by Malka Older
Domaine grins. “That is, indeed, one of the jobs I’ve been working on here.”
Mishima taps her finger on the table, pulsing the walkie-talkie with the signal she and Nakia agreed on while she was in the bathroom.
“Somebody had to do it,” Domaine goes on. “How can you defend the existence of that government?”
“And letting an Information staffer take the fall for your actions?”
“That wasn’t the intention,” Domaine answers. “But as it turned out, that case brought far more attention to the problem of—”
Mishima stands up. “I have to go,” she says, tossing some rubles on the table. “But you can explain it to Nakia.”
Domaine twists in his seat to follow her gaze to the door, where Nakia has just stepped in.
* * *
“Must have been hard, living in the null states.” Amran is pretty sure that’s what Misra wants to hear, but she’s having difficulty ginning up the requisite sympathy, and when Misra doesn’t immediately answer she tries for curiosity instead. “What was it like?” That comes out a little better. Amran has wondered often how people live in the null states; her time in DarFur gave her some insight into low-data environments, but that was different from no data or an actively anti-data government. Besides, it’s not just the lack of Information: null states are cut off from trade and technology, stuck in the past.
“It was a change for all of us,” Misra says. “We were scattered to different places. Some of us were lucky in our landing, others less so.” A certain grimness of tone suggests she was not one of the lucky ones. “This is a great place to tap into the exile-slash-training montage trope, by the way. I hated those stories while I was going through it, but in retrospect I can see how it seems romantic.”
Amran murmurs something noncommittal and Misra, keying into the ambivalence, leans forward.
“We’ve been portrayed as evil, or, worse, as nonentities, for far too long! We have to make people see our heroism. And it’s there, believe me! All it requires is the proper framing and contouring.” She calms a little and continues. “For a while it looked as though we wouldn’t be able to reorganize ourselves, and we would live out our lives in exile. But enough of us persevered. Some of the null states, with their own reasons to dislike Information, helped us, while others at least left us alone. Some threatened and harassed us.”
That’s what you get for not appreciating micro-democracy. Amran schools her face before it can give her away.
“The group splintered over the acceptable use of violence. Some people felt we had gone too far.”
Amran doubts that Misra is among that faction.
“What with the complications of dispersal and clandestine communications, it took time to develop a new strategy. There’s a broad scope at this point for exploration of the various dynamics at play, clandestine love affairs, secret messages, jostling for power, and so on. Eventually, we were able to regroup, but during the interim”—Misra leans forward—“a schism! Members of our core leadership had been corrupted by outside influence.”
That sounds promising.
“They took another direction. Friendships were destroyed, relationships damaged—keep in mind, this is all still going on in various null states.”
“We might have to consolidate the action,” Amran suggests. “Are there one or two important settings?”
Misra frowns. “The bulk of us were in Russia, but that group was broadly scattered. Travel within Russia isn’t as easy as it is in the micro-democratic world, particularly when the government is trying to keep an eye on you. Still, you could manage a lot of local color in there—freezing sleet storms, piroshki, internal combustion engines, televisions, borscht, you know.”
“So … corrupted by outside influence?”
“Right. They started working on smaller projects, incremental change, approaches that either won’t work or won’t be noticeable if they do.”
That would be the nonviolent clique, presumably, Amran thinks. Which makes it definite that Misra is not among them.
“The core group, however, managed to persevere and even grow, recruiting new members in the null states or among other exiles and malcontents.” How many of those are there, really? Amran wonders. Misra looks crafty: “We even forged partnerships with some of the top governments.”
“With governments?” Amran asks, surprised. “What kind of partnerships?”
“It’s the governments that suffer most under Information,” Misra says, as if this is obvious. “Especially the competent governments, the large ones.” The rich ones. “They provided us resources, financial and military.”
“And now you’re planning on taking over the world?” Amran didn’t mean to say it, but she’s shaken by the reference to military power. Misra gives her a long look. Amran tries a smile: “Narrative disorder.”
“We’re planning on freeing the world,” Misra says finally. “From the tyranny of Information!”
Laughter spurts out of Amran, squeezed between terror and hysteria. Misra stares her down until she gasps out, “Tyranny? Information facilitates democracy.”
“How would you know?” Misra asks. “You get all your data, every smidgen of what you know about the world, from Information! Of course you think they’re the good guys!”
“That’s not true. I’ve been places; I’ve seen how things work…”
Misra regards her with interest. “A true believer? That might not work for us. I wouldn’t want you to skew the narrative. Then again, if we can bring you around, it might be even better.” She leans forward, speaking slowly and clearly as if Amran were a brainwashed Info-zombie. “Wherever you were, whatever you thought you saw, it was what Information wanted you to see.”
This is too unhinged for Amran to even try to argue with it. “And you’re going to change all that?” She scoffs. “By writing tourist guides?”
“Tourist guides are fundamental in framing how people experience new areas,” Misra says, without a smile. “But no. Those efforts began as one of many fragmented initiatives but at this point are mainly for practice and recruitment.”
“Practice?”
