Infomocracy Page 21
“Hi,” he says.
“Hi,” the young man says, and then, “Who are you?” It is not unfriendly but puzzled.
“My name is Ken. I…” He hesitates. Technically, he doesn’t work for Information, and he doesn’t want to lie. Besides, he’s not sure being from Information is a good thing in this context. He doesn’t want to become a scapegoat for an organization he doesn’t even work for, doesn’t fully trust. He falls back on the truth: government workers might not be any more welcome than Information workers, but if he’s going to get mobbed, he’d rather have earned it. If this turns out well, he might even win a few more votes for his (old?) team. “I work for Policy1st. I just happened to be here.…”
“Oh, yeah, Policy1st, I’ve heard of that government,” the kid says. It sounds more polite than true.
Ken remembers belatedly that they don’t have a single centenal on Sri Lanka. “Anyway, I’m visiting in the Information office, and they have a little bit of news from their offices in other places. If you want, I can go see what I can find out about your hometowns.”
“Oh, really?” The youth’s eyes go wide and happy, and he turns to his friends to explain. In a few minutes, most of the crowd is focused on Ken. He ends up with a list of improbably long city and town names and a couple of centenal numbers for rural areas, and promises to be back as soon as he can.
“It won’t be much,” he warns them. “There’s only a trickle of data getting through.”
“That’s okay, that’s okay,” his new contact, Sandika, assures him. “We’ll be happy to hear whatever you find out.”
“Think about a way to post it or something so a lot of people can see,” Ken says, and heads back toward Information.
* * *
About a hundred miles outside of Tokyo, they lose connection. Panning the camera as they fly over, Mishima can’t identify any new, postearthquake damage. Crows are designed to fly at the lowest altitude possible that enables a straight line between the origin and destination, and Mishima uses cached maps to generate a flight path that brings them in over major arteries, keeping them low and for the most part hidden behind buildings. When they’re in range of the Information building, she deploys the Lumper.
Small arms seemed an entrenched problem during the early twenty-first century. The invention of the Lumper changed that. The backpack-sized device uses precisely targeted magnetic force to permanently disable all metal firearms within its effective radius. It took some time to catch up with the surplus of guns in the world, but since the technology was cheaper than an AK, readily accessible, and safe (with the exception of some unconfirmed reports of bad interactions with old-model pacemakers), it eventually rendered metal firearms all but obsolete. It is still standard practice to deploy one before any security operation.
Some people say that it is the Lumper, along with improvements in body armor, that made the pax democratica of the election system possible, more than the sudden sweep of political technology or the vast Information bureaucracy. Others point out that vicious inter- and intrastate war existed long before guns came into use, and that nations still can (and do) use a multitude of other explosives against each other.
There is still concern about printed plastic weapons, although they remain far less common. For that eventuality, Mishima carries a thermal-intensity flamethrower slung across her back. Her stiletto is tucked against her body as usual, but in her right hand is a larger fighting knife, and she carries a lightweight, three-pronged sai strapped to her right leg. For distance work, she has ten shuriken, with which she is adept though not expert, tucked into a strip on the left forearm of her navy blue body armor.
* * *
Domaine is a person of resources. Normally, he would be able to reach out to contacts on five continents, some of the same people who set up the interviews for that damn vid in the first place, and find out who’s after him. Now he’s running blind. He was tearing northward through the park, trying not to get lost on the twisting paths, when it occurred to him to wonder how the cop found him. Under normal circumstances, this wouldn’t even be a question, which is why it takes him so long to think of it. Domaine tries to fly under the radar, but if anyone wanted to figure out where he was, it wouldn’t be difficult, especially if they knew what he looked like. There are vid feeds almost everywhere, as well as data on purchases, hotels, transport, comms. Except none of that is available now. Assuming SecureNation hasn’t managed to reach Information when it’s down everywhere else, how could they know where he was? He slows to a walk, and when he comes to the next turn, he aims himself west. That meeting at the Museo del Barrio isn’t worth it, not if they know he’s going to be there.
Despite the chilly temperatures, there are people in the park. Mostly runners, bicyclists, and uniwheelers, and a few families bundled in heater jackets. Domaine keeps turning to check over his shoulder, and whenever he’s alone on a stretch of path, he quickens his pace. The Information vacuum works both ways: he’s halfway through his revenge plan when he realizes he doesn’t know the cop’s name or what government he’s contracted to. With no Information, the encounter wasn’t recorded, there was no tracking, there’s no way he can lodge a complaint or take care of it in a less formal way. And if it wasn’t random, and there’s no accountability, they’re going to try again. He has to find some safe place to wait it out.
* * *
Ken talks his report out quickly as he walks back, and has a version ready to project for Roz by the time he arrives. He fidgets while she reads it; he can’t access the Information intranet himself, and so he needs her help to comply with his promise. When he explains the situation to Roz, she listens, nods, and generates a password for Ken to access the intranet. He spends some time sorting—for a monolithic global bureaucracy, Information has a pretty crappy search algorithm—and then prints out a list, alphabetical from Anuradhapura to Vavuniya, on the old flash-printer. He can’t find any information for the rural centenals; apparently, Information offices are not sending their staff that far from home.
