Infomocracy

by Malka Older

  * * *

  Drestle’s office is only one flight of stairs and fifty meters of corridor from Nougaz’s, but the three permanent security officers of the Paris hub fall into place behind Abendou before he gets there. Mishima brings up the rear, unofficial as always, she thinks. She is wearing partial body armor under her fitted black corduroys and long-sleeved grey T, but next to the security officers, she feels practically unarmed. She has her stiletto, as always, and the shuriken in their leather case have been an awkward lump in her hip pocket since she shoved them in there some twenty hours ago, but she wishes she had worn the large knife.

  The door to the office is closed. The security officers fan out to either side as Abendou knocks smartly. “Drestle?” he calls. “Can I speak with you for a moment?”

  No answer.

  The security team leader signals Abendou to step aside, but he waves him back and pushes the door open himself, although he does at least turn sideways to present a smaller target. From her position against the wall behind a security officer, Mishima watches Abendou lean forward, then step in. A second later, the security team follows, but she already knows the outcome.

  “He’s not here,” Abendou says, coming out. “His workspace is cleared out. He even took that silly keyboard!”

  Still leaning against the wall, Mishima sinks to a squat, palms against her forehead. “He can’t have gone far,” she says, springing up again. “He must have found my tracker when he packed up his computer. That was only a few minutes ago.”

  “Down to the street,” Abendou orders the security team. “Shut down the building, check the immediate area—is the putain d’Information back up yet? Check on every means of transport that’s passed by here in the last five—ten minutes. If you can’t find him, come back and search this place with a magnifying glass, understand?”

  Mishima has another idea and is running for the roof. She bursts out of the access door and stands there, gasping in the chill air. It is dusk, and Paris is grey and blue, fine nets of bare branches stretching along the boulevards, a glimmer of the Seine visible beyond the darkness of the Jardin des Plantes, the travertine chess piece of Sacré-Cœur hovering in the distance. Her crow is gone.

  CHAPTER 30

  Yoriko sees the results a little late. She was in a projection film with her kids. It kept them quiet for a couple of hours, but they come out cranky. Nonstop vacation is getting to be too much for them. She feels a dull disappointment that Heritage has won. Again? Despite it all, she was hoping that Policy1st would somehow pull it off, that her efforts would make a difference.

  But then again, the Supermajority doesn’t matter much to her here. She checks the results for the Amami Ōshima centenal. The winner is Amami, a local government that doesn’t even compete for any other centenals. Going into the details, she sees that there was more dissent than she expected; Amami won 64 percent of the vote, and she wasn’t the only person to vote for YourStory. But now the election is over, and nothing has changed. If she were to start a taxi service, she wouldn’t need to worry about knowing what centenal she’s in to figure out whether she can turn on red or stop to pick up a fare in the bus lane, because the entire city has one government. There are no public transportation crows here, but there are three bus routes. It’s very different and sort of retro, but for the moment at least, Yoriko is happy with this low-drama option.

  * * *

  Domaine isn’t going to ask, refuses to show any interest, although from purely professional curiosity, he’s dying to know. The guard, or more likely intern, who brings him his meal doesn’t mention results, even though voting must be over. She says nothing when she comes to collect the plates. Domaine is telling himself that this is a discipline, like fasting, going without Information so that he knows he can, when the intern comes back, silicon plates still in hand.

  “Oh, hey,” she says. “Did you want to know who won the election?”

  Domaine’s discipline won’t let him beg, so he shrugs.

  “Heritage won the Supermajority,” the guard/intern says. “If you tell me what centenal you’re from, I can check who won there.”

  “Don’t bother,” Domaine has the satisfaction of saying, turning his face toward the wall. Heritage won, huh? “Wait and see,” he says, but softly. He doesn’t need to give them any more reason to think he was involved in this.

  * * *

  Mishima is still catching her breath after finally finding Abendou in Nougaz’s office. She tore all over the building, looking for him, before finally remembering that Information was back on and calling him.