“Data collection and presentation. We need to raise an army of staff to take over from Information, and we need to do it quickly so that there can be a smooth transition once the other operations are completed.”
“And what are those?” Amran asks, heart pounding, stomach queasy.
“Don’t worry,” Misra says, showing her teeth. “We will be democratic. Eventually.”
* * *
The XXII Century headquarters is topped with huge neon letters spelling out XXII with Century in Russian on one side and English on the other. Casino-grade tacky, but easy to find. There’s a head-high wall around the compound, but the gate is unlocked.
Mishima circles the building, checking on windows and doors, then settles into the shadows of the wall just inside the gate and waits in the cold, watching the people going in and out and looking for faces in the lit windows. She counts three ex-Information staffers among the many she doesn’t recognize. The place is full of activity, even in the middle of the night. All the rooms she can see from the road are busy, and when she’s been watching for twenty-eight minutes, a van pulls up and unloads trays of food and drink at the door. Mishima watches, breathing into her heated scarf, learning what she can about the layout, trying to figure out the best way in. Then, five minutes after the caterers leave, a figure she recognizes slips out the front door and starts toward the gate.
Mishima steps in behind him and slides one arm under his armpit, spinning him around while she secures an armlock on his right arm and finds his throat with the flat of her stiletto. “Rajiv,” she breathes into his ear. “What are you doing here?”
He twitches as though to struggle, and she presses the cold blade of the stiletto against his skin.
“Well?” Mishima whispers. “That wasn’t a rhetorical question. What is going on?”
The g
ate rattles.
Mishima drags him around the corner of the building to the unlocked bulkhead doors she found earlier and pushes him down the six steps in front of her. “Ready to talk yet?” She keeps the armlock and uses her knife hand to snag the doors closed. The cellar is completely dark.
“Fine!” Rajiv hisses. “Hit the lights, though.”
“So your people can see and come running?”
“No windows down here! Light switch on your left.”
Wondering why he’s so familiar with the layout of the cellar, Mishima kicks the back of Rajiv’s knee, controlling his fall so she doesn’t rip his arm out of his socket, and reaches for the light while he’s off-balance. The fluoron flicks to life. One door, open onto a stairway, but a quick glance upward shows her it is closed off with another door at the top. The room is bare except for a small broadcaster connected to a cable coming out of the dirt floor.
Mishima checks Rajiv for weapons. Finding none, she lets go and shoves him away from her. He stumbles, turns, rubbing at his neck. “Mishima. You came.”
“Attacking a data transfer center, Rajiv?” Mishima had been furious, but now she feels something more like disappointment. She can distinctly remember laughing with Rajiv, a few months after the initial disappearance, about the feckless renegade staff. “What are you doing with these yahoos?” It was at that conference in Kandahar, one of the last events Mishima attended as a member of the security intelligence team, and she remembers feeling pathetically grateful that they had something to laugh about besides her sudden fame.
Rajiv, always at ease, leans back against the stone foundation wall. “You remember in the last election how we were all running around, trying to make sure that sabotage didn’t derail the voting and, heaven forfend, make the wrong government win?”
Mishima nods, cautious. She still has her stiletto out, hovering in his direction.
“We managed it. We were all exhausted and traumatized and yet elated, because finally there was a Supermajority transition. But I noticed something in the months after that.” He spreads his hands. “Nothing changed.”
“Come on!”
“No, really. Think about it. Policy1st stumbled through the transition, but everything kept running. And it ran in the same way as when Heritage was in charge.”
“There were big changes in the centenals that turned over.” Mishima didn’t come to this damn island to discuss the finer points of micro-democratic theory. “The Supermajority was never supposed to rule the world!”
“Exactly,” Rajiv says. “And they don’t. Information does. Unelected, unquestioned—”
“I get the point, and it’s not a new one.” Mishima growls. “That’s a reason for you to start blowing things up?”
Rajiv grins. “Sorry, Mishima, if you’re looking for mass destruction, that subgroup is in Sebastopol. Here we work on rebuilding.”
“What?”
“You’re in the wrong place. And I’m afraid the Sebastopol team has already moved out, so you’re a little late to stop them.”
Mishima rushes him, forearm up under his chin, stiletto pressed to his ribs. “What are they planning?”
She hears his head knock against the stone wall, but he is still smiling. “I have no idea,” he wheezes.
Mishima pushes the knife harder against him. “Who does?”
“No one here. Unlike Information, we manage our OpSec.”
Mishima pushes away from him with an extra shove of her forearm into his windpipe that leaves him gasping. “You must have some way of keeping in touch.” Switching her stiletto back to her left hand, she pulls out her hunting knife, drops to one knee, and starts hacking at the cable coming out of the floor.
“Hey!” Rajiv yells. The cable is parting into a dense braid of fibers. “Stop!” He rushes her, and Mishima pops up into a side kick, the heel of her boot crunching sweetly into his ribs. Rajiv lets out an oof and falls back against the wall. Mishima gives the cable one final blow, slicing through the last strands, and goes over to him.
“What should I be worried about, Rajiv?” she asks him. “What’s going on here?”
