State Tectonics

by Malka Older

  There’s another boom, this one closer and louder. The door, Maryam thinks. De la Campana’s emergency button must have sealed it.

  De la Campana turns to Maryam. “Hide!” she says, urgently. “¡Escóndete!”

  “They don’t hurt anyone,” Maryam repeats. An unfrozen part of her mind twitches in annoyance at the lack of a new response.

  “Maybe not, but anyone could have known of your visit here, and I’m not taking any chances.” With surprising strength, the small woman takes Maryam’s bicep and speedwalks her back down the hall.

  “Not the cable room,” Maryam quails, her brain jerking back into action. “That might be what they’re after!”

  “Claro que no.” De la Campana opens a different door and stumbles to her knees, hands scrabbling on the wall. There’s another explosion from below and a sudden uptick in the background noise in the building. “Here.” De la Campana stands and pushes Maryam through the doorway. “You can stay here. If you hear them coming, there’s a panel to let you behind the wall there. It’s not comfortable, but it’s hard to find.”

  “Temperature scans!”

  “There’s a climatization unit in there that will hide your heat.”

  “But you—”

  “Everyone knows who I am and that I’m here. It will seem odd if I am missing. But you—even if they know you came, you could have gone for a walk in the woods.” De la Campana stands, and tugs her tailored T-shirt down at the hips. “Besides. They don’t hurt anyone.” She flashes Maryam a grimace that was probably meant as a smile and then turns and walks away, only a little unsteady. “¡Cierra la puta puerta, coño!” she adds over her shoulder, and Maryam scrambles into the closet.

  * * *

  As Roz expected, when Nejime sees that projection of the scan, she wants to bring in the environmental engineer immediately. Roz talks her down to a day and a half, and sends the official request to Djukic. She shows up thirty-six hours later. “It’s good you gave me a little time,” she tells Roz as she leads her through the corridors of Doha Hub to Nejime’s office. “I was able to run preliminary scans—not enough, mind you, to be sure we won’t be facing large-scale sinkholes, but I have better projections of the other tunnel.”

  She opens them as soon as Nejime’s door closes behind them. The line Roz saw in Berlin has grown slightly longer before petering into the unscanned and unknown, and the projection swings in for a close-up showing an ovoid curve cross-section.

  “How big is this?” Nejime asks, tracing the line of the mysterious tunnel.

  “Nowhere near as big as the tunnel 888 is trying to build,” Djukic answers. “We can’t be completely sure, because so far we can only see it from the bottom, but the bottom half is quite narrow. It could be high and narrow, but not too disproportionately.”

  “How narrow?”

  Djukic holds out her hands about the width of a doorframe.

  “So, it could conceivably be used to transport people?”

  “Yes, but not many at a time. Nothing like the superhighways 888 and PhilipMorris have planned.”

  “They couldn’t keep something that big a secret,” Nejime muses, turning back to the projection.

  “They wouldn’t have wanted that, anyway,” Roz puts in. “Russia and Switzerland may trade and share intel occasionally, but they’re not on the best of terms. They wouldn’t open a channel that would allow one of them to invade the other.”

  “Could it be for sharing intel?” Nejime asks, turning on Djukic. “Some kind of analog system, a cable perhaps?”

  “Sure,” Djukic shrugs. “Why not?”

  “No way to know without opening it up?”

  “How would there be?”

  “Scans, listening devices, echolocation? You’re the engineer.”

  “Environmental engineer.” Djukic frowns. “I am not an intel techie.” She doesn’t need to glance around the office to make her point: This is the mothership of intel techies; why are they asking her? “As far as I am aware, there is no way to find out what’s inside without opening it.”

  Nejime turns her full attention to Roz. “Let’s get in there, anywhere along the line, without them knowing about it.” She pauses, blinking. “A data transfer center in the Caribbean just went offline. Presumably another attack.”

  Roz takes her cue. “We’ll work on this.”

