by Malka Older
Ken thinks about mentioning weather predictors for the fishermen but decides not to push his luck.
* * *
“There’s a what?” Mishima says into her earpiece.
“Someone here who says he wants to see you.” It’s the New York hub, over the intranet. Mishima tries to figure out who’s speaking or picture the office, but she can’t remember the last time she was there. All she can be sure of is that it was in the Bronx. “He says … he says he did it.”
“Did what?” But she’s starting to get an inkling. Mishima is tired, she’s wearing someone else’s blood spatter, and all she wants is to go back to Doha, ideally with a shower along the way, and see if she can figure out how to apologize to Ken. Except that there is one thing she wants more than that, which is to fix this mess. “Can you describe him?”
CHAPTER 24
Suzuki is camped outside the Information hub in Paris.
He spent the first day trying not to go crazy, checking whether Information was back up approximately every thirty seconds. The thought that he wasn’t going to be able to vote was making him ill, visible hives and a pounding headache. Then the rumors started flying and he began to suspect, and then believe (although there was no way to confirm it, of course; how could he confirm it?), that Information was down everywhere.
Down everywhere. On Election Day. Years of planning, and they have technical difficulties. That makes him want to curl up in his hotel room with the lights out and his handheld set to alert him when the world is connected again and not before. He could sleep until then. Or, and the thought is seductive, he could go see the sights. Stroll the Louvre, climb the Tower, take a boat down the Seine. He could go shopping! He desperately needs a new raincoat (particularly if he’s going to be stuck in Paris for any length of time) and wouldn’t mind some new dress shoes, either.
Once he’s had a chance to recover from the shock and set his well-oiled, slightly oily mind to work, he sees that the Information hub is the key to it all. They will get the election, and everything else, back online. They are too well-funded, too respectable, too incredibly capable not to. It is only a matter of time. And once they manage the technical hitches, they will need to come up with a new set of rules. In all probability, those rules will be designed to exclude campaigning, but in reality, they will define a new form of campaigning, one with a very short time frame. Suzuki doesn’t see the powers-that-be pushing the election off for a month, three months. If they didn’t do it after the earthquake, they won’t do it now. It would mean admission of defeat, not to mention incredible added expense. No, they will want whatever happens to happen fast. And whoever learns the rules first will have an advantage.
So, he waits. At first he tried to see someone in the hub, but politely, not insistently, and when he was just as politely rebuffed, he left his contact details, which at this point are reduced to “the restaurant across the way,” and went there to wait. At least he’s getting a leisurely meal, the first in quite a few months. It looks like there’s a shoe store on the corner; maybe he’ll get some shopping done after all. He doesn’t think so, though. This is the closest restaurant to Information, their staff must eat here sometimes, and who knows? Maybe he’ll overhear something useful.
In any case, he wants them to be able to find him when they’re ready.
* * *
“Domaine, I don’t need to fly all the way to New York for you to tell me something. Just say what you have to say.”
Mishima’s voice is a growl. Domaine wishes he didn’t like it so much, because she’s obviously not interested in him. “Two reasons I can’t: one, this call is not secured, and what I have to say is highly sensitive, and two, they’re not going to let me out of this holding cell unless you make them, in person. And I’d like to get out.”
“You’re in there for a reason,” Mishima says. “Why should I get you out?”
“I’m in here because I confessed to something I didn’t do. It was the only way I could get them to put me in touch with you. It’s not so easy for us plebs to communicate these days, you know.”
“What did you confess to?” Mishima asks, distracted. She’s got the debrief audio in her other ear as she talks to him.
“This! This whole thing. Obviously, it wasn’t me.”
“How do I know you didn’t do it?” Mishima asks, although it’s a ridiculous question. “You would love to disrupt Election Day like this.”
“Yes, I would love to, but first of all, I can’t, and secondly, I won’t love what’s coming next. Neither will you. So get over here and listen to what I have to say! Come on, it’s not like you’re paying for the flight.”
“I’m paying with my time,” Mishima says. His constant digs at supposed Information privilege are starting to grate. But she already knows what she’s going to do. At least she can rest on her crow. “If whatever you have to say doesn’t pan out, I’m going to tell them to throw away the key.”
“Accepted,” he says. “And if it is good, can a man get a dinner date?”
She signs off.
* * *
The observations culled by hardworking Information lackeys all over the world keep trickling in over the intranet. Ken keeps an eye on them, and when he’s seen enough substantive reports come in from Sri Lanka, he asks Roz if he can take another walk out to share it with the migrant workers.
“No problem,” Roz says. “Bring back more of that take-away, okay?”
Ken lingers. “Are you sure? I know we’re on a tight schedule for finishing the ballot count.” It’s hard to slack in the face of Roz’s unrelenting work ethic.
She flaps her hand at him. “We’re fine. Although I may have something else for you when you come back…”
Ken is preoccupied. “We can finish everything, including that new stuff from Tokyo, in the next fifteen hours?”
