Infomocracy Page 18

  Mishima is telling a fairy tale about protection from the abrasiveness of the world; Ken hears a cautionary story about the excessive privilege of the irrationally adored. “Never would have happened in a Policy1st centenal.”

  “Almost makes me sorry I voted for them,” Mishima replies.

  It’s meant to be tart, zinging him for his lack of imagination, but Ken doesn’t even process her tone. He sees Mishima not as an idealist but as a pragmatist. Above all, he sees her as someone with her finger on the pulse. If she voted for Policy1st, they must actually have a chance. He squirms. “Do you mind if I just…”

  She glances up at his face and is instantly infected. “Yeah, I think we’ve held out long enough,” she says, already diving for her handheld. They lie next to each other on the airbed, each fiddling independently.

  Ken is first to break the silence. “I can’t get in,” he says. “I wonder if something’s wrong with the signal out here. We should go to the restaurant for lunch; they should be projecting—”

  “Wait a sec.” Mishima puts her right hand out, touches his forearm while her left continues to tap and sweep. On her handheld screen is an alert from five hours ago, an alert that she did not hear. She finally manages to connect to the Information intranet, and what she sees there is the virtual equivalent of a sudden blackout in a crowded room: shock, yelling, panic.

  Information is down.

  “What?” Ken asks when a minute has passed. He thought he was holding up well by staying away from Information yesterday and especially last night, but voluntarily, virtuously taking a vacation is entirely different from being exiled. His foot is tapping, his mouth dry. He’s going into withdrawal. “If it’s not working here, we should go uplink from…”

  Mishima’s mind flies through a barely hypothetical chain of events. She hooked up with Ken at that party; she was incautious after the earthquake and he figured out she was influential; Domaine got to him somehow, used him to distract her … or maybe not Domaine; he could be working for—Suzuki! He said he was working for Suzuki; could Policy1st be in on it? Or is Suzuki going rogue? How could she let herself get taken out of the game at the crucial moment? And what will happen now? If Ken is supposed to distract her until the election is over, what will he do when he realizes she’s on to him?

  Ken is struggling to keep his frustration under control. So, maybe there’s been a transitory connection glitch in this country that doesn’t really exist. It’s still early; no results will be up yet, except for those rare centenals where all hundred thousand inhabitants have voted already. They’ll be connected before it matters. He’s been looking forward to watching the results with Mishima, as if she could bring him luck somehow. And she’s knowledgeable and passionate about it, like he is. They’ll find a way to get connected. Worst case, they can get back on her crow; extreme worst case, they can take it back to the tip of India. Connection failures happen, even with today’s technology, Ken’s spent enough time in remote locations to accept that.

  “Maybe we’re better off without it,” Ken says, stretching his arms and getting ready to swing himself off the bed. He means, We’re in a landless paradise and it’s too early to find out anything anyway, so we might as well enjoy the moment instead of being tethered to our handhelds.

  That is not what Mishima hears.

  She jams her palm into the airbed controller, dropping them both down to the mattress, absorbs the shock into a roll toward her side of the bed and reaches into her pile of clothes, her fingers finding the narrow, lightweight haft immediately. In the same motion, she swings back toward the center of the bed and juts her stiletto into Ken’s still-bare thigh.

  CHAPTER 18

  Shamus is in no hurry to vote. His centenal in Addis is reliably AfricanUnity (a somewhat optimistic name, which the government is nowhere near achieving), and while he still enjoys voting for it as a form of private self-expression, there’s no urgency. Still, he doesn’t want to forget. He wakes up early on voting day. It feels like a holiday to him, after the crush of preelection work and before the self-congratulatory post-election run of advids starts, and he takes his time, going to a hotel down the street to drink freshly roasted coffee on their pleasantly shady terrace. After a plate of chechebsa, he rinses his hands and pulls out his handheld to vote. Nothing works, though; he can’t get in. He looks for the manager of the restaurant, a balding Ethiopian man Shamus has known for years. The man catches his eye and shrugs. Not working for anyone. Shamus registers that the bar’s normal projection of football replays and Ethiopian music videos, which plays at low intensity even over breakfast, is missing. He starts to have a sinking feeling about the postelection celebration contracts he was hoping for.

