by Malka Older
“Or?”
“Or Heritage engineered the outage and purposely lowered the defenses on their systems to let it spread faster.”
“Your instinct says that’s what happened?” Mishima asks.
Roz nods. “Maryam thinks so too, though she doesn’t have anything to prove it.”
“My informant also pointed to Heritage.”
They are silent for a moment. “So, about the votes…” Mishima starts.
“You know,” Roz says, “at the meeting on voting, someone talked about keeping the votes. It bothered me because it wasn’t one of the initial strategies, and it puts me in a complicated position.”
“Ken mentioned that,” Mishima says. “Who was it?”
Roz is silent again, replaying the meeting in her head. “Drestle. Do you know him? He works in the Paris hub.”
“I know who he is.” Mishima thinks. “He worked for a government once, didn’t he?”
“Public affairs officer with Heritage. Left a while ago, seven or eight years, maybe.”
“Maybe not long enough,” Mishima says. “I’m heading to Paris.”
* * *
Mishima is glad to leave New York. It’s a big office, but in terms of the election, it’s a backwater. Still, she finds herself unusually reluctant to climb back into her crow. Another seven hours of spotty connection and fretting. At least it gives her time to prepare their play with the votes. And think up a reason for being in Paris. Still, it’s almost enough to make her wish the mantle tunnels were already running.
The mantle tunnels. Not quite approved before the election. Would that make the risk worth it to Heritage? Another thing to think about during the trip.
* * *
After talking to Mishima, Roz goes back upstairs and beckons Maryam from her tech lair.
“How’s it going?” she asks when they’re alone in the corridor. Roz and Maryam have been friends since Maryam moved back to the Doha office a year ago, and usually manage to go out for dinner or karaoke at least once a month.
Maryam is wearing a knee-length black tunic, black trousers, and a loose-woven black silk head wrap, all of which have held up well in the three days of nonstop work since the election was interrupted. The strain is starting to show in her face, though. “We will make the deadline, but it’ll be close. Japan’s still not pulling its weight—not their fault; they’re reeling—and I think everyone in Sydney has decided to go home and get some sleep—” She stops, shaking her head. “Sorry. It’s just— People keep asking us how this is possible: ‘Why are there security gaps?’ ‘We thought you made everything more robust after the earthquake!’ I don’t understand how these high-level officials can still believe it’s possible to make technology fail-safe!” She throws up her hands. “Anyway. We’ll be fine. And you? How’s the vote counting?”
“Oh, we’re done with that,” Roz says, and hesitates.
“So, you’re preparing for the crazy possibility of using them?” Maryam snorts, and Roz nods with a grimace. “By the way, who’s that guy you brought to the meeting? Is he a specialist from another office?”
Roz smiles. “No, not a specialist at all. Someone Mishima brought in. Not even Information. He works for Policy1st. But he’s good, and he’s around. He works hard and doesn’t ask too many questions.”
“Qualities worth having,” Maryam agrees. “So, what’s up, habibti?”
Roz lowers her voice. “I’ve gotten more intel that points at Heritage. A dodgy source but pretty specific. What are you finding?”
Maryam shrugs. “Nothing since we talked. We’ll see. The forensic team is still looking for something conclusive.”
“I’m curious,” Roz says, her eyes on the open door of the tech lair, “what is going on in Heritage centenals right now.” She leaves a brief space, but Maryam doesn’t say anything. “In the meeting yesterday, they were clear about not limiting Information access to ourselves.”
“They were,” Maryam agrees.
“But I was thinking, for technical reasons, to enable you to do your job in there, you would probably have to … I don’t know, test it.”
“We are,” Maryam confirms in a low voice. “It’s still very weak. Right now, we’re only looking at some patchy stuff here on the peninsula, and with the focus on getting voting back up, it’s going to take a while. But yes, we will have Information access before anyone else. It’s not that we’re intentionally keeping it to ourselves; it’s just part of the process of bringing it back up.”
“Will you keep an eye on Heritage centenals for me?”
Maryam nods sharply. “Although if they did sabotage their centenals on purpose, they may take longer to come back on line.”
“Understood,” Roz says. She sighs, shifts to a more personal register. “How are you holding up?” Long distance is hard enough, but without private comms, it must be awful.
Maryam looks down at her hands. “I am too busy to think about it much, but … we’re both under a lot of pressure, so it’s not exactly going well. How are you doing?”
Roz stretches, sniffs at her underarm. “I think I’m going to take an hour or two and go home to change. Can I bring you anything from the outside world?”
Maryam’s laugh turns into a sigh. “We have plenty of caffeine and calories, so no, I can’t think of anything. I’ll sleep when the voting is over.”
* * *
Mishima works on the votes for a while in her crow, occasionally looking down at the cold Atlantic skimming under the camera. She’s building a program to generate and tabulate the false votes. It’s a simple program, but she tests it carefully with a number of different small-scale scenarios. They don’t want any glitches.
