by Malka Older
“Did it cause longer-term problems?”
“Hmm?” Maryam rouses herself back to the present. “It did, in fact. Even though contact was still possible between those two centenals, it was marginally more difficult. Interaction rates went down, and suspicion and hostility went up.”
“See?” Zipporah says, and the conversation spins back to the hypothetical future. Maryam falls back into isolation, wondering what that border looks like now.
* * *
If Ken hadn’t been pushing for Free2B to campaign in additional centenals, he wouldn’t have noticed when they did, but in between checking the polls obsessively he occasionally glances at the official election registrar. When he sees an additional target centenal, he has to count three times to be sure he’s not imagining it. Why didn’t they tell me? he wonders as he looks up the centenal number. He’s asked them to expand enough times. Maybe it was an impulsive decision and they haven’t decided if they really want to contest that centenal yet. Or maybe they have some problem with him as Campaign Director? Then the centenal data loads, and he’s even more baffled.
“I don’t understand,” Ken says when he finally gets through to Geoff Forth, the Head of State of Free2B. “Look, I’m thrilled that you added another centenal to the campaign, but I’ve sent you several breakdowns of the most accessible targets, and this…” He trails off, gesturing at his projection of the demographic breakdown for centenal 3829471. Trending middle-aged and up; currently a Liberty government; top-ranked issue areas are agriculture and law and order. “This is not an easy win for us.”
“What are you talking about?” Geoff asks without meeting Ken’s eyes. The automatic read is dishonesty, but Ken knows it’s more likely that he hasn’t stopped doing whatever he was doing when Ken called. “I thought you added the new centenal. Was a little annoyed you didn’t clear it with me first, actually.”
Ken has never been particularly fond of Geoff, which is uncomfortable, given how much he appreciates the government he founded and runs, but at least he doesn’t have to interact directly with him too often. “Of course I wouldn’t do that,” Ken says, trying to keep his tone bro-friendly. “That’s why I kept asking you to approve new campaign areas.” He wants to make sure that’s clear before moving on; Geoff is capable of associating this faint disapproval with him for weeks without remembering what it’s about or that he didn’t do it. “You’re sure you didn’t add this to the list?”
“I haven’t touched it, haven’t even looked at it in weeks,” Geoff says. He’s still focused on something else; Ken’s betting an interactive or one of those competitive crossword puzzles he’s so into. Much as he hates the founding-genius narrative Geoff cultivates, he has to admit it was brilliant to design a government that required almost no work on his part. “Must have been Phuong; she’s also been harassing us to expand.”
Ken doubts that, but he thanks Geoff quickly to forestall the coming rant about the overly optimistic Saigon office and goes to Phuong to confirm.
“Nope, haven’t touched it.” The Free2B Saigon centenal governor has been Ken’s boss for years. “What do you think, should we cancel or go for it anyway, since Geoff hasn’t let us add any of the ones we actually want?”
“Maybe we can switch it out,” Ken suggests. “But let me look into it first—maybe there’s a reason whoever it was picked this centenal.”
Ken tries not to take work home, because (unlike Mishima) he believes in dividing work time and family time. But he wants to decide quickly on that extra centenal—the excitement of planning a new campaign, even or especially an underdog effort, battling with his better sense—and so he ends up scanning the data after Sayaka goes to bed. When Mishima asks, he tells her what he’s working on.
“Wait!” Mishima says, when he gets to the fact that no one has admitted to targeting the centenal. She puts her hand on his arm, and Ken feels the familiar frisson: he’s never been sure if it’s driven by his attraction to her or the energy she exudes when she’s on the hunt. “You’re telling me no one knows who added the centenal?”
“It’s probably someone from the council,” Ken says. “Probably too embarrassed to admit it now that it’s becoming an issue. You know how Free2B is.” Lax with permissions and security.
