The story starts with the agent Tokyo lying on a table, naked and with the cerebrum open. It looks like he is in a room of a hospital with a doctor.
The doctor is telling him that he is dying and that their operatives are not getting along.
While the agent is fading, the doctor is presenting himself as Pyramid.
It’s the first and the last time they ever meet.
The doctor tells him that maybe he will meet old friends.
Then Tokyo starts explaining his memories.
His memories since he was a child and had some traumatic experiences that could have marked his personality, like his aunt, the dogs, etc. that could have influenced his fear of flying.
He also tells the reader his memories with Greta, since he met her on a plane to nowadays when we can see her in an end of the story. He explains how she was different from every women and how he fell in love with her little by little. On the other hand, he talks about the relations he had with other women, alhtough they were not important to him.
But his most important experiences are the ones related to his job, these are the ones in which the technicians who are exploring him are more interested. He explains his life since he was studying to be an agent of espionage in the training hall with his old tutor, to the different times he has risked his life in operatives; like the time he jumped from a balcony, for example; or the things he didn’t like to do, like going to the casino. He also tells us stories like the time he had to run away with a militar jeep.
But a very important fact in the story is his fear of flying that has limited his job many times in different airports, where great part of the novel is set. Due to this phobia he was incapable of taking a plane, so sometimes he couldn’t finish his work.
By the different endings of the story we can verify that he is being exposed to analyse his as if he was a rat of a laboratory, the technicians seem to want to deduce something useful from his experiences.