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  Seems unlikely. “It is a shame that Information is constantly attempting to influence the minds of your people, claiming that the election system is the answer to all their problems.”

  “Information does not enter here,” the sheikh answers. “We provide our subjects with all the news and entertainment that they need.”

  “But still.” Domaine leans forward. “The election system, flawed as it is, is constantly held up as a paragon of democracy, peace, consumer choice. It exerts an insidious appeal on nonvoters, no less dangerous for being false.”

  The sheikh is silent for a moment. Most of his entourage are suddenly busy with their handhelds, perhaps rechecking Domaine’s background and reassessing the discussion. Domaine presses on. “Surely you would prefer for the election system not to exist? We are working to eliminate it, or at the very least make it more realistic…”

  The open question breaks the tension, and the sheikh laughs. “Why would we want to change it? There is nothing that suits us more than most of the world believing that their will is being carried out by governments that do exactly as they please.”

  There is little else to say, and eventually Domaine is graciously removed from the room.

  * * *

  Ken’s antennae jump again as he’s leaving his fourth interview, and he jumps too. His first thought is that he’s glad he invested in the antennae, because he’s so hyped from the conversation he just had that he probably wouldn’t notice anything without them. His second thought is: because of that conversation, this must be the real thing.

  Maybe it was a trap to begin with. The centenal secretary seemed eager to give it to him. Or maybe the overworked woman wanted someone besides her clients to see it. Maybe whoever it is has been watching her office, just in case. Or maybe they’ve been following him for a while. They’ve figured out who he is, or they don’t care who he is but they don’t want anyone to know what he heard. Or what he has.

  It is nightfall, the sky a luminous blue above the city glow, and the centenal he’s moving through now is a poor one with few streetlights, darkening fast. He glances at windows as he passes, but in the glare of the pop-ups, tuk-tuk headlights, and vendor sparklers, he can’t make out anything in the shifting space behind him. Without stopping, Ken rubs his eyes as though tired, adjusting his antennae to broadcast video into the corner of his vision. He doesn’t catch anything immediately.

  Policy1st’s transportation policy includes only environmentally neutral vehicles. Ken got here on a Sunway borrowed from the office, solar-powered and with a top speed of a slow jog. It seemed perfect for the Jakarta traffic, which rarely gets above a slow jog anyway, and after the transport frustrations of the previous day, Ken thought it was necessary. It’s also about as inconspicuous as elephant coitus, which is not unheard of in these streets but still draws a crowd. As he gets back on, he notices a small switch labeled AUXILIARY SPEED—EMERGENCY USE ONLY.

  He proceeds with caution at first. His mind is processing a million different things at once: the map of this and the surrounding centenals, superimposed over his vision; the small vid of the space behind him; not hitting anyone with the snail’s-pace Sunway; and, most importantly, trying to figure out what to do with the intel he just received.

  His initial impulse is to send it to Suzuki right away; he even half-composes a message muttered under his breath. Then he remembers that this is not the type of data that can be transmitted that way. Ken curses, accidentally leaving a trail of profanity in his message draft, then closes it. He’s not used to carrying heavy stacks of physical paper; he didn’t even bring a bag. The Sunway has a small storage trunk on the back, but it would be too easy for someone to swipe from. Ken was holding the packet close to his ribs when he left the meeting, and he doesn’t see any option other than to keep doing so. He shoves it into his waistband to free his hands and tucks his shirt over it. He considers sending a message hinting at what he’s found. If he doesn’t make it back, Agus can follow the trail. He discards that idea, too. If, and (glancing at the rearview vid) it seems more and more unlikely, there are people following him because of what he’s just learned, they’ll be expecting him to transmit it somehow. They might be able to snag it off Information before it reaches its destination, use the transmission point to find him if they haven’t already. Besides, Agus would be sure to mess it up.