  “They’ll find it,” Abendou is saying as he hands her a cup of water. “He would have done better to take public transportation.”

  Mishima shakes her head, but she can neither talk nor drink yet. She shouldn’t be this out of breath, but at least it keeps her from crying in frustration and anger.

  “They’ll find it, all right,” Nougaz says. “In the nearest Heritage centenal.”

  “Yeah.” Mishima finally manages to stand upright. “And Drestle with it. They’ll never extradite him.”

  Abendou is muttering into his earpiece. “We’ve got people checking the likely crowflight routes between here and the three closest Heritage centenals, but you’re right; he’s probably already in their airspace.” He touches Mishima’s shoulder. “Sorry about that.”

  Mishima shrugs. “It was never really my crow,” she says, managing a grin. “Information property, I’m afraid.”

  “And your things? Your data?” Nougaz asks.

  “I never leave data on the crow,” Mishima says. “Well, almost never.” She might have gotten a little sloppy during the earthquake response, but fortunately not today. Her bag of essentials is by the espresso machine. “And it has a completely up-to-date security system.”

  “We’re finding that our security is not what it used to be across the board,” Nougaz says crisply. “Well. Are you ready to work?”

  Mishima nods. She is already feeling better, letting the last twist of regret fade and shucking off the crow she loved so much. Although she does wonder what she would have to do during this debacle to get them to loan her a new one. Save the election? Save Information? Save the world?

  “All right, then. I want you with my vote analysts cleaning up this election. We need to be absolutely certain on every single vote, and we need it as soon as possible, before Heritage has a chance to get entrenched. With every minute that the wrong result is out there, we lose credibility. I’ll be working with the other directors to see how we can best present the results when we do have them, and have them absolutely verified and verifiable by anyone. Go!”

  Mishima goes.

  * * *

  It takes the team of ten, with assistance from unknown numbers across the Information world, the better part of eight hours. Mishima spends the last couple of hours with two others building the interface for a program that will allow anyone to search, crunch, and individually verify votes using anonymous user codes. When they are finished, really finished, there are no cheers, no invitations to go for a glass of something. The faces around Mishima are drawn and pallid, and when she rubs her hands over her own, it feels the same. Some of the analysts are leaning back in their chairs with their eyes closed, others are talking quietly, and she sees a few who are already deep in Information, sucking in updates or news from wherever home is or catching up on some content or other. She stands up and wanders out of the analysts’ subsection into the hallway, lets the timed light go out, and stands in the darkness.

  She wants to go back to her crow and be alone and rest, but that’s not possible. Next best thing: go somewhere else to be alone and rest. She grabs her handheld and looks for the nearest cheap hotel. Ah, even better: there’s a Merita only a couple of blocks away. Yes, there will be more work to do, but they should be able to get along without her for a while, and Information is back up, so it’s not like she’ll be unreachable. She hits the light and starts down the stai
rs, feeling each step in her bones.

  “Mishima.”

  It’s Ken’s voice, in her ear.

  “Oh, man,” she says. “You’re still there.”

  “Yeah, but don’t worry, I haven’t been listening this whole time. We had some other things to do here. Listen, you just got Heritage knocked off the Supermajority.”

  “Yeah,” Mishima says. “They had it coming.”

  “Did you notice who you let in to take their place?”

  She hadn’t noticed it, not consciously, but even before she can bring up her handheld to look, she knows. “Liberty.”

  CHAPTER 31

  Mishima ends up going to the Merita anyway. She tells Ken that if anything comes up, he should call her, or call the front desk to bang on her door if necessary, but she’s pretty sure she’s not going to save the world in the next eight hours. She’s going to sleep, and she recommends he do the same.

  When she gets there, though, she doesn’t immediately get into bed. She knows sleep is not as urgent for her as solitude. This Paris branch of Merita is, inevitably, smaller than the Singapore version and slightly scruffier, but it is still the biggest and cleanest place she’s slept since then. No, she forgot about the nights in the Adapted Maldives. Those days don’t seem quite real. At least there’s a scar to prove they happened.

