Infomocracy Read online

  He’s already shaking his head. “I have to go check on some people. Actually”—he glances at the time on his handheld with an uncertain laugh—“I had a work meeting half an hour from now.”

  She nods and then pulls out her handheld and transfers him her details using line-of-sight. “If you want to come back here,” she says, then shakes her head. “I don’t know if the network’s working or will be…”

  “We’ll figure it out,” he says, happy to see her name. Mishima. That’s right. “I’ll be back, if not tonight then … once…”

  She nods too.

  * * *

  Domaine has to tear himself away from the disaster feeds to board his next flight. The casualty numbers are still unstable, no one knows what industrial horrors may have been released, and at least a dozen governments with bases in or around Tokyo are completely offline, opening the potential for anarchy in their centenals around the world. Domaine actually considers ditching his flight to keep watching but decides there won’t be any concrete information for the next six hours anyway, and goes on to Istanbul as he had planned.

  * * *

  After that dramatic farewell, it takes them a while to separate. First, it takes each of them some time to convince themselves that they won’t be able to access Information. Mishima spends fifteen minutes adjusting configurations and logging in to various high-security portals. Ken, who has long since given up on getting anything other than error messages, wonders again exactly what it is she does. The longer they stay, the harder it is to leave, especially after feeling the gentle sway of the pendulum start up again during three separate aftershocks. Each time, their eyes meet as soon as they sense it; each time leaves them feeling sweaty and knotted.

  But once it is clear that they cannot only do nothing but also know nothing while in the crow’s protective cocoon, staying is unbearable. Disembarking, however, turns out to be nontrivial. Mishima hesitantly points out that the sharp fall at the height of the earthquake was probably the building they’re moored to crumbling, and suggests that they try to find a safer landing spot. She realizes as she says this that she will have to navigate manually, since all Information links are cut. Fortunately, she’s done that before and, although not in many years, in almost as dire circumstances. Ken agrees, remembering how he had wondered if she might give him a ride to work, although that seems like it was in a completely different world.

  But the anchor won’t disengage.

  “Something must have … caught it,” Mishima says, from the control panel. They share a look, and without words, she starts reeling them in, closer to whatever destruction lies below. In her eagerness to get on Information, Mishima had forgotten about the outboard cameras; now she flicks a switch that turns them on, and swivels them down.

  Her first glance at the city, as the cameras pan past the horizon on their way to a bird’s-eye view, is not as bad as she expects. But then, Mishima generally expects the worst. She sees most of a skyline, the uneven pattern of tall buildings breaking up the sky. Something still stands. The pale roof of the hotel comes into view below them in time to see a broad crack across it before they settle gingerly to a landing.

  “Do you think it—do you think it’s completely collapsed?” Ken asks.

  Mishima tilts her head slowly, eyes wide. “I don’t know.” Leaving the crow seems like a terrible idea. She wishes they could put on spacesuits to venture out into that hostile environment.

  “I’ll go,” Ken says. “You stay here, in case you need to fly the crow.”

  “Are you crazy?”

  “It makes more sense than both of us risking it,” Ken says. He’s only partly trying to impress her; he’s also itching to see what’s happened.

  Mishima starts pulling on a pair of cracked rubber boots. “I’m going.” She manages to leave the rest unsaid: What you do is up to you.

  The roof, white concrete gridded with faint lines from its prefab mold, is more stable than she expected, although slightly angled. It’s disconcertingly hard to tell how high they are off the ground; some of the buildings around them are still standing, but she can’t tell what floors’ windows she is looking at, and her gaze keeps catching on the upside-down red triangles that mark emergency exits. She can’t catch a glimpse of ground in the cityscape around them.

  Ken steps uneasily over the crack in the roof, tests the other side. It doesn’t wobble, and he picks his way toward the edge. Standing well away from it, he leans forward just enough to get a sense of height. They are still far off the ground, maybe forty or fifty feet. Below him he can see a small crowd of people, some of them sitting on the pavement. He shivers, then turns back around as Mishima calls to him. “The anchor’s over here.”

