Null States

by Malka Older

  * * *

  Ken wakes slowly, and runs his insteps back and forth on the nano-smoothed sheets for the pleasure of it before he opens his eyes. Mishima is lying next to him in bed, eyes open but blank in the dimness. There are no projections playing on them, and no light for her to read by. Ken stares at her, enjoying the rare chance to watch her unawares, until he catches the tiny whisper of sound from her ear amp.

  He smiles, and she turns to look at him. “Listening in on a meeting I’m recording,” she says, muting one ear. “Sleep well?”

  Ken stretches and moans in response. “So well. What time is it?”

  “Just before midnight. You’ve barely slept an hour.” She clicks the volume down a couple of notches on her ear amp. “Did I wake you?”

  “Nah.” Ken stretches again. “My subconscious probably didn’t want me to miss out on the luxuriousness of this bed.” Also he’s happy, and nervous, and excited, and content. But nervous.

  Mishima puts her hand on his chest. “You should go back to slee–” She freezes mid-sentence, her face electrified by shock. With a quick wiggle of her fingers, she switches the audio to exterior speakers—a sudden outrush of jangling static—and backs up ten seconds.

  “—and just because they say that,” a man’s voice mutters urgently over the clink of silverware and glasses, “doesn’t mea—” Then a cacophony, a bang a crash a shatter, the rushing sound of a burst of flame or sudden wind, and the sound chops into static.

  “What the—” Ken finds he is sitting up in bed. He opens a news compiler projection just a fraction later than Mishima.

  “Why, remind me again, why did I try to reduce my news alerts?” Mishima asks between her teeth. Ken assumes it’s rhetorical, as the sound comes up on the compiler she’s using. Ken mutes his and sets it to text, and for a second, they are leaning shoulder to shoulder on the bed, watching the news:

  “A bomb has detonated in a café in a RépubliqueLéman centenal of Geneva—”

  Just like that, Mishima is out of the bed and pulling on clothes, dark pants and shirt, and a thick quilted jacket.

  “I have to go,” she says. “Our contact was at that café. They can’t have found out about him, right?”

  “It wouldn’t make any sense,” Ken answers, on automatic, and she nods with relief.

  “It wouldn’t. But then who—” And she stops, bent over to stick her heavy knife in her boot, struck with horror for the second time in five minutes. “Ken,” she whispers. “I went by there before I met you. I set recorders there. I was sneaking around.” She was careful, but probably not careful enough for a horde of amateur sleuths and news-compiler wannabes. “Everyone will be trying to figure out who set the bomb; they’ll be scrutinizing every feed from that café from the last 24 hours. If they identify me, my cover is blown.” And she’s back in motion, wrapping a dark scarf around her neck, stuffing her hair under a knit hat. The perpetrator has to be found before someone points a finger at the mysterious woman who slid her hand under several of the tables some five hours before the explosion.

  Ken is already at work on his tablet. “I’ll go through the vids and let you know what I find.” As usual, he catches himself just in time before saying “Be careful.”

  CHAPTER 17

  Mishima jogs through the quiet streets of Geneva. She’s far enough away from the café that there is no overt sign of disturbance except, there, the sound of sirens faint on the breeze. She slows to a walk and brings up her maps. There’s not much point in going to the scene of the violence: emergency services and security must already be there, it’s unlikely she’ll find any clues that they won’t, and she won’t have any specialized access on-site unless she identifies herself as Information, which would blow her cover with Heritage.

  A better bet is to head in the general direction and try to figure out where the assailant has gone. The bomber could have left the device hours ago, so the trail may be cold, but she examines the centenals around the strike in case it was an on-site attack. Presumably, the perp will want to leave RépubliqueLéman as quickly as possible; it’s never a good idea to stay in a jurisdiction where you’ve committed a violent crime. Mishima slaps on an extradition treaty filter and sees only one of the contiguous centenals has a government that won’t extradite to RépubliqueLéman: RepublicaHelvetiorum, to the east. The border isn’t far from the café. She turns and heads in that direction, running again. If the bomber is holed up somewhere in that centenal, she might get back to bed before dawn.