“It’s just…” Mishima hesitates, but all the data she’s working with is public, even if the pattern has not yet been picked up anywhere. She throws him her file on the mystery ads. “It doesn’t exactly fit the pattern, or rather, it fits as a significant escalation. Free2B is both larger and more geographically widespread than these other governments, but…”
“You think we’re being trolled?” Ken asks gleefully. “Ha! I can’t wait till Geoff finds out!” Mishima glares at him. “What? You know he thinks he’s too cool to be made fun of.”
“Maybe it is just a joke.”
“What else could it be?” Ken’s pulse has accelerated in a way that this election has not provided so far.
“Either it’s a very sophisticated attempt to sway the results in certain centenals, which would be bad, or active discrediting of the entire election process, which would be worse.”
“You want me to go out there?” Ken asks, meaning the new target centenal. “No ads have run yet; we must have caught it in process.”
“No,” Mishima answers, squeezing his arm lightly. “It’s better if they think you haven’t noticed. Ask around quietly to see if you can confirm that it wasn’t an official source who placed the campaign registration, but only in person. I’ll take care of the rest. Don’t worry,” she adds at Ken’s expression. “If there’s any way to involve you in the fun, I’ll let you know.”
* * *
They are both sleepy when they tumble out of the party, and Núria is mildly drunk, so they decide to take a taxi home instead of the public transportation. Maryam gets in first and leans her head against the window, tired but relieved that she not only survived, but possibly even enjoyed an evening with the camaradas. Núria gets in and leans against Maryam.
“Mmm,” Maryam says, and puts her arm around her girlfriend. Girlfriend. Why is it so hard to believe that is real, when they’ve been living together for a year now?
Because we travel all the time and barely see each other.
Because I love her more than she loves me.
Because I always manage to fuck these things up.
Maryam shakes her head, trying to dispel the sudden gloom.
Maybe everything will be all right. Maybe this time I can—
“By the way,” Núria mumbles.
“Mmm?”
“Something happened in Oaxaca that I thought I should tell you about.”
Maryam’s stomach and her sense of comfort both experience a sudden drop, and she’s unhappily wide awake: is Núria about to tell her she cheated on her during the deployment? But Núria is still talking and her tone sounds puzzled, a little hesitant, but neither guilty nor grief-stricken. And she would feel something if she were ending the relationship, wouldn’t she? She isn’t Valérie.
“I was approached by someone who…” Maryam holds her breath. “A child, giving out cards, you know, about a sort of datastream—”
Maryam thought she was awake before, but now she’s sitting up, accidentally dislodging Núria as she does so. Her only thought is how to stop Núria from talking without being too obvious. “Hey, look, we’re almost home,” she says desperately. Everyone knows the auto-taxi feeds are constantly mined for content and reposted as candid serials. Núria must be drunker than she thought to talk about anything in one, even if she doesn’t know how sensitive it is.
“Oh, yeah,” Núria says, and finds a new position against her shoulder, either sleepiness or OpSec training reasserting itself. Fortunately, they are almost home, and a few minutes later, Maryam is helping Núria out of the cab and they are swaying together toward the door of their apartment building.
“Sorry, sorry,” Núria murmurs into Maryam’s ear as they wobble down the
hall. “I shouldn’t have said that; I just, I kept forgetting to tell you…”
“It’s fine,” Maryam says. Núria’s hair is in her face, and it smells fantastic. She puts her fingertip to the door lock, struggles them into the sala, and drops Núria on the sofa. “Tell me now.” She goes into the kitchen to pour a glass of water and grab an anti-inebriation pill. “Something about a datastream?”
“That’s right,” Núria says. “There were these cards, telling you how to access it; kids would give them out on street corners.”
“And?” Maryam hands her the water and the pill and watches as she drinks gratefully.
“Bé, I thought you should know because their big selling point was that it was not Information.” Núria frowns. “Whatever that means.” She eyes Maryam over the rim of her glass. “Did you know about this? You don’t seem terribly surprised.”
“Sort of,” Maryam says, too wired for the moment to wonder about what she should tell and what she should keep to herself. “Did you take it? Did you look at the intel?”
