by Ed Finn
“Oh. Don’t tell me, it’s—”
“You’re always so proud to call them our people,” said Robert Skaay. “Well, our people want a lands-claim settlement—and they’re gonna use this spill to get it.”
“The Haida are blocking the pipeline?” Rob could see the hint of excitement in Terry’s eyes.
He sighed. “Not the pipeline, but the tanker terminal, which is pretty much the same thing.
“And it looks like I’m going to be across the table from them.”
“FORTY THOUSAND TONNES DRY weight,” said Krishnamurti, director of the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service. “We’re not sure how much oil it was carrying but it’s enough to make a hell of a mess. We’re pretty sure the Haida are behind it.”
Robert had taken over a conference room in downtown Vancouver and dimmed the lights so his glasses could take over, projecting a virtual rendition of the Ottawa room where the rest of the cabinet ministers sat. Like Rob, Krishnamurti was attending the meeting remotely.
The prime minister leaned back in his chair, arms crossed and obviously angry. “The Haida would never cause an environmental catastrophe! They’re all about preserving the land, aren’t they?”
All eyes turned to Rob. He sighed. “How would I know?” He stared them all down. After all this time they should know he’d never lived in the Haida Gwaii.
They should also know that, behind anything the Haida did these days, there was a couple hundred years’ worth of frustration with the Canadian government’s bad faith and broken treaty promises.
Krishnamurti cleared his throat. “It’s not their shoreline that’s threatened. There’s a mosaic of overlapping First Nations around the Passage, like the Oweekeno and the In-SHUCK-ch. The Haida may have risked screwing them over for the greater good.”
“More likely they’re all in on it,” said the minister of foreign affairs. “The bands that are affected can sue us for compensation.”
Rob shook his head. “But why do you think the Haida are behind it? Was there a bomb on the ship?”
“It’s purely circumstantial,” said the CSIS director. “It’s about timing.”
“Can you pass Rob that overlay?” said the prime minister to Krishnamurti.
“Right.” A flag in the corner of Rob’s vision told him he had new e-mail with an attachment. He blinked at the symbol for the attachment and something loaded into his interface. “What is it?”
“Have you got a window to look out? It works best that way.”
Warily, Rob rose and shifted the heavy curtain. Outside sprawled the green glass towers of downtown Vancouver. He could see the ski runs on Grouse Mountain, a green crosshatch under the summer sky.
Standing up out of the city in a profusion as thick as the surrounding forests were thousands of virtual flags. He poked at one and expanded it so he could see the caption. It was a man’s name, vaguely familiar; a spiderweb of faint lines radiated out from it. “What is this?”
“It’s an augmented reality overlay that tells you who owns what,” said Krishnamurti. “A Big Data aggregation of publicly available information on real estate, machinery, infrastructure, you name it—linked back to the shareholders, boards, and individuals who own it. A map of who owns what . . . and not just modern financial data. It’s got all the First Nations land claims. It was uploaded to the Vancouver Urban Overlays site six hours ago, just before the tanker ran aground.
“Whoever uploaded it did so from Haida Gwaii.”
WHEN ROB WAS GROWING up, they’d still been called the Queen Charlotte Islands. An hour north of Vancouver by plane, the Gwaii nestled just under the Alaskan Panhandle. An inverted triangle of coastal rain forest, the islands were known for their gigantic trees and for the art that those had inspired. As inhabitants of one of the last areas of North America to be touched by European conquest, the islanders had a more direct connection to their ancestry than any other Canadian First Nation; their strength hadn’t faded until around 1900 when smallpox devastated the islands.
That the aboriginal side of Rob’s family was from there had always meant, well, nothing, to him. Artistic though they might be, the Haida were a footnote in North American history. Yet they had never entirely gone away, and they had never thought of themselves as a conquered people.
Maybe it was that one simple fact about them that made them dangerous.
He looked behind him. The augmented reality interface gave Rob the illusion that he was not standing alone in a commandeered conference room high above the Vancouver skyline but was in fact closeted with the rest of the cabinet back in Ottawa. Turning back to the window, he stared out at the unsettling skyline, wondering how many other people were looking at the city—the country—through the same new lens. This app was a step beyond Nexcity, which merely showed you the future of local real estate. This . . . this was inequality made visible.
It wasn’t just the present-day ownership tags. The whole visible vista of mountains and coast was subdivided by faint curving virtual walls, like the sheets of the northern lights, except tagged with the relevant treaty claims. All the betrayals by the British and Canadian governments over the centuries were visible, shimmering in the sky. Even the currency that the money was counted in—it wasn’t dollars, but Gwaiicoin. That variant of Bitcoin was quickly becoming the most popular currency on the West Coast, and not just among the First Nations.
There was more.
The interface included something called Fountains View. When he tried it, the skyscape shifted; instead of shimmering walls of light, he was looking at . . . well, fountains. Fountains of money, rising off Indian lands and falling on the city, into glass-walled towers that wore the logos of logging and mining companies like crowns. Fountains of money that you could follow as they left the lands of the Aishihik and Te’mexw, the Klahoose and Nazko, and vanished into the vaults of white men—an accusation as clear as a cry from God.
