Null States

by Malka Older

  Mishima pings emergency services herself. If this man doesn’t need it yet, he will by the time she’s through with him. And she wants him alive. She finds a limping rhythm, moving away from the dancers because she doesn’t want them caught in the melee. Mishima catches the sound of sirens in the distance, but traffic is slowing to a halt and the thug is already darting through the street. Mishima readies herself but sees the indigo blue of an InfoSec uniform moments before the thug goes down, taken to the ground by a flying tackle.

  The indigo figures converge, at least five or six of them. She sighs, and sags against the fence, keeping her eyes open for propriety’s sake. How did they get here so fast?

  “Ma’am?”

  Mishima rouses herself to see a vaguely familiar face bending over her.

  “Ma’am? Are you all right?”

  It’s the younger of the ballroom dance teachers, she realizes. Mishima straightens. “I’m fine,” she says, dredging up a smile. She tastes blood and quickly closes her lips. “You should … Thank you, but you should probably step away in case…” In case there are any more.

  But by then, the InfoSec team has reached her, and she gratefully hands over bystander security to them.

  CHAPTER 40

  Maryam flies out to Shida Kartli herself. “You’re giving me a taste for the field, habibti,” she tells Roz when she greets her with bisous. They both know she’s there in case their digital communications are being hacked. With a conspiracy this tech-intensive, she can’t discount the risk that someone on her team was involved.

  They hole up in a pleasant café in the old section of Gori, golden stone walls and a dusting of the season’s first snow. Lel is being held for intensive questioning by the InfoSec team, but Roz wanted to debrief away from the Roma centenal anyway, to get distance from anyone else there who might be implicated. She and Maryam get their coffees and talk through the problem in the half-sentences of a long working friendship.

  “Is it specific intel or…”

  “Maybe something broader, but that would mean…”

  “I’ve confirmed the ToujoursTchad situation; it’s very…”

  “Do you think it’s limited to new centenals?”

  “It could be a starting point for…”

  “Or just more noticeable from our side.”

  Roz leans back. “We have to assume that it’s not just the centenals where assassinations have happened.”

  Maryam is already nodding. “Those are the places where something went wrong.”

  “Like in DarFur. Let’s say Al-Jabali was shaken by the election blackout, agrees to this mess…”

  “And then micro-democracy works out okay for him, Information is more supportive than he expects…”

  “Even without that.” Roz feels a pang of guilt. “He hears that there’s a team coming to do some audit that he doesn’t really understand. He panics.”

  “Or he has second thoughts. Doubts. He starts to push back.”

  “Now they know the Information team is coming,” Roz counters. “And he’s vulnerable.”

  They fall silent, remembering the tsubame explosion.

  “So…”

  “So.”

  “We have some data to sort through.”

  “A lot of data to sort through.” Every centenal on earth is under suspicion.

  They have their heads together, refining search criteria and trigger points, when a news alert flashes across Maryam’s vision. “What the…” She flicks the accompanying vid up into a projection between them—discreet enough to be blocked by their bodies from the few other people in the café—and together they watch Mishima perform some ridiculous kung fu, apparently with a blade strapped to her foot.

  “What—When is that?” Roz asks. She scrambles to pull it up on her own Information.

  “Six minutes ago,” Maryam says. “This celebrity news compiler had a trace on her. They picked up live as it was happening and have been running vid nonstop ever since.”

  “Did anyone get some help out to her?” Roz asks, realizing she’s on her feet herself, seven thousand kilometers away.

  “Local InfoSec is on it,” Maryam says, distracted. She zooms in on the attacker. “Do you think he could be—”

  “Not the ones we missed here,” Roz says. “Doesn’t match the description. But maybe an accomplice?” She jumps: an urgent call from Mishima herself. “Are you all right? We were just watching—”

  “Watching? Did they get it up on the compilers already?”

