by Malka Older
Mazen joins her before the guy has completely passed out. “How many more?” he yells. The guy just glares at him through his body armor mask and lets his eyes roll up in his head.
“The other one said there are five of them,” Mazen tells Mishima. Glancing up, she sees that all the intruders have been disarmed and are unconscious, fettered, or both.
“Which means the one in the server room,” Mishima says. “Can that be right? To take this huge place?”
“They took it a while ago,” Mazen offers. “These goons must be a rear guard. Although it’s strange, they must have known someone would come eventually. We’ll do a sweep to make sure. Once we free the prisoners, they can tell us more.”
“Prisoners?” Mishima looks up, and it clicks: the doors along the back wall lead to holding cells. She had known, somewhere in the back of her mind, that the Tokyo hub had detention facilities, but they are so rarely used that she had forgotten until now. Two of the Information security officers are fiddling with the locks. She turns her focus back to stabilizing the man she maimed. They want all the intel they can get out of these guys.
CHAPTER 23
The main Information hub for New York City is in the heart of the Bronx, which seemed inconvenient for many years until seawater started to eat away at the edges of Manhattan, and then seemed prescient. Domaine gets out there on a public transportation crow, walks in, and tells the man at the front desk, “I want to see Mishima.”
“Who?”
“Mishima.”
A long pause while the expressionless, heavyset man blinks and swivels his eyes, presumably scrolling through an eyeball-projection of a directory. Domaine takes this as a promising sign. He’s betting that Information still has some kind of internal connection going on, and the time it’s taking him to search suggests this directory includes more than the New York office.
The receptionist’s eyes refocus on Domaine. “Can I ask what this is regarding?” He’s not expressionless, Domaine decides; the perfectly calibrated blankness is actually an expression of disdain.
“Tell her it’s about … about what we talked about, about her team.”
The guy’s eyebrows go up, while the rest of his face remains frozen at disdainful.
“About the moles.”
Not even an eyebrow flicker this time.
Domaine gets frustrated. “Just tell her I did it! This, this whole thing—it was me.”
That, at least, gets a reaction. Turns out New York is one of the Information hubs that has holding cells. Two for one, Domaine thinks, settling into the safety of captivity.
* * *
A receptionist and a comms agent were killed in the initial assault, which, according to those in the holding cells, involved a lot more than five assailants. Everyone else is alive. Most of the upper management is crammed into the five holding cells, cramped and hungry and bruised. In their sweep of the building, the Information security team finds all the translators and grunt-work analysts locked in the translator bay, the doors fused by flamethrower.
As soon as they are out of the cells, a small squadron of techies and comms agents heads for the server rooms. Simone, the security team leader, wants them to have a medical diagnostic first, but there’s a queue for that and these people have been biting their nails for the last eighteen hours, desperate to restore connection.
“That must be why they attacked here,” Yelinka Korbin, pale and smelly but calm, tells Mishima. “Uplinks were still limited, since the earthquake, and there was a bottleneck here. We were hosting the municipal coalition uplink until they could get back on their feet. When they knocked our comms out here, Tokyo went dark.”
“The whole world went dark,” one of the security officers puts in.
Startled, Korbin glances at Mishima, who nods. “In the middle of voting. We’re working on it.”
“Everywhere? Then how…”
“The intranet is up. You guys were the only big hub that wasn’t on it. Also, someone managed to program the telegraph with an alert.” She pauses, looks back at the cells. “So, why did they stay? They must have known we’d get here eventually. Did they want to get caught?” Mishima wants to know how carefully she has to sift through their statements. Could they be decoys?
Korbin is still processing the news that Information is out. She seems more shaken by that than by a day of captivity, but she pulls herself back to answer. “Couldn’t tell much from inside those cells. But it was silent for a long time. My feeling is, the main group left, and then this bunch came back.”
“What about our security guards?” Mishima asks, but Korbin only shakes her head.
That question doesn’t get answered until Simone repeats it in the formal, closed-door debriefing an hour or two later. The techies have gotten the intranet up, so the debriefing is live, although the thin connection means they’re keeping it audio only. Mishima probably wouldn’t even be in on the call if she weren’t there in person, with the battle smell still thick on her.
It is LaForge who has to answer, and Mishima has to admit, he does it with impressive dispassion. “Due to the high costs, hiring challenges, and the prohibitive lack of capacity involved in running our own security program, we made the decision about two years ago to outsource to SecureNation.”
That raises a deep murmur. The smart people are wondering whether SecureNation acted alone or was subcontracted for the attack. Mishima hears someone mangle the quis custodiet quote. Everyone’s much less erudite without Information constantly at the tip of their tongues. She sees Korbin shut her eyes briefly, but whether in pain at the poor Latin or because she’s spent a day in a tiny holding cell because some idiot cut the wrong corner, Mishima can’t tell. She has a call coming in on her handheld. She stands up, says, “Even a narrative disorder couldn’t dream this up,” just loudly enough for LaForge to hear, and walks out of the room. That was even better than rescuing him, she decides.
