by Malka Older
“Yes, she’s impressive, isn’t she?” Taskeen pats the computer monitor fondly. “And most people don’t understand how impressed they should be. I’ve souped her up quite a bit. She can do a lot of what your personal handhelds can do, although of course a lot slower.”
Maryam, who had steeled herself to scrupulously avoid all mention of modern technology that was extraneous to her mission, coughs. “You, ah, keep up with the latest innovations?”
“I’m not in anachronism prison, you know,” Taskeen says. “The therapy of being here is wonderful. I feel very young, and I’m grateful for it. But keeping my mind active is just as important. I can’t keep relearning the things I learned when I was ten.”
“Claro que no,” Maryam says, automatically.
Taskeen seats herself in a wheeled chair by the computer and gestures Maryam toward a small sofa that probably already looked old in 2010. “So,” she says, tapping at the keyboard. “What did you want to talk to me about? Something related to the Information substructure, I imagine. Oh, don’t mind this,” she adds when Maryam hesitates. “I’m bringing up the translation program in case we need it. Now go ahead.” She rotates in her chair to face Maryam and folds her hands on her lap, smiling.
Maryam orders her thoughts. Fortunately she’s been using Spanish a lot lately. “I don’t know if you’re aware of this,” she begins, “but there have been some recent incidents attacking Information infrastructure.”
“What kind of attacks? Blackouts? Denial-of-service?” Taskeen is leaning forward, already gripped. Information is the enormous global bureaucracy that collects, sorts, stores, and administers all of the world’s knowledge, underpinning every modern activity; functionality outages can be devastating. The blackout during the election nearly five years ago brought global commerce and transportation screeching to a halt and almost caused several wars. But that’s not the problem that has brought Maryam thousands of miles and decades into the past.
“No,” she says, “it’s not that; it’s—” A whistle blasts through the apartment, and Maryam jumps, wondering if it’s an earthquake or monsoon alert, or a fire alarm somewhere in this building without Information uplinks.
“That’s the kettle,” Taskeen says, patting Maryam’s knee as she whisks by to the kitchen. “Nothing to worry about! I’ll be right back with the tea.”
Maryam has time to calm her heartbeat before Taskeen returns with two chipped ceramic mugs filled with milky tea. “Here you go, dear. Now, what were you telling me?”
After the respite, Maryam has to psych herself up all over again to divulge the tightly kept secret to this stranger.
“So far, the service interruptions have been minimal,” she starts carefully. “In fact, that’s what’s confusing us. There have been a number of attacks on data transfer stations, and we can’t figure out what the endgame is.”
Taskeen purses her lips and swivels her chair back and forth. “Explain.”
“In each case—there have been five so far—masked assailants break in, incapacitate the staff, disable the station, and leave, all before InfoSec can arrive. The longest they spent on-site was twenty-eight minutes, and that was in a remote area. No equipment has been taken, and the effect on the system…”
“Would be minimal,” Taskeen says. “Unless something has gone very wrong since I left, rerouting around a single station outage should be a matter of seconds.”
Maryam blushes, remembering that Taskeen wrote the protocol that has formed the basis for every product in her professional life. “At most, there were some stutters in access in areas local to the attack, and even that never lasted more than a few minutes. Getting the affected stations back online is a matter of hours.”
“So, why are they doing it?” Taskeen mused, her fingers playing idly on the keyboard in front of her. She picks up her cup, blows on it, and takes a sip. “Tell me more.”
Maryam looks up. “I can share the reports with you, but there’s very little there beyond what we’ve discussed…”
“No, I mean the rest of it.” When Maryam stares, the older woman puffs in frustration. “You’re here. If you thought this was random violence, you’d be talking to a security expert, not an outdated programmer.”
Maryam takes a careful breath. “Two years ago, there was an … issue, which raised our suspicions.” A global pattern of assassinations of centenal and government leaders unwilling to go along with the misappropriation of Information infrastructure.
