Null States

by Malka Older

  Ilya Turani was thirty and unmarried when he died, and the apartment Roz is visiting belongs to his mother and sister. When she explains who she is, they invite her in, although not without some sidelong glances that Roz doesn’t know whether to attribute to antagonism or grief. The apartment is cramped, although more due to a profusion of carpets and bric-a-brac than because of the size, and dim without artificial lighting. There is a faint smell of worry. Two printed plastic canvas bags sag in the hallway, unpacked but ready, and on the wall a projection set to energy-saver shows the latest updates from the front.

  “We would offer you tea,” his sister Patigul says, “but with the power outage…”

  “It’s fine,” Roz says. “I am so sorry to bother you again, but I wanted to ask a few questions about your brother.”

  They array their faces expectantly.

  “How did he feel about Information?”

  The mother’s eyes slide away, but Patigul answers haltingly. “He did not like Information much. To begin with. But later, before he died … I believe he was starting to feel more positively toward it.”

  Roz feels the knell of familiarity in her bones, but she still doesn’t understand. “What didn’t he like about Information?”

  Patigul shrugs. “The surveillance, the superior attitude. The attempt to control us.”

  “It took four days for you to find his body!” The accusation bursts from Ilya’s mother. “How is that possible when you know everything?”

  How, indeed? Roz has read the file; the presumption is that Ilya skirted around the edges of the feeds on his way to the unvidded alley where he collapsed. She feels a shiver, remembering the invisible consultant-assassins. She can imagine them leading or marching the young man along the edges of the streets, circling the invisible borders of the feeds. It’s a silly image, though. It’s not that hard to avoid feeds: you just have to watch them yourself to note where the coverage ends. Ilya could have easily done it alone if he had a reason to. “The investigators thought he might have been on his way to meet someone? A friend, perhaps?”

  “Not possible!” his mother cries. Roz has her eyes on the sister, but she too shakes her head.

  “Ilya was very focused,” she says. “And if he did have a girlfriend, there was no reason to hide it.”

  Roz can imagine someone saying that about her and flashes back to turning off her recorder alone in her hut with Suleyman—but there’s no point in pushing. She asks if there’s anything else they remember about the time before his death, offers her condolences again, and leaves.

  * * *

  Yes, Roz told Ken to focus on the election, but Amran has assured him that she has it under control, and he does want to find the assassin for her. He and Minzhe pore over the feed files, looking for any kind of pattern.

  Of course, it is Amran who spots it.

  “That’s odd,” she says, looking at the projected map of Kas, turquoise dots showing the locations of feed cameras.

  “What?”

  “Look how few feeds there are in this part of the market.” The market is the area of Kas where the feeds are densest, if still not anywhere approaching standard levels. “And over here, too.”

  “Is it random?” Minzhe asks.

  Amran fidgets her hands in her skirt. “I don’t know if it’s random, but it’s odd. You know I’ve been looking at the financial holdings of head of state candidates? Those areas are around Abdul Gasig’s warehouses.”

  “Could be just chance,” Ken says; the feed cameras aren’t very thick on the ground anywhere; easy enough for them to miss someone.

  Minzhe frowns. “It reminds me, though. After the assassination, Abdul Gasig kept calling the militia to check his house for intruders that never materialized.”

  “You think he was trying to point you in the wrong direction?” Ken asks. He doesn’t know who Abdul Gasig is, and is rapidly blinking to find out.

  “He was scared,” Amran says, her tone unusually declarative. “He was afraid whoever came for Al-Jabali was coming for him.”

  Minzhe leans forward and starts developing a quick filter, then expands it to all DarFur centenals. “Look,” he says, flipping through the maps on the projection. “No feeds cover the entrances to his warehouses or shops here, his business in Zalingei, or his trucking company in Djabal.”

  “There are a lot of businesses without feeds on them,” Ken objects.

