by Malka Older
“Oh, you know, we had already planned it before the trip came up. And it’s not really a tertulia; they just come over! Besides, I slept on the flight back—I doubt I would have been able to go to bed early.”
Núria is good at that. Maryam can never seem to sleep on flights.
“I have to leave again Saturday,” Núria says.
“Saturday?” It’s a sinking feeling. “Where to?”
“Oaxaca.”
“Oaxaca?” Maryam searches her memory for any on-going conflict there, then searches Information. “More advising?”
Núria rolls her eyes. “Ugh, it’s nothing. You remember how that centenal there opted out of micro-democracy last election? They call themselves the Independentistas? Well, of course the neighboring Liberty centenal is convinced that this means the Independentistas are their enemies and likely to attack at any time to expand their territory, so they requested security assistance.”
“¿En serio? And you have to go?”
“You’re the ones who pay for it.” Núria raises her eyebrows at Maryam, who sighs.
“Government sovereignty.”
Núria shrugs. “You know, we in the security forces are like an ambulance. If they call us, we have to go. Even if they’re hypochondriacs. Anyway, we do it on short rotations so no one gets too bored. I’ll only be away for ten days. And it’s not that bad an assignment. The food is great!”
“I bet,” Maryam says, as enthusiastically as she can manage. She doesn’t want to be the needy lover, and they knew going into this that they’d both be traveling a lot.
“What about you?”
“Me?” She’s still distracted by trying to hide her disappointment.
“How was your trip?”
“Oh.” Maryam remembers why she’s not supposed to be annoyed about Núria’s obfuscations: she has to do the same thing. “It was fine. Dhaka and Doha.” She tries to think of something she can say about it. “I finished selling my apartment!”
“Congratulations,” Núria says. “Did you see Roz?”
“Yes, she looks great,” Maryam enthuses, and then recalls the more troubling parts of their conversation. “She’s doing really well.” A pause. “She and Suleyman are going to move back to Kas after the baby is born.”
“Wow,” Núria says. “That’s a commitment.”
“Yeah.”
“Any more travel coming up?”
“Nope,” Maryam says. “Not that I know of.” She’s ready to say something about having a deep-research project that should occupy her for the next few weeks, but that might lead to questions she can’t answer. She bites into a pastelito instead.
* * *
Drawing on years of training in controlled motion, Mishima eases her trapped arm free. In ultra-stealth mode, she rolls smoothly to her feet, then creeps through the dim room toward the door. She slips out into the corridor and draws the door silently closed behind her.
Only then does she allow herself a deep breath. The baby is down for a nap.
Not so much a baby anymore; Sayaka is nearly two, toddling and stringing together disjointed words and gestures into stories that Mishima follows anxiously.
Mishima twitches her fingers, turning on the audio baby monitor and tuning it to a specific frequency that she isolates to her left ear. Mishima’s fame and life experience have made her too paranoid to use vid for anything she doesn’t want to share with the world, although she does enable a small window of baby-sleep status indicators—breath rhythm, temperature, heart rate, REM—in the bottom left of her vision. Then she turns up the ongoing conference call in her right ear and switches her input stream from typed to spoken.
They are still trudging through some of the murkier details about the proposed advisory council for the upcoming tweak of micro-democracy, and Mishima wanders around the apartment, picking up toddler detritus as she listens. Normally, she doesn’t have to multitask quite so dramatically. Mishima’s so-called job, which became official three months ago when an Information-wide primary chose five candidates to go into the global election, has only rare schedule requirements, and Ken’s work is even more flexible, allowing them to juggle childcare between their responsibilities most weeks. Today, however, Ken is in Surabaya; although the official campaign season for the upcoming global election won’t open until next week, scoping out opportunities and strategy development are well under way, and Ken is at a regional centenal governors’ conference for western Java. Until a few months ago, Ken was working as director of citizen engagement for Free2B, their current government, but in preparation for the election he’s been promoted to their government-wide campaign strategy director. Mishima is increasingly aware that their current work-life balance isn’t going to stand up to the pace of the election, but the campaign period is only four weeks. They’ll manage. Afterward … depends on whether Mishima wins.
A part of her is looking forward to a more hectic schedule as much as the other part of her dreads it. She misses urgency.
And these conference calls don’t provide it. At the moment, Valérie Nougaz is making a last-ditch reprise of her argument that there should be more Information representatives on the advisory council, or whatever it is they eventually name it. Mishima wants to jump in and point out that tipping the council in Information’s favor will only make people more suspicious of them, but she holds back. She and Nougaz are the top two candidates for the currently single Information seat, so the two of them arguing over the number of seats is not a good look.
Nejime, who has been hovering over the awkward inception of this council with more concern than any emperor penguin ever showed, advised her not to get involved in the preliminary structural arguments. It makes sense but it hasn’t been easy. Mishima is usually the smartest person in any room, and while she can freely admit that in this particular group—the upper echelon of Information’s strategic thinkers—others could claim that title, it’s debatable enough for her ideas to merit attention. In fact, if you count intelligence plus recent real-world experience, she’s undoubtedly the person best positioned to redesign this stupid system.
