Deep State

by Walter Jon Williams

  Banks seemed unable to entirely reconcile themselves to this business model.

  During the dry periods she’d kept the company going with her own money, paying herself back when she found a client. Until, earlier in the year, she had failed to find a client at all.

  In March she had fired eight of her friends. She would have fired the rest in April except that James Bond had come to her rescue.

  The new Bond movie, Stunrunner, would open in August. It was pretty much a remake of From Russia with Love, itself a film shot largely in Turkey—though instead of the maguffin being a Soviet coding machine that needed to be smuggled across the Balkans, it was Iranian nuclear secrets that needed to be got across Anatolia, with a climax filmed as a boat chase through the Basilica Cistern in Istanbul.

  James Bond would be played by a new actor—Ian Attila Gordon, a Scots pop star new to the business of acting. He was also the first Bond since Connery to speak with a Scots accent and the first with a visible tattoo, a large, colorful one on his neck that loomed above the wing collar of his tuxedo.

  The studio seemed a little nervous about the film, and about the Bond franchise in particular, which was suspected of being on the wane.

  At any rate, Dagmar was told that the studio would very much like a state-of-the-art viral-marketing campaign for the film and would like it to take place in Turkey, tracing Bond’s route across the country.

  “Turkey?” Dagmar had asked. “Isn’t Turkey like a military dictatorship now?”

  “The movie was shot before the coup,” Lincoln had explained. “And sad though the political situation may be, the studio would like its investment back.”

  And so would I, Dagmar thought, thinking of her savings that were on the brink of extinction, all eaten by her company.

  “I don’t have a good history with military governments,” she said. In a dark corner of her mind she could hear automatic weapons rattling, see bodies sprawled on the street, a great pillar of smoke that marked a massacre, roads lined with broken glass and burning autos.

  Lincoln gave her a mild look.

  “You handled yourself well,” he said.

  “I was scared spitless the whole time.”

  “This time,” said Lincoln, “you’ll have a whole posse to keep you out of trouble. I’ll be there myself.”

  The game, Dagmar considered, would bring some money to Turkey, of which the generals would no doubt get their share. But Dagmar could make sure the game wouldn’t have to support the generals in any other way.

  And she could make payroll. Her friends wouldn’t all be thrown out into the world.

  And all that was required was she pretended that a few generals didn’t exist. And, it had to be admitted, she already did that every day.

  “There’s never been a full-scale ARG in Turkey,” Lincoln said. “I expect it’ll be huge.”

  “Is there enough of an IT backbone in Turkey to run one of these?”

  “Turkey is supersaturated with IT,” Lincoln said. “They’re completely wired. A goodly percentage of the world’s hackers come from Turkey.”

  Lincoln Jennings worked for Bear Cat, a public relations company that represented the studio. Dagmar had met him before, but not under that name—she’d encountered only his online handle, which was “Chatsworth Osborne Jr.” He was a complete alternate reality geek—a dedicated player of ARGs himself—and now he had the budget to stage one himself.

  He was pretty well over the moon about it. This was some kind of long-buried dream for him.

  A six-week game in two languages, with live-action meet-ups in a foreign country? Dagmar charged Lincoln a lot. She had to pay herself all the money she’d loaned the company, she had to rehire as much staff as she could, and she had to have enough left over to survive the next dry period. She built escalator clauses into the contract, getting a bonus if more than the usual number of people actually signed up to play. During the course of her job, she’d be getting several checks, each for seven figures.

  The game she created took place around the margins of the movie’s action. Stunrunner had a straightforward script: a long series of encounters, some violent, some sexual, separated by chase scenes that took Bond through Turkey’s most iconic scenery, from Mount Ararat to the dome of the Blue Mosque. In Dagmar’s hands the story became much larger, sprawling out from the movie’s spare story line. She made use of the characters from the movie and added a couple dozen of her own, either on Bond’s team, the Iranians’, or members of a freelance group of mercenaries who wanted the Iranian secrets for their own reasons. She was tempted to make them SPECTRE but decided against it. The Bond films seemed to have forgotten about SPECTRE.