  Just as he’s starting to think the antennae were overreacting, triggered by a random repeat passerby or innocent stares, he passes under a rare bank of solar-powered streetlights, and a few seconds later he sees something in the vid: the glimmer of the lights passing over the carapace of a vehicle, a large vehicle. That in itself is not strange; what is odd is that the behemoth is not nudging people, donkeys, motorcycles, three-wheelers, and Sunways out of the way to pass. Ken risks a glance over his shoulder, and the headlights of the massive all-terrainer seem to wink at him. It is hanging back, maintaining a distance, inexplicable in this cutthroat traffic culture unless there is some other motive.

  His heart speeds up, adrenaline spurts. He has to think, though. There’s no way he can outrun them. Ken maneuvers his Sunway around a donkey cart, then stays between it and a three-wheeler for a couple of seconds. When the slow pace of traffic gets him near enough to the corner, he swings the Sunway up on to the sidewalk, slides it around the corner onto a dark, almost-empty side street, and flips the auxiliary speed switch. The platform below him hums, then vibrates. He hears honking from the street behind him as the SUV tries to make it to the corner. Then his head jerks back in a gush of smoggy air as the Sunway takes off, bouncing along the imperfectly paved road.

  Ken gets a momentary thrill, although it’s a little muffled by the effort he has to make not to get jounced off the thing. Then he’s thrown against the handrail hard. He chokes, staring down at the dimness of unlit pavement. His ribs hurt, although the package did cushion the impact some. He pushes himself back up to standing and hits the accelerator, and the Sunway gives a plaintive whine, shudders, and completely shuts down. Coughing, Ken glances behind him. He’s only about three hundred meters from the main road, where he can make out large, high-set headlights lurching around the corner toward him.

  He gives the Sunway one last shake, and when it doesn’t react, he jumps off and runs.

  The street that Ken is running down is what is known in Jakarta as a jalan tikus, a mouse road. It is lit only by the faint luminescence coming from house windows and a few outdated, immobile advids. He starts to turn down a cross street, aiming back toward the main road he came off of, but when he notices on his map projection that it’s actually blocked off by some kind of commercial complex he has to duck back out again, dodging past two guards playing chess in front of a gate. The SUV’s headlights are about a block behind him. He asks Information how common plastic guns are in Jakarta, hoping that the answer will be reassuringly lower than he expects. In fact, this is a major underground trade point for them. He runs faster.

  Ken’s map is helpfully calculating the quickest and most direct routes to his hotel, and he tells it to stop and use the centenal filter instead. He wants to find a government nearby with better law-and-order stats, or at least more streetlights. There are some alleyways that look too narrow for the SUV, but most of them only have one egress, and it’s a pretty sure bet that whoever is trying to follow him is looking at the same map he is. Ken gets so caught up in checking the parameters of a neighboring centenal that he almost steps in an open sewer. Blinking away the afterimage of the map, he glances back at the headlights (gaining) and sprints toward the next turn, where the street jogs left.

  He dodges a motorcycle coming the opposite way and swings around the curve, blowing past a tiny kiosk, its only sign a red-and-white ad for PhilipMorris products, glowing in the night and clouded with mosquitoes. A line of tuk-tuks sits beside it. Their drivers cluster in the light of the kiosk, most of them sporting examples of its merchandise between lips or dangling from their fingers. Ken ducks behind the tuk
-tuks but he’s too scared to stop running, so he keeps sprinting forward in a crouch until the headlights of the SUV swing toward him. He hunkers down behind the black canvas hatch of the last tuk-tuk and holds his breath. In the white flash of the headlights he can see the torn leather on the seat of the three-wheeler, the rusted lock clamped on the fuel tank. Then he’s in darkness again, and the huge vehicle is sliding down the road beyond him. Ken waits until it passes the next turn … ten meters past … they’re slowing. They must have figured out he’s not ahead of them. Before they can turn, he bolts.

  As soon as Ken breaks his cover he sees the red reflection of the brake lights. They don’t even try to turn around on the narrow road, just reverse hard over the potholes. Ken makes it to the turn first, skids around it, and takes off down the street as the SUV backs past the junction, stops, and lurches forward around the corner after him.

  But Ken has already crossed the border into the next centenal. The laws, which Ken already knows from his map, are posted in illuminated signs at the junction. Ken wonders whether his pursuers will read them or just plow through. He doesn’t dare stop to find out. Then he hears the series of sharp bangs. He ducks and glances back over his shoulder.