“No way,” Núria says. “It was too weird, and accepting strange programs or documents is totally against operational security protocols. But…”
Maryam pounces. “But someone else did!”
Núria nods. “Some of the other officers were talking about it.”
“And the intel really wasn’t on Information?” Maryam plops down next to her.
“It was a matter of some debate whether the data were just repackaged or really new.” Núria shrugs. “I didn’t think too much of it, because even if the data were new, if it was all about the Independentista territory, that wouldn’t be exactly strange, since they’re not covered by Information. But even a repackaged news compiler that’s not on Information is strange for us, so people were making a big deal about it.”
“Was it all about Independentista territory?”
“I don’t know, I never looked, I just assumed … No,” Núria says slowly, and it sounds like she’s sobering up now too. “No, I think I remember some people talking about what it said about the election … unless there’s an election in Independentista territory now too?”
“Do you think I can see the channel? Do you have the card?” Maryam asks. She slips her arm around Núria, inhales the scent of her hair again.
“I never took it,” Núria stretches against her, sleepy. “But also … I think there was more than one channel,” Núria starts. “I’m not sure; that was another thing that we wondered about, if they were really different or just different names for the same thing. I mean,” she adds with a yawn, “how much content that’s not on Information can there really be?”
“Did you see more than one? Do you know how they were accessed?” Maryam finds a thread of metallic garnet in Núria’s dark curls, the modification she put in for hair that would otherwise turn gray.
“No,” Núria says. “But I did wonder…”
“What?”
“Whether they were approaching us because … you know, because we’re YourArmy. Because we’re not known to be big fans of Information.”
If there is a war, Maryam remembers, the militaries will not necessarily be on our side.
“I mean stereotypically, you understand,” Núria adds into the sudden silence. “In general.”
“Stereotypically.” Maryam smirks. “In this case…”
“In this case”—Núria pulls her down to horizontal—“The biggest fan.”
CHAPTER 9
Mishima has to admit (although not to anyone other than herself) that she is just as inappropriately eager as Ken to go haring off after these mystery advertisers. She goes so far as to look at flights that will get her to centenal 3829471 before giving in to the fact that, as a candidate to the Secretariat, she is at least as visible as Ken and even less likely to take a random trip in the middle of the election.
“I could go,” Amran says unexpectedly when Mishima is briefing her.
“I don’t know if it would be helpful to be there in person,” Mishima says, repeating the arguments she’s used to talk herself out of going. “We have no evidence of in-person campaigning, and they could be creating and placing the ads from anywhere. We should prioritize remote vigilance.”
And, it seems, Amran does. Two days later, she comes back with an update. Even through the projection, Mishima can feel her nervous energy.
“I found someone in 3829471 who is looking into the false ads,” she says.
“Oh?” Mishima flicks her fingers out of her assistant’s line of sight to bring up Amran’s search activity over the last few days. “A curious citizen?”
“I don’t think so. The ads haven’t appeared yet.”
Mishima laughs. “That seems conclusive.” She likes Amran’s approach to the investigation, an oblique search that broadened the enquiry enough to catch others searching along the same lines, but she does note that it has been seven hours and twenty-two minutes since Amran saw these results. Even given the time for reading and processing, her assistant is ambivalent about something. “You want to go check it out?”
Amran takes a deep breath. “Yes, I do.”
“We could send someone else…” Mishima is running through the Information spy corps in her mind: Irepani, Rajiv, Yulya, Simone …
“I know the case,” Amran insists. “Besides…” She hesitates. Mishima waits. “The target is Somali diaspora.”
“It doesn’t mean you have to go if you don’t want to,” Mishima points out. “There are plenty of other ways we can build a connection. Or we could just spy on him from a distance.”
“I’m already running cross-references on his contact history immediately before and after his research, and facial recognition on any public in-person meetings, so I’ll see what comes up. I’ve also looked at his previous searches, and he does seem to have an extreme interest in local quirks and history.” She sends Mishima another file. “Otherwise, a short-term casual acquaintance to see what comes up, with a strict time constraint.”
