by Malka Older
For the moment, 888 and PhilipMorris are the top contenders in the Supermajority race. Policy1st is holding on to third, with the other big corporates, 1China and, surprisingly, SavePlanet all clustered in the next eight. There is still time for a lot to happen before the election, though, and with the uncertainty about how the Secretariat will affect government power, opinion pieces on how to vote strategically are hugely popular in plazas and on compiler sites.
When she’s done everything she can with the polls, comparing across sites and running analyses and breakdowns, Mishima checks up on some of the more unsavory elements that tend to gather during campaigning in attempts to disrupt governments, elections, or the entire system. She does it obliquely, and with a pang of guilt. This is no longer her job, but it was so integral to her experience during the last election that it is easy to fall back into. She has to worm around for a while on various shady plazas and sites, but most of these people want to be found, and she remembers the mindset they’re looking for. Anarchy has been relatively quiet during the interim, seemingly focused on building their following. Mishima swears under her breath when she finds indications that they attempted to influence the shortening of the Supermajority term. They must have calculated that the change would tend toward destabilizing the system. She’s not sure they’re wrong.
Recently, there has been an uptick of both spending and plaza activity by Anarchy’s predominant members—despite all evidence, they refuse to call themselves leaders. Before she can stop herself, Mishima sends a message to Nejime suggesting a closer watch on the group.
She approaches her next target with greater circumspection and greater guilt. It takes a correspondingly longer time for her to pick up the trail, but eventually Mishima finds a trace. What puzzles her is where she finds it.
Before she can follow up further, she gets a call. It’s from Nejime, and Mishima winces: she was in the mindset of lonely late-night working, but it’s still a reasonable hour in Doha.
“Since you’re not so terribly busy with your job,” Nejime begins, and Mishima feels an immediate spike of adrenaline, like joy, “there’s something I’d like you to look into.”
“Go on.”
“We’ve noticed some odd incidents.” Incidents is not promising, but Mishima reserves judgment. “Campaigning that doesn’t make sense.”
“Doesn’t make sense how?” Mishima asks. She blinks up the volume on the audio channel to Sayaka’s monitor long enough to hear her slow breathing, then closes it again.
“We’ve found campaign advids for localized governments running in places we wouldn’t expect those governments to contest.” Nejime sends Mishima a file.
Mishima chooses the globed visual representation first, to get a sense for the scatter—sparse instances, but distant leaps—then switches to tabular. Only three cases: advids for a two-centenal Tamil government playing in what was once Wales; the single-centenal government of the Faroe Islands touted in pop-ups in Jakarta; and an Andean-centered government advertising in Dakar. Governments can campaign wherever they like, but all these governments are strictly focused on local issues and have never attempted to gain centenals outside their geographic heartland before.
“Could it be a mistake, a glitchy targeting blast or typos in the address?” Mishima asks, checking to see if the advids were produced by the same company and then setting up a quick program to eliminate transpositions or easy substitutions in the numerical references for the centenals in question. Both return negative.
“It’s possible. But note that the centenals in which these incongruous advids are playing are closely contested. A few votes for an uncompetitive party could affect the outcome in any of them.”
“And yet,” Mishima says, as she rapidly calls up poll numbers, “they’re not being contested by the same governments.” The western British centenal is hovering between a local Welsh government and one of the new policy-based governments, also quite local in reach for the moment; the Jakarta centenal is in a tight three-way race between PhilipMorris, 888, and SavePlanet; and in Dakar, the corporate Liberty is battling it out with a West Africa–focused corporate called NousSommes and, somewhat further behind, 1China. “It’s unclear who benefits.”
“Other than those who oppose the whole system. I thought you’d like this,” Nejime says.
“How did you find it?” Mishima asks, intrigued. This is exactly the sort of oblique, small-sample-size data that would be dismissed as a coincidence by pattern-recognition programs and missed by human analysts.
“An Information grunt in Jakarta saw one of the ads from FríuFøroyar and got curious. You’re not our only employee with intuition and initiative, you know.”
“I hope you promoted them,” Mishima says.
“We’re certainly keeping an eye on him. But I’d like someone a little more experienced to follow up. And since you seem to be interested in nihilist anti-election movements…”
“On it,” Mishima answers.
“Just don’t get too caught up in it. Don’t forget about winning the election,” Nejime says, and signs off before she hears Mishima’s snort.
* * *
Maryam manages to forget entirely about the first official day of campaigning, until she steps out of her apartment building and smack into a haze of pop-ups smoothly extolling the possibilities of this or that government. She blinks them away in annoyance and some surprise: she wouldn’t have thought this centenal would be so hotly contested. As she walks down the street, she counts ads from six different governments, each with a response from the current incumbent, 888, that is a masterpiece of visual storytelling demonstrating deep knowledge of the centenal through a panorama of anecdotes set in and around beloved neighborhood institutions. She has to grudgingly admire the artistry of it, but every ad she sees reminds her time is running out to figure out and foil the attack Nejime predicts: Election Day is in four weeks. She is relieved to reach the ad-blocked shelter of her workspace.