* * *
Ken is back to work on the ballots. Most of the thrill has faded by this point, and he is sorting mechanically, barely even registering the Policy1st votes, when Roz stands. She hasn’t changed her clothes since he got to Doha, but the salwar kameez is weathering it better than his decidedly crumpled trousers and button-down.
“There’s a meeting on what we’re going to do with this mess,” she says, waving a hand at her cluttered workspace. “Are you coming?”
Ken jumps up and follows her. He’s starting to learn the building, but they are headed for a higher floor than he’s been to since he came down from the roof when he arrived. He’s guessing this is an important meeting.
“Um,” Ken says, catching up at the coffee machine. “You do know that I don’t actually work for Information, right?”
Roz takes her coffee. “Do you really think that I don’t know exactly who you are?”
Ken, falling behind again, reflects that the communications drop has significantly diminished the awe in which he held Information.
“Mishima vouches for you,” Roz says, turning to push the door of the conference room open with her shoulder. “That’s enough for me.”
Digesting that, Ken misses the first five minutes of the meeting and looks up to realize he has no idea who the people in the room are. There are two older men, an older woman, and five people around Roz and Mishima’s age, along with half a dozen projections of people teleconferencing in. The whole scene is not at all how he would have pictured a high-level meeting in the inner bowels of the menacing Information bureaucracy: ominously dim, the speakers’ faces angled with shadows, the surfaces hard and polished to a high gloss. Rather, it is a conference room awash in the latest thinking on productivity and harmonious consensus. Classical Arabic music plays at the edge of hearing to promote complex thought, and the lighting is soft and variable, designed to suggest that they’re sitting under a broad, spreading tree. There is even a faint breeze from time to time, bringing a hint of sea smell. Of course, it must have been ridiculously expensi
ve, but right now, Ken is the beneficiary of this pleasant space, and it makes it hard for him to believe that the people around him are conspiring against the world. He feels instead like he’s been included in benevolent discussions of global significance.
“We think we can get it back up in the next twelve to twenty-four hours,” a young woman is saying. Ken perks up. He can’t wait to get back on Information; this is worse than after the earthquake.
“Everything?” a projected head asks.
“Everything, but not all at once. Service will be restored in layers, and probably with geographic lags as well.”
A current of resigned dissatisfaction.
“Voting?” the older woman at the table asks.
“Along with the rest of it,” answers the woman. She is wearing a black tunic and loosely woven head wrap, and must be some super techie.
Ken has a sudden urge to take notes but quells it; nobody told him he was the damn intern here. He focuses on the conversation.
“Where are we on the counting?” This from a projection of a middle-aged woman with bangs who speaks with authority. She is looking at Roz, and Ken feels his face prickle with heat even though no one expects him to say anything.
“We’re at about seventy percent of what we have,” Roz says. “But that doesn’t include what we’re about to receive from Tokyo, where most of Asia’s ballots were tracked for tallying. Obviously, they got held up there; in fact, that may have been part of the rationale for the attack, and for the return of a small group of assailants.”
Ken, who has heard nothing about an attack on Tokyo, is drinking this in, baffled.
“That will add some time,” Roz continues, “but we’ll also have help from their staff. With a push, we could finish in the twelve- to twenty-four-hour timeframe. But I question whether that is the best use of our resources.”
Ken can’t help nodding, although he tries to do it thoughtfully rather than emphatically.
“For the moment,” Roz goes on, “the results are of limited usefulness to us. We have few if any complete centenals. Incomplete centenals range from zero to ninety percent participation. We could make predictions on a few of them at the latter extreme, but not enough to get any sort of sense of the Supermajority.”
“So, we throw those votes out?” asks a projection.
“Not yet,” Roz says. “We’re still checking through them and considering other analytical approaches to see if they can tell us anything about the methods of the attack itself. It’s possible we may find something of interest. What are we going to do about restarting voting?”
It’s exactly the question Ken would have asked, and he’s hanging on the answer. But from the first tentative responses (“… we could restart completely, but invalidating the previous votes seems premature…” “Is it necessary to restart everywhere at the same time?”), the debate is so convoluted and so far from resolution that he loses the thread again. He wonders about Policy1st’s chances, and what will happen to him in the aftermath; whether Suzuki will forgive him for going AWOL, or even know about it; whether he wants to go back to Policy1st, and whether that answer would change if by some amazing chance they win the Supermajority. He surfaces when he hears someone mention territorial aggression.
“I’m just saying we don’t know what’s going on out there,” a grizzled projection is complaining. “Other than these ridiculous bulletins, that is. Is there any way we can turn on Information for the security of the election process without making it more widely available?”
“Information is a public good,” one of the older men says with finality. “It may fail for technical reasons, and we may strategize about the best technical approach to get it back up, but we will not withhold Information once it is in our power to make it available. We cannot give ourselves the power to see and leave everyone else blind.”
