by Malka Older
Why, if they’re already exporting their locally compiled data through Information, would they be broadcasting a non-Information channel?
Maryam scans through their modified programs and is surprised to find herself itching to fix the technical issues to help them transfer ideas more effectively. She shakes her head at herself: either the camaradas are getting to her more than she thought, or she’s emotionally susceptible for some reason. Why would she, an Information employee, help a revolutionary anti-Information government? But they do make some good points. And it’s not like they’re an enemy of micro-democracy. Maybe she could volunteer her expertise to the Independentista government as a way to ingratiate herself with them.
There’s no airport in the Territorio de la Justicia—too much environmental damage—so Maryam flies into OaxacaLibreYSoberana, a micro-democratic centenal with close ties to the Independentistas, and takes an augmented bicycle taxi from there. It is not a long journey—the Independentista territory includes several neighborhoods within the city of Oaxaca, extending from there out into rural areas—but it’s a novel sensation to be driven by a person, triggering both a pleasant old-timey feeling and an uncomfortable layer of guilt. The driver is chatty, especially after the stored energy capacity kicks in. Coasting along, he points out major landmarks, talks about the work that’s been done to improve the road without long-term environmental harm, and offers a full buildup to crossing the invisible border between micro-democratic territory and the fragment of Information-free government that is their destination.
Unmarked and unguarded though the border might be, the change is immediately obvious. Election ads and other pop-ups are cut off from one block to the next, and all of the casual data Maryam sees overlaid on her vision—intel about the age of the houses, the nearest pharmacy, the weather forecast—disappears. When she blinks to bring up Information, she sees instead a different, clunkier interface offering her the choice of an education portal, a general knowledge portal, and a current events portal. After a few false starts, she selects current events, which takes a ridiculously long time to open, and is given sample slices of four well-known global news compilers, two more that are specific to anti-colonialist and liberation theology traditions, and a regional one, along with what looks like a locally produced news show with production values out of the ’50s. There’s also a local plaza, apparently all text. She can’t imagine any of this stuff appealing to people with access to real Information. She flicks it off.
The taxista is still talking, waving his hands at buildings and pointing in the direction of the zócalo. Maryam is supposed to be a tourist, so she might as well take advantage of the driver’s loquaciousness. “So there are no cameras here at all?” she asks, looking around in affected wonder and taking in the stone-paved streets and packed dirt alleys, the large covered market surrounded by street vendors selling flowers and wooden toys.
“None!” the taxista says, with a flourish of his hand. “And let me tell you, as someone who has lived in three different centenals”—he counts on his fingers—“Libertad, OaxacaLibreYSoberana, y NuevoPRI, I don’t miss them at all!”
Sure, Maryam thinks. Nobody misses cameras until they need one. “I heard there were tensions between the Independentistas and Liberty,” she says, trying to sound timid.
“Pff! Just the elites panicking. If you want, later I can take you to the border they put up, give you a tour, even take you through the control point.” He leans back to line-of-sight her his contacts. Maryam accepts, then points him quickly back toward the road, her timidity now unfeigned: a cat is darting through traffic, causing the solar bus in front of them to jerk to a stop. The bicycle swerves on its own and the driver laughs. “Don’t worry, señorita! We still use crash-prevention technology. It is just the power that comes from the people.”
This sort of enthusiasm for the Independentista project could get old fast, Maryam thinks as they pull up in front of her hotel, a two-story building near the central urban area of the Territorio de la Justicia. The lobby is cool and humid after the brilliant heat outside, a small fountain playing against tile in one corner. Again, she finds a person where she least expects one, an elderly woman who checks her in with gentle slowness. Maryam wonders if these are all make-work jobs to keep the economy running, or a natural consequence of the absence of Information.
Her room is small and has the same damp air as the lobby, but when Maryam opens the two windows onto the courtyard it quickly fills with the smell of pine: a cultivated microclimate. She inhales deeply, then sets up a modified workspace. It’s a bit like those very few times when she briefly locked herself out of any but the most urgent updates in order to concentrate on a project: the isolation only becomes unnerving if she remembers that she can’t turn Information back on whenever she wants. The taxista’s contact details give her the first fingertip-hold in the Independentista system, and she worries away at that until she has more.
* * *
Amran wishes she had been able to get the training—In what? Spycraft? Self-defense? Weapons?—before she left. She was able to talk herself onto the plane without too much difficulty, but it’s a long flight. She can only stave off the fear for a few hours before it takes over. Images of the debate attack five years ago play through her mind: shattering glass, chaos, terrified people. She restrained herself from looking up Anarchy before she left, which was probably poor spycraft, now that she thinks of it, and she wonders what else they have done. She wonders how vicious they are when they aren’t making a political statement; when, say, they are dealing with an Information spy.
