In 2040, Aydin completed his doctorate in particle physics and left the government dole at the age of twenty-eight. And though it pained his bitter mother, the first job he accepted as Dr. Demirci was with TÜBİTAK’s Defense Industries Research and Development Institute in Ankara, the SAGE. He told Leyla, Dilara, and himself that he was loyal to Turkey, not to its current Silverist government, and above all he would be loyal to his family. Aydin had plenty of options coming out of Iz Tech, but SAGE would pay the best. That proved especially beneficial with a baby on the way.
Azmi Demirci was born on New Year’s Day in 2041. He was healthy and perfect, an energetic child with bright blue eyes and an otherwise olive complexion, just like his father and grandfather. The task of raising him and his sister Safiye, born three years later, consumed Aydin and Dilara for years. They lived a comfortable life though they maintained the pretense of being good, pious Muslims. There were regular visits to the mosque even though he had rarely set foot in one before his late teens. Dilara wore a hijab around her head in public, but she had never bothered with one before the Reawakening. Aydin grew his dark beard so as not to stand out in a crowd, despite preferring to be clean-shaven. For a while, they decided they could live with such annoyances.
The problems began when Azmi entered school. His teachings were not quite what Aydin remembered from his own youth. From the time Azmi began his formal education, the head of his school was an imam. Recitations from the Quran were compulsory for every young student, and a thorough knowledge of the holy book and the hadiths was required by age eleven. Religious teachings saturated every subject other than math, and home-schooling was strictly forbidden. Aydin found himself fearful of what he should say to his own children. Admit to them that he and their mother were not themselves religious, that they were only putting on an appearance? Allow them to read through the ridiculous scripts at school, and when they came home, counter what their own teachers and books were saying? Tell them that they shouldn’t take their schooling literally, and that the Quran was just archaic nonsense rather than the sacred words of God? Tell their children such things when the kids were sure to repeat it to others?
Melik Saglam died in office in 2051, but the Silver Wolves had still not gone anywhere. Turkey continued to have free elections, but everyone inside the country and out knew that the opposition was only what the Silvers allowed to exist, guaranteed to lose every time. And as Aydin’s own children grew to be teenagers, they would come home in the afternoons and tell their parents what they had learned in school that day, and he could do nothing about their teachings without risking attention from the Cultural Police or worse. The media honored informing on disloyal or atheistic friends and family as patriotic. Perhaps Azmi and Safiye would be easier to speak to about such things when they were older and able to reason better, Aydin told himself. Especially Safiye, who seemed to have a good mind for science and logic.
Work kept Aydin going for years. His career as a SAGE physicist was far more stimulating than he had hoped for as a student. Ironically, SAGE had the Americans to thank for that. A research center in California reached a long-envisioned milestone in 2032: the advent of Blue Sphere, the first supercomputer able to improve upon its own capabilities. Dubbed a “singular artificial intelligence”, the SAI quickly gained an immense level of intelligence. In a remarkable display of restraint –due to fear as much as reason– the SAI’s developers limited its capabilities, confining the machine inside a Penning trap. The U.S. government then led the world in promoting the Eisen Plan, a treaty which enforced strict oversight of the few SAIs allowed to exist and thus regulating the tremendous advances they could create.
One of the first tasks given to the SAI was to download and analyze all particle physics data from CERN and other research centers, and to make recommendations for future testing. The result was nothing short of a new epoch of technology. Like the outpouring of transportation machines that followed the advents of steam power and the internal combustion engine, or the deluge of electronic technologies developed since the arrival of the computer age, the mid-21st Century saw a revolution in materials science. Advances in nanotechnology, robotics, energy production, ubiquitous computing, and climate control transformed the world as fast as the Eisen Plan allowed.
For the DA nations, wealthy enough to afford construction of a facility like Dirac Station, the new technology also included dramatic advances in spacecraft propulsion. This meant the alluring prospect of interstellar travel, but in the shorter term it meant economic access to the virgin territory of the solar system.