A brief silence, and then the same projection says, “Well, then, we bring it up for everyone. I need to know what’s happening so that we can respond! Centenals could already be fighting each other.”
“The problem with that,” another projection answers, “is that as soon as we turn Information back on, the campaigning will start again. There’s no way to stop it.”
Ken pulls out his notebook and pen and starts scribbling. The breeze and all are nice, but pen to paper is the only way he’s going to stay focused, and he wants to catch all of this.
“It’s not only the campaigning,” a projected woman answers. “This act in itself, the reality that Information has been down and that we have to restart voting, will affect people’s decisions.”
“After a shock like this, everyone will run to SecureNation if we let them—”
“SecureNation won’t be on the ballot,” the woman with bangs says definitively. Ken feels his eyebrows jolt up in surprise and busies himself with his notepad.
“Well, then, Heritage. Stability, safety, trust.”
“Heritage could be behind this.”
“They might have won anyway; we don’t know that.”
“We can’t delay the voting until we conduct a full investigation, it would be anarchy.”
“People can’t stick with their current governments for another two months?”
“We can’t postpone the vote that long,” Roz puts in with authority. “The most important assets for the election systems are trust and routine. Both are badly damaged already; we’ve got to salvage to what little is left.”
“The only solution I see,” says the older woman in the room, the one with blunt-cut silver hair who has said little so far, “is to restart voting without making the rest of Information available. To anyone,” she adds, glaring at the unshaven projection who asked for private Information access.
There’s a brief silence.
“Can it be done?” someone asks.
“Maryam?” asks the silver-haired woman, and everyone turns to look at the lead techie.
“Sure. Not instantly; we want to make sure the voting is ironclad and goes live simultaneously all over the world, but I would say we can do that within the next, say, twenty hours. Fifteen if we make it our priority.”
“And then shift efforts to bringing other services online while people are voting?”
The techie nods. “That would work for us. Although of course, we’ll want to keep a close eye on the voting as it goes on, in case of any further attacks, so we’ll need to keep some resources for that.”
“This will affect people’s votes,” the woman with the bangs says. “But then, I don’t suppose there’s any way we can avoid that.”
“Not without a time machine,” someone else says, and there are guffaws around the room.
“In that case,” one of the projections says, “we should consider whether to use the existing votes.”
Silence again. “Use them for what?” asks the woman with the bangs.
“For data. Let everyone vote this time—if we tell people not to vote if they already did, lots of other people won’t get around to it either. But we’ll keep the old votes and use them as a basis for comparison. We can see how many people changed their votes.”
Murmuring and consternation.
“Which set do we use, though?” someone asks. “We need to decide that before the voting restarts. We can’t wait to see how they’re different and then decide which one we like better.”
“If we use the initial votes, we have essentially two voter groups with different sets of Information.”
“That’s not true,” a tall man answers. “Or rather, it’s always true. Voters in different places or voting at different times during the twenty-four-hour period always have different sets of Information.”
“The initial votes are purer,” someone else says. Ken feels, rather than sees, Roz roll her eyes.
“Purer, bullshit,” the grizzled projection says. “The votes we use should all come from the same batch.”
“Roz,” says the woman with the short silver hair, “in your opinion,
is the initial voting set uncorrupted? Could it be used, either as data, for comparison purposes and so forth, or as actual votes?”
“We haven’t found any evidence that the attack on the Information servers affected the votes that were cast,” Roz says. “Although I will add that’s another reason not to suggest people who voted last time shouldn’t revote. We can’t say for sure that nothing was lost, particularly at the precise moment the comms went down. We can certainly use the initial set, although I would ask that they be run through the compiler. I don’t want my team to be the only ones checking live votes.” Ken is pleased to hear himself referred to as a team.
“Interesting.” There is some general muttering. Ken can feel the discussion edging toward stability. His face grows hot in anticipation, but he can’t let this go.
“Excuse me,” he says, and immediately feels like an idiot. Everyone else jumped into the conversation so smoothly, and he practically raises his hand and waits for the teacher to call on him. They’re all looking at him now, probably staring at the space next to his head where his public Information should state, at the very least, his title and name. International man of mystery, Ken thinks, and plunges on. “You can’t—that is, I don’t think you can keep people off Information for an extra day when you have the technical ability to give it to them. There are people out there who are away from their homes, their families, and have no way of getting in touch with them or finding out anything.”
“He has a point,” Roz says after a pause. “We need to consider humanitarian principles.”
“We are not humanitarians,” snaps the woman with the bangs. “We are bureaucrats. That said,” she adds more gently, “he’s not wrong. People are bound to realize that if we can manage voting, we can manage comms, and it could lead to backlash.”
“We can probably get comms up and running at the same time as voting,” the super techie offers. “Person-to-person calls. No news compilers, no global vision. All that is going to take more work, anyway.”