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  Policy1st believes in the principles of the elections. We offer you a clear, honest expression of our policy positions, and seek peace and economic growth in all our centenals. Visit one of our centenals, check us out on your comparison sheets, and use your Information to see what Policy1st can do for you.

  It ends with the Policy1st campaign slogan for this election, drawn in expertly calligraphed characters in their signature colors, bold yellow on a fresh, sky blue background.

  The best policies, the best results.

  “Pretty good,” Ken says, impressed at the subtlety and at how quickly they put it together. It never mentioned war, annexation, or Japan but would draw a clear counterpoint for anyone who had gotten Liberty’s message. “But you know, anyone excited by the idea of … you know, war, I mean … this is not going to change their minds.”

  “If we find something concrete, we can get more aggressive with our advertising and at the same time launch a complaint to the election board.”

  “It’s amazing, with all the Information collectors out there now”—Ken shakes his head—“how many things still slip through.”

  “Amazing,” Suzuki sighs, “but true. There’s a lot that gets past Information analysis. You should know that better than anyone,” he adds, glowering at Ken from under his eyebrows. Ken wonders if Suzuki has already checked whether yesterday’s rendezvous showed up anywhere. “We can’t depend on them to protect the fairness of this election. I want you to keep an ear out on this trip. See if Liberty has been making similar promises elsewhere.”

  Ken runs through his destinations in his mind. “Hard to sell in Java, although they might scrape a centenal or two together on that basis. But Liberty’s pretty weak there; PhilipMorris is the big corporate to worry about. Singapore and Taiwan—yeah, an anti-Japan message could still resonate. But war?”

  “Be alert,” Suzuki says. “It might take other forms. Try to record anything relevant you find.”

  Ken nods, feeling a pulse of excitement. “They won’t make that easy.”

  “Buy whatever recording devices you think will help. Check out the latest generation of recorder disks; they’re amazingly small. Plenty of places where you can do that in Singapore—or Jakarta, for that matter. Try the centenals belonging to Asia’s Return—they have particularly lax controls on pirating electronics.”

  Better and better.

  “And keep your own head down—this does not supersede our overall strategy. We don’t want them to know where we’re playing.” A second of hesitation. “Keep your head down, and watch your back.”

  * * *

  Mishima stretches in her travel bed, checks the time. Late. The Buenos Aires voter motivation party rocked until well past dawn. Mishima knows these events are important, and maybe once she would have enjoyed them, but now she finds they leave her feeling drained. Not tired so much as empty, annoyed at all the hullabaloo for people who barely even think about their votes. Officially, she was there to collect as much data as possible and send it up for analysis, like any other Information employee, but her secret purview is far wider. Last night, in addition to supervising the organization of the gig and coordinating with the local security team, she was keeping an eye out for the kind of campaigning that governments do at voter rallies, which are supposed to be apolitical. Usually it is much more subtle than unsubstantiated allegations spelled out in giant burning letters.

  She rolls over and checks the status of the libel case. Jorge and the local team are focused on RosarioPrimero, the only government competing directly with Heritage in the immediate surroundings, but Mishima is not so sure. Heritage may not be in many close races in the Río de la Plata area, but the big governments are thinking about the Supermajority, and any loss for Heritage will increase their chances. Besides, those images were recorded and shared so quickly, they could influence voters anywhere; it might well be a global play rather than a local one. A team is working on cleaning it up, but the changing patterns of the flames is making it hard to efficiently search for the shots. A bit sophisticated for RosarioPrimero, Mishima thinks, checking out their Information: only two centenals, one of which they’re probably about to lose to Heritage. She told Jorge to look bigger, Liberty or PhilipMorris or, possibly, 1China, who have been making inroads in the southern cone lately. She doesn’t think he’s going to, and toys with the idea of taking a quick scan herself, but she knows she can’t solve every campaign infraction she comes across. She’s supposed to be looking at the bigger picture now.

  The encounter with Domaine still bothers her. Was he involved in the libel plot? It didn’t look like it, but what else would he be doing there, in person and apparently alone and unarmed? Disillusioning voters one at a time? She spent the rest of the party on edge, called in half a dozen potential threats. None of them turned out to be armed, but she wants to review the vid footage anyway.

  First, though, she calls up her Information. Like most people, Mishima has a couple of favorite feeds, sources that she’s found to be fast and reliable, although she’s probably both pickier and a better judge of “reliable” than most people. She has her screen set up to automatically calculate and source the most popular feeds globally and locally, so that at any given moment, she knows what most people are learning. She includes the major news compilers, regardless of how many people are paying attention to them, broken down to the continent level and sometimes further. Besides that, her algorithm adds in a couple of random streams that flick between various compilers, opinionators, and virtual plazas without regard for size or relevance. It’s a tactic that reminds her, every time she uses it, of the panels from Watchmen where Ozymandias watches multiple TVs tuned to different channels to reach a composite view of society and make predictions, both financial and political. Not for the first time, Mishima wishes that her world had as few channels as his.