For the Hras al-M’umnyn nations, it meant being able to sustain an arms race and develop technologies which could give it a fair chance of defense if the second cold war ever turned hot. From its founding, the HM coalition found itself surrounded by adversaries. From the emergence of the Kinshasa Pact, to the enduring cultural tensions with Iran and Israel and India, and above all from the Democratic Alliance emerging as a successor to NATO, the intransigent leaders of the HM spent more than three decades bracing for war at every turn. Their support for pro-HM insurgencies in border nations like Nigeria, Iraq, and Kazakhstan only kept the tension in place. For Aydin and his colleagues it meant employment, both prestigious and prosperous.
Aydin’s work at SAGE nevertheless became more troubling as time went on. The line of reasoning he told himself as a younger man, that he was loyal to Turkey rather than its Silverist government, broke down year by year. The two concepts seemed more and more inseparable. Many of the projects he helped to develop, like the Hancer particle-beam system and the Kalkan electromagnetic projection shield, were technologies Turkey shared with the rest of the HM. They were arming the United Caliphate, Pakistan, Niger, Somalia, Afghanistan… all the allied nations whose social policies made Silverist Turkey seem almost liberal. It was at SAGE, through small talk with colleagues, occasional hints during a conversation, sometimes just an instinctual sense about another person, that he could detect others who felt the same unease about the theocracy they were living in.
Problems there came closer to the surface during the Black Sea Crisis in the summer of 2056, when the world braced for war like it had in October 1962. Aydin and a few like-minded colleagues spent some of their hushed conversations talking about how they might manage to get their families out of the country. Perhaps they could forge phony identity cards. Perhaps they could bribe the right customs official. Perhaps the rumors of a refugee system from Morocco into Spain were true – they could at least travel to Morocco on holiday without much problem. But Aydin never seriously considered any of the possibilities for himself or his family. His mother once looked into such options many years ago, and no doubt it would be even harder now than in the early days of the Reawakening, when there was still so much chaos.
Then one day his colleague Dilaver Karanci was not at work. Dilaver was twenty-four, a bright young engineer who spoke more eagerly and openly about leaving Turkey than any of the others in their circle of friends. Three days later, Aydin was told what had happened by his friend Ozker. Dilaver had gone to Antalya and paid a sympathetic fisherman to ride his boat out to sea, disguised as a deckhand. He then boarded a Greek trawler southeast of Rhodes. Dilaver was now in Athens, and he was talking like a parrot to Democratic Alliance military officers and scientists about what he and his former colleagues were working on.
Two days after that, all the employees of SAGE with a Secret-level clearance or higher were assembled in the compound’s auditorium. Entering the auditorium, the employees were greeted by the sight of a dozen well-armed Iron Wolves troops, the elite internal security service subordinate direct to the president, standing on either side of the stage. Their colonel stood in the middle. Once everyone was seated, the colonel spoke, a stern expression on his face and a sidearm holstered on his hip, and he informed the workers of what most already knew by then: that Dilaver Karanci was a traitor. Then he walked to the side of the stage and left the auditorium’s front wall scree
n to display a video for the employees to watch. It showed a middle-aged man and woman kneeling on the ground, their hands tied behind their backs. Through tears, they identified themselves for the camera as Yusuf and Ela Karanci, the parents of Dilaver. An Iron Wolves sergeant walked into view behind them, drew a pistol, and shot each of them in the back of the head. The entire video lasted twenty seconds. As the auditorium lights came up and the employees silently reminded themselves to breathe, the stern-looking colonel drew his sidearm from its holster and spoke again. “You are dismissed.”
None of Aydin’s colleagues talked about defecting again, not even in whispers.
Except Ozker Ozcan.
Known to everyone as Oz, Dr. Ozcan was as close to Aydin Demirci as anyone other than Dilara. Oz was heavyset and ebullient, a white-bearded grandfather who always treated everyone like a good friend. Aydin found it hard to believe that he was especially political. But Oz was the first one to broach the subject of Dilaver Karanci’s defection to Aydin, the very afternoon after they saw the video. Oz admitted that he was the one who arranged for Dilaver to meet the fisherman that transported him away to Greece, against Oz’s advice. But Dilaver was adamant, and he was also naïve.
