Free A Highly Unlikely Scenario, or a Neetsa Pizza Employee's Guide to Saving the World by Rachel Cantor

protocol? To see how he’d react in certain hypothetical, highly unlikely Scenarios? It could only be. And he’d failed! He’d talked with Milione for weeks—too late now to report the missing complaints, too late to report the unlikely Scenario for incorporation into improved optimal Listener algorithms!
    Leonard was in despair.
    When the phone bleated, he picked it up.
    This is not a pizza test, boychik, Isaac said. This is your very real life.
    I don’t know that. I don’t know that it’s not a test!
    Is your pizza people knowing the clapping song?
    Isaac began to sing.
    What do you want from me? Leonard shouted when the song was over. Leave me alone!
    This will never happen. You are chosen, you must know this. You show not so much curiosity for someone of your ability: have you investigated my identity?
    I don’t need to! You’re a crazy person in Marco’s loony bin and this is his idea of a joke. Tell him I hate him more than anything! Leonard shouted, and hung up.
    He went to the Brazen Head.
    â€œWho is Isaac the blind?” he typed. “Is he crazy? Is he blind? Does he know Marco Polo?” He chose the cartoon spaceship to take off with his query. It landed on several fields and cityscapes, abducting terrified infofile “passengers,” which it quickly probed, then discharged (via an escalator) into the brain of the Brazen Head, which responded thusly:
    â€œIsaac the Blind (1165?–1235?) was a leading Jewish scholar and Kabbalist in Provence, southern France. There is no indication that he was crazy, though the Brazen Head thinks his ideas were pretty out there. Yes, he was blind, though they say he could see into people’s souls. Whatever. He was something of a scold: he is famous for sending a letter to his followers, the rabbis of Gerona, and especially Rabbis Ezra and Azriel, in 1235 (more or less), reprimanding them for sharing mystical secrets with the hoi polloi (ho-hum). Like good boys, they shut up like he asked. He was dead twenty years by the time Marco Polo was born, which you’d know if you’d been listening. Ciao, baby!”
    Azriel? Hadn’t Isaac said something about Azriel?
    The Brazen Head belched and a tiny figure in a caftan escaped out its mouth, looked wildly around the screen, and ran off.
The grandmother of your grandsons
    The phone bleated again.
    Lenny, the man said, I need you to listen good. You need to quit this job and do as I say.
    Quit my job? Are you crazy? I prepared my whole life to be a Listener!
    You prepared many lifetimes to be a listener, which is why you gotta quit this job.
    Never! If I quit my job, I’ll never get it back. Neetsa Pizza doesn’t like traitors.
    Understand: there will be no more calls, already you answer your last call. Now you do as I say.
    Why? You have to tell me why!
    The world needs you.
    I can’t help the world: I never leave my White Room. I like it here.
    There can be no more White Room. Is time for you to meet her.
    Who? Isaac, you’re asking too much of me.
    Is time for you to meet the grandmother of your grandsons.
Signs and wonders
    Leonard hung up the phone. This Isaac whoever-he-was was too cruel. First he squeezed Leonard’s heart pretending to be his grandfather, the only person besides Felix who’d ever truly loved him, then he gave him a friend and took him away, and then hetook what was left of his heart, that very small bit of secret hope that maybe someday, somehow, someone who wasn’t a child might love him, and he squeezed that too! All the while pretending to be blind! Was Leonard so obvious? Could anyone see into his heart? The world was even scarier than he’d thought. He slumped to the floor and put his head into his hands.
    When the phone bleated again, Leonard ignored it. When it was silent, he picked it up and heard a sound like air that had been dead for centuries; it sent a chill down his spine, or maybe that was the