“This can’t be legal,” he said. “Where are they getting the data?”
“It’s all from legal sources. Shareholders’ reports, mostly,” said Krishnamurti.
“We think the same people somehow grounded the tanker?”
“We don’t know it for sure. We’re assembling a liaison for them. Here, I’ll bring it up.”
Rob turned back to the conference room, repopulated with the transparent images of his colleagues and a newcomer. A new figure sat in one of the previously empty chairs: a young aboriginal man, well dressed and calm, who gazed back at Rob through intelligent, dark eyes.
Rob shuddered. “Is it live?”
“Not yet; we don’t have enough behavior of the group it models to bring it to life. When it is, maybe we can learn more.”
“Meanwhile,” said the prime minister, “let’s look at our policy options. Your people have run the padgets?” Krishnamurti nodded and called up SimCanada. Back in Ottawa, it would be appearing on the wall screen; for Robert, the data sprang to life as a series of virtual screens floating in and even beyond the boundaries of the room.
There were sixteen Canadas up there, blotched with color that showed relative levels of political support for the Party, as well as economic well-being across the country, industrial measures, and even those new intangibles, the “happiness quotients” that were in such vogue now. Each map showed a different possible future for the country. The damned program provided only multiple futures, never a single projection, which was one of the things Rob hated about it. It had to do with how morphological analysis worked, but it was annoying anyway. What good was a system that let you see the future if it couldn’t tell you which future was going to come to pass?
The sixteen maps showed Canadas six months from now, based on different policy choices the government was working on. These options were flight-tested in an agent-based simulation of the entire country that included the behavior of individual virtual citizens. The simulations were fed by real-time polling and econometric data, and by data from the padgets—policy-development
gadgets—employed by the country’s political parties. Krishnamurti used a slider on the screen to move forward and backward in time and sideways through the different options. “So here are the results with and without the tanker spill, depending on which of the response packages we select. As you can see, there’s broad support for a crackdown to start with, but the padgets show quick deterioration of public support if the perceived threat declines . . .”
Robert expanded several of the maps to look at them more closely. That land-claims overlay was a dirty trick, and some of the Canadas showed the effect it might have if this was just the opening salvo in a more sophisticated information war. The scariest one was where the electorate somehow woke up to the fact that only 16 percent of the eligible voters had cast their ballots for the sitting government. Robert’s party had muzzled Elections Canada back in 2014 so the bureaucrats couldn’t even study the actual numbers, much less tell the public that less than 50 percent of them had voted last time. Rob only knew because the Party could afford to pay for private studies.
The more he looked at the sims, though, the more puzzled he became. “The only scenarios where we can win the next election are ones where we finally negotiate binding land-claims settlements with the Haida and the other First Nations,” he said. “How do they get to extort us and pull a propaganda stunt like that overlay, and still make us look like the bad guys if we don’t come to the table?”
Krishnamurti exchanged a glance with the prime minister. “Demographics,” said Bill Michener, who had been prime minister for four years and was comfortable in the job. “The aboriginal population’s booming, while the rest of us are in decline; and lately, they’re turning out to vote in record numbers.”
“But there’s more to it than that,” added the CSIS director. “Five years ago only we could afford the processing power for something like this.” He nodded at the SimCanada maps. “And only we had the data. Now . . . so much information is publicly available, and with block chains running on mobile phone meshnets . . . we think the Haida are running their own SimCanadas. They’ve been war-gaming this scenario, maybe for months. This isn’t just a bunch of boys who got all fired up and decided to make a roadblock. It’s a calculated power play directed against the federal government of Canada.”
“It’s not about either of these stunts on their own,” said Bill. “It’s the overall pattern. They want to do our jobs for us.
“They represent a clear and present danger to Canadian sovereignty. That is why we’re having this meeting.
“If the Haida win, there’s going to be a domino effect. The First Nations have land claims on one-third of Canada’s landmass. They’re experiencing a baby boom and are growing far faster than the rest of the population. We’re aging, retiring, and hopelessly mired in debt while they’re debt-free, young, and just entering the workforce.
“Put it all together; the math is easy.
“This is a power grab.”
THEY’D BEEN FLIPPING THROUGH scenarios for an hour when Bill sent Rob a back-channel request. Rob accepted, giving himself and his old friend an encrypted private channel.
“Bill, what are we really going to do about this?” said Rob before the prime minister could speak. “This isn’t Quebec and whoever they are, those hackers aren’t the FLQ. They’re not trying to separate; they want something else. But what?”
“Yeah, as to that . . .” Bill stared pensively off to his left, which for Rob was a blank wall but was probably the window on Bill’s end of the connection. “You know I used to go to the Davos conferences. Couple years back, the president of Paraguay comes up to me and he says, ‘Do you have any power?’ I mean, I wasn’t the PM yet, I had your job, but . . . At first I just stared at him. But he says he’s been talking to prime ministers, presidents, CEOs, you name it, and they all say the same thing. Ten years ago, they could have done things. But now? There’s international treaties and grassroots watchdogs, NGOs, churches, even reality shows all tramping around in what used to be our space. Most of all, there’s the block chain, this thing they say runs Bitcoin. If you’re, I dunno, some kid living in Africa, and you’ve got a smartphone, you don’t need to use your nation’s currency, you can use Bitcoin. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. You can register anything with the block chain: property ownership, health status, laws, citizenship . . . That kid in Africa doesn’t need his government—he’s got the Internet.