“You don’t mind if I take it to them now?” he asks Roz.
“Consider it part of your job,” Roz says. “And get something to eat while you’re out.”
He keeps his eyes and ears open on his way there. The Qataris still seem calm, although he does hear one shopkeeper cursing Information, with a fist-shake in the direction of their compound; he doesn’t know when his resupply will come in or what his prices should be.
The Sri Lankan street is mostly empty, and for a moment, Ken wonders whether he managed to navigate correctly without his Information map. But then a skinny kid, twelve or fourteen at most (is he a foreign worker, Ken wonders? Or somehow along with his family?), runs up to him and guides him to a shop with a thatched awning and a sign overhead that says (according to his visual translator) HOME TASTE.
Within the restaurant, the air is dim and rushing with overworked ceiling fans. All of the light in the place comes in through the plate window at the front, bounced off the bright pavement outside. People are packed in, sitting at tables or standing against the walls. As Ken’s eyes adjust, he makes out Sandika coming toward him, hand outstretched in greeting.
“Hello, hello, you came!” Sandika says, taking Ken’s hand in both of his.
“Yeah,” Ken says. “So, I guess everyone’s ready to hear the news? I told you, it’s not much…”
“No problem! Everybody’s happy with whatever you have.” Ken hands him the printout. Sandika looks surprised to see paper but quickly recovers, taking a picture of it with his handheld and then fiddling with the projection. “Have something to eat,” he suggests to Ken, motioning toward a row of earthenware amphorae in the back of the room.
Ken grabs a plate and works his way along the smorgasbord while the shreds of Information scroll slowly up the wall, improved by Sandika into a variety of fonts and colors. He can’t find a seat, so he leans up against the wall with his plate as, at the tables around him, tiny cries of relief
and busy hushed conversations greet the news from town after town. Ken scanned the bulletins before he came; there isn’t a lot of news, but none of it is particularly bad, either. He wondered whether he should censor it if there was, and was leaning against it, but he was glad not to have to make the choice.
Satisfied, he turns his attention to his plate, heaped with rice, dhal, chicken curry, slithery fried eggs, cashew curry, mutton curry, okra curry, coconut sambal, and fried pappadam. Having just come from Chennai, he feels utterly comfortable digging his fingers into the lukewarm morass and shoveling it into his mouth. His tongue is on fire, but it’s a vibrant, deep-flavored fire. Sandika appears out of the dimness and hands him a cool glass bottle. Ken downs half the ginger beer in the first swallow. It’s almost as spicy as the food, but the peppering of its carbonation does something to quiet the chili sting. Sandika grins and comes back with another bottle and a small container of yogurt, which does more than the drink against the burn.
Ken feels exceedingly grateful to Roz (is she his boss now?) for giving him permission to eat. He would have done it anyway, but it’s more pleasant without any underlying guilt. Although now that he thinks about it, her words could have had a different meaning. The next time Sandika comes by, Ken asks if he can get another meal to go. He heads back toward the Information compound a few minutes later with a notepaper-wrapped parcel that weighs half a kilo.
* * *
The official security people go first, disembarking rapidly from the crow and fanning out across the roof before taking the roof-access door with no resistance. Even though Mishima is not part of their team, she has worked security for Information in the past, so she has the same training and knows their weapons and drills. The team leader, Simone, didn’t even question the idea of her joining the foray. Mishima is paired with a young officer named Mazen, and together they bring up the rear; not the safest place, but in this case a lot better than the front. Once they get down the narrow stairwell from the roof, the team fans out, each pair taking a different direction as the corridor branches and crosses. Mazen and Mishima are tasked with clearing a long stretch of hallway to the right of the central corridor, with conference rooms and offices off each side.
The floor has that strange silence of an office on a holiday, when the carefully designed working areas seem random and meaningless. At least there are no bodies yet, Mishima thinks. They each take a side to peer or push in the doors. Mishima berates herself for not having gone through the blueprints more carefully; she hasn’t spent much time on this floor.
Mazen is a step or two ahead when she pushes at a door sitting ajar and sees a man on the other side. He’s across the room, standing at a workspace, wearing dark body armor. She inhales carefully. The man is holding a katana, and as Mishima registers it, he turns his head and sees her.
For an instant, she feels, in the antiquated but expressive phrase, outgunned. But a katana is only deceptively simple: for someone who doesn’t know what they’re doing, they can be worse than useless. The room is crowded with servers and computer equipment, a table, and a couple of chairs, which advantages her shorter weapons. This guy is holding the sword in his right hand, perhaps a little too much in the middle of the grip. That, combined with something in his posture, suggests to Mishima that he is not an expert.
At least she hopes so as she rushes him.
As she starts forward, she lets fly a shuriken, then another. The first bounces off his facial armor as she expected—the idea is more to startle and distract him than anything else. His flustery attempt at a parry shows that she was right, that he doesn’t know what he’s doing. As he raises his sword, she gets lucky, and the second sharp-edged star catches him in the underarm seam of his body armor. He winces and twists to the side, and Mishima charges in.