  The film’s Operation Stunrunner, in which Bond first was inserted into Iran, then made his thrilling escape, in Dagmar’s hands took on a far more Byzantine aspect, now not simply about the mullahs’ nuclear secrets but about security in the Strait of Hormuz, about the mercenary outfit’s attempt to hijack an oil tanker, and about Semiramis Orga’s attempt to establish herself as an opium smuggler.

  Semiramis Orga, by the way, was a character from the movie, the bad Bond girl who gets killed about a third of the way in. (The less bad Bond girl, the one converted to virtue by a night with Bond and who flew off with him in the end, was a Brit named Evelyn Modestbride.)

  Dagmar’s story was told in many different ways. Radio plays, short films, coded messages, comic strips, pictures with coded messages between the Photoshopped layers, sound files with text hidden in the code.

  Then, as if the story wasn’t complex enough, Dagmar broke it up into bits, fragments that would be hidden online on Web pages, buried in source code, sent in email, and even available in plain sight if you just knew where to look.

  Many of the game’s puzzles had a crossword theme. That was Dagmar’s idea, inspired by the notion that the answers—if they stuck very carefully to the Turkish setting and to elements of the Stunrunner story—would be the same no matter which language the clues were given in. Turkish, like English, was written in the Latin alphabet. She wouldn’t have to explain to players how the puzzles were supposed to work or cut across too many cross-cultural divides. Dagmar hired a crossword designer and signed her to nondisclosure agreements the length and complexity of which surprised her.

  It was the task of the players—ostensibly working to assist Bond’s front company, Universal Exports—to tease out the hidden history of Operation Stunrunner, to locate the fleeing Bond and help him escape from his enemies. In the early days of the game the players had kept running across an ad for the Mystery Tour, a twelve-day journey across Turkey, with absolutely no itinerary given.

  Within the game, there was a lot of hype given to the Mystery Tour. The players were always overhearing nonplayer characters talking about it.

  There was a certain amount of suspense about this game element. Everyone wondered if players would actually fly across an ocean on just a few weeks’ notice, all in order to get on a bus with absolutely no idea where it was going.

  Indeed they would. And they were joined by a lot of Turkish players who were deeply enthusiastic about such a large-scale game appearing in their country and in their own language.

  Even though the work schedule was still frantic and though there were two live events after this one, Dagmar had felt a giddy sense of relief ever since the Mystery Tour’s passenger manifest had topped two hundred and then kept growing till the buses were filled with nearly seven hundred people. Nearly 2 million others were participating online.

  The Mystery Tour players had witnessed a villain’s breathtaking helicopter escape past the great stone heads of Mount Nemrut. They had pursued clues through the canyons and spectacular stone chimneys of Cappadocia and tracked the killer of Semiramis Orga through the ruins of ancient Perge. Now they were hunting Bond through Ephesus while conferring online with others who were playing from their homes and offices.

  This was another freaking great triumph for Dagmar and Great Big Id
ea, is what this was.

  Give me a big enough budget, Dagmar thought, and I’ll convince millions of people that you’re cool.

  And how much, she asked herself rhetorically, is that worth?

  Lots, she thought. To certain people, anyway.

  Her thoughts froze at the sight of a pair of armed police. They were ambling along the tree-lined road toward Dagmar and Mehmet—paying them no attention, grinning and bantering with each other.

  But the machine pistols they carried weren’t banter. They were the voice of the new regime.

  Maybe, she thought, these two weren’t supporters of the generals. Maybe they were just ordinary cops, not fascists or murderers. Maybe they hated the new government, the new restrictions, the new gangster paramilitaries who were strutting in the sun of the generals’ protection.

  And maybe they didn’t. Maybe they were loathsome creeps who supported martial law and tortured suspects with cattle prods.

