Null States

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  FOR MY PARENTS

  Dora Vázquez Older and Marc Louis Older who make everything possible

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thank you, as always, to my family: Lou and Calyx, my parents Dora and Marc, my brother, Daniel. I couldn’t have done it without you.

  There are so many people I need to thank from my time in Darfur that I cannot name them all. Thank you to the Sudanese staff of Mercy Corps Mukjar and Mercy Corps Um Dukhun, for your welcome, your kindness, your camaraderie, and everything you taught me. I know many of you may never see or hear about this, but I think about you often and with gratitude. Thank you to the expat and inpat staff of IMC and Save the Children Spain in Mukjar, and Oxfam, Triangle, and MSF Holland in Um Dukhun, and to the Zalingei, Nyala, and Khartoum Mercy Corps staff.

  Thanks to everyone who made my time in Spain so wonderful, but most relevant to this book is the amazing Carbonería. In Switzerland, Jeannette Spuhler, Katharina Vögeli, Annahita de la Mare Michalsky and her family, and Jaqueline Latham. I traveled to Saigon alone, but have fond memories of the dance teachers in the park. In Singapore, Yibin Chu for his hospitality and for the introduction to Tiong Bahru. In China, Eric Sun, Wang Ming, Madoka Ono, Don Hayler, Lili Huang, PT Black. In Georgia, the Mercy Corps team and Carmen Crow Sheehan, who could also have been mentioned in the Darfur section, and her family.

  Many thanks again to my doctoral advisor, Olivier Borraz, for his patience as well as for his always interesting questions and insights about governance, democracy, and risk.

  Thanks to NaNoWriMo: I wrote a good chunk of this book during November, and my years of NaNoWriMo experience made writing the rest of it easier.

  I want to thank the Accountability Lab and Blair Glencorse for partnering with me on donations from Infomocracy; I know very well that periodic small donations of entirely unpredictable amounts is not the ideal way for a nonprofit to get funding. I so appreciate their willingness to work with that, and I am very proud of what they do with it.

  Many many thanks to the wonderful team at Tor.com for all their support. Carl Engle-Laird’s insight and patience has made my books far better. Mordicai Knode and Katharine Duckett have gone above and beyond in making sure that as many people as possible get to read the books. Wilhelm Staehle’s amazing, complex covers have probably sold a lot of books for me, and they certainly make me very happy every time I look at them. Richard Shealy’s care and flexibility saved me from many grammatical and spelling errors, and I particularly appreciate his attention to little-known place names on this book. Thanks also to David Gil, Thomas Wier, Rima Kohli, Catherine Galloway, Catherine Richard, Cynthia Rowe, and Sylivester Ernest for some last-minute language assistance. Any errors are entirely my own.

  CHAPTER 1

  A huge tree branches high over the entrance to the compound. The shade would be welcome, because even in the rainy season the daytime temperatures are over 43 degrees, but a flock of large white birds is draped over it. Roz has to hope she’ll get used to the smell, but getting in and out of the compound is going to be a literal crapshoot.

  Information, projecting annotations and explanations over her vision, can tell her that the tree is an Acacia auriculiformus and that the birds are Ciconia ciconia, but Roz doesn’t find out why they don’t get rid of the birds until Amran’s briefing. It’s the first topic she covers, before the logistics of their meeting with the head of state or even the security guidelines.

  “The birds weren’t there when I signed the rental contract three months ago,” Amran tells them, in a tone that says the cawing has already frayed her nerves. The owner of the compound, Halima, is pregnant, and it would be bad luck to disturb the birds and worse luck to cut down the tree. From the sound of it, Amran has mooted both possibilities.

  Roz isn’t going to judge her. Amran is the Information field lead for this centenal and will be here for years, while she and the rest of the SVAT team are only in Kas for a week, maybe two. She’s more interested in the problem of how difficult it would have been to get that story from Information. Without the inside knowledge about the pregnancy you could ask about birds and trees all you liked without getting anywhere near the explanation. Roz starts doodling an algorithm.

  “According to Information, the birds are seasonal migrants,” Minzhe puts in hopefully.

  “Halima says they will leave after the rainy season,” Amran says, but she doesn’t sound cheered. Roz switches on visuals of the local weather forecasts. This week: SUNNY, 47.8. SUNNY, 47.2. SUNNY, 46.1. SUNNY, 48.3. SUNNY, 48.2. SUNNY, 46.7. NEXT WEEK: SUNNY, 49.4. SUNNY, 48.5. SUNNY, 48.8. SUNNY, 48.4. SUNNY, 47.8. SUNNY, 46.1. SUNNY, 46.6. She flips further ahead: SUNNY, SUNNY, SUNNY.

  Having explained the smell, Amran is getting into the protein of her presentation with a three-dimensional headshot of a thin, neatly bearded man with a wide smile and twinkling eyes rotating in the center of the room. A personal history tracks down the side of the image. “Abubakar Ahmed Yagoub, known by the identifier Al-Jabali because he was born in the Djabal refugee camp in what was then eastern Chad.”

  “And he became centenal governor here?” Charles’s interjection is more disbelief than question, but Amran answers anyway.

