Null States

by Malka Older

  “Been here before?” Roz asks. It is getting dark, but the shadows of the market are lit with torches, fires, and fluoron strings, some warped and colored to form shop signs. With evening the temperature has fallen, and Roz can feel herself relaxing, her forehead unknotting.

  “Once or twice, during the centenal mapping,” Malakal answers. They are close to the old Sudan-Chad border, and centenal designers tried to disrupt those lines when they could. “I think … hmm. If I remember right, there was a decent fish restaurant somewhere up here.”

  “Fish?” Roz asks, wrinkling her nose.

  “River fish,” Malakal says. “We’re close to the water.”

  Roz shrugs, but the catfish, fried into satisfying crunchiness and served in a heaping pile on a metal tray with more of that chili and tiny limes, leaves her licking her fingers and wishing she dared order more.

  The funeral is early the next morning, and they should go right to sleep, but when they get back to the crow, Malakal pulls out a bottle of sesame alcohol he brought from the south—every centenal for miles around here is dry—and they end up drinking it sitting on the floor of the cabin.

  “I always feel weird working these kinds of missions,” Roz admits.

  “Assassinations?”

  “No!” She chokes back an inappropriate laugh. “No, these governments that are, you know…” He doesn’t. “Ethnically based, or retro-nationalist. With their populist heads of state, pushing the dream for their people, and only theirs, to declare their greatness and difference from everyone else. I mean, it’s so twentieth century, so the opposite of what Information is supposed to work for.” Roz fidgets. “It’s almost like we’re working against ourselves by helping them.”

  “They were elected,” Malakal reminds her.

  “Just because it’s democratic doesn’t make it right,” she shoots back at him; it’s a quote from Valérie Nougaz during the turmoil around the establishment of Information twenty-five years earlier.

  “They’ll come around,” he says, taking a drink. “We have to give them time to understand that the incentive structure, the whole political system they’re a part of has changed.”

  “Or they won’t,” Roz counters, “because they’ve self-segregated into their own centenals and they don’t have to interact with others or evolve.”

  Malakal puts up his hands, one still holding his cup. “Even if that’s the case, we can’t go second-guessing their decisions after we’ve told them that making decisions themselves is the most important thing, the basis for our system.”

  “I know,” Roz sighs, and drinks.

  “Micro-democracy is what we’re trying now. If it doesn’t work, then we’ll come up with something else eventually, I guess. But I’ll tell you, I can’t think of a single case when telling people what they should want works out well.”

  “We don’t tell people,” Roz points out. “We offer them Information and pretend it’s neutral. We help them choose, and tell them it’s their choice.” She hopes the sarcasm comes through; she’s getting buzzed.

  “We do,” Malakal says, heavily. “As with, for example, centenal mapping.” He takes another drink and changes the subject. “You think the team is okay after that explosion?”

  “I’m pretty sure they’ve all seen worse,” Roz says. “But most of them I don’t know very well.”

  “They’ve all been screened, you know. Extensively.”

  Roz nods. “I know. I’m sure I won’t find anything, but I want to cover every possibility. There might be something specific to this place that wouldn’t have raised flags before.” She can’t help but think of Minzhe, his mother’s powerful position, the ease with which he embedded himself into the militia group. “And Amran isn’t SVAT. She hasn’t gone through quite such a rigorous screening, or training.”

  Malakal sighs, and plays with his empty shot glass. “She does seem a bit out of her depth, doesn’t she?” He reaches for the bottle and refills. “What did you make of her bit about the drama and the rising tension?”

  “I don’t know.” Neither of them wants to say narrative disorder, so Roz decides to pretend they already have. “Do you think she’s faking?” A pause while they consider the possibility. “She did seem very agitated,” Roz points out, working against her worst impulses.

  “She knew she’d messed up a couple of times that day, which could account for that,” Malakal says. “Although … well, we’ll just have to keep an eye on it. By the way…” he takes a swallow of the sesame drink, as though trying to put space between that topic and the next. “Have you heard from Mishima?”

