Infomocracy Read online

  MODERATOR: Let’s move right into something that some of you have mentioned in your opening statements: law and order. Suppose that an individual commits a violent crime in the jurisdiction of some other government and then flees into one of your centenals. Will you extradite that individual, subject him or her to a judicial process under your government, or ignore this circumstance unless the crime affects your citizens?

  In Addis Ababa, in the same bar where he met Domaine (what a nutter!), Shamus rolls his eyes. They always haul out this question, or something like it, for the debates. For all of Information’s bullshit about transparency and clarity and highlighting differences, they live off of people using their communications and reference systems, and they love questions that get people talking. Extradition policies are all clearly posted in the comparison sheets, but people still get excited about crime, even if there’s nothing new in the answers. He keeps an eye on the debate projection in the bar but switches his personal feed back to football replays, and curses Information again for not allowing any live matches during the debates.

  HERITAGE:… in addition, we would like to take the opportunity to decry the incidents of violence that have been occurring in far too many centenals in the run-up to the election. It is deeply unfortunate that the micro-democratic process causes so much strife, and we earnestly hope that someday we will always be able to govern the way we do between elections: peacefully and prosperously.

  Subtext: skip the elections and let us rule forever, Mishima thinks, slugging back the rest of her bourbon. It’s enough to make her wish she hadn’t shut down that WP=DICTADOR fire-writing in Buenos Aires quite so quickly. She orders another, willfully oblivious to the solicitous expressions on the faces of various high-paying guests hovering in her vicinity.

  POLICY1ST: Our extradition agreements vary from government to government. We would never extradite someone to a government with cruel or unusual forms of punishment; however, we would likewise never let a violent criminal wander our centenals unpunished and unrestrained. So, while the precise answer will vary according to the case, you can be sure that such an individual would be subject to a process of justice, either under our laws or under those of the centenal where the crime was committed.

  Ken nods, satisfied. He hopes that a lot of people were listening to Policy1st, because Vera nailed it: not only the words, but also the firm yet compassionate tone. As much as he agrees in principle with Information’s embargo on video during the campaign, he wishes people could see her open, earnest face as she’s speaking.

  He listens to her on his earpiece, but with the volume low enough so that he can hear the soundtrack playing in the bar, too. They are taking votes among the patrons to decide which feed to listen to for each question (seriously, Ken loves this government—maybe it’s just the bar, but surely an enabling environment has something to do with their easy participatory approach) and so he hears a bit of PhilipMorris’s answer, which everyone wanted to listen to because they are famous for their continued defense of the death penalty. At the same time, he scans the transcribed answers crawling up the projection, with some extra attention to Liberty’s. Nothing surprising leaps out at him. Everyone knows the extradition policies anyway; this is a pure crowd-pleaser.

  MODERATOR: Thank you. The next question is on foreign policy. Now, we are all aware of the legal issues concerning centenal sovereignty, but there are grey areas staked out by treaties and intercentenal coordination, and cross-border concerns have raised new models of how centenals may interact. The question is: are there any circumstances under which you would attempt to influence a centenal belonging to another government?

  In the bar in Jakarta, in the hotel in Singapore, and on the beach outside of Naha, Ken, Mishima, and Yoriko lean forward simultaneously. Ken switches his earpiece, then registers that he is hearing the same thing from both ears; the bar has voted to listen to Liberty. He wonders whether the rumors are out while loyally switching his own feed back to Policy1st; every listener helps build their buzz.

  LIBERTY: Of course, we respect the integrity and political independence of all governments. We also respect the rights of our own citizens, their needs, economic fulfillment, and pursuit of happiness. And especially, of course, their freedoms. And we will defend that.

  Mishima stands up, drains her third glass, and heads for her room, ignoring the gestures of the well-dressed man sitting next to her, who’s been trying to buy her a drink for half an hour. Ken slumps back in his chair and wishes he were more (or less) sober. Yoriko, sitting on the warm sand and listening to the warm voice of Johnny Fabré boom through excellent acoustics into the night around her, wishes suddenly and urgently to be somewhere else.