“Two years ago?” Taskeen puts down her cup in surprise. “You’ve known about this for two years and you haven’t rooted them out yet?”
Maryam’s brief had been to reveal only what was necessary, but she should have known that necessary would be more than she wanted to discuss when dealing with a retired and presumably bored genius. “We apprehended one suspect, who named two midlevel Information staff as their superiors. But the apprehension of that suspect was quite public”—as part of a failed assassination attempt—“so they had warning, and they absconded before we could arrest them. The thing is—”
“Absconded?” Taskeen wrinkles her nose. “Where to?”
“Null states,” Maryam answers; outside of Information jurisdiction. “Probably Russia. The thing is, almost two hundred other staff disappeared at the same time.”
Maryam can hear the quiet hum from the computer. “That does suggest a larger plot,” Taskeen says finally. “My, my. What has upper management been doing?” Her tone sounds as though she tried to lighten the statement halfway through, and Maryam decides to ignore the criticism of her bosses.
“Most of them were Hub-based centenal support staff who, we’ve found since then, were implicated in attempts to reduce Information coverage. The details are complicated, but…”
“You think these attacks are continuing the same project.” Taskeen taps at her keys some more. “Presumably as former employees, they understand the limited impact of shutting down individual transfer stations, so they may be using them as practice for a concerted larger-scale assault.”
Maryam waits.
“Or they’re trying to use the attacks to learn something about the system.”
“That’s where you come in,” Maryam says.
Taskeen does not immediately leap into the problem the way Maryam would like her to. “So maybe not trying to reduce Information coverage so much as … take over?” She is leaning forward again. “You think they’re trying to break your monopoly?”
“It’s not a monopoly,” Maryam says, the coldness of her tone diluted by the fact that she has to search for the word monopoly in Spanish.
“There are justifications for a monopoly on a public good, you know,” Taskeen says mildly. She takes a swallow of tea. “Piggybacking on your infrastructure, that certainly makes sense, at least to start. Rebuilding all of it would be an enormous start-up cost.”
“Exactly.” Maryam tries to sound encouraging, but Taskeen isn’t done with background yet.
“Two years is a long time.”
Maryam offers a rueful chuckle. “Yes,” she says. “I’m afraid it … it took us some time to make it a priority.”
“Because you hoped you had nipped the plot in the bud.”
“Yes.” And because there were so many other things going on: internal battles over election rules and Supermajority terms and massive potentially planet-destroying infrastructure projects. And because nobody wanted to believe they’d been betrayed, and those who did believe it wanted to make sure no one else found out about it. “We still don’t know for sure that the same group is responsible for the transfer-station attacks, but we’ve seen a recent upswing in data activity in various null states, most notably in Crimea and along the Baltic coast, which is where we think the majority of the former staff fled.” She pauses, but Taskeen seems surprised by all of this, and it’s easy to think of her as a colleague. “Exformation, as some of us are calling them.”
“And I suppose the general public is taking this all c
almly? The mass exodus, the attacks, the potential rival to Information’s power?”
Maryam’s smile disappears. “It’s all public,” she says stiffly.
This time, Taskeen’s laugh doesn’t sound surprised at all. “Public but invisible.” She shakes her head. “Information needs to live by its principles. People are already too inclined to think the worst of it.”
“It’s all there,” Maryam says, her face heating. “You can read about it. If you can get on Information, I mean.”
“Mmm.” Taskeen turns back to her computer and starts tapping again. Maryam wonders if it’s possible that light touch is having some effect, triggering a recording mechanism. It seems unlikely, but she doesn’t know enough about the outdated hardware, and her skin starts to crawl with suspicion. There could be recorders in the room, or some early twenty-first-century analog. She can’t stop her fingers from feeling along the edge of her chair.
Maryam folds her hands back into her lap as Taskeen turns to her. “You’ve found nothing to indicate who carried out these attacks? Surely, you have cameras, data…” She gestures: What good is your surveillance state if you can’t use it to catch anarchist terrorists?
