Null States

by Malka Older

  “She tries to kill them both, maybe, with the oil explosion,” Maria says. “It fails, he confronts her when he gets home. Their argument makes him late to leave and she…”

  “She would have to have planned it already,” Roz points out. “To have made the hardware change. But let’s say she did, as a contingency. Then the provocation, and when she snaps, all she has to do is…”

  “A highly sophisticated software override?” Maria’s voice holds all the skepticism Roz is feeling.

  “It’s not impossible,” Roz says. “Let’s comb her education and comms records, see if she might have those kinds of skills or be in touch with anyone who does. Hopefully, the militia will interview her and we can get a better sense for who she is.”

  “Ideally before she is elected to replace her murdered husband as head of state.”

  CHAPTER 12

  When Heritage won the Supermajority in the first micro-democratic elections, they took over the old UN building in Geneva as their global headquarters. Theoretically, the grant of this building was connected to their status as Supermajority rather than to the Heritage government specifically, but the distinction was never codified. Twenty years later, when Policy1st finally toppled Heritage in the most recent, and messiest, election, there was some talk of shifting the building over to them, but even before it got to the point of finding out what Heritage would say about that, Vera Kubugli declined, more or less gracefully: “It’s time for a fresh start.” Veena Rasmussen, who was head of the eco-focused Earth1st spinoff of Policy1st before they reunited, contributed their headquarters, a completely energy-neutral building in Copenhagen, for the bulk of the back-office functions, although Policy1st tends to discourage the idea of a global headquarters and emphasize instead their flexible, networked structure.

  Mishima hasn’t been in Geneva in years, certainly not since the election, and she imagined the city as dusty and derelict since Heritage’s fall. It was a silly assumption to make: Heritage holds only two centenals, with the UN building as a separate little bubble. There are four or five local Swiss governments in the greater Geneva area, some Francophone and some polyglot. Liberty, the disgraced corporate government that includes Nestlé, holds one centenal. Beyond the eastern edge of the urban area, separated by a ribbon of two-decade-old pines, the remaining Swiss nation-state clings to its territory, bitterly insular and anti-Information.

  It’s unsurprising, then, that the city is more or less unchanged, and as it turns out, even the Heritage centenal is humming. Mishima/Kei queues for security check in the middle of a line of tech law experts, sociologists, and economists flown in from Heritage centenals all over the world, dressed in fitted, multi-panel, long-sleeve T-shirts or furled skirts and chatting excitedly about per diems and the quirks of micro-democratic law. Mishima is already recording everything at a radius of one and a half times her earshot. She’s not transmitting right now, because there are almost certainly comms scanners in this building, but when she does, there will be a team of Information grunts ready to disentangle the overlapping voices and transcribe the whole mess. She concentrates on getting herself through security.

  It’s not that difficult. Her stiletto is magnetized to her tablet and too thin to show up, so the long-distance body scan told them before she entered the building that she’s not carrying any weapons. She’s almost certain they won’t find her recording devices, which are just slightly ahead of the public tech curve, and so should be ahead of the monitoring curve, too. They would have done the standard Information background check before she got here; the only reason there would be a problem with that now is if they waited to detain her within their jurisdiction, which is possible, but Mishima has a lot of confidence in the team that put her character together. The only tricky part, really, is the mental-emotional scan, supposedly pixelated for privacy unless they find any unusual spikes that suggest instability, extreme stress, or the intention to commit violence or espionage. Fortunately, Mishima has plenty of experience hiding her inner turmoil, and she isn’t even worried enough to be relieved when the guard gives her the nod.

  Her contact is waiting for her in the corridor on the other side of the checkpoint. Deepal Wanigaratne is a lifelong Heritage citizen who has been employed in their government bureaucracy since he completed his degree in micro-democratic public administration, and he still considers himself loyal to his government, but like many other Heritage supporters, he was shocked by the revelations of the last election. Since then, he’s been providing unclassified intel and other low-level assistance to Information. “Sunlight is the best disinfectant, and all that,” he says in the vid in his file. “We can be better and still win.”

