by Malka Older
“Oh, just preparing the ground, you know.” Suzuki gestures airily. “It’s frustrating; we should be governing already. Instead, our centenals are all on their own.”
The restaurant, which was almost empty during the afternoon, is starting to gather clientele and fill up with expansive French phrases and expansive French people leaning back in their chairs, arms spread. From here, it’s hard to see the global economic crash that some predict as a certain consequence of this Information outage. “And you were thinking you might be on the cusp of winning the Supermajority,” Mishima says, her voice low.
Even with the alcohol hitting his caffeinated veins, Suzuki knows he has to be careful here. “We assumed nothing,” he says. “Of course, we were pleased with the way things looked, but it would have been an amazing development. Amazing.”
“Indeed,” Mishima says. “Revolutionary.”
“But this thing has happened,” Suzuki says, and he bangs his hand on the bar, but with a muted thump. “We know, we all know that things cannot pick up where they left off. Voters don’t work that way. We are losing voters every second as their courage to do something different fades. We were already at a disadvantage. And you? What will you do to fix this?” He has forgotten himself, and he turns his glowing eyes to meet hers, so righteously furious that she feels the shock of it across the dim air between them.
She doesn’t blink. “Is that why you kept campaigning—illegally—after the campaign ended?” Mishima touches her handheld, and the projection of his anti-Liberty advid animates, tiny and silent, on the bar.
He deflates so suddenly, she puts a hand out behind him in case he slumps off his stool. “We had to get it out there. We had to get it out in time.”
One of the advantages of people thinking Information is all-knowing, Mishima reflects, is that they rarely ask you how you got your intel or suspect your informant. “You could have given it to us.”
He shrugs, mutters, “Didn’t think you would do enough with it.”
“Your illegal advid didn’t make much difference either,” Mishima comments.
He looks up, suddenly eager again. “How do you know? Do you have the results?” Then: “You’re not going to disqualify Policy1st, are you?”
Mishima finishes off her glass of wine. “No, we don’t have the results, but that advid didn’t get picked up by any compilers. We have the last-minute polls and there are no noticeable changes in the constituencies where that advid played. And no, we’re not going to disqualify a major government because one of its operatives did something stupid and unethical.” Mainly stupid.
“And me?” Suzuki has his eyes on his wine now, looks like he’s about to add a tear to the glass.
“We’ll be in touch,” Mishima says, getting up to go. It’s unorthodox, but she has a little bit of latitude here, and until she knows how things are going to fall out in this election, she’d rather keep Suzuki on a leash.
* * *
The crow is the same size and model as Mishima’s but decidedly more impersonal. Six narrow, stacked bunks in the cabin instead of a futon, and in the main room a light partition separating the controls from a group workspace. Right now Ken is the only passenger, so he can spread the map projections as large as he wants as he prepares for his mission. (Mission: their word, not his. The excitement drums through him every time he thinks it.) The maps are, necessarily, a few weeks old. There shouldn’t be any major changes, but of course, they can’t know for sure.
“If you do come up against something serious and unforeseen—if, I don’t know, Heritage is building moats around their centenals and raising the drawbridge to keep noncitizens out—get back here as soon as possible. That in itself will be enough intel for now,” Nejime had assured him.
Ken had tried not to show how nervous he was in her office. He recognized her as the woman with the short silver hair from the meeting, but since he started listening in on break-room conversations, he’s heard her name spoken in awed tones; she is one of the originals who has worked for Information since its founding. Even without that, the fact that she has a corner office on the eighth floor would have been enough to tell him she was important.
“We need to get a sense for what’s going on in Heritage centenals right now,” Nejime told him with little preamble. “We’d rather not send anyone they can recognize as Information.”
“And I only showed up after the comms went down,” Ken finishes. No one who hasn’t physically seen him here would know he’s in Doha at all, let alone helping out.
