Null States

by Malka Older

  “Haven’t I seen you at headquarters?” Mishima asks.

  The person—Mishima is leaning toward female—blushes, splotches of color on a face that looks wan and distressed. “You mean the Heritage headquarters? Yes, I work there.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “I could ask you the same question.” The person’s resolve crumbles quickly. “Can I ask whose side you’re on?”

  Mishima wants to shake her/him, offer a warning. That’s not a serious question; it’s a plea for friendship, solidarity, and the sharing of confidences, all too easily taken advantage of. But she is here to take advantage, so she answers, “Not Halliday’s; I’ll tell you that.” She’s fairly sure that’s true, although she doubts it’s exactly what this person was asking.

  Of course it works. Her counterpart breathes out with relief and sags against the wall. “It’s a travesty, what she’s doing,” the person says, and then looks down as though that was the wrong word. “Tragedy, really” comes out in a lower voice, not far from tears.

  “I know!” Mishima agrees, with more force than necessary to try to keep the conversation productive. “I’m sure she’s breaking all sorts of laws. How did you find this place?”

  The person sniffs, and rubs the back of a hand under her/his nose. Then s/he unmutes her/his public Information and holds out a hand. “Syl.”

  The public Information tells Mishima it’s spelled with a y, and offers no clue as to sex or gender. Mishima decides the ambiguity is intentional and stops trying to figure it out. Because she is thinking in Japanese, she has little need for gendered pronouns in any case (“the person” sounds much more natural in that language), but figuratively speaking, she switches to the plural. “Kei,” she tells them. “I’m a consultant.” She lowers her voice and adds, “I was at the café the other night.” True, if misleading.

  Syl’s eyes widen, then fill, and they look away until they’re back under control. “I was supposed to be there. I should have been there, but I was late; I didn’t—” They bury their head in their hands. Mishima bites the insides of her cheeks and then reluctantly reaches out to rub the young person’s shoulders. She startles when she gets an alert from Lucien, the desk officer she’s been working with in Paris, but has to admit relief: Syl has been crying for two and a half minutes.

  “Sorry,” she tells the weeping person by her side. “I have to take this.” Not entirely true, since the alert wasn’t marked urgent, but Mishima has always had difficulty with so-called emotional productivity. She manages to open the door enough to squeeze out into the hallway without disturbing Syl and calls Lucien back.

  “What’s going on?”

  “We’ve made progress here,” Lucien says. “We may have enough intel for what we need to do.”

  “Enough intel?” Mishima asks. It’s not a concept she believes in. “What is it, exactly, that you need to do?”

  “You can start wrapping up in Geneva,” Lucien says, as if this is something Mishima will be happy about.

  “I’m in the middle of something,” Mishima says. “I’m going to need more time.”

  A hesitation on the line. Mishima knows that Lucien is primarily a coordinator, relaying data and decisions back and forth; he probably isn’t used to pushback. “Umm … We were thinking by tomorrow?”

  “End of the week,” Mishima answers.

  Another pause. “You see, mission priorities—”

  “—are decided in the field,” Mishima finishes. “There’s more work to be done here.”

  Lucien tries again. “The funding for this mission—”

  “Do you want me to move into a cheaper hotel?” Mishima snaps. She’s not used to dealing with budget line items, not from Information. “I’m in the middle of an operation. I’ll be in touch with further details in a few hours.” She switches off the call, takes a deep breath, and slips inside the micro-loft again.

  Syl has gotten themselves under control, which allows Mishima to justify stepping out like that. Maybe that was all they needed, a little time alone. She settles herself in, waits a few moments for intimacy to reestablish. “What’s going on?” she asks finally.

  Syl, who has clearly been waiting for the opportunity to unload on someone, tells her. They tell her about Si and Nat, Heritage mid-level strategist and techie, respectively (Mishima immediately identifies these as Silas Massey and Natalia Avellanera, whose faces stare from her memory even before she pulls up their files: both killed in the bombing). They worked against Halliday during the campaign for a head of state to replace Pressman. After Halliday won, Si and Nat and their crew were initially soothed by promises of continuity. (This reminds Mishima that all these factions belong to a government she actively dislikes, but hey, that’s what micro-democracy is for. To each her own.) Then Halliday started making her influence known. (Blinking behind her listening façade, Mishima pulls up data and cross-refs to confirm what she’s being told.)

  “That’s when secession talk started,” Syl goes on, gulping against their tears. “The council came up with it as a threat, but then people started to get excited about the idea. And Halliday—she didn’t want Pressman regaining power anyway, and she was pushing hard for secession no matter what Information did.” The word Information is bathed in a mild, unthinking scorn.

  “So, the anti-Halliday movement became an anti-secession movement?” Mishima suggests, when the pause lengthens.

  Syl nods. “But the bombing … we never thought she’d do something like that against her own, against Heritage citizens!” They raise their eyes to Kei’s, pleading for equal outrage.

  “How do you know it was Halliday?” Mishima asks, wary of assumptions from a traumatized survivor. Then again, Syl found this place. Mishima takes her eyes off her interlocutor to cast a quick glance around the depressing apartment.