  As he starts toward her, he feels the vibration in his feet and sprints the few steps of roof to grab the anchor line, the foot of the crow, anything.

  The tremor subsides after a moment, and he grins sheepishly at Mishima, although he sees she’s also gripping the line. “Here,” she says, pointing to where the line disappears into a jumble of debris, in which Ken makes out a doorknob, the rest of the door buried. It must have been the top of the stairway to the roof, or maybe a small utility room. They start moving fragments of concrete and brick, hand over hand, the dust staining their fingers and their clothes. Some of the pieces are heavy enough that they have to work together to lift them, Mishima thinking how we forget the physical weight of all the things we’ve built up around us. She can’t wait to get back on the crow and off this unsteady ground. She’s sweating as she and Ken grip different sides of the door and angle it off the roof, dislodging more crumbles of concrete that tumble to the roof with a raucous clatter. In the sliding of those smaller pieces they almost miss the new rumbling below them.

  “Here’s the anchor,” Ken says, breathing hard. The newly excavated mechanical hand still grasps a piece of metal railing, and Ken grabs it, tugging at the tines. The roof shakes and then drops, a sudden violent jolt. Ken catches the anchor line, hangs on as his legs try to keep him upright on the pitching building. He looks back to see Mishima scrambling to her feet.

  “We’ve got to go!” Mishima yells, taking his arm.

  They sprint for the door of the crow. The roof is pounding, and what should have been three running steps becomes five or six uncertain footfalls. Ken dives through the opening headfirst, Mishima leaps so she can dash for the controls. She pushes them up in the air, away from the rocking ground, and orders the anchor to unlatch as they rise. It opens, and she exhales, retracting the mooring line. As they lift, she stares down through the camera. The crack in the roof widens, yawns, opens, and then the view is obscured by a cloud of dust. Ken hopes the people in the street below got out of the way in time.

  They are silent for a moment, watching the dust settle in on itself.

  “Are you sure you want to stay in Tokyo?” Mishima asks. “I could take you somewhere else. It’s going to be pretty messy down there.”

  The pull to be in the middle of the action is too strong. “I have some things to take care of,” he says, which sounds annoyingly arch but is also true. “What about you?”

  Mishima tries to grin. “Messy is what I do,” she says, glibly irritating Ken even more than he irritated her.

  “As close as you can get me to the Policy1st building is fine,” he says. “It’s in Ichigaya.”

  “Perfect,” she says. As expected, the auto system won’t take coordinates, so she points them to the northeast and steers manually. Out of habit more than conscious respect, she avoids the airspace over the emperor’s palace, weaving along major arteries as she normally would. They are peering down at the crowd of people in Hibiya Park, pale faces turning up to follow their path, when the pattern of light changes. Mishima glances up and sees a wall of windows looming toward them, so close she can make out the pale blur of a face, its shocked expression matching hers as it hurtles toward them. She swerves hard, throwing Ken against the wall and almost losing the controls.
r />   “Sorry,” she says, righting the crow as the skyscraper that nearly clipped them sways back in the other direction like a sapling in a strong wind. Crows normally don’t fly very high, but Mishima decides to add some altitude, and they cruise the rest of the way well above the tops of the buildings.

  CHAPTER 10

  Suzuki is bleeding—still, slightly—from a cut on his forehead. It must be a kind of magic, Ken thinks; even when he’s thrown against the edge of a desk in the middle of a massive earthquake, he manages to come out with a perfectly photogenic injury. No black eyes, no squashed fingertips, just a heroic-looking streak of blood in exactly the right place for the cameras. Which, thankfully, haven’t arrived yet.

  The Policy1st offices, in an appropriately nondescript, unextravagant five-story building, remain standing, although people are still picking up furniture, wall hangings, tablets, broken teacups.

  One man who Ken knows slightly, Hirano-san, was burned when the water heater shattered. “Koike-san took him to the hospital,” Suzuki says. “Although who knows what kind of treatment he’ll be able to get in this mess.”

