Infomocracy Page 19

  “No harm in keeping it there a little longer.” It can be removed as soon as symptoms have subsided, but Mishima would rather be on the safe side. “I don’t think I said”—she brings over two bowls of rice with nutrition sprinkles—“that I’m sorry.”

  Ken resists the urge to snap back, Are you? Are you saying it now? and arranges the rice bowl and chopsticks while he looks for a response. She hasn’t started eating yet.

  “Thank you,” he says finally. After that, they eat in silence.

  * * *

  Mishima’s eyes only flash with one update during the meal, and it isn’t a useful one. Another person sending out a ream of urgent questions on the intranet.

  “They targeted the election,” Ken says.

  Mishima’s eyes refocus on him.

  “It’s not general Information. A lot of old stuff is still available. It’s the election.”

  She refrains from saying “Obviously” or even “I know,” because she can’t trust her tone not to be biting, bitter, or rude. And how did he figure that out so quickly, anyway?

  “Who stands to lose?” he wonders aloud, this time not looking at her.

  Mishima has been asking herself that question, but the answers are inconclusive. “It could be Heritage,” she says, “if they suspected they were going to lose the Supermajority. Or one of their competitors, if they thought they were going to be close but not close enough.”

  Ken hesitates, but the tug to reknit their rapport is too strong. “Before this happened, we were following some … hints. That Liberty might be planning a war.”

  Mishima reassesses him again. How does he know about that? “We were looking into something along those lines too,” she says, thinking through it. “But it looked like they were going to try to justify it electorally. What would they gain by knocking out the system without waiting to see if they could win the Supermajority legitimately? They were certainly in the running for it.”

  Ken is reluctant to give up on Liberty as the bad guys. “What if it’s a fake-out? They knock out the election to show that they can—no, not that they can but that it can happen. It comes back online in a few hours, or a day—long enough so that everyone notices. But Liberty has shown they can handle it. For all we know, Information is up in Liberty centenals right now!”

  Mishima checks, routing a connection through a server in a nearby Liberty centenal. “It’s not.”

  “Or a distraction? This way, no one will know if they’re taking over neighboring centenals until it’s too late.”

  “If that’s the case,” Mishima says grimly, “there’s not much we can do about it.”

  * * *

  Back in the cabin, Mishima does what she should have done a long time ago: check Ken’s Information. Everything that’s publicly available and everything else that she can scrounge access to. His public profile is smooth and deceptive: student in a doctoral program at some utterly unreputed university, with the recent addition that he’s working with Policy1st on his research. Misleading, yes, but transparently so; most of the large governments have semiofficial people working for them to suss out missed chances without alerting their competitors.

  That gives her the idea to set her Information to compile a list of suspected clandestine operators for the major governments and their last known movements. It fails almost immediately. She sets the timeframe farther and farther back until it will run, but she doubts the outdated intel will do her much good. She leaves it building in the background while she delves deeper into Ken’s life.

  His most immediate job before becoming a fake graduate student was two years earlier and apparently unrelated: as a supervisor in a Sony-Mitsubishi projector factory, having worked his way up from foreman. She correlates his movements over those two intervening years with Suzuki’s, and with a little more digging, she is able to turn up a temporary ID photo from a SecureNation garage fifteen months ago that identifies him as a Policy1st driver. Did he have any political leanings before that? She does a targeted search and finds that though he has no college degree, he did take classes at a junior college while he was working at the factory: political science, economics, and something called Shifting Conceptualities of Social Justice. Media Literacy and a follow-up, Media Management. Did he choose those, or was that already Suzuki? Or someone else?

  His personal history, though not readily available, is easier to find: born in a Sony-Mitsubishi centenal in São Paolo, to issei. Seven years younger than she is, but she had suspected as much. Orphaned at twelve. High school in Japan. Moderate Sony-Mitsubishi scholarships to support him through that, but no follow-up for university. Instead, that just-above-menial-level job at one of their plants. She wonders how he met Suzuki. Surely the data is there, if she had the time to search for it, combing vids and feeds and visitor logs in the months before his job ended.

