Infomocracy

by Malka Older

  Nougaz pauses for Abendou, who has been hovering a few steps back, to catch up to them. “We’ll have a strategy within the hour,” she says, nodding to him. He nods back and turns toward his office. Nougaz shifts her attention back to Mishima. “Take a day off,” she says. “When you’re back, I want you with the analysts’ team. We need all the help we can get, and yours particularly.”

  Mishima opens her mouth to say that she’s fine, that she can go straight to work, and then shuts it again. She nods and goes to find a hotel Suzuki is not staying at.

  * * *

  Ken, on the other hand, is immediately drafted, and he takes to the work with gusto. Nejime appropriates him from Roz, and he spends the afternoon finding ways to build the story of Liberty’s treachery into every conceivable platform. News compilers are only the most obvious way to tell the world that the new Supermajority is lying to its constituents and promoting territorial aggression. They work it into talk shows, political features, telenovelas, serials, trade shows, cooking classes, tourist brochures, projection games, documentaries, educational programs, celebrity stalking, encyclopedia entries, and dance contests. Ken is particularly enjoying the task of wandering into centenal virtual plazas and spouting propaganda to whomever he meets there.

  “It’s amazing,” he tells Roz when he stops by to get her for dinner. “I think Information is finally getting a grasp of how to do public relations. If you guys could improve your own image half as well as we’re destroying Liberty’s, people wouldn’t hate you so much.”

  “Hmm,” grunts Roz. Ken wonders whether it’s the criticism or the fact that his job is suddenly so much more interesting than hers that is making her grumpy.

  “I heard that Information is Lumpering every Liberty centenal,” he says to cheer her up. “And working on Lumpering all the places they lied about.”

  “Hmph,” Roz says, a grumpier variation on her first response. “Doesn’t do much for bombs or flamethrowers. Or pointed sticks, for that matter.”

  “They’ve contracted LesProfessionnels on contingency to act as peacekeepers,” Ken says. He has been caught up in the excitement flowing around Nejime’s office, but Roz’s skepticism is slowing him down.

  Roz stops at the entrance to the cafeteria. “Let’s go out for dinner,” she says. “I think you need some air.”

  “So, what have you been doing all day?” Ken asks as they leave the Information building. It is later than he thought, and the air is refreshingly cool.

  “I’m on the SVAT team.”

  Ken struggles with it for a moment. “The what?”

  “Specialized Voter Action Tactics team. For those places where the work you’re doing is just too subtle.”

  “Oh. Wow.” Roz’s voice gives no hint of pride, but the title sounds impressive to Ken, so wow seems appropriate.

  “I was working centenals along the old India-Pakistan border most of the day,” Roz explains. “With LesProfessionnels.”

  “You what?” So much for having the cooler job.

  “I do get out of the office sometimes, you know.”

  “So, what you said about the bombs and flamethrowers…” Ken realizes he is rubbing the slowly diminishing bump on the side of his head, and makes himself stop.

  Roz allows herself a smile. “Today was closer to the pointy sticks and thrown rocks end of the spectrum. But there were a few flamethrowers, yes.”

  “Are you okay?” They turn out of the office park area onto the shopping street. The awnings that shade the street during the day have opened to allow glimpses of the fading sky.

  “I’m fine,” Roz says. “It looked like the violence might spill over there, and at that point, nobody is bothering to look at Information for anything except tactics and weaknesses—you know one of our indicators for this is the density of searches for The Art of War in local translation?” She rolls her eyes. “These people are so predictable. So, we go in and provide face-to-face Information dissemination where we think it is will have the greatest effect.”

  Ken is silent for a moment, picturing Roz, as calm and centered as always, patiently explaining to a regressive nationalist desperate for blood and relevance how that authentic-sounding Information about the election was actually counterfeit while muscled ex-French legionnaires with flamethrowers guard the perimeter. “So, did it?” he asks at last.