  The point was that Dagmar couldn’t know what they were, nor could anyone else. She had no choice but to be afraid. It was the only rational option.

  And the police would sense that. Even if they didn’t support the junta, they’d sense the fear and resentment of the population, and that would put the police and the people on different sides of a gulf that was going to get wider and wider as the situation went on.

  The first thing that totalitarianism did, she thought, was equalize suspicion among the whole population. Anyone could be a suspect; anyone could be an informer; anyone could be a killer, in or out of uniform.

  Mehmet protectively stepped in front of Dagmar as they walked, leaving the rest of the road to the police. The cops smiled and nodded as they passed, and Dagmar smiled and nodded back. She felt that they had to know that her gesture was clearly forced, clearly false.

  The police passed and went back to their own conversation.

  The tension trickled slowly out of Dagmar’s spine, the fear as it ebbed being replaced by anger.

  Damn it, she thought. This was a lovely country. It wasn’t fair that she had to be afraid of the people who ran it.

  Learned Chatter Scrambles Peen

  Alaydin says:

  6 Across. Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus Augustus_____________. WTF? Something after that?

  Classicist says:

  Imperator, maybe?

  Alaydin says:

  11 letters.

  Hippolyte says:

  “Ant Only Loses 1, Clips Her.”

  Desi says:

  Ant Only minus 1 is Antony. Was Mark Antony here?

  Corporal Carrot says:

  The Roman or the singer?

  Alaydin says:

  Elton J. was here.

  Corporal Carrot says:

  If you clip her, does that turn her into a he?

  Hippolyte says:

  7 ltrs.

  Classicist says:

  ARSINOE. Antony had Cleopatra’s sister Arsinoe IV murdered in Ephesus. Right in the Artemisium.

  Hippolyte says:

  Thanks! Artemisium answrs 5 dn, btw.

  Burçak says:

  omg! 6 across! mithridates!

  Classicist says:

  How do you know?

  Hippolyte says:

  I’m standing right next to B’cak and looking at it. C Julius Caesar Octavianus Augustus Mithridates. Inscribed on the biggest gate in town!

  Classicist says:

  There’s got to be a story behind that!

  ReVerb says:

  I’m standing next to a building marked “porneion.” Does that mean what I think it does?

  Hanseatic says:

  Hey! There’s a wreath on Arsinoe’s tomb! Semiramis Orga’s name is on the ribbon! I’m uploading a picture!

  Culinary Institute of America, Initially

  Dagmar and Mehmet walked through the gate of the ancient city into the parking lot, where tour buses and visitors’ cars were parked next to stands offering guidebooks, postcards, porcelain, soft drinks, Turkish delight, jewelry, apple tea, textiles, ice cream, hand-carved meerschaum pipes, brassware, and camel rides.

  Dagmar hadn’t yet seen a camel in Turkey that didn’t have a tourist on it. But then she was here on the wrong day for the camel fighting, apparently another local attraction.

  As Dagmar stepped into the parking lot she was immediately surrounded by hucksters offering their wares. Ten postcards one euro. Scarves genuine pashmina pashmina. Guidebook Ephesus, beautiful pictures. My place has everything but customers, please come in. Ten postcards one euro. Ten postcards one euro. Ten postcards…

  Dagmar smiled at them all politely but otherwise didn’t respond. Not even to the sign that offered, with unusual frankness, GENUINE FAKE WATCHES.

  One bus stood out from the others, with a telescoping antenna that towered as high as the nearby cypress trees. The antenna captured the live feed from Dagmar’s cameramen and relayed it to nearby Selçuk, where Lincoln’s technicians had installed a colossal IT structure that featured high-bandwidth connections to the Internet along with a satellite uplink. The rig provided many more baud than Dagmar would actually need, though she was grateful for the room to maneuver.