  In this case, all Deepal had to do was hire Hirasawa Kei, a perfectly qualified unaffiliated consultant and Free2B citizen, for a legitimate job opening. He has complete, plausible deniability, so he shouldn’t be worried, but Mishima can’t help but notice how jittery he looks as they exchange formal cheek kisses and greetings. His file didn’t say anything about nerves. Maybe he’s amplifying the energy that pervades the building. Everyone is on their toes, speaking half a tone too high and two degrees too loud, playing with their cognitive calmers while they inhale espressos and blink through news alerts.

  Heritage may be flush, and the UN might have been flush before them, but this building was built at a time when ideas about enabling productivity were very different. Deepal shares his windowless, low-ceilinged office with two other staff, Xandra and Loïc. They’ve squeezed in an extra workspace for Mishima in the corner. “As we discussed, we need an economic analysis of our government-wide viability independent of the rest of micro-democracy. It is, of course, completely hypothetical and aimed at finding vulnerabilities and opportunities in the trade balance,” Deepal adds, a little too loudly.

  “Interesting project,” Mishima says. “I can’t wait to get my teeth into it.”

  Deepal hovers for a moment as though he expects her to ask him for his security passcodes or the latest classified strategy documents, and then edges away. Kei gets to work, and so does Mishima.

  It’s an ideal setup in that the job they want her to do requires less than half her brain, and that without any Information help. Once she has laid the groundwork for what she needs to do, breaking it down into semi-repetitive tasks, she sets a program running so that it will seem that Kei is conducting these tasks at about half the speed it takes Mishima to actually do them. She uses the extra time to snoop.

  * * *

  To vary the leftover goat Maryam prepares for them in the compound, the SVAT team goes out for dinner at a restaurant Minzhe and Charles suggest. It’s near the wadi, which is nothing but soft sand at the moment, but a thick screen of trees with actual green leaves suggests the power of the latent waterway. The one-room restaurant has brick walls painted blue, a big fluoron sign announcing itself as New Waves, and bustling waiters. Roz notes that the clientele is almost all male, although she does see one table with three women decked out in bright toubs and dark lipstick, deep in conversation with each other, ignoring and being largely ignored by the men around them. Another woman sits among a table of workers in blue coveralls with a logo on the back that Information identifies (slowly; bandwidth is not great here) as from the evaporation plant.

  Minzhe pulls up the menu from Information and projects it above the middle of their table. It’s decorated with photos of suspiciously well-lit and perfectly dressed burgers, fried eggs with yolks the color of marigolds, even one of laughing white people sharing a basket of popcorn termites. Of course, there are no burgers on the menu. Fried eggs and termites, yes, but the termites are stewed, not fried. Roz is confident they don’t come with shiny happy white people. Absently, she marks up a citation for false advertising. Stock photos are illegal on Information, and New Waves will get twenty-four hours to respond to a warning before Information replaces them with any stills it can find of their actual food, unlikely to be flattering.

  A boy, probably not y
et twelve, hurries over to the table, but when Roz asks for the chicken kebab, he stares at her, motionless. Minzhe has to order for everyone in Arabic. The boy bounces a nod with a lightning grin and runs back toward the kitchen.

  “Are you telling me,” Roz asks no one in particular, “he doesn’t have a translator?”

  “Why would he need one?” Minzhe asks. “He’s just a kid, and he probably doesn’t run into foreigners that often.”

  “We met a couple of people without auto-interpreters while doing our surveys,” Maria puts in.