  As usual during the keyed-up election season, she is faintly disappointed by the lack of anything earthshaking in the results. There is the standard slew of local news—minor floods in Bangladesh, a daring jewel theft in Paris, an indiscretion by a music star—none of which raises serious pings on her Radar. A significant smattering of stories about the mantle-tunnel approval process, which doesn’t look like it will make it through before the election. (Mishima wonders briefly whether Heritage has delayed it on purpose, but decides the issue is too divisive for that.) Everything—the floods, the music star, obviously the mantle tunnel—is tied to the elections by this point in the cycle. All of the major feeds are dedicating resources to the campaigns, and most of them strive to have at least some coverage every day, but Mishima finds nothing surprising there, either. She skims a few of the longer features, hoping they will enhance her worldview or lead to an epiphany: “Who are the least-campaigned voters?”; “Pivot centenals across Southeast Asia”; “Most effective campaign vids.” Mishima remembers similar titles from a decade ago and learns little new.

  Finally, she checks up on a few races and aggregates she is following closely. With nearly a hundred thousand centenals, it can be hard to pick favorites, but part of Mishima’s job is looking for trendsetters and possible dominos, as well as places that might represent interesting global dynamics. Some of this, of course, is subjective, like the centenal in Tokyo where Mishima used to live. While it was solidly Sony-Mitsubishi back then, shifts in employment and a couple of minor bureaucratic scandals have left it open to contestation, and both Heritage and Liberty are advertising heavily there. The latest polls show Liberty slightly ahead, but it looks like Sony-Mitsubishi has finally caught on to the gravity of the threat and is trotting out some new job-training programs, so it may shift again. This story—aggressive plays against weakened incumbents that are slow to respond but often effective when they do—is a key pattern for this election cycle and seems to justify Mishima’s belief in subjectivity, even if not all of her supervisors agree. She also looks at the distribution in the greater Mumbai area, a seething anthill of demographic diversity and
cutthroat competition, and notes Policy1st’s continuing progress across Eastern Europe. Not much change since the last time she checked, twenty-two hours ago, but the data is still trending upward.

  Still in bed, she checks her schedule—and, while she’s at it, her location. Mishima’s crow is not large, and it’s not fancy, but it’s almost hers. Which is to say, it belongs to Information, but it’s hers to use. The fact that Mishima convinced Information that it made more sense to loan her a personal crow than to continue paying for commercial travel and hotels makes her feel additionally proprietary toward it, as a good which she has not paid for but won with her wits. (It has also given her a certain cachet among the few other Information employees who have heard about this and made her a hero to the even smaller number who were able to work out the same deal.) The best part is getting several hours alone whenever she has to travel. The best part is being able to work in bed. The best part is being able to move whenever and wherever she wants.

  She’s almost halfway across the Pacific, slightly delayed by inclement weather that diverted her from the optimal path. She has a few meetings to project into over the next couple of hours, and then a brainstorming session on the name-recognition problem tomorrow. In the meantime, drafts of the weekly comparison sheets, compiled by lower-level operatives, have come through for her review, so she decides to go through them before the meetings. The comparison sheets are formatted as a grid, with important topics across the top and governments down the side. There are pull-out sections for local issues at various levels—centenal, municipality, microclimate, island, time zone, language group. Each square offers the stated position of the government, an explanation of what that was calculated to mean in practice, and, if applicable, the deviation from that stated position indicated either by previous performance or current rhetoric. Citizens can even see a personalized grid with specific outcomes of each government for them: how much they would pay in taxes, for example, or changes in the funding projected to go to their kids’ schools, or the probability that their local bar will be shut down.

  It’s a popular tool, and surveys last decade showed that a plurality of citizens used it to decide their vote. Mishima is checking for anything that she can add based on her exposure in the field, as well as scanning for questionable items, hints to campaign strategies, and possible trickery. Part of her brain is looking at it in a more personal way too: she’s also an undecided voter trying to get a full picture of the options.

  Halfway down the grid, as she’s running her finger along the row assigned to LIBERTY, Mishima sits up in bed fast. She adjusts her vision settings, opens more feeds, tries to read five articles and watch two vids at the same time, then stops herself. She only has a couple of hours. Where should she look? She might as well start with where she’s headed. Mishima begins pulling up Information from Asia.

  CHAPTER 3

  Domaine sees himself as being like one of those campaign workers, or a high-level Information agent like Mishima (Mishima! He wonders if it’s her first or last name). He’s working himself to a thread, traveling constantly, playing the geopolitical Great Game. He’s just doing it for a different cause.

  “Yeah, just like them. Except you hate everything they stand for,” says Shamus.

  Shamus is a second-generation Irishman whose maternal and paternal grandparents were, respectively, from Zambia and Gambia. “Really,” Shamus says. “Imagine the limericks.”

  Domaine tries. “What was the fifth-line rhyme?”

  “Usually Namibia. If you have enough of a brogue, you can make it work.”

  “You must have had fantastic geography courses,” Domaine says. “Most kids where I grew up couldn’t have named one country in Africa, let alone three. Hell, most of them thought Africa was a country.”

  “And where did you grow up, then?” asks Shamus. “Not Africa, I take it.”

