by Malka Older
“And this funder, among others, supports my cause but also other, rather more, um, opportunistic ones.”
Mishima refrains from commenting. She supposes Domaine does see himself as selfless, and it’s true he probably wouldn’t get much directly from toppling the global order.
“So, I hear things. Now, I don’t know what’s happened in the last thirty-six hours, I have no way of knowing, right?” Mishima is not ready to concede that. There may be open comms that she doesn’t know about. But she nods to keep him talking. “But I’m fairly sure there’s been an attack on one or more Information hubs. They would be places where regional votes are compiled. The attackers would have disabled the comms, maybe stolen or corrupted votes, and disappeared. Not many casualties, if any, because they don’t want you to focus on finding them but to keep reacting to what they’re doing.”
“Go on,” Mishima says.
Domaine leans forward. “It was an inside job,” he says. She doesn’t react. “Some Information offices have been outsourcing their security, and that security is compromised.”
“So?” Mishima says.
“So, what? Am I right?”
“Whether or not you are,” Mishima shifts her position, as if impatient, “you’re still talking about the past. How does this help me?”
He eyes her. “Knowing that it’s an inside job? I would think that would be very helpful.”
“Very,” Mishima says, standing up. “And we already knew it.”
“All right,” Domaine drawls. “So, you are aware that SecureNation is not reliable. Do you know who hired them?”
“Why don’t you tell me what you think you know, and then we’ll see how useful I think it is?”
Domaine blows air through his nose. “Fine. Since you came all this way … the funder I’m talking about, she didn’t put any money toward this. But she likes to think she’s a radical, hangs out with geeks and mercs, you know what I mean? When we talked last week, she said that we had one more reason to try to crash the election system, because if we didn’t, they would do it for us.”
“They who?” Mishima is getting impatient.
Domaine clears his throat, looks down at the table, up at the corner of the room, plays coy. “A major government.” Mishima glares at him. He sighs dramatically: can’t she figure anything out herself? “Heritage.”
Mishima shakes her head with more conviction than she feels. “That makes no sense. They have the most power. They were likely to win again. Why would they take that kind of risk?”
“Maybe they would win, maybe they wouldn’t,” Domaine says. “But after the earthquake, their numbers went shaky and they panicked, started putting out feelers to the kind of people who could do this kind of thing. And some faction of SecureNation was willing.”
“Still risky,” Mishima says skeptically.
Domaine shrugs. “Power corrupts, and once you get cozy with the Supermajority, you don’t want to let it go. Anyway, I made much the same argument in casual hypothetical conversation to said donor, and she told me that it’s not only the SecureNation subcontractors: they have someone at Information facilitating things.”
“Which, let me guess, is why you have to topple Information, the evil oppressor, blah blah blah,” Mishima finishes for him.
“It’s true; I would take it with a grain of salt,” he admits. “Especially because she did go into a long and borderline narrative-disorder rant at that point. Also, as I think I may have expressed to you before, a Heritage win is Information’s worst nightmare. Which is what I said to her.”
“I take it there’s more?” Mishima asks when he pauses.
“I’m trying to help you here; just let me tell the story. So, she says I’m right. Information doesn’t want Heritage to win; they’re trying to boost their competitors, or shield them, or somehow tilt the oh-so-fair playing field. Certain individuals within Information think this is wrong and are willing to do something about it.”
Mishima doesn’t want to show anything, any surprise or interest, but it takes her a fraction of a second to file that statement next to Korbin’s analysis of her Liberty report before she goes on. “So what are they doing about it? Comms down in mid-election, an attack on an Information office—what’s the endgame?”
Domaine rolls his eyes. “Winning the election, of course. Knocking comms out gives them the opportunity to manipulate votes. Or so I understand it.”
“How?”
“I have no idea, Mishima. It’s not my plot. I heard someone famous talking about it, and I’m cobbling that together with hints and impressions and cackling self-congratulatory cryptic messages that I’ve been a party to over the last few weeks. That’s all.”
Mishima studies him. “Why are you telling me all this? You should be dancing for joy that the election was disrupted.”
“I hate your stupid pseudodemocratic infomocracy, true,” Domaine agrees. “But I would hate a corporate dictatorship manipulated by the military-industrial complex even more.” A pause. “So. How about dinner?”
She stands up, this time without pretense. “You’re lucky I’m not telling them to throw away the key.”
Mishima enjoys the faint panic in his eyes at that and adds that to the bile-green peak of self-disgust. “You’re going to leave me in here? I told you I didn’t do this.”
“I’m going to check out your intel. If it’s good, we’ll see about letting you out.” She pauses at the door. “I’m also having them do a cross-ref in case there’s anything else you should be in here for.” She pauses to watch him consider the possibilities. “Like the debate attack.”
Domaine leans back, relaxed again. “I had nothing to do with that. I don’t run with Anarchy.”
“We’ll see,” Mishima says.
“An onsen full of witnesses will put me in a hot spring during the entire debate. No tech on me at all.”
“Very convenient.”
Domaine shrugs. “What would you do with a night off in Kansai? You can check it out as soon as Information comes back on.” Which is about when he wants to get out of here, anyway.