  Roz smiles into her cup. The lights in the cabin are set to a fire-like flicker. “Yeah, I talk to her pretty regularly. Should give her a call, actually; it’s been a month or so.”

  “Is she doing all right?” Malakal asks.

  “She’s doing fine,” Roz says, a little surprised. When is Mishima ever not doing fine? “You know, she’s working on some interesting stuff, has a nice place…” She’s not sure how close Mishima was with her erstwhile boss, and decides not to mention the significant other.

  “That’s good to hear,” Malakal says, sighing himself a little lower into his slump against the wall. “I felt bad when she left, you know … Like I should have supported her better during the last election, all the crap that was going on. She didn’t have to leave.”

  “I don’t think that was the problem,” Roz says. She’s more awake now, shifting into reassurance mode, peering at Malakal with curiosity. First the centenal borders and now this. Who knew he had such a guilt complex? “She’s never said anything to me about feeling unsupported—and, you know, she did all right on her own.” Or not quite on her own, but without Malakal being actively involved. “I think she was ready for a change.”

  “I’m glad to hear that,” Malakal says again. “I know I should write to her, or call, but I left it for a while and then it got harder to do.”

  “You should. I’m sure Mishima would be happy to hear from you.” She thinks so, anyway. Mishima would certainly be pleased if he were calling to tell her that Information is falling apart without her. Roz almost laughs aloud, thinking of her friend.

  “Well. We have to get up early tomorrow. I think I’ll head to bed.” Malakal raises his considerable bulk to standing. “You’re okay here?”

  “Of course.” The crow has a relatively private cabin, which Malakal is using, and a main room with the controls and workspace, which also has a couple of bunks outfitted for visitors.

  “Good night, then.”

  “Good night.”

  After Malakal retreats into his room, Roz finds she is too wound up to sleep. Knowing she’ll regret it, she opens her work inbox. She’s barely been away for a day, and there’s already a slew of messages. Roz can take care of most of them quickly, but she’s working on a couple of highly sensitive matters for her boss, Nejime, and she wants to check on the updates. There is more back-and-forth on the idea of reducing the election cycle to five years. Nougaz is pushing hard for it, which Roz supposes has the added benefit of publicly demonstrating that she’s not in Policy1st’s pocket.

  It’s not that Roz doesn’t like Policy1st. She voted for SavePlanet, but Policy1st would have been her second choice, especially after they merged with Earth1st. She probably would have voted for them if she’d thought they had a chance, and maybe the slightly bad taste they generate in her mouth is partly rooted in shame that she was so far off in her election predictions. Still, though. She’s not thrilled with them as Supermajority, although they are better than Heritage, or at least bad in new and refreshing ways. They try too hard, design dense and clockwork-complicated schemes to make people care about policy, like trying to get kids to do their cerebral exercises by disguising them as games that aren’t that fun and have to be played for seventy-five minutes every day. It’s early yet; maybe they’ll get better. Their rise was so sudden and unexpected, they must still be disbelieving and greedy about the power th
ey won.

  And then there’s the fact that Nougaz dumped one of Roz’s best friends in order to snuggle up with the Policy1st head of state. But Roz tries not to hold that against the whole government.

  The best thing to come out of the Policy1st Supermajority as far as Roz is concerned is the spate of copycat policy-based governments. They are all small—none of them hold any centenals yet—but it’s a good sign that they’ve started this early and will spend years in opposition, figuring out how they’re different from existing governments. Some of them are whole-wheat hoagies—“healthy” policy on the outside, because it’s trendy right now, greasy politics on the inside. There are a few, though, that show promise. Roz believes the system needs renewal. It needs young, idealistic parties. That’s the reason she’s reluctantly supportive of the five-year-cycle idea. That and the memory of the Heritage stranglehold on politics for the past twenty years.

