Deep State

by Walter Jon Williams

  The hunter-killer wedge hovered closer, and now Dagmar could read POLIS written on the fuselage of the craft.

  Lloyd spoke to the wedge operator in Turkish, and the machine oriented itself carefully, then raced forward.

  There was a sharp, blurry succession of images, too incoherent for even the fast image processors to make sense of. The horizon seemed to flip a couple times, and then the wedge’s guidance program took over, and suddenly it was sailing upright, apparently undamaged, through the sky.

  Lloyd punched a fist into the air.

  “Wedges rule!” he said—and then something caught his eye, and he pressed another image to enlarge it, succeeding just in time to catch an image of the broken police drone, one wing spinning in its slipstream, as it caromed off the roof of a stalled tram.

  We own the skies, Dagmar thought incredulously.

  The demo went on. More people kept joining, most carrying bouquets, some attracted by texting friends. A young woman, laughing at her own daring, ran up to the two police and handed them each a bouquet. The police politely accepted, and the girl ran back.

  “Like wow,” said Lincoln deliberately. “I just had a sixties flashback.”

  There was the hoot of a police siren, and another police officer on a motorcycle came weaving through the stalled traffic to join the two police. Dagmar guessed the officer on duty had arrived. He chatted with the two cops, then spoke into his lapel mike.

  “They’re mounting up,” Richard said. He pointed at the camera fixed at the Mustafa Kemal station. Police were leaving the station, piling into vehicles, motorcycles, and a bus. They wore riot gear, helmets and body armor and plastic shields. Automatic weapons were strapped across their chests.

  Dagmar shivered as memory stroked her spine with soft, cold fingers.

  Even before the coup, Turkish police had routinely used torture on suspects. “Usually just the ones they think are guilty,” Lincoln had said, with small comfort. Suddenly Dagmar felt a strong need to get everyone in the demo to safety.

  “Tuna, time to break it up,” Dagmar called. “Police coming up Mustafa Kemal.” She saw Tuna nod, then raise the megaphone to his lips and bellow orders. The people near him reacted.

  Tuna walked back onto the square, shouting. The singing faltered but then strengthened again as the people got the message and began to disperse.

  The signs and banners, and flowers and photos, were left behind, brilliant color against the rough gray stone of the square, beneath the big Turkish flag that flew before the university gate. There were pyramids of blossoms, photos of celebrities laid out in suggestive couplings, flowers that spelled out political messages, pictures of the junta defaced with mustaches and beards and devil horns, blooms that formed the Turkish star and crescent, serpents of flowers with human photo heads…

  The pushcart vendors, covered in flowers, stood amid the colorful debris with smiles on their faces. They’d done good business amid the holiday atmosphere.

  One of the advantages of the Beyazit Square location was that there were so many ways to leave the area. People could retreat back into the huge university complex or head across Ordu Road into an area filled with hotels and tourists, places where police might be reluctant to charge. They could go into the Beyazit Mosque that stood on the east side of the square. A few paces farther was the Grand Bazaar, with its maze of narrow streets and its hundreds of shops.

  Once they’d dropped their bouquets and photographs, the members of the crowd carried nothing that would mark them to the police, particularly if they dropped the hats and scarves and masks they’d used to shroud their identities.

  And Tuna—whom Dagmar had last seen hustling in the direction of the Grand Bazaar—would be clean once he broke the SIM card and dumped the phone in some convenient receptacle.

  He was a writer and translator. He lived in Istanbul. He had every excuse for being where he was.

  When the police finally fought their way through the traffic tangle, there were only a few pedestrians on the square, along with the flowers and photos and pushcart vendors.

  No demonstration, no riot, no reason for police to be there at all.

  Dagmar looked at Lincoln standing across the room, standing with a cup of coffee in his hand. He looked at her and silently mouthed a pair of words.

  Insanely fun.

  She nodded. Yes. It was. She bent over her keyboard.

  As soon as Tuna was safely away, she was busy supervising the viewing, editing, and distribution of the masses of video that had been collected during the demo. These were edited into ten- and fifteen-second clips for distribution to television outlets, while the rest was uploaded onto sites with names like downwiththedictators.org and restoretheconstitution.net. The videos were edited slightly, to make the crowd look bigger than it was or to blur images where faces were too recognizable.

  Most of the job, however, was out of her hands. The images and video taken by the demonstrators themselves would soon be everywhere, viewed on file-sharing and social-networking sites, sent from one phone to the next, used as wallpaper, submitted to media.

  No one had died. It was possible that no one would even be arrested.

  The proof-of-concept had proved itself.

  The concept showed that action against the government was possible, that it would be seen, and that it would be safe. It showed that you, too, could prank the government.

  You could make your overlords ridiculous. And all you’d need would be access to a computer, and a cell phone.

  They had promised to make the nation safe from people like you, but you could make them liars.

  The fact that the demo hadn’t, objectively speaking, accomplished anything was irrelevant. No buildings were occupied, no security agencies compromised; no centers of power were seized.

  All that would happen later.

  The next stage was to make the military government irrelevant. Not merely to congregate at but to occupy public spaces and public buildings and meanwhile flood all media channels with propaganda, urging everyone—the security forces in particular—to join them.

