Infomocracy

by Malka Older

  “I don’t believe it,” Ken says as they walk back toward Roz’s workspace. “I was assaulted and she’s not going to do anything?”

  “She’ll do something,” Roz says. “You should have seen her when the pilot called in to tell us what happened. But the election’s already started. We have to get through it.” She glances at him and away quickly. “You don’t have to stay. Do you want to go get some rest?”

  “Only if it makes you feel better,” Ken says grumpily.

  Roz glares at him. “We have a ton of work to do. Mishima’s staking out Drestle, but we have to watch the votes, especially if the threat comes from somewhere else. But the most important thing is for you to get better, so if you need the time…”

  “No, I want to work,” he says. “Let me grab an icepack.”

  * * *

  Mishima’s still monitoring the audio sensor and Drestle’s comms. At about six hours in, she tightens her watch on his uploading and processor usage. At eight hours, she goes to the vending machine on his floor and arranges herself so she can see into his office. The results are still uncertain, but it looks to her like both Liberty and PhilipMorris have a chance at unseating Heritage, with 888 and, incredibly, Policy1st not far behind. He has to be getting nervous.

  At twelve hours, Ken pings her using her encryption code. “Hey,” he says when she calls him back. He’s not sure if anyone told her about the events in Beirut.

  Mishima is crouched in a garret-level maintenance room to be sure that no one can overhear. “Anything?” she whispers.

  “Nothing,” Ken says, not sure if he’s relieved she didn’t hear about the beating he took or disappointed to miss out on the sympathy.

  “No requests for the original votes?”

  “No. And nothing from Drestle at all, certainly no requests of the size that would be necessary to pull this off.”

  Mishima rubs her forehead. “He may wait until the last moment, to know if it’s absolutely necessary.”

  “It’ll be necessary,” Ken says with more assurance than he feels.

  “Too early to tell,” Mishima says gruffly. But it’s true; on the most sophisticated projections, it’s not looking good for Heritage. She wonders if people are blaming them, along with Information, for the outage. “Could our target be generating the votes rather than using the originals?”

  “Roz says that would never stand up to scrutiny. The individual signatures on the votes are too hard to forge, especially at a large scale.”

  She taps her forehead, taps the floor. She wishes she could pace. “What if it doesn’t have to stand up to scrutiny? What if they just need it to hold for a few hours after it’s announced? Then they switch the ballots in after voting closes, when no one’s looking.”

  Ken tries to think this through. “How could they do that?”

  “Ask Roz if it would work,” Mishima says. “And keep a close eye on your packets.”

  “Are you going to sleep?” Ken asks, and wishes he hadn’t.

  “Don’t forget to vote,” Mishima tells him, and hangs up.

  * * *

  Shamus was one of the few who voted as soon as he got the message, before calling anyone. Voting is a matter of pride and identity, and it’s not like he has to think about his decision. Once he’s gotten that taken care of, he turns to business. As he expected, his workspace is filling up with messages, another three ticking in as he watches, then two more. All these gonzos who thrive on publicity, press, splashes, cross-referencing, news. They’ve been starving for days and probably called him before they called their mothers. Shamus wades through it.

  Can you please do an ad for me, ASAP?

  Can you show me a draft marketing strategy based on the new election results as soon as they’re out?

  NOW is the moment to hit with our data security device, will pay extra for quick response.

  He flags that one and then pauses when he sees a message with Domaine’s name on it. With an attachment.

  * * *

  Mishima is still sitting on the floor by the vending machine when Shamus calls her. She hesitates—Drestle has to make his move soon; they’re closing in on eighteen hours—then takes the call.

  “How’s it going?” she asks, without taking her eyes from the vote totals.

  “Oh, not bad, myself,” Shamus says. “Rolling in requests to help shape the consumer preferences of the new world order. Erm—listen, I’ve got something here I think you should see.”

  “I’m a little busy. Is it urgent?”

  “It is a bit. At least, I need to know how to respond.” He forwards her Domaine’s message. “Take a look at the attachment.”