Maryam has been working in a café down the street from her apartment. It’s a change for her, but searching for exploitable weaknesses in the bones of Information infrastructure in search of clues to a massive conspiracy from her desk in the office makes her nervous. The café, ironically called El Chismoso, has wraparound bank seating in individual, dual, and small-group configurations, all with scan blockers and conversation-muting sound architecture: a reaction, Maryam assumes, to the country’s repressive history and its tradition of neighborly spying. She is not overly worried about the latter; what she’s doing wouldn’t make much sense to anyone without a firm grasp of Information’s underlying technology. Still, she is careful: doing her work at eye level even within the cocoon of the solitary booth, examining micro-modules of the problem to keep the larger issue unidentifiable, muting her public Information so no one can infer what kind of infrastructure she’s considering. Occasionally, she gives in and opens, in the corner of her vision, a small live feed from one spot or another along the Liberty/Independentistas border in Oaxaca. Even though they talk every night, she finds it soothing having that tiny link to Núria, and the intense concentration of her work is punctuated by momentary distractions whenever she sees a YourArmy uniform saunter through her view.
Maryam was initially trying to match the vulnerabilities Taskeen suggested with what data they have gleaned about the transfer station attacks, but she didn’t find anything conclusive. She has moved on to looking for other evidence that a weakness has been exploited: scouring communications to and from null states; searching for underlying code modifications in the areas Taskeen pointed out. It’s painstaking, and even if she’s right about the modalities it’s unlikely that she’ll hit upon the exact places they are using them. Also, irrational as it is, she can’t avoid a faint unease, as though those eerie white masks are searching for her as well. She has been taking increasingly long breaks to work on the normal election-related maintenance instead.
Frustrated, she stands and stretches. The café has
gotten crowded, so she puts in a deposit to hold her booth for fifteen minutes and edges her way along the aisles to the door. After the muted environment of the café, the street is loud with pregoneros and passers-by and bright with sunshine and campaign ads. She lets her eyes drift along the pedestrians and up the façades, stretching her arms and shoulders. An ice cream vendor passes on a bicycle, her projected menu shimmering above the cooler, and three men walk by laughing.
“¿Señora? ¿Señora? ¿Ey, señora?”
Maryam doesn’t realize at first that the low urgent voice is accosting her. This is partly because she’s usually addressed as señorita, and so she’s already a little annoyed when she turns her head. The speaker is young, maybe that’s why: slight-built, androgynous, baggy light blue guayabera, public Information muted, which is much more common in Cuba than in Doha.
“Señora, you look like you’re not from around here. Maybe this can help?” They project up an image of the old cathedral at night framed by bright text about hotels and restaurants, and cut it off again, quick as the flash of a trench coat opening.
“I live here,” Maryam says, offended again.
The person gives her a long look over: her loose head scarf, her black pseudo-silks, her perforated leather slippers. “Sí, claro, señora,” they say, and walk on.
Maryam remembers that she’s been speaking Spanish, her clunky accent obvious, and resists the temptation to switch to Arabic. Like that would make her seem more like a local. Belatedly, something clicks in Maryam’s memory; she pulls up nearby feeds, hoping she can find an image of that photo. Did that text bubble really read Everything Information doesn’t tell you?
“Wait!” she yells, starting after the vendor as she continues to blink through the feeds. “Wait, I’ll take one.”
The vendor glances back over their shoulder, and Maryam tries an encouraging smile. Look lost, she tells herself. “I’ll take one. Please?”
This time, the vendor’s gaze is warier, probing Maryam’s eyes instead of her fashion choices. “Paper only for you, señora,” the vendor says, pulling a crumbly folio from their shirt pocket. “Six bits.”
“I’ll take three,” Maryam says, gesturing urgently with her payment toggle.
The vendor takes off.
“Wait!” Maryam yells again, senselessly, and then runs after them. The vendor is quick and lithe, dodging through a gap between two of the chatting men and skidding around the crowd of schoolchildren clustered around the ice cream vendor. Maryam loses sight of them around a corner. She speeds up, wishing she was wearing better shoes for running, which is especially embarrassing since the vendor is wearing the local favorite, self-adhesive shower sandals, hardly the most ergodynamic footwear.
Turning the corner at least puts her in the shade, and she catches a glimpse of the scurrying figure ahead. Maryam pounds after them. An old woman sitting on a stoop, knees wide apart under her long skirt, cackles something at her that even her translator doesn’t catch. She hears snatches of three piropos of varying levels of rudeness and admiration, but she keeps running until she sees the vendor worm their way into the rows of vendor carts clogging the entrance to the Parque Coppelia and disappear in the lunch-hour crowds.
Slowing to a jog, Maryam diverts toward the Malecón and then turns back south, aiming for the other side of the park. She opens a bunch of feeds along Calle 25, on the assumption that the vendor was heading east rather than trying to lose themselves in the crowd and double back: crossing Calle 25 would take them to the university and, beyond that, away from the open-grid pattern of the Vedado into the tighter, named streets of first Chinatown and then La Habana Vieja. Flipping through six sets of three feeds each while avoiding pedestrians turns out to be impossible, so she posts up in a doorway on the angle of Calle 25 and sweeps both directions while more slowly reviewing the feeds from the last three minutes.