  Domaine ignores him, glances up at the massive three-dimensional football game projection above the bar. They are sitting in a pub in Addis Ababa, Domaine’s second port of call since the Buenos Aires party. Shamus is a graphic designer and self-described “advid concept man extraordinaire.” In point of fact, Domaine can’t afford the best. In the past, though, he’s been happy with both Shamus’s creative output and his prices, happy enough to have a beer with the man.

  Ideologically, they’re on opposite poles, would probably be at each other’s throats if Shamus cared enough about it, which makes the beers more interesting.

  Shamus moved to Addis after the first global election, during the now-traditional period of loosened immigration controls. The whole point of micro-democracy was to allow people to choose their government wherever they were, but plenty of people didn’t agree with their 99,999 geographically closest friends. Some areas—Ireland being one classic example, vast zones of what used to be the United States another—had been polarized so deeply and so long that your choices if you stayed were pretty much A or B.

  “Or maybe I was looking for a better climate, didja ever think of that?” Shamus points out.

  Opening the borders (such borders as remained, anyway) allowed the new governments to pull in more like-minded people, consolidating their holds on their centenals for the next election and stretching into neighboring ones as populations surged. Some journalist two decades ago dubbed the process mandergerrying, although it is also known as reverse osmosis, because it results in greater concentrations of like-minded—and, on occasion, racially or ethnically alike—constituents.

  “And that’s exactly what’s wrong with the system,” Domaine says, thumping the bar.

  “The system’s treated me all right, mate,” Shamus says. “Plus, the immigration bit isn’t even part of the system—that’s something governments choose to do, and not even all of them, mind. It’s a by-product.”

  “Systems include their by-products; it all comes from the pattern of incentives they create. It’s how they make people think, how they make people behave.”

  Manchester United scores, and the crowd goes wild, drawing both of them to look up at the projection hovering above the bar. Most of Manchester, including the team, now belongs to Heritage, and when the broadcast projection shifts to a graphic representation of celebratory comments and memes related to the goal, it glosses pretty closely to a map of Heritage centenals, liberally splattered around the globe. Shamus, who’s rooting for the Black Stars, shakes his head and taps in an order for another Guinness.

  “Look, mate,” Shamus says. “Seventy years ago, do you think my grandparents, may they rest in peace, chose Ireland? Do you think they, in Zambia and Gambia, went, ‘Let’s see, which of the developed countries will give our kids the best chance of making it good, i.e. letting us live out our old age in the lap of luxury? Which combination of welfare state and promotion of free enterprise will get them there?’ Do you think they said, ‘We want our grandkids brought up Catholics and football fanatics with Gaelic names in English spelling?’ ‘Yeah, we wanna be rained on all the bleedin’ time?’ D’ya think they made an informed bloody decision?”

  “Don’t get me started on Information,” Domaine growls.

  “They didn’t! They made it to Morocco lugging everything they still owned and met someone who knew someone who had the connect in Cork to slip them through, and that was that.”

  Shamus getting worked up actually calms Domaine down. “They could have reformed immigration without redoing the whole global system.”

  “Apparently they couldn’t, could they? Besides, why should people have to move halfway across the world—well, okay, a quarter or so in my grandparents’ cases, perhaps more in yours—to have a decent government? And not for nothing, mate, but you should shave off that fro, at least while you’re here. Look like one of those white Rasta pretenders.”

  Domaine runs a hand through his pouf absently. “I agree that loosened immigration is often better. Economically, it usually is. The problem is the concentration of ideologies—and, in some cases, ethniciti
es.” He doesn’t bother to look pointedly at Shamus.

  “Where people want to live isn’t an ideology,” Shamus says. “How they want to live. Whom they want to live with. It’s only an ideology when they try to tell other governments to do the same thing.”

  “It doesn’t have to be.” Domaine says. “But the election makes it that way.”

  “The fact that you’re antielection just tells us that wherever you lived before it started, you were privileged. Don’t you remember what it was like? Except for that global few for whom borders didn’t matter, you were affiliated with where you were from. Kids born in Cuba were labeled communists, kids from the US imperialists, black kids from Ireland immigrants and opportunists. It didn’t matter if you disagreed or voted for the opposition. Your fate was ruled by the majority or the powerful minority, no matter how large.”

  “The fact that you can still accuse me of being from somewhere privileged shows that the election hasn’t changed anything,” Domaine says.

  “All right,” says Shamus, standing up and slapping some money on the bar. “I’m in for the night. I’ll get you some product shortly—how long are you in town for?”

  Domaine shakes his head. “Out early tomorrow morning.”

  “To?”

  “Saudi.”

  Shamus stares. “You don’t need to convince them not to vote—they don’t!”

  “Exactly.”

  * * *

  Policy1st doesn’t have a full-time operative in the Ryukyus. It’s a small archipelago with minimal domino potential, so only local governments and the biggest, best-funded players keep permanent staff there. But after hearing the rumor Ken passed on from Amuru, Suzuki (who is one of those people who always knows someone everywhere) gets in touch with a contact. At fifty-one, Yoriko is old enough to have a Japanese name instead of the more Okinawan versions that became popular since elections started.