  Mishima leans back against the wall. This hasn’t been as helpful as she hoped. She can read this as the story of an underprivileged kid, interested in politics, who found an influential mentor in one of the most powerful policy-based governments in the world, and has been doing mildly dodgy but not outright illegal work to help that government gain power. Excitement, intrigue, world travel, the promise of a government job at the end of it, something that will give him the status he’s never had.

  But then again, she can read it as the story of a man who has lied about almost everything and has every reason to keep doing so. Maybe even this is a cover story, one she could crack if she had the time. Maybe he was a Sony-Mitsubishi mole at Policy1st. Maybe he’s spying for them right now. He’s very self-assured for a driver and factory worker. Then again, Mishima herself didn’t graduate from university, so she can understand bootstrapping.

  She’s either going to have to trust him or not. The one thing this exercise has made clear to her is how much she wants to.

  CHAPTER 20

  Qatar, though it’s no longer officially called that, is one of those vestigial countries that have managed to both participate in elections and survive as something approximating the nation-state it used to be. Its AlThani government has even managed to expand, winning centenals on territory that formerly belonged to Bahrain and along the western edge of Abu Dhabi. Foreign nationals vote in their home centenals, regardless of how long they have lived or worked on the peninsula, and AlThani regularly polls above 90 percent among its citizens.

  They’re gaming the system, and Mishima doesn’t like it, but she’s learned to live with it. AlThani offers Information low-rent offices and tax breaks on high-tech infrastructure, so the compound there is well-appointed and frequently hosts those conferences and meets that the hierarchy deems worthy of physical face-to-face. Mishima knows Doha well enough to have a favorite Persian restaurant and Lebanese pastry shop, and a place she’s been a couple of times for projector tune-ups. Even with the navigation data still on the fritz, she’s easily able to pilot to the Information hub.

  “Are you going to get a flight somewhere?” Mishima is not sure whether she cares; she’s very successful in sounding like she doesn’t.

  Ken hesitates. Even if Mishima wants nothing more to do with him—and she’s the one who stabbed him, so he’s not sure what her problem is—she’s still his best chance to be involved in whatever’s going on. He could go to the nearest Policy1st office—he’s not even sure where that would be. Maybe Tehran? Or Amman?—and offer his services, but if he was going to do that, he should have gone back to Chennai. He could try to find Suzuki and act like the personal assistant that he’s apparently destined to be, but he’s still upset about being passed over. He’s not sure he wants to work for Suzuki anymore. Plus, from what he’s seen of Mishima and her friends back in Tokyo, Information isn’t the boring hidebound bureaucracy everyone says it is. It’s way closer to the heart of things than Policy1st, and that’s where he wants to be.

  “Um, do you think they need any help? I figure I’ll do at least as much good here as at Policy1st.”

  Mishi
ma looks like she’s about to tell him to get lost, but then she wavers, and Ken feels a surge of pride. If she hates him for whatever mixed-up personal reasons, then any help she gives him now must be because she thinks he’s worth it.

  “Come on,” she says. “Let’s see what the situation is.”

  * * *

  From the state of the intranet, she’d half-expected to walk into a tornado, people screaming impossible orders, tablets and chairs flying through overlapping projections. Instead, the Doha Information hub occupies a state of controlled chaos: quiet, fast-moving, dense. There are far more people than usual, and nobody is laughing; Mishima sees tight mouths, gripped fists, and urgent, low-voiced side conversations. She catches a glimpse of Roz hunched over a workstation and pauses. From her gestures and posture, Mishima can see she is sorting through a hunk of data.

  “Try her,” she says to Ken, nodding her head at Roz. He looks, nods, moves. “Good luck,” Mishima says to his back, thinking she might not see him again.

  Ken glances back at her. “You too,” he says. “Call me when you can.” And he turns away before she can react.