  Roz shakes her head and gets Minzhe to help her with her pronunciation of “thank you” in preparation for the arrival of the food. It comes promptly and, as expected, doesn’t look anything like the photos on the menu, but it is delicious enough to silence the SVAT team while they eat. Her plate clean, Roz sips what remains of the particularly excellent mango juice, feeling far more at home in this desert than at any time since she arrived. Her feeling of well-being does not extend to progress on the case, however; so far, their investigations of Fatima have uncovered nothing to indicate she was capable of the remote attack. She leans across the table to Charles, who’s deep in discussion with Minzhe about which of the sheikhs will run for head of state.

  “How would you like to go to Djabal with me tomorrow?”

  * * *

  Roz uses the walk back to the compound to plot how she’s going to use her own money to buy personal interpreters for everyone in Kas who needs one. Maybe she can bring a few friends in on it and cover the whole DarFur government.

  By the time she gets to her hut, she’s realized how quixotic that is. It’s not just that translators, when she checks, cost a bit more than she expected. There’s also the difficulty of identifying who doesn’t have one, the logistical challenges in distributing them, and the potential problems that might arise from an Information employee making donations to citizens in one government and not in the neighboring one. Also, it occurs to her that the money, were she to donate it, could be better spent on something else (like streetlights, to pick the most obvious need she’s facing at the moment). Finally, she resigns herself to the idea that Minzhe is right: a preteen in an isolated village might not have much need for an interpreter. Hating herself a little for giving in, she checks her messages.

  There’s the usual flood of mostly routine queries from the hub, but her eyes jump to the notification that Maryam called her two hours ago. Roz checks the time. Midnight in Kas, which means two in the morning in Doha. It would be reasonable to wait, but Roz knows it would just be an excuse for not calling because she’s tired. She’s talked to Maryam much later than this, and if she’s asleep, she won’t answer.

  She answers immediately. “Roz! Thank you so much for calling me back.”

  “It’s no problem,” Roz replies, and immediately berates herself for the syrupy soothing tone that infects her voice, giving the lie to her words. “How are you doing?” That came out a little more naturally.

  Maryam doesn’t seem to notice. “Ahh,” she says. She’s pacing, one hand pushing back her hair, in her apartment in Doha. “Better, I think. Better than when I called you a couple of hours ago.”

  “But you can’t sleep.”

  “I’ve been gaming. It’s okay, I worked until almost midnight, I can go in late tomorrow.”

  “That sounds good,” Roz says, stretching out on her own cot. “Be good to yourself. Do what you need to feel better.” For now, she thinks. This is the mantra she’s been repeating to Maryam at intervals over the last six months.

  “It just … It still feels the same,” Maryam says, her voice damp. “I can’t stop thinking about her.”

  “Of course not,” Roz says. “That’s totally normal; you know that.” She sighs. “You know you could … get a prescription for something to help you off of it.”

  There’s a pause. “Have you ever used something like that?” Maryam asks. She sounds almost accusatory, but Roz knows her too well to take it that way.

  “No, but you know, I haven’t had a rough breakup like that in years”—because I haven’t had a long relationship in years—“and back then, AmourOff wasn’t around.”

  “No.” Maryam is still pacing. “No, I hate pills. I got myself into this; I knew perfectly well that getting involved with her was a bad idea. Even if she wasn’t my supervisor, she was the director of the hub—”

  “Which you moved away from, risking your career,” Roz puts in. Maryam doesn’t answer immediately, and Roz wonders what part Maryam’s unexpected ascendance in Doha had to do with Nougaz taking her back. Did she seem like a catch once she was the talked-about techie genius in someone else’s hub?

  “I knew I shouldn’t get involved with her,” Maryam says again.

  Roz searches for something comforting. “It was part of your life, and in a month or two, you’ll be able to see it that way.” It’s true, it’s been a while for her, but Roz can still remember how this feels: the empty awful ache of waiting for another person that nothing else can make right. “You just have to give it time.”

  She repeats that mantra several more times before Maryam finally signs off, exhausted and effusive in her thanks. Roz strips to an undershirt and crawls into the climate control of her bed. As she’s lying there, the day’s events play through her mind, and she notices that she hasn’t seen Suleyman since leaving him so precipitously that morning. She remembers Charles’s description of the meeting with the sheikhs in the afternoon, which included noting that Suleyman was equanimous and utterly opaque. “Aloof, even,” Charles had said.