Mishima is continually amazed by the faith people seem to have that Information is coming back on, any second now. She hopes they’re right. She walks out, and a security guard slides in the door before it falls closed to escort Domaine back to the holding cell. In that brief interim between Mishima turning her back and the guard appearing, Domaine manages to palm a coin-sized metallic disk out from under the table, where it has been clinging magnetically since he slapped it on at the beginning of the conversation.
CHAPTER 25
Mishima thanks Nakia for her invitation to dinner but refuses. She leaves the building and walks, directionless. The neighborhood around the Information office is windswept and grey, long roads and difficult intersections lined with garages and parking lots and little of interest. It’s built for cars, not pedestrians, and she should take her crow and find a restaurant with moorings, but she keeps walking. She needs time to think.
When Domaine talked about vote manipulation, she couldn’t help seeing Roz at her workspace, sorting votes as though with a fine-tooth comb. After a little due diligence, she is happy to discard that suspicion. Her role in analyzing the early votes was an ad hoc decision, not something anyone could have planned for. Mishima saw most of the process on the intranet while she was flying from the Adapted Maldives. It was not surprising, because she’s good at that type of work, but not guaranteed. And she didn’t volunteer for it. Besides, she knows Roz. Not enough to swear she wouldn’t betray them, but enough so that when combined with circumstantial evidence, she can feel comfortable trusting her.
Even so, she hesitates to go to her first. Go to anyone in Information first. There are too many overlapping alliances. Which leaves one perfect (too perfect?) option.
* * *
Ken is working next to Roz when his intranet screen blinks and shows him nine blank spaces. He scrambles up and mumbles something to Roz and takes his handheld into
the bathroom. No one else is in there, but he immediately realizes it’s a stupid place to talk anyway, so he leaves and goes to the only other place he can think of: right outside the front door of the building. It’s not that people never enter or leave, but you can see them in either direction for a few seconds before they arrive, and he’s pretty sure no one can manually eavesdrop without him noticing. He types in Mishima’s code.
“Hey. Can you talk?” is the message. It’s in English this time, not kanji, and Ken wonders if she’s realized that he doesn’t read Japanese and his visual translator’s default setting is off. Whatever. He initiates the call.
“Hi,” Mishima says. She looks kind of pale, but maybe it’s the lighting. A streetlamp, he thinks. She’s wearing a scarf and a knit hat, her ruddy hair loose beneath it. It’s winter wherever she is, and night. Good, he’s narrowed it down to about a quarter of the globe. “How are you?”
“Fine,” Ken says. “How are you?”
“Okay,” she says, but as though it’s a placeholder rather than an actual word with meaning attached. “How’s it going with Roz?”
“Fine,” Ken says again, but more warily this time: Mishima’s been talking to Roz, after all.
She hesitates, and there’s a kind of motion that Ken interprets as her stamping her feet against the cold.
“Are you outside the Information office doors somewhere?” he asks her.
“Yeah,” she says. “You, too?”
“Yeah.” He stretches his arm out to show her. “Hot out here. At least the overhang gives me a little shade.”
She makes a sound in her throat; he can’t tell over the crappy connection whether she’s laughing or growling at his taunt.
“So?” he says. “What’s up?”
She hesitates again. “I’ve just gotten some intel,” she says finally. “The source is … a little doubtful, understand? But he says that there’s a double agent within Information.”
“A double agent?” Ken is intrigued. That would imply that there are single agents.
“Someone who’s working against the election process.” She sighs. “For whatever reasons.”
“So, they knocked the comms out, and the voting…”
“This is part one, apparently.”
“You mean this whole crisis of communications, the technical issues, all of it—”
“Are a way in. A way to open up a little space to maneuver, maybe have a window of greater authority, or to cast some confusion around the voting, let it be manipulated.”
“So, they’re working for a government,” Ken says.
She looks at him questioningly.
“I mean, not trying to overthrow the system, which is what this kind of looked like at first, but trying to decide the outcome.”
“Yeah,” Mishima says. “Something like that.” Of course that’s why Domaine was willing to pass on the intel: their goal is not his goal.
“Who are they working for?” Ken asks.
Mishima hesitates again. “The thing is,” she says, “I don’t know whom I can trust within intel.”
Ken feels a sudden sinking in his guts. “You don’t think … Roz…” He wants to reject this idea himself, immediately, but he makes himself consider it.
“I don’t think so,” Mishima says quickly. “I’m almost sure not. But … what do you think?”
“I agree,” Ken says. “She seems solid. And cares about her work.”
“Yeah.” Mishima sounds relieved. “But still, before I went to her, I wanted to check with you. And … I thought maybe you could help me try to figure out who it is. The double agent.”
This is almost as good as rescuing her. Ken doesn’t want to sound too eager, though. But then, before he can stop himself, he starts to laugh. “So, what you’re saying is, two and a half days ago, you stabbed me in the leg because you couldn’t trust me, and now I’m the only one you can trust?”