“Exactly. Beyond that, you seem to possess the necessary skills.” She looked at him archly, and Ken felt himself flush, imagining how transparent his little act for Policy1st must seem to these Information mavens. Nejime went on: “We’ve selected a location in Beirut, only a few hours away, where a Policy1st centenal adjoins a Heritage centenal. With Information down, it will be easy for you to stumble across the border unintentionally.”
“And what exactly am I looking for?” Ken asked, trying to sound professional.
“Anything that tells us what that government is doing during this outage. You can compare with the vids from three weeks ago and see if there are new banners, pop-ups, unusual activity…”
Maryam jumped in as Nejime trailed off. “If you happen to hear anything about the state of their repeaters or hubs, pay close attention.”
Ken nodded, although he didn’t see how he could get anywhere near that. Maryam was in that early meeting too, so it’s easy for him to identify her as the hotshot head of tech. Everyone says she’s on her way up, although she’s relatively new in the Doha office and left her previous posting in Paris suddenly.
“Just a little reconnaissance,” Roz told him, almost protectively. “Get a sense for it. Then get back into the Policy1st centenal before you hail the pilot on the intranet.”
“Don’t take too long,” Nejime added. “We are in a situation where speed matters more than comprehensiveness. If we don’t hear from you within two hours, we will assume something has gone wrong.”
Two hours doesn’t give him a lot of time to wander from the Policy1st centenal into Heritage, look around, and wander back, Ken thinks, studying the map. The plan is that he will get dropped off at the American University of Beirut Medical Center, where the arrival of a crow is not such a remarkable event. It’s a ten-minute walk from there to the border, more if he loses himself convincingly. That shouldn’t be hard, he thinks, looking at the maze of tiny streets. The scarier part is figuring out a route that takes him into Heritage and out again. How far in should he go? Where should he look for evidence of “unusual activity?” He supposes he should go by the centenal government building if he can. He glares at the map, trying to memorize all the streets leading to the Policy1st centenal. In the worst case, he supposes, he can aim for the coast and follow that back around.
It is then that he notices the centenal, contiguous both with Heritage and Policy1st, that belongs to Liberty.
* * *
After her encounter with Suzuki, Mishima goes up to her crow to change into something more discreet, and returns her focus to her primary target. She laid the groundwork while en route, and she can now look at his schedule without leaving a trail, has mapped where his office is in the building, and, by using oblique search terms, has a pretty good record of his activities from six months to three weeks ago, which is as close as the crashed servers let her get.
Now that she’s on the ground, she takes her spying to the next level. She finds reasons to walk by his office several times to check the layout and how he uses it: an old-fashioned keyboard on a standing desk, a leather chair comfortably appointed in the trappings of erudite power facing a larger-than-standard projection area. The third time, after she has visually confirmed that he is in his scheduled meeting on exit polling, she slips inside and sticks a magnetic disk to the underside of his standing desk. Since Information is so well defended against spyware, and since hacking is not Mishima’s expertise, much
of her spying career has involved analog devices. This one is a powerful audio sensor that will capture any commands he issues to his handheld or desktop, however softly he whispers them, to say nothing of conversations. It can recognize keystrokes by the minute differences in sound between the different keys and translate typing into text. She doubts it will be very useful; most of the talk must be already done, and whatever handheld work is left he has probably masked under anodyne macros. But it’s worth a try.
She reminds herself that they may be completely on the wrong track. Using the initial votes for comparison data is not a terrible idea, nor a necessarily nefarious one; Mishima can imagine suggesting it herself if her interests tipped more toward data than reality and if she were several shades more naïve about the way Information works. He may be innocent.
