Null States

by Malka Older

  * * *

  Voting opens at six A.M., and Ken is in the office with Amran and Minzhe, watching the initial flurry of ballots. The voting slows after seven, but the three of them stay in the heat-shielded office, watching the ballots trickle in and slicing the numbers across various demographics. Amran is tracking requests for technical assistance and deploying her team of stringers to help people connect. There’s another rush around eight, but it’s briefer, and by ten, Ken is bored. Malakal will be arriving at one with a crow for them to do a quick tour of the eleven DarFur centenals showing the tightest polls, but Ken is antsy now.

  “Let’s go for a walk,” he says.

  Amran looks up, eyes wide. “Now?”

  “Sure,” Ken says. “Why not? We don’t have to be here to follow the numbers. Besides, I’ve never seeing a voting station.” In most micro-democratic jurisdictions, people vote from their personal devices, from anywhere and at any time during voting hours. In DarFur, however, handheld ownership is well below universal, and Information has shipped in a number of specially configured handhelds for public voting. With explicit encouragement from the SVAT team, the centenal government added flags and banners to make the polling area more festive.

  “All right,” Amran says. “Let’s go.” Her gaze slides toward Minzhe and away again. He doesn’t bother looking up; he hasn’t left the compound since he got out of jail. As they leave, Ken notices Minzhe amplifying his projections: voting data in one, some slow-moving, dark-palette gameplay in the other.

  There are puddles on the sandy ground, so it must have rained earlier in the morning, but the heat has reasserted itself and the sky is cloudless. As they step through the gate, Ken’s antennae twitch and he jumps, but it’s just bird shit falling from the unsettled flock of storks making a racket in the giant tree.

  Ken has been to the market only twice since arriving, but even to him the number of people heading that direction is striking. “Do you think they’re all going to vote?” he asks Amran, watching three women walk past in toubs—pink, green, and indigo—that flash as they walk.

  “Maybe,” Amran says hopefully as they are passed by a group of men in dull-colored trousers and shirts, laughing at something.

  The crowd does get thicker as they approach the polling station in front of the centenal hall. Ken is accustomed to population density—he used to live in Tokyo, after all—but as the streets fill in around them, he starts to feel nervous. For one thing, he attracts a lot more attention here; he keeps catching people staring at him. His antennae are jumping constantly, so he turns them off.

  “Does this feel okay to you?” he asks Amran. Ken’s trying to keep his voice down, and she doesn’t seem to hear him, but the way she’s glancing around and behind her answers the question for him. They are now as close as they can get to the voting station; Ken can’t see it, but he can see the flags and behind them the top of the centenal hall. Someone jostles him, and he looks around, but the man is already looking away. The crowd doesn’t look angry but expectant: people are laughing, elbowing each other, or standing with their necks craned toward the center.

  “I think we should leave,” Amran says.

  “Don’t we need to document this or something?” Ken asks.

  Just then, there’s a roar of motion, and they’re pushed toward the front. “All right, let’s go,” he yells, but Amran has already turned and is trying to worm her way out through the pressing bodies. Fortunately, the crowd is not too deep, and after a short struggle, Ken emerges, disheveled but unharmed. “Did you hear that guy calling me 888 scum?” he asks Amran indignantly.

  “Look!” Amran says, and Ken turns back to the crowd in time to see the first rock fly through the air.

  * * *

  The more comfortable place to which Mishima and her interlocutor—Wu Jing, special advisor to the premier, according to the confirmed name card he sends her via 见闻网—decamp is a penthouse apartment overlooking the glowing lights of the city. From the glass wall, Mishima looks for the flicker of a refinery fire but can’t find one. She was offered a shower and a change of clothes, but she declines; she doesn’t want to stay here—or be beholden to Wu—any more than she has to. Besides, it was his tactics that put her in this bedraggled, smelly condition; let him face it.

  There is not much left to talk about. Mishima offers the contact details of the people who will set negotiations into motion, as well as those who will give it the sheen of importance by attending. “Of course,” she adds, “I will need assurance of my own safe-conduct out of here.”

