State Tectonics

by Malka Older

  In the case of the so-called null-state debate, Roz can’t blame him for being uninterested. She had hoped that even without a debate, there would be some discussion of planet-wide issues, in particular the mantle tunnels and their environmental effects. Instead she gets overly crafted self-aggrandizements. They vary slightly according to the fashion of each null state (Russia restrained, the Saudis religious, the Swiss passive-aggressively neutral, the Independentistas proudly revolutionary, and so on) but the overall tenor is the same: We are flourishing without micro-democracy, but we’re willing to take part in your games if only to demonstrate how great we are.

  There is Information annotation of the statements, but it is exceedingly mild. Reading along, Roz can almost feel the hesitation of whatever poor sap is on duty for this.

  “They’re not calling them on anything!” she complains to Suleyman, but then has to add, “I suppose there isn’t enough solid data coming out of the null states to prove or disprove much.” At least Information agreed to allow video, so they can people-watch foreigners during the soporific content.

  “And they probably don’t want to admit how much they do know,” Suleyman says, once again showing himself to be savvier than she gives him credit for.

  Roz is about to make a joke to that effect, maybe with a kiss, when the Chinese diplomat’s speech gets interesting. “Unlike Russia, which works to destabilize the delicate balance of world relations, the Pax Democratica you have so carefully built, we aim to preserve and work within this highly effective world order.” The Russian representative is on her feet, complaining, and Roz is leaning into the rush she gets in those rare moments when something more or less momentous breaks through the cautious veneer of international politics. Then this goes from less to more. The projection disappears and the elegantly modulated voice of the Chinese representative is replaced with a jerking, artificially distorted drone: Why don’t you get to vote on those with the real power Why don’t you get to vote on those with the real power Why don’t you

  Suleyman leaps up and goes to the terrace, leaning out to look up and down the street. Roz hasn’t moved, but she’s doing the same thing in her own way: opening local news compilers and launching early-warning algorithms to look for any signs of disturbance here. She knows the non-debate is—was?—more than three thousand kilometers away, but the disappearance of the projection and the invasion of that voice make it feel like they’re under attack, and Roz’s heart is racing.

  “Anything?” she asks as Suleyman comes back into the room.

  He shakes his head. “Nothing visible.”

  “I don’t see anything either. Local, that is.” The quick glance was enough to alert her to the attack on the data distribution center. Someone is already stringing together a timeline of the previous attack and any other distribution center oddities.

  The distorted mantra drones on. Roz becomes aware that there’s a sort of counterpoint or chorus accompanying it at a lower volume, but she’s more disturbed by how long it lasts. The voice and its message are both annoying, and Roz is tempted to mute it, but she wants to know when it ends. When Anarchy attacked the debate during the last election, they controlled the audio feed for thirty-five seconds. This disruption is already at 268 seconds and counting. Of course, last time the appropriation of the broadcast was only part of an attack that also included violence. She hopes that in this case, the focus is on data, and everyone at the event itself is safe. She can imagine the Chinese and Russian diplomats, oblivious to the incident, continuing their duel of honed insults for an imagined audience.

  Roz levers herself up to standing: there’s no reason to, but sitting suddenly feels too passive, and besides, she’s supposed to be moving around as much as she can because exercise is good for the baby and for smooth labor, quick recovery, blablabla. She paces the room, hugs herself, and then moves over to her workstation in the corner. “Let me see what’s going on.”

  Suleyman nods; ten minutes later, Roz discovers a cup of mint tea by her hand. “Shukran,” she says, noting that the repetitive audio has ended (or been cut off by Suleyman), and dives back in.

  * * *

  Unusually for her, Maryam dozes through the last half of her flight, missing the subtle buzz as those who kept their news alerts on reacted to the reports of data hijacking, prompting anyone who’s not immersed in content or asleep to check their own Information. Instead, she wakes up disoriented and then, as is her practice, focuses on dealing with the various airport processes as efficiently as possible. She dozes again on the public transportation crow heading for the Doha Hub, forgetting that her news alerts are still off.