  She lets herself laugh hysterically for a while, then takes a bath, which she intends to be long, but which she finds she is too tired to enjoy. She towels off and falls into bed.

  Once there, though, she is too tired to sleep. There are creaks from the floor and walls, and a rushing of water in pipes when someone on another floor takes a shower. The mattress is too soft. Mishima misses her perfectly calibrated futon, misses floating above a city cushioned by the isolation of empty air, misses her crow. She rolls over. How could she have let him get away with her crow? How could she have let him get away at all? She sits up in the not-quite-darkness of the hotel room and opens Information.

  Mishima watches passively for a while, letting the kaleidoscopic play of her preferred feeds guide her through her deep exhaustion. They say that watching projections at night is bad for sleeping, that letting them switch around on auto is bad for concentration. Don’t worry. Bad for everything. But this is Mishima’s world and the way she interacts with it; her brain has long since remolded to respond to sensory overload. So don’t worry. She knows she needs the distraction, needs something to occupy the surface of her mind so the rest of it can work. And it works. She becomes aware of a thought, a phrase, tugging at her attention. A memory. Don’t worry, I haven’t been listening this whole time.

  Ken. That was what he said. But what if it wasn’t true? Mishima feels her psyche sink, can almost see her profile morphing into a new configuration even without running the diagnostic. Ken, listening in on the entire meeting with Nougaz and Abendou. Ken, who knows her crow, can guess how much it means to her. What if …

  Kicking herself for being so careless with her comms, Mishima considers calling Roz to confirm what Ken was doing during the last few minutes of the vote, but it’s even later in Qatar and everyone must be sleeping after the excitement. Besides, there are plenty of ways he could have warned Drestle without Roz knowing, even if she was sitting right next to him. And Mishima is already on Information. She checks everything she can find on Ken’s activities and comms since Information came back on, and finds nothing remotely suspicious. He voted so immediately it must have been programmed and spent the rest of the time on a bunch of vote-tracking sites. No outward communications other than the ones to her, at least none that she can see.

  Somewhat mollified, she wonders if she can find anything from the Information blackout. Unsurprisingly, cameras with memory storage and people with too much time on their hands have already started filling in the gaps, and Mishima is able to browse a partial, gossip-ridden, patchy history of the past four days. Almost like being back in the early years of Information, she thinks, remembering the quirks and frustrations, the semisecret tricks for getting better intel.

  Then an alert comes up, and her nostalgic reverie is cut short. A feed has identified two of her targets on the clandestine campaign workers list. Mishima is skeptical, but when she skims through the feed, the figure leaps out at her at once. He’s looking away from the camera, but it’s definitely Ken. What was he doing in Beirut yesterday? And what was he doing with Camille Saad, the Liberty spy, her fluttering hands accenting the inaudible words her mouth is forming as they walk through the feed’s angle of vision? Mishima searches the surrounding area before and after but finds no other record of them in the patchy coverage. Saad is from Beirut originally, but what was Ken doing there? She cross-refs further back and finds a few days when the two of them overlapped in Lima. But there is no sign that they were ever in the same room together, or of any communication between them. Mishima searches the data, looking for certainty until she falls asleep, the lights of the projections playing over her face for a few minutes before they darken.

