Infomocracy Read online

  * * *

  Even at top speeds, it takes Mishima’s crow more than ten hours to reach Tokyo, which is plenty of time for her to decide she’s made a mistake. The Sendai and Kansai teams will get there long before she does. By the time she arrives, whatever is going on will be over; she will have wasted more time traveling, and if Tokyo comms aren’t up she won’t be able to contribute for the rest of the crisis. In the meantime, she is staring at the intranet, where Roman has set up a dedicated space for them to stay in touch whenever the still-shaky connection allows. Most of the time, he has nothing new to tell her except that they are working on diagnostics to figure out what the hell happened to the carefully designed, presumably vault-locked voting system.

  Trying to find something to do, Mishima scans through the results from the search she ran earlier on clandestine government campaigners. Ken comes up in it, which she supposes should give her confidence that he is who he says he is, but that doesn’t seem to help. She looks down the rest of the list. Three PhilipMorris operatives across the globe; that Lebanese woman who works for Liberty, and another Liberty agent who Mishima doesn’t know, active mostly in southern and eastern Africa; a couple of people she recognizes from 888; and a raft of stringers for 1China.

  Unfortunately, there’s no recent data. Everything she sees for Ken, for example, is from before she met him. Mishima cross-refs and crunches what she’s got, but the patterns don’t resolve. The problem, she decides, is that she’s tired of working at eyeball level. She needs her privacy. Most of the seven-person security team is asleep on the floor anyway; it’s not like she needs to keep them entertained. She wishes she could sleep like them. That’s how you can tell they’re pros. She retreats into the bedroom and shuts the door.

  She is sitting on the futon, staring at movement plots, when Stanislaw pings her on the intranet.

  “Hey,” he says. “Can you hear me?”

  “Yeah, for now it’s good,” she says. “What’s up?”

  “The Kansai team turned back. They got our message before losing connection and decided they weren’t well-equipped enough to go into a security situation. We suggested they try to find some security support on the way in, cops or SecureNation personnel or something, but they didn’t feel it was feasible given the total lack of Information.”

  “And Sendai?”

  “They never left. The office decided they couldn’t spare the team.”

  “Okay,” Mishima says. “Any word on what knocked down comms?”

  Stanislaw hesitates. “I’m not privy to the top-level discussions,” he says.

  “But?”

  “But Maryam and the other techies keep saying it couldn’t be done, because the system is so decentralized. It’s easy to knock out, physically I mean, a server in one centenal. But everything else can be routed around it. Knock out one centenal and the system doesn’t even notice. Not even the people in the affected centenal would know.”

  “What about a virus?”

  “They say it’s unlikely. Well, they say it’s impossible, but I’m revising that down to unlikely, given that something happened. Essentially, everyone’s saying it couldn’t be done.”

  “Couldn’t be done without…”

  “Either an army of hackers or … someone on the inside.”

  With a chill, Mishima remembers Domaine’s menacing hint. “Has anyone—” She stops. There’s nothing she can suggest that they’re not already trying. Besides, this channel isn’t secure. “Stay in touch.”

  “As long as I can,” he says.

  From there on her insomnia takes a more dramatic tinge, as she imagines what they might find. A building completely empty, or full of the dead, or blown to pieces? The office she remembers humming along, making do without Information like they did after the earthquake, everyone amazed that she would come that far, with a security team no less, when they’re all fine? She imagines hand-to-hand combat and stealthy file extraction, piecing together the motives of mystery assailants. She sees herself rescuing LaForge from desperate straits, her boss’s boss, the one who told her to stop following the Liberty trail. In the fantasy, he falls on his knees to thank her and admits through his sobs that he was wrong. Although she still thinks that this doesn’t look much like Liberty.

  She closes her eyes and remembers the time after the earthquake, everyone working together in silence and frustration. She goes through the layout of the building from memory, even though blueprints and walk-throughs are available in Information archives. The vending machine corner, which fueled so many late nights. The tea stations on every floor. The unisex bathrooms, the low-ceilinged canteen, the roof access. The street outside. The café where she gave Ken her cryptokey.