  And so, she’s unprepared to walk into the Doha Hub and find a whirlwind of muted activity. “What’s going on?” she asks Saeed at reception, her eyes tracking up the figures crisscrossing the seven stories of galleries lining the covered atrium.

  Saeed gapes. “You haven’t heard? There was an attack on the null-states event—”

  “What?” Maryam blinks frantically to page through news sites. “No casualties,” she reads aloud, liquid with relief. They don’t hurt anyone.

  Saeed leans forward. “They—we still don’t know who it was—had full control of the audio feed for twelve minutes and eleven seconds.”

  “Twelve minutes? But … how?”

  “That’s more your department than mine.”

  Saeed’s right; it is exactly Maryam’s department, and her eyes stray upward again, this time searching out the techie-infested fourth floor. Yep, it looks like the volume and agitation of people in the corridors are notably higher there.

  “Can you let Nejime know I’m here?” She gives him her suitcase to keep behind the desk. “I’m going to see Hassan on the way up. And Roz.”

  “Roz is working from home,” Saeed calls as she turns away. “She might be in later.”

  “Ma’alesh,” Maryam answers, already heading for the stairs. She’ll stay at Roz’s tonight anyway.

  “Twelve minutes?” Maryam repeats when she gets to Hassan’s office—formerly her office. “What happened?” There are three members of Maryam’s old team clustered around Hassan’s workspace, and three more entering or leaving the office as she says it, but Hassan answers her, even though he hasn’t taken his eyes off of whatever he’s got projected up at eye level.

  “We don’t know yet. There should have been plenty of redundancy, even at that floating venue.”

  Maryam pauses, taken aback for the second time. Hassan is more perturbed than she expected. “The attack on the data transfer station?”

  Hassan throws up his hands, still not looking away from his work. “Sure, that was the most default route for the data. But there were fifty, a hundred others for the routing algorithm to substitute. It’s like it didn’t see them,” he adds, almost to himself.

  Maryam is silent so long that Hassan eventually looks up from his projection. “Something to add?” he asks.

  Maryam shakes herself, then shakes her head. “Sorry to interrupt,” she says. “Let me know if you want extra help on this.” She turns to go.

  “Hey! Of course we want your help, if you have time.”

  “I have to see Nejime, but send me what you’re working on and I’ll take a look later.”

  Once out of the office and after a quick glance to make sure she was alone, Maryam posts up against the wall to leave a message for Taskeen in one of the plazas they agreed on. She’s sure Taskeen would prefer she use their secret tunnel, but Maryam isn’t in the mood to play with network failures.

  She expects to have to wait to see Nejime, but Zaid ushers her in immediately. “She’s been waiting for you,” he whispers. The office is full—Leung and a group from his team clustered around a projection in one corner, Nejime conferring with al-Derbi in another—but as soon as Nejime sees Maryam, she asks everyone but her and al-Derbi to leave.

  “What’s going on?” Maryam asks, unnerved, as the door closes behind the foreign relations team.

 
“Maryam.” Nejime reaches out as if to touch her hand. “I’m sorry. I feel terrible.”

  “What is it?” Irrationally, Maryam blinks up Núria’s location, Surely she wasn’t there, surely she wasn’t hurt …

  “We only have the first reports, so I can’t say that this is completely confirmed yet, but it seems that Rajiv used his authority to slip the attackers past security. He was there, he got them in, and he fled along with them,” Nejime clarifies, seeing how stunned Maryam is.

  “Was he … a hostage? Was he under duress?” Maryam asks.

  “As I said, we don’t have all the intel yet, but witness reports suggest not.” Nejime pauses. “Maryam, I made a mistake asking him to interact with you and Taskeen. Do you think he could have learned anything from you, anything that he could be taking to the rest of this group as we speak?”