  Wu waves his hands negligently. “Of course. You may leave tonight if you wish.” A young woman comes in with a tray of tumblers and bottles, and he serves himself and invites Mishima to do the same. “There is one other condition,” he adds as she pours.

  Mishima gives the servant time to get to the door, close it behind her. “And that is?”

  “You must front the negotiations for Information.”

  For a moment, she is flattered, thinking he’s misunderstood. “I can certainly be on the support team, but I’m not at the level to…”

  He is shaking his head, smiling. “No, you are the lead representative or China won’t take part.”

  The lead representative? “For status reasons, it’s important that the lead representative…”

  “You will be the lead representative, the most visible figure. You!” His forefinger stabs the air, then he leans back again and sips his drink. “You, with your real name, and your real face. Or we don’t talk.”

  And Mishima thought she was going to get out of this unscathed.

  * * *

  Between the time difference and the long day of voting, Roz doesn’t expect to hear about the DarFur election until late at night, and although she has to steel herself from checking in with Ken at several points during the day, she is surprised to get a call from him mid-afternoon.

  “Hi!” She walks away from the community meeting Laurent is leading. “How is the election going?”

  “Uh, fine. No clear result yet, although Fatima has a slight lead.”

  “It’s early,” Roz says after checking that they are only three hours into voting.

  “There has been an instance of, um, minor unrest.” Ken is not sure how to break this. It’s true it’s not exactly his fault, but he wishes it hadn’t happened on his watch.

  “Unrest?”

  “Well, kind of a riot.”

  “A riot?” Roz steps outside the meeting hall. “What caused it?”

  “Unclear.” Ken squirms. “I can’t believe how little Information infrastructure they have here; it’s really tough to get solid intel—”

  “Ken. What happened?”

  “There was a mob-like situation by the centenal hall. At the voting station. There have been some more rumors about 888. In retrospect, I might not have been the best person to send here.”

  Roz comes down on that instantly. “Ken. You are the best person to be there. I wouldn’t have picked you otherwise.” Well, best available person, anyway. But it still stands.

  “Right,” Ken says, only a little happier. “Also … I can’t be sure this has anything to do with it, but when I went to check on Abdul Gasig the other day, he said something about regretting it if we tried to hurt his chances…”

  “What?” Roz is trying to keep up. “You went to see Abdul Gasig? And he threatened you?”

  “Not specifically. I’m not positive it had anything to do with it.”

  “Can you send me the recording?” Roz does not have time for this, but she can’t let it go. Was the assassin in front of their noses the whole time? “What happened with the riot?”

  “The governor was trying to shut it down and he got a rock in the face—”

  “What?” Roz is standing up straight now, rigid and sparking, bloody images already forming behind her eyes.

  “They were throwing rocks, and one of them hit the governor in the eye. The clinic sent him to Nyala.”
/>   “Nyala—the hospital is in—”

  “The 888 centenal,” Ken finishes with a sigh. Like there weren’t enough problems.

  Roz doesn’t think Minzhe’s mother will take it out on the governor personally, but she doesn’t actually know Minzhe’s mother. “Ken, can you get a guard on him, or surveillance, or something?”

  “Already done,” Ken says, happy to have gotten something right.

  Roz wonders if she can ask, if the question gives her away, or if her voice will give her away, but it turns out she can’t not ask. “Is he all right?” His eye. She imagines it smashed, again and again.

  “It’s not life-threatening,” Ken says. “But they aren’t sure about his vision.”

  Something else, Roz tells herself, cover it up. “Who’s running the centenal now?”

  “He hadn’t appointed a deputy governor yet, but I was just at the centenal hall, and it looks like the finance manager is keeping things moving. People have quieted down. Most seem pretty upset that he was hurt; he’s not unpopular, so no one is making any trouble so far.”

