by Malka Older
“I wish I shared their confidence,” Mishima says, sitting down at the common table. “Hang on.” A waiter is hovering. She orders a double espresso, scans the menu, and adds a termite and scrambled egg enchilada, a glass of carrot juice, and a yogurt parfait. After subsisting on energy chews for the last few days, she’s starving for strong tastes and authentic protein.
“Sounds delicious,” Ken says, his own stomach growling. Might be time to go see how the Sri Lankans are doing. “Listen, there’s something else I have to tell you. I came across this vid last night claiming that Information saved the votes from the partial election to use for some sort of nefarious purpose…”
“Oh, yeah,” says Mishima, remembering.
“And it referenced you, and um…” Ken coughs, embarrassed. “… some of the chaos going on in Information right after the blackout. It also sounded like it had your voice in it. I mean, it was hard to tell, because there was distortion, but it sounded like you saying something crazy like ‘You should be dancing for joy that the election was disrupted’ over and over again.”
“Yeah, I’ve seen it,” Mishima says. “Don’t worry about it.” Her food has arrived, and she puts the handheld down on the table and forks up the first bite. That vid reminds her: she should tell New York to let Domaine go. Partly because it was gutsy of him to record her and release it while still in custody, but also because, as far as she can figure, he hasn’t done anything illegal. At least, not recently. And the Information he gave her did pan out. Not wanting to sign off from Ken yet, she types out the message with her left hand while eating.
* * *
Suzuki is finishing his poached egg on croissant when he sees that woman from Information walk in, casually dressed and ordering a big breakfast as if it were all over. He sops up the last of his egg, downs the dregs of his chocolate, and walks around the common table to where she’s sitting.
“Excuse me,” he says.
Mishima looks up. “I’ll call you back,” she mutters quickly into her handheld.
“Is that—” Ken’s voice disappears as she cuts the connection.
“Suzuki-san,” Mishima says in a more leisurely tone. “What can I do for you?” She’s glad she decided to check out, if he’s staying here.
“Listen,” he says. He collapses onto the chair opposite her, as if he can’t stay on his feet much longer. Mishima notices that his hands are trembling. “I just got a message from … an associate. From Okinawa. He’s given us intel in the past, and it’s always checked out. He keeps an eye, that is, he has an interest in Liberty.” Amuru had reached Suzuki only half an hour earlier, after being unable to get through to Ken. “In any case, some of his contacts within the Liberty centenals in Okinawa told him that even though they had voted for Liberty, they were uneasy about some of the policies they were implementing.”
“I didn’t know they’d implemented anything yet,” Mishima says, taking another forkful of her enchilada.
“That’s the thing,” Suzuki says. “Nobody did. Except their citizens. My colleague was able to get a copy, a photo, you understand, of the latest globe.” He taps his handheld, and the projection, a tiny square of map, shoots up between them, small and intimate. “Look at this.” He gestures with a shaking finger, but Mishima already sees it.
“Liberty holding most of southern Kyushu?” She doesn’t want to show doubt in front of Suzuki, but she barely saw the final election results last night; she projects them quickly at eyeball level to be sure, then collapses them again. “Nope, not even close.”
“That’s right,” Suzuki says, jabbing his finger at the map again. “Our globes show one thing, and those of Liberty’s constituents another.”
Mishima frowns, reaches for her coffee. “I’m not sure…”
“They have somehow managed to splinter Information.” He sighs, runs both hands up through his hair. “You know, we received intel a few weeks ago, a month, saying that Liberty was threatening ‘peaceful annexation’ of traditional enemies of their citizens. I couldn’t understand what this meant, ‘peaceful annexation.’ I didn’t take it seriously, figured it was just a rallying cry for some of the more deluded among their likely constituency. But this…”
Mishima’s gears have finally shifted into action. “Can you send me that?” she asks, spewing tiny fragments of mostly chewed enchilada. She shovels another couple of bites into her mouth—so good—gulps the carrot juice to wash it down. Sadly, she’s going to have to leave the yogurt, but she manages another sip of the scalding coffee as she stands up.