  That was the essence of the people power revolt—to walk away from the established government and set up your own, virtual government. If the majority of the population chose to recognize the virtual government rather than the traditional one, the generals would end up alone in their palace, trying to get someone to take their phone calls while their own televisions broadcast a message transmitted by their enemies. Recent history was loaded with examples, iconic moments in the transition of power: Enrile crossing EDSA from Camp Aguinaldo; Yeltsin standing atop a tank in front of the Russian White House; Ljubisav Ðokic´ charging the Belgrade broadcast station on his bulldozer; a crowd of Georgians, armed with nothing but roses, driving Eduard Shevardnadze from his own parliament building; Yuschenko taking the presidential oath in a half-deserted room in Ukraine…

  All moments when tyranny cracked.

  It wasn’t a question of whether the generals would use force to maintain their position. That was a given. They’d taken power through a coordinated series of assassinations of journalists, politicians, Christian missionaries, intellectuals, labor leaders, and Kurdish heroin dealers. Presumably they would not be overly disturbed if their tanks’ treads were dyed red by the crushed bodies of their enemies.

  But the tank drivers were another matter. They were vulnerable to propaganda, and more important, they were vulnerable to their own humanity. Once the generals’ instruments of power refused their orders, the generals were finished.

  In the Philippines, in Serbia, in Georgia and Ukraine, the tank drivers had balked. In Iran and China and Burma, the tankers had obeyed orders.

  Dagmar looked around the room in a sudden surge of joy.

  We are like ourselves, she thought, and no one else.

  Within an hour, a bouquet of flowers and a photo of an anonymous seascape had been nailed to the wall of the ops room, just beneath Atatürk’s ferocious gaze.

&n
bsp; After everything had been collaged together, the demo would be re-created in an augmented reality environment. People could go to Beyazit Square, now or at any point in the future, and if they wore the right goggles or had the right app for their handheld or had the proper helmet with a heads-up display, they would see the demonstration superimposed on the environment. They could participate vicariously in the demo; they could walk through it as if it were actually happening in their present.

  They could lay flowers and photographs on the ground and photograph them and then upload them to the AR site, where the pictures would be added to the virtual environment.

  It was possible that more people would participate in the demo afterward than were present at the actual event.

  For years after the demo—perhaps forever—the AR of the demo would be available to anyone with the right equipment. People taking a picture of the university’s baroque gate would see an icon on their phone, or people scrolling along a map of Istanbul would see a symbol and click it, and instantly the demonstration would come to life, flowers and photos and bemused pushcart vendors.

  Perhaps they would know it as the moment that Turkey began its entry into the twenty-first century. Or perhaps it would be known as another moment of false hope before the advance was turned back.

  But in any case the monument was there, gleaming in the electronic world that lives alongside your own, eternal and evolving, and whatever the Bozbeyli regime did, they could not erase it.

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  There was a grinding sound as the sea came over the shingle, the sound of thousands of small stones tumbling. The sea reached for Dagmar’s sandals with foam fingers, failed, withdrew. Stone rattled again on stone. The air tasted of iodine and salt.

  “And there,” said Ismet, pointing, “the goddess was born.”

  White clouds tumbled on the horizon. A great ruddy rock reared up above the shingle beach, ran to the water’s edge, then fell to the sea. Just offshore was a pair of huge stones, one large and craggy, one smaller and phallic. Maybe there had only been one giant rock on the day when Paphian Aphrodite had risen from the foam, here where the foam after many ages still, perpetually, anointed her birthplace.

  There were only a few people on the beach, but they came in pairs. Even now Aphrodite attracted courting couples.

  Visions of the Botticelli Birth of Venus floated in Dagmar’s mind. The delicate Italian scene, seashell and Boreals, the welcoming nymph or goddess or whatever she was in her spangled dress, and the improbably long-necked Venus herself, draped in her own red-gold hair… all these imagined elements were too delicate to have actually taken place in this primal landscape, all sea and wind and stark stone.

  If a goddess ever landed here, a goddess shaped by this landscape, the ground would have shaken beneath her footfalls.

  “Aphrodite was worshiped here since at least 3800 BCE,” Ismet said. Dagmar considered the dates.

  “Aphrodite actually goes back that far?”

  “She had many names over the years,” he said. “The Cypriots just called her Wanassa—the Queen.”

  Dagmar turned to look at him. He stood farther up the shingle and was therefore a little taller than she; the Mediterranean gleamed in his sunglasses, stone and sea and white foam. He was dressed with care in a striped seersucker summer jacket. A little spot of sunburn glowed high on each cheek.

  “How do you know all this?” she said.

  He gave an embarrassed smile. “I looked it up in the guidebook on the shelf in the break room,” he said.

  “Ah,” she said. “So you don’t have hidden depths.”

  “Apparently not.” Politely.

  She turned back to the sea and imagined the goddess rising, sea sluicing off naked shoulders. A wave spattered Dagmar’s toes with chill water.

  “Tell me more,” she said.