  * * *

  It isn’t until late morning that Roz has the breathing space to identify the trickle of unease she’s been feeling all day. At this point in the day, she’s able to dismiss the warmth of her feelings for the governor: a crush, nothing more. It helps that he’s hopelessly unattainable. Roz hasn’t looked beyond his public Information, which is mute on his relationship status, but it feels safe to assume he’s married, possibly to more than one woman. Besides, he’s so firmly rooted in this world completely unlike her own that anything serious would be impossible.

  No, what’s bothering her is the suggestion that Suleyman might be in danger. Roz was not impressed with his glib dismissal. It’s not just her libido making that thought so disturbing: if the centenal is teetering after one assassination, another would destabilize it. Is that what the attacks are aiming for?

  Nothing they’ve learned here has answered that question, and so Roz opens up the files Mishima sent about the other deaths she thought were similar. Roz was skeptical of the link when Mishima brought it up: Al-Jabali’s assassination seemed linked to local or at most regional politics. Reading through the files, though, she has to admit that the similarities are unsettling.

  While none of the deaths were ruled as murder, none of them could be conclusively proved to be natural causes. The drowning is the most suspicious: the victim was not a swimmer, no one knew what she would have been doing on the ocean, and there was no record of her boarding a boat of any kind. She disappeared right before an important centenal consortium meeting she had been working toward for months. The car accident in Sri Lanka occurred on a notorious stretch of curving mountain road, but one that the teetotaling victim knew well. The heart attack suffered by the Uyghur activist in Xinjiang was definitely a heart attack, but the victim was young with no previous or family history of heart problems, and any number of drugs could have caused it and disappeared before he was found four days later. Individually, none of the incidents raises flags; taken together, they start to feel eerie.

  Roz finds she is even more convinced by the backgrounds of the different governments. These are tiny governments—DarFur, with thirty centenals, is the largest—and Roz has only the faintest recollection of their existence. Reading the details, though, Roz starts to transpose. She sees Al-Jabali in every assassinated leader, all of them charismatic, energetic, working tirelessly for a marginalized group that has never, until now, gotten a fair shot. Roz, whose family has had multiple tribal and geographic affiliations for at least three generations, finds the idea of a people hopelessly outdated—aren’t we all people?—but reading through these, she can feel the pounding appeal for justice. More importantly, she begins to understand why everyone here keeps pointing to external actors. Before, she attributed it to circling the wagons or paranoia. Now, she’s starting to give it credence.

  * * *

  Ken is ten minutes behind everyone else searching for the bomber, but he has a couple of advantages.

  1) Mishima has shared with him some of her lower-level access to Information. Not enough to see internal or classified documents, but enough to have an easier time opening every feed there is with a view of that café.

  2) He knows he can ignore the mysterious woman who loitered there briefly five hours ago.

  3) Ken has a high estimation of Mishima’s powers of observation and he doesn’t think she’d fail to notice a suspicious package, so he can set her pass-by as the outer limit and concentrate on the period between
then and when the café got busy.

  He starts with the explosion itself. With five different vids catching it from different angles, it’s not difficult to pinpoint the source. He opens a connection to Mishima using their encrypted communications code, relieved to have a reason for doing so. “Which table did you put the recorder on?”

  She’s breathing fast but easily. “I put one on every other table on the terrace, why?”

  “The explosion happened under the second table from the right.”

  “Yes,” Mishima says, and runs on.

  Ken focuses on the table and tracks back from the explosion, but the crowd of Heritage workers jostling around three tables makes it hard to see who might be reaching underneath.

  Which, now that Ken thinks of it, is another clue. If the attack is targeting this Heritage group, the bomber must have waited to place the device until the group was seated. He shifts back to the explosion again and works back from there with a larger visual frame and—

  “Someone running from the café,” Ken blurts, as soon as he sees it.

  “Which way?”