“Miguel said that everybody’s having the same experience. Either they’ve finally gotten to the place where they expected to have real power only to discover they don’t have it, or they’ve been in power for twenty years and watched it drain away over that time.”
“Yeah.” Rob shrugged. “I thought that’s why the NSA tried to take over the Net. ’Cause it was a threat.”
“Sure.” Bill had a rueful look on his face. “Problem is, the block chain and all that other stuff—like that ownership overlay—really has little to do with what’s happening. It’s more about economics, education, mobility . . .”
Rob sat down so he could get a better look at Bill without the interface shaking. They’d talked about the need to clean up the Canadian political landscape before, but mostly back in university. The subject hadn’t come up since they’d actually risen to become the country’s leadership. Both of them had been laying the groundwork for a purge for years, secure in the knowledge that the other had his back. So what was this bullshit about the president of Paraguay?
“Look, there’s nothing going on we can’t manage,” he said. “You know we have something on everyone. Journalists, activists, housewives—anybody who ever used the Internet. It’s in the Criminal Leads database, and Krishnamurti has it. Everybody’s accidentally stumbled into a kiddie porn website or pirated movies or exchanged dirty e-mails with a coworker. Everybody’s done something we can hang over their head.”
“I don’t think that’ll help,” said Bill, but Rob smiled.
“What I’m saying is we don’t need to impose the War Measures Act to deal with something like Haida secessionists. A while back I had the NSA/CSEC database cross-linked with the enemies list in CIMS.”
“You what?” Bill sat up straighter. “You combined the files?”
The Party’s Constituent Information Management System was the confidential database where all its friends and enemies were listed: at its simplest, it noted who’d donated to the Party, and who had told the canvassers to go to hell. Previous governments had not had enough foresight to divide up a constituents list so neatly into friends and enemies—remarkably naive of them.
“The NSA was more than happy to give us the data and CSIS mined it for incriminating patterns. I covered our asses by using the Freedom of Information Act to do a ministerial request with another pretext. You could say the data fell off the back of a truck and into the Party database. All it takes now is a single query to produce a list of enemies plus the grounds for issuing warrants for them. They can all be rounded up by tomorrow, if you want.”
The prime minister shook his head. “The NSA didn’t dismantle American privacy because they thought the Net might become a threat. They felt the power slipping through their fingers for years by that point. They did it ’cause they were scared. And it would have worked during the dot-com boom—but by the time they did it, secrecy wasn’t where power hid any longer.
“If the bastards we’re dealing with can make an overlay like the one you just saw, they can also make one based on your list. They may not have the list, but they’ll have a pretty good idea who we’re likely to be watching. And you can bet there’s buggers out there who data-mine arrest reports looking for patterns just like the one that’d show up if we did what you’re suggesting. They’ll stick the data in the block chain where we can’t censor it, even with War Measures in place and your man in the RCMP on side. Once the dust settled there’d be a nonconfidence vote and we’d be out of power.
“The fact is we’re going to negotiate.” He laughed at the expre
ssion on Rob’s face. “To start with, I mean. It’ll go wrong, it always does. And when it escalates—and we both know it will—we’ll have our pretext and the approval of the public when we come down on them like the proverbial ton of bricks. Your job is going to be to do the negotiation.”
And keep the status quo, thought Rob. Well, of course; stalling on land-claims settlements was a great Canadian governmental tradition.
“We have to get a handle on these hackers first. That’s . . . another reason I wanted to talk to you.”
“Because of the CSEC data?”
“No. Listen, Rob, I don’t think you have anything to do with what’s going on here, but you know somebody who does—somebody, in fact, who’s a silent partner bankrolling a goodly portion of the Haida Gwaii meshnet. The money’s in Gwaiicoin, but we were able to follow it.” Bill told him where the trail had ended. Rob leaped to his feet, swearing.
“You’ve got to be kidding me!”
“There’s a traitor in your house, Rob. I’m going to trust you to take care of it.”
Rob shook his head. He’d come to expect betrayals in his long career, but this one . . .
“I’ll deal with it, Bill. Tonight.”
“YOU REALLY DIDN’T HAVE to come, the tanker thing’s all over the news,” said Terry as he made to close the door; then he noticed the RCMP security squad on the steps and scattered down the walk. “Oh. I guess you’re not staying for supper . . .”
“Hi, Dad!” Margaret emerged from the kitchen carrying a tray of deviled eggs. “You heard we bought the place?”
“That’s not why I’m here. Listen, I need to talk to you,” he said to Terry. “About the Haida negotiations.”
Terry glanced at the security team. He went down the hall to his little home office and Rob followed. Once they were inside, Terry shut the door and leaned on the computer desk, crossing his arms.