Null States Read online

  “This is…”

  “The minutes,” the council leader explains.

  “On paper?”

  “Well, yes, we take notes by hand, usually.”

  “What about that?” Charles asks, gesturing at the autorecorder niched into the wall.

  “Ah.” The council leader, and indeed the whole council, turn to look at the recorder as though they’re noticing it for the first time. “Yes. You see, the electricity was out.”

  In fact, Roz notices, the autorecorder is turned off now, even though the fan is turning. She starts composing a citation for lack of recording of government meetings but stops partway through. It’s an important transparency point, but they may have further questions for these sheikhs, and considering that they will be notified as soon as the complaint is filed, she might as well take the time to check electricity status for the day in question and other mitigating factors fully before she sends it.

  * * *

  Mishima meant it when she said the job was interesting. No government remotely near this size has ever removed itself from micro-democracy, and trying to disentangle these tightly clinging economies is a fascinating challenge. Can far-flung Heritage centenals generate everything they need through intra-governmental trade? How might terms of trade change? Are sanctions likely, and if so, how will they affect the newly independent government? An added benefit to this job is that Mishima is in a position to skew the results, hopefully introducing a bit more worry into the minds of the decision-makers.

  She doesn’t let it distract her from her real mission. The main difficulty she has is zeroing in on her targets. This is such a big place that she could pretend to get lost in the corridors for days without stumbling on the right people for the intel she needs. Instead, she puts recorders in the canteen and listens to a lot of gossip, using an algorithm that shifts word timing and frequencies slightly to allow her to listen to multiple conversations at once.

  “Do you think they gave her P-20 grade position?”

  “They call that authentic mohinga?”

  “No way! She should have at least fifteen years’ seniority for that, and she only has, what, twelve?”

  “Did you see Boyling Point last night?”

  “Ooh, I love that necklace!”

  “How fast can you finish that report? I need you working on advids for the secession.”

  “But why else would she take a posting way out there?”

  “Thanks! I got it when I was in Cuzco last week.”

  “I didn’t really buy the second act. She wouldn’t have left Boyle like that.”

  “You should know by now not to eat anything they garnish with the label authentic.”

  “Unless the real reason comes out in an episode or two.”

  “Which target demographic?”

  “Maybe she likes the work?”

  “What, you think she’s a spy?”

  “888. We want them to stay open to trade with us—or, ideally, join us!”

  Mishima snorts at that last one and covers it with a cough in case her officemates are listening. Information has analysts undercover in most of the major governments, and there are no signs that anyone else is thinking of joining the rupture for the moment. Besides, 888 are highly trade-focused, and micro-democracy has been good for them. If Heritage can make secession work, though, the balance could tip.

  She sorts through everything she hears to find the loudest voices, the ones that say certain words most frequently, and then she follows them, casually, from a distance, turning into restrooms or stairwells, mapping the hierarchy of power. While staring at three-dimensional representations of economic networks projected ostentatiously overlarge in her workspace, she listens to conversations being recorded three floors away by tiny disks she has left clinging to doorjambs or under tables. By the end of day one, she has a pretty good grasp of the power ecosystem; by the time most people arrive at work on day two, she has bugged six conference rooms and three offices that she believes are likely to host high-level discussions about the secession.

  That belief is reinforced when, scooting back down the hall after leaving a recorder, Mishima passes a whole entourage heading the other direction. In the middle of a gaggle of men in business-classic and women looking airbrushed, she catches a sidelong glimpse of Cynthia Halliday.

  After the disgrace of the last election, Heritage’s long-time head of state, William Pressman, resigned. He hasn’t left Heritage territory since, and his extradition, along with the charges he may face, are one of the bargaining terms in the ongoing negotiations. He was replaced by Cynthia Halliday, one of those white women with shiny blown-dry hair and regular features who manages to convey youth and experience, competence and energy, in one fit, slightly underweight package. On the arm of her Ghanaian husband, a high-school sweetheart who grew up in the same Heritage centenal she did, she looked like the perfect breath of fresh air to bring Heritage back from its debacle.

  Pressman was an actual head of state as well as a figurehead. He was backed up by a coterie of advisors and balanced with a council of mostly old white men like himself, but according to Information sources, he wielded a lot of power, usually with calculated suavity and consensus-building, but on occasion with a streak of ugly entitlement. Now, however, the situation is less clear. Information already has plenty of good intel from Heritage in the nearly two years since the election, and Mishima knows perfectly well that Halliday’s role in decision-making at Heritage is limited. What they don’t know is exactly who is in charge. Some say that Pressman is still pulling strings from the background, although there’s been no evidence of this, and his movement is severely limited by the warrant out for his arrest. More plausible is that the old white dudes council has taken over the bulk of governing, possibly with a diminished role for the nominal head of state, or possibly with none at all. Since Halliday’s normally based in London, the fact that she’s here is significant. Is this decision epic enough that they need her buy-in? Or is she just being briefed for the press conferences?

