routine. Someone, we still don’t know who, is selling a mini plutonium bomb here, in Athens of all places. That’s what you get for being at the crossroads of three continents. Now our agency has to locate them, and then we’ll have to collect the bomb before a terrorist cell buys it and we all end up blown to high heaven.

Great.

“You know what I can’t wrap my head around?” Ermis tells me as he collects his money from the internet poker dopes.

“What?” I ask, eyes still on the screen.

“How often someone is looking for ways to blow us all up.”

“Don’t worry. The enemy probably feels the same way.” Not enough clues on the screen. Let’s hope that they’ll find the seller in time.

“But a suitcase nuke? How many people will die if it goes off?”

“Ermis, do you know who’s been making these bombs?”

“You mean they may have bought it from our military allies?”

“Not necessarily, but they might have. If we don’t want to be annihilated at some point, why do they keep making those?” I ask.

“To act as a deterrent to the others.”

“You mean, to the bad guys.”

“Exactly.”

Sometimes I envy the way Ermis looks at things. He separates the world into Good and Evil. I, on the other hand, use a different distinction: between players and dopes, and I’m afraid our own leaders don’t belong to the first group.

My mobile blinks, reminding me it’s time for Orientation. I’d forgotten about them. Every six months I get assigned a bunch of clueless newcomers for fast-track training. I check my messages again; nothing new about the bomb, I can’t use it as an excuse to get out of that chore.

I get up and walk to the Orientation room.

I enter the room quickly. I don’t spare them a single glance; I don’t even offer them a greeting. I switch on the presentation and show them the Quantum Cloud graphic. A blurry shape constantly shifting, like a swarm of birds flying across the sky. I begin talking about eigenvalues, spectators and collapsing wave functions. I realize they make neither heads nor tails of my speech. Great, none of them gets physics. I take a different approach, make it simpler, ask them to see the pulsating quantum cloud, try to imagine that this is reality. Then I point out its protrusions, explain that they are the possible futures. And I tell them that while everyone else can see only a single one, we premnemons see many, before they even come into being. These few seconds of precognition give us an edge, and this edge is why they’re here, on the fast track for a new career.

The usual question follows.

“So we can change the future?”

One man asks the question, but he speaks for many. You always get the smartasses among the newcomers, the ones who think they’re superheroes. This is the first thing we were taught, though. We are not heroes, we don’t perform extraordinary feats, we do not save the world. We just try to untangle a knot, and the threads are human lives. This is our job, as kind of high-end tailors.

“No,” I tell them. “Realities are endless but some are more likely to manifest than others. You worm your way into one and hope it’s better than the rest of them.”

He looks at me, baffled. I take the neodymium magnet out of my right pocket, and the pack of paperclips out of the left.  I scatter the paperclips on my desk. The magnet attracts them all, creating a bizarre pile, like an abstract sculpture.

“The future is this magnet, and the only thing you can do is attach yourselves to it trying not to make it worse than it is,” I say. “Your ability gives you a slight edge that might come in handy in certain situations. But you can’t change the future any more than a paperclip can control the magnet.”

A young woman in a colorful dress and a bob raises her hand.

“How did you find us?”

I look at her. What was her previous job? Real estate agent, insurance sales, medium? I’m not sure.

“How many times a year do you google déjà vu? How many times have you been thrown out of a casino? How much money have you earned gambling, legally or illegally? How many people did you dupe into believing you can tell the future, and got their money? This is how we found you. Each of you thinks they are unique, but you’re wrong. You are just rare.”

Another hand goes up. A tall, lanky guy.

“And what about the Loop?” he asks, as if he knows something the others don’t.

I look at him haughtily. Ermis must have told him. He likes to scare the newcomers, his idea of a hazing ceremony.

“The Loop… Listen here. You’ve all been through a series of tests and did fine. But you need to get through a lot more to be able to come to me and ask me about the Loop.”

I leave them to their tests. Few will make it; things get harder from now on. The rest will go home thinking we are Masterbet, a top betting company. This is what the sign out front says, after all. Only after they pass the final test, and agree to work for us, will they find out they’ve been recruited into the International Counterterrorism Agency, Mnemonic Operations. Few will quit after they’ve gone so far.

I return to the office. Still no new clues on the bomb, nothing to work with, and the clock is ticking.