  But it’s just the tires exploding on the antivehicle protection in the street. This centenal belongs to a green-party government that runs in Jakarta on a radical antitraffic platform, and is pedestrian only. In the dimness (the eco-government of the centenal is experimenting with wind-powered streetlights, and they are on the faint side) the SUV settles, like one of those beetles that gets eaten from the inside out. Then a door opens.

  Ken turns back around and concentrates on running. Whoever’s in that SUV has legs too. But now he has a head start, and the darkness is in his favor. He loses himself in the side streets, using his eye-level map to avoid dead ends. What he wants to do is to lie low until they’ve given up or until daylight, but he doesn’t have anywhere safe to go. He’s tempted by a late-night warung whose patrons are slurping bowls of noodle soup (vegan, according to Information). As he’s hovering in the shadows across the street, indecisive, a man significantly larger than Ken runs up, pauses, and darts inside the warung, glancing at faces. Ken turns and walks quickly in the direction the man came from, heart pounding.

  They know what he looks like. Without slowing, he plots a way back to his hotel on his map, prioritizing busy and well-lit streets. Following it, he comes out of the centenal at an exit right on Sudirman Avenue. Vehicles dart by on the six-lane road, and along the middle of it the monorail tracks loom like the spine of some huge, useless, and long-dead animal. Ken considers hailing a public transportation crow, but in Jakarta these are few and overcrowded, with out-of-date algorithms. Besides, if they’re tracing his comms, they could find him that way. He’s got an old-fashioned cargo; he might as well get home the old-fashioned way. He flags a cab and disappears into the anonymous crawl of Jakarta traffic.

  CHAPTER 6

  “I don’t understand,” Agus says for the third time. First it was disbelief that Ken had been followed, and possibly threatened, by PhilipMorris goons. (“We don’t know they were from PhilipMorris,” Ken warned. “Just seems the most likely candidate.”) Then it was reluctance to admit that Ken might have gotten some valuable intel with his unorthodox methods. Now Agus is hung up on the technical details. “How did they take the poll without it coming up in Information?”

  Suzuki, conferencing in from Budapest, doesn’t bother to hide his irritation. “They used pen and paper, kid!”

  The flash of pique from his boss lets Ken take the high road. “It’s amazing,” he says. “I can’t imagine how many people they used or how long it took. But they wanted to have this intel without anyone else knowing.”

  “And what does it tell us?” Suzuki asks.

  Ken laughs and shakes his head. “Look,” he says. “This was done by hand, and it has to be analyzed by hand.” He picks up the slab of papers and drops them on his hotel desk for emphasis. “Before we can say we know anything, we should verify it ourselves from the data. But what my informant told me, when she handed these over, was that in several of these centenals”—Ken blinks to bring up his notes—“3539082, 3539091, and 3539080 are the most promising—there are significant grassroots opposition movements, and PhilipMorris is doing everything it can to downplay them in Information. Then there’s data on the biggest issues for the populations, possible angles to approach them. Like here”—he flips through to a summary page he found for one of the sections. “Listen to this: in 3539091, a lot of concerns were raised about the education system in the mid-cycle governor’s election. So, PhilipMorris funded five new, latest-model school buildings for the new governor. All that should be on Information, I guess, for us to check. But according to this poll, people are angrier than ever, because there aren’t enough teachers and the curriculum is, according to Stania, mother of three, ‘stupid.’” Ken looks up. “I would say that’s an opportunity, with the new education plan the policy department is so excited about. I’m sure they’d tailor something for this centenal if we ask them.”

  “Maybe,” grunts Suzuki. “They’re pretty busy with the debate prep, but it’s true they are very hyped about the new education initiatives. I can try to push it along. Agus?”

  Agus, woken in the middle of the night and conferencing in pajamas from his living room, blinks rapidly, no doubt going through maps and pulling up cheat sheets. Ken almost feels sorry for him. “Yeah, we’re working hard on 082,” he says. “The other two, according to our analysis, they’re not in play. But, um, I like the idea of education…”

  “Look,” Ken says. “You have to go through the data. There’s some good qualitative stuff here, but I don’t know if it’s enough to get us there. That’s your department.”