  Mishima is not a hacker, but skimming daily schedules off the intranet doesn’t really count, even if they’re confidential, protected, and encrypted. Within two hours, she’s dropped additional recorders in every room that Halliday is scheduled to be in that day. The tricky part is that she has to pick all the recorders up at the end of every day. They’re inconspicuous, but not so inconspicuous that a motivated cleaner won’t find them, and she can’t take the risk of tipping Heritage off to the surveillance, even if it doesn’t get traced back to her.

  * * *

  “What do you think?” Roz asks Charles. They are walking to Fatima’s house. It is only 0.64 kilometers away, but Roz is already clammy inside her heat-reflective clothing and wishes she could have reasonably suggested they take the tsubame.

  “I think they’re not telling us everything,” Charles says. “Something strange is going on there. It might not be related to the assassination, though.”

  “Or it might be,” Roz says. She’s skimming the minutes she was handed as they walk. They portray exactly what the council said they would: a normal-verging-on-boring meeting about infrastructure project updates. “How are we going to figure out what it is?” She’s thinking about classic lie-detecting algorithms, not because she thinks they’ll work but because that’s just where her mind goes, but Charles has a better answer.

  “I can stick around here if you want, try to suss it out.”

  “That would be great!” Roz says. “Do you want me to stay a few days to help?”

  “I think one person will be less intimidating,” Charles says. “I want to build relationships with the sheikhs, see what they’ll tell me more informally.”

  “Look into these infrastructure projects, too,” Roz says, passing him the papers. “Just in case the content of that meeting was more than a smokescreen.”

  Charles had messaged ahead to Fatima, but she still keeps them waiting. The main house is concrete and brick, the
furniture relatively new and expensive for this context, although not what Roz would expect to see among her circle in Doha. Tired of sitting on the stain-resistant couch, she walks over to a window that looks out on an interior courtyard—the one where she endured the funeral, she realizes.

  “You are back.” Roz turns to see Fatima in the doorway. “What do you want this time?”

  She’s obviously addressing Roz. Charles answers instead. “Sorry to bother you again at this difficult and busy time, but we are still trying to find out who killed your husband.”

  Fatima does not move her gaze from Roz. “Prove to me that you and your colleagues did not kill him, and I’ll happily prove for you that I did not.”

  Roz injects gentleness into her tone from some stored-up repository. “Why don’t we, for the moment, assume that neither of us did so we can work together on finding justice?” She wants to kick herself for saying justice, but clearly there’s no winning here.

  “Promise me you’ll investigate your own people,” Fatima insists.

  More gentleness, Roz tells herself, but it doesn’t come out nearly as well this time. “I can look if you want, but I won’t find anything.”

  Fatima’s face turns dark with suppressed anger. “Are you so sure your colleagues are innocent?”

  Not necessarily innocent, but certainly good enough not to leave evidence. “I will investigate,” Roz says formally. “Now…” Direct, concrete questions. “Can you tell me where the tsubame was kept when your husband had it here?”

  For a moment, she thinks Fatima isn’t going to answer, but politeness or self-interest or some vestigial respect for Information or authority figures in general wins out, and she nods her head at the window. “Out there. In the courtyard.”

  Not terribly difficult to access. “Have there been any accidents or unusual incidents over the past few months?” Charles asks, and Fatima finally looks at him. Her fury seems to drop off as she does, and she droops as if exhausted.

  “No, none.” She stops and thinks again. “No.”

  Fatima has nothing else to add. When they finish speaking with her, they interview her cook, Aisha. She confirms where the tsubame was kept and tells them she remembers nothing unusual about the twenty-four hours before the assassination. “He arrived the night before; they ate dinner. He seemed normal. I went home, and by the time I came back the next morning, he had already left.”

  “Do you still think it will be useful to stay?” Roz asks Charles when they finally trudge back to the tsubame. “Today hasn’t been very productive.”

  “At least for a few days. It takes time to get people to trust you enough to tell you things.” He winks. “I just hope I can find an accommodation without bedbugs.”

  “Send me an evacuation contingency plan tonight,” Roz tells him as they reach the tsubame. She knows it’s irrational, but Djabal feels so much more exposed and hostile than Kas. “And let me know if you need anything—or anyone—from Kas at any point.”

  She looks the tsubame over; nothing seems to have changed since they left it. She’s tempted to crack it to make sure that valve is still there, but self-consciousness wins out over fear, and she says good-bye to Charles and climbs in.

  Roz had been slightly dreading the lonely ride back, but she puts on some thematic music and about half an hour in, the arid, monochrome, unperturbed landscape starts getting to her. The late afternoon sunlight stretches across the sand, turning low hills ruddy and drawing giant shadows behind the scattered, knobby trees. Twice she catches the dark iridescent flashes of Cinnyris osea. She’s almost sorry when she sees the evaporation plant that means she is nearing Kas.