  Mishima glances at it, plays the attachment. Presses her lips together instead of swearing. Thinks for a minute. She’s been awake for thirty-some hours and has drunk the commensurate amount of caffeine. She tries to steady her breathing. “Go with it,” she says finally. She deserves it for giving Domaine even that much.

  “You sure?” Shamus asks.

  “Yeah. We can handle it. And you’re too valuable an informant; I don’t want him getting suspicious if you don’t run it.”

  “Okay, then; you’re the boss,” Shamus says. “Anything else I can do for you?”

  She gives him a smile. “Enjoy the fat years, Shamus. I’ll let you know if we need anything.”

  * * *

  Ken has already voted. Not wanting to take any chances, he set his handheld three days ago to auto-vote for Policy1st at any opportunity. He also ordered it to document the vote three different ways, and he checks those now to be sure, then goes back to watching the feeds with Roz.

  They are munching on some ugali Roz made for him on the grounds that it is soft enough for him to chew without hurting his jaw, and that it will restore his strength. Ken finds the blandness comforting. He runs his fingers over his swollen cheek. He considers calling Suzuki, but when he tries to imagine how he would explain where he is and what he’s doing, he gives up and decides he’s too busy to call right now. If he knows Suzuki, he probably is too.

  He’s trying to be pleased that Policy1st is doing as well as it is, even if the Supermajority looks unlikely. He has separate feeds open to follow certain centenals: Miraflores, a cluster in Jakarta, most of Chennai, and Sri Lanka. The centenal he went through in northern Japan is already 80 percent counted and ready to be called for 河北, a local government. Policy1st is set to snatch a couple of centenals from 1China in the Ryukyus, and actually, Lima is looking pretty good too, so he feels like he contributed something.

  He’s watching Miraflores when he sees the shift, so small that he thinks maybe he blinked. His handheld twinkles with an incoming call, and he types in the code with shaking hands. “Yeah?” he says.

  “Did you see that?” Mishima breathes. She’s speaking so softly, it feels as though she’s right next to him, lips by his ear.

  “I think so,” he says. “Are you tracking it?”

  “Yes,” she whispers. “I think…” She is scanning her trackers, running the program she set up, opening the action record at five levels of complexity. “I got him!” And without even bothering to click off from Ken, she springs to her feet and runs.

  * * *

  Mishima careens into the office of Valerie Nougaz, a large corner room with a narrow line-of-sight angle across the Jardin du Luxembourg that offers a glimpse of the Tower.

  Although Information prides itself on its flat, consensus-based organization with no single person at the top of the hierarchy, experience has proven it expedient to have one director for each office, as well as functional regional directors for some of the key areas. Mishima has found that each office has its own subculture, some more disciplined than others. In Paris, it is best to go straight to the top. It won’t be easy, because Nougaz is skeptical and straightlaced, but she has a lot of pull in the larger organization, and if convinced, she will do most of the pushing to make sure the plan is adopted.

  At this late stage of voting, t
he office is crowded with people. There are two separate projections, one for Nougaz at her workspace and the other for her deputy, Abendou, in the opposite corner. Nougaz, in a crisp white shirt open across the collarbones, a floaty mauve scarf, and a wool pencil skirt, is tapping out her signature code on an aide’s handheld and talking into her earpiece while nodding at the staff member running through a presentation. An election countdown clock, the animated numbers huge, bright, and faintly vibrating, hangs in one corner of the room.

  Mishima dodges all the associates to get in front of the boss. “Madame—”

  “Ah, Mishima.” Nougaz, thin of face and body, maintains a calm authority by refusing to raise her voice, or her pulse, to match that of her interlocutor. “One moment, and I’ll be right with you.”

  “Madame, I’m sorry, but this is urgent.”

  Nougaz looks over at her, one raised eyebrow hidden behind her improbable bangs.