“We’ll work on this,” she tells Suzuki. “Thank you for bringing it to me.” And she’s out the door.
* * *
Yoriko’s kids are finally in school, and she is down by the harbor, flirting with the ice cream man, when the armada pulls in.
The Hidari Gomon Armada is what they call themselves, on the bright vertical banners—cloth, not projections—streaming from their masts. To Yoriko’s eye, they are a collection of pleasure ships and fishing boats manned by a bunch of guys with nothing better to do. They jostle into the harbor, accompanied by a lot of yelling in a dialect that, under other circumstances, would be music to Yoriko’s ears: they sound like home. Now, though, she finds herself embarrassed as the men—of course they’re almost all men—act out a raucous disagreement about whether to stop for a meal or press on for their destination. The majority of the crafts dock, while a handful head back out to sea. A few minutes later, a pub’s worth of sun-reddened men in their fifties and sixties straggles up from the marina onto the main street, where they spread out across the pavement as though it were a pedestrian-only area and belonged to them. They start peeling off into the different establishments—food, alcohol, souvenirs—and three of them enter the ice cream shop, the bell on the door clanging.
“Do you have any shaved ice?” one of the men asks.
The ice cream man, a dapper, balding fellow that Yoriko has taken a shine to, gestures toward the freezer. The man wanders over to look. “Only this premade kind?” He leaves in disgust.
“Sorry about him,” another of the men says. His hair is combed back in an Elvis-style pompadour, a solid black wave that is probably dyed or genetically modified, because he looks to be in his sixties. His boating clothes are expensive, and there’s a metallic flash from the gold chain on his chest. He looks familiar, and Yoriko tries to remember if she’s ever driven him in her taxi, or if it’s just that he runs true to type. “I think he got sunstroke on the way over.”
“Sailed in from Okinawa, did you?” the ice cream man asks reluctantly. One of the things Yoriko likes about him is that he’s normally quite reticent, but these guys clearly want to talk.
“Can I have a grilled-squid soft-serve cone, please?” asks the other man.
The ice cream man sets about loading the machine and preparing the cone.
“We left Okinawa right after the election results showed up. Couldn’t believe it!” Elvis says, slapping his leg in self-congratulation. The ice cream man, back to the new customers as he winds out the cone, catches Yoriko’s eye; this is going to be good.
“Liberty actually did it! Not only did they win the Supermajority, they won Satsuma!” The man is drooling. As the ice cream vendor hands over the cone to his companion, he smacks his lips and orders the Spam and bitter melon twist.
“Headed over there, are you?” the ice cream man asks. Yoriko is frantically checking the election results at eye level. It’s not possible, is it? Could Liberty have somehow won Amami Ōshima too, without her knowing? But no, the results are the same as they were last time she looked, and Liberty has only a tiny smattering of centenals across all of Kyushu.
“Gotta go see it,” Elvis agrees. “I mean, not to gloat or anything…” He winks, hard, at Yoriko, who’s afraid to talk lest they recognize her Okinawan accent. “But it’s our government now, so we thought we might as well take a little vacation there.”
The ice cream man hands over the second c
one in a way that implies amiable agreement, though he says nothing.
“Well,” Elvis says. “We’ll be seeing you! And you should think about voting Liberty next time. All sorts of benefits!” He winks again, but Yoriko has already turned away to feign interest in the advids along the wall. What if her face is up on wanted posters in Liberty centenals?
She waits in the ice cream parlor until the armada departs. The ice cream man is in stitches over the whole thing—“Can you imagine their faces when they get there? If they get there.”—which she finds comforting but not entirely convincing. As soon as the last boat has disappeared over the horizon, she walks out onto the street, shaking despite the tropical heat. Yoriko is desperate enough to briefly consider calling Suzuki but discards that idea almost immediately. He’s the one who got her on Liberty’s radar in the first place! Should she call her local Amami government? But what if they know she didn’t vote for them? Besides, why should they care about what Liberty does?