Ermis is still there, pretending to go through files, but of course he’s still playing online poker. The Agency knows but they let it pass, as long as we don’t go overboard winning. Letta, who lost all measure and scooped a bunch of bitcoins in a few hours, is now at her home, playing backgammon on her computer all day long. I hear she hasn’t lost once. Just spends her unique talent besting a machine. I’m not sure who, out of the two of us, chose the wrong way to use their gift.

I go home in the afternoon—an empty home; premnemons don’t lose at poker but they don’t win at love, either. At least, that’s my take on it. Most of us are alone. The others blame the job’s high stakes, but I can’t get it out of my head that premnesia is to blame. I don’t know why, perhaps it’s that we can’t believe these little white lies that save a relationship when things go south.

I call Anna and ask if she’s free tonight; she hesitates. Never mind, another time. I end the call. I shouldn’t have avoided the fight the other night, I should have let her blow off some steam, but I saw it coming and was too tired for arguing so I evaded her and this is the result. Now we’re surfing the downward spiral and the more I use premnesia to avoid the worst, the worse things will get, until I finally admit that this relationship isn’t working.

The next day is no different, only Ermis is joking about premnemons and bombs both. The fact that we’re about to meet two guys carrying a compact warhead doesn’t seem to faze him. We finally got a photo of the suppliers. It’s low resolution and I can’t make out the faces clearly. One of them looks familiar, but the thing with premnesia is that everyone does after a while. I point him out to Ermis but he doesn’t remind him of anything.

“Can’t it be a pretty girl for once?” He laughs out loud. He looks like a child, all freckled and boisterous; it’s easy to forgive his cringe-worthy remarks.

After all, I do need him. Especially on days when I feel trapped in a vast loop and every day seems to repeat itself. Some say that this is what happened to Letta, that she never won a fortune in bitcoins, just got trapped in a Loop and was crushed. They take it even further, they say that within the Loop you can see the future. Not the few seconds we can see now, but deeper, see the great attractor, the black hole, the neodymium magnet. And then your mind shatters, for there’s nothing worse than knowing your future and being unable to alter it.

I don’t believe them. Not for any other reason, but because I know from carefully scouring the archives that for a Loop to manifest, it takes two premnemons playing tug-of-war, each trapping the other by guessing their next step, and Letta was the only one who quit that day.

My screen blinks again but I know already it’s not the cue to set out on our mission. Just the newcomers being done with their last test. I drag myself to the Orientation room again. Only three people remain. I knew this batch was defective. Not that the previous ones had yielded many more. Some dart away once they realize the job can be physically dangerous, and potentially fatal. Others scatter when told that not even their family can know about their future work. If you ask me, they’ve made the right choice. There is one guy in a Daredevil T-shirt left, a brunette whom I can’t see as a secret agent, and the lanky one who asked about the Loop. Now I welcome them; in time we’ll be colleagues, and my life might depend on their skills. They must learn everything I know, but first, they must get to like me.

“You know what I really hate?” I ask them. “What’s the first thing on my list?”

They shake their heads.

“The future. The future that gets to come no matter what.”

They smile. I’ve won them over. Time to get to the theory.

“And right after that, I hate cats. I can’t know exactly what Schrödinger was thinking when he placed the cat in the box along with the radioactive vial, but I’m pretty sure that whenever he got home, there was a sweet, loyal dog waiting to greet him happily at the door.”

They smile again. Not all three; the brunette is sure to have a cat. I describe the Schrödinger thought experiment, the one where the cat is both dead and alive until someone opens the box and looks inside. They have trouble wrapping their heads around it. They have questions. I answer as best as I can and continue. I scribble equations that describe the superposition of quantum situations, the screen floods with eigenvalues, possible futures. They seem to keep up this time. And then I explain that they will be trained to have control over their predictions, summon them at will instead of having flashes, call upon them the moment they must, before an enemy pulls the detonator and sends you straight to the sweet hereafter. I look at them. They’re so enchanted by what I tell them that the fact their day job will occasionally involve chases and shootouts hasn’t sunk in yet.

By the end they’re frazzled, but they seem to have grasped some of it. They still have a lot of work ahead; premnesia is a strong advantage but it won’t do all your work for you. Still, they might just make it.

“And the Loop?” the guy asks once again. Damn you, Ermis. Just as I thought I was done here.