  “We need the room.” Mishima, who has her own ways of projecting authority, addresses this to those around her. The woman collecting the signature code has already made herself scarce; the others look to Nougaz questioningly.

  “Well, then,” she says. The projections snap off and their curators exit quickly. Abendou sticks around at a nod from his boss.

  “Madame Director,” Mishima says swiftly as soon as the door is closed, “the election is being stolen from this office.” She mutters a quick order to her handheld, and the projection she has prepared jumps up, slightly larger than normal to convey the urgency and because there is a lot of complicated stuff going on. Mishima moves in front of it, pointing.

  “Here and here,” she says. Because the vote shifting is so fast and subtle that it’s hard to catch, she’s arranged a visual that prints the totals in the centenals she has selected every three seconds, line after line down the projection. She scrolls up five and six minutes to show them the shifts she caught. “Now, if you look at these trackers, you will see the corresponding activity on Drestle’s processor.” She is aware of Nougaz and Abendou exchanging glances when she mentions the name, but doesn’t look up.

  “These are very small amounts,” Abendou says. “Can you be sure this is not a legal correction of some problem in the field or an error, perhaps?”

  Mishima takes a deep breath, pulls up her additional visuals. “I can’t be sure yet, but it would be a huge coincidence. As you can see here, based on analysis of the original votes four days ago, as well as the latest polls before that—which we no longer have access to, but which I’ve reconstructed using what was saved in my system—there was a better than 50 percent chance that Heritage would be edged out of the Supermajority. They might have hoped that the stoppage would drive more people toward stability, but as we’ve seen over the last twenty hours, it didn’t. Rather the opposite. Now, these centenals”—she highlights them with a twitch of her finger—“fulfill three conditions: their results today have shown a jump from their trajectory in the polls; they are trending away from Heritage and toward one of the other top five governments; and the margins of victory, one way or the other, are likely to be very small. These are the centenals where a small shift of votes can send them into Heritage’s column and, based on the analytics of their recent history, that shift won’t ring alarm bells.” She pauses, out of breath. Nobody has yet yelled at her for spying on a high-level colleague or told her she’s crazy. She didn’t expect them to: these are professionals, and she’s never had a problem with anyone at the Paris hub. But she is a little surprised that they aren’t trying harder to defend one of their own.

  “If we watch,” Mishima goes on, scrolling down to the present, “we may see another one happen in real time.” She wants to have witnesses for this, if possible. She looks quickly across the stats for the centenals. “Probably here,” she says, pointing to Miraflores, in Lima, which has seen a surprising swing toward Policy1st. “He already moved one hundred votes, but it looks like that will not be enough.”

  “And how does he move the votes?” Nougaz asks. “To be honest, we suspected … something would happen connected to the outage, but we didn’t think this type of manipulation was possible.”

  “He’s using—there!” Mishima points as the Policy1st vote count in Miraflores drops by twenty votes. They wait, silently hovering, and forty-two seconds later, the Heritage vote count jumps by twenty-one. “Probably one legitimate vote in there,” Mishima notes. “As I was saying, he’s using the votes from four days ago. I’m not sure how he got them; we were trying to trap him with a decoy set, but I’m almost certain that he got access to the originals. They look legal at first glance, especially when used this judiciously. I imagine he’ll use the rush of renewed Information after the vote closes to go in and do a little more polishing.”

  “Very impressive,” Nougaz murmurs. Mishima isn’t sure whether she’s referring to Drestle’s plotting or Mishima’s deciphering of that plot. “And what do you suggest we do about it?” she asks Mishima.

  “Arrest him,” Mishima says. “Immediately, before the election ends.”

  “Of course,” Nougaz says, with a flick of her fingers. “But what do you suggest we do about the election? Do we invalidate all Heritage votes? Let Heritage voters choose again? What do we do with legitimate Heritage centenals?”

  “Madame, we don’t have time to decide these weighty questions at the moment,” Mishima says.

  “I’m inclined to agree,” Abendou puts in.