“They put some planning into avoiding feeds,” Maryam explains. Despite the near-ubiquity of cameras, the universal access to the feeds from those cameras makes it possible to avoid them if you work at it: you look at the image and work your way around its borders. “And they wear masks and robes over some kind of frame that hides body type and stride.” She represses a twitch; she saw the footage for the first time while preparing for this visit, and even knowing what to expect, the blank and silent countenances were terrifying. “We’ve been putting more and more resources toward looking for them, but they seem to know the system extremely well.”
“As if they had once worked within it,” Taskeen notes grimly. She claps her hands twice, and Maryam expects a projection to leap out between them, ideally one with answers about unsolved data sabotage, but the older woman rises to her feet instead. “I forgot to bring the sweets.”
While Taskeen is in the kitchen, plates clinking, Maryam quickly kneels to check under the chairs and the computer table. She straightens again, feeling like an idiot—as if the recorders would be visible!—and studies the framed pictures on the walls: Taskeen shaking hands with various dignitaries of the past half-century. She recognizes two presidents of Bangladesh, a prime minister of Nepal, the current queen of Bhutan when she was much younger, and Maryam’s former boss Nejime when she was much, much younger. Maryam turns her attention from the better-known faces to those of Taskeen Khan at various ages, looking for clues in her standardized smile. Maryam wasn’t sure about the gambit of coming here when Nejime suggested it. She’s still not sure that this kind, spry old lady who has long been her hero isn’t her enemy.
“So,” Taskeen says, coming back with a bowl of amriti and the teapot. “You brought something for me to look at?”
“Updated diagrams of the current system. Since you retired, more structures have been layered on top, and it’s not always easy to understand what’s going on at the most fundamental level. We thought you might be able to see something we’re missing that suggests what they could possibly gain from these attacks.”
It sounds ridiculous now that Maryam says it out loud, but Taskeen settles into her seat and holds out a hand. Maryam starts the motion to throw her a file via Information, remembers where she is, and searches in her bag for the small device Saleha gave her. Taskeen takes it and plugs it into the computer.
“So, what are you going to do about this when you find the culprits?” Taskeen asks as she types and clicks away at her computer.
“I’m not going to do anything about it,” Maryam says. She’s watching closely, trying to figure out how the antiquated technology works. “I’m not a policy person. I don’t make decisions, I just implement them—and only technical decisions, at that.”
Taskeen chuckles softly. “Keep telling yourself that, if it comforts you.” She hits one last key triumphantly, and the first diagram comes up. “All right, walk me through this one,” she says, her voice shifting into management mode.
* * *
Maryam avoids hotel restaurants on the principle that captive audiences lead to decreased quality and value, but after pushing through the crowd that afternoon she has neither the energy nor the desire to go back out on the street. She finds a seat at the bar—a design feature, not a place for selling alcohol, as this centenal teetotals—and peruses the menu, annotated by Information with reviews and ingredient source data.
She has finished her kebab—middling—and is working her way through a salty lassi that’s a little too salty when a man slides himself into the seat next to her. He is skinny and has a wide eager grin as he sits sideways on his chair to face her.
“Hello, miss,” he says. “Where are you from?”
Maryam frowns at her lassi. Her public Information is projected beside her face for all to see. Working for Information is usually enough to discourage unwanted attention, but due to the clandestine nature of this assignment, she has muted that fact. The letters of her name shimmer with a subtle iridescence, but she wouldn’t expect a straight man who tries to pick up women in hotel restaurants to catch that marker of queerness. She’s surprised he didn’t pick up on the font, which is a standard signal of being in a relationship. Maybe that’s more geographically limited than she thought. Either way, she doesn’t feel like dealing with him. She takes a last sip of her lassi and taps across the bits to pay for it.