  “Nat.” Syl has to pause to stifle another sob. Again, Mishima sees the smiling face frozen on the news compilers, and this time it fully hits her, blowing past her shield of urgency, and now she’s biting her cheeks not out of impatience, but to push back the tingle behind her eyes. “Nat set up some tracking systems on the head of state.”

  Mishima blinks in surprise. “She must have been good.”

  “She was!” Syl sniffs. “Halliday was very, very careful to set up an alibi for the time of the bombing.” Suggestive, Mishima thinks, but inconclusive. “We knew something was going on; we just never expected … So, I was supposed to follow her that night and figure it out before I met up with them.” Syl looks up, fierce. “I saw her face when they gave her the news about the bombing.” Probably when Syl found out about it too. Mishima can imagine her horror and fury. “She wasn’t surprised. She just … waited for them to tell her exactly who the victims were. And then she gave a little smile.”

  The two are silent for a moment.

  “Were you able to follow her communications?” Mishima asks when she estimates it’s been a decent interval. She’s worried the question sounds too pointed, but Syl brightens noticeably.

  “Comms were my job,” they say. “It didn’t help much; Halliday is very disciplined with her protocols, and of course I couldn’t monitor the Inner Channel—”

  “Inner Channel?”

  Syl blinks at Kei. “The Inner Channel. You know. The way they told your centenal about the secession plan?”

  “Oh,” Mishima says. Syl’s expression is incredulity, which is usually the one right before suspicion. “Oh, we call it the Deep Vein.” She cringes inwardly, but Syl seems to accept it.

  “We never managed to crack that; it’s a totally different system. But I figured out a way to at least track when Halliday received Inner Channel communications, and statistically they tend to strengthen her stance on secession, so we concluded”—Syl droops again—“that most centenals are in favor.”

  That seems doubtful. Mishima wonders if there’s any way to ask for the data without giving herself away, but is wary after her faux pas. And what is this Inner Cha
nnel? She imagines Halliday leaning toward the dangerous surface of a magic mirror, conferring with centenal governors around the world, and shakes it off.

  “So, how did you get here?” Mishima asks.

  “I was sort of … Nat’s backup. For the tracking systems. When I saw an unscheduled trip into the city, I followed her.” Syl’s eyes come up again. “I want proof.”

  “And you saw her,” Mishima says, putting together the yelled conversation she heard from the stairs.

  Syl slumps. “She said it doesn’t matter. No one will believe me and there’s nothing to tie her to anything. I don’t even know what she was doing here, what this place has to do with the bombing.”

  Mishima could tell her. “You were looking for evidence. There.” Mishima waves a hand back into the darkness of the loft.

  “I thought there had to be some reason why she came here. It’s such a risk. But I only caught them as they were going out. They either cleaned up the evidence already, or there was nothing useful in the first place.”

  Mishima spends the next hour crouched beside Syl, going through the detritus in the back of the apartment: disposable towels, a toothbrush, and traces of chemicals that can be combined in dangerous ways. Syl brought a DNA analysis kit: not as sophisticated as the one Mishima carries, but since she prefers not to explain where she got that, she reserves it for any inconclusive results on Syl’s, and none of those appear.

  As they work, Mishima puts together her theory: they expected the bomber to make it at least to ForzaItalia, maybe to safety. His death in Switzerland has left some questions; Switzerland may not have been forthcoming about the sequence of events, and they’re worried enough to come here and make sure no evidence was left behind. Odd that Halliday would come herself, but “Rolf,” the fixer, is already in the wind. Maybe she likes thinking of herself as a hands-on leader.

  Mishima wishes Syl good luck, gives her Kei’s contact details, and leaves before they can remember to ask any questions about her involvement in this. From the stairs (Syl is taking the elevator) Mishima calls the LesPro officer in charge of the bombing investigation to tip him off to the apartment. Maybe they’ll find something she didn’t.

  She is just pushing through the lobby doors when an urgent message sparks her nerves. Report to Paris at earliest convenience. Geneva Hub crow available for this purpose. It has Nougaz’s security signature, which means Mishima’s convenience has nothing to do with it. The Geneva Hub is on the way, so she stops to pick up the crow and moors it on top of her hotel. The message said nothing about whether she would be returning to Geneva, and Mishima packs the few items that are not already in her valise and checks out of the hotel before starting the short flight to Paris.

  CHAPTER 23

  With the debate over and the campaign running as smoothly as can be expected—all the candidates have gone back to their home jurisdictions, and the first polls after the debate show Fatima firmly in the lead—Roz returns her attention to the murder investigation. She pulls budget data from Djabal to confirm her suspicion on the infrastructure projects, but there are blank cells and other discrepancies in the forms that obscure where the money came from. It’s odd, because the technique is different for each of the budget lines she’s interested in, making it hard to trace. Either these are legitimate errors, although they seem too strategic to be that, or the fraud is far more sophisticated than she would expect from a spanking new government with no experience writing Information budgets. Roz sends a message to Djabal’s centenal governor asking for clarification and another to the Information desk officer in charge of financial support to the DarFur government.