  * * *

  If it were up to Suzuki, he would set his handheld to auto-vote the nanosecond he was eligible to do so, get it over with quickly and efficiently. It’s not like he’s going to get talked into changing his mind halfway through Election Day. He guffaws at the thought. But, for better or for worse, he is one of the public faces of Policy1st, and public voting is an important part of political theater.

  He’s in Paris for the election, a highly symbolic choice. Policy1st was dreamed up at the Institute of Political Studies in the seventh arrondissement, and yet until this year, they had never won a centenal in the city. Now buoyed by a coalition of anti–mantle tunnel preservationists, poli-sci geeks, and young parents convinced by the education plan, Policy1st’s victory in the centenal that covers most of the fourteenth arrondissement is all but certain. The plan is for Suzuki to vote there, standing in the park in front of the old Mairie building with a cheering group of volunteers.

  Policy1st has sponsored a street festival that carefully conforms to the no-campaigning regulations for expenditures and events on Preelection and Election Days: the government’s name and logo do not appear anywhere on the booths offering music and free food, the bouncy castle in the shape of the Eiffel Tower, or the giant steampunk-themed carrousel. There is no grand speech, but the music all winds simultaneously to a close and the food vendors are all refreshing their stock as the volunteers swirl into an attention-drawing crowd around Suzuki and he pulls out his handheld with a flamboyant flourish. There is no doubt that this moment will be picked up by the news compilers.

  The only problem is, he can’t seem to vote. Holding an absorbed smile on his face—part of his professional skill set—Suzuki taps and taps, even whispers to his handheld, but nothing works. Finally, he raises the handheld above his head, fingers strategically blocking the screen from even the most high-def camera, and waves it back and forth, wearing the same triumphant smile as he would if he had managed to vote. The volunteers cheer, as they’re supposed to, but it doesn’t sound as loud as it should. Suzuki notes that some of them are fiddling with their tablets or handhelds too. He wonders which techie is to blame for this screwup and how to make sure that person never works for Policy1st again.

  * * *

  Both of them stare at the pointed steel. Ken is starting to drastically reassess the situation, their relationship, everything he thinks he knows about her.

  “What—what kind of an Information worker are you?” Ken finally asks. He can’t seem to take the stiletto seriously. It happened too fast, he likes her too much, they were getting along too well. It barely hurts, as though she had thumped him in the thigh with her fist. It’s a joke, such a funny joke he almost starts to laugh before he catches himself. Instead, he squirms upward toward a sitting position, his left leg still outstretched with that hilarious knife sticking out of it.

  “I think I should be asking who you are,” Mishima says in a conversational tone. “Who sent you?”

  “Who sent me? What are you talking about?” Ken is thinking about Suzuki, about Suzuki telling him not to see her anymore. Did he know something about her Ken doesn’t? The burn is stinging and spreading and he reaches for the handle of the knife, but Mishima grabs his wrist with a grip like a magnet, and Ken drags his eyes aw
ay from the blade in his leg to meet hers.

  “Who are you working for? Anarchy? Domaine? Or is it Policy1st? Are they the ones behind—”

  “What the—who? You know I work for Policy1st! Behind what?”

  Does she know, though? Mishima is trying to remember if she’s ever had any independent corroboration of that. Ken makes another grab for the knife, but she deflects him easily. “Why here? Was the idea to get me as far away as possible?”

  “As far away from what? We’re on vacation! This was your idea!”

  It was, in fact, her idea. Reluctantly, Mishima does her own reassessing. “If you’re trying to…” But the shock is wearing off, the pain is ratcheting up, and Ken is losing it.

  “Get this thing out of me!” He kicks and wriggles until he frees his hands briefly, and Mishima has to use one arm to pin his upper body to the headboard.