  “I…” She doesn’t know what to do. “Do you need help? I can try to get back there if I can…”

  “No, no,” Ken says, mortified. “No, it’s fine. As I said, everything has calmed down. Besides, what’s going on there is so important! DarFur will be fine.”

  It’s not really DarFur that Roz is worried about.

  * * *

  Roz is looking for flights to Nyala before she’s even off the call with Ken. Suleyman needs her, and she has to go. If the flights had been bookable, she would have paid before she had time to think about it, but as soon as she decides to throw her career to the winds in a thoughtlessly romantic gesture, it becomes apparent that it is, in fact, impossible to leave the front. There are now only two commercial flights a day out of Urumqi, and they are overbooked for weeks and weeks ahead with desperate asylum seekers. She’s stuck here until Information decides to end the deployment or, as is looking more likely by the day, evacuate them.

  CHAPTER 36

  Roz is never sure how these things happen, but somehow the rumors about negotiations travel the hundreds of kilometers from Xi’an to Urumqi before they make it on to Information. She overhears refugees whispering about talks in the fair in the morning and discounts it, is asked about it by the waitress at her favorite restaurant over lunch and confirms that there is nothing on Information at noon, and sees a news alert at 1:24 P.M. How do people know? How could Information know faster?

  She doesn’t have time to trace the rumor nor to design algorithms to speed their ingestion. Roz and her team scramble into a frenzy of community discussion and explanations and the construction of a process to decide representation at the talks. The heavy overhang of fear has retreated, but the fighting hasn’t stopped yet; mortars pound the mountain range that night.

  None of this alleviates Roz’s need to get to DarFur; if anything, it exacerbates it. She had a flash of hope that Information would let her leave early, but it’s clear that even if the talks go as smoothly as can be imagined, the SVAT’s work in Urumqi will remain urgent for at least a week to come. Roz tries getting a ride to the negotiations and leaving from there, but she can’t find a good-enough excuse for her presence at the talks to get her travel approved on an official flight. She is beginning to think about hitchhiking down to Kunming to see if she can get a flight out of there when she gets a call from Minzhe.

  “I hear you’re trying to get to Nyala,” he says without preamble.

  “How did you—”

  “I might not be an 888 spy, but we do have plenty of them.” We, Roz notices. “My mother … appreciates how you supported me. There happens to be an 888 crow in Xinjiang that will be leaving for Harare later today. If you would like to be on it, a stop in Nyala can be arranged.”

  This is not what she does. She doesn’t leave her work, not for anything, and especially not an urgent job like this. She’s on the front lines of the biggest crisis of the year, maybe the decade. Her team needs her.

  But how much of that is hubris or misplaced masochism? They have agents here; they might need every one of them, but it’s unlikely that they need her specifically.

  But does Suleyman really need her?

  She thinks about staying. Staying feels okay.

  She tries to imagine not going to Suleyman if he does need her, and has to stop because she can’t bear it.

  “Thank you!” she whispers.

  “It’s okay,” Minzhe says. “I owed you. And—don’t feel too bad.” Roz waits, breath held. “This place. It gets to you. It gets into your blood.”

  Roz exhales. “Thank you,” she says again, louder this time. “Minzhe?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Why are you still there?”

  He fidgets. “There’s one of the militia members. I think he … might have a crush on me. Or maybe not. He … took my side when I was arrested.”

  Roz doesn’t know what to say. That certainly puts her own problems in perspective.

  Minzhe clears his throat. “It’s complicated. Don’t worry about it. But I want to clear my name, for him.”

  “Let me know if I can do anything to help,” Roz says.

  She can’t walk away without a word, especially from a job like this. Better to do it in person, she decides; harder, but it leaves less of a record. Laurent isn’t in the apartment, but they are required to keep their location trackers on at all times in emergency or pre-emergency situations. She finds him two streets over in his favorite Sichuan restaurant, slurping down some incredibly spicy tofu. “Hungry?” he asks when he sees her. “Have a seat.”

