Null States

by Malka Older

  Minzhe laughs, although not as happily this time. “She wouldn’t hesitate for a second.”

  “She might if it would put you in danger,” Ken suggests, but Minzhe is still shaking his head. “In any case, if she had, she would have used her name, right?”

  Minzhe thinks about that. “Probably. Unless there was something to gain from doing it anonymously. But I think the domestic benefit of having her name on it would outweigh anything else.”

  “And if she had put her name on it, Roz would have known that it was you. But she didn’t. She wasn’t sure. That’s why she asked me to check.”

  “I thought she just wanted the technical specs,” Minzhe says with something like a laugh. “So, you think someone else knew about it? And talked?” He thinks. “It’s true; it wasn’t exactly a locked-down secret. Hey, you want a drink?” Minzhe opens his backpack to pull out a couple of sealed plastic sachets of clear liquid.

  “Isn’t that illegal here?” Ken asks, wary of some kind of trap.

  “Technically, but lots of people drink. Besides, this is an Information compound; shouldn’t it count as an embassy or something?”

  Ken shrugs and sits down too, although it isn’t long before they’re both lying on their backs, looking up at the thick field of stars above them. “You see why this place is so great?” Minzhe asks dreamily.

  Ken isn’t sure he can completely agree, but lying on this warm roof in the dark is pleasant enough. “You know what we should do?” he says. “We should find the assassin. For Roz.” And for Mishima, really, because, as he can admit when he’s drunk enough, everything he does is to impress Mishima.

  “We should find the assassin for the widow,” Minzhe says. “And for the governor, and for all the citizens.” He drinks. “But yeah, also for Roz. She was pretty great, you know? I didn’t really thank her properly.”

  * * *

  Despite a mild hangover the next morning, Ken is still enthusiastic enough about finding the assassin to call Roz and ask where he should start looking.

  “Never mind that for now,” Roz tells him. She is stuffing her face with bread and goat—more goat!—on a brief and late lunch break. “Focus on the election, it’s”—when is it? She’s lost track of days—“the day after tomorrow, right?”

  “Don’t worry; we’ve got everything under control,” Ken says, exchanging a glance with Amran, who gives him a determined nod. “If you’ve got any ideas where to look for the assassin, we can put some time into it.”

  Roz hmphs but sends him her work file: the data on the feeds from Maryam, and all the permutations she’s tried on it. “But don’t get too distracted! The election is the important thing right now.”

  “Of course,” Ken says, thinking privately that finding the assassin would go a long way toward raising confidence in the election. He clears his throat. “How are you?” Ken isn’t sure what to say that will be sufficiently awed, supportive, and not jealous. The news compilers are going nuts over what they’re calling the standoff in Xinjiang, and he can’t help wishing he were there.

  “A little desperate,” Roz says. She manages to make it sound ironic and jaded, but even so, Ken is alarmed. He remembers how calm and flat-toned Roz was during the election fiasco. “Call me during the election, okay? As soon as you know how it’s going?” She cuts the call, shovels the last of the meat and puffy bread into her mouth, and nods to Nerol, who pays.

  Roz completely missed Ken’s envy. She is not following the news compilers, because she can’t bear their breathless excitement about what is the tragic and dreary reality of her daily life. They have no real recourse if the armies turn against them, and as they wait to be overrun or evacuated, they are supporting recent arrivals, striving to calm the population, and then spending the long nights smoothing data management wherever they can before repairing to a bar or a roof to drink. When their desultory talk touches on the current situation, it is almost always to ask what China will do.

  CHAPTER 33

  Mishima had expected that an autocratic nation-state outside the realm of Information and surrounded by micro-democratic centenals would lie outright to its citizens to keep them happy. What she finds is far more subtle and more familiar. China has its own version of Information, 见闻网. It is more top-down than Information while also oddly gossipy. Yes, there are topics that don’t show up at all or deviate from the more broadly accepted definition (looking up micro-democracy, for example, triggers an impressively academic barrage of snark and shade). Advertisements are all but unregulated; Mishima stares for thirty seconds at an advertisement selling ‘rejuvenating’ face cream, wondering how it is possible, until she remembers it doesn’t have to be. But most of the world’s knowledge is there. Current events are somewhat distorted (reminding her, with uncomfortable déjà vu, of the Information blackout two years ago), but what she misses more are external communications.

