As children, we’re told not to stare into the sun. This is common sense, of course, but there’s always a temptation to do so, if only to see how long one can look before being blinded. But Terry didn’t just stare into the sun; he threw himself into it. And death was his only destiny.
Poor Terry. Poor damned, deluded Terry. ■
The Revolution Will Not Be Refrigerated
Ian McDonald
When the despot finally fell, and the itchy process of nation-building was secured, his statue in Golden Rukh Square was smashed down by a tank and a monument to the revolution built in its place. Cast in bronze, it featured three domestic appliances: a satellite dish, a game console, and a refrigerator.
The Zabayeen find the refrigerator in the kitchen of the empty house. It has been shot six times. It is a modern and expensive fridge, of Chinese make: full height, double doors. The six bullet holes are an egregious affront to the burnished stainless-steel skin, but the Zabayeen can deal with that.
The Zabayeen were tipped off on Twitter about the empty house. It’s a good, strong upper-middle-class two-story villa, discreet behind its compound wall, with many airy verandas, in a good, discreet middle-class area. The kind of house that belongs to the kind of family that, because it is strong and upper class, can be tempted to speak too freely and too loudly.
The government troops have rammed the compound’s gates, smashed in the front door, and drawn a line of bullet holes around the walls of the living room. The Zabayeen find no blood, no evidence of massacre amid the shredded upholstery of the faux-leather sofas and the shot-up two-metre flat-screen (ay, a nice lift that would have been!), but they proceed carefully. There could be grenade traps, snipers, holdout family members with kitchen knives. They discover only the fridge. Inside, vacuum-packed meat and champagne. The Zabayeen take the meat but leave the champagne. They may be making a dollar, but they are also revolutionaries, and revolutionaries do not drink while the people are still unfree.
As they call the pickup to reverse into the compound, each of the scarf-masked Zabayeen feels a stab of shock as a voice suddenly speaks in the shot-up, dead house.
“Are you sure you want to eat that? Shall I show you your Memorable Photograph?”
The revolution began with an empty two-litre Diet Coke bottle falling toward a pair of shredder blades. The blades were set at the midpoint of a metal funnel and were powered by a two-stroke engine. Two hundred rpm; a blur; helicopter blades. The bottle struck the blades and shattered instantly into plastic flakes no bigger than a fingernail paring. The plastic snow slid down the funnel into sacks, which were taken three streets up in a battered, windowless Nissan pickup to the smelter. The melted plastic chips were then blown, like cotton candy, through a spinning drum into fibres. The baled fibres were taken away in another Nissan to be sold to make the kind of cheap fleece you get free with subscriptions to National Geographic.
The hopper of the spinning blades was on the ground floor of the house of Azamat Yerzhanev. Children picked through the piles of plastic bottles—their eyes are the keenest—and picked out waifs of metal. A different family group handled small scrap. Next to that house was a rag puller, tearing apart bales of discarded clothing, and two doors down the Nursultanevs had a similar hopper-shredder for cardboard and newsprint.
For generations the Zabayeen have worked the city, taking away its trash in handcarts and moped trucks and old smoking pickups, and recycled it with eighty percent efficiency. There’s community and pride among the Zabayeen; marriages and a career structure.
The revolution’s second part started with a loan from the International Monetary Fund. The country’s long-lived and enduring despot wanted to build a dam that would secure electrical power for generations. It would also give him the ability to turn off the taps to nations downstream, but this was not the point. His gas-rich country needed the electricity. It really did. Such loans always came with requirements to privatize and open the nation to international trade. This gave the despot pause, as many of his family members were in charge of state industries. But trash collection was easy and unregulated. It had never been an industry. The despot issued contracts for city trash services to a Swiss company and took his percentage.
The Swiss trucks swung out onto the streets of the city. They were beautifully branded, and the guys clinging to the back wore hi-viz tabards, protective gloves, and cute rubber boots. The despot’s citizens found them mildly ridiculous. They took the trash away in their big trucks to a purpose-built recycling depot on the edge of the city, by the expressway named after the despot’s brother. And they didn’t come back for a week.
The citizens said, What?