  CHAPTER 14

  The Information liaison for Policy1st is Gerardo Vasconcielos. Born in a EuropeanUnion centenal in Santiago de Chile, he was able to move without migrating to Brussels, where EuropeanUnion still holds a number of centenals as well as its global headquarters. He worked for intergovernmental relations there for three years before signing on with Information. He has covered Policy1st for the past five years. Smooth and personable, he has good relationships with both the Mighty Vs while also maintaining a decent if somewhat Eurocentric roster of contacts at other levels in the hierarchy. His experience with bureaucracy proved helpful during the massive expansion Policy1st underwent after the last election. Guiding a new Supermajority has proven extremely challenging, however, and Nejime has projected in to accompany him for this meeting.

  “Any update on the status of the corporate funding case?” Vera asks before they start.

  “Not yet,” Gerardo answers.

  “PhilipMorris is ready to break ground on the mantle tunnel,” Veena adds, coming over from the window. They are at the Policy1st headquarters, sleek and completely sustainable, in Copenhagen. “And now 888 have submitted plans for two of their own. They are carving up the planet. We should have more say in this.”

  “888’s plans have not yet been approved, and as you know quite well the PhilipMorris tunnel goes from PhilipMorris centenal to PhilipMorris centenal,” Nejime says. “There’s no reason for anyone else to have input.”

  “They are digging through the mantle of the earth,” Veena says. Long practice in politics has taught her to temper her environmental passion—passion for survival, she calls it—in public, but she sees no reason to do so in a closed room meeting with intelligent people. “It could affect the entire planet.”

  “And we are the Supermajority,” Vera says.

  They have been told a million times. “The Supermajority does not get to decide what everyone else does. They do not get approval on the infrastructure projects of other governments, even those that might affect the whole planet. This is a micro-democracy, not a representative dictatorship.” It’s true that Heritage managed to carve out more space for itself during their twenty-year tenure, but that was mainly through clever use of their unwritten power—trade, cultural status, economic might. It’s possible that these subtle extensions of authority were given too much latitude, but since the transition, those at Information who believe in strong government autonomy have been united with those who would like to see a more powerful Information in pushing back against any repeat.

  “If we don’t, then who does?” Vera says. This is one of her tactics, pushing at the procedural questions and needling at the contradictions until she can force change. “Do you?”

  Nejime lets Gerardo answer that, preferring to maintain her aura of ambiguous power.

  “You know we don’t,” he says. His eyes dart to Nejime’s projection while he does; Gerardo is a consummate bureaucrat and can’t keep himself from calculating the interests of different parties, and the interest to himself in telling them what they want to hear. “But what we can do is better communicate the issues to make clear why 888’s project should undergo a more thorough environmental study.”

  The Mighty Vs roll their eyes at each other.

  “And what exactly,” Vera asks, “is going on with Heritage?”

  “What do you mean?” Gerardo asks, looking from one to the other. “Did they come up with some new reason to avoid handing over Pressman?”

  Nejime keeps her mouth shut. She gives Vera a sharp look though, wondering if Nougaz has done the same. The rumor probably comes from someone else, she decides; this is too big to stay quiet for long. She changes the subject. “We need to discuss the K-stan war.”

  Veena immediately turns her suspicious gaze on Nejime but lets Vera answer.

  “What do we need to discuss? Policy1st doesn’t hold any centenals bordering on the conflict. A null-states war has nothing to do with us.”

  “The governments that are contiguous with the conflict are, for the most part, poor and at risk of democratic destabilization.” Nejime minds her diction, letting that express implacability along with her flat tone. “If they fall, you will still have no centenals on the border, but if the second layer falls…” She opens up a map, zooms. “Your centenals 5290674 and 4803943 will be on the front l
ine. Of course, such a progression is extremely unlikely, since the overrunning of the first centenals would already irrevocably destabilize the system from which you draw your power.”

  Both Vs are staring at her stonily now.

  “Is this meant to be a threat?” Veena asks.

  “It’s meant to be realistic,” Nejime says. “You have been privileged to be able to ignore foreign policy—”

  “Ignore foreign policy?” Vera bursts in. “You mean get informed by Gerardo here that it’s none of our business whenever we express concern about Heritage, or PhilipMorris, or any of the other governments that have been baying for our blood since we won?”

  “By foreign policy, I’m referring to relations with states outside of micro-democracy,” Nejime says. “Unfortunately, we do not exist in a vacuum.”

  “And there are places where even Information gathers no data,” Veena put in with a grim satisfaction.

  “What exactly are you asking for?” Vera asks, not sounding in the least inclined to give it.

  “Support for defense of the front-line centenals and efforts to broker the peace.”

  “Support?”

  “Financial support, technical support, data if you have any,” Gerardo puts in. “We can be flexible. Let’s work with your capacities to figure out what we can do.”

  “I hope you’re requiring the same of Heritage,” Vera says sourly as he projects out a worksheet.

  Nejime doesn’t share that they’re in no position to require anything of Heritage right now. Behind her game face, she wonders which is the greater threat: the null states or the former Supermajority.

  * * *

  Mishima’s strategic recorder placement pays off. She has only audio, and the five or six voices are anonymous to her, but she’ll be able to run them through recognition later, hopefully once she has some good guesses to streamline the process.

  “Any updates from the hive?” A snarky, but unoriginal, reference to Information. “Are they going to negotiate?”