However, as Ken reminded her at one point when she was ready to chew the walls with frustration, this is not about the best idea. It’s about politics.
Case in point: she got into an early argument with Nejime and al-Derbi about why the Information representative should be globally elected.
“It doesn’t make sense. This person represents Information; it should be Information staff who chose whom they want in that position.”
“That’s not the point.” Al-Derbi spoke softly, as usual. “Information already has influence.”
Mishima was so focused on system design that she hadn’t seen the larger picture. Of course, Information would continue to influence the world the way it always has: through the subtle, often unintentional control and weighing and presentation of data. The point of the Information representative wasn’t to advocate for this already-powerful entity but to garner the reflexive legitimacy that people would assign someone who was globally elected. To make people feel like they were involved. Illusory democracy.
After the slightly embarrassing pause of working through it, Mishima turned on Nejime. “I thought you told me this was going to be a real job,” she snapped, perhaps more sharply than she should have, because she was annoyed with herself for missing it, annoyed with them for playing these games.
“It is a real job,” Nejime answered. She raised her voice as rarely as al-Derbi, but soft was not the adjective that leapt to mind when she spoke. “There will be decisions made in this assembly, and the skills and quick thinking of the representative are of utmost importance. But it also needs legitimacy, and we need greater engagement in the process as a whole. With any luck, this restructuring will salvage, little by little, the system we have worked the past quarter-century to build. But perhaps you expected you would be ruling the world?”
Mishima almost walked away right there. She would have done it
with a smile, but it would have been absolutely irrevocable, and she still had doubts, mostly in the form of a gauzy image of her sitting in some august chamber, making sophisticated arguments and voting on difficult measures with Sayaka cuddled to her chest or sitting on her lap. “I expected not to be bored,” she said instead. She should have stopped there, but she was still mad. “I expected not to be a celebrity spokesperson. I expected not to be a veneer on the endless mechanics of bureaucracy.”
“Do you think Valérie Nougaz would be running for an unimportant, boring position?” al-Derbi asked pensively.
That’s the best proof anyone has offered so far, but Mishima was still feeling ornery. “She’s old. Maybe she’s looking for semi-retirement.”
Nejime and al-Derbi, both of the same era as Nougaz, ignored this, although Mishima has a feeling it’s going to come back and bite her in the ass some day.
She shifts her attention back to the ongoing discussion long enough to register that they’re talking about the name of the council now.
“Supreme Board of Advisors?” Gilchrest asks. Mishima thinks he’s being sarcastic, but his tone always sounds dry and deadpan, so it’s hard to say.
Nougaz shakes her head, too annoyed to laugh. “We’ve had enough problems with this stupid Supermajority moniker. How many conflicts have been caused in the past quarter-century because people overestimated its importance?”
Nougaz is right, as she so often is, but the name of the entity is a problem Mishima cares very little about, and that little is mostly annoyance: it should have been decided long before now. It’s more than a pet peeve about the inefficiency of bureaucracy (as she’s explained to Ken more than once); it’s a foreshadowing of how problematic the building of consensus is going to be for this council.
Not wanting to get too irritated, Mishima uses the time to catch up with the latest news in Nakia’s case. It’s an odd feeling, scrolling through accumulated stories instead of popping news alerts as they appear in the moment, but between the kid and the prep for the new role, she has fallen behind. There is a faint overlay of guilt, as well: she hasn’t contacted Nakia since the allegations came out. She hadn’t contacted her in months, maybe years, before then, either. Their friendship was one of food and chatting when they happened to be in the same place, not so much reaching out in between, and in the wake of the accusations, Mishima hasn’t figured out how to change that. It’s impossible to forget that writing to her would look bad from a political standpoint, but Mishima hopes that’s not a factor in her decision.
The case itself is fascinating and frightening enough to attract her attention even if she didn’t know the principal. Pre-campaign polls in an 888 centenal in commuting distance of Manhattan have been showing for several months that AmericaTheGreat, a nationalist government that barely hides its white-supremacist platform, is a strong challenger.
As one of the political directors of the New York Hub, Nakia was involved in framing and presenting the situation and oversaw the annotating advids or content from the contending governments. She also lived in the centenal in question and, given that she is not white, would have to move if AmericaTheGreat won. The easy retrospective consensus at cocktail parties and in plazas is that she should have recused herself, but Mishima knows the situation is well within both policy guidelines and customary practice. It’s impossible for directors to recuse themselves from every issue that affects them, and Nakia was part of a team working on the coverage; any given item would have gone through at least three and up to eight different levels of overview.
Nonetheless, AmericaTheGreat saw an opportunity and attempted to paint her as a partisan abusing her power, leading to a flurry of annotations, retractions, blockages, and, finally, a challenge to an algorithmic analysis. The requisite algorithmic tribunal determined an 86 percent probability of bias, and the case was automatically referred to human judgment, with a charge of influencing or attempting to influence the outcome of an election with the exacerbating factors from a position of power and before the start of official campaign period.