“¡Ey! ¿Qué haces allí?” A shutter flaps open, slamming against the wall, and a wiry old woman leans out the window and waves Maryam out of her doorway, rapid-fire invective following her as she walks up the street while still flipping through feeds. The vendor could be anywhere by now. She should go back to the office and conduct the search in a more professional manner, but instead she follows a hunch toward the university. If she can’t find the vendor, maybe she can find some evidence of their product.
CHAPTER 5
Maryam finally gets back to the office, hot, tired, and slightly annoyed at losing her deposit on the table at El Chismoso, but in possession of four wrinkled pages she picked up from a table outside the bursar’s office at the university. The first page of the pamphlet announces itself as an atlas of local microculture. She’s not positive yet whether it’s of the same provenance as the clandestine guide she was offered—the cover image is different, and there is no direct comparison to Information—but her instinct, or pattern recognition, tells her they’re related. She leaves it at her workstation and goes to find Batún, the Habana Hub Director.
“Have you heard anything about non-Information tourist guides?” Maryam asks him, once he’s gotten off the top-level meeting about campaign monitoring.
“About … what?” Batún is clearly still stuck in the discussion about borderline fact misrepresentation and enforcement of polling standards.
Maryam has been in La Habana long enough to know him, and so she waits while he rubs his large hands over his lined forehead and follows him when he trundles down the hall to the cafeterón.
“¿Quieres uno?”
Maryam starts to shake her head and then changes her mind and accepts, and Batún puts in the order for a colada. He takes the coffee and the stack of miniature cups and they head back to his office, where he pours. He takes a sip, rubs his hands over his forehead again, takes another sip.
“Now,” he says. “What are you asking me about?”
“Anything, any rumors or hints or anything at all about someone distributing local data that’s either not available on Information or available through a different source. Maybe paid, maybe not?”
Batún leans back in his chair to think it over. “Nothing comes to mind,” he says at last. “You said tourist guide before?”
“That’s how it was presented to me, at least.” Maryam tells him the story of the vendor. When she gets to the part about the text that may have said Everything Information doesn’t tell you he leans forward.
“But you’re not sure that’s what it said?”
“It was something to do with Information; I’m not sure of the exact phrasing.”
“No feeds?”
“I’ve been checking, but so far I haven’t found an angle that would show that projection. It looks like they put it up two-dimensionally, and they might have known where the feeds were.”
Maryam hadn’t planned to go into the full, embarrassing story of the chase, but he’s interested enough that she finds herself telling it anyway, and then going back to her workstation to get the pamphlet. As she hands it to him, a corner of the front page crumbles off.
“Cheap material?” Batún asks, handling it carefully.
“I suspect it’s designed to self-destruct.” Maryam remembers the vendor’s face when they refused to give her a digital copy. “A safety mechanism that allows them to disseminate widely without committing to unvetted buyers.” She hesitates. “I had another encounter that may have been with these people, but the modus operandi was so different that I’m not sure it’s connected.” She tells him about the odd incident in Dhaka.
“So, you have a copy of that one?”
“No, I turned it down.”
“Why?” Batún asks, carefully flipping through the pamphlet on his desk. “It was free, right?”
“It was creepy,” Maryam says, annoyed. “Clearly you’ve never been a woman traveling alone.”
Batún laughs his deep laugh and then reins it in with a grimace when Maryam doesn’t smile. “Fair point,” he says. “Sorry. You want to follow up on this?”
&nbs
p; “I—I don’t really know what to make of it.” Maryam had been hoping to hand it off. “It’s not exactly my area.”
“Well, it might be,” Batún says thoughtfully, handing the pamphlet back to her. “I’ll admit I never thought of tour guides as the way they’d take us down, but if the Exformation crew are starting a separate datastream outside of Information, I would say it’s very much your area. You better scan that, first thing,” he adds, as another bit of intel crumbles into dust against her fingertips.
* * *
Ken is happy that Free2B is doing so well, particularly in its incumbency centenals. It is, as he’s said at least a dozen times this week, the best indicator of governmental success. However, he has to admit that it makes this campaign cycle lack a certain urgency that he remembers fondly from the last one. Five years ago he felt like the future depended on Policy1st winning as many centenals as possible, and he and others scoured the globe to find places where their efforts could make a difference.
Now he has to argue for days with the Free2B leadership over any expansion to their campaign. If it were up to him, they’d be competing in every centenal that adjoins one of their incumbencies, and looking for other opportunities as well. They have a great platform of policies and principles, very appealing to a lot of people: not too strict, not too lax, a laid-back aesthetic with a social compact at its heart. (Or at least that’s what the campaign copywriters have put together.) But that laid-back aesthetic also translates into a lack of ambition, at least on the part of the government leadership, and so far they’ve refused to contest more than four additional centenals, two of them fairly safe bets. “Bigger isn’t always better, you know,” the head of state told Ken gently on the last projected conference. “Expanding too quickly could hurt our model. Maybe when we have better immigration numbers, or a little more name recognition.”