At least she has a lead. Her subject, Dalmar Dualeh, met yesterday with a woman named Radha Langer who is not from the area. Langer is checked in to a hotel in the centenal adjoining 3829471, and the cross-reference found a recent visit to Porthmadog in Wales, where ads for a small Tamil government are playing. It could be a coincidence, but all the mystery narratives Amran has ingested have told her there’s no such thing. Besides, Information hasn’t helped her find any connection between Langer and either of those places. In fact, as Amran reviews the profile again, Information is a little thin on Langer all told. Her intuition—her narrative disorder, Mishima would say—twitches, and her fingers twitch in response, but she holds back: the linkups on planes are notoriously easy to hack and regularly trawled for sensitive data revealed by bored passengers. She can take another look when she lands, and decide whether to fabricate an acquaintance with Dualeh or go straight for Langer.
In the meantime, Amran has to try not to be terrified. And (Mishima’s suggestion for the flight, as if she knew the idleness would make Amran fidgety and scared) get used to her cover identity so that she doesn’t stutter over her new name when introducing herself to someone. She reviews the public Information that will be displayed next to her face again, hunched over even though she’s projecting at eye level and there’s no way the person sitting next to her will see anything but flickers.
She is Idil Farah, content designer for Puntland Studios, a small content developer in Nairobi. Mishima guessed correctly that Amran would have a thorough knowledge of their catalog. “And you fit the profile of someone who would work there. We’ve settled it with them so that they will claim you if anyone asks.” Amran’s hypothetical position had to be fairly low-level so no one will expect to see her name in the credits, but that, Mishima told her, will make sense because she’s so young. (Amran doesn’t feel so young, although she guesses in comparison to Mishima’s vast experience she seems that way.) She’s traveling for work to research a new project, a diaspora-based love story they are developing.
It is a bit exciting, imagining this different life for herself. Amran has never before pictured herself as a content designer. She was always sure she wanted to go into either government or Information, but Mishima is right: now that the idea has been planted, it makes complete sense. The neat details devised by whoever manufactures these false identities (she thrills again to the idea of
something false coming out of Information) make it astonishingly easy for her to build a whole fantasy world out of it. Yes, she imagines saying, I worked on Mysteries of the Night; I only had a small job, but I was able to meet Leylo Daud, and she was very pleasant to work with. Yes, content design can be hard work, but my colleagues are wonderful and we have fun even when we work late. I hope to move up in the company soon. I would really like to be generating new concepts …
This is pleasantly distracting enough to take her mind off the fear, and eventually Amran/Idil manages to fall asleep.
CHAPTER 10
“So,” Djukic says, leaning close over the tiny round table. “Are we breaking into the tunnel or not?” They have decamped to one of the cafés on the upper level of the Hauptbahnhof; Roz asked Djukic to brief her away from the team.
“I think … not yet.” It has not escaped Roz that the projected terminus of the tunnel is the Heritage centenal where William Pressman, former head of state for the former Supermajority, holed up to evade arrest until his successor, Cynthia Halliday, turned on him a couple of years ago. If this tunnel was his means of communicating with the world outside of Information surveillance, there’s a possibility it’s no longer in use, but Roz can’t imagine Heritage would let so valuable an asset go to waste. In either case, it will be an enormous scandal. Roz wants to seek guidance before unleashing that level of chaos in the middle of election season. “I’m going to get an answer on that soon. Is there anything more you can tell me about the tunnel itself, now that we’ve found it?”
Djukic leans back. “It’s more or less what we thought. Maybe big enough for a person-carrier, but not big enough for very many to travel at the same time.”
“Still, the fact that it is at least that large … if it were just for comms, they would have made it smaller, right?”
Djukic offers one of her characteristic shrugs. “Perhaps. Maybe they wanted the option. Or they wanted access maintenance. Or perhaps they found the engineering challenging. That’s the other thing we noticed: based on the technology, this tunnel is at least a few years old. There has been a lot of progress in mantle-boring technology in that time as more governments started researching the possibilities of sub-crustal travel.”
A few years … That fits with the timeframe for William Pressman’s house arrest. One would think Heritage would have given up on drilling through the mantle of the earth after their first attempt cost them the Supermajority, but some people never learn.
“Okay,” Roz says. “Give me a minute to call in.” She stands and walks through the main hall of the building and out into the chilly air. She finds a corner more or less out of the wind, where she can be sure no one has line of sight on her, checks public feeds to make sure her face is not visible on any of them, and calls.
Roz generated some single-use encryption codes before coming, seeding most of them with Nejime’s assistant Zaid (and the remainder with Suleyman, just in case). When she calls Nejime using one of them, there’s a slight delay before her face appears, lips pursed. “You don’t think this is an excessive level of security?”
By the time Roz had explained the situation, Nejime is completely focused. “Very interesting.” Roz can see her start to pace. “Not totally confirmed?”
“No, not yet,” Roz says, “but the engineering data looks conclusive.”
“Last time we talked, they thought it went to Switzerland,” Nejime grumps, and then looks up. “I suppose this calls into question Moscow as the other terminus?”
“I suppose it does,” Roz agrees. “It’s still a possibility, but there are at least two other Heritage centenals within the tunnel’s possible trajectory—as well as those of other governments, of course.”