  “Find a way in,” Nejime says, her attention already elsewhere. “There’s too much we don’t know right now.”

  * * *

  Maryam spends the first nine minutes after de la Campana leaves her in the dark, crouched, listening as hard as she can. She doesn’t hear much. There are three more explosions, all of them farther away—probably at the other buildings. A faint pattern of voices, occasionally rising, from the ground floor. Doors slamming as people on this floor leave their offices and either try to run to the roof or make their way downstairs. A few yells, and the sound of footsteps pounding quickly down the hall. Maryam cowers and reaches for the wall panel, but the pounding rushes by the closet door, and there are no shots, and no one screams. At some point, she becomes aware that she’s whispering, They don’t hurt anyone, over and over to herself, and she stops.

  How long has she been crouched in here? She blinks up the time: 11:06. What time did they attack? None of the attacks have lasted longer than … what was it? Twenty minutes? Twenty-five minutes? Her fingers twitch, but Information isn’t there to answer. No longer than half an hour. That’s all she has to do, sit out half an hour. And how long has it been now? Maybe fifteen minutes? Surely not twenty already. Maryam shifts, rolls her shoulders. Or maybe this is the attack they’ve been planning for. Maybe they aren’t waiting for Election Day. Maybe data stations are going down all over the world. Maryam fights the cold tremor of panic. She reaches automatically for her de-stress set—a calibrated puzzle game with a cycle of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan qawwali at background volume—but that’s not there either. She makes a mental note to pull a copy onto her handheld when she gets back on Information, and somehow that reminds her that her handheld tracks motion. She checks: it has been nine minutes since her position changed.

  Maryam lets out a long breath and feels it tremble. It feels like it’s been much longer than nine minutes. But at least now she knows. She can hold out twenty more minutes, and if it lasts longer than that, then she’ll know the pattern has changed.

  She wonders what’s going on below her. In the previous attacks, the brigands tied up the staff and left them in meeting rooms or lobbies before disappearing into the buildings, away from any feeds. Have they already rounded up the staff? She can’t hear anything, or at least nothing identifiable: maybe some whispers of ambient noise that could be faraway voices or the normal functioning of the building. Maryam eases her aching legs into a sitting position. Around a thousand people work in this complex, but without Information, she’s not sure how many are in this building. Or maybe what they’re after isn’t in this building at all: Maryam remembers the looming shape of the storage building, the sunburst colors on the energy building.

  At that moment, the dim light that filtered around the door edges from the hallway extinguishes, and the background hum of the building cuts off, replaced briefly by a rush of voices and cries from below. A moment later, the hum starts up again, louder, along with a fainter, blue-tinged light: backup power.

  Maryam wonders if de la Campana is all right, if she’s tied up, or if she stood up to them foolishly or heroically and has been hurt or … She remembers the director saying, Anyone could have known of your visit here, and all the calm she had regained dissolves in a cold flood of nausea. Could it really be chance that they attacked this site, out of the 7,924 data transfer stations worldwide, less than an hour after Maryam arrived? She huddles down into herself on the floor, trying not to make a sound, imagining over and over what will happen when the door is ripped open and she is staring once again into that terrifying mask.

  This panic is deeper, but Maryam surfaces faster.
11:10. Twenty-five minutes to go. Information Security is on the alert for anomalies out of data transfer stations; they’ll know this one is offline almost immediately. If the attackers aren’t close already—Maryam presses her senses against the quiet of the building and hears nothing—it’s unlikely they’ll find her before help arrives.

  What could they get done in such a short time? Curiosity (or boredom) gets the better of fear, and Maryam tests her access to the internal systems. The processors are active and running a diagnostic, although she can see a steep drop in processing activity ninety-two seconds ago when the power went off. They must have tied processor and memory backup into the emergency power, because it doesn’t look like there was much of an interruption …

  Maryam gasps, and immediately covers her mouth with her hand as if she could smother the sound after it escaped her. This isn’t an auto-diagnostic. The attackers must have launched it.