  * * *

  Ken expects Suzuki to call him at any minute, asking where he is—no, he wouldn’t do that. Suzuki never asks. He would tell Ken that there’s a lot to do, time to get started. Ken avoids looking at his messages or even checking where Suzuki is, on the superstitious grounds that it might somehow draw the man’s attention. Then he remembers that Suzuki can’t call him, and he can’t check where Suzuki is, because Information is down.

  This happens three times. In his defense, he hasn’t gotten much sleep.

  They’re still plowing through the existing ballots. In some places, quite a high percentage of votes were cast, most of these in time zones where the first six hours of voting corresponded with the afternoon and evening hours. So far they haven’t come across a single centenal where every vote has been reported; there might be a few where a high-enough percentage is in to calculate the winner without a doubt, but they haven’t tried doing that, so he’s not sure.

  Ken is starting to get a sense for the magnitude of the problem. At first, he was thinking only in terms of winning: where Policy1st stood in the votes that had been counted, what they could do to make sure this disruption, whatever caused it, did not affect their chances. Now, though, he understands that this is not an attack on this vote so much as an attack on micro-democracy as a system. That idea is so scary he doesn’t want to think about it.

  He has gathered by now that Mishima is no longer in the building, or the country. No one told him directly, but he’s overheard enough in the canteen and by the coffee machine, and from people walking by his workstation or coming to chat with Roz (a small number; she works relentlessly and doesn’t encourage small talk), to be pretty sure she’s on some desperate mission, probably in danger.

  After that, the extra time his mind has between sorting and verifying votes is entirely devoted to intense fictional scenarios in which he comes to her rescue. She has been captured by the mastermind responsible for this election fiasco, and he bursts in with a flamethrower to release her from her chains. She’s held hostage in high-level negotiations for the future of the planet, and he appears and distracts her captor long enough for her to escape. Her crow crashes, and he’s the one who finds it and drags her out of the wreckage.… He shakes his head. This is stupid. Not only because he is sitting in an Information hub doing the most bureaucratic of Information tasks (and liking it!) and unlikely to get anywhere near whatever glamorous assignment she’s on, but also because she stabbed him in the leg.

  Why did she do that? He tries to put himself in her place. This enormous thing had happened. She thought he might have something to do with it. And her reaction was to stab him? Clearly, they are very different people. Granted, it was a minor wound, and she healed it afterward, but that doesn’t change the fact that her reaction was mistrust and violence. What would he have done? Maybe ask her. Or try to trap her into admitting something. Not stab her.

  He can’t stop thinking about her.

  CHAPTER 22

  Information going down only worsens Domaine’s suspicions. He can’t check up on the people he’s worried about, can’t trace the movements of certain assassins and enforcers he’s aware of, or check for suspicious money flows in the hours after his advid went live. He can’t even get out of New York City,
with four out of every five flights canceled. So, despite his worries (probably paranoid, he tells himself), he heads to one of the events that brought him here in the first place. Initially planned as a meeting of a select group of anti-election organizations to discuss strategy after the election results, Domaine guesses it will now be a poorly attended klatsch of gossip, speculation, and accusations. Perhaps he’ll learn something, although he suspects this election interruption has nothing to do with the people who want to interrupt elections and everything to do with those who want to win them.

  The meeting is in the old Museo del Barrio, now a center for transcentenal community work that is forgiving toward antielection activists. Unfortunately, the Upper East Side neighborhood Domaine is walking through to get there is not the most salubrious. The pitiless buildings designed for the rich have been subdivided into bolt-holes for the desperate, and rats and cockroaches scuttle among the trash blown around by the stiff breeze. Normally, none of this would worry Domaine, but he is jumpy and convinced that the streets are too empty. He looks around for a public transportation crow, but of course with no Information, they are not running, or if they are they’re avoiding this neighborhood, and he has no way to summon one. He is still glaring at his useless handheld when he hears the hum of an engine. A vehicle pulls up beside him. Domaine looks over. A SecureNation patrol scooter.