  * * *

  Having slept—fitfully and, as he has done for the past week, under his desk—for most of the time that Mishima spent counting votes, Ken does not take her advice. He spends the time prowling the reconstituted Information. He looks at the centenals that voted for Policy1st, learns about the cities in Sri Lanka mentioned in the bulletins he’s been transmitting, finds out what companies inhabit the buildings around the Information offices here in Doha. He feels a remembered urge to pick through the demographics of the vote thread by thread but can’t quite bring himself to look at any more ballots right now, real or fake. He puts on some music, reads some comedy, checks out the local news compilations from his centenal in Tokyo. He logs on to an interactive serial he follows. It’s set in the tense time right before the election system was put in place, when underpaid bureaucrats with launch codes threatened to use long-forgotten nukes, and supposedly stable democratic governments strained at the seams. Ken plays a suave and experienced British spy who is supposed to unravel a number of (mostly) historically accurate conspiracies while avoiding assassination attempts and laying the foundations for the elections. The narrative is beautifully designed, with delicious atmospheric tension and period detail that has clearly been nitpicked by obsessives. Sometimes, though, Ken comes out of character briefly to wonder whether that era was really so much scarier and more nerve-wracking than the ridiculous election he’s living through now.

  Once he’s sated his immediate Information and entertainment needs, he starts focusing in on the anticipated problem. He isn’t able to find any evidence of territorial aggression so far, no troops massing on borders or suspicious arms trading, but it’s early yet—Johnny Fabré hasn’t even given his acceptance speech. He wonders what kind of advids and projections are playing in Liberty centenals now, and checks on the site in Beirut, but from what he can see, they’ve taken down all the sketchy stuff. While there’s a lot of self-congratulation going on, it is all fairly restrained. He has a moment of doubt: did he really see those crazy advids, or was he hallucinating? There is no way to look it up, and his memory seems to become more tenuous with each passing hour.

  He could look up the men who assaulted him, and he thinks about doing so but decides it would be an unhealthy way to spend the next several hours. He spins away from the Beirut centenal Information and returns to election news. Heritage is complaining vociferously on every platform it can find that it shouldn’t be held accountable for the actions of one deranged individual, but hasn’t made any statements indicating it will allow the extradition of said individual. PhilipMorris, which placed a close third for the Supermajority, is calling for a recount, suggesting, as Roz predicted, that if Information was wrong the first time, they might be wrong again. The vote-counter accessibility program Mishima and the others designed is defusing that.

  He’s researching the legality of centenal annexation when he sees something else. The advid shows up in a Policy1st plaza where he lurks occasionally,
to monitor what people are talking about. It’s anti-Information, which is not entirely surprising: Policy1stans do as much griping as anyone about the fairness, promptness, and transparency of Information, and probably more about their lack of a coherent policy platform. This, however, claims to be an exposé of malfeasance during the recent voting debacle, and Ken clicks it on with trepidation.

  * * *

  Despite her exhaustion, Mishima wakes suddenly and completely the next morning as wintry light spills into the room. She gets up, washes, and puts on the same clothes as the day before. She debates whether or not to check out but decides since she has very little luggage, she might as well. First, though, she goes downstairs to take advantage of the complimentary breakfast.

  She calls Ken from the stairwell. “Hey,” she says, and hears the wariness in her voice. Not the smoothest approach if she wants to catch him in a lie.

  Ken is oblivious. “Hey!” he says. “Did you get some sleep? I’ve been monitoring all the centenals we highlighted; seems pretty quiet so far.”

  “Um.” Mishima is uncomfortably aware that she could have gotten much more sleep if she hadn’t binged on unfounded suspicions, and also that she never sent Ken the adjustments she made to his map of high-risk centenals. “Yeah, okay.” Remembering Information is back on and the connection should be reasonable, she snaps on video. “What the hell happened to you?”

  Ken had forgotten about his battered face. “Oh. Let’s call it an early run-in with Liberty.”

  “What?”

  He gives her an abbreviated version, focusing on the weirdness he saw in the centenal, downplaying the beating, and completely skipping over the beauty of the Liberty spy who came to his rescue. “Anyway, as I was saying, there are no signs of any illegal behavior.”

  “Other than beating the crap out of you?” Of course there was a reasonable (heroic, even) explanation for Ken being in Beirut.

  “I’m fine,” Ken says. “And it doesn’t feel like it was an official attack. Although the experience does make me think we were right about them. All those insistent messages, and then the intranet thing—they are planning something. Everyone here is so focused on the election itself, they think everything’s fine now that the voting is over and verified.”