But the more she looks into him, the more she’s convinced. She doesn’t have time to do a full-immersion background on him the way she’d like to, but she sets up a tightly configured workspace near the espresso machine with one of the latest pre-crash globes on the minimalist projection, and starts unobtrusive conversations with everyone who comes by over the next couple of hours. When she asks, sympathetically, about who seems to be under the most stress, Drestle’s name never comes up; rather, he’s been supporting people with his calm manner and pleasant jokes. Without approaching the subject directly, she learns that Drestle, like many other staff, had planned to stay over the night of the election and has not left since the crash; she saw seven suits in his office, four of them clearly used. Many people keep one or two extra suits for emergencies, and it’s possible that he’s extra cautious, or that he sent out for them or printed them, but she suspects he knew he’d be staying longer.
She gets Korbin, who has refused to take time off to recover from her ordeal until after the election has been settled, to reach out to her counterpart Heritage monitor in the Paris office. She learns that Drestle maintains a lively interest in Heritage and often takes the Heritage specialist out for long lunches. He normally works in news compilation oversight, but his election assignment has been poll analysis and predictor supervision. He’s well positioned to figure out where minor tweaks can lead to the desired outcome.
When she thinks she’s gotten as much intel as she can without attracting attention, she walks down to the river and along the Quai d’Austerlitz to the old national library in the thirteenth. It’s well after midnight, the fluoron lamps along the bridges reflecting in the Seine, but the library, no longer staffed by people, is permanently open and has almost as good connectivity as the Information hub. She sends her circumstantial evidence to Ken, just in case, and then, because voting will restart in a few hours at most, she shifts her energies to where she has more of an advantage. Hunched in a small carrel on the ground floor (since the earthquake, she is leery of higher stories), facing her reflection over the darkness of the garden still grey with winter, she opens globes and polls and predictions, overlapping projections crowding the space in front of her eyes. She keeps the data feed from the audio sensor in Drestle’s office open in a corner and lets her mind flow over the glowing estimations of the world’s political leanings, probing for the weak point, the point she would pressure if she wanted to steal an election.
CHAPTER 27
Ken wanders into the Heritage centenal without any difficulties. No moat, no roadblocks, no SecureNation uniforms. The border would be hard to miss, with a bright Heritage banner projection across the street (he wonders if that could count as late campaigning?), but he makes a show of looking down into his handheld as he passes under it. In any case, there are plenty of pedestrians and vehicles moving in both directions.
Once he’s in Heritage and nobody’s looking at him funny, Ken starts to enjoy himself. It’s a beautiful day in Beirut, chilly but sunny, and it’s been a long time since he’s taken a leisurely stroll in a pleasant climate. A few blocks in, he spots a crowded manakish stand on the side of the road and goes over to order one with za’atar. “By the way,” he says as he’s waiting, “can you tell me how to get to Alameddine Street? I think I got turned around.”
Three men immediately start offering him directions, and the subsequent argument soon draws in two more. Ken catches the eye of the manakish seller. “Terrible not having Information,” he says.
“You said it,” the man agrees. “Can’t understand how they’d let that happen.”
“I heard it was another attack on the election process, like the debate,” someone else says.
“Eh, attack nothing. All those votes overloaded the system.”
“Do you think they’ll put off the election?”
“It’s already been put off, hasn’t it?”
“Do you think it will change the result?” Ken asks.
“Here? Nah,” answers the vendor, wrapping up his manakish and handing it to him. “Why would we change our votes over a few days’ delay?”
“You would think that with the Supermajority, we could get our Information back faster,” someone grumbles, but nobody seems to take that as a reason to abandon ship. Ken transmits his details with line-of-sight for eventual billing, thanks the vendor, and raises his manakish in salute to the rest before ambling on.
Four conversations later, Ken has a full stomach but no new intel. The centenal government, housed in a former embassy building, looks so normal that Ken dares to stick his head in the front door. Staff are power walking the corridors, and there’s a long line in front of the centenal services desk, but that seems a normal response to the sudden lack of Information.
Ken checks the time. An hour and a quarter since he was dropped off. He turns toward the border with Liberty.