  “Did it what?” Roz is studying a display menu, printed on paper and arranged on a small podium in front of a modest restaurant: a holdover from the blackout.

  “Have an effect.”

  “Some.” She runs her finger down the menu, as though savoring the tactility. “Not as much as we’d like. They’ve been given exactly what they’ve been dreaming about for years, and now we tell them it’s not true. It’s a hard sell. Of course, when I say ‘they,’ I mean a tiny fraction of the people in each centenal who are ready to go conquer. The rest are just confused. I think we’re going to shift the focus to them tomorrow.” She shakes her head. “But we came out here to clear our heads. Shall we try this place? Maryam told me it’s pretty good.”

  * * *

  On her day off, Mishima goes for a long walk. She cuts as straight a path as she can to the river, then turns left and follows its long bend through Paris. It’s an ugly day, cold and moist and overcast, with a fierce wind along the quais, but she has a fully charged heater jacket, and with that comfort around her core, she almost enjoys the wet bite of the air on her face. She watches the bateaux-mouches and the barges in the river, and the joggers and the dog-walkers along its banks. There aren’t many people sitting still in this weather. She gets as far as the Île aux Cygnes before she decides to turn back. Tired, she shortens the return by cutting through the city. She crosses six different centenals on her way, and each border is obvious. Sometimes, it is the litter on the sidewalk coming to a sharp end, or the roads suddenly riddled with potholes, or the cluster of teenagers who have clearly crossed into the next centenal to smoke cigarettes before going back to class. One government—she doesn’t even bother to check which—has set up sidewalk heaters along the central strip of the Boulevard Pasteur, and old women and unemployed men sit there, feeding the pigeons and drinking from brown paper bags. She passes through a street fair selling delicacies from sister centenals in the provinces, and detours into the shared territory of the Jardin du Luxembourg, restfully free of advids and animations by common treaty.

  She stops at a hotel near the Panthéon that looks pleasant and spacious, and finds that it is both. Pricey, but she decides to expense it, even if Information didn’t exactly send her to Paris and require that she stay here, even if it is a day off. After all, an Information employee just crowjacked her apartment. There’s enough floor space in the room that she can lie on the spotless parquet and stretch out her arms. Staring at the off-white ceiling, she lets her narrative disorder run wild.

  Liberty planted Drestle to ruin Heritage’s chances. Heritage has a secret agreement with Liberty, an illegal corporate merger nobody knows about. SecureNation is using them both and getting away with it because of its willingness to be the power behind the Supermajority. Suzuki plotted out the whole thing, down to their supposed chance meeting in the restaurant this morning. Ken … but when she thinks about Ken, she diverts into an entirely different type of narrative. She veers back to the outcome she fears most, the worst case she has avoided envisioning until now. Information, fading into irrelevance due to the stable Supermajority, planned the whole thing. Frustrated with the impossibility of getting people to make informed choices, stymied by the name-recognition problem and the celebrity factor and a million other quirks of neurobiology, the people who cared decided to manipulate the people who didn’t.

  Trite, she thinks. But now that she’s looked, she can’t look away.

  She runs through it again, tests for narrative cohesion, for character motivations, for verisimilitude.

  Not the attack on Tokyo, she decides. Everything else, maybe, but not that.

&nb
sp; She starts over with that new parameter, and lets the stories swirl through her mind until she falls asleep.

  * * *

  Ken finds his new job far more comfortable than the last one. At first, he attributes it to the convivial atmosphere: the Information compilers under Nejime are young, gregarious to the point of being rowdy, and every scruffy overeducated one of them seems to think they’ve hit the employment jackpot. Ken had gotten used to and even come to admire Roz’s intensity, but it didn’t make for what he would call a fun work environment.

  It isn’t until the second day that he realizes it’s not the company that makes him feel at home but the work. He’s slid into the groove so easily that he didn’t realize how familiar it is. They call it compilation and distribution, or in some cases highlighting and contouring, but he’s done it before under a different name: campaigning. As habitual as it is for him, he can’t shake the feeling that doing it for Information is somehow amiss.