  “Um…” Roz meets Maryam’s eyes. They can both see Mishima’s face through the vid connection, but the projection below them is playing live, showing Mishima standing barefoot on a swath of grass, her arm in a makeshift splint, an InfoSec team in the background and a small crowd of bystanders observing from a respectful distance. She has no idea the world is following her every move. “Yeah, they’ve got it. I’m here with Maryam; we were just talking about…”

  “Right.” Mishima snaps back to the problem at hand. “Look, I’m almost sure these assassinations are coming from within Information. I just wrote to Nejime, but you have to follow up with her, make sure they put a lock on everyone who worked with these centenals during the transition.”

  “On it.” Roz nods to Maryam, who is already opening comms. “Shouldn’t you be in hospital?”

  “The helmet caught most of it, I think. But yeah, I’m going; I just want to make sure everything’s taken care of here.”

  * * *

  By the time Mishima has finished the debrief with the InfoSec team (“No, no, let’s get it over with now”) and cleared admittance and triage at the hospital, Ken has arrived, and they’re able to go into the doctor’s office together.

  “I see you refused nanobots for your arm,” the doctor notes, blinking through the file with a moue. “We believe they’re safe, but I can understand your concern, given the pregnancy. Well, that means a splint for a few weeks. And I suppose you probably won’t want THC, either?” In addition to Free2B’s generally pro-weed stance, they have poor relations with most pharmaceutical companies, and other types of pain reliever are expensive. “Is the pain level manageable?”

  “Sure, no problem. The baby’s fine?” Mishima has already run her internal diagnostics five times, but she wants to hear it from an expert.

  “The ‘baby’ is barely visible without a microscope at this stage, and relatively resilient. I see no impact, physical, chemical, or emotional,” the doctor says, blinking through the scans one more time. “You didn’t take any injuries directly to your torso, and you seem to have avoided any stress spikes throughout the encounter.”

  For a brief moment, Mishima feels like the consummate badass she is.

  “Of course, part of the reason for that may be your high baseline stress level,” the doctor adds. “You should try to relax as much as possible. For the baby.”

  Back to reality. Through her grimace, Mishima notices Ken’s fingers twitching minutely by his side. A message pops up in the corner of her vision:

  Nobody’s perfect.

  Much as she would like to believe she can be the one exception to that rule, Mishima has to smile, and that, she supposes, helps her relax. For the baby.

  CHAPTER 41

  Mishima wakes late and sore the next morning, stiff from sleeping in a position that won’t dislodge her splint, a dull ache in her arm beneath it. Her neck is sore, her hands are bruised, and when she leans her weight gradually on her feet, a spurt of fire shoots up from the edge of her left foot where the nail was ripped out of her little toe in one of the skating maneuvers. At least—she checks again before hobbling to the bathroom—the baby is still there, still as okay as a barely detectable clump of cells can be said to be. Even after running the diagnostic, Mishima lets out a relieved sigh when she pees without blood. Maybe, and she hates to admit this feeling even to herself, but maybe it’s for the best that she is now the world’s most recognizable spy.

  Nejime calls before Ken
has woken up from his jet-lagged sleep. Mishima is sitting alone at her workspace, trawling the news compilers idly with a mute on for her own image, when she gets the message to meet her at the Saigon Hub. If Nejime has taken the trouble to come out here in person, it’s probably important.

  * * *

  Roz and Maryam spend another day in Shida Kartli, sitting in on Barsali’s interrogations and talking to Lel again, but both are eager to get back to Doha. With the K-stan negotiations wrapped up, Roz is able to arrange a handover quickly, and they fly back to Doha together, but Roz stays only long enough to unpack and repack before catching a complicated series of last-minute flights to Kas.

  The first thing she sees coming off the plane, after the dusty horizon, is Amran’s wide smile. Can she really be that happy to see her? Before she can guess at the answer, her gaze moves on, over Amran’s shoulder, and meets Suleyman’s. His smile is much smaller, a subtle curve of the lips, but—is it just her or can everyone see it?—his whole face seems to be glowing with happiness, and it fills her. Even the protective screen over his right eye doesn’t dim it.