  “He moved here ten years ago and was one of the key activists pushing for the adoption of micro-democracy. Although of course it didn’t happen until the Sudanese state had collapsed from within, Al-Jabali is credited with laying the groundwork for a smooth transition—and leveraging that into political success, both as centenal governor here and as head of state for the whole DarFur government.”

  Amran throws up a large projection of the area previously known as Darfur, now divided into 78 centenals of 100,000 people. Each is empowered to choose its own government from among the over two thousand worldwide, but in this isolated region most of them have stayed local. Thirty of those centenals are held by the DarFur government, led by Al-Jabali. It’s a strong showing for a government competing in its first election, but Al-Jabali doesn’t seem satisfied. The government’s policy papers and rhetoric are rigorously, even stridently pacifist, but there have been troubling occurrences of nationalist talk and hints at expansionism. The most disturbing incident occurred a few weeks ago, when nineteen DarFuri citizens staged a rally in a centenal belonging to 888, a corporate government that originated in China. Al-Jabali has been courting the international stage, promoting the expansion of the DarFur state to anyone who will listen. He hasn’t gotten much play globally, but his rivals here are paying attention.

  This is not a particularly sexy assignment—no knife-wielding fanatics ranting about people they hate just across the centenal line, no dicey border redrawings—but Roz can feel a jitter of exc
itement in the team anyway. For the past year and a half, SVAT agents, the elite of Information’s global bureaucracy, have been cleaning up the mess left by the last election. Confusion, sabotage, recounts, and fraud sparked low-level conflicts in more than a hundred centenals worldwide. The first, urgent missions put SVAT agents and security officers up close and in the faces of swindled voters to explain what happened and why they shouldn’t take out their frustration on their rivals, the ones they thought they had vanquished politically. Progress was slow and irregular, but the work was never boring, and less than two years later the handful of remaining battles have settled into a tense equilibrium. It isn’t over, but this is their first job not directly related to the election fraud since it happened. Finally, they’re back to classic SVAT work: a populace that, after a long history of propaganda exposure and conflict, is high-risk for nationalism and other pathologies, and a charismatic new government that doesn’t yet understand the extent to which Information will call them on their exaggerations.

  Amran is going through the locations of various episodes on the map, sometimes showing vid or zooming in for a quick auto-tour. “Al-Jabali has said he will address these problems, and there is no hint yet of open conflict, but given the history of this region, your team was requested as a precautionary measure.” Roz notes the passive voice and wonders whether Amran opposed their deployment. She hasn’t been here very long herself; she might have wanted a chance to work on things before the Specialized Voter Action Tactics experts swooped in to save the day.

  “It’s tough when people who have been the losers for so long finally get their chance, only to find the rules have changed,” Maria comments. Roz is mildly surprised to hear that kind of empathy-based extrapolation from a pollster. Maria is the only member of the four-person team Roz hasn’t worked with before, and Roz hasn’t had time yet to form an opinion.

  “Ten years must seem like a long time to wait for their next chance to expand,” Charles agrees. Round-headed and fortysomething, he’s the oldest team member and the one Roz has worked with the most: solid, skilled at building rapport with local elites, and not in the least starry-eyed about Information. She wonders if he’s making his feelings known about the latest controversy in the upper reaches of the bureaucracy. The director level at Information is concerned enough about cynicism and disengagement—and the competence of the new Policy1st Supermajority—that they’re considering speeding up the election cycle, holding them every five years instead of every ten. For now, those discussions are both secret and hypothetical.

  Amran’s presentation is over, and they should get moving. “For today,” Roz begins. “Let’s focus on building the relationship with Al-Jabali, learning how he sees things. Reinforce election protocol in the background, but subtly. And listen for issues where we can work with Al-Jabali to make him—them—happy.” She looks at Amran. “Is it time for our meeting?”

  Amran blinks, probably glancing at the time in her personal, eyeball-level projection. “Uh, yes, we should head over there.” She is twisting her hands in the front of her long skirt. “Actually, Al-Jabali may be a few minutes late. It seems he’s traveling from another DarFur centenal.” Unusual to make an Information team wait. Roz steels herself for an uncomfortable mission. “The visit was planned before I gave him the SVAT team’s schedule,” Amran adds, but Roz is still skeptical.

  “Can you confirm his ETA?” Charles asks. They are sitting in a square brick room, one of two freestanding offices inside the compound. There is a wide-bladed fan shuffling air through the vent openings high in the walls, and the outside of the building is wrapped in heat reflectors, giving the interior the feel of a shaded courtyard. Even so, Roz can feel sweat dripping down her back. No one wants to stand out in the sun waiting for a dignitary any longer than necessary. Amran blinks rapidly, checking his location and trajectory on Information.

  “Twenty-two minutes,” she says. “But the rest of the government is already assembling at the arrival area, so we should go.”