Finally, although Yoriko has never thought of herself as a snitch, she calls Information. Amami Ōshima is too small to have a permanent Information hub, so she calls the one in Naha and tells her story. The man she talks to sounds impressed. “Hey, did you say you’re not from there?” Yoriko explains that she just moved. “Listen, it just so happens we’re looking for a nonlocal stringer for Amami. Send me your CV, okay? And don’t worry about this mix-up with the election results. We’re already looking into it.”
* * *
“They’re doing what?” Nougaz is already in the office when Mishima gets there.
“They’re feeding different people different Information. Probably through these intranet adaptors for handhelds that we have intel about. I don’t know; is this better or worse than an actual war?”
“It’s going to explode into war if it goes on much longer,” Nougaz assures her darkly.
“It does explain one thing that always confused me,” Mishima says. “They were talking in such anachronistic terms, threatening countries rather than centenals. I couldn’t understand how they planned to overrun a dozen centenals with a dozen different governments, so I figured it had to be an empty threat.” She shakes her head. “How can people still think like that?”
“Twenty years isn’t that long,” Nougaz says. “Our job is to make sure Information and the centenal system survive long enough for those attitudes to disappear.”
“To be replaced by centenal-to-centenal rivalries?” Mishima asks, one eyebrow arched.
Nougaz sighs. “I suppose we should feel flattered they’re using Information rather than bombs for the moment.”
Abendou yanks them back on track. “Is fragmenting Information even legal?”
“It’s not, actually,” Ken chirps into Mishima’s ear. She called him back as soon as she was out of Suzuki’s earshot to fill him in, and told him to look into any other cases of this.
“Hang on,” she tells him, “let me put you on public.” She taps the handset and Ken’s image springs up in the projection space.
“It’s not legal. I’ve been looking up what Liberty could and couldn’t do with the Supermajority, because, well, we expected they’d do something.”
“Ken is at the Doha hub,” Mishima says by way of explanation to Nougaz, who is looking at her questioningly.
“Oh, this is Ken?” Nougaz tilts her head to look at the other side of his face. “Your face doesn’t look as bad as I’d heard. How are you feeling?”
“Uh, fine,” Ken says, after a pause. He hadn’t realized the Information grapevine ran so quickly between offices, too.
“I was very impressed to hear about your exploits,” Nougaz says. “Do go on.”
“Right, um, thanks. Diverting, twisting, or otherwise affecting the Information received by citizens is illegal for any government,” Ken says. “They can add data but not subtract or change. This holds true for the Supermajority as well, and we have a precedent to prove it.”
“A precedent?” Abendou says. “Someone else has tried this craziness?”
“Not exactly the same,” Ken says, “but in their first term, Heritage tried to finesse an unfavorable report on a wonder drug developed by one of the companies in their coalition that has since gone bankrupt. There was a cover-up about the chicken used at KFC, and another one about genetically modified corn from Monsanto. It was early in the Information age, and Heritage thought they could get away with blurring results, words, advertising claims, especially if they did it only in their centenals. Information was still trying to assert itself, and they jumped all over it, shut it down. The language in the legal precedent is clear and forceful.”
“And we will shut this down just as hard,” Nougaz says. “It’s too bad this comes directly after the disaster with the election. Unbelievable, these people. But tant pis.” She turns to Abendou. “Let’s set up a meet with Liberty right away. I want all the director heads looped in, visibly or invisibly.”
“You’re going to talk to them?” Ken asks.
“That’s step one,” Nougaz answers.