  “Still,” Minzhe says. “When he has so many, it’s a pretty big coincidence.” He cross-references the top ten business owners in DarFur; all the others have at least one feed on public space near one of their businesses. Minzhe can check, if he wishes, who has entered and exited, stood and chatted, glanced at the entrance, over the past year and a half. None of them are under comprehensive surveillance, but to have no intel at all for Abdul Gasig stands out. “Worth a chat at least.”

  “Yeah,” Ken says. “Definitely.” He stands up, looks at Minzhe again, more meaningfully.

  “Oh, no,” Minzhe says, raising his hands. “I can’t leave the compound, remember? Security risk.” Ken’s glance strays toward Amran, but Minzhe cuts him off there, too. “She has to work here long-term. Abdul Gasig could become head of state. Don’t put her in that position, not when you’re here to do it instead.”

  Amran, meanwhile, is pointing at the election events timeline, which, unlike the assassination timeline, is blooming with color and notations. “Abdul Gasig has a rally in Mukjar this afternoon.” She blinks. “He and his staff are out at the landing site, you could probably still catch them.”

  “Go on,” Minzhe says encouragingly. “Remember, you have the full force of Information behind you.”

  It occurs to Ken during the walk to the landing site that Minzhe might be setting him up. You don’t live with Mishima without becoming at least a little paranoid. Or maybe it’s just incipient heatstroke. Ken has a heat-reflective hat, but it looks silly and definitely doesn’t project the full force of Information, so he left it at the office. Grumbling to himself, Ken vaults over the mural wall (you don’t live with Mishima without becoming at least a little fitter) and holds up his hand to shade his eyes as he walks toward the landing site.

  There are a few young people in sharp haircuts crowded around a tsubame. One of them is draping it with an ABDUL GASIG FOR HEAD OF STATE banner, trying to cover the label from a vehicle rental company in Kampala. The others are standing around looking important, or watching the legs in mechanic’s coveralls that protrude from under the vehicle. Ken recognizes Abdul Gasig from his file but would have picked him out easily; he is standing a little ways away in the shade of the covered platform, tapping his cane with impatience. When he sees Ken approaching him, he jumps.

  “Good morning,” Ken says, planning on a formal introduction despite the public Information beside his face.

  Abdul Gasig cuts him off. “Who are you?” he asks, stepping back and bringing up his cane like an ungainly rapier. “What do you want?”

  “We,” Ken says, with dignity and the full force of Information, “had a few questions.” The cane is trembling a little in front of him, but then, Abdul Gasig is old. With his wide mouth and his eyes hidden behind those round dark glasses, he reminds Ken of a frog. “We wanted to ask you about the Information feeds around your businesses.”

  “Is this a threat?” the sheikh asks, jabbing with the cane, and then, without waiting for an answer, turns to the group by the tsubame. “Never mind!” he yells. “Pack it up; we’re not going. Younis! Call Mukjar to cancel my appearance. They can hold the rally without me.”

  Not entirely displeased with the effect he’s had, Ken pushes ahead. “Can we talk here?”

  Abdul Gasig turns back to him, cane still raised and shaking more now. “I won’t tolerate threats, you understand? I won’t have it!”

  “There is no threat, sir,” Ken says as soothingly as he can. “We just wanted to talk about the feeds.”

  Abdul Gasig leans in, not very close because ever
yone else is out of earshot, but still to an unpleasant proximity. “Are you really from Information?” he hisses. “The real Information?”

  Ken draws himself up. “Just because I’m a temporary consultant doesn’t mean I am not part of the official organization,” he starts, but again Abdul Gasig doesn’t let him finish.

  “Are you trying to sabotage my candidacy?” the sheikh asks, voice tilting upward now toward outrage.

  “Not at all,” Ken says, “we just—”

  “I don’t know anything about the feeds,” he says. “Not my job, not my problem. But if you try to use this against me, you’ll be sorry!” With a final shake of the stick, he scurries over to his waiting entourage and heads toward town, leaving Ken and the mechanic standing there looking after them. Without taking his eyes off them, Ken calls back into the office.