  Curious about the other prong of Information’s response, he looks for reports on the SVAT team activities Roz told him about. He’s surprised at how difficult it is to find anything. In the end, all he gets is a five-line report telling him there are eight SVAT teams deployed in different areas of the world (one, he notices with interest, on the extreme southern tip of Kyushu). No vids, no manual, no results. He is relieved when he finds some commentary by witnesses or participants, although the fact that most of it is numbingly positive (“so polite and professional … I didn’t think Information staff would be like that”; “after talking with them, I have a much better understanding of the situation”) makes him worry that something is being suppressed.

  Partly to test his theory, and partly because he thinks it would make a great addition to their campaign, he floats an idea for how to highlight the SVAT team activities: a new, short-format game focused on diplomacy in high-stress situations, with enough fight sequences to attract subjects with violent proclivities. It is immediately squashed. “We’d rather not put our resources toward promoting Information,” Nejime tells him personally. “The story is not about us.” It’s a reasonable explanation, especially given the budget equivalency policy, but after that, Ken can’t quite find the same enthusiasm for highlighting and contouring.

  * * *

  Mishima’s job with the analysts, when she gets back to the Paris office early the next morning, is to unpack polls, plaza trends, opinionators, and any other voter intel she can find to identify Liberty’s weakness and optimize the timing. Instead, she sets up her workspace and starts looking at data from Tokyo. She tries satellite imagery first but doesn’t see what she’s looking for, so she starts going through the servers at the office, the last inputs before the comms went down, intel that hasn’t been sorted, analyzed, or broadcast.

  Even in that relatively short timeframe, it’s a lot of material, especially when she’s looking for something clandestine. By six in the evening, she has found nothing, and she leaves the office. She gets dinner at the restaurant Suzuki was haunting, sitting at a table by herself with content flashing before her eyes. She plays Crow Wars V for a while to distract herself, but the bad guy has been redesigned to resemble Johnny Fabré. She shuts it down in disgust and eats, enjoying the pigeon breast in mirabelle sauce and watching the other patrons, and then walks back to her hotel. She is still exhausted enough to sleep easily, which is unusual and welcome.

  The next morning, in the analysts’ section, she turns off her translator to listen to the tone of the chatter around her without understanding its content. Subdued, still. Determined, she thinks. Hopeful, but not yet certain. They’re not there yet. She turns the translator back on and gets to work, cross-referencing with the data she put together on the recent movements of clandestine operatives from the different governments.

  Midafternoon, she finds it. Maybe. Probably. With the clue—a materials shipment to a certain address in a Heritage centenal in Odaiba, on Tokyo Bay—she goes back to the satellite photos, narrowing the window in space and time. The indications are slight, but she sees them.

  If she still had a crow, she would go herself, but she doesn’t. And, if she’s honest with herself, it would probably take too long, anyway. She goes through official channels instead. Not the head of the Tokyo hub, who’s too close to it. Not Nougaz, because as simpática as she is, she wields a lot of power and seems comfortable that way, and Mishima can’t get that worst-case scenario out of her head.

  She goes to the Kansai hub director, Koshino, whom she knows slightly. He listens to her while looking at the data she’s sent over (she didn’t bother using a secure connection; at this point, the more people who see this, the better).

  He stares at it for a while, then mumbles in his deep voice, “You figured this out using your narrative disorder?” sounding awestruck.

  Mishima takes a moment to smile at the success of her strategy to turn her disability into a superpower. This means it’s time for phase two: modesty. “That wasn’t the narrative disorder,” she says. “I just took a step back to look at what didn’t fit. Hard to do on an emergency schedule.”

  “The attack on the Tokyo office,” Koshino growls.

  “We assumed that it was part of the disruption of the election, but that made no sense. The election was already disrupted. So, I looked for something else.”

  “And you think it’s in the bay?” Koshino asks.