“Heritage’s secret communications,” Nejime muses. “We knew they had some sort of system set up during the secession crisis, but I always assumed it was code-based, not an entirely separate physical channel.”
“It makes sense that Pressman would want sequestered communications, given the risk of prosecution.” Nejime, still pacing, doesn’t answer. “So, we hold off for the moment?” Roz asks, hopefully. It feels creepier to break into the systems of a micro-democratic government than those of a null state, even if those systems are illegal.
“No,” Nejime says, snapping out of it. “We’re assuming that this channel is defunct, but they could be using it right now to conduct clandestine communications—on unapproved infrastructure, no less!” Roz is surprised by the force of Nejime’s fury. “Even communicating centenal to centenal within Heritage threatens the legitimacy of the election. And if this does go to a null state, they may be a part of the conspiracy to attack us openly!”
Conspiracy? Roz thinks, but she doesn’t dare vocalize it.
“This is the problem with sovereignty, with the so-called Supermajority! You give these governments self-determination, they use it to eke out every shred of power and secrecy and economic advantage they can! And people still dare to argue that the system would work better without us, the governments left to self-regulate!” Nejime reins herself in, modulating her voice back to something like normal. “We need to know what’s being transferred down there. The first debate is in four days and we’re only a few weeks from election day. If they are still transmitting data, we need to take care of it now. Get them started on the prep. I’ll send Hassan and Niamh tomorrow; if we find comms cables as we expect, they’ll do the sniffing so it won’t be noticed.”
Probably.
* * *
Centenal 3829471, a segment of the city of Guelph, is not at all Free2B’s target demographic. Not that Amran has ever been to Free2B, although she harbors hopes that Mishima will invite her to the Saigon centenal some day. But in the meantime, she has done a lot of research on them, and this is definitely not a centenal they are likely to win. Guelph has a university, but it’s not in this centenal, and most of the students live on campus or nearby. This centenal is older, whiter, and staider, and seems unlikely to be swayed by policies like subsidized diverse food trucks and holistic herbal health care strategies.
Amran wonders what premise the false-flag ads could have here. None have appeared yet, both encouraging and a little worrying: what if this is all some misunderstanding? She spends some time wandering around town to orient herself, although only after she has set up tracking on Dualeh and a facial recognition program to run Langer’s image against other identities. That will take a while, even though she told it to start with known Anarchy associates.
In the meantime, she explores the bare-branched residential blocks and occasional tacky shopping street. There’s not a lot of colorful design or informal economic activity or other interesting things to look at, so while trying to understand the layout (in case she has to flee on foot), she lets herself concentrate on election ads. Liberty doesn’t seem confident that they’ve got this centenal locked up, and the streets are blanketed with pop-ups in the brazenly cheery comic-book style they’ve adopted for this election cycle. Based on ads, the main contenders seem to be local or regional: O!Canada!, a retrograde government trading, like so many do, on nostalgia; and, less prominently, AgFutures, which targets farmers but also attracts agricultural scientists and people who believe themselves “culturally farmers”.
Tired and not particularly enlightened, Amran stops for some coffee (bland) and donuts (overwhelmingly good). She is tempted to go stake out Langer’s hotel, but that seems like the sort of thing she should be trained for first, so she decides to start with Dualeh.
* * *
“We go in tomorrow,” Roz says. “They’re sending a couple of people to help analyze the pipe.”
She had thought Djukic would be pleased, but the engineer is frowning. “You discussed this over Information?”
“We’re using one-time codes for encryption,” Roz says. “Not perfect, but it should do. Look, the sooner we get this done, the sooner you can go back to your job.”
Again, Djukic doesn’t look as happy about th
at as Roz expected. Consulting as an environmental engineer for a mantle tunnel can’t be that much fun. Still, she quickly organizes the two workers to start digging the person-sized access tunnel, promising to take a turn herself when she gets back from dinner. Fortunately, with the tunnel so much closer to the surface than they expected, it won’t take long, and the excavation detritus will be manageable.
“We should reach the tunnel tomorrow, early afternoon if we take our time.”
“Perfect. The techies should be here by then.” Roz sops up the last of the juice on her plate with sorghum bread. Djukic insisted on a moderately long walk to find a pub for dinner—“Nothing by this ridiculous fake-sports complex is going to be any good,” she proclaimed with expressive handwaving—and Roz has to admit her rabbit stew was excellent.
Djukic shrugs. “Whatever you say, boss.” She taps in an order for schnapps. “Want something to drink?
“Oh—thanks, but I’m not drinking.” Roz pats her belly.
Djukic’s eyes widen. “You don’t have an alcohol neutralizer?”
“I do,” Roz says. “But in that case, what’s the point?” She doesn’t trust those things to keep her baby safe, but she doesn’t want to sound like the paranoid luddite she probably is.
“Suit yourself,” Djukic says, taking a shot, and then asks belatedly, “It doesn’t bother you if I do, does it?”