  They take the exit under the bird-filled tree like a gauntlet, one by one, dodging between the white splatters on the sandy ground. Outside the brick wall of the compound, the packed-sand street runs straight between other similar walls, some of reed or sticks, others reaching the exalted level of concrete. A pair of children guiding a donkey with taps from a branch pass them at the cross street. There is little else to see, and everything is in shades of brown and beige. Information here is starved for complexity, for objects to identify and backstories to report on, and Roz gets a wealth of detail about everything she sees: the bricks were baked on the outskirts of town; the reeds are collected during the rainy season; the concrete comes in by truck over pitted dirt roads through the desert, their routes traced on maps that hover briefly before her eyes, 60% transparent. The children have no public Information showing, but the donkey is a Riffawi.

  Despite the dullness of the colors and scarcity of input—no pop-out advids, even!—the newness of it all sparkles for Roz. She always enjoys this time at the beginning of a deployment, when all the Information is fresh and she can feel a composite understanding of the place building piece by piece in her mind.

  She finds herself walking next to Minzhe. “How does it feel to be home?” she asks. Minzhe knows this area better than any of them. He grew up in Nyala, the largest nearby city, in what is now a centenal belonging to 888.

  “Pretty good, actually. It’s been a while.” He stretches his shoulders back and exhales, as though the intense heat and burning glare of sun off sand are pleasant for him. All of them are wearing heat-reflective clothing except for Minzhe, who’s wearing a flowing white jellabiya. Roz is sweltering despite the climate-control properties of her iridescent trousers, but Minzhe wears the thin cotton as though he belongs there. She doesn’t even think he’s sweating. “They almost didn’t let me come, can you believe that?”

  “Why?”

  “Because of my mother. In the end, though, they decided it wouldn’t be too much of a conflict.”

  Roz has no idea what he’s talking about, and glances down so she can check with Information. If he sees the update flashing against her eye, he won’t be offended: he gave her enough of a cue to search on without volunteering the intel himself, so looking it up is the most appropriate response.

  In the meantime, she keeps up the small talk. “I don’t know. I feel like I get sent on every African mission they get. And where I’m from is nothing like this place.” Culturally, climactically, ethnically.

  “I bet they’ve never sent you to your hometown, though, right?”

  True. But her home is a special case. She sees that Minzhe’s mother is now the governor of the centenal he grew up in. Roz can understand why that would give them pause. Information always tries to avoid letting its officers get too close to their jobs; that’s why Amran, the field lead here, is Somali instead of Fur or Beri or anything else from this region. “Besides,” Minzhe goes on, “it wouldn’t go over so well if everyone on this mission looked more like me or Maria than like you and Charles.”

  Maria, chatting with Charles a few paces ahead of them, has already turned ruddy with the sun, giving her narrow, slightly puffy face a chafed look. She has a translucent blue scarf pulled loosely over her light brown hair, though Amran told them that foreigners don’t need to cover their heads. The public Information that Roz sees projected next to her face gives her hometown as 5370293. It’s unusual to identify where you’re from with centenal number instead of municipal name. Roz wonders if it’s because she comes from an impossibly rural place that no one has ever heard of, or if she is demonstrating some extreme commitment to the election system. Roz skips the mapping exercise of finding out exactly where 5370293 is and checks with her translator instead. Maria has been speaking Swedish.

  The road leaves the residential compounds behind and enters rows of tents and shacks: a market zone. Roz has her Information configured to keep a small map at the bottom right of her vision, av
ailable for quick enlargement, but in the market she is also offered glowing signposts projected against her vision: IRONWORKERS down this row to the left, HAND PUMP to the right, POTTERY AND BASKETS beyond it. The flies and her nose tell her before the projections do when they approach the butchers’ section: much worse than the guano back at the compound. The restaurant section is after that, which is probably logistically convenient but a bit too much for Roz’s appetite. Minzhe, on the other hand, sniffs hungrily at the aroma of roasting meat. “Look at that.” He points with his chin at a hefty haunch of geep turning on a spit, the juices dripping into the fire pit. “We’re coming back here after the meeting.”

  “They may have planned a meal for us,” Roz points out, amused.

  “All right, later tonight, then! Best way to get to know a centenal is to have tea in the market.”

  Roz is about to murmur an agreement when she is distracted by something black and gleaming in the thicket of people moving along a cross street. She turns her head to look, and among the cloth of many colors, the baskets riding high on women’s heads and the glare of the sun she sees it again, black and shiny and in the shape of an automatic rifle. The man holding it is wearing olive drab and moving away from her; a second later, he is completely blocked from view by other bodies.

  Roz slips a hand into her satchel and activates the small personal Lumper she carries with her. Its range should just about reach the man with the gun, rendering the firearm inoperable if it wasn’t already. It’s hard to imagine that this place hasn’t been thoroughly Lumpered over the past few years, and Roz supposes that properly Lumpered, harmless firearms may have kept some talismanic or status value here, where they held sway for so long. Probably what she saw is exactly that.

  Which ought to put her mind at ease. But something about the gleam of light on the surface didn’t look quite right. What if the gun isn’t metal? Is it possible that the DarFur government, or some of its lower-level officials, countenance overt display of plastic weapons? It seems unlikely. Information, which has just identified the head of the market committee, sitting among his plastic wares with a couple of other men, has nothing to say on the subject, which makes it almost certain it isn’t happening.