  She takes a few steps forward and yanks her eyes away from him so she can greet Amran, but they keep straying back. In the moments when she focuses on her colleague, she can almost see the conclusions forming in Amran’s head and building into a crystalline structure of hypothesized plot lines running from this point back into the past and forward with terrifying speed into the future. Roz prepares herself to maintain her equanimity in the face of censure, but when Amran’s expression finally settles, it’s into an even bigger smile, and it doesn’t falter when Roz announces she and the governor are going for coffee.

  Even though it’s been two days since it happened, Mishima’s spinning skate-kick has pride of place on the mural wall. There is a small notation far down one end on the upheaval in Gori, which Suleyman must have requested, because that’s an awfully minor and remote story to have made it in otherwise. Most of the wall is devoted to covering and explaining the results of the Pokhara negotiations, with several panels suggesting possible new structures and institutions in world government. Roz sends an image of one particularly prescient panel to Nejime before they settle down at Zeinab’s.

  Suleyman’s hand brushes hers as he serves the coffee, and Roz feels sparks go off in her belly. When he is walking her to the Information compound, where she will be staying, she finds herself tilting slightly in the deep sand, catching herself just before her fingers tangle in his. Roz spends some time with Amran and Halima and Halima’s new baby, and the stringers all stop by to greet her. Despite the heat and the weirdness of it all, it’s a pleasant afternoon. Then Suleyman comes back. They have dinner at New Waves because Roz surprised herself by missing their chicken taouk, and they laugh louder than two colleagues would. But it is not until after dinner, when he invites her back to his compound, that they are alone in any real sense.

  Roz knows she can’t stay with him, that it’s not even a question, but sitting beside him in the courtyard already feels transgressive. She is simultaneously prickling with the awareness of being alone with him and feeling exposed under the broad sky shading toward evening, only head-height brick walls hiding them from the road. The conversation trips and flags, and then he stands. “Would you?” he asks, gesturing toward one of the huts. Her body blooms as she steps after him into the relative darkness, and he takes her hand and pulls her close. “Now?” he whispers, his breath eager on her cheek. “Now,” Roz confirms, and raises her lips to his.

  * * *

  The small Saigon Hub overlooks the river. Mishima has been there once before, stopping in on a courtesy visit when she first moved here, although otherwise she tried to keep her distance. The staff part before her like water, guiding her by their evasion to the inner office where Nejime is waiting.

  “How are you feeling?”

  “You know,” Mishima says, meaning Pretty awful, but not in any way that matters.

  “You may have noticed,” Nejime starts in, “we’re carrying out a major operation, detaining anyone who might have had contact with these centenals in the run-up to transition. Malakal’s already been released, by the way. We’re convinced he wasn’t involved.”

  Mishima blinks and nods; she had entirely forgotten that he fit the criteria for suspicion. She has been avoiding the whole mess as much as she could.

  “Unfortunately,” Nejime goes on, “some of the most promising leads have disappeared.”

  Mishima nods. “They would have known. When the attack on me went wrong…”

  “That,” Nejime agrees, “and we were very close in Shida Kartli as well. The ringleaders have gone to ground.” She smiles. “We’ll find them. The concern is that this goes far deeper than five assassinations. Roz and Maryam believe that the murders were only the most obvious cases, the cases where something went wrong.”

  “They could be operating all over the map?” Mishima asks. “To what purpose?”

  “They were working on our intel networks,” Nejime says. “Diminishing them in some cases and, in others, rerouting them.”

  “Rerouting them?”

  “Diverting the intel to themselves.”

  Mishima doesn’t understand. “Sensitive intel? For blackmail? Or financial gain?”

  Nejime shakes her head. “As far as we’ve been able to ascertain, none of the data we’ve identified as missing is valuable.”

  “So what then?”

  “We imagine these are the first steps in a larger attempt to gather intel, perhaps for distribution.”