  “The goddess was worshiped till nearly modern times, centuries after the Christians officially suppressed the cult. Girls would come here, or to the ruins of the temple, and make offerings or anoint the goddess with olive oil, hoping for…” He hesitated. “Fertility, I suppose. There was a fourteenth-century Christian writer who complained that if you slept on the ground here, you arose… very lustful.”

  She smiled to herself. She rather liked Ismet’s shyness in sexual matters.

  “The statue survived all those centuries?” she asked.

  “The goddess was older than any statue. The Aphrodite worshiped here took the form of a cone-shaped rock. It’s in the museum in Lefkos¸a.” Giving the Turkish pronunciation of the capital city the Greeks called Lefkosia, a word that Franks like Dagmar mispronounced as “Nicosia.”

  Sea boomed on the great stone. A Royal Navy patrol boat ghosted on the edge of the horizon. She turned again to Ismet.

  “So Aphrodite was really a stone phallus?”

  He turned slightly away, still a little shy.

  “Apparently,” he said.

  “Wouldn’t you just know it?” she said, not exactly sure exactly what she meant.

  “Ancient coins show the cone beneath a crescent and star,” Ismet said. “Just like the ones on the Turkish flag.”

  The sea heaved, shifting tons of grating stone.

  The day after the demo in Istanbul was a day off for Dagmar’s crew. Tuna was flying in for a debriefing, and Rafet the dervish was en route to Antalya to set up the next action, which would take place the day after tomorrow.

  Most of the Lincoln Brigade had gone to the beach—not the beach here at Kouklia but the British beach on the aerodrome, as much a part of Merrie England as Brighton itself and kept free of waterborne terrorists by gray Royal Navy patrol craft, cutting back and forth on the horizon like metal sharks… Richard and Judy had expressed interest in Banana Boating, an entertainment in which they would straddle a giant yellow banana-shaped craft that would be pulled at a rollicking pace behind a speedboat.

  Dagmar had begged off riding the giant banana in favor of history and archaeology, and Ismet had offered to drive.

  Dagmar looked up and down the beach.

  “Only couples come here,” she said.

  “It seems so.”

  She stepped close to him. Ismet accepted her kiss with his usual courtly gravity. Dagmar couldn’t quite tell if he was enthusiastic or not, so she kissed him some more. Presently he grew more animated. His skin had a spicy scent of some exotic mixture of aromatic Eastern oils… They put their arms around each other and kissed for a long time.

  Dagmar plucked the handkerchief from his jacket pocket and dabbed her lips.

  “That was nice,” she said.

  “It was. Very.”

  “I’ve been thinking about doing this for a while now.”

  “So have I. But”—a ghost of a smile—“I’m just the employee. I couldn’t make the first move.”

  “No,” Dagmar said. “Sexual harassment is supposed to come from the boss.”

  She kissed him some more. Then there was a bang, and she jumped in his arms. She looked up wildly, saw and heard a battered blue Ford truck backfiring another cloud of blue smoke.

  “Christ,” she said, shuddering.

  Ismet stroked her back. “Just a truck,” he said. His lips sought hers.

  “This may not be a good idea,” she said, and slipped from his embrace.

  His face showed sudden concern and surprise.

  “You’re not suddenly worried about being my boss?”

  Surf boomed. Dagmar shook her head. His handkerchief was twisted between her fingers.

  “I have a bad history with men,” she said.

  �
��So it’s not that I’m Turkish? Or a Muslim?”

  “My last lover was murdered,” she said.

  His mouth opened, closed.

  “And an ex-lover was killed around the same time. And my two best friends. And—” Dagmar gestured at him with his own handkerchief.

  “You’re a spy, aren’t you?” she said. She gave a laugh, a little bubble of hysteria bursting from her lips. “You’re crossing the border into enemy territory in a couple days, and you could be caught or killed or beaten or put in prison…”

  Ismet reached her. She shuddered at the touch of his fingers on her arms.

  “I’m not a spy,” he said.

  “Right. You’re special ops.”

  “I’m a journalist. I’ll have reasons for being where I am, for asking questions, for being at a demonstration. Even if I’m arrested, there’ll be no reason to hold me.”

  “Try that line of argument with a bullet or a bomb,” she said savagely. “Bullets don’t much care about your reasons.”

  She had firsthand experience with bullets and bombs. And bludgeons. And other forms of death that lurked in humanity’s collective dark unconscious.

  Dagmar took off her shades and rubbed a hand across both eyes.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m just so completely not over it. What happened in LA.”

  “You said you wouldn’t talk about it.”

  “I am not talking about it,” Dagmar said.

  Ismet scrutinized her. “May I touch you?” he asked.

  She lifted her chin, stared defiantly out to sea as if she could see, just above the horizon, some hopeful star that she could follow. Instead she saw only the patrol boat, flashing a signal lamp at some shadowy craft over the horizon.

  “Yes,” she said. “Please.”

  His arms went around her. She wrapped herself in his embrace as if it were a blanket.

  “You’re not some kind of curse.” His voice came quiet to her ear. Warm breath moistened her neck. His myrrh scent flooded her senses.

  “You don’t kill men with your spell,” he said. “You’ve just been in some dark places, that’s all. Along with some of your friends.”