“Right, the Loop. Imagine you’re playing a game of chess, where one opponent can guess the other’s move. Do you know how many moves the game will take?”

He thinks on it a bit.

“Infinite,” says the brunette.

“None,” says the lanky guy.

“Which is the same thing,” I add. “This is the Loop. Two chess masters playing the same game, forever. Two paralyzed premnemons, gazing eternally into the future.”

“It sounds like the Schrodinger’s cat paradox,” says the brunette.

“Correct. Just don’t forget that within the Loop you’re not Schrödinger but the cat.”

I let them imagine themselves in a box next to a glass vial full of poison and get back to my desk. The head of operations is standing over Ermis’ head. They’ve found the bomb.

“We found it,” she says.

“If it goes off, Athens is gone,” says the boss.

I’m still stuck on the low-res photo.

“Do we know their names?” I ask.

“Just the pseudonyms they use in this transaction.”

“As in?”

“Thanos and Dr. Doom.”

“So they have a sense of humor,” Ermis says.

“Don’t be fooled. This will be dangerous.”

The boss projects their rendezvous point on the screen. One of the dozens of parking lots surrounding the Venizelos airport. We study it mostly as a matter of protocol. All the little details that could make a world of difference once upon a time, before we ourselves arrived at the Agency, before the premnemons and before the stolen glances at the future. I know that many agents are envious of us; they feel that their years of training went to waste, that we came and stole their place, but it’s not like that. Déjà vu takes training too, using it is exhausting, it saps your strength. The quantized future is strange, fleeting, blurred. The deeper you try to see the murkier the picture gets, like the particles of the microcosm: the more you know of their position, the less you know of their direction. At the end of the briefing, just before we go home to get some rest, Ermis is looking at me with his salacious smile.

“Do you know how many premnemons it takes to change a lamp?”

“No.”

“Premnemons don’t get burnt lamps.”

At night I get online and earn a few microbitcoins. It’s safer than actual money and less traceable. I must go to bed early, be on my best game for the mission, but I find it hard. More and more, my sleep depends on pills. A side effect of the job, some colleagues suggest. Not unthinkable. I’ve seen a bunch of weird stuff since I got hired. Like the cat rumor, a wild theory which I keep hearing. That they are the only animals who have premnesia just like us, that this is why they seem to have nine lives, that they always know how to get away and choose their future. No one admits to believing in it, but almost everyone has a cat at home. I’m the exception. Even if the story is true, it just confirms my opinion that these beasts are selfish bastards. They know the future and say nothing, leaving us at each other’s throats, totally indifferent. They only care about eating and strolling around. Black cats are the only exception; they show up before disaster strikes to warn you, even if you never take them seriously.

I take two pills, lie down, and dream of cats looking down at earth from afar, meowing threateningly.

The next day, I get to work early. We equip ourselves, mostly handguns and Geiger counters, and set off for the rendezvous point. Ermis is always the calmer of the two in these cases. He smokes scented cigarettes, listens to heavy metal music on his headphones, and lounges in the seat beside me as if he were going on a trip. I’ve never felt fine with the bulletproof vest on and the Berretta nesting in the holster. This is supposed to go down smoothly. We meet the guy with the bomb, scan it with a handheld Geiger counter to make sure they’re not tricking us, hand him the suitcase filled with money and then handcuff him as he takes it. We’ve done it before, and everything has always gone according to plan. And yet I’ve never managed to go with the flow, to relax in my seat like Ermis does. It might be me, it might be the drizzle that’s been falling since early morning, it might be the guy in the photo whom I’ve seen before yet can’t for the life of me remember.

The black Chevrolet is just where the signal says it should be, yet another car among thousands. I leave the blinkers on and look at the black car appear and disappear behind the droplets, just like a premnemon’s future. Ermis puts out his cigarette, takes off his headphones and checks his gun. We stay silent for a few seconds and then open both doors at the same time. Ermis stays motionless, weapon in hand, and I get the cash-laden suitcase and the Geiger counter from the trunk. I activate it; small crackles come out, cosmic radiation. I know the measurements by heart, but the best instruction is the one given to us by the head of Equipment: if the crackling sounds like oil frying in a pan, start running fast in the opposite direction.