  But Roz doesn’t. She tells him she has to go, and it’s important, and he immediately says, “No problem, go! We’ll figure it out.”

  Roz thanks him, but she knows that he’s saying it because that’s what a team leader should say. She’s sure he’s going to make desperate, probably resentful calls for more assistance as soon as she’s out of sight. He’d certainly be entitled to that resentment.

  She gets her bag—since she never unpacked, there is very little packing to do—and follows Minzhe’s coordinates to the crow. They take her past the People’s Park and then up the white concrete external staircase of a moderate high-rise. It is windy in the desolate way of this city, and once she gets above the surrounding buildings, the mountains loom, wild and insistently close. The air is blue and heavy with portents. Despite herself, Roz wonders if it’s a setup, if Minzhe sent her into danger. There could be anything waiting for her on this rooftop, or nothing. Then she climbs up the last flight and sees the bumpy oblong craft humming there, a Chinese man in the background finishing a smoke.

  * * *

  The biggest hurdle is figuring out where to hold the negotiations. Everyone agrees from the start they will take place in an 888 centenal. Not only are they close enough to China that the Chinese will feel safe, with enough distance from China to be perceived as neutral, but companies in the 888 consortium still sell to both Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, although from what Mishima understands, supply chains are pretty torn up in the former. China initially argues for the 888 centenal in Darjeeling, probably to remind everyone about how their armies briefly overran the area twenty-five years ago, but 888, who spend every election cycle trying to persuade the voters that incident is distant history and their companies had nothing to do with China’s military overreach, flatly refuse. Eventually, the parties settle on Pokhara: remote, with facilities to offer the elite from each warring party a pleasant and ego-massaging boondoggle, and suitably neutral.

  Vera dug her nails in and screamed for Policy1st to have a seat at the table, and with Veena dropping hints to news compilers, Information finally gave in. The presence of the Mighty Vs means Gerardo is in attendance and Nougaz is not. The other top eight governments howled, naturally, and dropped spitebombs into the plazas and gossip sites wherever they could, until a determination was made that any government with troops committ
ed in Xinjiang should have representation at the talks. The hotels are full, the negotiating tables keep getting longer, and there is a sideshow of intergovernmental elbowing, but there is also a growing sense of critical mass. The largest players in micro-democracy are in the same room for something other than a debate; it might actually lead somewhere. Meanwhile, the Chinese delegates are planning a few extra days to enjoy the hot springs in the Annapurna range, although from what Mishima understands, no hiking will be involved: luxury crows, all the more coveted because of their rarity in China itself, have been hired.

  Mishima herself cares little for the surroundings, except to wish she could fade into them. She kept her hair black, hoping for that shred of anonymity, but in every vid she’s seen of the conference, she’s the one in perfect focus, as if there were a spotlight on her. Every morning, she has to march into the conference room at the head of the Information delegation, even though once they are inside, where the only feeds are closely guarded, Nejime takes the power seat at the table and Mishima hangs in the back. She knows her input would be listened to if she had any, but she’s still stunned by this punishment. Besides, there’s little doubt as to the outcome of the talks; she’s completed the task she was sent there to do.

  “Now what?” she asks Nejime, during a rare private moment in the older woman’s hotel room. They have been drinking—wine from some experimental Nepali vineyards—and despite the alcohol neutralizer Mishima is as close as she can get to showing how this has affected her.

  “We’ll see,” Nejime says, sounding not the least worried. And why should she be? It’s Mishima’s life, not hers. “We’ll see when this is over.”

  CHAPTER 37

  There is a glassed window in the wall of Suleyman’s room at the clinic, and Roz stares through it before going in. He is lying on the bed, and the eye she can see is closed, but it’s his injured eye, so she doesn’t know if he’s asleep or not. Nanobots, programmed in Juba based on the injury report and flown in, are invisibly at work under the translucent bandage, occasional twitches under his swollen eyelid the only sign of their progress. When she finally opens the door, he has to turn his head to see her. His face stays petrified for a moment, and then he holds out his hand.