  “Hang on.” She gets his wrist again, made easier by the fact that it’s none too steady. “Wait—just wait a second, and I’ll fix it.” She gets his eyes focused on hers. “You’re not—behind this, you’re not with whoever’s behind this?”

  “What are you talking about? What is going on?” Ken yells.

  Mishima bounces off the bed again, this time grabbing something from her bag on the floor. She’s back before he can move, swiftly extracting the knife with her left hand—the skin tenting around it briefly before it pops out—and slapping something—a poultice? a balm? a patch?—over the wound with her right. And holding it there. The whole top of his thigh goes cold-numb, but what does that mean? Is that thing healing him or just deadening the pain? Ken is a little afraid to ask, partly because he’s not sure he wants the answer, but mostly because Mishima’s still holding the stiletto.

  “In an hour or two, you won’t even know it happened,” she assures him, a little too breezily. Mishima is feeling somewhat ashamed of herself.

  Ken shakes his head. “Who the hell are you?”

  Mishima shifts, disappearing the knife somewhere and grabbing her handheld instead. She holds her screen out to him. “All communications are down,” she manages to say. “Information is down.”

  Ken stares at her, and it, blankly. “You stabbed me because this hotel has a lousy Information connection?”

  “No, not only here,” Mishima snaps, her control failing again. “Everywhere! Look!” She shakes the screen in front of him. “That’s the Information intranet. No one can do anything. No one can find out anything. They don’t know what’s going on. All. Information. Is. Down.”

  Ken gapes. “It’s election sabotage.”

  “It’s war.”

  CHAPTER 19

  “I have to go.” Mishima still feels guilty about the knife wound in Ken’s thigh. It was only a surface puncture, but she may have overstated slightly the effectiveness of the healing pad she slapped on him; while it’s rebuilding muscle as they speak, and he shouldn’t notice any decrease in mobility or strength, there probably will be a tiny little scar. She hears the brusqueness in her tone and modulates. “I mean, I have to get back to work. This is a mess, and they’re going to need me. Do you want to stay? Should I drop you somewhere?”

  Ken considers his options. He’s calm again, and he wonders if that patch on his leg might include a sedative. Even artificial calm is better than panicking, he tells himself. “Where are you going?” It occurs to him that if he lets her go now, with this uncomfortable sputter of violence between them, he will never see her again, or at least they will never see each other in the same way. Which might be for the best, if she treats all her lovers this way.

  Mishima is also thinking. Her instinct is to go to Tokyo, but it’s far, and every hour of travel is an hour that efforts and initiatives and solutions are being made without her. If the intranet is up, it doesn’t matter which office she’s in, as long as they have the massive hardware of a hub. And, as much as she hates to admit it, people. She wants to be around people, other people who are freaking out and working frantically, even if she knows that feeling won’t last long once she gets there.

  “Doha,” she says.

  Ken nods, as though it’s what he expected. “That works for me.”

  * * *

  The resort’s anachronistic semaphore system turns out to be extremely fortuitous; despite the complete collapse of digital communications, the launch comes for them almost as soon as they raise the flag. Fortunately, the suite was paid in advance, because as they sweep through the lobby, Mishima sees a gaggle of confused customers in front of a sweating manager. She considers stopping to tell them that it’s not a local technical failure that prevents them from paying their bills, but a global attack on all transactions and interactions—on humanity, basically—but they are already past, and she suspects it wouldn’t help, anyway. They clamber into the crow, she sets the best course she can manage using hard maps, and they take off.

  Mishima stays at the controls far longer than she has to. Every time she looks at Ken, she sees his shocked face as he yelled, “Get this thing out of me!” and every time she feels worse about it. Instead of looking at him, she wants to curl up with Jane Eyre, or a highly compressed season of The Wire, or Crow Wars V, but she can’t because she’s too polite (or embarrassed) to use content in front of a guest. She wishes she hadn’t let him come along for the ride.