  * * *

  Domaine, still in Saudi, misses the debate entirely.

  CHAPTER 8

  After the debate Mishima checks out quickly, annoyed with herself for indulging in the Merita longer than she had to, and gets back to the relative privacy of her crow, where she can deploy her superpowers. Which is to say, her high-level clearance and sophisticated analytical software, not to mention her brain. As soon as she’s comfortably settled, she sets up a private connection to Information that doesn’t go through the Merita line. After a moment of reflection, she goes further and unmoors, disconnecting physically as well as virtually. She sets a course for Tokyo, since she’s pretty sure she’ll have to talk to people with significant authority about whatever she finds, and probably urgently. Tokyo’s both the closest power hub and the one where she has the most connections. Or, to put it differently, home.

  She opens feeds to the latest real-time polls, using her Information biometrics pass to get the raw data as well as the crunched and cleaned-up results. The first thing she sees makes her punch up the speed to get to Tokyo earlier: Liberty has jumped a full four points. Mishima yanks the data onto her closed system so she can play with regressions and slice it up in different ways without anyone using Information to guess what she’s looking for.

  Now that she’s locked off for at least seven hours—seven and a half, she sees, glancing at the ETA—she takes her time. Clicks in an order for tea, arranges her feeds the way she likes them. She would hesitate to admit it to anyone because it sounds so antisocial, but she enjoys the long hours of travel in this job, knowing that every couple of days, week at most, she’s guaranteed at least a few hours where, even if people can reach her, she never has to be in the same room with them.

  A few advids slide in along with her feeds, reminding Mishima that she should refresh her security filters. There’s one from AllFor1, a middle-tier government that has been trying aggressively to move up in the ranks this time. The vid is a close-up on the face of a woman—not too young, not too old, some kind of Asian-Caucasian cross: a trendier, cleaner version of Mishima herself.

  “Tired of getting treated like a statistic? We know you’re more than just part of a group. You’re an individual. Help your centenal join the government that works hard to treat you like one.”

  Mishima has to smile. The phrasing is supposed to remind you that AllFor1 has one of the lowest unemployment rates on the planet. The rumor is that they guarantee all their citizens jobs in the extensive government bureaucracy needed to treat every case individually. Mishima, along with anyone else who bothers to look at the Information crib sheets, knows this isn’t true, but even the 63 percent government employment rate is high. And questionable in terms of viability, especially if they grow significantly this cycle, as it looks like they might. With that much government, they don’t actually produce very much. They fund most of that employment through high taxes; you pay your own salary, in a way. One of the most common debates in the Information staff virtual plaza is whether they will be able to swing it somehow, maybe by contracting services out to other governments. The ALLFOR1 logo comes up, and Mishima notes that they’ve changed it. In the last election, when they were targeting mainly European and American markets, the supposedly individualistic cultures that some
cubicle analyst thought would be a better demographic for them, they were ALL4ONE. This cycle, having realized that Asians like personalized attention too, they’re trying to go global, and that meant adjusting their numerology.

  The advid ends and another catches her eye: it’s the word INFORMATION, and something about it—the rich red hue, the ornate script—tells her that whatever this ad wants to sell her, it has nothing good to say about her employer. She wonders what went wrong with their targeting software. Although she has to keep quiet about her precise functions, she makes no secret of her affiliation with the organization. Then she notices another ad-word that she thought was separate, IGNORANCE, in a far sharper font and sparkling black fill, swinging closer to and now orbiting the other. The two words spin faster and faster, finally resolving into a version of the yin-yang, curled around each other. It’s nicely done but evaporates without any explanation or address, and Mishima gets back to work.

  She needs to prepare a presentation to convince her superiors that the potential problem with Liberty is worth putting resources toward, and that the first resource should be Mishima herself. It’s not going to be an easy sell. The Information bureaucracy, vast as it is, is stretched tight with the election: tracking all campaign actions, official and unofficial; mediating disputes; managing the delicate, highly technical process of voting itself; promoting voter registration; helping smaller governments fulfill their transparency obligations. Hypothetical threats are low on their list at the moment. And her evidence is very thin. It seems so unlikely. People have gotten lulled into security over the last twenty years of relative peace.