  “How we doing?” the cop, or soldier, asks, leaning out the window. He’s set the scooter to keep pace with Domaine’s distracted walk, and it purrs with restrained power.

  “Fine, officer; how are you?” Domaine responds, putting on a smile. He’s trying to remember if this government subcontracts to SecureNation or not. In all honesty, he’s not even sure which government jurisdiction he’s under at the moment.

  “Just fine,” the man drawls. They continue in silence, Domaine speeding his stride and the scooter hovering beside him like a storm cloud. “Thing is,” the cop goes on, “you’re wanted.”

  “You must be mistaken,” Domaine says, with utter confidence. He can’t be wanted—he has an alert that tells him if any government is officially after him. His hand twitches for his handheld before he remembers that he can’t prove it, not without Information.

  “Reaching for something?” the cop asks, and when Domaine looks back he’s holding a small plastic gun.

  “Just my handheld,” Domaine says, showing his empty palms. “Forgot about Information being out. So inconvenient.” He manages a laugh. The plastic gun is a nonstandard weapon for SecureNation, a very bad sign. He’s wondering: is this random harassment or a targeted attack? Which of the dictators, warlords, and autocrats he met with would use SecureNation to get at him?

  At this point, it may not matter.

  “Oh, it’s not that bad,” the cop says. “Not if you still remember how to operate without it.”

  “I remember you need an arrest warrant,” Domaine says, keeping his voice light. He’s not at all sure that’s true in this centenal, but he wants to stall this out as long as he can.

  “Thing is, I’m not on duty right now,” the cop says. “Got lucky, I guess. How about we go for a ride?” The hatch for the sectioned-off rear of the scooter glides open, and the plastic gun sways suggestively toward it.

  Lazy scum-searcher. “Sure,” Domaine says, leaning back as if to climb in. As he lifts his leg toward the running board, he slips a small grenade out of his satchel and underhands it onto the floor of the scooter. As it hits the anti-stain cover, he pushes off the running board and sprints in the opposite direction.

  The cop lets out an angry laugh. “You’re only making it harder for yourself!” he yells out the open window as he closes the hatch and pulls a tight one-eighty. He’s barely had time to accelerate after Domaine when the bomb explodes. The partition in SecureNation scooters is designed with precisely that sort of maneuver in mind, and Domaine knows without looking back that the cop—or mercenary, or whatever he is—will survive, but the scooter is done for. With any luck, the driver should be shaken, disoriented, maybe even concussed. Domaine turns down a side street and heads for the park, hoping to get lost in its anarchist wilderness before his pursuer can recover.

  * * *

  Ken sleeps under his desk, or passes out there. When he wakes up, Roz is already back to work (did she even sleep?), but when he stumbles back from the bathroom to join her, she holds up a hand. “I have something else for you,” she says.

  She projects a screen from her handheld so he can see it. It’s a page from the intranet:

  • Bogotá

  Minor unrest in outlying areas; scattered power outages

  • Zurich

  Rioting over locked supermarkets

  • Eldoret

  Mostly calm; growing concern

  • Bologna

  Demonstrations in piazzas, tent cities starting

  • Saïda

  Fisheries affected by lack of weather data, disruptions in transportation. Population calm.

  The list of cities continues, scrolling down the page.

  “There’s no Information, so there are no news compilers,” Roz says. “But we need to know what’s going on out there. Information offices are sending people out into the streets and then sharing their reports over the intranet.”

  Ken refrains from asking what they plan to do with these reports. He doubts Information is sending riot police out in Zurich.

  “I want you to go check on the situation in Doha. You get the idea from these: a few sentences is all we need, although more details would be great. And don’t put yourself in any danger. Okay?”

