Null States

by Malka Older

  “Granted,” Roz says. “But they didn’t say privacy; they…”

  “Roz. Roz. They know, just as well as you do, that data is power. They’ve had higher authorities use it against them long before we came on the scene. Why should they trust Information when it tells them all the data will be made public? Why should they trust them not to take punitive action based on that data?”

  “So they use the vid money for infrastructure projects.” Roz has to admit it is hard to argue with.

  “Ballsy, though,” Maria comments. “What I’m wondering is how they covered it up so well. Nobody noticed until we were looking really hard for something else.”

  “Maybe,” Roz says. “Or maybe that’s exactly what we were looking for.”

  * * *

  When Mishima gets home, the Saigon apartment is empty. Ken is in DarFur, filling in for Roz, which seems like a pretty great career move for him. He sounded excited about it. Still, the apartment feels very quiet.

  On the way home, Mishima learned that she is now incredibly famous. She is a mystery, a superwoman, a geopolitical powerhouse, at least according to the covers of three vidlet mags she noticed while browsing in the Pokhara airport. The flight attendants’ mouths went O-shaped when they saw her. There are images of her walking through Xi’an neighborhoods pasted into the vid backgrounds for karaoke songs across Asia, diagrams of her face on the covers of Chinese-language anatomy and drawing textbooks, and her photo on the cover of at least five different, unrelated novels published in the last week. All that in addition to the news coverage of what she actually did.

  Glory and fame. And the definitive end of her career in espionage.

  She can imagine her old team in Xi’an working their usual overtime to find places to plant her image. She wonders if they think they’re doing her a favor, or if they understand it’s a punishment. She wonders which they’d prefer.

  She tries her usual tactic of narrative immersion, but the stories fall flat. Mishima is relatively well versed in psychology, and she’s aware that she’s experiencing a minor existential crisis. She has just lost a part of herself: her anonymity. She misses Ken.

  A news alert flashes, and Mishima perks up at the idea of something not about herself, but this particular item doesn’t help her mood. Halliday has surfaced in Guantanamo. As a tribute to (or, some say, an exploitation of) its carcelous past, a single-centenal government in Guantanamo has turned itself into an open prison for nonviolent international criminals, mostly corrupt or otherwise discredited politicians. They are automatically granted asylum within its borders, where they live in relative comfort and bring in a steady tourist trade of convict-watchers. It’s the last part that Mishima likes the least: these narcissistic megalomaniacs should be cut off from any kind of power or attention. People shouldn’t be allowed to come stare; that’s practically a reward for them. She huffs about that until she notices another alert about herself, a long-form profile titled The Mystery Woman of the K-stan Negotiations.

  She needs to work. Work and exercise. She puts on some music, loud, a stream of ’40s slide that is one of those lapses in taste she doesn’t even want Ken to know about, and dives into the first unfinished project she finds: the assassinations.

  CHAPTER 38

  The Shida Kartli region of what was once Georgia is now a patchwork of Georgian nationalist centenals mixed with a sprinkling of EuropeanUnion and, Roz learns on her way there, one lone outpost of USA!USA!, a tiny government popular mainly in Europe that claims to emulate the culture and values of the former superpower. (No one has ever been able to figure out whether they’re being ironic; even the citizens seem confused.)

  The bulk of the region has united into what is generally agreed to be one of the most successful conglomerations of centenals in the world. It’s particularly feted as an example of a smoothly functioning rural coalition, which is still far less common than urban ones. While it helps that the governments are broadly aligned in terms of foreign policy and political leanings, what really ties them together is the economics of agriculture in the late twenty-first century.

  None of this prepares Roz for Shida Kartli’s beauty. Maybe it’s the contrast with the austerity of the Sahel and the desperate hardscrabble feel of Xinjiang, but the spreading orchards backed with blue, sharp-edged mountains take her breath away. Along the older avenues of Gori, the hard edges of stone buildings are hazed over by pine trees and vined trellises. The food is a welcome change from Darfur: khachipuris and Borjomi water, even for quick working lunches.