  “A shadow Information?” Mishima is fascinated by the idea.

  “Perhaps. It’s the only scenario we’ve found that matches the pattern.” Nejime gives a one-shouldered shrug. “We always thought an opposition would be a good idea,” she muses, “but not like this.”

  Mishima is off on another track. “The Heritage comms pipeline, the Inner Channel.” She remembers, too, how Nougaz asked her not to look into it. “That message from Deepal. That could have been from—”

  “The point is,” Nejime interrupts, “we’re losing control. The Heritage secession threat is one sign. This is another. We need to make a major shift. If this gets out of hand, we could lose the whole system.”

  “What kind of shift?” Mishima’s mind is running an old-school documentary montage of fascism: goosesteppers in black and white, a DPRK parade in grainy color, the barred activists of the twenties.

  Nejime throws a projection, small but beautifully animated, into the air between them. “We need to rework, or perhaps enhance, the system architecture.” Her projection represents micro-democracy as a flat layering of centenals, the governments with the most centenals only slightly taller than those with less, all of them side by side. A thin, intermittent line across the top of the structure represents the Supermajority’s extra influence. Information overlays the whole, transparent and scaffold-like. “We need something more.” Nejime twitches a finger, and another schema is lowered gracefully over the first. “What we are thinking now, and we are open to suggestions”—she nods her head at Mishima, who is wondering fiercely why they’re courting her so hard—“is a kind of council, or senate if you will.”

  “Mm,” says Mishima. The ache in her arm is biting into her concentration. She wonders how painful childbirth really is.

  “People imagine that the Supermajority has far greater powers than it actually does. Sometimes, even Supermajority holders imagine that.” A complicit smile, meant to be shared. Mishima waits. “It’s becoming clear that while actually awarding such powers to a government would risk corruption, there is a need for an entity with the power to manage oversight and ground rules.”

  “A House of Lords, as it were?” Mishima asks. It’s possible she’s still a little snappy from the fight yesterday.

  Nejime does not appreciate it. “I’ve been fighting for government rights since before you were born. It’s just not working. We need to adjust.” She pauses to sigh. “We are sti
ll debating the exact composition of this body, but it would be composed of representatives of governments—either as individuals or as blocs. That body would be balanced by specific but very limited powers entrusted to the Supermajority, and, perhaps, an observational role for null states. It would also include representatives of Information, probably in a leadership role.”

  “Information was never intended to govern,” Mishima says.

  “Another element of the system that is often forgotten or misinterpreted. A refresh will remind people exactly what it is we’re supposed to do.”

  “Where’s the accountability? You’ll be open to accusations of being undemocratic.” Mishima realizes she’s forgotten to say we but decides that’s okay. Her work status with Information has shifted so frequently over the last few years that she can’t even remember what it is right now. She’ll happily take the role of an external consultant in this conversation.

  “Ah, but these representatives will be elected.”

  “How?” Mishima asks, still suspicious. There are any number of ways to elect people. With the same number of votes cast for each of a certain number of candidates, the system—representative, direct, party-based, individual, winner-take-all, first-past-the-post, run-offs at certain levels, primaries, secondaries, tertiaries—any of these may give a different result.

  “As I said, we’re still working out the details,” Nejime pauses. “Even so, knowing what we know about campaigning for election”—a toothy grin—“we’d like to get started as soon as possible. And we’d like to present you for the position of chief Information delegate.”

  Mishima looks down at her hands, concentrates on the pain in her arm. It’s a nagging ache, not too sharp but hard to ignore. She thinks about the pinkish color of the pain, its saw-toothed shape, and when that is clear, she leans on her left foot and feels the flame in her toe, slightly dulled since the morning. Then she looks up again. “Why me?”

  “You are competent, committed, and you know the system inside and out. Also, you are now a celebrity. Your spy cover is pretty much blown, I’m afraid, but there are advantages to exposure, and one of those is electability.”