  While she’s waiting for a response, Roz convinces Maria the campaign doesn’t require hourly poll updates and dragoons her into combing through feeds and records instead. She tells her to look for any evidence of foreigners with a grudge in any of the centenals the tsubame visited. It’s not a negligible number of people. Djabal, in particular, is something of a crossroads, and although it is earlier than their initial time frame, the period just after the election saw an influx of outsiders, looking both to migrate into the new system and to provide technical assistance of all kinds.

  The biggest problem, however, is not the number of individuals—it’s still very low by Roz’s data-crunching standards—but the fact that they don’t know what to look for.

  “Anything,” Roz tells Maria. “Anything strange. Anything that makes you pause. Anything at all.” A little later: “And let’s cross-ref through everything.”

  That gives Roz the idea to cross-reference with foreign visitors around the other suspicious deaths in Mishima’s file. It takes some time to put together, and while the search eliminates immigrants and regional travelers, a surprising number of the consulting firms appear on at least two of the lists.

  “I hadn’t realized assisting new governments was such a tightly linked industry,” Roz tells Maria.

  Maria shrugs. “Data is money.”

  They spend another three hours trying to nail down full itineraries for all the consultants that visited at least two of the centenals. It’s an impossible task, although for the opposite reason from most of the impossible tasks she’s had to handle in her career. Usually, Roz’s job is to find ways of searching through too much data; here, there is too little, and the whole proposition seems unformed and useless. How can she prove or disprove anything when so many places and times are invisible to them?

  “I don’t know how they manage here with so little Information infrastructure,” Roz says.

  “We do all right,” Maria answers, a hint of deprecating dryness in her tone. As if she’s referring to something Roz should know about.

  It takes Roz a few moments to work it out. When she says we, she’s not talking about herself and the other inhabitants of DarFur, so … Roz remembers the centenal number on Maria’s public Information and looks it up, but in the infinitesimal slice of time it takes to find the data she wants, she makes the connection. “You’re from Privacy=Freedom,” she says, raising her eyes from the projection to focus back on Maria’s waiting gaze.

  “I thought you knew.” Maria laughs, her pale face reddening. “I assume that’s the first thing anyone learns about me.”

  Privacy=Freedom, a radical Luddite government that prohibits feeds and electronic monitoring systems within its borders, holds only two centenals, one in California and one, where Roz has just learned Maria grew up, in Thailand. Roz remembers hearing that there is a substantial colony of Swedes there.

  No escaping the awkward now. “So, how do you do it? Not having any Information…” It’s hard to imagine, although this experience in DarFur is starting to get her close.

  “We do have journalists, you know,” Maria says. She sounds amused. “Everyone thinks we’re these extreme, anti-technology renegades. But we use all kinds of technology as long as it’s not invasive, and there’s nothing extreme about not wanting every moment of your life recorded from multiple angles.” That’s an exaggeration, but Roz keeps her mouth closed instead of saying so. “And it’s not like we’re not allowed to use content and Information from outside.” That does make it sound different, if creepy: Privacy=Freedom citizens spying on the rest of the micro-democratic world without letting them peep back.

  “Sure, but…” Roz thinks about everything she uses Information for, all the time. “If you’re driving, and you come to an intersection, how do you know what vehicles might be approaching from either side?”

  “Well, we try not to design blind intersections,” Maria says. “And we use mirrors.”

  Mirrors! Ingenious. “You must have found it much easier than we did when Information went out during the elections,” Roz says, trying to offer Maria’s odd cult some credit. “If you even noticed, that is.”

  “Of course we noticed.” Maria is frowning at the memory. “As I said, we do use Information from elsewhere, and we allow temporary feeds to be constructed during election periods, for vote monitoring. It w
as disturbing, although I suppose it didn’t disrupt our daily lives as much as it did in most places.”

  “And what about stuff like this?” Roz asks. “Criminal investigations?”

  “I guess you could say we do it the old-fashioned way? Ask around, look for physical evidence, um … I don’t know, really. Not my area of expertise.”

  “Mine either,” hmphs Roz, and gets back to work.

  * * *

  “Mishima.” Nougaz comes forward to greet her with bisous when Mishima walks into her office. “Nice to have you back in Paris.” A reminder that Nougaz tried to recruit her for this hub, is probably still trying. “You did great work in Geneva.”

  “Am I done there, then?” Mishima asks. She decides to pretend this is another consultancy job: no reason for her to care. Just do what she’s told.

  “We got what we needed,” Nougaz says. “Écoute: the secession is, or has become, a power play on the part of Halliday, right?”

  She’s pleased with herself, Mishima notes. “That’s certainly what it is for Halliday. The others may have thought they were doing it for Pressman. A few may even have believed it was the best move for the government. But Halliday’s not an ideologue.”

  “Yes, yes.” Nougaz waves her hand dismissively. “Thanks to your intel, we were able to open private-side negotiations with Halliday. She will close off any discussion of secession.”

  Mishima waits, but clearly she’s supposed to ask. “In exchange for?”

  Nougaz smiles. “Power.”

  This time, Mishima waits as long as it takes.

  “We will take the council off her hands,” Nougaz says. “Including Pressman.”

  Interesting. “So, we get the criminals we wanted…”