  * * *

  Ken is pumped after the debate—well, once he’s sobered up by watching replays of that Liberty answer a few dozen times, while in his other feeds their polls soar. He wants to do battle. He’s ready to be sent straight to their headquarters to take them to task. Or better still, to the news compilers, to explain exactly what’s wrong with this kind of rhetoric, or maybe more than rhetoric, at this point in civilization. It doesn’t help that it’s Agus who tells him he’s been called home.

  “Tokyo. Of course,” Ken says, nodding as though he had expected it. “That is, after the debate last night…”

  “Vera did pretty well, huh?” Agus says, almost like they’re buddies who can enjoy the moment together. “Our polls have been tracking up.”

  Ken abstains from calling him an idiot. Yes, their polls have shifted slightly upward in absolute terms (insofar as there is any absolute in the baseless game of electioneering). But the leaders, the top three and several of the next eight, have moved up more steeply, widening the gap between Policy1st and the Supermajority. At this point Ken just hopes they’ll make it into the second debate. But right now should be all about optimism.

  “Wait till Suzuki gets at ’em in the next debate,” he promises.

  By that point there are no flights that will get him in before evening. He has the choice of rushing to Tokyo to cool his heels or taking an overnight and going into the meeting eyes raw and mind wandering. As he’s looking at the options, though, playing with connections in Rangoon or Ulaanbaatar, he switches his calendar to Tokyo and notices an event notation: an invitation to a party that very night. Done! He punches in for the earliest arrival he can find, and heads for the airport.

  * * *

  “Where are you going?” The man in the backseat taps on the divider. “Ma’am? Go straight here!”

  Yoriko catches his eye in the rearview monitor, nods, and flips off her turn signal. She wasn’t trying to increase the tab, although that wouldn’t be an unwelcome side effect. Ever since the debate, she’s found herself avoiding Liberty centenals.

  Not that her work is done. As Suzuki didn’t have to point out, everyone saw the debate. Yoriko learned nothing special by being at the event. Or, at least, almost nothing.

  “Wait,” Suzuki had said as she described the beach barbecue. “What did you say they were giving away? Nestlé breast-milk substitute?”

  Yoriko squints to remember. Yes, she can see again the baby-blue logo.

  Silence. In her projection, Suzuki is frowning slightly. “So, Nestlé is in bed with Liberty,” he says finally. “Odd.”

  “Maybe it’s a new treaty,” Yoriko suggests. “There were Shiseido products as well.” She had refrained from mentioning those earlier, because she’s embarrassed how many sample packs she took.

  “Well, aside from that.” Suzuki pauses, and she can hear him muttering under his breath as he notes it down for follow-up. “Any other strange behavior?”

  Yoriko swallows. “I’ll keep looking.”

  And she will. There’s a rally tomorrow night she’s planning on going to. She’s both sorry and relieved that they are unlikely to show any sensitive material in an open meeting.

  * * *

  Tokyo is almost as dense as Jakarta, but not nearly as diverse in terms of governments—or, really, in any terms Ken can think of. A lot of it has belonged to the technocratic Sony-Mitsubishi merger since the first election, with a few centenals going to Japanese nationalist governments instead and the usual outposts of the top players: Liberty, Heritage, PhilipMorris, SecureNation around the military bases, and yes, Policy1st, which holds the centenal where Ken lives, along with a few others. The hot-button trend this year is the few local “progressive” governments focused on legal and economic systems that try to enable young entrepreneurs. Despite that story having been told in every generation since the first election, they still haven’t swept away the old guard of entrenched corporates, and the safe money is that they never will.

