by Malka Older
“You are suggesting we let it stand?” asks Lin.
“I’m suggesting we don’t have a choice.” Nougaz pauses, and when she speaks again, her tone is more conciliatory. “We need to consider the order of the election questions.” Around the table, attention that had been focused elsewhere locks on to her. “If the question about intel provision had been first, the election would have been over then—the entire system, probably. How many people would have even gone on to the second question? But they put it into the final position, after the other voting choices had been made.”
“If you’re trying to say that means the election result isn’t contaminated—”
“Of course it’s contaminated! What I’m saying is that they could have blown up the entire voting mechanism, and they chose not to. They want the process to continue.”
“You’re saying this isn’t a threat to micro-democracy?” Al-Derbi is skeptical.
“No, it’s certainly a threat. I’m saying micro-democracy isn’t the target of the attack. We are.”
“Maybe we’d be better off considering where the attack is coming from,” Mikolajczak says. “Who did this?”
“I suspect it’s connected to the people who left the organization two years ago,” Nejime says. “We’ve seen an uptick in activity from their suspected sites of exile.”
Ken sees Mishima open her mouth, but before she can say anything, Nougaz has jumped in again. “I believe Taskeen Khan is involved.”
There is a minor sensation at that. Ken, who has never heard the name, does a quick look-up, then realizes he’s seen her portrait every time he’s walked through the lobby of the building.
“What is she trying to do?” someone asks out of the hubbub of voices.
Ken can see Nougaz looking significantly at someone; following her gaze, he recognizes Maryam, who used to be the head techie in Doha and then moved to somewhere, in Latin America, he thinks.
“What does it look like?” Nejime responds. “Break the so-called Information monopoly.”
“Would it be effective to, erm, compromise her ability to lead this effort?” Ken didn’t see who asked the question, but Mishima’s voice is unmistakable as she answers.
“Are you suggesting that we assassinate a retired eighty-nine-year-old?”
There’s a murmur in response, probably not so much to her words as to her presence. A lot of people seem not to have noticed she was here until now. Ken allows himself a moment of smug self-congratulation about how awesome she is.
“I appreciate the consideration,” says another voice. Ken follows it to the doorway. The woman standing there doesn’t look like she’s eighty-nine, but she does look startlingly similar to the portrait in the lobby.
* * *
Amran calls Mishima and can’t get through. She calls the Doha Hub and can’t get through. She calls the Mexico City Hub, and when she can’t get through there, she gives up on communications and runs along the sun-simmering pavements toward the Nairobi Hub.
* * *
Maryam closes her eyes and, while they’re closed, revises her understanding of the last dozen hours, removing the premise that Taskeen was talking to her from her antiquated apartment in Dhaka and imagining her instead en route to or stashed away in the Hub, waiting for exactly the right moment to make her entrance.
Taskeen waits until the commotion has quieted before she goes on. “I thought it might be helpful for me to be here in person to explain exactly what has happened, and what is likely to happen next.”
Nejime breaks in with an unexpected display of sentiment. “How could you do this, Taskeen? How could you betray all that we’ve worked for?”
“Do you remember the principles we founded this system on?” Taskeen’s eyes sweep the room; it is only to be expected that they touch on Maryam’s before continuing. “Democracy. Choice of government. Political self-determination. It is time to expand our principles of choice to information management as well.”
“Democracy doesn’t work without an informed public,” Nougaz puts in. Maryam is surprised: she had thought Nougaz would hold back before committing. She really has a talent for making people think the worst of her, even those who know her best.
“And a single source informing the public is more dangerous than none,” Taskeen says. “Even if all of you are convinced that you are irreproachable, you must imagine the consequences if someone less principled were to take over this behemoth that we’ve built.”
“A single source is less dangerous than many competing unregulated sources,” Nejime cuts in, and she throws up a projection. It’s a quick kaleidoscope of vid clips from old news programs and more recent documentaries: diagrams of media bubbles; glamorous news anchors getting caught in lies; analyses of voting influence. Maryam wonders if Nejime’s been working on it since they talked yesterday. “It will be chaos.”
Taskeen is ready for it. “I hope we aren’t prioritizing order over democracy,” she says, and throws a montage of official government news and propaganda efforts. The flashes of the competing projections put Maryam in mind of a battle of wizards.
“That’s not us,” someone says indignantly, and Taskeen bows as if she’s proved her point.
“We made this system,” says Taskeen, with the lightest emphasis on the we to remind them that, in terms of the architecture at least, she personally made most of it. “We can modify it.”
“Tear it down, you mean,” snarls Nougaz.
“I mean improve it. And for better or for worse, it’s done now, so you best use this time to figure out how to address it rather than arguing the theory.”
“She’s right,” Nejime says. “Even if we were to invalidate the election—and as you pointed out”—with a nod at Nougaz—“that is probably inadvisable—the idea is already out in the world, and it has been all but proven that people prefer it.”
“That doesn’t mean we have to accept it!” Lin is almost yelling, and for a minute, the room devolves into a babel of competing voices.
When it subsides, Hassan slips a question in.
“So, what do you need from us? Are you looking for some level of control over our infrastructure?”