* * *
Ken doesn’t notice a marked shift in the neighborhood when he crosses into the Liberty centenal. Liberty and Heritage both appeal to broad demographics: in this case, both seem to have focused on populations that are not super rich, not terribly poor. The centenals contain professional, working, and creative classes living in a mix of modern efficiency-contoured apartment buildings, crumbling cement tenements a hundred years old, sleek white stone multistories from the beginning of the century, and the occasional protected church, mosque, or palace.
But if the backdrop looks the same, the atmosphere is completely different. In the Liberty centenal there are clumps of men standing around in the street, talking and gesturing. Advids pop up at eyeball level, individual cries for attention: Who do you trust? What is Information telling you? Stand with Liberty! Down a side street Ken glimpses a more public bit of street theater. Half a dozen people—women as well as men—are watching a large projection of Johnny Fabré sitting opposite an equally groomed but much younger woman. “… believe that Liberty won the election?” she is asking. “It’s not a question of believing; I know it!” Fabré answers, banging a fist on the arm of his chair. “We have the data. But don’t take my word for it. Why would they shut everything down unless we had won?” The woman nods as if that made sense.
Spooked, Ken brushes away the pop-ups and ducks into a pastry shop, thinking he can run his lost routine one more time and then make for the rendezvous point. The shop, too, is crowded, although few people seem to be eating or ordering. A few hold tiny coffees, and all are loud. When Ken approaches the counter, the shopkeeper looks at him suspiciously. “Are you a citizen?” he asks.
Ken hears echoes of a French revolution drama he used to watch. “Um … not a Liberty citizen, no…”
“Then you won’t be able to pay,” the vendor says. “Sorry.”
“I see. Uh, what I’ve been doing in most other shops is giving my verified details through line-of-sight. As soon as Information comes on, I’ll pay the—”
“So, I won’t get the money until Information is back up? Which could be in weeks, or months, or never! Sorry, kid, but I can’t run my business that way. How would I pay my suppliers?”
The same way, Ken supposes. But he sees the guy’s point. “How do citizens pay?”
/> The shopkeeper grins and shows Ken a small device on the counter. “They set it all up for us! As soon as they realized that Information wasn’t going to come back on immediately, they gave us these thingamajigs, and then they had everyone come in to get an attachment on their handhelds—see, look.” With no embarrassment, the man grabs the wrist of a passing client and twists it to show Ken an iridescent bauble stuck to his handheld. The client looks at Ken with mild curiosity, says something to the shopkeeper that Ken’s translator finds incomprehensible, and goes off to his cluster of comrades, chuckling loudly. “That works for payment and communications. We have intranet now!” The shopkeeper goes on with pride.
“Very impressive,” Ken admits. “But it’s a shame people from the next centenal over can’t shop here anymore.”
“Eh, we get along,” the shopkeeper says. He’s losing interest in Ken now, his eyes following the give-and-take of a raucous conversation farther down the counter. “What were you going to order, anyway? Here, have this.” He gathers a kunafi, a piece of halva, and a square of baklava into a small box and hands it to Ken.
“Oh, I couldn’t—at least let me give you my details, and I’ll pay you later?” But the shopkeeper is already waving him off, and Ken exits back onto the street, looking down at the sticky sweets in his hands and wondering how that happened. He had been planning to take the next left to head back toward Policy1st, but he is intrigued by this intranet thing, and he walks farther into the centenal. Now that he’s looking for them, he notices the shiny blue-green tokens on every handheld he sees, and on a couple of earpieces. The pop-up advids continue, creepier and creepier: The Information Outage was planned! Make sure your vote counts! Defend Liberty borders! Ken wonders if everyone sees them, or if they are targeting him because he doesn’t have the intranet doohickey yet. Sure enough, a few steps later he gets Come by the centenal government for your handheld adaptor. Liberty is helping YOU stay CONNECTED! Ken wonders if it’s worth going by to see if they will give him one, although he decides they would check his identification first. He’s looking down at his handheld to consider his options when he realizes he’s about to walk into something and stops short.