  “Agus, get your people on that analysis right away,” Suzuki barks. Ken spares a thought to hope that it’s not Tanty who gets stuck with the grunt work. She’s far too valuable for it, but Agus might be that bad a manager.

  “I will as soon as I get the physical data,” Agus grumps.

  “I’ll swing by with it in the morning,” Ken says. “And I’m photographing it already, in case…” In case they come after him again.

  “And don’t just analyze, Agus. Act!” Suzuki throws in.

  Duly chastened, Agus signs off, but Ken hesitates. Suzuki sighs, rubs his face, then looks up. “So,” he says. “What’s our play?”

  Ken wasn’t ready for that question. “Well, we use the data, right? And we turn it in to Information, expose what PhilipMorris has been hiding, maybe get them a penalty.”

  “Do we,” Suzuki muses, “do we.”

  It’s not a question, but Ken answers anyway. “We have to,” he says. “Or we could get sanctioned for keeping it.”

  “The issue,” Suzuki says, “is whether we benefit more from keeping it or sharing it. A slap on the wrist from Information, at this stage in the game, isn’t going to have much effect on the voting. If we give the data to Information, on the other hand, everyone gets to use it. The edge we get from this vanishes.”

  “Well,” Ken says uncertainly, “if we analyze the data fast, we can still get a jump on the rest of them.”

  Suzuki shrugs. “True, but we are investing our own time and energy in analyzing it. Everyone else gets the numbers crunched for free by Information.”

  “We could take the time to analyze it before we give it to them,” Ken says, knowing he is falling into the trap.

  “And once we take that time, why not take a little more?” Suzuki asks. “It becomes a question of degree.” He laughs at Ken’s discomfort. “Don’t worry, son. I’ll turn it over to Information. We want to win this the right way. Now you get some rest. You did good work today. Exactly what we hired you for.” And he cuts the connection before Ken can figure out what expression to put on.

  * * *

  The Merita hotel chain offers rooms at a steep discount to people whose Information shows that they ar
e interesting: as cocktail-chatter counterparts, as connections for entrepreneurs, as potential romantic partners. It’s a strategy to convince wealthier, duller clientele to pay a premium in order to share some sparkling conversation, or in the hopes that they will be able to pass for one of the glintelligentsia themselves. Most Information drones do not remotely qualify, but even if Mishima’s particular job at Information weren’t deeply interesting to the power brokers of the world, she would have no trouble getting in. When she was six and watching television (the opiate of choice at the time) her mother once asked her, vaguely, “When you watch TV, do you ever feel guilty about wasting your life?” a question that probably had far more effect than an admonition would have. It had even more impact when her mother died shortly thereafter. Ever since, Mishima has taken pains not to waste her life, and her Information reflects it.

  She doesn’t take advantage of the Merita deal very often; sometimes, the stress of staying at a deluxe hotel can outweigh the relaxation. But after the long night of research, and given that the public lot she found to moor her crow is both bumpy and loud, she decides she needs it.

  The room is a luxuriously spacious eighteen square meters and immaculate. Mishima stretches and meditates, then gets in some long-overdue wushu practice until her empty stomach reminds her of one of the disadvantages of Merita. They have excellent restaurants, but since part of the point is that the fascinating people mingle with those who merely pay, there is no room service or takeaway, and they are generally located in neighborhoods without decent streetfood or other easy options.

  Mishima goes to the restaurant and selects a common-table seat that is, at least for the moment, neighborless. She takes a look at the menu and checks her body stats. The endive-prosciutto salad mostly closely matches her nutritional needs, but that’s hardly portable. Mishima decides to splurge on the peanut butter–banana-honey sandwich instead, a true luxury given the rarity of both bananas and honey. When it arrives, she waits until the waiter walks away, then wraps the sandwich in the linen napkin and heads back to her room. She doesn’t feel like making small talk with anyone right now, and they should understand. It’s election season.