  If she can ignore how much she wants to talk to Ken and her yen for up-to-date intel, the day-to-day of her fake job is not bad. Granted, it’s not Singapore. The skies are gray with some mix of clouds or pollution (air quality readings are one of those taboo topics), and the weather is trending toward a cold winter, with Siberian winds chapping her fingers and blowing in sand from the Gobi. Her apartment is tiny and mostly made of plastic (synthetic fiber rugs, silicon dishware, slotted plastic bed and chairs), but—and she’s sure this is an incredible privilege offered to visiting elite—it is in a wonderful neighborhood. She’s not in the city center—most of that is heavily restricted—but between the first and second ring roads, not far from the Giant Wild Goose Pagoda and the Tang Paradise park. She walks to work every day on a road lined with adorable one- and two-story shops with sloping roofs, offering the wealthy everything from old-fashioned leather-bound notebooks (she buys one for Ken, who has something of a pen-and-paper fetish) to wicker furniture to charcoal braziers (now strictly decorative, as charcoal is illegal) to tai-shaped pancakes filled with chocolate (which Mishima eats for breakfast for a week before getting sick of them). At night, usually very late at night, on the way back, she stops for dinner, different establishments every night, nearly all of them delicious.

  It’s also not Switzerland. China maintains conduits to micro-democracy and its rich trade through 1China and 888; Mishima doesn’t see any classic cars like the Swiss cop’s. What is different is the public transportation: China strongly discourages private crows and tsubames, and doesn’t use public service crows either, relying instead on the massive infrastructure investments of the first half of the century. On Mishima’s scarce time off, she rides the maglev out to the end of every line and back, to get a sense for what she’s missing by living among the wealthy. She sees fields of towering tenements, clothes hung to dry on every balcony, and unrefurbished industrial estates with dirt roads and low concrete factories. The government is very vocal about the fact that the city is powered by a solar sail in the Gobi, and as far as Mishima can tell that is true at least for the center, but out on the edges she sees smokestacks, and once the endless dragon fire of what she believes is a refinery. Back in her neighborhood for the evening, she strolls a street of tiny art galleries, buying a few modest pieces to take back to Ken, then gets a massage. Thinking how much he would enjoy this makes her miss Ken more.

  Even the work situation is, if not enjoyable exactly, not unpleasant. The first difference she notices is that everyone works a lot. The offices are regularly buzzing until eleven or twelve at night, and nobody seems to take more than one day off over weekends. The second thing is that there are plenty of content designers here. These two pieces of data, put together, would send her into a panic if Mishima had such a mode; certainly, they suggest that they didn’t need an outsider to produce content. Fortunately, the projects the Chinese are manufacturing are fascinating enough to distract her from the uneasy sense of ground falling away beneath her feet.

  The massive floor where Mishima works is open-plan, and project teams are encouraged to set up
projections with slices of their work as partitions. Naturally, this became competitive. Finding her workspace means walking through a mutable labyrinth of glowing, humming, leaping plot points, expressed through cartoons, actors, the faceless avatars of storyboards, or scrolling ideographs, with images of their radicals shimmering behind them. It’s narrative disorder heaven, if somewhat risky for her sense of focus, and gives her a chance to peek at a lot of other projects.