  And all of the lunches are quick working lunches. Though the setting is idyllic, the situation might be even more depressing than in Xinjiang. At least the world is paying attention to the disastrous conflagration of the K-stan war and now even more avidly to the peace negotiations. Here, Roz listens to centenal after centenal explain how Russia pushes the borders in day by day. Tanks and soldiers come and tell people that the line between centenal and nation-state has moved, and therefore it has, whether it moves on the maps or not. Eventually, the maps always catch up. Sometimes, she visits the border itself, where tearful farmers and their sullen children who didn’t want to be farmers anyway point out indistinguishable plots of stolen land a kilometer or two away.

  Population numbers are changing little, which makes this an almost-invisible problem in terms of centenal elections and demographics: a smaller area with one hundred thousand people is still a centenal. For the people there it’s unmissable: the loss of livelihoods and living spaces is putting a burden on social services and the economy. Still, it’s the fact that she didn’t know this was happening that shocks Roz the most.

  As requested, she calls Suleyman when she gets there. Roz can feel her pulse speeding up as she waits for the connection. She’s not sure what to say, and she can imagine the long, dry pauses as he searches for something to tell her about lying in a hospital bed and she self-censors the technical details of her job. But his face lights up when he sees her, and Roz can feel the smile catching on her own lips. He tells her she’s beautiful, that he misses her, and he wants to know all about this new place she’s found herself. She finds she has a lot to say, and he listens. It’s easier to call him the next day, and the next. Roz isn’t sure whether it’s a good sign that their relationship is going so much better now that it’s entirely virtual, but she’s willing to concede that the circumstances weren’t ideal while they were in the same place.

  She’s still not ready to marry the man.

  She also calls Ken. She already knows from the news compilers that Fatima won the election, but they don’t give a lot of detail to a tiny election in a remote government, and she wants to know everything.

  “It went really well,” Ken tells her from Zeinab’s, where he and Minzhe have taken to breakfasting every morning. “The voting was smooth, no reports of any problems other than that one riot. Everyone accepted the count. And you know the best thing? Fatima is going to create a deputy head of state position and appoint the runner-up, Commander Hamid from the militia, as deputy governor.”

  “That setup would have saved some trouble last time,” Roz comments. She is still angry at Commander Hamid for the way Minzhe was treated, but she can see the benefits of the arrangement.

  “Everyone’s pleased,” Minzhe puts in over Ken’s shoulder. “We’re sticking around for a few days to make sure, but honestly, the biggest problem is figuring out the centenal governorship in Kas. You need to convince Suleyman that the riot wasn’t targeting him.”

  “Not my job,” Roz says, although it’s possible she’s already mentioned it to him.

  * * *

  Technically, the single Roma centenal that Roz visits on her third day in the Caucuses is outside the Shida Kartli economic zone consortium, but there have been two Russian incursions there in the last three months. This is the first centenal LomDream has ever won, and they only managed to scrape it out in the last election because their head of state, Lel Jaqeli, is a minor celebrity, havin
g won several singing competitions after retiring from life as a professional football player. Even with his fame, it’s remarkable that they were able to win with a platform based on Roma cultural rights, given how much prejudice still exists.

  The flight takes half an hour, and she can’t call Suleyman because he’s having his eye checked, which makes her bored and antsy, so she looks up the record of the election. It’s a former Heritage centenal, and the discrediting of the Supermajority helped LomDream eke out a win.

  It’s only as she scans through their post-election policies in the few minutes before landing that it hits her: LomDream is a populist minority government coming to power for the first time! And so, when she gets to the centenal hall, her first question is not about exclusion from the Shida Kartli economic conglomerate or even the Russian incursions but “Tell me about the consultants who have come here to support you.”

  The young man meeting with her—deputy to the undersecretary of music, economics, and security, or something of the sort—frowns and pulls away. Another centenal still getting used to having Information deeply involved in all their business, Roz suspects. “All our consultants have been Information-approved,” he says quickly.