  What she can do without guilt is work, so she throws herself into that. Normally, this would work almost as well as a great narrative, but the patchy intranet connection is frustrating and disconcerting, and she can’t immerse.

  As she picks away at the gaps, testing an uplink in Goa, a route around a corrupted server in Prague, a cache in Alexandria, she starts to sense a pattern in the metadata. She configures her handheld to visualize it: a partial, shifting map of what she can and can’t access. When she can’t deal with resetting one more broken connection, she sits back and looks at it. Far more satisfying as a puzzle. She spins it around, looks from different angles. Information isn’t down. She tests this, calls up some random data: last year’s top-grossing song, the date the subcontinental highway was completed, the number of high schools in the nearest centenal. Only the last one gives her any trouble, and as soon as she modifies to look for older data—six months ago instead of this minute—she finds it. Information is still there; it’s new Information that she can’t get. News. Updates and annotations, which are designed to provide up-to-the-second Information, don’t happen; since a lot of protocols are designed around updating to the nanosecond, that’s thrown off some processes and led to global delays and errors. Communications are completely knocked out as far as she can tell. And anything relating to the election is particularly complicated.

  That seems to confirm their initial assessment. (She remembers Ken saying “It’s election sabotage” and sneaks a glance at his corner of the room. He’s focused on his own handheld, and she wonders what he can possibly be doing.) This isn’t a sweeping attack on infrastructure but a strike aimed specifically at blacking out the election.

  That is helpful, but it doesn’t make her feel much better. Even if this is an attack on the election, that doesn’t mean it won’t have broader repercussions. What is going on out there in the world? Has someone initiated a coup? Are close-fought centenals rioting? Are governments unilaterally declaring themselves the winner in individual jurisdictions? Do citizens even know that their votes are lost? Has war, as she suggested so grandiosely, actually started, or are the pieces still falling into place?

  Mishima decides she doesn’t care about being polite anymore. It’s her damn crow. She goes into the cabin and shuts the door behind her.

  Instead of diving into some form of narrative content, though, she goes back to work, reading through what her colleagues are saying on the intranet. She’s been keeping an eye out for Yelinka Korbin, mostly because of the working rhythm they developed during the last crisis, but also because Korbin works on Heritage. Mishima would love to know what the Supermajority holder is saying about all of this
, and what they were saying and doing right before it. Korbin isn’t logged on, though, hasn’t logged on since the intranet got back up six hours ago (only twenty-eight minutes down. Not bad, Mishima thinks). On a hunch, she checks log-ins by location. No one has logged on from the Tokyo office. They aren’t connected to the intranet yet.

  Or maybe they’ve been attacked.

  Mishima glances at their (calculated, not updated) location on the map, grabbed by an urge to reroute for Tokyo after all. But she stops herself. If the office isn’t back online yet, she won’t be able to do much from there, and in the very unlikely (she tells herself) event that they’ve been attacked in the physical world, it would all be over by the time she arrived. A bleak thought.

  She runs a quick check: Tokyo is not the only office that has not checked in. Seoul, San José, Budapest, Glasgow. A number of other smaller ones. No pattern that she can make out, at least not yet. Why can’t she just know what’s happening on the other side of the world? She feels blind.

  Her stomach gurgles uncomfortably. She—they—didn’t eat that morning, haven’t eaten since last night’s curry. And of course the food-cooker is in the other cabin. She considers restricting herself to the emergency snacks she keeps in the storage compartment in the bathroom, then tells herself to grow up and goes back into the work area.

  “Do you want something to eat?”

  Ken looks up from his handheld, starts to shake his head, then changes his mind. “Seems like a good idea,” he says.

  Mishima goes to program the food-cooker. Her scalp prickles and she adjusts her angle so that she can see Ken in her peripheral vision, but he hasn’t moved. Just her damn overactive narrative drive again.

  “How’s your leg?” she asks.

  “It’s fine,” Ken says. He bends and stretches experimentally. The numbness has faded and there’s no pain. “Totally fine. How long should I leave this thing on it?”