  She stares after him, amazed that he still wants to talk to her. Well, sending him to Roz might change his mind about that. Not that Roz is awful; given the events of the last eight hours, Roz should be a far more pleasant companion than Mishima herself. But she is very good at painstakingly sorting input, and Mishima’s not sure how Ken feels about essential, thankless work.

  “Mishima!”

  She looks up to see Stanislaw the statistician hurrying her way.

  “Mishima, what are you doing here? I’m so glad to see you!” He throws his arms around her briefly. “We thought you were in Tokyo.”

  “What happened in Tokyo?”

  “Sorry, sorry.” Stanislaw raises his hands. “We don’t know anything. Mishima! We don’t know, okay? They’re probably fine. We just haven’t been able to get through to them.”

  “No contact?” she asks. They are walking together along the wide, fan-lined corridor toward the strategy department.

  He shakes his head.

  “Are they the only ones? I thought I saw a few more.”

  “Tokyo’s the biggest one that hasn’t checked in yet. We’re still missing…” He blinks and glances quickly back and forth, checking the latest at eyeball level. “Glasgow, Kiev, and San José, as well as a few smaller offices, but Tokyo’s the only one we’d expect to be back on already.”

  “Can’t we call someone else in the area and ask them to walk over there?”

  “We’ve asked Kansai and Sendai to send people, but everything’s so disrupted…”

  “How can there possibly be no comms?” Mishima asks. “Can’t we … voice-call them or something?” Of course they can’t. “Or send a—” Then she stops so suddenly that Stanislaw goes on a few paces before he realizes she’s not beside him.

  “What?” he asks, turning back toward her.

  “A telegram. We can send a telegram! Remember? Like three security chiefs ago, oh, what was his name, the one who sent me that idiotic message during the summit…”

  “Qasim,” Stanislaw almost laughs. “He wanted to take you to his desert tent and grill kebabs for you on the bonfire! Oh, good times.”

  “Right, right! Remember, he was all about redundancy? He had telegraphs installed in all the major offices.”

  “Oh, yeah! He convinced them the cost was negligible compared to the benefit—”

  “—in moments like these,” Mishima finishes. “Where’s ours? Does it still work? Who would know?”

  “Roman, the infotech.” Before he finishes speaking, they are running toward his office.

  * * *

  It turns out that the telegraph machine does work, although it’s turned off and nobody knows how to use it. The director of the Doha office, Yasmin, power walks over while Roman, having finally found a converter for the power plug, speed-reads the manual.

  “This could work?” she asks.

  “Te-ó-ricamente,” Roman says.

  “Odds that the Tokyo machine is turned off?” Mishima mutters to Stanislaw.

  There’s a hum, and then a glow. Qasim the ex-security director believed in redundancy but not regression, and the telegraph has a digital terminal. Although it is connected to the original submarine line, it translates typed text automatically into code.

  “How do we send to Tokyo?” Yasmin asks.

  Roman is still skimming the manual at eyeball level. “There’s no addressing and no operators. This is an emergency system, so it’s designed to blast the message to all Information hubs on the loop.”

  “So potentially anyone else with a connected telegraph could overhear it?” Yasmin asks.

  Roman shrugs. “Does anyone else have a connected telegraph?”

  Mishima tries to look up the answer on Information, but even connected to Doha’s giant uplink, it’s slow and stuttery.

  “We can send a nonproprietary message, like ‘Tokyo, please respond with condition,’” Roman is suggesting, when the machine lights up and beeps. They all jump.

  “What was that?” Yasmin asks.

  “We’re receiving,” Roman says.

  The first line reads TOKYO. The rest of the message needs no translation: SOS. SOS. SOS. SOS.

  Mishima is moving. “Send whatever security you can spare to meet me at my crow, on the roof, ten minutes,” she calls to Yasmin. “And contact the teams from Kansai and Sendai; tell them to be ready for trouble!”

  CHAPTER 21

  Ken’s not sure that Roz has noticed he’s not Information staff. As soon as his faltering self-introduction got to the point of offering help, she threw him a huge set of files and explained what she needed, and neither of them has come up for air since. At some point, Roz comes over and puts a mug of tea (red, not green, and very sweet) by his arm; at another point, somebody else refills it.