Mishima doesn’t join his laughter. “That’s about the size of it,” she says. Then, with a flash of anger directed somewhere off in the direction of the streetlamp: “Why do people always expect you to trust them? With all the shit that goes on in this world, I don’t know why anyone expects my trust just because they are unverifiably, according to themselves, a nice guy. Who the hell defaults to trust?” Then she brings herself back and meets his eyes again, across the thousands of miles of distance and unreliable stream of encrypted-then-decrypted data packets. “About the stabbing, though. Ken, I’m really sorry about that.”
“It’s okay,” he says, and this time he means it. “I’ve thought about it, and I see why you were suspicious. I’m not saying I would have acted the same way, but—you know, it’s okay.”
“It’s not okay,” she says. “But thank you.”
“It is okay,” he says. “You didn’t hurt me. Not, um, for more than a few minutes, anyway. My leg is fine. I’m fine. Someday, we’ll joke about it.”
She doesn’t believe the last bit, but even so, she feels the bright green mountain of guilt inside her subside a little. “So, I do have sort of a plan. It has to do with those votes.”
“Oh!” Ken says. “You know, in the meeting about restarting voting—”
“You were in that meeting?” He must have seriously impressed Roz.
“Yeah, well, Roz brought me along.” Ken is tempted to tell her about his contribution to world peace through restored communication but restrains himself. “Anyway, there was someone who talked about keeping the initial votes, for data and comparison purposes.”
“Who?” Mishima asks, suddenly sharp.
“I don’t know,” Ken says. “They weren’t showing any public Information. I guess no one is these days. Roz will know.”
“Yeah,” Mishima is thoughtful. “Okay, here’s what I’m thinking. We’ll doctor up a batch of fake votes to replace the initial votes, keep careful track of the exact distributions, then leave that in place of the real ones for the duration of the election. If anyone switches them in, we will be able to prove it’s a fake quickly and, hopefully, nail whoever switched them.”
“Okay,” Ken says. He has no idea how to create fake votes.
“I’ll get started and then I’ll send some samples to you and Roz to build on. At the same time, I’m going to try to track this person, whoever it was who said that in the meeting, see if they’re a likely mole and what I can find out.”
Ken wants to tell her to be careful but bites his tongue in time.
“I’m going to need you to lend Roz your handheld,” Mishima goes on, “so we can use this secure connection.” Creating those encryptions is complicated, and she doesn’t feel like giving this one out to another person right now, even someone she trusts.
“Hey, Mishima,” Ken says, and instantly feels awkward. This may be the first time he’s said her name to her face. “You said that you were working on Liberty too, right? You still don’t think they have anything to do with this?”
“Not this,” Mishima says, “but that doesn’t mean that they’re not plotting something. I’m working on that, too. In fact … if you have time, we need to map out existing Liberty centenals and highlight the ones that might be, um, aggressive. That will give us a head start on where to look, because when Information comes back on it’s going to be…”
“Overwhelming,” Ken says, caught up in the sudden image of once again having real-time access to the sum of the world’s knowledge.
“Exactly. But don’t take too much time on that. The election is the priority. I don’t know how we’re going to figure this out before the voting starts again.”
“Why before the voting starts again?”
“The fake votes are a last resort, although we’ll need to have them ready. It would be better to figure out what government is messing with us before anyone votes again. We can’t disqualify a government once the election has reopened and people have voted for them. I don’t know how many times we can restart the whole thing before we lose credibility.” She sighs.
“I wanted to get back to Doha, but with the timing, there’s just no point. We’re going to have to do it by secure calls and hope no one notices and manages to decrypt them.”
She does look pale, Ken decides. And sad. “We don’t necessarily have to figure it out before the election starts,” he says. “Look, they’re only going to try to change the outcome if they’re losing. If we can stop them from changing it, they still lose. If they are going to win anyway…”
“It’s going to be tough to deal with a Supermajority government that planned to but didn’t have to sabotage the vote,” Mishima finishes.
Roz is quiet for a few moments after Mishima tells her what Domaine said, withholding, as she did with Ken, any mention of Heritage. “I’ve been working on something here too,” she says finally. “Analyzing the last votes that were cast—Ken’s been very helpful, actually. Slicing down to the picosecond, we’ve found a couple of interesting things. First, the origin point for the virus is the Tokyo hub.”
Mishima digests that. “Could it be because the infrastructure there was weakened by the earthquake?”
“Possibly,” Roz answers. “I passed it on to Maryam—you know she’s leading the restoration work? She says the data is too corrupted to be sure, but she is going to recommend that the investigation start there.”
The investigation to find the spy inside Information. There is an uncomfortable silence, Mishima thinking back to the absorbed, companionable days and nights after the earthquake. “There’s something else, though,” Roz goes on at last. “The virus started in an Information hub. But that hub going blank shouldn’t affect voting, right? Almost immediately after Tokyo is knocked out, voting goes dark in the Heritage centenals several hundred picoseconds, almost half a nanosecond, before it is cut off in other governments. Once it gets into government systems, it is the Heritage repeaters that go out first and spread it fastest.”
“Meaning?”
“Again, Maryam says it’s suggestive but inconclusive. It could be that the virus was designed to spread through Heritage centenals, that someone was trying to shut down the Heritage centenals to knock them out of incumbency, but when that many repeaters went out, it crashed the whole system.”