That’s the contract. Weekly trash collections. It’s more efficient.
We didn’t sign up for this! the citizens complained. How is that more efficient? The Zabayeen, they took it away every day and there was never any fuss. There are rats and worse in the streets. How is this better?
There were Twitter and Facebook campaigns. It made the state television news, which everyone knew meant it was effectively a dead issue. After three months the protest was on the verge of decaying into minor public irritation, like the buses and the price of bread, when someone had one of those bright ideas that turn middle-class complaint into revolution: The Zabayeen! Will no one think of the starving Zabayeen children?
The campaign featured the pictures of two Zabayeen metal-picker girls, looking up big-eyed into the camera. They were cute. They were poster kids. Within two days they were on posters, websites, T-shirts, and coffee mugs. Three days and the papers were clamoring to talk to the Zabayeen Sisters. They were the beautiful daughters of Azamat Yerzhanev, the bottle shredder. The picture had been ganked from the Flickr account of an economics student researching efficiencies in the informal sector. No way was Azamat Yerzhanev going to let his daughters be subjected to a string of impertinent and patronising questions from journalists and news reporters and political bloggers, so he answered for them. Quite by accident, Azamat Yerzhanev backed into being the voice of the dispossessed.
And that was the third part of the revolution.
Yes, they can talk, the hack-boy says.
The fridge stands in the street outside Rakhman the metal man’s house on Metal Street. His Zabayeen team sit on low stools to its right with glasses of tea, his daughters (three) to its left. Rakhman called the hack-boy when the preliminary dismantle revealed wiring and circuit boards that no honest working man’s domestic refrigerator should have. One wrong snipper-snip with the wire cutters could render it useless; worse (ay!), worthless. Zabayeen and hack-boys are not natural allies, but since the revolution many sleep together who would have held their noses before.
What do you need a talking fridge for?
It’s not so much that it talks, it’s that it’s connected. Online. Internet of things. Everything is smart these days and everything is connected.
Two sons and the oldest daughter nod at this.
So if you run out of stuff, the fridge will re-order it for you, the hack-boy says, plugging a USB cable into the fridge’s socket.
It asked us if we wanted to see our Memorable Photograph.
Well, duh, obviously not of you. Like if you had a weight problem, it could show a Memorable Photograph—either you at your fattest or the you you want to get back to, or maybe some movie star or underwear model—and either tell you off or give you some encouragement. Someone must have been on a diet.
No one says anything after that, because whoever the dieter is, weight gain is their smallest problem right now. Whether you are middle-class loudmouths like Fridge Family or working-class hero like Azamat Yerzhanev, if you vanish into Evdet jail, you will only see day again if the revolution succeeds.
Hack-boy plugs in his laptop and runs some code.
Only the militia could shoot so many bullets and not hit anything vital. I can delete all the dialogs if you’re thinking of selling it.
Who’s going to buy a
secondhand smart fridge right now? I’ll cannibalise it for parts.
Younger son chips in: Can you get football results on it?
Not. A. Problem, says hack-boy and taps keys.
Well, I might keep it, Rakhman says. Until afterwards. Do you want to stay for something to eat? We’re having meat.
The younger daughters are firing up the oil-barrel barbecue and hacking open the vacuum packs of lamb and Western-style beefsteaks.
The revolution proceeded routinely and according to the rules of networked 21st-century protest. On the revolutionary side: mistrust of ideology; absence of a political class; uncertain leadership; a loose affiliation of diverse interest groups. Young. Male. Unemployed. Occupy a large central open area. Communicate in real time through Twitter and other social media. A generally situationist approach: stunts and shows and declarations, not assaults on jails and heads on pikes. Calls for multiparty elections and a reduction in the price of bread. No one can argue with the price of bread.
On the government side (for the secret police read the rules too): There is a time to threaten force and a time to draw back from the threat of force. There is a time to permit Facebook and Twitter, and there is a time to shut them down. There is a time to confront mass demonstrations, and a time to pick off key players in targeted arrests. There is a time for show trials, and a time for quiet corpses in the canal and bullets in the ballpark. The government has mathematicians and analysts who know how to disrupt the kinds of networks on which social-media revolutions are based. Don’t plunge the country into destructive civil war. Don’t give the Westerners any chance to send in armed forces on the pretext of securing your hydrocarbon reserves. Don’t end up dead in a sewer pipe.
