The HEJERA PLOTby Y. I. Hy (C) The Hayut Foundation, P.O.B. 8115, Jerusalem 91080, Israel.
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1.1 In the beginning
In the beginning
Logi-Loony's name came up when the President and his
advisers were despairing of new peace initiatives for the Middle East. No
chemistry formed between the parties, Prime Minister Begin was gripped by
fears of holocaust, and any proposed basic solutions got more acid reactions
in reply; and any proposal seemed to Begin as endangering the Jewish people
and courting disaster.
The president thenmade a break in the talks so that his problem -solvers
could come up with some really radical solution to get things flowing. The
experts reviewed all the previous proposals ever made, and when they could
not find any ways for a breakthrough - they put the computers to search all
the catalogs of publications in the various sciences - for any article that
mentions the Middle East (the M.E.) and which offers a hold on Begin's
outlandish world view.
It was these computers that eventually came up with the names of Logi-Loony
and of two articles he wrote on some cybernetic device called the HEJERA.
Although none of the experts thought earlier that an article in an obscure
journal of radio-astronomy or organic chemistry could possibly be relevant
to the matter at hand - yet the Arabists at the State Department were drawn
to the name "HEJERA", and the psychologists from the Department of Human
Resources were drawn to "Logi-Loony".
The two articles offered a practical response to a proposal published in a
Taiwan-based journal on Cybernetics and Policy (which, it was later
discovered, was owned and edited by the very same Logi-Loony). The author -
an Israeli called "Y.I. Hy" - proposed to build the "HEJERA " - an acronym
for "the HEavenly JERusalem Agency" - as "a man\-made flying saucer in which
the mentation of various ME leaders are raised", and which was to work in
conjunction with "MECCA ", an acronym for "the Middle-East Conflict C
omputation Automaton". The entire MECCA-HEJERA concept was rather complex
and shrouded in obfuscation. It was quite apparent that the author had no
idea of how the device could be built. But in his two papers Logi-Loony
suggested he could build it.
As little and strange as the information obtainable on HEJERA was, that on
Logi-Loony was even less and stranger. He apparently owned a Korean
university where he had not been seen since moving to Taiwan years before.
He was rumored to be the younger brother of the Rev. Sun Young Moon, whose
Unification Church claimed to unify Christianity with Taoism. Moon of course
refused to comment on the rumors, or on anything else for that matter.
What was found about Logi-Loony was that he wrote on every possible subject,
and many impossible ones; and that his papers were invariably published in
the professional journals in fields which had nothing to do with the
contents of his articles. The article in the journal of radio-astronomy
proposed the HEJERA as a communications and education satellite for the M.E.
The article in the journal of organic chemistry, however, titled
"Repercussions of the Zhabotinskii reaction", was mainly a psychological
portrait of Mena hem Begin, the Israeli premier (that is how the computers
picked this article up).
When the editor of the journal was contacted and asked why he had accepted
such an article for publication, he admitted that he was a Jew and had
accepted the article while drunkenly celebrating the Purim holiday (a
commemoration of the Jews of their redemption from an ancient plot to
annihilate them). The editor felt that the paper was enigmatically relevant
and that publishing it was a gratifying defiance of professional and
political bonds.
Another finding about Logi-Loony was that he must have been very rich; and
apparently also very greedy. The wealth came from royalties rights he had in
several companies producing electronic gadgets that were supposed to enhance
psychic abilities. All other facts about Logi-Loony's life remained shrouded
in mystery.
When Reagan's people tried calling Logi-Loony's Taiwan office, they were
told that he had left for Washington the previous day. Just as they were
putting down the phone in their secluded White-House operations center - a
strange and enigmatic man walked in unannounced, saying that he was
Logi-Loony, and that he presumed they would want to consult with him. He
also said that he could build the MECCA-HEJERA system without problem, but
the price he quoted \-- eighteen million dollars - certainly posed a problem
for the president's agents.
To their protestations that such a sum could not be allocated without the
knowledge of the Treasury and the House; which would jeopardize the needed
secrecy; Logi-Loony kept answering with a straight face that this is just
what a supersonic fighter costs, whereas his device would serve the cause of
peace more effectively. After some protracted horse-trading Logi-Loony set
his minimum price to "twice six hundred and thirteen ten-thousands of
dollars" for the job - which turned out surprisingly to be the entire
reserves of the Covert Operations budget.