  The largest is the virtual warriors project, for which ten thousand individual life stories are being scripted in tribute to the current head of state (whom they refer to as “determined leader”), as a modern take on the terra cotta army. Ten thousand people who never existed, imagined through every detail of their life: dazzling. Beyond that are a plethora of smaller endeavors: detailed reimaginings and re-reimaginings of every glorious period in Chinese history, which form the basis for an entire category of interactive series and vids; the backstories and shenanigans of the celebrities who star in these and the more modern dramas, all of which are entirely fictional; the more subtle (in plot; the production is still extravagant) opposition stories: the narratives that allow the resentful, the disenfranchised, the young to believe themselves part of a daring or devoted or punk-influenced resistance to the ruling powers. While picking up the premises and plot points of these is part of her mission, Mishima is careful not to look too closely at the technical details of the politically shaded projects: it is too easy to fall into that habit, and she doesn’t want the temptation when she’s back in her real life.

  Her own project area has shortcut images of China’s greatness all along the partitions: light shimmering off of rich brocade, ancient brick fortifications, young and attractive executives in paneled suits. On the inside, the projected walls are a deep indigo, blank until they are figuratively papered with ideas, to-do notes, storyboards, icons, and calendars. Mostly, though, the dark walls are used to screen bits of narrative.

  All of the story beads have already been constructed: episodes projecting China’s commercial greatness and hinting that no foreign company can consider itself a success until it has broken in here; sunny residential fantasies urging migration; action-adventures that masquerade as crowd entertainment while hinting at the insurmountable military power of the nation. There are narratives slated and ready to be shopped to Information-based news compilers if China joins in the K-stan conflict on the Kyrgyzstan side; if China joins on the Kazakhstan side; if China obliterates both of them; if China mediates a peace deal; if China stays aloof.

  Mishima’s job is to help them put the content blocks together in the ways that will be most effective for a foreign audience. How many beats between this twist and the dénouement? Is this surprising enough? Too surprising? Does the heroic sweep here work? And, occasionally, the detail work: will this joke be funny or offensive?

  It only takes a few days working in that hive, the glassy domed roof arching high above, for Mishima to understand that her position might not be a spy trap. Yes, China has plenty of content designers, but they are almost all Chinese content designers. Mishima is working on content for the outside world. That also explains why they went to Moliner. They might be risqué, but they have a reputation for ushering blockbusters across a wide range of different markets. Taking an algorithm from their procedures, Mishima suggests planning in minor tweaks for as many sub-markets as they can afford (in terms of time; money is almost as abundant here as at Information). It will mean hiring at least one more foreign content designer, and she lobbies for that, too: it will give her more time to address her other responsibilities, but also she wants her team to have another narrative designer on hand in case she has to suddenly disappear or is equally suddenly arrested for espionage.

  Because, despite the long days of work and the constant danger, Mishima has conceived an unusual affection for her team. The ten narrative developers assigned to her are young, hard-working, and curious about the world beyond their borders. Their questions start with a cautious patter of raindrops and build to a storm front: What place is she from? Has she been to many centenals? How many? Really? How does trade work? When two centenals disagree, who decides? Does Information really know everything? How do people choose whom to vote for?

  Mishima does her best to answer from the perspective of Chen Jun, less worldly than Mishima but much more experienced than these kids, and believing herself the last word in sophisticated. She tries to draw her examples from vids and series as much as possible, ideally from Moliner but occasionally from their competitors, and feels pleased that all the hours she has spent immersed in content finally have a use in the real world.

  After the second week, they send the most gregarious, Chu Lifen, to invite her out for drinks with them. They go not to one of the hyper-cool bars she has found along the walk home but to a restaurant with spill-proofed tables and prices a tenth of what Mishima has been paying. They eat bullfrog sautéed on an iron plate and a Sichuan-style fish not quite as good as the one Mishima had a week ago in Chengdu, and start with water chestnut juice before quickly moving on to hard alcohol. The questions get sillier and riskier.

  “Is it true that centenals are a way for people to segregate?” one shy young man asks halfway through the fourth bottle.

  “No…” Jun has no particular reason to want to defend Information, but she would probably feel some pride in her system. “No, most centenals are based on policy preferences or cultural practices, and almost all of them”—a slight exaggeration—“allow free immigration.”