We get close to the Chevrolet. Ermis plays it cool, I know he’s checking the future too, just like I do, but I don’t see many variations. The Chevrolet’s door swings open. The guys get out with the bomb in a suitcase, we sweep the Geiger over it, the crackling gets louder but does not reach dangerous levels, the casing is strong. All’s well. A black cat turns around the corner, I only catch a glimpse of its tail. I look at Ermis; he didn’t notice it. Stupid superstitions.

The Chevrolet door swings open. Two men in suits and sunglasses almost identical to ours get out. Fuck. Thanos. Now I remember. He was in one of my Orientations a year ago, yawning as if I were telling them the most boring thing in the entire world, and he left for good before taking the final tests. He was wearing a T-shirt depicting the villain playing solitaire. Does he remember me?

We exchange suitcases, Thanos is looking at us while the other guy makes sure the money is in the suitcase. I sweep the Geiger counter over their suitcase, hear the radiation grow stronger, see the ion counter increase on the screen. I pull the gun which I had stuck on the magnet on the back of the Geiger and lock it on the guys’ head. Ermis has taken out his own weapon. Not fast enough; Thanos is holding a weapon of his own, and he shoots. I shoot back and drop to the ground. A bullet grazes my back. I shoot blind, where I assume Thanos to be. He shoots back. Bullets ricochet on the parking lot walls, the echo bursts in my ears. I crawl toward the car through the rain puddles, inhaling the stench. Fuck. Something went wrong. I hear moaning, I don’t know if it’s Ermis or the guy I shot, but I dare not look. All I know is that a few meters away from me there are two blood-soaked men, a plutonium bomb and a premnemon pointing his gun at me. A fucking premnemon working for the other side. Fuck our leadership, we had no warning of this.

I’ve never fought a premnemon before. I close my eyes and concentrate on the déjà vu. I’m sure that somewhere over there, behind the fallen bodies, Thanos is doing the same thing. I must take him by surprise. I shift my position and hide behind the car near me. I walk carefully, in a semicircle, get right behind him, point the gun at his head and shoot. I shoot at his head, but he’s not there. He has shifted his position. He pounces on my right, gun at the ready. He shoots. But he hits nothing. I chose a different route, among the parked cars. I dive under the Chevrolet. I see his leg and plant a bullet there. I dive under the Chevrolet, he’s already there, his gun pointing at my face. I see his finger on the trigger. I take a deep breath, hear footsteps on my right, and feel the bullet going through my insides. The pain, tearing me up. The blood, flowing. I take a deep breath, hear footsteps on my right, no time to turn, and feel the bullet going through my insides. The pain, tearing me up. The blood, flowing. My breath, stopping. The same thing over and over. I shoot, he shoots. I get him, he gets me. I die. He dies too. One time, two times, ten times, a thousand times. The Loop. This is it. We created a loop of infinite options, but nobody chooses, we are paralyzed in the face of death. The first to hesitate is gone, the other takes the advantage. A game of chess with two losers.

I am scared. Of staying trapped in the loop, of facing the future, of going mad before I die. I try other variations. To call for help, to run away, to shoot through the car. No dice. Whoever takes the first step, perishes. He ends up with a bullet in his head. I hear my name. Maybe Ermis is calling me. I hesitate. A crack appears on the horizon, as if the universe were torn in two. I get closer. Wrong. It gets closer, beckons me to look inside it, see what’s coming. The crack spreads, turns into a miniscule tsunami of fire coming toward me. The great attractor, the future, the inevitable future. I look at it, gulp it down, hear the scream. Is it mine or Thanos’s? He has definitely seen the future that awaits us. The game is rigged, we are the pawns, others make the decisions. How do you end a game of chess when everyone can predict every move? Only if the pawns move horizontally. Only if the move is illegal. A move that can’t be predicted.

I raise my hands in the air, get out from behind the car, and walk toward him. He shoots me between the eyes. I come out again, hands in the air, he shoots me again. I come out again. He hesitates. I approach with the gun held high, as if surrendering.

He comes out. Gun pointing at me.

“Will you kill me again?” I say.

“What do you want?”

“Did you see it? Did you see the fucking future?”

He won’t talk.

“Did you see the ruins? The children? The bodies rotting in the sun?”

He did. His eyes tell me so.

“What do you want us to do?” he asks.

“Hand me the bomb.”

He looks at me as if I just told him to detonate it. “Why, is your side any better?”

“No. But it’ll take some time.”