When she can’t stare at fake votes any longer, she looks at the Liberty centenal map Ken sent her within an hour of their conversation. It is sobering. Stealing the election seems awful, an affront to micro-democracy and Information and everything her life has stood for over the past five years. But—as visible in that undulating ambivalence line in her emotional profile—she knows that a change in Supermajority wouldn’t make that much difference to the lives of most people. She knows that neither elections nor Information are neutral, that subtle changes in where centenal boundaries are drawn would lead to completely different outcomes, and that as much as they try to balance it, Information workers end up transmitting their most minute preferences and prejudices through the subjective choices of their work. And she casts her lot with them anyway, because she can’t think of anything better. If she were the one to choose the quote that is found above the entrances of Information offices worldwide, it would be the one that says democracy is the worst system, except for all the other ones.
Information can get so overwrought that sometimes, she wants to take the whole organization and shake it, shake everyone in it and all of their huge, locally contextualized, beautifully designed buildings. Yes, they are right on principle, but democracy is of limited usefulness when there are no good choices, or when the good choices become bad as soon as you’ve chosen them, or when all the Information access in the world can’t make people use it.
Thinking about war puts it in a whole new perspective, though. That would destroy the system, bring the pax democratica crashing down, open the door to every opportunist and violent nutcase and wealthy megalomaniac out there.
And even before accomplishing that, war would destroy everyone in its way. The people whose centenals are highlighted in turquoise on the globe Ken sent her, and the people in the centenals next to them. She skims it quickly, highlights a few that Ken missed, possibly not aware of the political tensions in those regions. She hesitates over two that he highlighted in Naha, because there is so much distance and ocean between them and the Japanese nationalist centenals and territory that would be their target, but Ken left a note that the rhetoric has been high there.
Then she leans back and watches the globe projection spin slowly, superimposed over the screen image of rushing ocean below h
er. She’s been to many of these places—if not the Liberty centenal itself, then the city or the general area—and she tries to visualize them, put herself in each, briefly. What will they do?
She wonders if SecureNation made a deal with both Liberty and Heritage, hedging their bets, taking all they can get. Or maybe Liberty has hired one of the other purveyors of force, YourArmy or LesProfessionnels or a smaller, more specialized one. It’s difficult to imagine them transporting a sufficient quantity of soldiers and weapons into each of these far-flung centenals. That logistical difficulty, along with the reduced importance of landmass in geopolitical power dynamics, has always been one of the safeguards of the system. On the other hand, maybe this comms blackout is letting them do exactly that. And most centenals have little or no military readiness other than a contract with one of the armies, which won’t do much good if that army is the one attacking them.
There is one thing that has always bothered her about this problem. Liberty hinted at aggression against nation-states, an anachronistic idea that, within the election system at least, no longer exists. She wants to think that this is a sign that it is an empty threat, that they are targeting older voters for whom those old associations still ring strong. But then, those may be exactly the people who pose the greatest threat to the system: the people who can still remember, with rancor and longing and the inevitable distortions of time, what things were like before.
CHAPTER 26
The Paris Information hub has, against all economic sense, clung to a place in the city itself. Although Mishima has been there several times, without the benefit of Information navigation she still has to circle twice before she finds the right rooftop, tucked into the densely packed, finely aged buildings in the fifth arrondissement.
Of course, the first person she sees coming down the carpeted, gilded stairwell from the roof, while she is still rubbing her eyes and worrying the knots in her plan, is Drestle. He is a tall man with an unhealthily large gut and thinning, glossy blond hair that he lets wave down to his chin.
“Mishima! To what do we owe the pleasure?”
“Drestle, hi,” she says. “I’m following up on a lead from one of my informants about some Preelection Day campaigning. Figured I’d take care of it during this enforced hiatus.”
“Wow, I thought they’d have you busy with more important things,” he says. His tone is pleasant.
“Oh, they do,” Mishima says, with as much wryness as she can manage, “but all of that I can do anywhere. I’ll tell you a secret: traveling without Information access is actually great for productivity.”
He chuckles and walks on.
* * *
Roz is aware from the general timbre of the building’s hum and from overheard conversations that the techies are losing their voices and straining their sanity to finish new security measures before voting restarts, so she is surprised when she looks up from the fake votes to see Maryam gesturing to her. Roz’s workspace isn’t sound-shielded, so she follows Maryam up to the roof. She had forgotten the time of day, and when they step out onto the terrace, she blinks her eyes at the low sun and has to remember which way is east before she can decide that it’s mid-morning rather than late afternoon. It’s already hot enough to ensure no one else will come up there, but Maryam brought a parasol with a solar-powered fan attachment, and standing under that in the narrow shade of the arbor the temperature is bearable.
“How’s it going?” Roz asks.
Maryam nods. “We are flat out, but we’ll make it. The team is doing amazing stuff.” Her voice is hoarse from talking out commands and code. Roz has heard that some members of the team are switching back to typing interfaces to give their raw throats a rest.
She must have something significant if she has taken time out to come by. “What are you seeing?”
Maryam fidgets. “As I thought, Heritage centenals are the hardest to bring back online. Something happened to a large number of Heritage repeaters, and we—I, really—suspect that it’s hardware-related. But hard to say without at least a virtual inspection. And we should really be on the ground.”
“Have you asked for a security team?”