  “I heard there are centenals that don’t allow black people,” another young man adds.

  “And others that don’t allow white people.”

  “Or Chinese people.”

  “There might be some places that end up like that.” Jun would probably be uncomfortable talking about this and proceed cautiously, so Mishima does too. “But if it’s an urban area, they’re going to come in contact with people from other centenals anyway.”

  “What do you do if you’re in the minority and the government you want isn’t elected for your centenal?”

  “You can always move,” Mishima points out, and offers them a pre-cooked story about how she moved a few blocks over when she got her job with Moliner to switch citizenship to a centenal with a more favorable tax structure. That garners her a few moments of stupefied silence.

  Mishima knows they are watching her. She is watching them, too. When they ordered the first bottle of baijiu, she excused herself to the rather smelly bathroom and inserted her alcohol neutralizer. She stays sober enough to remember everything but cultivates a sympathy buzz strong enough to enjoy joining in the impromptu singing of one of their flagship vid series’ theme songs.

  All of which is to say it’s not a bad gig, being a fêted foreign content designer in the capital of China. Not a bad gig, and tons of intel. Mishima could happily hover there in stealth mode for another two weeks if it were up to her. But the war in Central Asia is getting worse and closer to the centenals lying between it and China; she has to move on to diplomacy soon if this mission’s going to do any good. She starts asking around, subtly but not too subtly, about who in the narrative studios has connections to the ruling party.

  CHAPTER 34

  Roz is working the refugee fair when the electricity goes out. Most of the government delegations have backup power storage, so after the lights go out the projections hyping cheap domestic goods and exotic locales keep running; in a breath, the space goes from the bland vulgarity of a voter rally to the eeriness of an abandoned amusement park. In the flicker of the projections the assorted soldiers can be seen raising their weapons, finding formation, and then, as communications come through, filing out into the city, leaving the refugees and staff alone in the pavilion.

  Roz takes a deep breath. Some of the refugees are, sensibly enough, under tables already, but her first adrenalized thought was not mortar shelling but assassination attempt. Information is unaffected as long as they have the b
ackup power to access it and keep the relays running; she checks the grid status and sees that the whole city and part of the surrounding countryside are out. It’s not centenal-specific, then.

  “Roz, you okay?” Laurent’s voice over her earbud, calling in from the temporary campsite.

  “Sure,” she says, pleased she doesn’t sound quaky. “Some traumatic flashbacks going on here, though—we’re going to need to project an explanation fast.” She’s already working on the beginnings of it, a big friendly NO IMMEDIATE THREAT sign. “Do you have a cause yet?”

  “Not yet, but we can confirm that there is no direct shelling going on, no artillery close enough to hit us.”

  It takes forty-six minutes to confirm that a mortar hit the lines connecting to a hydropower station a hundred and fifty kilometers west in the mountains. Although data coming out of the null states is sketchy, analysts believe it was an error rather than a deliberate attack on the power grid of Urumqi.

  The situation calms quickly when explosions fail to materialize, but with governments reluctant to continue to use limited backup power on projections, the fair is shut down for the time being. Roz goes to help Laurent at the camp, but the work there has slowed down too. Shelter inflaters use too much power to be run off of backup electricity, so Laurent has been organizing a temporary common space for those who haven’t been assigned shelters yet. Fortunately there haven’t been many newcomers today, so it’s manageable, and Laurent tells her to go home and get some rest.

  Roz is briefly tempted to go back to the apartment and lie on the thin mattress with light streaming through the ineffectual curtains. Instead, she turns toward the nearest maglev station. The urban coalition apparently thinks the train is important enough to run on backup power, at least for now, and as she boards, Roz remembers a story she heard from some other city—Kunming?—that lost power after China’s breakup and pulled its trains along with a massive magnet on an oxcart. This train goes much faster than that, and after three stops, Roz gets off two centenals from where she started and walks a kilometer and a half, sweating under the sun, to the address in the file Mishima sent her.