Infomocracy Page 9

  It is perhaps because of the earlier conversation that he notices the auburn-haired woman, although she is striking enough—smooth face, smooth figure draped in a dress of shining copper cords loosely woven enough to show the occasional glimpse of smooth skin—that he thinks he would have noticed her anyway. An almost-visible energy trembles in the angle of the wrist holding her champagne flute. Maybe she noticed him first, because as soon as he really looks at her, her eyes meet his. Her personal Information is completely mute, an opaque absence of facts and figures in the air next to her face. Ken pivots away from his group, gently enough not to disrupt their conversation.

  * * *

  Mishima has had a rough day. Walking out of the Information offices into the chilly Tokyo twilight, she’d thought about going back to her crow and getting some sleep, but she doubted sleep would come. Her fingers were twitching like a pianist’s and she kept looking back over her shoulder as she walked along the narrow streets of Marunouchi. She had broken down the numbers for them in the glossy three-dimensional charts that people always seem impressed by, although at this point Mishima can generate them without effort. The percentage of voters who, according to their best Information, would vote to change the entire system, or to threaten it by going to war. It’s a small but not insignificant coalition of haves who think they deserve to be have-mores; nationalists who consider some aspect of identity (ethnicity, religion, place of birth) more important than the government one chooses; and all-out cranks and contrarians. Maybe six to eight percent, although she warned them that it’s possible that they are underestimating. There are likely to be some who would support this but, not believing they have a chance, vote on more mundane concerns that will matter if the system continues to function. The danger is if Liberty can succeed in attracting these voters without losing their more mainstream constituency, they might actually be able to win the Supermajority. If this is actually why they want to win it, they could then throw the entire system, the hard-bought peaceful cacophony of the past two decades, into violence and chaos.

  The bosses didn’t buy it. Mishima can still hear LaForge, who, as the Director for Strategic Election Analysis, is her boss’s boss: “These aren’t even campaign infractions.”

  Mishima had explained patiently (hopefully it didn’t show that she was being patient) that they are being subtle because this is not about mass campaigning, but about signaling.

  “Really?” LaForge had raised his eyebrows. “Is there any indication that this signaling, if it even exists, is more than a campaign ploy? Troop movements, perhaps? Weapon purchases?”

  If there was, Mishima didn’t have it. “We haven’t even looked,” she pointed out.

  The atmosphere had remained disapproving. Mishima’s own supervisor, Malakal, was projecting in from Juba, and had been quietly supportive but not particularly enthusiastic about the idea of her taking time off from her other duties. She can understand that: he got stuck overseeing the centenal mapping when what used to be Sudan finally accepted micro-democracy a few months ago, and he’s swamped. Everyone else in the room had seemed bored at best, hostile at worst. It makes no sense, but … Mishima wishes she had more confidence in the organization she works for.

  Her crow was moored in Shinbashi, a couple of kilometers away. Without thinking, she turned away from the spilling lights of a public transport crow hovering near her and kept walking, ignoring the pop-up advids and peering at the tiny slices of Tokyo life visible through windows, open doorways, among the drunks laughing red-faced outside of bars. When she reached her crow, she found she was still not tired enough to sleep.

  It is that same nervous heartbeat that sends her to the party. That and the new dress she hasn’t worn yet, which fits perfectly when she slides it on back in the crow. Maybe a night off is exactly what she needs. She punches in the coordinates of the party and finds a mooring spot above a hotel nearby.

  When she spots Ken, she’s already on her fifth glass of champagne. She’s seen him somewhere before; that’s why her eyes stick on him the first time, and linger as she’s trying to place him. Not an Information drone, please. She sips. But he must be connected to the campaign; she hasn’t seen anyone not related to it in months, and the tingle of recognition feels more recent than that. Was he in the Singapore hub? Or maybe at the Merita, at that stupid debate party? No … By the time she’s figured it out, It was an event, not sure where, he works for a campaign, not one of the awful ones, which though? he’s noticed her, and now he’s turning, smiling. The smile doesn’t say he knows her but that he’d like to. She prepares to stomp whatever line he’s come up with.

  “Please,” he says. “I need to talk about anything but the election.”

  Mishima can’t help smiling back. “Me, too.” They are speaking Japanese; Mishima clicks off her translator to be sure. “What topic were you thinking?”

  “Well…” Ken had been about to suggest hair, because of his earlier conversation, but the unusual color of hers makes him self-conscious. “Well.”

  “What did you do before working on the campaign?” She’s supposed to be taking the night off, but at this point, Mishima doesn’t even think about her leading questions.

  “Actually, I’m in school,” Ken says. “Postgrad. And before that, working.”

  The smile is easy, no manufactured charm, and his tone is confident. She lets him slide on the school thing even though she’s more and more certain he’s connected with a government campaign somehow.

  “Working on?”

  “Tech,” he says, and leaves it there. “And you?”

  Mishima briefly considers her previous careers—security specialist, spy, financial trader, farmer—and decides not to reveal any of them, retreating instead to her usual ploy. “I work at Information,” she says.