  “He did act a little strange…” Maryam tries to remember everything she said to him. “I was being careful, but it never occurred to me he might be a—” She chokes a little on the drama of it.

  “A double agent,” al-Derbi says gravely.

  “But he said a few things that seemed odd, so I didn’t offer much. And Taskeen—Taskeen lied to him a couple of times, or misled him, I guess.”

  “How do you know?” Nejime asks sharply. “You two discussed it?”

  “No, she misrepresented technical details in a way that must have been intentional. She was rude to him, too. I thought she was just being crotchety, but maybe she suspected something.” Between this and the apparent technical sophistication of the data attack, Maryam’s mind is racing into conjecture. Could Taskeen have been working with Rajiv instead of deflecting him?

  CHAPTER 15

  “A tunnel?” Maryam and Roz are sitting on the veranda again, and Maryam bites her lip: she said it too loudly.

  Roz laughs softly. “It’s fine. I turned on the airscaping before we came out; I don’t think anyone can hear us. That was my reaction, too.”

  “And it was full of comms cables?”

  “Packed with them,” Roz says. “Well … lined with them—they left space in the middle for personal transport. An escape pod, maybe.”

  “But why so many cables, when the tunnel only goes between two fixed points?”

  “It depends, in part, on where point B is,” Roz says. Djukic is working on that. “But I think … I suspect Heritage was selling channels.”

  “Selling channels to whom?”

  “To other governments. We’ve only worked our way through a few of the data streams so far, but it looks like they’re all encrypted under different systems.”

  “You mean other micro-democratic governments?” Maryam asks, sitting up. “They were paying Heritage to transmit data behind our back?”

  Roz sighs. Her reaction, two days ago when the idea was first floated, was much the same. Now she wonders how it could be surprising for anyone in their line of work. “People are constantly trying to get around Information. There’s this addictive fetishization of privacy, even when it’s not for any particular purpose.”

  “That may be,” Maryam says, taking a bite of candied kumquat. “But if you’re right, we’re not talking about chisme or petty private scandals. These are governments digging a secret tunnel through the mantle of the Earth to keep people—not just Information, the constituents they supposedly work for—from knowing what they’re doing.”

  Roz nods agreement. “We’re considering the possibility that this may not be governments but the individual corporations within Heritage’s coalition. Corporations have secrets too.”

  “Very true,” Maryam agrees, taking a piece of papaya this time. “Election time makes it seem like everything’s about governments, but that might make more sense than Heritage cooperating with other governments, even for money.”

  “Of course, if they were talking to a null state without our knowledge…”

  “Scary,” Maryam agrees. “So there’s still the possibility this could be Exformation.”

  “Yes, but … I keep coming back to the question of why so many cables. You would think they would only need one.”

  “When I started researching these weird tourist guides,” Maryam says, “I was baffled by the idea of data not available on Information. But now … there’s so much out there, so much we miss.”

  There’s a long-enough pause that Maryam thinks Roz isn’t going to answer. When she does start to speak it’s slowly, as if thinking it through as she talks. “I started to see that in Darfur. The edges, the gaps in coverage. And then there are the null states, and the places near them. And then there’s everything people try to hide from us, successfully or not. And the things we don’t see at all, because we don’t think they’re important or we don’t know what to look for.” Maryam realizes that Roz’s measured tone is that of someone guiding a friend through an epiphanic doorway, invisible from one side, impossible to miss from the other, that she has already passed through long ago. “And sometimes it … it seeps further. It grows. People are used to hiding things, and they keep finding new ways to do it.”

  “Until they dig tunnels hundreds of kilometers under the surface.”