  “I think this is worth more investigation.”

  * * *

  If Mishima had known she would be tied to a chair less than twenty-four hours after starting to make noise, she would have waited a little longer.

  It is Chu Lifen who turns on her, setting up a private booth, enclosed in projections for them to watch a vid. Mishima has a flicker of warning as Chu Lifen moves behind her, but fighting her off with any efficiency would destroy her cover. Before she can change her mind, Lifen has strung her hands together and slapped a gag on. She doesn’t seem angry or resentful, just pushes Mishima down into a chair, elasties her ankles and elbows to it, and slips out of the booth.

  Her politeness seems like a good sign to Mishima, as does the fact that she’s at work and not in a dark alley or her tiny apartment, but as the hours go on, she begins to doubt. The vids that play on a loop on the partitions don’t help: Mishima can close her eyes, but the sound of a knife slicing across the skin of a stretched throat is hard to disassociate from the image once it has been seen. If Mishima could get up, she could walk right through the projections that hide her from the colleagues presumably hard at work all around her, but no one is going to barge in; the convention of projections as walls is so accepted as to be unbreakable. And so she waits, wondering if the studio after-hours is really any better than a dark alley.

  * * *

  When Roz calculates her route back from the Turanis’ apartment building, she sees that the city has decided to shut off the maglev to conserve energy, and she turns toward the guesthouse on foot. Information tells her that a squad of LesPros accompanied by local electricians and engineers is en route to the site of the power break, but the repairs are nontrivial, requiring significant hardware, and there is no estimate yet for when power will be back up. It doesn’t help that there are few feeds in that area, a rural tract near the border with Kazakhstan.

  Roz skirts around an outdoor game of pool and buys a skewer of lamb from a charcoal brazier beside it. People imagine a sharp border between the world of Information—dazzling, rational, replete—and the supposedly bereft null states, but she can feel absences pushing in toward them, giant blank spaces in the countryside fingering into smaller fragments in the cities, all those slivers of unwatched space around the feeds. She finishes her meat and tosses the bamboo skewer into a kindling collection point for the poor before calling Maryam.

  Her friend answers right away. “Tough break with the power cut.”

  “Yeah,” Roz answers, absently checking their electricity reserves. Information has, as usual, stored more than anyone would have expected to need, so they’ll be fine for four days at current usage levels. The city might be in trouble in a day or two. “Hey, did you ever check whether the feeds in ToujoursTchad matched their agreement?”

  “I did! And they are in fact short. Funny regional trend, that. I wonder who came up with the idea. Considering how much they say they hate each other, it’s interesting how fast a local innovation like that can spread.”

  “Can you check the centenal I’m in now?” Roz is tired and headachy, and Maryam already has code written to do this.

  There is a brief pause as she runs it. “Yes, low,” she says. “Not as dramatically as the others, only by 14.2 percent.”

  “Still significant,” Roz says, rubbing her forehead. But maybe not enough by itself. “Have you heard anything about data … not showing up? Data we should have disappearing?” She feels silly even saying it, but Maryam, a techie who’s unsurprised by any kind of bug in the system, takes it seriously.

  “I haven’t heard anything about that, and I’m not sure how it would work, but I can try to figure out some diagnostics.” She’s frowning, already thinking through the problem.

  “Is there any simple way to search for other centenals with a feed gap?” Roz asks. Maybe that will be quicker.

  “No audits have been held on the new centenals yet this cycle,” Maryam says. “I’d have to set my program to run globally.”

  “Do that,” Roz says. “And do it quietly.”

  “You still think someone within Information is involved?”

  Probably, but that’s not what’s worrying her. “I think they’re coming after us.”

  CHAPTER 35

  When she hears footsteps, Mishima opens her eyes in time to see one last close-up of a twisted rope pulling taut on some unseen weight, and then the four screens around her go indigo blank. The dome above is dark, and except for the approaching footsteps, the hall is quiet. It’s late, late enough to be after-hours even for these workaholics.