What Oz wanted wasn’t defection, though. He spoke of insurrection. He claimed to have contacts elsewhere around Turkey who were quietly planning a coup. Certain wealthy men in the business community, other elite scientists, even a few key figures inside the military and intelligence services. And some of them, Oz said, had their own underground contacts in the Caliphate and even in some DA nations. They were the leaders of the Yedinci Ok: the Seventh Arrow. The Turkish underground. Oz wanted Aydin Demirci to join them.
Aydin was impressed that Oz had confided so much to him. Still, he told Oz thank you, but no. He cared too much about his wife and children to play the rebel.
Azmi graduated secondary school in 2059, and it was time for him to begin his requisite year of military service before his university studies. Aydin never had to deal with conscription; it was a policy begun when he was already in his mid-twenties. Well before Azmi reached conscription age, Aydin knew it no longer made much military sense. Wars were no longer fought with huge armies of shell-firing men and machines out on land. The age of massed ballistics had peaked a century ago. The world’s few conflicts were fought between precision weapons from the air, sea and space, or on land with small numbers of elite troops who had more in common with Japanese samurai or Ottoman Janissaries than with the waves of rifle-toting conscripts who fought the wars of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But for Silverist Turkey, conscription was a useful tool to reinforce political cohesion among their young men. It also helped the Silvers recruit new muscle for the security services, and it was a useful way to provide for the unending subjugation of Kurdish lands in the east. Azmi had options of joining the naval or air services for his duty, but the headstrong and ambitious boy chose the Army instead, against Aydin’s wishes.
Oz kept his offer open and occasionally whispered news from the Seventh Arrow, or the Arrows as he called them, about what was really happening in Turkey. True military spending was over double the reported levels. Most university student organizations were actually run by Cultural Police operatives to identify potential dissenters. Atrocities in occupied Kurdish lands. The torture and execution of suspected homosexuals and political subversives was common practice within Cultural Police detention centers. In Turkey alone, thousands of dissidents and undesirables a year were rounded up, many of them executed. Oz’s news went on and on.
By the late ‘50s, Dilara had to replace her hijabs with niqabs, and the teenaged Safiye, bright but docile, did not even have the prospects of attending an online university. Women were no longer accepted as students beyond age eighteen. The Silver Wolves were not letting their remodeled nation go the way of Iran, which had slowly liberalized their Shia theocracy in the decades after their 1979 revolution and eventually became an uncomfortable ally of the west. The Silvers were determined to do quite the opposite. But Oz never said what the Arrows were doing about any of it.
In 2060, eight months into Azmi’s Army service, he returned home on holiday leave beaming with an announcement for his family. He showed enough promise that a wonderful career path was opened for him. He would attend the International Islamic University in Istanbul with military sponsoring, and after graduation he would be an officer in the Army. And after six years of service in the Army, he would have the option of joining the Iron Wolves.
What began as a stern disapproval devolved into a bout of screaming at his son. It surprised Aydin as much as Azmi. No, he insisted to his son, you will not do any such thing. You will not be a puppet for the Silvers to control. Don’t you realize that we are living in tyranny, that it was the Cultural Police who probably killed your own grandfather? Do you not see that your government has poisoned your brain since the day you first set foot in a schoolhouse? Did you never come to realize, growing up the son of a scientist, that theocracy is absurd? You will be used to stifle the lives of your fellow Turks, and you will leave shame behind you once the Silver Wolves are finally gone. You will not do this, Aydin shouted. You will not even consider it.
Azmi was stunned, and then stunned at himself when he fought back against his father. He had always tried to be a dutiful son as instructed by his teachings, but he would not stand for this. The old man was a relic, he yelled, disloyal, a callow and aging academic who barely understood the world outside his laboratory. A hypocrite as well, spending decades working for SAGE. Azmi would do his duty in the Army and in the Iron Wolves, for Turkey and for God, and damn if Aydin was proud of him or not.