  She doesn’t remember that from any of the reports on previous attacks.

  She should disconnect immediately, before they notice someone else in the system. But if they’re running a diagnostic, that confirms the attacks are trial runs. They’re probing the system for weaknesses.

  Or maybe a specific weakness.

  Maryam squeezes her eyes shut for a second. The attackers aren’t outside the closet door. They aren’t about to leap out of the darkness and grab her. Logging into the system won’t change that.

  She plunges in.

  Her first step is to call up the initial diagnostic command, hoping that the parameters will offer hints to what they’re looking for. But the command is already gone, and so, when she looks, are the beginnings of the output: they’re erasing as they go. They must be dumping data directly into portable memory and wiping; that’s why this wasn’t in the reports.

  A new routine starts up. She sees it running through every connection point, and it jangles through her nerves like a slap, like the moment she saw that mask looking into the feed: they’re coming for her.

  They’re trying to triangulate her location, and it’s not even going to be hard, because in her rush to get on before she could get too scared, she didn’t try to mask her access point. Muttering imprecations through lips numb with fear, Maryam cuts her connection. She huddles for a moment, cursing helplessly—she doesn’t even know if they found her before she cut off—and then builds a quick-and-dirty bounce program to fold into the connection command. It won’t hold long, but she throws a ridiculous coefficient on it, so maybe, maybe, it will hide her until InfoSec arrives.

  It almost doesn’t matter. Exposing herself is better than cowering in the dark with no intel beyond the uncertain interpretations of her eardrums.

  Maryam hits the connection, wastes a few milliseconds confirming that the bounce subroutine is working. Her fingers are trembling so hard, she has trouble with her controls and almost goes to verbal, but decides that would take too long. Deep breath. She orders a copy of the outputting diagnostic results into her handheld memory. And then, a more daring thought—she wonders if she can divert the attackers’ output so that they don’t get what they need. It serves them right, she thinks, pawing through the code they haven’t bothered to protect. While they’re diverting Information’s intel, she can yank theirs. Along the bottom of her vision she can see their search routine barreling through the bounces she set up. Maybe if she—and there it is! She changes the address for the output dump and, for a few seconds before they figure out how to reroute it, their data is hers.

  What chance that those few seconds will make a difference?

  At least she doesn’t have to do anything until they reroute the diagnostic or find her hiding place. Maryam watches the search across the bottom of her vision, the diagnostic output down the right sidebar, and dabs at her cheek with the back of her hand. She is damp with sweat: the climatization and air circulation functions aren’t supported on emergency power. The search program is creeping closer, but there are still two false nodes left and she’s poised ready to re-scramble when the entire system cuts off.

  Maryam blinks in the darkness, afterimages of her interfaces glowing faintly in her vision. They killed it. Her stomach lurches again into the familiar crease of terror: did they locate her? They could have been running a hidden program while she was distracted by the obvious one. She pushes her palms against her eyes and listens. But instead of pounding or yells she hears a growing buzz. Information blinks back on: a portable aerial broadcast, located twenty meters up and ten meters to the northwest of her position. There is a banner across the top of her vision, its message reiterated into her earplugs: This is a message from Information Security. You are now connected. We are securing this site. Remain in your current location and await further instructions.

  Maryam slumps back against the closet wall. She will wait, happily. She has no desire to move.

  CHAPTER 7

  It’s a clear night after a streak of heavy rain, and Mishima and Ken are out on the balcony, enjoying the warm air and a bottle of sake.

  “You’re ahead!” Ken is looking at Mishima’s polling so she doesn’t have to.

  “And that’s good, right?”

  “Three points,” Ken says, ignoring her. “Which is a point more than the margin of error.”

  “So, basically tied.” Mishima hadn’t been able to decide what she expected the polls to look like, but regardless of their configuration her reaction feels inevitable: jaded, sardonic, pessimistic.