So there were camps in the central square under the great golden Rukh bird that was the symbol of the nation, with slogans painted on bedsheets and kids with T-shirts wrapped round their heads. Kids stood in the median strip of the highway named after the president’s brother-in-law, “Victory” V fingers pointed skyward. There were protest raps squirted on out MP3, and YouTube citizen-journalist posts, and as many blogs and tweets as there were pigeons in the air over the minarets of the Sapphire Mosque. And it ran true to script. Scene by scene, line by line. Revolution become stalemate. The people in Golden Rukh Square knew that the government could sit them out. This happened to the Westerners with their spook masks and their expensive tents. There’s a half-life to activism. The news cameras drifted away. Citizen-activists flaked from blog rolls like dead skin cells. They unfollowed, they defriended. As long as the gas flowed, no one needed do anything. The demands of the dispossessed trash collectors had been forgotten save for the iconic image of the Zabayeen Sisters and their bold, noble father.
Maybe the officer held a family grudge. Maybe one rock too many had rattled off the mesh screens of his armoured cop cruiser. Maybe he hadn’t received his kickback from the Zabayeen. Maybe he was just tired, sick death dog tired, and the hairline cracks in his soul joined up.
Whatever: he arrested (ay!) Azamat Yerzhanev.
And the city exploded.
The news corporation helicopters and remote camera drones caught the defining image: protesters gyring around the column in the centre of Golden Rukh Square, gyre within gyre, circle within circle, wheel within wheel. Commentators were careful not to draw too close an analogy with pilgrims performing the Tawaf around the Kaaba, but it was there to be seen, on a hundred news reports and a thousand white-boy mash-ups, some with jokey yakety-sax music.
The people united can never be defeated! shouted the tweets from Golden Rukh Square, which was sincere and obvious, and #Takeoutthetrash!, which was a pun that only worked in English, so most of the joke was lost on many of the Zabayeen, whom it appropriated; and, obvious but always effective, #freeAzamatYerzhanev.
The planet tweeted and retweeted as the wheel of people spun off from Golden Rukh Square, impelled with moral momentum.
What they couldn’t retweet, what they didn’t see, was where the phalanx of protesters met the lines of White Wolves, the government elite force. And broke, and ran, in volleys of automatic fire. They didn’t see the phone shots of bodies writhing in the streets, of men in blood-stained T-shirts dragged out of the firing line by friends, of an old imam waving a white handkerchief over his head as he tended to a convulsing youth. They didn’t see the shaky footage of men running as the White Wolves charged them.
They didn’t see and they didn’t hear because Golden Rukh Square was where the script was thrown away and the government took the entire country offline.
Hack-boy is at the door on Metal Street before he has had his boiled egg and yoghurt, and Zabayeen rise early. He’s offered tea. There is a new tang to the Metal Street perfume of smelting plastic, hot solder, and electric arcs. The smoke of burning vehicles leans over Zabayeen Town, fingers of a dark, hovering hand.
We’ve eaten all the meat, says Rakhman
It gave me the shits anyway, says hack-boy. What’s all the fuss about that beef anyway?
They drink tea, they joke, as people always have within the sound of gunfire.
Did you catch any of it? Rakhman asks.
I’ve more sense, says hack-boy. Then, in polite time, How important are those football results to you?
Well, no one’s getting anything right now. Why?
Only (and hack-boy ducks his head and twists his foot because he has never been any good at asking for things—he’s a class hinter, but asking is, well, needy) I could do something with a bit of it.
As long as it keeps my Coke cold, Rakhman says. Which bit?
The hacky bit.
The first two nodes on the FreedomFi network went online at 16:30 the day after the Rukh Square massacre. Its first upload was eighty-three seconds of jerky, grainy, overloaded, heart-stopping footage of the White Wolf charge. Within ten minutes it had 5,000 hits. By 18:30 the FreedomFi had gone down under a benign denial-of-service crash as people tried to connect. It was only two nodes, hooked up to a satphone, powered by the processor and wireless cards of a last-gen PlayStation and a smart fridge. By nightfall, there were eight nodes covering four square kilometres. By dawn, thirty-seven. Within two days FreedomFi had been joined by three other free wireless networks.