  Nejime has sent her notes from the meeting with Heritage earlier that day, the latest in a string of increasingly bitter negotiations as the former Supermajority tries to wriggle out of the sanctions imposed on it for election fraud and unauthorized construction of planetary import. Roz gets the sense that their approach is more and more precarious, but she ends up skimming through the notes when she sees a news alert at the bottom of her vision. There’s been an escalation in the Kazakh-Kyrgyz conflict, a daring attack on Astana. Casualties and damage were low, and it seems to have been a one-off rather than the opening of another front, but it still marks a turning point in a war that until now has centered around the Bishkek-Almaty axis.

  Information generally does not take this much interest in conflicts outside of its purview. But Democratic East Asia runs right up against the conflict, and many of the centenals on the edge are already feeling its effects in food shortages and fear.

  Regional challenges add to the concern. More than a century of institutionalized, forced colonization has segued into a fragile democracy. 1China stuffs the ballots through continued migration and mobilization of existing partisans, while local Uyghur and Tibetan parties do their best to stave them off. The current border is a patchwork of governments, many of them balanced on a pichaq’s edge, and there is growing concern that the Central Asian war could spill over and destabilize them, or force them to enter into armed conflict. Worse, many of the local governments in Democratic East Asia are poor, and they have either foregone a military contract or, at best, purchased a cut-rate defense package. If they are seriously threatened by the Kyrgyz or Kazakh armies, will the system somehow—through Information’s budget, maybe, or a collection among other governments—fund their defense?

  The Information powers-that-be claim that there has never been war between two governments participating in micro-democracy. Strictly speaking, that’s true, although in her SVAT work over the past two years Roz has encountered a number of violent episodes that flirt with the quantitative threshold between “war” and “low-level conflict.” Armed threat by an outside government is one of the outlier cases that nobody knows how to deal with yet.

  This threat is so feared—collective defense is one of the big theoretical holes in micro-democracy—that there’s been talk of Information stepping in as a negotiator to find an interest-based resolution to the conflict. There was a sense among Information officials, accustomed to the intricate cross-hatching of allegiances and rivalries among micro-democracy governments, that interstate conflict would be easy enough to fix. This has turned out not to be the case. Information does not cover residual nation-states like Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan, and intel is sketchy. Case in point: in addition to the official Kyrgyz military, several militias have splintered off with varying demands and leadership, and it’s still unclear who is responsible for this latest attack.

  Roz is both horrified and fascinated by the situation, and has been following it obsessively, in part because she finds nation-states so difficult to comprehend. She has never been able to get her head around why people and governments insist on clinging to the antiquated grab-as-much-territory-as-you-can philosophy. If they’re splintering so rapidly that even a well-informed outsider like herself can’t keep up, they might as well divide into centenals in an orderly way and be done with it. She can’t understand why the Kyrgyz military or militia would attack Astana, when Almaty is a much more important city both in terms of population and economy. She realizes that the capitals of nation-states have some symbolic significance, but why didn’t they make Almaty the capital in the first place?

  Roz is a firm believer in democracy, but this war is enough to spur an illicit craving: that Information had the power to step in and make them stop, make them all citizens whether they want it or not. She learns all she can about the attack in Astana, and falls asleep late to troubled dreams.

  CHAPTER 6

  When they want to go out in public, Nougaz and Vera usually arrange a “chance” meeting in a café or restaurant or, occasionally, a museum, although those have an awful lot of cameras and open vid share policies. It’s not that it’s a secret; neither of them is hiding the relationship from their friends or colleagues. Nougaz has a long history, well-known in government circles, of pushing for a weaker Supermajority (and, implicitly but not incidentally, a stronger Information). She has no intention of changing that just because she’s dating the head of state of the current Supermajority.

  But announcing their entanglement for public consumption is an entirely different threshold, one neither of them is particularly eager to breach. There are plenty of vids of them together in leisure settings, but so far everyone seems willing to believe that these are informal meetings, or at most friendly networking. Indeed, that’s how the relationship started, on one romantic rainy evening in Paris.