He recovers faster than she thought he would, and has the sword in the air ready to strike. He’s still swinging one-handed, but it’s a katana and even a glancing blow will do some damage. By now Mishima has her sai out and ready. She doesn’t feel confident enough to block and trap the sword, but she sidesteps the arc and slams the long tine of the sai down on the back of the blade, pressing it to the ground. She swipes her combat knife across the inner elbow of his body armor, opening it up and gashing the flesh beneath, then steps away, flipping the sai and slamming the stubby handle into the side of the guy’s head. She keeps moving, getting some distance before she pauses, poised, to check the results. The sword is lying where he dropped it, still clattering against the tile. His body hits the floor beside it in an ungainly pile.
Mishima sheathes her sai on her leg, wipes the big knife on the guy’s body armor and then slides it back into the holster on her hip, checks his stats, and slaps elasties on his wrists and ankles. Mazen pokes his head in the room.
“That was fast!” he whispers.
Mishima grins at him. “Big sword, small brain,” she says, pointing at the unconscious man. She collects her shuriken, wiping down the one that nicked him in the armpit, and folds them away. Mazen is looking around the room. “You think he was guarding this?” he murmurs.
Mishima takes it in more carefully, seeing the surroundings not as obstacles but as equipment. “Could be the comms,” she says. She pushes every on switch she sees, and is rewarded by a reassuring hum, but neither of them wants to stick around to see if the machines reboot themselves. Not yet.
Mishima picks up the katana, considering whether to use it or stow it. Odds are the other baddies have the same weapon (unless they’re doing a ninja-turtle thing). She wastes ten seconds thinking about whether she wants to meet them on their own terms or whether there’s more advantage to facing off with her own idiosyncratic combination of weaponry. But she can’t leave the katana here. She doesn’t know how many are in this group or where they are, and she can’t risk this guy rearming if someone comes along to free him. In the end, she takes it, holding it in front of her in a mid-level guard posture, and edges out into the hallway again.
They’ve only checked a few more doors when they hear a crashing sound back the way they came in, and then yelling. Mazen breaks away first, and Mishima follows him and the shouting back to the main corridor, a hard right, and another hundred feet down a short passage to the right and through an open door with a melted lock. Mishima leaves some space between herself and Mazen as he charges into the room; she’s still leading with the sword and doesn’t want to impale him if he stops or jumps back suddenly. She shuffles into the room in a toe-to-heel formal stance, then hears the whoosh and hiss of a flamethrower and speeds up.
She finds herself in a large space, with a couple of desks facing each other in the middle and a row of doors along the back wall. Her attention is immediately grabbed by the combat. The Information security team wears dark blue body armor with complicated iridescent armbands that are near impossible to forge, so the strategic situation is obvious at a glance: four baddies against a pair of InfoSec, now joined by Mazen. Three of the bad guys brandish katanas against an Information fighter who has gotten his own flamethrower out and is waving it between them, holding them off as he backs toward the door. The other Information officer is on the floor as if he’s thrown himself out of the way, right hand gripping his left arm, where the body armor appears singed. The fourth assailant stands over him with a flamethrower, a tiny wisp of steam curling from its multiorifice mouth. Mazen has paused ahead of her, and the attacker with the flamethrower is lining up to blast the security officer on the floor again.
Mishima’s dojo training kicks in and she lets out a guttural yell. That’s normally a stupid move in this kind of situation but now works nicely to let Mazen know she is charging past him, sword above her head. Her cry startles flamethrower guy into looking up right before she brings the katana down on his forearms. The folded steel slices through body armor, skin, muscle, and bone with a sharp squelch that is horrible and satisfying, and bites into the burning metal of the flamethrower with a thunk. The man screams.
Mishima w
renches the sword away from him. The blade pulls a spurt of blood from the deep cut in his arm, and yanks the flamethrower along with it, the sword firmly notched into the barrel. She pivots so that she’s facing everyone in the room and backs away.
One of the other attackers is trundling toward her, sword raised. Mishima shakes the unbalanced monstrosity in her hands, but the katana won’t come free. She is trying to figure out how to defend herself with the ugly flamethrower-katana hybrid she’s holding when Mazen roasts the bad guy with his flamethrower. Body armor offers a fair amount of protection from a thermal-intensity flamethrower, but a direct hit like that is still going to burn, and the force of it knocks her assailant off his feet.
Since both the katana and the flamethrower she’s holding are now essentially useless, Mishima throws the whole lot toward an unoccupied corner and pulls out her knife. By this time, the downed Information officer—Mishima didn’t bother to learn all their names; she thinks he’s the tall one—is back on his feet and pressing the singed man hard, knife slashing at his arms. Mishima sees him lunge forward for a vicious stab to the thigh and then knock the katana out of the baddie’s hands. Mazen has gone back to the other side of the room, but during the fighting, another pair from the Information team has charged in, and the remaining opponents are hemmed in.
Mishima drops down next to the man she disarmed, who has fallen to the floor and is trying to use his less-injured right hand to hold together the bleeding gap in his left arm, sliced almost all the way through. She pats him quickly for other weapons, tosses the knives she finds over to join the flamethrower, and starts working on a tourniquet for his bad arm.