  Ken feels like he should ask if Suzuki’s family is okay, but he’s not sure if he has one or if they’re in Tokyo. He’s almost positive Suzuki’s not a native, but he does spend a lot of time in the greater metropolitan area to be completely alone.

  Suzuki spares him the quandary by not having time for further pleasantries. Even as he’s giving Ken his trademark special-occasions bear hug, in this case for being alive, minions are hovering nearby with tablets to be signed and decisions to be made.

  “Ready to work?” Suzuki asks him.

  “That’s why I’m here,” Ken says.

  “I’m glad you made it,” Suzuki says. “I was worried you might be stuck on the public transportation—it’s apparently gone haywire since all the maps are down.” Ken keeps his mouth shut, and Suzuki goes on. “Do you have your tablet?”

  Feeling suddenly naked, Ken shakes his head. “Just my handheld.”

  “Here.” Suzuki shoves one (Koike’s? Hirano’s?) into his hands. “The intranet’s up, even if we don’t have access to Information. Log on. We’ve got work to do.”

  * * *

  As she redirects the crow toward the Information offices, Mishima is already sorry she was so short with Ken. It doesn’t bother her long; she knows that as soon as she can connect, she’ll be glad he’s gone so she can work. All she wants to do right now is work. Someone has to fix this.

  The Information hub in Tokyo is, not by accident, a long, low, earthquake-resistant building constructed in space made available by the last missile strikes during the fall of North Korea. The building is virtually undamaged, and Mishima is able to moor easily to the roof and disembark at the crow passenger access door. She tries not to think too much about her entrance the day before, that time from the ground floor, full of purpose and energized to take on Liberty. It still stings that they wouldn’t authorize her to pursue it, but for the moment, the issue is moot.

  On the first floor, Mishima finds Rachchivandrum, who, by happy chance, is both one of the colleagues she likes reasonably well and the person who seems to have taken charge. “What can I do?” she asks as soon as there’s a pause in the flurry long enough for her to get his attention.

  “We’ve only got three uplinks going,” Rachchivandrum says, barely looking up. “And I don’t know if anyone else in the city is connected at all. Go over there and give Korbin a hand—she’s synthesizing reports as they come in, trying to upload concise bulletins and build a disaster map at the same time.”

  Tamping down her disappointment at not being able to connect immediately, Mishima joins Korbin at a workspace projecting five different small screens and a billiard table–sized map of Tokyo. Korbin, who oversees Heritage campaign coverage in East Asia, was silent and unhelpful on the Liberty question yesterday. Now, though, her eyes are half-closed in concentration and her hands are moving faster than Mishima’s ever seen.

  “Take these,” she says without any other greeting, and waves a bunch of projected files into Mishima’s workspace. “I haven’t started on them. Triage, see if there’s anything urgent that we can help with, and then consolidate as much as possible—the uplinks are ridiculously slow.”

  Mishima digs in with an uneasy satisfaction but keeps half an eye on Korbin.

  “What do we know?” she asks ten minutes later when she sees her colleague’s concentration relax momentarily.

  Korbin’s pale water-colored eyes meet hers. “Not many details. Massive infrastructure damage. Obviously, communications are almost entirely out—so much for resilient networking.”

  “We knew there were vulnerabilities,” Mishima says, but even she can hear how futilely know-it-all it sounds. Korbin ignores her.

  “Because of the comms problems, public transport is down. We’re working with the municipal government to reprogram the shuttles to run standard routes, but because we’re not sure what’s standing and what’s not, it’s been tricky to identify optimal landing points. Similar issues for restocking private businesses—grocery stores, pharmacies—we’re going to be looking at shortages pretty soon.”

  “Are we working with the private sector?” Mishima asks. Since it’s Japan, the tea station is still working and she walks over to get a cup for each of them, brewing it bitter and strong.

  “Domo,” Korbin says gratefully, accepting hers. “Yes, ‘we’ in the sense of Information outside of the affected area. They’re sourcing and staging as well as they can, and doing pinpoint coordination with anyone they can talk to. It’s still going to be slow, though.”