  Tokyo was one of the first cities to form a municipal coalition government, and it shows. The public transportation system is subsidized and therefore cheaper than most, although inhabitants, Ken included, complain every time the prices rise. Ken prefers the municipality initiatives that contribute to the flavor of the city, as when they reimagined the crisscrossing tracks of the old public transportation system—metro, commuter rail, monorail—as urban art gallery and sustainable street lighting. Tourists cluster around the old pillars of the elevated trains, examining an exhibit on historical, ink-on-paper advertising, and drunken salarymen stumble in the steady, colored lighting from the fluoron ropes looping the city.

  Another effect of this is that, at least at night, you know immediately when you step into a centenal that is not part of the coalition, because the hulking tracks are dark. It is in one of these areas, under the ancient arch of a railway bridge, that Ken finds himself that evening, his brown engineered-leather boots splashing through puddles of groundwater. It’s a grim-looking place, the unmarked rusted-steel door under a sign, unlit, for a long-closed metro station. But Ken pushes without hesitation, and the interior is warm, light, clean-lined, as swanky as the penthouse of any high-rise. He slips off his boots before taking the two steps up onto the hardwood floor, raised almost a meter above ground level to protect against flooding. The air inside is fresh; and the lighting is pseudo sunlight. The long rooms are just on this side of crowded, and all the people are beautiful and beautifully dressed.

  Ken shuffles off his coat at the coat check, and with it his work life. He runs a hand through his hair, throws his shoulders back, takes a cosmo off a tray, and sidles through the crowd. A quartet is playing twentieth-century jazz in one room, a DJ mangling more recent lounge beats in another. Peering through a half-open door, Ken sees a small group clustered around a projection of that World Cup elimination he wanted to watch. He’s tempted, but is feeling too social for that right now, and goes on to check out the rest of the party. Eventually, Ken spots the host, Eichi, his old high school roommate, who now works for a flash sustainable urban architecture firm—hence the digs. He angles through the guests—some of whom are now swaying in time with the music—till he reaches his friend, and clinks glasses with him.

  “Hey!” Eichi says. “I didn’t expect you to make it.”

  Ken winks, appreciating his status as a man of u
rgent international tasks, maybe with a whiff of mystery and importance. “Lucky scheduling coincidence. How are you?”

  They catch up. Eichi’s lovely wife, a doctor, slinks over to greet him. The kids are in bed. An energy consultant and a rising-star newscaster drift into their discussion. The proposed mantle tunnel comes up, which was pretty much guaranteed, since the first trial is planned to be a Tokyo-Taipei link. The newscaster is ebullient about it; the energy consultant sees some benefits. Ken, whose personal take is not far from the official Policy1st position that drilling through the earth’s crust for faster and supposedly safer medium-haul transportation is inviting an environmental catastrophe, if not the apocalypse, limits himself to a few clever but noncommittal remarks.

  “Of course, Heritage will monopolize it,” the energy consultant says. Ken pegs him for a Sony-Mitsubishi stalwart.

  “Well, naturally, it will run to and from Heritage centenals, but they’ve promised it will be accessible to all at the same price,” the newscaster answers. “Besides, other governments are free to build their own.”

  “If they can raise the funds,” Eichi puts in. “But aren’t they going to put a limit on the number and density of the tunnels? We don’t want to turn the earth into Swiss cheese.”

  “It’s only a tiny fraction of the crust,” the energy consultant says.

  To Ken’s relief, the conversation eventually wanders on to Tokyo’s canals and waterways (cleanliness of, alternative uses for, risks of) and from there to a new blood glitter that subtly highlights the veins beneath the skin, apparently the latest craze of the überrich. Ken gets to expound on his theory that hair care has taken a disproportionate role in perception of public figures since the turn of the century, but unfortunately that turns the conversation toward the campaign. Johnny Fabré’s mane is justly famous, and in any case at this stage of the game, the election is never far from the surface of any sparkling conversation. A mayoral aide (not from this centenal; slumming like the rest of them) joins the group, and Ken’s attention wanders away. Not that he isn’t endlessly fascinated by the campaign, but right at this moment there’s too much he can’t say, especially with the newscaster’s eyes lighting up. All of their gossip is at least a day old, anyway.