“No, not at all!” Taskeen says, with pride. “In fact, I think it best if you keep your infrastructure proprietary as long as possible. No, we have found that with small antennae, we are able to maintain a network that is, though certainly less efficient and robust, entirely workable for a start-up.”
The senior Information leaders in the room take a moment to digest the degree to which their long-term investment in global, world-class infrastructure has become obsolete.
“If that’s the case,” Hassan ventures, “why did you attack the data distribution centers?”
“That wasn’t us,” Taskeen says, and almost exactly as she finishes speaking, there’s a dull but distinct thud and the lights go out.
* * *
The electricity flickers back on a second later; the Hub has robust backup systems. But the projections that have been looping silently in the air above the room are gone, and so, Maryam notices, is everyone who had been projecting in. Other than that, no one has moved except for Mishima, who is now standing and holding her daughter in her arms. The girl bursts into tears, and for a moment, her anguished sobs are the only sound.
Maryam sees Mishima’s eyes meet Ken’s across the room. There’s a breath of intense communication in their gaze, and then Mishima is on the conference table, striding across it, leaping lightly down on the other side. She passes the girl to Ken and is out of the room without a word.
CHAPTER 28
The Doha Hub security center is on the ground floor, or at least it used to be; on her way down the stairs, Mishima tries to blink up a blueprint to make sure it hasn’t moved, but Information is completely out. Annoyed, she focuses on getting to ground level as quickly as possible.
Simone, whom Mishima knows well, is no longer the head of security at Doha, and Mishima has never met her replaceme
nt, Jens. She’s hoping that he won’t give her any trouble about joining the team, but when she bursts into the flurrying crisis room, his eyes widen immediately with recognition and surprise. Still a legend, Mishima tells herself. She hovers by his side, listening to the quick updates and half-spoken questions and confirmations, and by the time he turns to her a few minutes later, she has most of the picture.
“Before Information crashed, we received SOS signals from the data transfer stations in Al Khobar and Jam,” he tells her as soon as he has a breath between demands. “I suspect Al Hamra is out too.”
“You think they’re isolating us?”
“I’m sure of it.”
“And the explosion?”
“Our grid connections,” he says. “A targeted precision bomb that knocked out our power source.”
“Bomb?”
“From an aircraft, most probably,” Jens says. “Someone seems to be waging war on us.”
Mishima sees Sayaka’s sobbing face again, shakes her head to dislodge the image. “So the Information outage is probably localized. It should be working in the rest of the world?”
“Almost certainly. And they may not even have realized we’re offline yet.”
“Do you have any other comms available?” Five years ago, during a global outage, Mishima received critical intel through this hub’s telegraph. From the look on Jens’s face, he knows the story.
“Roman ran for the telegraph first thing. He’s sending out a generalized SOS, but the closest connected hub is Baghdad, and they’ll only come for us if they’re following the protocol for keeping it on and linked to alerts.”
“On Election Day, I would hope they are,” Mishima says. “Still a minimum … three hours?”
“Very optimistically, I would say.” Jens is starting to relax into the shop talk.
“And further attacks?” They are both watching a radar screen bolted uncomfortably high up on the wall: no one expected it to be the main source of data.
“We’re expecting them, but we haven’t seen anything yet.” He gestures at the large projection display in front of him. The spaces allocated to feeds from the cameras at the hub entrances are blank, knocked out in the hack. “We have people stationed at the entrances, but of course we won’t know anything until we hear from them.”
“No walkie-talkies?”
“No, but we’ve set up a line-of-sight chain—not complete, we don’t have the staff for that, but at a few points to shorten the time.”
“How sophisticated was the tech attack?” Mishima wonders. “Blanket EMP-style, or…”
“They’re working on that.” Jens nods at four people clustered around a horribly convoluted circuit diagram projected up in a corner. “All they’ve said so far is ‘more a scalpel than a sledgehammer,’ so I think there’s some hope there.”
“Okay.” Mishima shakes off her professional curiosity. “Where do you want me?”
“You came in a crow, right? Post up on the roof. I want you in the crow and ready to take off.”
“You’re concerned about aerial bombardment?”
“If that’s what happened to the grid connection.” He points to a map projected against the entire side wall. “The transformer station, here. Close enough for us to hear the explosion but a little far for us to easily confirm.”
Mishima gives an unwilling shudder at the thought of that amount of firepower, at the thought of Sayaka in the room above her. “From where?” she asks.
For the first time, Jens hems and hedges. “Look, I’m not super-proficient with this radar. It’s not like we’ve had a lot of practice with it. And the map on it is just coastlines; it doesn’t show any centenal borders.”
“Well?” Thinking about the levels above her—floor, space, floor, space, floor, Sayaka, floor, space, roof, space, bomber jets—is making Mishima itchy.
“To me it looked like they were coming from the Heritage centenal just across the Gulf.”
The thought of being attacked by a government is shocking, particularly this government: Heritage has one of the best militaries in the world.
“I understand,” says Mishima, reverting to Japanese syntax. She turns to go, then pauses. “Have you thoroughly Lumpered?” she asks, knowing the question is so basic as to be insulting, but he nods without any signs of offense.
