by Malka Older
Roz doesn’t answer, even though Ken waits for two sips to be sure. He squirms. “Where were you today?”
“Iran-Iraq border. The centenal in India has calmed down for the moment. But this one … Today got violent.” Ken opens his mouth, but she shakes her head. “Not us. LesProfessionnels dealt with it. We weren’t the ones who got hurt. But still … People are being displaced into neighboring centenals. This is not going to end with the election.” She takes a breath. “We’re lucky, though. So far, it’s only a few spots, a limited number of centenals. And they’re isolated from each other; it’s not like they can find common cause.”
Ken waits, watches while she sips her coffee again, then changes the subject because the idea of war is too terrifying for him. “This mantle tunnel thing … Do you think it caused the earthquake?” Ken has found it difficult to relish that development. Yes, it knocks Heritage out of the running for anything above centenal census-taker for the foreseeable future, but every time he thinks about Tokyo, he remembers a dusty arm curling out of a weighty mound of debris. He hates the idea that someone, some group of people, caused all that destruction.
“The truth is, nobody knows,” Roz says. She sighs, puts down the check she was fiddling with. “I’ve been reading everything I can find on the subject, and I haven’t found a reputable geologist, seismologist, or engineer who was willing to commit one way or the other. And the disreputable ones are split down the middle. Not that it matters.” Information didn’t even have to raise the issue. As soon as the fact that Heritage had been illegally drilling in Tokyo Bay came to light, dominating the news compilers, the plazas lit up with the question of whether it led to the earthquake. “We know that it caused at least two deaths: the Information employees killed in the Tokyo attack.”
“So, that attack didn’t have anything to do with the election?”
“The attack on the election had to do with the mantle tunnel. That was part of what made Heritage so desperate to ensure they would win. Then, while they were at it, they decided to make sure there was nothing incriminating in the data at the Tokyo office.” She frowns. “We’re not sure yet, but the attackers are still denying they knew anything about the tunnel, and my guess is that’s why they had to come back. They were told to destroy servers and data, but they didn’t do the job completely the first time, because they thought it was about keeping the comms down rather than getting rid of specific evidence.”
Ken wants to ask about Mishima, but he’s embarrassed to admit he hasn’t talked to her in a few days, so instead, he grabs the check. “I got this,” he says, grinning. “Yasmin told me they’ve worked out a way to pay me for my time here.”
“You’ve earned it,” Roz says. “So, are you sticking around?”
“Um … we’ll see.”
“You’ve got to stay at least until Mishima gets back. She said she wanted to watch the election results with us.”
“Oh, yeah, of course,” Ken says, laughing with relief. “I wouldn’t miss that.”
CHAPTER 33
For the first time in a long time, Mishima flies commercial. It hasn’t gotten any better. But at least it’s a relatively short hop, Paris to Doha. To complete the experience, she takes a public transportation crow in from the airport, swaying in the bench seating as it follows the shortest route that gets everyone where they want to go.
The Doha hub has set up a viewing party in the canteen, with refreshments of a higher caliber than the free food everyone there has been eating for two weeks. The partitions have been removed and animated banners shimmy across the walls, thanking the staff for all their extra efforts.
By the time Mishima gets there, at twenty hours in, the results are shaping up. The scandals triggered by Heritage and Liberty have hurt corporates across the board, although PhilipMorris is too strong to be completely knocked out of the running, and 888, Sony-Mitsubishi, and other non-Western corporates took less of a hit. Mishima looks for Ken among the crowd of Information workers watching the projections. She spots him next to Roz and Roman, fluted glass in hand. His tense face tells her he’s not ready to believe it yet. He’s so enthralled, he barely notices her. Or maybe he’s playing hard to get. Mishima mingles.
Looking across the crowd, she’s surprised to catch a glimpse of Nougaz. The older woman meets her gaze and gives that distant nod that does nothing to reduce the awkwardness of running into someone in an unfamiliar context. Curious, Mishima stares but can’t make out much through the crowd and shrugs it off. She gets something to eat and then finds her way back to catch up with Roz.
Mishima keeps an eye on Ken’s face, tight-lipped and twitchy as they make the formal announcement—“Hopefully, it’ll stick this time!” someone yells—that Policy1st has won the Supermajority. Then he’s hugging everyone, forgetting that they’re not all on the same team, that not everyone in the Information office shares his enthusiasm.
“Oh, hey,” he says to Mishima, even though she’d already said hi to him twice. “You look great!”
She grins as he goes on to hug Roz and then Roman and then Stanislaw the statistician, whom he’s never met, and then wobbles toward the dance floor. Mishima and Roz go back to obsessing over the finer grain of the results. Liberty has lost centenals, not just compared to its win a few days ago but even compared to its fourth-place showing ten years before that. “And that’s before the legal action,” Roz says with some satisfaction.