  “So it seems,” Roz sighs. “My point is that while this tunnel is a dramatic and extreme example, people hide data all the time. In a way, it’s part of the system, a natural outgrowth…”

  They think about that in companionable silence. Roz’s belly is noticeably bigger than the last time Maryam saw her, or maybe it is just the effect of the loose neck-to-ankle dress she is wearing. Maryam’s mind flits back, as it has been periodically, to the last moments of her visit with Taskeen. She still hasn’t received a reply to the message she left in the plaza, and she’s not sure whether Taskeen simply hasn’t checked the site—it is, after all, a bit more complicated for her than blinking, and she might not expect a ping so soon after Maryam left—or if she is trying to force Maryam to use the channel they built.

  “Dealing with an actual tunnel would be so much easier…” she says dreamily.

  “Easier?” Roz asks, remembering the piles of dirt slowly mounting under the old Zurich railway station.

  “I just meant because then we would know the channel, we’d be able to see it.”

  “You know,” Roz says after a pause. “Maybe we’re overreacting.”

  Maryam shoots her a skeptical glance without bothering to sit up from her slump.

  “We’re basing this on the theory that terrible people have been planning terrible things for years and no one has been able to find them or stop them! How realistic is that?”

  “You think they’re not actually doing it?”

  “I’m just saying we see hypothetical tunnels and data oubliettes and who knows what everywhere! Just because Nejime is freaked out about getting through the election doesn’t mean someone is trying to blow it up.”

  Maryam shakes her head. “You found an actual secret tunnel.”

  Roz waves her hands. “Those enemies, we knew about.”

  “You still don’t know for sure who’s on the other side,” Maryam points out.

  “You see my point, though.”

  “They attacked an election event! They hijacked our data stream for twelve minutes.” Maryam can no longer say the word twelve without mental italics. It’s not that twelve minutes is such a terribly long time, but it is very long, very long, in proportion to the amount of effort expended on the attack. Once Rajiv got them through the door, it only took six attackers ten minutes to take it down. Maryam hopes, vindictively, that the software assault took ages to code and involved lots of thorny debugging.

  “And what did they do with those twelve minutes?” Roz asks. “Repeated the same three-second clip over and over. They probably didn’t even expect it to last that long.”

  Maryam flinches; that almost sounds like criticism of the tech department. She’s been reacting to that sentiment all day, and she’s still not sure whether non-techies are actually thinking it or whether she’s just being d
efensive.

  “When that voice came on,” Roz goes on, “Suleyman walked out and looked up and down the street. For rioters, or terrorists, here! I did the same thing virtually.” She shakes her head. “Over nothing! This tiny disruption. It wasn’t just that it startled us. We’re all waiting for something big. Something global.”

  “A revolution,” Maryam says, and then thinks of the camaradas revolucionarias and their theories about the life-cycle of political regimes.

  “We overreacted,” Roz points out. “It was just … those losers again, trying to get attention and knock things down without any plans to pick them back up again.”

  “We don’t know what it was yet,” Maryam says, with a little more force than necessary. Something’s happening. She’s never tested high on the narrative-disorder spectrum, but in this case, it feels inevitable to her. “Maybe we’re right to expect something big, and it just hasn’t happened yet.”

  Roz doesn’t answer, but the words seems to coalesce in the air around them, like a threat.

  “Or.” Maryam isn’t sure if she’s talking because the last thing she said is making her nervous, or if this really needs saying. “What if it’s the other way around, and we’re underreacting? What if the revolution is happening, right now, and we’re not seeing it?”

  “What do you mean?” Roz asks.

  “What if they’re making their move, spewing out modified intel, and we don’t know because the people who see it don’t know it’s modified?”

  “How would we even test for that?” Roz wonders.

  “I don’t know,” Maryam says. “Remember in the last election how Liberty changed Information for people within their centenals?”

  Roz groans. “I can’t deal with that right now!”

  Maryam cedes, and they are silent for a while.

  “What do you think their goal is?” Roz asks.

  “Hmm?’

  “If they change Information for some populations. Liberty had a reason. They wanted support, votes, immigration. Why would this … this nebulous, nameless group do it? How does it help them?”