“We do it regularly, and initiated a site-wide Lumpering as soon as the electricity was cut.”
“Can I take some hardware?”
Jens nods her to a door in the side of the room and turns to a woman who’s offering him an updated report on the grid connection. Mishima goes into the armory. She grabs a torch, the standard flamethrower the security teams carry, and, after a little searching, a pack of shuriken and a large dagger to add to the hunting knife and stiletto she’s already carrying. Then she runs for the stairs.
* * *
It takes the collection of experienced, elite Information leaders in the meeting room twelve and a half minutes to come to the same conclusion that Mishima reached in two seconds. Maryam watches them argue back and forth about what should be done, but keeps an eye on Taskeen. The older woman jumped at the explosion and looks pale, shaky, and undecided. All of which, Maryam hopes, means she’s not behind this attack.
The room might have kept discussing, but a runner from security stopped in to inform them that they suspected a bombing attack on the electrical transformer station, or possibly the power plant, and that an evacuation is recommended.
Even then they can’t make up their fucking minds.
“Evacuate to where?”
“They might be expecting us to leave, pick us off once we’re outside the building.”
“They might want the building; they’re probably just waiting for us to leave to take over.”
“AlThani won’t stand for this infringement on their sovereignty.”
“They have no way to find out about it. Information is totally off.”
“They might notice the flyovers.”
“Maybe. Do they have radar or any other non-Information-based air surveillance?”
Nobody knows.
“Maybe we can do something about communications,” Taskeen says, standing. “Maryam, can you find us a place to work?”
Maryam is on her feet. “Hassan?”
A moment later, the three of them are in the corridor. It’s a distinct relief to be out of that room full of talk and confusion.
“Hassan took over my job when I left,” Maryam tells Taskeen as they charge down the corridor toward his office. “He’s the most up-to-date on everything we have related to comms and codes.”
“Perfect,” Taskeen says, with a quick nod. She seems to have recovered her sangfroid and is striding along with every appearance of aplomb.
“Taskeen,” Maryam says. “What is happening?”
The older woman tilts her head slightly. “I don’t know exactly.”
“But you suspect.”
Taskeen nods.
“Why don’t you tell us what you know?” Maryam says, frustrated. “Who are you working with?”
“Some of your former colleagues.”
Hassan joins in. “Did you start working with them before or after they left?”
“That’s complicated. Before, but we weren’t planning on any of this at the time. It started as a consultative relationship, and the contact was broken for a while after they deserted.”
And during the assassinations? Maryam wonders.
“As you know, there were quite a number of people who exiled themselves two years ago. It is not a monolithic group. A large segment of them have been working with me toward the goal of what some call ‘free’ and what I prefer to call ‘competitive’ data services. However, I am aware that there are others who are more interested in toppling Information than in what might replace it.”
“And these others…” Hassan starts.
“Are violent, yes.”
“Are they working with Heritage?”
> Taskeen and Maryam both turn to look at him. They have just walked into the techie department—largely empty, evacuation is underway—and Hassan is leading them to a workroom. “I think so. Why?”
“There was a spike in traffic on the comms in the Heritage tunnel shortly before the power went out,” Hassan says.
Heritage again. Maryam shakes her head in annoyance. “Why can’t these people stand to lose power? Don’t they understand this is a democracy?”
“So what are we doing here?” Hassan asks.
“Maryam and I believe,” Taskeen says, “that they attacked the null-states debate by hacking into the algorithms that find alternative data transmission routes when one is blocked or overloaded. If they did the same thing here, maybe we can counter it by either reloading the algorithms”—Hassan and Maryam make identical faces: this is unlikely to be feasible—“or manually entering new pathways.”
“And we’re aiming to connect to AlThani security forces,” Maryam says.
“That’s the best place to get military reinforcements quickly?” Taskeen asks.
“Definitely,” Hassan says. Maryam thinks of Núria in the hotel room. Is there a YourArmy contingent anywhere near here? Could Núria convince them to deploy?
“After we alert them,” Taskeen says, “or maybe simultaneously, I’d like to suggest connecting with some of the local data services groups.” She throws up a file and flips through it, looking at a series of node maps.
“Why?” Hassan asks. “You think this will be a good publicity stunt for your new project?”
Taskeen ignores his hostility. “The attackers are hoping to control this narrative. They’ll tell people they were being heroic and fighting tyranny. Attacking the Information Hub in public view is a very different proposition. Particularly for a major government.”
Chilled, Maryam meets Hassan’s eyes. “Let’s get to it, then,” she says, as steadily as she can, and they start pinging.
* * *
It’s harder to be fearless when you’re worried about other people besides yourself. Mishima tries to shut down the images her narrative disorder is playing ceaselessly, of Ken but mostly of Sayaka. Her face, red and wet with startled tears as Mishima pulled her away from her vanished projection; her clinging arms as she handed her over to Ken. Fear and fury are twin wires running between her heart and her guts, one cold and one burning. Every time she feels the icy pinch of fear, she tries to send more anger pulsing through her veins, but it’s hard to stave off the cold, standing alone on the roof, waiting for something to appear out of the cloudless, desert-burnished sky.