Glancing up at the dance floor, Mishima notices Nougaz and Maryam making out with the sort of passion that only a long-distance relationship can inspire.
“So that’s why Maryam left Paris so suddenly!”
Roz follows her gaze. “Oh, yes,” she says, grinning with relief. “It’s been tough on Maryam these past few months; hopefully, they can find a way to make it work.”
“Looks like they’re trying!”
They drop their heads back into the data. Heritage has lost all its centenals in the Kantō area and in Taipei as well; they’ve dropped a few in other places but not as many as she expected. The upcoming prosecution for election tampering is likely to weaken them further. Interestingly, a sideline poll shows that approval of Information has dropped significantly, but since they never have to get elected, that is more an indicator to factor into future strategy than a loss.
* * *
When the party has calmed down a little, Mishima takes Ken up to the roof. There’s a garden there, a small plot with chilies, sesame, basil and rosemary, a patch of cosmos, and a young guava tree, surrounded by hanging lanterns and places to sit. He didn’t even know about this, but clearly it’s a relaxation area for the staff. It’s midnight now, and no one is there. Or maybe Mishima had it cleared for them; that’s another possibility. Since coming to Doha, most of Ken’s outdoor experience has been during the day, skating from one shadow to the next, sweating and burning as the heat pressed him toward the ground. At night, it’s entirely different. The air is warm, but there’s a breeze that smells of mint and henna, and the sky seems to have opened up above them, vast and embroidered with stars. The office park surrounding them is dark, but out in the city he can see lights on other roofs, distant squares of dun and red hovering in the darkness. Ken hears music from somewhere; live or recorded, it’s too faint to tell. Drums and a winding melody, a horn or a reed or a nasal voice drifting on the breeze.
Ken settles into a wood-and-wicker settee; Mishima drapes herself sideways over an armchair of the same materials. He’s tempted to make some joke about whether she’d stab him if the power went out, but he’s afraid to jostle their détente. Then he does it anyway. He’s learned to live dangerously.
Mishima snorts. “No, this time I think I’d just push you off the roof.”
Ken hesitates a second before laughing, and that makes Mishima laugh harder, falling into the seat of the chair. When at last Ken manages to stop giggling, his body feels as if it’s been through shiatsu, slumped weightlessly against the lounger. He sighs and stares up at the stars.<
br />
Mishima passes him a flask. “Congratulations, by the way,” she says.
Ken tips the flask in salute and drinks. “Thank you,” he says. “Not that I had much to do with it.”
“Come on,” says Mishima. “That centenal you were working in Chennai went to Policy1st. And I think you had something to do with Miraflores.”
She’s been tracking him, Ken thinks, flattered. She couldn’t follow him while Information was down, so she doesn’t know about what he considers his greatest success: the first Policy1st centenal in Sri Lanka, just south of Colombo. “Well.” He passes the flask back to her. “It’s been a team effort.” He cracks up before he can get the whole phrase out, and they both start laughing again. “No, but really,” he manages when he can breathe again. “It’s been an experience.”
That has a note of finality to it. “You’re not going to try to find a job with Policy1st? Exciting times.” Mishima takes a drink, passes it back.
Ken grimaces. “I don’t know. Suzuki was my … contact there, and now…” Mishima never had to use her intel on Suzuki’s illicit campaigning. Once data was restored from the crashed servers, the vid of him pretending to vote went viral. He resigned before he was asked to and is working on his memoirs.
“They’d be lucky to have you,” Mishima says. “Someone there must realize that.”
It’s probably true, and Ken does know most of the major players to some degree, but no one has gotten in touch and he’s not in the mood to go begging. It’s not pride, or not only pride. He’s not sure how much he believes in Policy1st anymore. Working on the campaign stripped away a lot of his loyalty and idealism, and he imagines that with the Supermajority, things will only get worse. Things meaning people, and policies, and principles.
“Ten years is a long time to wait for the next election,” is all he says.
“What about Information?” Mishima asks. “You’ve earned some goodwill there.”
Ken drinks. “It’s been great here, but I don’t think I want to live in Doha.”
He doesn’t tell her that Nejime has already asked him to work on the restructured image team. “We’re rebuilding it from scratch,” she promised him. “We could use someone with your unique combination of experience and skills.” He was tempted; she had pushed all his buttons with a few neat sentences. Maybe that’s why he doesn’t think he’s going to take it. It is too close to the way Suzuki used to talk, too much highlighting and contouring.
Mishima laughs. “There are other hubs.” She takes the flask. “Nougaz offered me a job in Paris.”