  “Sure,” Ken says, wondering what it is about him that made her think he’d make a good spy, or reporter. Maybe he’s just expendable.

  He’s never been to Doha before, and so he ventures out onto the streets with interest. There are a lot of big office parks right around the Information compound, not many pedestrians and not much to see, which is especially boring when it’s ninety-seven degrees and the sun’s beating down on your head. (When were these office parks built? What role do they play in the local economy? No way to know.) For a few minutes, he feels dazed and dizzy; he hasn’t been outside in two days and has barely eaten or slept. He definitely hasn’t hydrated enough. Then he turns onto a street that is shaded and breeze-tunneled, and immediately feels better.

  Blinking in the sudden shadow, he makes out rows of small shops; not a souq, exactly, a commercial street. He glances up, curious about how the shades operate and what they’re made of, but no helpful Information annotating appears beside the dim shapes blocking the sky above. At least his translators still work.

  He ducks into the first store that looks like it might sell bottled water, and gets a nutrition chew while he’s at it. There are two clerks behind the counter complaining to each other about the lack of Information, one of them incessantly trying to connect on his handheld, but they don’t seem unduly upset. Ken clears his throat. “Can I pay you with an Information chit?”

  The clerk with the handheld holds out his hand without looking up, brings the slip of paper that Roz gave Ken up to his eyes, checks the number against something stored in his handheld. “Sure,” he says. He glances at Ken’s purchases and writes out a double receipt, handing Ken a copy. Ken pockets it, wondering how long it will take for the world to slip irrevocably back into paper currency.

  Out on the street, Ken notes a few other people walking: a woman draped in black pushing a climate-controlled stroller, a couple of white-robed men standing in the doorway of a restaurant. (What kind of restaurant? He doesn’t know. What are the favorite delicacies here? No idea.) Everyone seems calm enough. He walks for a few more blocks. Most people are going about their business. He thinks he hears an anxious undercurrent, but maybe he’s imagining it. It’s so quiet and normal that his antennae haven’t jumped once, and the contrast with how strange it feels working without Information’s net is unnerving.

  Ken turns down another side street, thinking he can make
a big loop in the covered area of the city, maybe even sit down and get a meal as part of his snooping before he heads back. The change is gradual, but a block or two down this street, he realizes he’s in what could be an entirely different country, which would make perfect sense if Doha had different centenals like everywhere else. The people here are skinny and browner and dressed differently, the smells are spicier, and when he turns off his visual translator for a moment to check, the lettering on shop signs is different.

  The mood is different too. People—mainly men, a few women in saris or waitress or nanny uniforms—mill around or stand whispering in small groups. It’s not a mob, not even moblike, but Ken thinks it might qualify as “minor unrest” or “growing concern.” He wanders through, trying to look like he has somewhere to be on the other side of this block, and listens.

  “They are voting without us, malli.”

  “I can’t reach anyone back home.”

  “Do you think the Qatari have news?”

  “There must be a way to call.”

  “What if there’s rioting there?”

  “Go inside, nangi. I’ll come in and tell you what I find out.”

  “I heard all the flights are canceled.”

  “What about boats?”

  “Is the connection down everywhere or only here?”

  “Do they know we can’t vote?”

  Ken’s translator tells him that they’re speaking Sinhala. This is enough, he thinks, he could go back and write it up (“Doha: Qatari population more annoyed than worried; foreign workers from Sri Lanka nearing panic”) but he is reluctant to take data without giving some back. He can too easily imagine their situation: far from home with no way of communicating, maybe no safe way of getting back. Anything could be happening there. He circles a few more times, trying to identify someone to approach. There aren’t many older people here, and there isn’t a clear leader. They are bunched into clusters, maybe by workplace or by home centenal or village. Ken picks one of the larger groups, eyes it for a few minutes, then taps the shoulder of a young guy who people listen to.