“A traveler or a tourist?” Mishima has to admit Amran is making a good case for herself. Clearly some of the intervening time has been spent in prep. But she suspects there’s also a degree of anxiety. Best to bring that out before deployment. “It might be dangerous. I’m just speculating”—it’s pleasant to say that phrase to another person with narrative disorder, who might calibrate properly instead of giving it undue importance—“but one of the groups I’m looking at for this is Anarchy.”
It takes Amran a moment to place the name—they haven’t been very active inter-elections—but then her eyes widen. “The ones who tried to bomb the debate in the last election?”
“It fits their disruptive approach, and they have the technical savvy to pull it off.”
Amran is looking down at her hands. “Still … there’s been no suggestion of violence related to this effort so far, has there?”
“No. But we don’t know what they’re planning yet.” Mishima relents, aware that some of her reluctance is because she wishes she could go herself. “I’m just worried about you going without being trained for this sort of thing.”
“I’ll be careful,” Amran says, her eyes still down. “Just observation.”
“No, I think you can go beyond observation. A casual acquaintance with a built-in time limit is not a bad idea.” Amran brightens. “You’ll need a cover identity.” Mishima is talking to herself more than to her assistant now. “I’ll speak to Nejime about it. And I’d like you to get some training, but you will need to get on the plane as soon as possible. I’ll send you some manuals and we’ll backfill later. In the meantime—” Mishima pauses, searching for a practical piece of advice. “Do you have a knife?”
* * *
Djukic’s message comes a few days later, vague and urgent. Roz walks into the landscaped caverns of the former Zurich rail station with no idea what they’ve found. She works her way around the wave pool—particularly popular now as winter encroaches outside—and down the
stairs to the basement. Djukic and her team have done a nice job: setting up pop-up shelters even within the building to screen their activities, and putting up large UNDER CONSTRUCTION signs to make it seem like some kind of work is being done on the building itself. Roz opens a few doors to empty temporary offices before she finds them: Djukic and two others, huddled around a projected map and brainstorming board.
“Hi!” Roz says. “What did you find?”
Djukic turns to her with a puzzled grin. “I think you’ll have to explain it to us—geopolitics is not my area. We found the tunnel, almost on top of the path we predicted, but considerably shallower.”
“Shallower?”
Djukic nods, drawing Roz over to the three-dimensional map and pointing out the line passing through empty space well below everything recognizable. “We went right by it on our way down, only off by a couple of meters. It’s only three meters deep here, already sloping up out of the mantle into the crust.”
“So…” Roz feels slow.
“So the terminus is closer than we imagined. I don’t think this tunnel could reach the nation-state of Switzerland.”
Roz gapes. “It’s not a nunnel after all.” Or, at most, only half nunnel. “Where does it end?”
“There’s still some wiggle room in the calculations, because the slope can be slightly adjusted depending on various factors. But we’re fairly confident it terminates in this centenal’s territory.” Djukic spins the map to show the surface and highlights a modestly sized semi-rural centenal just outside the Zurich coalition.
Roz staggers back until she finds a chair and sits. “Heritage.”
* * *
Maryam isn’t sure what to expect from Independentista territory. She recognizes plenty of preconceptions about the Independentistas themselves—in her head, they are a more proactive, less privileged version of the camaradas—but it’s harder to fit their Territorio de la Justicia, as they call it, into her stereotypes. It is not exactly a null state. For one thing, the Independentistas have a trade agreement with Information. They import updates from selected news compilers and handpicked educational material and programs. In return, they export certain intel about themselves as well, so before she arrives Maryam is able to research their population, politics, and economy, and follow the back-and-forth the Ministerio de la Educación/Guendariziidi has been carrying out with Information over the colonial biases inherent in their educational programs. The Independentistas have gone so far as to make their own modifications and export them back into the micro-democratic world via Information, although the low production values have kept them from winning more than a loyal but narrow following.