“They’ve kicked it out to twenty-four,” Roz says, “to let the techies make sure that everything is absolutely as robust as possible before restarting. Also, Mishima is helping. She’s traveling and apparently bored, so she offered to take some on.”
That gives Ken something to think about while he walks out to Lankaland. He’s relieved Mishima is alive, because he had been hearing hints that she was involved in something gnarly, maybe that attack on Tokyo they were talking about. But then it hits him that she contacted Roz, is probably chatting away as they sort ballots to keep their brains from numbing over. She’s bored. And she still hasn’t gotten in touch with Ken.
He thought he was being all adult, telling her to call him after she stabbed him, but who is he kidding? He’s a sucker.
True, calling him would not be so easy right now. She probably doesn’t know he’s up on the Information intranet. He could send her a message.
No. He shuts that idea down right there.
At the restaurant, which is noticeably quieter now that the first rush of news has been digested, Ken sits with Sandika and some of his friends. Most of them work at hotels or other tourist-trade facilities, and they tell him about the difficulties in sending money home. Some of them love working abroad. Sandika, for one, still finds it thrilling. He meets people from all over the world, makes enough money to have spending cash after he sends some home to his parents, and he goes to a lot of parties on his off time. But for others, it has become a grind, and one that they are increasingly convinced is not fair.
“You know, Policy1st has really strong protections for citizens who work abroad,” Ken starts, and then stops abruptly, embarrassed to be shilling for his government. Campaigning, in fact. He remembers, guiltily, the conversation during the meeting about campaigning during this strange interim between voting and voting.
But Sandika and the other guys seem so interested, and he can’t find a good way to avoid telling them now. He tries to state policy as plainly and clearly as he can, as if he were the Information annotations alongside Suzuki’s beautifully turned statements during a debate.
“So, what do yo
u guys think about Information?” he asks as soon as he can work in a change of subject.
They look at each other. “I mean…”
“It’s fine.”
“Normal, right?”
“When it works.”
They laugh.
* * *
Once en route to New York, Mishima does a mental-emotional scan. Domaine will be trying to manipulate her; she’s better off knowing her weaknesses, unpleasant though that may be. She runs the diagnostic and takes a look. Mishima’s mental state appears, according to her preferences, represented as shaded, color-coded, overlapping line graphs. There’s the sound the sword made slicing into the arm, a red spike; her feelings about it are a deeper, more complicated purple, wider and shallower around the red peak. The jagged cluster of sensations around the attack on the second debate is already fading into the background. Her general low-level ambivalence about Information work, on the other hand, has heightened to a strident orange-yellow color, and her anxiety about the possibility of global war is a looming grey bluff. There is a pale blue hump of sadness over the two people killed in Tokyo, both of whom she knew slightly. A small bile-colored triangle represents her gloating over LaForge’s dishonor. The most dramatic peak, however, is the green of her guilt about stabbing Ken, which shades into the pulsing yellow serration of mistrust toward almost everyone. Her narrative disorder is the background palette, a bright but 85 percent transparent pink faintly patterned with lightning bolts, ninjas, flowers, sailing ships, smoking guns, and horses.
What a mess. She looks at the recommendations. A long unburdening to a close friend is at the top, but impractical for a number of reasons. Exercise is up there too, but also difficult in the close constraints of the crow. She is aware that this is the logical sequence she follows almost every time she undertakes this exercise. One of the reasons she does it as often as she does is that reliably, never first but always somewhere in the top five, she finds “unwind with premade content.” License to feed the addiction. She has used this as an excuse often enough, dived into films or soaps or series or novels. Today, though—or tonight; she can’t keep track anymore—she doesn’t desire unreality. She wants to be busy. She sends a message to Roz, asks if there’s anything she can do to help with the vote analysis.
* * *
When Ken gets back, Roz is ready for him. She unwraps the parcel he brought, delicately avoiding the fragrant stains that have seeped through the notepaper (someone’s high school math homework, apparently) as she explains what she wants.
“I’ve been thinking about what else we can find out from this data. How are you at analytics?”
Ken puffs slightly. “Before I hit the campaign trail, I was doing a lot of poll dissection, working alongside some of Policy1st’s best analysts—”
“Okay,” Roz cuts him off through a mouthful of string hoppers and brinjal curry. “This shouldn’t be too challenging, at least initially. I want you to work on crunching some of the ancillary data from these votes. Start with time—the exact time, as close as we can get it—place, and government, and we’ll go from there.”
Ken raises an eyebrow. “Looking particularly at the votes around the time of the outage?”
Roz nods. “You can start there and work your way back. It might not tell us anything, but I think it’s worth checking, since we have the person-hours.”
Ken is so pleased at the thought that his presence is helpful, and so busy trying to hide his glow and stay professional, that it isn’t until he’s started working through the analytics that he catches the other implication of what she said, the slight emphasis: “I think it’s worth checking.” Maybe this is a private initiative, something best not mentioned to the higher-ups, at least until it’s proven worthwhile.
Speaking of gossip. Ken has been hesitant about asking Roz anything, since she’s so laconic and hardworking herself. But with the vote count under control and Roz contentedly munching on the last few pappadam, this seems like a good moment. “So, what did SecureNation do, exactly? I mean, why are they barred from the election?”