  Finally, Roz taps his arm, as if he were deaf. Ken wonders if she’s already said something he didn’t hear. “I’m taking a break,” she says. “There’s free food in the canteen.” Ken nods and follows her, too dazed for polite conversation. He checks the time on his handheld. They’ve been working for six hours straight.

  The canteen is three floors down, large but sectioned off into smaller dining areas to seem less cavernous, with sand-colored walls and a casual, techie feel. There’s a payscreen, but it’s turned off. Free food for the duration, Ken guesses, helping himself from the heaping pot of seasoned rice mixed with okra and bits of what he thinks is lamb. He looks around for Roz and, not wanting her to think he’s trying to weasel out of the work, sits down next to her at an otherwise empty table. She stops shuffling the food into her mouth long enough to ask, “You okay?” and then, “Who did you say you are, again?”

  Ken shrugs, hoping to answer both questions that way. It has occurred to him that Mishima might have suggested this work to get rid of him. He shouldn’t be surprised; she’s been trying to get rid of him ever since the comms fell apart. He rubs his thigh absently. “Um, Mishima brought me,” he says.

  “Ah,” Roz says, nodding as if that explains everything. Ken guesses she’s about Mishima’s age, maybe a little older. Dark brown skin, black hair twisted along both sides of her head into a curl in the back. Turquoise-and-navy salwar kameez, probably what she wore to work a day and a half ago for what should have been a normal, insane Election Day. “Where are you based?”

  Ken isn’t sure how to answer. He remembers asking Mishima something similar and wants to say nowhere like she did, but doubts he can pull it off. He settles on “Tokyo,” and Roz looks stricken and puts a hand on his arm.

  “Sorry,” she says, which Ken takes to be about the earthquake. He shrugs again and looks for a change of subject, but she has already gone back to guzzling her rice, as if she had made a faux pas and wanted to give him time to recover. He takes the opportunity to look around. If he’s honest, he’s hoping to spot Mishima, but in the divided, cellular dining
hall, it’s hard to see anyone for more than a passing moment.

  “I guess the work is good for you, then?” Roz is asking. She is pinching the last grains of rice between her fingers, the rest of the plate streaked clean already. Ken is impressed.

  “It’s good,” he says. “It’s exactly what I want to do right now.”

  “Great,” she says. “I’ll see you back up there when you’re ready.” She nods and gets up, taking her plate with her to some recycling spot.

  Ken doesn’t like the work; it’s painful and exhausting. They are sorting records by hand, millions of them, and it is boring and exacting at the same time. But it is true that it’s exactly what Ken wants to do, because about an hour and a half into it, he realized that the records they are sorting are the votes that came in before the system crashed.

  Roz showed him how to check each record for key data points and what forgery indicators to look for, certain data fields that should look a certain way, a string of digits that he has to verify each time using a program she’s rigged up. “Or anything else that looks strange,” she said. He supposes they’re looking for a clue, something to tell them what went wrong, what triggered the failure, or who might have done it. Maybe they want to have a partial count done by hand, since they can’t trust their computer systems now. If that’s the case, he doesn’t understand why anyone would trust him and Roz to do it better (but then, he doesn’t know Roz’s reputation). It doesn’t matter. He’s sorting ballots, holding them in his workspace and in his head. It’s almost better that they’re ballots invalidated by the circumstances: no one else will ever see them or know the result that might have been.

  When he realized what he was looking at, Ken’s first thought was that he might learn something to help Policy1st, as though this were an incredibly realistic poll. He spent the next two hours debating whether or not it was ethical, given that he had volunteered his time and been accepted on the recommendation of a friend (or whatever Mishima was) and at the same time trying to figure out an angle that would be useful. Then he realized he didn’t care. He is seeing the underskin of the election, the tiny teeth on the gears that make the machine work. He just wants to watch. What buoys him through the last stretch of his exhaustion is the knowledge that he is now a completely verifiable election geek.