Refrigerator spoke to game console spoke to smart-car navigation system spoke to ex-military comms spoke to sat dish spoke to Tivo box spoke to coffeemaker spoke to mosque adhan spoke to SMS alert spoke to hacked-up old big-box PC spoke to last year’s tablet spoke to smartvertising (ay!) hoarding spoke to air-conditioning system.
Children worked the trash cities on the desert edges, beyond the furthest mall parking lot. Zabayeen teams raided the trash bags and junk that the middle classes (a real revolution! Ay!) had left out in the hope that the Swiss would take them away. Women’s fingers analysed, dismantled, sorted. Younger sons delivered bags of circuit boards and power units. Hack-girls and hack-boys soldered and coded and put things together.
Unholy! Haram! Wrong! An alliance of dirt-poor, shit-stupid rag-pickers and socially inadequate, over-educated technicians. And they expect to build a revolution, let alone a society. Outcasts! Traitors! Freaks!
The White Wolves closely followed the banning edicts, rushed through the Executive. But which among the thousands of satellite dishes in Metal Town, the refrigerators of Cardboard City, the disembowelled computers of Circuitville, was the traitor? They burned houses, they burned streets. They destroyed one node, ten nodes; the network survived. The network grew faster than its links could be disconnected. The government mathematicians had the theory, but they could not practice it. They did not know where to look.
By day six the FreeNet, built from an Internet of stuff, covered eighty percent of the main urban areas. Eleven million people had seen the White Wolves cave in the side of the helpful white-handkerchief-waving imam’s head with a steel bar.
And then all those smartly connected little domestic things reached out to their brothers.
Oh, but ev
eryone has a tale to tell at the President’s cabinet meeting.
The Police Minister’s toilet chided him about the deployment of the White Wolves.
The stereo in the Economy Minister’s blacked-out Mercedes would only play music by Rukh Square rapper MC Revo, intercut with podcasts from political cleric Erzhan Mukhmetkali.
The Justice Minister’s daughter’s tablet computer only showed grainy and cheaply edited feed from revolutionary Web channels.
The Gas Minister’s smartwear undershirt, designed to monitor his cardiac health, shouted slogans.
The smart treadmill in the Military Attache’s gym gave him six months of ever-increasing bread prices.
The Trade Minister’s smart coffeemaker showed him cell-phone footage of riot police, filming the filmers.
The Propaganda Minister’s wall-sized flat-screen would not switch away from foreign news coverage.
My radio alarm is singing revolutionary songs at me, the President says, standing before the fridge.
It’s the Internet of stuff, the President’s advisers say. When everything is smart and everything is connected, someone will try to hack it.
Targeted arrests should take care of it, the ministers say. A few judicious killings . . .
We’re laughingstocks, the advisers says. They can tell where we’re going to be before we even know it. They can communicate, regroup, and break up.
What do we do? asks the President. There is a terrible silence around the cabinet table.
We could, ventures the Justice Minister, we could release Azamat Yerzhanev. And cut the price of bread.
Who? Who defies the Executive, who snaps their fingers in the face of the despot? Who keeps online services running when the nation unplugs itself from the Internet and goes dark and silent? Who but the lowly, the forgotten, the shredders of bottles and the gatherers of metal, the pickers of wires and dismantlers of circuitry, the flensers and gutters and winnowers of techno-waste. The Zabayeen take those last-season mobile phones, those redundant computers, those obsolete wireless routers, those satellite dishes you can no longer afford since they put the subscriptions up again, and from them build a network, a wireless network, a network of networks that covers the city, the country, that can talk and transmit and share when the despot takes his entire nation offline. While the protesters camp and fling rocks and chant and wave flags under the outspread wings of the great golden Rukh, the Zabayeen build and solder and weld and code and link and hand out access codes to their own grey Internet. The Zabayeen Net, the one no one can shut down because it is everywhere and nowhere.
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