“Miss, so sorry, I don’t want to bother you.” Against her better judgment, she glances at him: still smiling, but now modulated with apology. “So sorry, but you look like you’re not from around here, and maybe this can help.” He snaps, and an image appears. It looks like a travel guide, a lovely glossy photograph of a packed street in Dhaka, with tons of lines and arrows annotating it. Text flies up above it, briefly in Bengali before rearranging into Arabic under the influence of Maryam’s visual translator and accompanied by a sonorous male voice: “Feeling out of place? Need to know more about the context around you? We can help!”
How odd. Maryam taps her fingertips against her thigh under the counter, composing some quick lines of code. “Why would I buy your travel guide,” she asks, “when I can have as many as I want for free?” She snaps her fingers, imitating him, and four images jump into the air between them, the portals for Dhaka travel guides from four different Information compilers.
The guy laughs in admiration. “Ha! That’s very good!” But Maryam is frowning at the image he called up, still hanging in the air between them. It looks uncomfortably like the street she was stuck in earlier that morning. She searches for herself in the crowd, but it is too dense to be certain before he flips it off. “You don’t have to buy. This is a free sample, as a gesture of goodwill for a stranger in Dhaka. If you find it useful, maybe you will buy in another place. And you will find it useful. This guide is special. Ask your guides for the best chotpoti in the area, or what gangs roam the streets these days, or what this means in a Tejgaon neighborhood.” He raises his left arm and clasps four fingers from his right arm on the opposite elbow.
Maryam stands up, annoyed. She’s not going to run the searches and give him an opportunity to look triumphant when they’re blank, or press his hard sell, or whatever his game is. She doesn’t look back until she’s left the restaurant, and then only to make sure he didn’t follow her to the stairwell.
* * *
This hotel is so old that her room includes a Mecca-pointing arrow on the ceiling; Maryam notes it is a fraction of a degree off from the prayer-orienter she uses, projected in her vision.
Changed and in bed, she calls Núria, but there is no answer. The location monitor puts her somewhere over the Atlantic: deployed again. And heading farther away. Maryam curls into her pillows, turning the temperature up a notch on the climate-controlled sheets for comfort despite the warmth of the night.<
br />
To keep herself from checking where Núria is going, wondering if it’s dangerous, speculating how long she’ll be, Maryam projects up some content. She dithers at first between a ringle concert in Tallinn and an episode of Petrarch, a historical novela she’s following with occasional winces. Then she notices a new episode of Centenal Searchers and immediately pulls it up. It’s a great show. The insanely attractive hosts—two women and two men who have flirted with each other in all possible configurations—travel to remote single-centenal governments to explore their idiosyncratic laws and customs. It’s a sweet show, laughing gently at the oddities of the world’s isolated communities but admiring them at the same time, and Maryam relaxes as she watches handsome, goofy Samir interview an elderly man in a one-centenal government in Louisville about their annual horse-racing festival.
When she turns off the projector unease slips back, and before she falls asleep, she wonders if that weird travel-guide presentation was a random sales pitch, or if she’s being targeted.
* * *
Maryam wakes to the sound of calamitous construction behind the hotel. She stretches in bed and realizes with surprise she’s looking forward to going back to the sanatorium, almost giddy with it, in fact. Maybe it’s the fun of dressing up in someone else’s clothes. Or maybe slipping out of your accustomed era even for an afternoon has its benefits.
She takes a longer route to avoid pedestrian congestion, and because that photo from the travel guide is still creeping her out, and arrives at the sanatorium with her good mood intact. Saleha looks up from her workspace when Maryam comes in. “Welcome back! You can go to Taskeen’s on your own if you remember the way. Here, I’ll get out of your way for a few minutes so you can change.”
Taskeen greets her warmly at the door. This time the tea is ready, the pot and the mugs waiting in the computer room. “There wasn’t nearly enough intel in those reports,” she chides as Maryam sits down. “The observations by the witnesses are sadly lacking in detail.”