He smiles. Bitterly. “I remember you, pal,” he says. “Who are you trying to fool? We are both paperclips, hurtling toward the future.”

I look him in the eye. I can see his despair, as surely as he can see mine.

“But do you know what happens if you place millions of paperclips together?” I ask.

He looks at me. He doesn’t talk. We throw the guns at the same time. I pick the suitcase with the dirty bomb, he picks the one with the money. I prop Ermis up, he can barely stand. He’s bleeding, but he can crawl toward the car. I drop him in the backseat and hear the Chervolet speed away. I take a deep breath. I’m scared that the Loop didn’t close properly and I’m just seeing a possible future. Ermis’ groans ground me again. I speed up, really step on it. I call central to brief them and drive to the nearest hospital. They put Ermis on a gurney and they cart him to the ER. I walk beside him, as far as I can. He sighs.

“Hang in there,” I say.

“Did we get them?” he asks.

“They got away, but they left the bomb behind.”

“It’s something.”

No, Ermis. It’s nothing, but now is not the time for you to find that out.

“How did they get us?” he asks.

“One of them was a premnemon.”

“How do you know?” he asks.

I hesitate for a moment. One moment only.

“The Loop,” I say.

He looks at me in a haze and suddenly opens his mouth wide, as if he saw our most possible future, too.

“No shit,” he says. “It really exists?”

I nod. Two doctors come up and take the gurney.

“It’s going to be okay,” I say as they roll him away, but I don’t really believe it. Not for Ermis, for the rest of us. Back in the waiting room, I collapse on the blue plastic seats. I feel as If I’ve been walking around for ages, as if I’ve been through the heaviest illness. My eyes close. I open them abruptly. I try to shut them again. The crack is there, I look at it and it looks right back at me. I feel endless sadness but cannot for the life of me remember why. As if someone wiped the image I encountered and left only emotions behind. Perhaps a part of me stayed there, a part that keeps seeing what is coming and transmits its horror back to me.

I lift my hands in the air, come out from behind the car and walk toward him. He shoots me between the eyes.

I wake up.

I’ve been having the same dream for a week. A different ending every time. And every time I wake up drenched in sweat. The pills do nothing, at least those I’ve tried. The only thing that calms me down is getting up, getting dressed, hugging Mr. Jones, getting in the car and setting off. I don’t go to work; I quit. They didn’t ask much, maybe they knew it was coming. For how long can you last once you’ve been in the Loop? They might have had to put me out to pasture themselves. In the interview with the Agency psychologist I didn’t do all that well.

I got a cat, too. I didn’t buy it, I found it in the car when I was leaving the hospital. Black as coal, it might be the one who turned around the corner when we went to pick up the bomb. I still don’t believe the rumors of their déjà vu, but even if I did, I finally realize why they say nothing about the future, the upcoming Armageddon. It’s not that they don’t want to tell us. We are the ones who don’t want to listen. Because, if we listen, we will then have to do something. At least, that’s what I do now. Nothing spectacular, to be honest. I just don’t follow the rules. I’m the pawn that moves diagonally and takes directly, the one who does what it wants and not what it is told to do. The future is an all-powerful magnet but if I learned anything while studying physics it’s that forces come in pairs. As much as the magnet pulls at the paperclip, the paperclip pulls back. Sometimes I think I’m on my own, an ant carrying an impossible load.

And yet, I might have company, other premnemons that fell in the Loop, saw the horrible future and decided to do something about it. Like Letta, or the plutonium bomb guy. Or even regular people; no need for déjà vu to know everything’s going straight to hell, just simple reason, the most underestimated force of all if I may say so. If millions of paperclips come together, then they won’t get stuck to the magnet, they will bring it toward them. That’s physics for you.

I get to Parnetha, enter the casino and sit at the blackjack table. Mr. Jones purrs in my arms. I don’t hate cats anymore, or the future that won’t change. Of course, this brought arrogant croupiers to the top of the list. I’m neither a bad man, nor a sadist, but tell me honestly: if the other guy has the posture of a Pope and waits to see what you’ll do with your seventeen, what are your options? As I see it, you can only ask for another card, get a four, and smile.

“I wish I could do that too,” I hear a voice behind me.

“Don’t be so sure,” I say, “but if you’re thinking of taking it seriously, it’s better to get a cat.”