Aydin struck the first blow, slapping his son across the face without so much as a moment’s thought beforehand. He tried to strike a second blow when Azmi started hitting back. They were broken apart by a tearful Dilara and Safiye, though not before Azmi struck his mother with the back of his hand for daring to hit him. Then Azmi stormed out of the house and took a train back to his barracks, and Aydin did not speak to him again for six months.
But the next day, he did speak to Oz. Yes, Aydin decided, he did want to do what little he could for the Arrows. Demirci had not felt so emotional in all his life, not even when his father disappeared, but he told Oz that he had never thought so clearly before now. The Silvers stole his own son, and Azmi could turn Aydin over to the Cultural Police just for saying what he said. And his daughter Safiye was brilliant, a born scientist who would never be able to realize her potential. Despite Aydin and Dilara’s best efforts, Safiye could barely imagine that she might become anything other than a wife and mother. Yes, he told Oz, he wanted to fight back if he could. Oz introduced Demirci to a few Seventh Arrow contacts in Turkey’s scientific community, but nobody beyond that at first.
It was Oz who convinced Demirci to try and make up with his son, if only for the sake of appearances. Aydin convinced Azmi to come home during his first break from university, and he did not hesitate to apologize. He insisted that he was merely concerned for Azmi’s safety if the Army deployed him to the Kurdish lands or if ever there was a major war, and that he had contrived the rest as a way of trying to shock Azmi into changing his mind. Azmi told his father that he supposed he understood, and perhaps he’d understand better when he was a father himself one day. And that was all they spoke of it, a brief conversation before dinner. But Aydin was never quite sure if he believed his son.
In the summer of 2064, Oz brought Aydin with him to downtown Ankara, to meet his most important contact within the Seventh Arrow. In a hotel six blocks from where the mausoleum of Ataturk somehow still stood, in a room filled with other key figures of the Arrows, Aydin Demirci met General Devrim Candemir. Candemir was the new commanding officer of OKK, Turkey’s special forces. If there was ever to be a coup, the general was the Arrows’ best candidate to seize power. He was every bit as sharp and serious a leader as Demirci expected him to be, a man who spoke of both practical strategies and lo
fty ideals. He was a recognizable public hero as well, tasting fame three years earlier as the commander of the Tabriz raid in Iran.
But Candemir was secretly a Seventh Arrow member since well before then. As a young man he was still in the academy when the Silvers came to power, when his ears were ringing with concepts like duty and the secular principles upon which Ataturk’s Republic and its army had been founded. As his country descended further into piety and fascism, he saw senior military officers removed on suspicion of being too attached to the old ways. But Devrim Candemir was too young and inexperienced to be purged. He learned to do his duty and rise through the ranks without daring to attract attention as disloyal. Now a general, he knew every detail and potential weakness of the upper government and the military. Rumor within the Arrows was that he already had the backing of the Democratic Alliance to lead a provisional government.
If done right, a takeover could be disguised as a popular revolt provoked by the government rather than a coup from a few disaffected elites. The clique of Silverist leaders could be publicly discredited and Candemir installed as the head of a provisional government, until the Silvers were removed from all areas of power and Turkey returned to a democracy. But the Arrows would have four more years at most to pull off such a move with Candemir. In four years, General Candemir would reach the army’s mandatory retirement age.
Aydin returned to SAGE and began brainstorming ideas. The men he had met in Ankara, the “central committee” of the Seventh Arrow, had already proposed and rejected a few solutions. A junta led by Candemir wouldn’t work, not with most of the military loyal to the Silvers. A direct seizure of key people and buildings in Ankara would have no popular support, even if the Arrows had the manpower for it. They had members working as staffers in the Presidential Complex, but none in a position to plant the seeds of a scandal capable of bringing down the whole party.
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