  “So, we have to get Information connections back up.”

  “I’m going to switch over to that team pretty soon—I used to work on network regeneration. Can you take over here?”

  Mishima nods. She swirls her tea, waits for what hasn’t been said. Finally, she asks, “And?”

  Korbin knows what she means. “No solid casualty numbers yet—there’s stuff being floated online, but none of it comes from us. They must all be algorithms or straight-up guesses, because I’m pretty sure no one has better info than we do and we’re lost.”

  “Order of magnitude?”

  “At a guess? Nanmannin, tens of thousands,” Korbin says. “But nothing to back that up. Could be way higher, or even lower. At the time it hit, many people would have been on their commute rather than in a building, which should help. But there’s a lot of damage.”

  “Emergency services?”

  “Deployed and responding. Some better than others, of course.” Korbin rolls her eyes. “Sony-Mitsubishi teams are all over the place and seem to know their stuff. Hello Kitty, not so much.” She’s talking not about the corporate conglomerate that includes Sanrio, but about ChouKawaii, a single-centenal government specializing in fanfic and cute characters. Economically they do pretty well, but apparently they haven’t been investing much of the revenue in disaster preparedness.

  “Any big civil disturbances?” Mishima asks. She knows compiling assessments is one of the most valuable things she can do right now, but she can’t help itching to get out on the street.

  “Not that we’ve heard. But all the major party reps are nose-diving in, naturally, so if you consider that disturbing the peace…”

  Mishima wishes that she were in one of the places where spitting on the floor would be an acceptable response. But there was something else she wanted to ask. “What about shelter? It’s cold out there.”

  Korbin shrugs and it turns into a shiver. “We’ve heard reports of gatherings in the usual places: parks, community centers, high school gyms. The museums. There are a lot of people in Ueno, and we’ve even heard of congregations in the park around the Imperial Palace.”

  “Okay.” Mishima goes back to her files. “I’ll have these done in a few.” She is constructing a table of the intel, with casualty and injury projections, types of damage, commodities needed, and specific problems, and at
the same time adding it to the map. Most of the incident reports are text-only, and Mishima feels herself detaching, slipping into a state in which her mind bypasses emotion and narrative and gets the job done. It helps that she can’t plot any intrigue around this; deus ex machina, Mishima notes grimly, seems to be good for her concentration. When she’s finished the batch, they upload a brief bulletin with the Information they’ve gleaned and do another. By the time Korbin switches to uplink recovery, the map of Tokyo glowing in front of them is starting to look like the new, devastated reality.

  * * *

  Ken spends most of the day collating data about the needs in the Policy1st shelters. Runners—high school–age interns, mostly—show up at the office from one of the eight shelters in Policy1st’s three centenals, transmit a chunk of numbers and one-word questionnaire answers using line-of-sight, and head back out. Ken’s itching to get out there himself, but Suzuki pointed out that none of those kids could do his job, and they know the neighborhoods better than he does. Besides, the numbers are coming in almost nonstop, and another two shelters have opened. Ken focuses on his spreads, trying to keep his eyes away from the workspace next to him: Mizuno is working on a missing-persons database, and projected above his desk is a growing gallery of pictures brought in by terrified relatives and friends. Every once in a while, one gets shifted to the LOCATED file, but new photographs are coming in far faster. Whenever Ken catches a glimpse of one of those faces, he feels the sorrow and anger clogged up inside him. Instead he zooms in on the numbers: heated blankets, diaper sizes, bags of rice. Soon, Suzuki told him, the offers of assistance will begin pouring in, and then they’ll need to be able to match them with the needs as quickly as possible.

  When Suzuki finally tells him that he should go check on his apartment, some fourteen hours after he started working, it takes Ken almost an hour to get there. Public transportation, which normally works by compiling all requests and calibrating the optimal route, is completely down because of the Information disruption. Ken thinks about hitching, but the faces he sees in driver’s seats are uniformly pinched with worry.