  “If we need a quick solution”—Mishima shoots him a quick nod of thanks—“get the techies and vote-validation experts on it, and see if you can undo all the fraudulent votes before the clock runs out.” She glances up: three hours and change to go. It should be enough. “This second-by-second documentation I’ve done should help.” She motions copies of the program, with its data, into their workspaces, and then freezes.

  “What is it?” Abendou asks.

  “One of my trackers just died,” Mishima says, pointing to a gap in the repeating lines in the projection. “He may have found it.” A brief, uncomfortable pause. “We should hurry. If he’s taken this risk, it’s because he and his counterparts over there think that Heritage is going to lose. So, let it. The Supermajority goes to someone else, the election is legitimate, and the transfer of the Supermajority will give you lots of noisy cover for figuring out what sanctions are appropriate for the attempt.”

  “Very astute,” Nougaz says with approval. “Abendou, can you take the lead on implementing that plan?”

  As he is nodding, everyone’s handhelds trill.

  For a vertiginous second, Mishima is back in her crow, vibrating above a collapsing city. She looks down at her handheld.

  Thank you for voting! We are pleased to announce that with voting definitive in 86% of centenals, we can now confirm that the winner of the Supermajority for this election cycle is: HERITAGE!

  CHAPTER 29

  Mishima glances up at the clock, then down at her projections. “It’s not true,” she blurts. “Even counting the stolen votes, they haven’t won yet. Arrgh, but they’re going to…” People are still voting, and the numbers for Heritage spike as centenals try to join the Supermajority.

  “How the hell did he make that announcement?” Nougaz asks. “Stop this! Detain him.” Abendou leaves, calling security as he goes, and Mishima bolts after him. As the door swings closed behind her, she hears Nougaz spitting orders to an assistant. “Get me Boubal! And set up a conference with every director. I know; just tell them the announcement came from this shop!”

  * * *

  Shamus glances at the results on his handheld. “Bastards,” he says without surprise, and goes back to work.

  * * *

  Ken stares at the announcement for a long moment, trying to make sense of it, then looks around. He expects pandemonium in the Information office, but all he hears is a brief roar, like the audience of a distant fireworks show. Then a slammed door and running feet. Otherwise, all is quiet. “Do they know?” Ken asks,
dazed. “Do they know someone stole the election?”

  Roz is poring over her numbers. “If they don’t now, they will soon,” she says. “I’m trying to make sure this came from the Paris hub.”

  “You mean that it wasn’t someone else who stole the election?” Ken asks.

  “Yeah, or more than one person working together,” she says, fingers dancing around her workspace. “I’m almost positive, but I’m trying to track it. We have a ubiquity program that makes any Information announcement appear to issue from all hubs simultaneously.”

  “Uh-huh,” Ken says. Typical Information creepiness.

  “It’s to ensure we all speak with one voice,” Roz explains, a little defensive. “To prevent retaliation. And to prevent raising the importance of one office or department above the others. Anyway, this announcement was filtered through that, so I have to track how it entered the program, which is non-trivial. What’s happening on Mishima’s side?”

  “Oh.” Ken hadn’t wanted to hang up, because of the time involved in reconnecting through the secure line, but he muted the call when Mishima got to the director’s office, both because it seemed wrong to listen in and because it was distracting. He raises the volume, leaving his side muted. “Running footsteps,” he reports grimly.

  “Don’t distract her,” Roz says. “I’ve almost got it here.”

  “Did he think no one would notice?” Ken asks.

  Roz shakes her head. “He must have felt threatened, known somehow that we were on to him. But it was not such a stupid move. This is going to make everything a lot harder.”

  “What do you mean? It’s obvious now that someone was messing with the election.”

  “Yes, but we still have to prove how and where. In the meantime, Information has been wrong about an election result.” She taps her handheld and a projection comes up, some kind of complicated three-dimensional map he can’t parse. “There. It’s clear. It was Drestle. At least, it came from his workspace, with his code. But you see the problem, no? If Information is wrong about an election once, they can be again.”