  A man walks through the projection to her left, at a nicely calibrated angle that tickles her peripheral vision and forces her to turn her head if she wants to see him well. She does. Middle-aged, coiffed, reasonably fit, hair perfectly black—almost certainly a modification. He’s wearing an old-fashioned suit, even to the tie. It’s supposed to harken back to a time when China was strong and expanding, but Mishima has always thought it one of the ugliest eras in men’s fashion. She doesn’t recognize him, which means he’s not the premier, vice-premier, not the minister of interior, nor the minister of defense. He has the unmistakable smell of staid bureaucratic government, and he’s meant to look powerful.

  “I certainly hope you’re empowered to negotiate,” she says before he stops walking.

  There’s no laugh, not even a twitch, although Mishima thought it came out pretty well, especially considering she’s thirsty, hungry, and had to piss herself a few hours ago.

  He waits long enough for her to wonder if he’ll answer. “I suppose you are?” He speaks Chinese with an affected burr to recall the previous capital, Beijing, now a micro-democratic patchwork.

  “I can show you my diplomatic credentials when you untie me.” In point of fact, Mishima could reveal the endorsement—temporarily tattooed on her upper arm with an iridescent ink that appears only under a precise frequency of ultraviolet light—without being released, but no need for him to know that.

  “An ambassador?” he says, allowing surprise—or skepticism—into his tone. “Most ambassadors announce themselves.”

  “Would you have accepted an ambassador from Information at this time?”

  He blinks: he didn’t expect her to be from Information. “Perhaps,” he says, but it’s unconvincing. China does not have diplomatic ties with Information, although messages are sometimes passed through 1China.

  “We preferred to be as discreet as possible,” Mishima offers, thinking it will show common interest.

  Instead, his face tightens. “So, it’s blackmail? What have you found?”

  Mishima shakes her head. “No blackmail. Just a suggestion.”

  “Go on.”

  She inhales. This is where she needs to use what she’s learned: the hints, slants, nuances in all the narratives she’s seen over the past week that tell her what China wants. She lets her eyes unfocus as she builds the story. “China is not so different from Information. A diverse population, experience with autonomous regions”—in the past, and with varying degrees of actual autonomy, but no need to get into that. “Great military power, tremendous access to data.” Sh
e doesn’t think he’s swelling, but he is listening. “We are the ultimate judges and administrators, arbiters and governors, within our own territories.” Pause. “What both Information and China need is greater influence beyond their frontiers. Not the kind of influence that comes from military expansion, with an unending and costly burden of maintenance, but the kind that derives from engagement and authority in international events.” Wind it up before he starts getting antsy. “The war on your western border is out of hand.” She catches a slight shift at that, a loosening; he would far rather talk about Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan than about China. “Information is looking for a partner to help end it.”

  “What are you asking?”

  “That you go in intending to end the conflict, not exacerbate it. A respect for the rights and safety of all noncombatants but especially those in the micro-democratic centenals between you and the K-stans.”

  She lets him think about it. The opportunity here should be obvious to him: neither China nor Information can broker this alone.

  “Information will not use this opportunity to expand its jurisdiction?” he asks.

  “We cannot tell people not to switch to micro-democracy if they want to. But we will not campaign for it in these areas at this time. You are likewise expected not to use the negotiations to expand your borders.”

  There is another pause. Mishima thinks about the longer-term aspect of the deal, but she prefers to leave that until later. He seems to see the sense in her proposal. At last he moves, stepping toward her, closer, and leaning over her until she can see the loose skin under his chin, the thickened skin around his eyes. Definitely modified his hair to black, she thinks. But he’s old enough to have real power.

  He releases the catch on her restraints. “I’d like to see your credentials now, I think. And then, assuming everything is in order, we can discuss this somewhere more comfortable.”