  Roz can’t imagine any description less apt for the man, and she wonders where the difference came from. Could he be offended that she ditched him so quickly? She replays the scene from the morning, worrying whether she made it clear enough that the message was urgent. Maybe he has very distinct professional and personal sides. Either way, she thinks as she falls asleep, she should be sure to meet with him again soon to smooth over any uncertainty.

  CHAPTER 13

  It is a few days before Roz manages to see Suleyman again. First is the trip to Djabal. The logistics of this are nontrivial. Going by road would take at least two days, so Roz asks Charles to look into flight options. “No problem,” he says, looking briefly crafty. When he calls her out of the office several hours later, there is a tsubame neatly parked on the sandy ground of the compound.

  “Is that…” She was expecting him to scramble a passing Information crow for them.

  “Yep!” Charles answers. “I took the white streamers off.”

  “You took the—no one’s used it since?”

  “No one. The upside is, there was absolutely no conflict with us borrowing it. Hell, we could probably keep it here for contingencies.”

  “Let’s try not to get any more entangled with local government assets than we have to,” Roz says, walking slowly around the vehicle. It gleams. She sighs. “I suppose you checked the valve?”

  “Personally,” Charles says. “I installed the anti-remote patch, too.”

  “What about a general diagnostic?” The assassin could have used different approaches on different tsubames.

  “Not a single irregularity.”

  “Did you have your friendly neighborhood mechanic handle it?”

  “I did it personally, with the auto-assist.”

  “All right,” Roz says, resigning herself to the lack of rational excuses. “Let’s go.”

  Traveling by tsubame is not nearly as comfortable as flying in a crow, and Roz’s legs are stiff by the time she clambers out of the vehicle in front of the Djabal centenal hall three hours later, but at least they made it in one piece. And at least it had climate control. After she steps out of that cool, cramped bubble, the sun feels even more aggressive, the heat more sweltering.

  Inside the centenal hall is not much better. They arrived eighteen minutes early for the meeting that Charles arranged with the Djabal council of sheikhs, but fortunately they are able to go in almost
ten minutes early, because in the stifling waiting room, Roz feels like she’s melting. The conference room is only slightly better: there’s a fan, augmented by a complicated breeze-amplifying vent system cut high into the wall. All in all, the hall is a more modern building than the one in Kas, cast in cleancrete in graceful lines; built with Information funds, Roz notes. The centenal divisions probably made Djabal more politically important than it had been.

  The council of sheikhs is ever so slightly more modern too, one toubed woman staring impassively back at them at the end of the line of men in white jellabiyas. On the other hand, they are all old. As Charles introduces the Information mission, Roz realizes she was scanning the table for Suleyman or at least his equivalent. Instead, all the faces are worn and—is she reading this right?—scared. Or at least nervous. Roz sharpens up.

  “Yes, indeed, we met with the President before his unfortunate accident.” The leader of the council, and governor of the centenal, is an elderly man with a narrow, pendulous face and a white beard. “It was largely a routine meeting. We updated him on centenal business, talked through various infrastructure projects. When he realized he was late for the meeting with your team, he rushed out as quickly as he could.”

  “We understand he was normally quite punctual,” Charles says.

  “Yes, yes, generally,” agrees the council leader. “My impression was that he had forgotten or mistaken the time of your arrival.”

  “Was there anything at all unusual about the meeting or his behavior?” Roz asks.

  The council leader assumes an expression of exceeding blandness. “None, really, nothing at all.”

  “Are there records of the meeting?”

  “Why, yes, of course.” The aged sheikh gestures and the woman leans forward—Oh, fuck, Roz thinks, they still use her as a secretary?—and passes Roz a few sheets of paper. Roz stares at them.