  Roz reins in her frustration, considers his anxieties and interests, recalibrates her tone. “We’re not worried about anything you’ve done. We are researching possible incidents of…” She is tempted to say fraud to avoid overreaction but reminds herself that she is committed to transparency. “… violence carried out by consultants who apparently had Information validation. Obviously, we’d like to put a stop to that as soon as possible.”

  “Violence?” He’s suspicious still, eyebrows furrowed, arms folded.

  “Assassinations,” Roz says sweetly. “In fact, the first thing we should do is talk to your head of state’s security detail.”

  The young man laughs. “Security detail? The governor doesn’t need bodyguards. He’s his own security.”

  “Then we have to talk with him as soon as possible! Only”—Roz raises her hand—“tell him not to use any mechanical vehicle to get here!”

  Fortunately, Lel Jaqeli is close by, meeting with constituents in a hall down the street. The deputy undersecretary refuses to pull him out of the meeting. Waiting for a head of state brings exploding tsubame to mind, and Roz spends most of the thirty-six minutes pacing, but the governor is alive and fit when Roz is shown into a moderately secure room in the centenal hall for a meeting with him and his assistant. Neither the assistant undersecretary nor Jaqeli are thrilled to be told that the head of state should walk everywhere for the foreseeable future, accompanied by at least one security officer. While she was waiting, Roz prepared a montage of graphic images from the assassinations that have already occurred, and that quiets them down.

  “Now that I’ve got your attention,” Roz says as the assistant blinks up a schedule and starts cutting down travel for the next week, “what can you tell me about this group?” During the down time, she was also able to go through the list of consultants that has visited this centenal over the last year. It only took a few minutes for her to zero in on the likely candidates: DemoGreat sent no invoice and therefore no Information validation number. Their suspiciously vague expertise in “consumer advocacy promotion guidance” also seems like a clue.

  The assistant immediately gets flustered and covers it by searching through his Information for something, or pretending to, eyes blinking and rolling anywhere but to Roz. Jaqeli is much better at this game. “Let me think,” he says. “There were so many of them.”

  “They might not use vehicular homicide this time.” Roz wants to drive home the fact that the assassins are a greater threat than anything Information will do. “They could use poison, a bomb, sabotage the structural integrity of your home…”

  Lel makes up his mind. “They’re here now. They preferred to make this visit unlisted.”

  “What? Where?”

  “Right now?” Lel blinks a few times, bringing up a schedule. “They should be in the canteen, I suppose.” Roz notices him pale, possibly remembering her suggestion of poison.

  “What do they look like?” Roz is already signaling for back-up.

  “Can you pull up some pictures or vid?” Jaqeli asks his assistant.

  “I’m looking, sir. So far, nothing.”

  “Nothing?”

  “We’ve found that they’re very good at avoiding feeds,” Roz puts in. “Can you describe them?”

  Jaqeli looks up, thinking. “Foreign,” he says.

  For fuck’s sake. “Male?” Roz asks. “How many were there?”

  “On the first visit, two males, one female. This time, one of the same men and a new one.”

  “Let’s start with the two who are here now. Tall? Short? Skin color, hair color?” Roz can’t believe this guy managed to win a European football championship. How did he even tell the other players apart?

  “One is medium height, um, perhaps slightly shorter than I am,” says the head of state, who is at least a head taller than Roz. “He could be North African or Middle Eastern or South Asian.” Or Latin American, then. Or Roma, but she assumes they would have noticed that. “Light brown skin, dark brown hair and eyes. Not bad-looking, but no vid star, either.”

  Great. “And the other?” The update comes in: a security team has departed Tbilisi, estimated to arrive in thirty-nine minutes. Roz doesn’t want to wait, and she asks that YourArmy reps be scrambled from the border to join her.

  “Lighter. Taller. Light brown hair, I guess—or was he blond?” The assistant shrugs. “He spoke English; I checked because I like to practice, so I had my interpreter off but with subtitles.”