Logi-Loony thus proceeded to organize a company called YRU Inc. (which he
explained as "Yerushalem Reconstruction Underwriters"). He hired dozens of
scholars to travel around the world recording everything ever supposed to
have been said by or about twelve people, no longer alive, whose names he
supplied.
He also hired many technicians to build the individual components of the
Automaton, which he assembled himself in great secrecy. When finished it was
a black-yet-translucent box shaped like a cube inside which was a polyhedral
star made of two crossed tetrahedrons touching the vortices of the cube.
When asked what its strange shape signified, Logi-Loony replied that its
shape was synthesized from those of the Ka'ba in Mecca and "the Dome in the
center of the Twelve-Gated City, the First of the Two Directions". One of
the Arabists from the State Department recognized the latter expression as
an ancient Muslim name for Jerusalem.
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1.2 When Logi-Loony told Reagan's peopleWhen Logi-Loony told Reagan's people that the system was ready, they assembled in a darkened room with the Automaton at its center. Logi-Loony touched one of the corners of the box. It then turned out that the smooth black surfaces of the box were actually display screens of some sort, for on each of the object's many surfaces short and well-known sentences, such as "Workers of all lands, unite!", "Allah is Most Great!", "If you will, this Legend would be real" and "I Am my Brother's Keeper", suddenly appeared. The sentences were written in points of light which reminded some of the Reaganites, outdoors men and Western-fans like the president himself, of stars shining in the night sky. When Logi-Loony touched one of the sentences - the whole picture changed: the sentence just touched appeared to be a sort of a centerpiece of a conversation, with a constellation of other sentences clustered around it, reminiscent of people in a conversation. Logi-Loony then pressed twice consecutively, all the sentences currently appearing on the facets of the MECCA disappeared at once, and in place of each, one saw the name of the person to whom the sentence was usually attributed; these twelve persons were: 1) the son of Adam known as "Cain" (and "Idris" in the Koran). 2) Abraham, the legendary patriarch of the Arabs and the Jews. 3) Ishmael, son of Abraham. 4) Rabbi Akiva, a chief author of the mishnah and Talmud. 5) The Apostle John, also known as Saint John of the Apocalypse 6) Augustine of Hippo, also called Saint Augustine. 7) Mohammed, the prophet of Islam. 8) Rabbi Isaac Luria, also called "the Holy Lion" of Safed. 9) Karl Marx, Ph.D., a social philosopher. 10) Theodore Herzl, D. Jur., journalist and play write. 11) Sigmund Freud, M.D., psychoanalyst. 12) Abraham Isaac HaCohen Kook, first Chief Rabbi of Palestine. Logi-Loony told Reagan's experts that these twelve could be viewed as "the founding fathers of the Heavenly Jerusalem", and he thus employed them in the device as the Advisory Board of the HEJERA. The president's people pointed out that neither Reagan nor Begin would be enthusiastic about a machine which spouted quotations from, say Marx, who expressly opposed heavenly utopias and religions in general. But Logi-Loony assuaged them that all expressions of the historical personages had even been radically modified to have coherence among the HEJERA board. Thus, for example, Marx' private confession to Engels "I am not a Marxist", had been un historically emphasized, as well as other expressions which portray him essentially as a penitent. The Americans also complained that the sum they had paid was an awful lot for a system of imaginary conversations among twelve famous people and one living interlocutor, but Logi-Loony insisted that the Automaton was much more than that, as they would soon see. He then touched the name of Freud as an example and a three-dimensional image of Freud's head appeared at the apex of a pyramid of laser beams radiating from the corners of the box. Logi-Loony then started conversing with the image of Freud, who proceeded to analyze the anal roots of miserliness. The Reaganites still complained that even with the dubbed motion-picture holography and natural-sounding conversation, the machine was still basically an ordinary computer. But the more they conversed with the various twelve figures, the more they were impressed that these figures often seemed to have "a sixth sense", even about the unexpressed associations of the person they were speaking to, and they were becoming convinced. Though Reagan's people had by this time stopped complaining - they still didn't understand how the MECCA-HEJERA system was going to soften what they privately called "Begin's constipation". Logi- Loony told them to simply give Begin the Automaton and show him how to operate it, with only one condition: that he keep his conversations and the existence of the whole system secret. On the last moment something so strange transpired that stunned the Reaganites. Logi-Loony said he would accompany the HEJERA to Jerusalem, this time - and this was the surprise - at no extra charge. Back to Contents of this article Main Contents of the Academy of Jerusalem Main Contents of the Cyber Library |