  On this occasion, they meet in a tiny crêperie in the 6th with a student-heavy clientele. Nougaz is a public figure but, like most Information officials, not exactly a household face. Vera, with her distinctive hairstyle and plentiful press appearances, gets some glances and the occasional request for a joint vid (which she politely refuses) or autograph (to which she politely acquiesces). Once seated, though, they are rarely bothered.

  “You look stressed,” Vera comments, spooning up a dropped dollop of dulce de leche from her plate.

  Nougaz, who calculates maximum utility like she breathes, selects the stress source that is most likely to lead to something else she wants. “There was an assassination yesterday,” she says, an appropriate gravity to her voice as she lets her eyes trace the tabletop. “A head of state in East Africa.”

  Vera frowns, and blinks through recent headlines. “I did see something about that … Oh!” Nougaz watches her large eyes widen, flick back and forth as she reads. “Valérie, I think I knew him.” A pause, then a decisive nod. “Yes, we met at an event for African heads of state last year. How terrible! We should put out a statement, draw attention to this.” Her fingers twitch as she composes a memo. “I only spoke with him briefly, but he seemed like he was really trying to do something.”

  Nougaz twitches her shoulders affirmatively. “He was getting fairly good reviews. But it was still so early in his tenure. All that potential gone because of insufficient security.”

  She half-expects Vera to get angry that she’s bringing this up again, but the Supermajority head of state fixes her with a sardonic look and replies mildly, “I’m following all the recommended protocols.”

  Vera’s on-site security, in the form of two InfoSecs delegated to her detail, looms just outside the doors of the café as both warning and readiness. The more important element is off-site, where at least three layers envelop her every move, more in data-dense environments. One team monitors every feed on Vera at all times, looking for signs of illness as well as for external threats; the next watches every immediate approach; the third is at one additional remove—in this case, the streets around the café, the apartments above it, the airspace above that. Pretty soon, the earth’s crust below it, if the mantle tunnel proje
ct moves ahead.

  It should be enough. But the change of Supermajority created resentment, and Policy1st’s insistence on putting policy wonks like Vera in visible positions instead of political spokesmodels has not helped. Nougaz has seen the attacks in public and semipublic plazas, calling Vera (and, less frequently, her co–head of state Veena) ugly, stupid, unworthy of being broadcast. Any literal incitements to violence are removed, but the more subtle dehumanizing content is only annotated. Nougaz is aware that not everyone takes annotation as seriously as they should.

  “You can’t control everything.” Nougaz looks up from her thoughts to see Vera’s smile and melts, but only on the inside.

  “So I’m learning in Central Asia. Did you see the new offensive last night?” She clicks her tongue. “It’s terribly frustrating. A war between null states, and yet we keep being drawn into it one way or another.”

  “You shouldn’t call them that,” Vera chides. “It’s derogatory.”

  “It’s not, actually. Null states is a technical term, referring to the lack of data available for those areas.” Nougaz realizes she’s quoting her ex, and stops. “Perhaps it’s worth investing in denser feed infrastructure there, if we can figure out a way to get it done. We’re going to have to go global eventually.”

  “How about you keep the focus on the governments that pay your bills before offering Information to those that don’t?” Vera cuts in. “Can you imagine how expensive it would be to put even a minimal coverage of feeds into those countries?” She shudders dramatically at the thought of the vast, cold steppes.

  “Security and intelligence gathering are a benefit for the whole micro-democratic system. If not a necessity.”

  “I’d rather you kept your eye on Heritage,” Vera says, taking a sip of her chicory blend. “They’re trying their best to weasel out of the consequences of their actions.”

  “That’s not really your concern.” Nougaz feels it come out too sharp. She can see herself in the mirror behind the bar: one eyebrow has gone up under her pale bangs, and the planes of her narrow face look beveled, like marble worn with use. She catches herself holding her breath for the comeback, but Vera shakes her head without anger.