  Fortunately, this is Ken: he knows it’s a front. “There’s a decisive age split, but that was to be expected. Hmm.”

  “Hmm?” See? She does care.

  “Nougaz has the edge on ‘strong, decision-maker.’”

  “Well, she is a strong decision-maker,” Mishima says. She means it: she’s seen the downside of that strong decision-making a few too many times. Her tone comes out strange: admiration crossed with the irony-sarcasm-sardonic axis. She was hoping for flat and unbothered.

  Ken is trying to figure out how anyone could be a stronger decision-maker than Mishima, but he supposes most poll respondents have never been stabbed in the leg by her. “It’s not like that’s the primary quality for an Information representative on the Secretariat,” he tells Mishima instead. “What people should want for that role is someone low-key and restrained. Rational. Geeky.”

  “Mm.” Mishima doesn’t feel like parading her cynicism again, but she has no faith that people will vote for the kind of person they should want, if should even means anything in elections. In her experience personality outweighs logic, self-interest, and the requirements of the position every time.

  Ken shifts Sayaka’s weight on his chest and turns his focus to government-level polling data, projecting it up so they can read it together.

  “Free2B is looking solid,” Mishima comments.

  “In all five centenals,” Ken grumps.

  “And you’ve got a good shot here and here.” She traces the map facet with her forefinger.

  “Hmm,” Ken says, and brings up the data for Policy1st.

  Mishima tries to look on the bright side. “They’ve improved over the last three days.”

  Ken shakes his head but says nothing. Mishima doesn’t push it: it’s going to be hard for Policy1st to close this kind of gap. True, nobody expected them to win the last election, but they were swept in by a perfect storm of two separate corruption scandals. It seems unlikely to happen again.

  “What would you do differently if you were working for them?” Mishima asks, a gentler way of saying Do you really think you would single-handedly save the world this time?

  Ken sighs and stretches, careful not to disturb the sleeping toddler. “I know, you’re right. But I still feel bad for not helping when…”

  “It’s a shitty move, this five-year shift,” Mishima says. “But Policy1st losing won’t be the end of the world.”

  “No, not the end of the world, but I think … not a good outcome. Not just because of what Policy1st does or
doesn’t do when in power, but because it unfairly misrepresents the potential of policy-based governments in general.” Ken knows it’s the Policy1st line, but he agrees with it.

  “Unfairly,” Mishima repeats, trying to keep her voice as gentle as it was before.

  Ken shrugs, annoyed, and Sayaka murmurs and turns her head without waking. He rubs her back as he answers. “It’s unfair because five years isn’t enough time to get a grip on governing, not enough time to work their way out of the complications Heritage left for them.”

  “Politics isn’t fair.”

  “No, but we should want our systems to be. As fair as we can make them, anyway.”

  Mishima leaves a long pause, because this conversation isn’t going anywhere. “In any case, I still think you are doing more good with Free2B.”

  He perks up slightly, which is a good sign: if he wanted to hear that, he must be leaning away from the Policy1st job. “Really?”

  “Really. But you know if you want to switch, I’m with you.”

  Ken shakes his head. “They made the job sound great, but … I feel bad about it, but I just don’t trust them anymore. I think I would get there and it wouldn’t be anywhere near what they are implying.”

  Mishima reaches out to rub his arm. “You’re so much wiser than I am.”

  Ken takes his cue. “You know everything is going to change once the election is over and you’re a member of the Secretariat. That’s the job you want. The campaigning is just what you have to go through to get there.”

  “Maybe,” Mishima answers, looking back up at the sky. “I’m more and more doubtful that the job will be worth it.”

  “Then you’ll quit,” Ken says, with perfect faith.

  Mishima sighs. The past five years have given her some opportunities to dismantle her loyalty to Information, but she’s not sure it’s completely dead yet. Besides: “And disrupt this whole carefully planned scaffolding of new governance?”