His face is a mask of anger now. “There’s nothing here for you. You want to know who’s going to bring you down? Khan’s the one you should be worried about!”
Footsteps pound the boards above them.
“Khan?” Mishima knows three Khans who work in different hubs, and one more—no, that’s a character from a novela. “Which Khan?”
“Taskeen Khan,” Rajiv says, practically spitting. “She’ll take you out before we do.”
The door at the top of the steps is thrown open. Mishima leaps away from Rajiv and folds her knives away in apparent innocence. Two men rush down the stairs.
“What’s going on here? Is something wrong with the—” The taller of the men stops talking as he sees the cable, then notices Rajiv. “Are you all right?”
“That man attacked me!” Mishima says. “He’s a traitor wanted by Information.”
The tall man looks at her. “The latter is hardly our concern. And the former—” He stops, studying Mishima, then smiles. “I know who you are.”
“Congratulations,” Mishima answers, edging toward the stairs to the bulkhead door.
“Wait,” he says. He turns to his companion. “Call the doctor. Get security down here and someone to fix this cable.” Then he looks back at her. “Mishima—am I saying that right? My name is Anton Verne. I don’t know what you’re doing here, but it seems serendipitous. I would love to give you a tour of our facility.”
Mishima hates being famous. “I’m good, thanks.” She leaps for the stairs, but the bulkhead doors are opened from the outside before she reaches them, and two heavy men peer down at her.
“Fine,” Mishima says. “A tour.”
* * *
Maryam wanders out of Nougaz’s office, unsure where to go. She wanders into the staff lounge. It’s empty except for a man Maryam doesn’t know sitting at one of the tables, manipulating a tiny projection of a datacube. She nods at him and goes automatically to get an espresso from the machine, then takes it to a corner table.
She covers her face with her hands, trying to find some anchor. She can’t decide whether Nougaz was trying to distract her by slandering Núria or telling an improbable truth. At least in here, she doesn’t have to worry about figuring out where feeds are; she is so tired of thinking about that. It’s only since Dhaka; she never worried about it before. Is Núria one of those people who automatically thinks about them all the time? In the midst of her confused thoughts Maryam hopes Nougaz was lying about the tunnel, because she doesn’t want her to have been telling the truth about Núria.
Maryam raises her head at the sound of rushing footsteps in the corridors, and someone shouting. She stands up, feeling shellshocked already, and her gaze meets the stranger’s in the other corner. She has the feeling her face is mirroring his: startled, wary, ready for the next crisis to hit. Then the projection from his workstation flickers and extinguishes.
* * *
XXII Century is, Anton tells Mishima, less a producer than a facilitator. “Very much like Information,” he says, with a marketing timbre to his voice. Each suite in the building houses a different organization, all of them working on data provision.
“Not compilers,” Mishima says.
“No,” Anton confirms. “Most of them hunt their own raw data, although we do have one group that specializes in packaging.”
The data peddlers have names like Opposition Research and Omnivision, and seem to employ happy young people, all of them slightly manic.
“It’s almost showtime for them, you see,” Anton says as they walk into his office on the second floor, followed by the two security guards. “Market share is everything, and even a few hours’ delay in jumping into the breach could be fatal for these young companies.”
Mishima blinks. “And what is it you do, exactly?”
“Finances. I have been managing the investm
ent flow.”
Verne is slender with dark shiny hair and prominent dark eyes. Mishima doesn’t recognize him. “Where did you work when you were at Information?”
He shakes his head, laughing. “I’m afraid I’ve never worked for your organization. In fact, I have spent most of my life in Russia. But I’m one of your biggest fans. And in a way, we’re your greatest ally out here.”
“What do you mean?” Mishima leans back and laces her fingers behind her head, squeezing them to activate the beacon in her walkie-talkie ring.
“We are extending your reach into the null states. We receive data from your world and propagate it here. Of course, our technical means are far clumsier than what you have, but we are slowly building our own networks here as well.”
“And you push Russian intel back out to micro-democratic governments, secretly.” She is terribly out of practice at Morse code.
He shrugs. “We have to pay for what they give us. But I’ll be honest: they get far less than they give. Part of the data-arbitrage conditions.”
She studies him. “Why hasn’t Russia shut you down?”
“They’ve tried a couple of times, but only halfheartedly. I think they see this as a relatively controlled outlet for inevitable data contraband. They also don’t believe we’ll be able to spread far beyond Saaremaa, because of the lack of infrastructure. And where we invest in new infrastructure, I am always expecting them to snatch it away from us.” He stands and goes to the coffee machine.
“Then why do you bother?”
“After tomorrow,” Anton says, coming back with the coffees, “our focus will shift entirely from the null states to the micro-democratic territories. There will be immense potential for growth and gain. Once that has settled, we can return to the question of Russia.”
Mishima studies him. “You all seem very sure that Information will fall.”
Anton smiles and offers her the sugar bowl. “I was hoping Information would send someone this way. Communication has been … difficult, for obvious reasons, but in fact, cooperation is in both our interests at this stage.”
“Why should we cooperate with you?”