“Oh? What kind of job?”
“She wants me to be some kind of special advisor and move into deputy when Abendou makes director.”
“That sounds good,” says Ken, who knows none of these people and still doesn’t have a clear understanding of Information office structure. “Are you going to take it?”
“I haven’t decided.” Mishima drinks. She’s been trying to picture herself strolling around Paris as if she belonged there. Maybe wearing heels, an inconvenient luxury her work in the field usually precludes. Or a compromise, heeled boots. Wandering the streets, stopping by her favorite boulangerie. It’s pretty but unconvincing. “It’s a great opportunity but … different, you know?” She yawns. “I don’t know; maybe I’m ready for a change.”
“Sure,” Ken says, taking the flask back. He’s thinking about the other possibility within Information: Roz told him that they are going to expand the SVAT team program, try to use it not just for peacekeeping but for better data dissemination in the most underinformed centenals. She must have seen that his imagination was already running away from him, because she immediately warned him that it wouldn’t be as good as it sounds. It’s certain to get tangled in bureaucracy and unlikely to have much impact even when it goes to the right places to do the right things. More than that, it would be dangerous.
“But you’re going to do it?” he had asked.
“I’m already fully inoculated against disappointment in this particular bureaucracy,” Roz had answered.
“I know this guy,” Mishima says after a pause. She’s looking out at the rooftops and doesn’t notice Ken tense up. “He’s in the … antielection movement, I guess you could say. Sometimes, I almost think I could join it.”
Ken tips the flask, swallows. He’s glad she said “join it” rather than “join him.” “If they’re antielection,” he says at last, “what are they for?”
Mishima laughs, sort of. “Nothing I can name. I guess that’s why I never quite decide to join them.”
Ken passes the flask back, and Mishima takes a swig. “Did you hear? They’re saying next round they’re going to try to get down to the ten-thousand-person level,” she says. “Instead of centenals, I don’t know, decimals. To keep minorities from getting overrun in their centenals, you know? And so that people take more responsibility for their votes and hopefully make more informed choices. Nano-democracy, they’re calling it.”
Ken shakes his head, exhausted just imagining it. “Do they really think that will help?”
Mishima shrugs, and passes the flask. “I suppose someday they’ll get down to one, and then we’ll all be happy.”
Ken grunts out a laugh, drinks, and says, “I’m thinking about getting out of politics for a while.”
Mishima looks at him as though he said he wanted to get out of breathing for a while.
“I mean,” Ken says, “until the next election. Or something.”
Mishima laughs, briefly. “Do you know why they set the elections ten years apart?” Ken shakes his head. “So that there would be time for governing in between bouts of politics.”
“It doesn’t work,” Ken says immediately.
“I know.”
“There are the centenal elections—some governments do them as often as every two years. And referendums and policy shifts within that. The last five years are all about positioning.”
“Among the big governments,” Mishima reminds him.
“True.” Ken yawns. He can’t help it. “So, yeah, I guess trying to govern, or whatever, in one of the smaller governments would be like doing something different.” He remembers the centenal in Jakarta where he watched the first debate, Free2B. He never did look up all their outposts. “Or maybe I’ll become a … a bartender.”
Mishima laughs, a real laugh this time. Bartenders don’t exist anymore outside of films and extremely pretentious bars.
Ken laughs too. “Or a game designer, or a crow mechanic.”
“You really think you could live like that?” Mishima is trying to imagine what it would take to slow her pulse down, how it would feel. She imagines the problematic mountain range of her psyche smoothing into a gentle, dull plain, the colors overlapping into blah. Even if she survived like that, even if she liked it, she can’t imagine it would last. There would be an emergency somewhere. Someone would call her, offer her payment and per diem, tell her she’s the only one who can help, and that would be it.
“Sure. For a couple of years, at least. Could you?” He’s searching Free2B’s centenals. Looks like there are a few good options, climactically speaking: Peru, northern Vietnam, a couple in New Zealand.
“We could try.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Malka Older is a writer, humanitarian worker, and PhD candidate at the Centre de Sociologie des Organisations (Sciences Po) studying governance and disasters. Named Senior Fellow for Technology and Risk at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs for 2015, she has more than eight years of experience in humanitarian aid and development, and has responded to complex emergencies and natural disasters in Sri Lanka, Uganda, Darfur, Indonesia, Japan, and Mali. Infomocracy is her first novel. You can sign up for email updates here.
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CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
About the Author
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
INFOMOCRACY
Copyright © 2016 by Malka Older
All rights reserved.
Edited by Carl Engle-Laird
Cover art by Will Staehle
A Tor.com Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC
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Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.