  “It’s the only place they could conceivably hide it. Also because of the location of that property. It makes sense. Easily accessible by existing transportation but right on the water.”

  “Why would they move ahead before the approvals went through?” Koshino practically spits at the stupidity of the former Supermajority.

  Mishima can’t answer and barely cares. “The usual, I imagine. Maybe they suspected they wouldn’t be able to hold the Supermajority this time and wanted to lock the deal in for their centenals. Maybe something to do with the construction contract. One way or another, it must be the money.”

  “Korbin hasn’t mentioned anything about this,” Koshino muses. “Maybe she didn’t know.”

  “Korbin…” Mishima feels her confident grasp on the situation evaporate.

  “You didn’t hear?”

  She hadn’t. She had been busy taking a step back.

  “Korbin turned herself in yesterday. She gave Heritage the access they needed to trigger the Information and comms blackout.” He pauses, but Mishima is in no state to say anything yet. “She claims she didn’t know exactly what they would use it for, and she is adamant that she had no idea there would be a physical attack on the office. She seems genuinely distraught over contributing to the deaths of her colleagues…” He shrugs. “Hard to say whether it’s true, but I believe her. In any case, her evidence gives us enough to fully sanction Heritage.”

  Some superpower, Mishima thinks. A couple of long nights bonding over disaster response and her narrative disorder is lulled into a completely false storyline. She remembers Korbin on the external stairwell: “There’s a lot of concern over the possibility of Heritage winning again.” She must have thought the deck was stacked too steeply against them; she must have gotten too close …

  After waiting again for a response that doesn’t come, Koshino goes on. “We did think that there was something missing from the story, so if you’re right”—up until thirty seconds ago, Mishima was positive that she was—“this could clear a lot up. Let’s see what we find.”

  Koshino moves quickly. A dive team is scrambled with members from the Kansai, Kyushu, and Tokyo offices, and they’re in the water almost before that conversation is over. The first dive finds nothing.

  Neither does the second. Koshino has linked Mishima in to watch, but she’s only glancing at the watery projection occasionally as she works on what she’s supposed to be doing: analysis of voter moods. The strategy is working; voters are shocked by Liberty’s cavalier management of constituent intel. They wonder what else they might have been lied to about. Th
ere is voter’s remorse; there are rumblings. Nobody has mentioned the possibility of another election, but in her estimation, most people will probably welcome it. Mishima isn’t ready to make the go recommendation, but it’s getting close. Tokyo should tip it over the edge, if they find what she expects they will.

  Some of the outrage is, naturally, deflecting on to Information. The usual groups and plazas and opinionators are heating up, launching diatribes and petitions for legal changes to weaken the global bureaucracy. Domaine’s vid is popular in those circles and is spreading beyond them, but it doesn’t look like it will jump to viral status. That creep at the Liberty meeting was right about one thing: despite all the Information available, people tend to look at what they want to see.

  The third dive finds a well-hidden gouge in the seabed: the underwater drill site for the first mantle tunnel, planned to stretch from Tokyo to Taipei, begun in secret without approvals or Information coverage.

  * * *

  “So, they’re going to call an election?” Ken asks Roz. They’re at the Persian restaurant they discovered two nights ago, finishing their zulbia with coffee.

  “That’s the plan,” Roz says. She checks updates. “Maybe tonight.”

  “Are they sure?” Ken asks.

  “In theory,” Roz says. He thinks she’s finished, because she pauses to take a sip of coffee, but then she goes on. “In theory, no one can be sure of the behavior of voters.”

  “So, they’re taking a risk.”

  Roz sips again. “I suppose we could keep running elections until we get the results we want.”

  Her voice is as dark as the coffee. This, besides his gratitude, is why he keeps ditching the gung-ho gang of compilers to eat with Roz. Their unquestioning eagerness is starting to grate.

  “What they did was illegal,” he points out, as much for himself as for Roz. “It’s not like Information does this every time.”