  Dagmar knocked on the door, and the bus driver, Feroz, opened the door with a hiss of hydraulics. Dagmar bounced up into the interior, happy to be liberated from the hucksters and their polite insistence that she buy their tourist crap. Mehmet came aboard, and Dagmar made way for him as she looked around at a mobile headquarters that would have done Ernst Stavro Blofeld proud.

  The side windows in the fore part of the bus had been blacked out. Flatscreens were everywhere, most of them carrying live feed from the cameras that were following the players around Ephesus. Others were turned to sites where gamers were meeting online and exchanging information, others to pages from the game that were due to receive updates.

  Another screen showed a site with the crossword puzzle, where Dagmar’s crossword designer Judy Strange was monitoring the players’ progress in solving her clues.

  “I thought they’d take forever on the one about Lysimachus,” she said as Dagmar looked over her shoulder. “They got that right away.”

  “Never underestimate their mastery of trivia,” Dagmar said.

  “No, I won’t,” said Judy. She was a short, intense woman with dark-rimmed glasses and abundant dark hair partially confined by a rhinestone-studded plastic tiara. A dozen semiprecious stones glittered on the piercings in each ear. She wore long sleeves to cover tattoos that ran down to her wrists—she and Dagmar had both judged that Turkey wasn’t really ready for a glimpse of Judy’s body art.

  Her body was craned forward to study the screen from just a few inches away. Judy wasn’t shortsighted, Dagmar had concluded, she was just overintense.

  “ ‘Imperator,’ ” she muttered. The players had just solved another one.

  Dagmar patted Judy’s shoulder, a coach encouraging a valuable player, and made her way toward the rear of the bus. On the way she paused by the cooler built into the aisle behind the side door and opened the lid. Briefly she contemplated a beer—drinking an Efes in the city, Ephesus, that had inspired its name would be a singularly appropriate thing. But she decided that a beer shortly after eight in the morning was degenerate behavior even for her and dutifully pulled out a plastic bottle of water. She went to the door that sealed off the rear third of the bus, knocked, and entered.

  The back of the bus had been transformed into a lounge/study for Dagmar and her senior project heads. There was a long central table and plush benches along the sides and back. And, because this was the sort of place it was, there were the flatscreens and keyboards, too.

  Lincoln sat on one of the benches, eating a honeyed pastry he’d bought from one of the vendors. He pointed vaguely at the screens.

  “It seems to be going well,” he said.

  “So far,” Dagmar said, crossing her fingers, “so good.”

  She had never bossed a game so logistically complex as this one, con
cluding as it did in a twelve-day tour of a foreign country, with six live events scheduled in six locations—unique in the annals of gaming, and something Dagmar hoped she’d never have to do again.

  Yet Ephesus was the fourth event, and so far nothing had gone wrong. If only fortune held through Ankara and Istanbul, she would dutifully give thanks to her long-overstretched luck and return, for a week’s vacation, to the beaches of Antalya.

  Dagmar opened the water bottle, took a long drink, and sat opposite Lincoln. Lincoln gave her a blissful grin, and Dagmar was reminded that while she was working, Lincoln was having the time of his life.

  Lincoln was, she supposed, in his sixties. He had a large, noble head, with graying hair worn over the tops of his ears and sideburns stretched halfway down his jaw. He wore metal-rimmed sunglasses that would have done credit to the face of Elvis.

  Dagmar supposed Lincoln had been quite a lad, back in the days of Disco Fever.

  He licked honey from his fingers.

  “How are plans for Ankara shaping up?” he asked.

  “Pretty well. Too much depends on how the players react to today’s update.” She took off her panama hat and ran her fingers through the hair that had gone gray while she was still a teenager.

  “Sometimes I hate our kind of synergy,” she said.

  “The synergy’s the coolest thing about it.”

  “I know.”

  “So you hate the coolest thing about the work you do.”

  Dagmar shrugged. “Who among us is not a mass of contradiction?” She looked at him narrowly. “You, for instance,” she added.