  “West. Hang on, I’m checking the next feeds … Got it! Dark coat and trousers, a cap with a brim. Continuing west—turning north—turning east. They doubled back. Heading toward the border with the RepublicaHelvetiorum centenal at a point north-north-east of the café.”

  “Already headed that way. Ref me the feeds you’re looking at and I’ll do the tracking. Stay on the compilers and see what they’re saying.”

  Mishima opens the feed Ken has sent her and sees the dark figure running toward its limit. She sets a parameter to open the next contiguous feed on a blink, and has the satisfaction of watching the person run into the field of view as expected. The suspect is already in the RepublicaHelvetiorum centenal and continuing east. Mishima checks on the map to see if she can find a faster route to the suspect to shave off some more time, but the path she’s following is the most direct.

  The person fleeing the café is still running, but not very fast, and Mishima is catching up. She recognizes the streets she is speeding down from the feeds she was watching—a dramatic red door here, a distinctive curve there. The figure on the feeds isn’t hesitating at corners or crossroads and, after the initial misdirect out of the café, has kept on an almost straight trajectory. The route was probably planned in advance, which means that this person must have some plan for evading the feeds as well: a safe house or some other kind of cover. Mishima runs faster.

  “Nothing but speculation yet on who did it,” Ken reports. “Most of the compilers are still focused on … impacts.” He finds himself unwilling to say casualties.

  The suspect disappears off the edge of the feed. Mishima blinks it away and looks for the next one, but nothing comes up. She blinks again, still running along the last known trajectory, and brings up the map, but even as she does, she understands why there are no more cameras. In front of her she sees the dark wall of pines that marks the end of the RepublicaHelvetiorum centenal, and of micro-democratic territory, and the beginning of the sovereign nation of Switzerland.

  * * *

  When the militia interview with Fatima finally happens, Minzhe almost misses it. He’s out in front of the barracks, kicking a soccer ball around with Jibrail and Khaled and a couple of the other guys when Yusuf comes running down from the barracks and asks Jibrail to come see the commander. Yusuf tags in for him and the game doesn’t stop, but Minzhe is curious. The commander rarely asks for anyone, and he notices the other guys are distracted, looking up at the barracks as he knees a shot through their erratic goalposts of the camel and its tree.

  “Nice one,” Mohamed says, and goes after the ball. Minzhe takes two steps toward the market, so they won’t see what he’s doing, and opens his hack into the militia’s official vid recorder. Fake-coughing to cover his face, he sets it to eye-level in his non-dominant eye at 75% transparency to reduce reflection and flashes, volume turned down low in his ear, and turns back to the game.

  At first, there is nothing to distract him from the football: the recorder is off. But in the midst of the next scuffle, clouds of fine sand following their desperate kicking after the ball, Commander Hamid’s dry, flat voice speaks in his ear without so much as a crackle of static preamble. “Remote interview with candidate for the presidency, Fatima Adam Abdallah. Commander Hamid Mohamed, interviewer.” Minzhe backs off from the game, coughing again and waving his hands as though defeated by the dust, as the commander drones through date, location, and context. He climbs the slope to where AbdelKadir is watching the football and occasionally glancing behind him into the shaded interior of the barracks.

  “Hey,” Minzhe says, and fidgets. He’s pretty close to AbdelKadir, but he doesn’t want to give away the hack. “Uh, the commander just called Jibrail up; is it for the thing?”

  AbdelKadir stares at him a little too long before he answers. “The interview? Yeah, they finally got her to agree to do it, as long as it was remote so it wouldn’t look like she was under suspicion.”

  “He doesn’t want me in there,” Minzhe says, dropping to a squat next to AbdelKadir’s chair so he can look him in the eye. “It’s fine; I understand that. But you have to tell the commander he can’t conduct the interview himself.”

  AbdelKadir laughs. “You want me to tell the commander that? I thought you were the one telling him to do this in the first place.”

  “Yeah, but that was before the commander announced he was running! He can’t interview her now; it will look…”

  AbdelKadir glances back at the barracks again. “He knows. That’s why he called Jibrail.”