* * *
Liberty stalls the meet for three hours, then sets it up in their own virtual space. “That way, we can’t record them,” Nougaz tells Mishima, who will watch with Abendou on Nougaz’s projection so that they are not registered as separate participants. Nougaz herself is going in as an “along the wall” as opposed to “at the table” participant. As this is the first time that the Supermajority has changed hands, the protocols are still not fully in place, and Information has decided to bring two primary negotiators. Grier is in charge of Supermajority relations, but up till now he’s only dealt with Heritage, so they’ve added Nejime, who spent years as the liaison to Liberty before taking on her current position as Archives Director. Looking at Nejime’s back in the projection, Mishima knows that Ken and Roz are watching everything from her viewpoint.
On the Liberty side, Johnny Fabré sits at the end of the table, facing them. Except for a brief greeting, however, he doesn’t speak. The main negotiator is a narrow man sitting to his right, around the corner so that his face is visible only in profile. He looks down as though he were reading from notes, although Mishima doesn’t think he is. She can’t decide whether he’s acting self-effacing to comply with some denialist policy about pretending Fabré’s in charge, or whether he’s avoiding responsibility. Either way, it bothers her. She’s used to assuming that the leadership of Liberty is on an ego trip fueled by populism and lucre; seeing someone there uninterested in his own stature unnerves her.
“The people have spoken,” he says in a patient tone, as though explaining to children. “We are enacting the mandate they have given us.”
“These so-called annexations were hardly a prominent plank in your campaign platform,” Nejime says dryly.
The man curls his wrist in a gesture of dismissal. “Based on polling, we are convinced the issue was decisive to our election.”
“Whether you have a mandate or not,” Grier says, “this aggression is illegal.”
“We have not committed aggression,” the man says, feigning shock. “No one has been hurt.”
“You have committed an aggression against the truth and transparency of Information,” Grier says. “Illegal.”
“What do you think is going to happen when people start figuring this out?” Nejime says. “When people in Singapore hear that Liberty citizens in Malaysia think they have conquered them, when Turks learn that, in Greek Liberty centenals, Cyprus is entirely Greek, and vice versa?”
“We find that the people who hate each other that much rarely view the same types of Information,” the man says. “It seems terribly unlikely that they will ever know. In the meantime, everyone is happy, and the possibility for real aggression is being defused.”
“It is, nonetheless, illegal,” Grier repeats. “We are ordering you to cease and desist.”
“As the Supermajority government, we believe we have some latitude to adjust the laws in minimal ways where nece
ssary,” the man says without changing his tone.
“They expected this,” Mishima whispers to Nougaz as Grier goes into the various precedents when Heritage tried to throw around its weight. “They’re not going to back down.”
“‘The Supermajority position,’” Grier quotes, “‘allows for smooth decision-making as necessary on rules governing minor elements of inter-government relations. It is not a position that allows for any interference with elections or Information.’ Micro-Democracy Charter, section 58.3.”
Unexpectedly, Johny Fabré smiles. “Every system must be refreshed from time to time with revolution,” he says. And Liberty closes the meet.
CHAPTER 32
Mishima follows Nougaz from the secure comms room in the Paris hub and catches up with her a few yards down the hall. “Listen,” she says. “I made a—an error in dealing with an informant a while ago.” Was it only a couple of days ago she was in New York? A week? “He was somehow able to get into my data—I think he got a beacon past all my scanners on a previous meeting and then used it to copy some files. He recorded me, too.” She takes a breath. “The point is, he made this.” She projects Domaine’s vid at an intimate size and in two dimensions so only the two of them can easily see it. “Use it,” she says when it’s finished. “Say the last elections were flawed, call another vote, and blame it on me. Get rid of these people.”
Nougaz appraises her. “Very noble,” she says, in a way that makes Mishima think she’s read her: she’s realized that this isn’t a sacrifice, that Mishima isn’t throwing herself on a grenade so much as grabbing for a parachute. At this moment, Mishima is tired, disillusioned, and ready to be out of this whole mess. “But I think we are still a formidable enough organization to manage this particular problem without recourse to a scapegoat. Besides, we’ve already admitted to one election miscount; I’d rather not invent another.”