Roz looks up from the few remaining morsels on the notepaper, surprised. “You don’t know? They were the ones who attacked the Tokyo office.”
“How was the Tokyo office attacked?” Ken is careful to ask in a neutral, nonpanicked tone.
Roz leans back, thinks. “Of course. That was when Mishima left. I suppose nobody else would have told you.”
Roz may not talk much, but when she sets out to tell a story, she does it properly. As she finishes eating and drinks the ginger beer he brought back for her, she lays it out for him: the anachronistic SOS call; Mishima’s rapid departure with the security team on the expectation some other assistance would reach the office first; a reasonably exciting rendition of the events once they arrived.
“The men they captured haven’t talked much, but everything they’ve said supports the hypothesis that Tokyo was attacked because of its vulnerable state after the earthquake. Also, as a regional vote collection station, it offered them the option to steal or corrupt some votes, but they may not have realized that at first. They sent a smaller group back for the votes, and our security team surprised them.”
“And they were from SecureNation?” Ken asks.
“They had SecureNation badges and training, but they have all claimed to have acted without the knowledge of the larger organization. That’s pretty much all they’ll say. What is damning is that the security personnel in the office, who were subcontracted from SecureNation, aided or at least did not prevent the attack.”
“So, there was some kind of conspiracy,” Ken says. “What does SecureNation say?”
“That a group of their staff acted completely without their knowledge or approval in a heinous act that they disavow entirely. Since it will take some time to reach any conclusion in this investigation, the compromise is that SecureNation will only be able to compete for centenals it already holds. In all other centenals, they won’t even appear on the ballot.”
“So, they’re getting away with it?” Ken’s brain is filled with images of sword-wielding militiamen attacking Mishima.
“They may not have done it,” Roz points out. “In the worst case, those at the top will have maintained a plausible deniability. But as you know, most SecureNation centenals—and there aren’t that many; they’ve never been in the running for Supermajority—are made up almost entirely of military personnel and their families. What do you think would happen if we were to tell those well-armed soldiers, who incidentally control most of the remaining nukes we can account for, that on Election Day they can’t vote for the only government they’ve ever known because of some incident most of them have never heard of?”
Ken frowns. He doesn’t like to hear Information’s famous neutrality being watered down for practical reasons in the face of military strength.
“Don’t worry,” Roz tells him. “The investigation and trial will happen, just after the election. Besides, the censure SecureNation is worried about is economic, not political.”
“What do you mean?”
“SecureNation is quite small as a government, correct? Most of their influence comes from contracting their services out to other governments. So, what do you think happens if word gets around that their employees are unreliable and have a penchant for attacking the governments they’re supposed to be protecting?”
“Everyone will switch to their competitors,” Ken says.
Roz smiles. “Information is very good at getting word around.”
* * *
Mishima finally gets a few hours’ sleep and wakes up in time to eat and take a little care over her appearance. It’s not that she wants to look good for Domaine; what she wants is not to look harried, desperate, or otherwise off her game. She pulls her hair into a chignon using a capilliphelic gel that draws the strands smoothly together on the outside even when the inside is a tangled knot, and puts on loose grey silk trousers with a tight matching jacket that has
a million self-adhesive buttons. A light spray of oxygen and she gets off the crow looking as fresh as possible. She doesn’t want to go into this feeling rushed, so she spends a little while catching up with Nakia, her closest friend in the New York hub, over coffee. Then they go to see Domaine.
The holding cell here is slightly larger than the ones in Tokyo, and nicer, although in fairness, she saw the ones in Tokyo only after eighteen hours way beyond maximum capacity. She asks for an office or small conference room, and Nakia leads them to a room with a round, plastic-finish table, four chairs, and a bleak view, and leaves them to it.
“Okay, Domaine,” Mishima says. “I’m here. Spit it out.”
He takes his time, looking her over. He’s lost some of his brashness; being without Information has been hard on him too, especially while locked up. On the other hand, he exudes a kind of righteousness, the conscious nobility of a bad boy who’s stepping away from his persona to consider the greater good, a little Judd Nelson in The Breakfast Club. It’s cloying. She half-expects him to break into a riff about how this is a far, far better thing he’s doing now.
“I don’t have too many details, and maybe you won’t think it’s worth your while to have come. But I couldn’t take the chance. Being in the business I’m in, you hear things.”
“Hear them where?”
Domaine shifts. “Look, I’m piecing stuff together here. There have been … hints, shall we say, in the circles in which I move. People laughing when they shouldn’t be, or making ‘offhand’ comments that didn’t make any sense until now. But”—he puts his hands up as Mishima prepares to stand—“I do have something more concrete, okay? I’m just telling you that there have been multiple indications.”
“Where does this concrete something come from, then?” Mishima asks when Domaine doesn’t go on.
“In this case, from funders. A funder.” He hesitates, then names a music star. He’s already got half a dozen warlords after him; no point in worrying about a pop singer.
“And?”