“In process,” Maryam answers. “As I was saying, Heritage is hard to bring back up, so we don’t have much intel from their centenals. But I wanted to tell you what we are seeing.” From her voice, it’s already clear that it is nothing good. “There’s a fair amount of unrest out there, across a range of governments. We’ve seen five or six riots, and at least a dozen places where people are preparing for violence—gathering weapons, organizing militia. And that’s only in the limited areas where we have eyes and ears—maybe fifteen percent.”
“Have you reported that up?” Roz asks, uncomfortable at the thought of deciding what to do about this.
“I told Nejime,” Maryam says. “She can handle al-Derbi.” The man who was so forceful about Information for all. “She understands it’s a technical issue.”
“I wonder if Heritage could be liable for damages,” Roz muses. “If we prove they were behind the outage, I mean.”
Maryam laughs. “I’m just a coder, habibti; I have no idea about the law. But speaking of Heritage, Nejime agrees that we need to know what is going on in their centenals and so, erm … we were wondering if we could borrow your intern.”
* * *
Ken is working on the fake vote database, expanding, embellishing, and keeping careful track of what the correct computer analysis should show. “We have to have enough Heritage wins so that it’s worth their while to take votes from here,” Mishima cautioned. “So, we need a smattering of additional centenals going their way, not enough to make it too obvious.” He’s also running further analytics on the real votes, trying to dredge out further intel about exactly how the voting ended.
With the increased volume of work, Ken has reduced his Lankaland visits. Instead, he takes his brief breaks within the Information building, frequenting the common spaces where people go to take time off or hold informal meetings. There are coffee machines, a fridge full of artificial beers and a couple of off-brand sodas not affiliated with any government (running low at this point, with deliveries complicated by the Information outage and everyone too busy to go out to get more), teakettles (nuclear-powered, so Ken’s put his tea habit on hold), marijuana infusions, and a vending machine with energy chews and packaged snacks. Ken prefers the fried foods and sweets sold by a Lebanese woman in the lobby.
Hanging out around the building has also helped him plug in to the Information community. The partitioned canteen doesn’t promote mingling, and people are much more social in the break areas. It is from listening to this chatter that Ken is aware of at least three other individuals or groups who are also playing with the votes, trying to figure out what went wrong, or fail-testing the new model, or trying to find the perpetrator, like he is. Most of them still view him with suspicion, glancing sidelong at him when they meet him in the corridor or when they come to Roz for raw data.
Thinking about what Mishima said, he can’t blame them for not trusting him. He came out of nowhere, he doesn’t work for Information—he doesn’t even know if he’s getting paid for his time; probably not—and here he is, working next to Roz, accompanying her to the scary meetings. But as the staff get increasingly overworked and caffeinated, they are getting more gregarious too, and Ken has probably introduced himself or been introduced to a dozen people. He is sitting on the fringes of a group in the third-floor lounge, muttering to his vote database while he listens in on gossip, when Roz and Maryam find him and take him to Nejime’s office to tell him about his next assignment.
* * *
Suzuki is rationing the last drops of his sixth coffee—two crèmes, and then four espressos when the milk started to weigh on him—when he sees someone come out of the Information hub front door. He’d been starting to think that they had some kind of underground tunnel system to get food in and out.
It’s a slim woman wearing a silver grey
rain cloak with a voluminous hood. It hits tailored and flowing in all the right places, and manages to look dramatic and understated at the same time, as if she stepped out of a century, past or future, where this is everyday wear. Suzuki is half-rising in his seat, wondering whether to follow her, when she turns into the overhung entrance of the restaurant. He settles back down and watches her push back her hood, revealing shining dark-red hair. She pulls off the gloves magnetized to her sleeves and removes her cloak, revealing first the left side, then the whole of a peacock green dress in tight, shining panels. She hangs the cloak and perches herself gracefully on a seat at the bar, orders a glass of Bergerac.
Suzuki knows her; he’s seen her before around the election way. He doesn’t know her name, and he’s not sure exactly what she does. He tips the last of his coffee into his mouth.
* * *
Mishima waits. When she found Suzuki’s note languishing on the Paris hub message space, she had to wonder whether it was a coincidence that he was in Paris. But why would he be waiting in a restaurant, leaving messages at the reception, if he’s already on the inside? She goes to the restaurant dressed to be noticed: if he avoids her, he’s already got his in. But she’s barely touched her wine before he’s sliding in beside her.
“Nice evening,” he starts, though it isn’t.
She looks him in the eye. “What are you doing here, Todry?”
He’s slick enough to laugh. “Stuck here like everyone else, I guess,” he says, genial, all politician. “I was here for an event, and—well, you can imagine.”
“There are still some flights running,” Mishima points out. “And Policy1st must have a crow you could use.”
“What’s the point in going somewhere when I have no Information about what’s going on anywhere?” Suzuki motions to the waiter, indicates that he would like one of whatever Mishima’s drinking.
“True enough,” Mishima is trying to see him without thinking about the way Ken sees him, looks up to him. A mentor, a patron. She has to work hard to look at him without wanting to poke every hole she can in that pedestal. “And what would you be doing if you did go somewhere?”