  Minzhe lets out his breath, settles to the ground next to AbdelKadir’s chair. “Good,” he says, and proceeds to pretend to watch the football while he listens to the recorder.

  He can’t help but worry that AbdelKadir is either wrong or misinformed, and so he’s relieved when he hears the commander identify Jibrail as the primary interviewer. Jibrail sounds nervous as he starts in with the standard questions, asking Fatima where she was when the tsubame exploded and how she heard about it. He’s one of the younger militia soldiers, only twenty-three, and Minzhe has to wonder why he was picked for this.

  Fatima, on the other hand, sounds strong but tense, her face tight-lipped in the projection as though she’s restraining some powerful emotion: Anger? Frustration? Annoyance with having to relate this painful story again?

  There’s no real way to come at it subtly after all this time, but Jibrail tries, asking in that too-high voice about Fatima’s familiarity with tsubames and when she decided to run for head of state. Minzhe, leaning back into the slope behind him, wonders if the commander is feeding him the questions. He watches as Khaled scores a goal and Mohamed disputes it. AbdelKadir’s fingers, hanging loosely off the arm of his chair, are centimeters from Minzhe’s knee, and he examines that distance clinically, wondering about its rationale.

  “You killed my father!” Jibrail says, shaky. Minzhe jerks. AbdelKadir glances at him, and Minzhe slaps his ankle as though killing a mosquito. He focuses on the spot until he feels AbdelKadir look away again. Unfortunately, somewhere in that sequence, AbdelKadir readjusted his hands to his lap.

  “I did not kill them!” Fatima is saying with cold fury. “I did not want to kill my husband. I still don’t even understand how it was done! But I am sure it was Information that killed him. Talk to them!”

  Minzhe is blinking up Information, wondering how he could possibly have missed that Jibrail is Al-Jabali’s son, and blinks again in confusion when a different name comes up. Embarrassingly, it takes another two links for him to understand: Jibrail’s father was Al-Jabali’s bodyguard, and a militia soldier in his own right, killed with his charge in the explosion. Minzhe sighs.

  “Everything okay?” AbdelKadir asks.

  “Fine,” Minzhe says shortly.

  Fatima is still talking. “They come here; they spy on us. They decide who they want in charge, and then they control
them. And if they can’t be controlled”—she mimes a flamethrower’s gush. “That’s why it happened while they were here. I don’t know if the whole organization killed him and those people are here to clean up, or if there is some division within them. Maybe they are spying on themselves and my husband was killed because of it. But you can be sure it was them.”

  “You really think so?” Jibrail asks, sounding younger than ever. “Why would Information kill him, though? Was he standing up to them?” He says it with a sort of admiration.

  “I don’t know; ask them!” Fatima hisses.

  Minzhe hears a buzzing, probably as much as the recorder can pick up of the commander yelling into Jibrail’s earpiece. “Do you have any evidence?” Jibrail squeaks.

  “How could I have evidence?” Fatima spreads her palms. “I did not see the explosion, I have no experience with these machines, the body…” She breaks off into hoarse sobs and shuts off her vid.

  Jibrail sputters his closing out as quickly as he can. “Thank you for speaking with us. We’ll be in touch.” And the recording is closed.

  Minzhe blinks his vision clear and looks down at the soldiers scuffling and playing in the sand below him. He starts composing a careful message to Roz.

  CHAPTER 18

  Mishima steps into the shadow of the close-planted pines and lets her eyes make the adjustment from the well-lit streets of Geneva. If the bomber noticed her pursuit, he or she could be waiting under these trees to ambush her.

  There’s another reason to be cautious. Being a spy anywhere is risky, and Information will disavow any knowledge of her if it becomes politically expedient, but they have enough power that such a circumstance is unlikely. The weight of their authority provides her some protection anywhere in micro-democratic territory. In the null state on the other side of this line, she’ll be entirely on her own, and from what she’s heard, the Swiss are not welcoming to migrants who cross the border without permission.