The scandal should have ended there. There was already a fair amount of attention from news compilers and activists because of the continuing controversy over what beliefs made a government too awful to be allowed to win an election. Failing the algorithmic tribunal was not rare—37 percent of all cases that went to algorithm failed, as Mishima was reminded by Information annotation every time she read about the case—but it always adds to the notoriety. Still, at that point a quick yes or no human verdict, complete with transparency analysis, would have ended the case, with at worst a thirty-month jail sentence if Nakia had been found guilty.
Even jail might be a better outcome for Nakia than this continuing morass of suspicion and indeterminate suspension from her job. A resolution would be better for Information, too, especially going into the election. Mishima can’t understand why the board hasn’t come to a decision. There must be something unusual in the data, but while normally all Information data, including authorship and editing markers, are publicly available, the posts that triggered the case have been sequestered because of the ongoing investigation.
A message comes up against Mishima’s vision: her assistant, Amran, has pinged her to let her know that the attendees are putting anonymous suggestions for the name of the council on a board. Mishima rolls her eyes but invents one (Multi-perspective Government Interaction Committee) and throws it up. This seems likely to be one of those situations in which anonymity is touted but participation still counts.
AmericaTheGreat has twenty-seven centenals; it seems like a large number in the context of horrendous and irrational prejudice, but in the grand scheme of micro-democracy it’s tiny. More importantly, of the eight centenals it won in the second election, six voted themselves out again in the third. Mishima doesn’t have to configure this data herself: there is a sub-group at Information dedicated to tracking and analyzing what they call “quasi-democratic governments” within micro-democracy, so she’s confident in the assertion that between the outmigration of out-group inhabitants and poor economic competitiveness, their electoral victories rarely last long.
That’s the primary justification within Information for allowing them to continue to exist. The official position of the organization is that the Basic Law on Human Rights marks the lower boundary for acceptable action within the micro-democratic system, but when someone argues that the law should be expanded to prohibit coerced migration or segregationist intent, the response is usually They’re going to fail anyway. Let them work it out of their system, people say. Let their voters experience for themselves how poorly these ideologies work in practice. But that’s a dubious argument when faced with evidence of how such groups affect people’s lives during the time they are in power. Mishima suspects the rationale for winking at them has to do with the more powerful groups that, if less fascist in their ideology, still bend toward segregationist or colonialist tendencies: 1China, for example, or the AlThani government in Doha, the unusually generous host of its regional Information hub. Or even PhilipMorris, with the harsh distinctions between their producer and consumer centenals. And while AmericaTheGreat and their ilk tend to fail, the overall centenal share of identity-based governance is growing.
Amran pings her again, and Mishima realigns her feeds to prioritize the meeting. They’ve decided to call it the Secretariat, which fulfills the blandness criterion at least. One thing has been accomplished on the call, which already puts it well above the average. Mishima feels comfortable zoning it out completely.
From her Saigon centenal where Free2B is polling at 82 percent, she can shrug off AmericaTheGreat’s rising poll numbers as a tiny and probably temporary threat to the New York centenal where Nakia lives, and as all but irrelevant to the system as a whole. Her narrative disorder, however, almost immediately produces a perspective that might be Nakia’s: a beloved neighborhood and community, under attack by people who hate her for no reason; a majority that will expel
her from the place she’s lived for the past eight years; a decisive, popularly sanctioned rejection of her humanity. Just imagining it makes Mishima bite her lip with anger. Is it possible, then, that Nakia consciously or unconsciously let some of that anger or the disdain over the utter illogic of it slip into her intel decisions?
It seems almost impossible that it not affect her work. But that isn’t surprising: despite the patina of neutrality, everyone within Information knows that personal preconceptions and preferences are always going to slip in somehow. That’s why the regulations have, over years of wrangling, become so extensively detailed. So why is this taking them so long to decide? Her guess is that they are working out a new detail in the rules. Or maybe they’re throwing a bone to the government-sovereignty faction in the face of ever-increasing complaints about Information’s power, but this seems like a particularly poor example from which to argue for stronger governments.
It gives Mishima the shivers, even though she’s never been in the position of picking and choosing what data to present and how. Although if she wins this data-forsaken election, she’ll be in exactly that position, and with a powerful spotlight focused right on her.
* * *
Ken is fifteen minutes early, but when he walks into the hotel restaurant, his former boss is already seated, the tiny flickers of updates and messages playing against his corneas. Suzuki’s hairline has crept up a few inches, and Ken wonders why he hasn’t had it reseeded. He must like the éminence grise look.
“How are you?” Suzuki asks warmly as Ken slides into the booth across from him. “It’s been a long time.”
It has been years since they’ve seen each other: since they both left Policy1st, Suzuki because of a scandal, and Ken because of burnout and disillusionment. They have been in irregular but not infrequent contact since then, usually through Suzuki throwing some of his speaking engagements Ken’s way, but they’ve never had a reason to meet in person, or even via projection.