  “Okay,” Roz says, sending on the description to all personnel in the area. She hesitates; she wants to go to the canteen now, avoid any chance of these bastards slipping through their fingers again, but the YourArmy officers won’t get here for another eight minutes. “What exactly do these consultants do?”

  “What do you mean?” Jaqeli says. “They help us with…” He glances up, probably checking the list. “Um, consumer advocacy promotion guidance; that’s right.”

  “Specifically?” Roz prompts.

  “It’s about helping people navigate advid claims, and so on,” the assistant says smoothly. “They did several campaigns in the smaller villages last time they were here.”

  Roz taps her fingers against her leg, surreptitiously adding the assistant’s description to her list of suspects. “Can you send me the list of the villages they worked in?”

  “I can’t seem to find it in the records,” he says when it becomes apparent she’s not going to move on until he answers. “I can try to get it to you by this evening.”

  “Do that!” Roz snaps. “And this visit? Why is it unlisted?” She aims the question between them; Jaqeli is more willing to cooperate, but she’s starting to think it’s the assistant who knows the details.

  “They did good work for us the first time, and so when they mentioned they’d prefer not to list their visit, we thought, why not? I figured it was some tax-evasion thing,” Lel confides, growing more expansive as no one assassinates or arrests him.

  “Because they did such good work for you on consumer protection?” Roz asks skeptically.

  Jaqeli glances at his assistant, and then Roz does too. Without thinking, she snaps her arm out, grabbing the assistant’s wrist before he can wiggle out any more of a message.

  “You’re under preliminary arrest,” she tells the assistant, and then speaks to the room, because someone at Information should have noticed the conversation by this point and marked this feed for real-time monitoring. “Shut down his comms. Shut down both of their comms!” She gets the answer into her earpiece within fifteen seconds: “Done.”

  Roz lets go of the assistant’s hand now that he can’t type out any warnings. “Where are they?”

  He pulls his arm back to slug her and Roz ducks, her hands flying up. She feels the blow slam into the top
of her head, and loses her footing, staggering back. Jaqeli catches her, and she shakes him off, furious. “Get after him!” she yells, not at the singing footballer but at the listening support team. Or maybe at herself, because before she knows it, she’s out the door, taking off after the sound of footsteps down the hall. “Connect me to the YourArmy team leader!” she yells. Fucking mess of an operation; she should have her own team, with dedicated security, and emergency comms hardwired the way they were in DarFur and Xinjiang.

  The centenal hall is an ancient structure, probably soviet or just post-, and it’s a monument to the longevity of poor building materials, the endless hall punctuated by ill-fitting doors and hanging cobwebs.

  “This is Corporal Sanz-Vidal,” comes the voice over her comms, punctuated by deep but even breaths. “I am approximately two minutes from the centenal hall.”

  “He’ll make the door before then,” Roz says with some difficulty. She’s out of shape, and anger and shock hamper her breathing. Her ears are ringing from the blow. “I’m in pursuit. No way I’ll catch him, but I’ll try to keep eyes.”

  Except that she doesn’t see him. He must be just ahead of her.

  “Maintain distance and use caution,” the officer replies. “I’ll try to get there sooner.”

  “How many people do you have? The other two suspects are a higher priority, greater flight risk, and—”

  Something flies through a doorway in front of her. Roz stumbles, tries to leap it, gets caught up in the legs of the wooden chair and goes down, landing hard on her hands and knees. The assistant bursts out from the door but can’t resist aiming a kick at her ribs before taking off. Roz takes the hit and catches his foot, twisting it hard away from the floor. The man shrieks, hops on his other foot once, twice, and goes down.

  “Bastard!” Roz hisses, and pulls herself up until she’s sitting on his chest. “Stupid bastard!” There was no way she could have caught him if he had kept running. His fear must have made her seem scarier than she is. He beats at her with his hands, but with her full weight on his chest, he can’t land a solid blow. Roz thumps him in the head before she realizes what she’s doing. It doesn’t knock him out, but it does quiet him. “Settle down!” she yells.