  His gaze almost immediately skates past her face, scanning the party, and Mishima worries for a second that she’s underplayed, that he’s lost interest. She barely has time to be surprised that she cares whether he’s lost interest before she realizes he was looking for another topic. The idea of the massive bureaucracy of Information tends to make people want to talk about something, anything, else.

  “Where are you from?” Ken asks.

  Another tough one. “All over,” Mishima glosses, twinkling. “You?”

  “Here, more or less,” Ken says. “Do you live here now?”

  “I don’t live anywhere.” It’s not the way she usually tells it, but she’s decided she wants to hold his interest. He’s cute enough and so far has avoided saying anything incredibly stupid. And she needs a night off.

  “You don’t have a place?” Ken’s wondering how badly Information pays its employees, and whether her lack of an apartment is enough to convince her to come to his. Although now that he thinks of it, his place isn’t in much of a state to receive visitors.

  “I travel too much,” Mishima says.

  “What do you do, stay in hotels?”

  “Sometimes,” she says. And then, as if she’s just remembered, “I do have a crow.”

  “A crow? Your own crow?”

  “Sure,” Mishima says, and gives him one more long, appraising look. “Wanna see?”

  * * *

  As she told him on their way up, it’s not a luxury crow. It’s utilitarian. And decidedly neater than his apartment, Ken thinks, looking around. There’s not much more than a spotless workspace—a small fridge, a food-cooker, and a good-sized printer with five different material nozzles. Behind that is a tiny bedroom, the futon folded into a couch. Mishima pulls some beers—real ones, Ken notices—out of the fridge and turns on the music. They stand chatting by the table for a while, the brassy braided strap slipping off her slim shoulder driving Ken batty. They listen to the music, some kind of West African soul, he would guess, and drink another pair of beers, and finally they slide into the bedroom. He kisses her earlobe, her neck, and she growls low in her throat and pulls him against her. Ken is just sober enough to remember to display
his birth control (enabled) and inoculation status (up to date) on his personal Information to avoid any awkward pauses later on. He doesn’t usually sleep with girls he’s just met, but this one—Mishima, she told him her name is—is irresistible. And it’s election season.

  CHAPTER 9

  Domaine leaves Riyadh on a flight to Almaty, thirsty and desperate for news of the election. Fortunately, they serve alcohol on the flight, but they block all feeds other than their own for the duration, and the hours of repeated segments about Kazakh tourism and special haj deals drive him to drink more than he should. He asks for a digital newspaper, and the flight attendant smiles inscrutably at him and keeps pushing the drink cart up and down the aisle, up and down the aisle.

  As soon as they touch down, Domaine tries to link in to Information from his earpiece, but the connection is maddeningly slow. Once he’s off the plane, he whips out his handheld and starts opening feeds while he walks, but even before he can get any news, he starts to notice it: the pitch of the background buzz, the number of tablets people are staring at, the raised eyebrows, covered mouths. Something has happened.

  * * *

  Ken wakes up naked and can’t remember why. Unconcerned, he lets his gaze wander the small room, round-cornered and compact. It’s not until his eyes light on the shiny bronze coils piled the floor that he has a kinetic memory, his hands sliding that coppery netting down a muscular back. He turns his head and finds a pair of brown eyes looking straight into his own.

  “Good morning,” she says. In the pale light from the frosted window, Ken thinks her more beautiful than the night before, her dark red hair even more dramatic. “Ocha?”

  Ken nods as she delicately crosses over his body to step, naked, out of bed. She pulls a robe from somewhere and eases into it, indigo with flowing silver flowers.

  “Did you sleep well?” Ken asks, unable to think of any other way to make conversation. He’s trying to remember what exactly they did last night after removing their clothes, but all he gets is a haze of alcohol and a few indistinct sensations. A moan? His or hers? A curve under his palm, definitely hers, but which? Most of all, he’s trying to remember her name.

  “I slept beautifully,” she says, unfurling her arms into a stretching yawn before going back to the neat movements of preparing the tea—the old-fashioned way. Ken approves of teapots, but he wonders what kind of energy this crow runs on, what it’s using to heat the water. Everyone says nuclear energy is totally safe, but Ken still doesn’t completely trust nuclear-powered water heaters and food-cookers.

  “I don’t know about you,” the woman goes on, giving him an absolutely killer-cute look over one shoulder, “but these days—during the campaign, I mean—I don’t sleep well at all. It’s crazy, I’m so tired all the time, and yet when I get a chance to nap…” She shrugs, the silk sliding with her movement.

  “Oh, I’m the same way,” Ken nods. “Every time I lie down, my mind thinks of a million more things I should be doing. All the different time zones don’t help.”

  “Where did you say you work, again?” She brings over the teapot and two cups, white Satsuma pottery that grants him a flashback of the skin over her ribs, and hands him one cup so she can pour.

  He hesitates for a second, then goes ahead. “Policy1st.” He’s not sure whether he told her the night before, but it’s not so much of a secret. Particularly for someone who works at Information, as he now remembers she does.

  “Oh,” she says, looking thoughtful. It could be worse than Policy1st, for sure. Where has she seen him, then? On the campaign, and he speaks Japanese, so … “You work with Suzuki-san?”

  “That’s right,” Ken says. “He’s my boss. Do you know him?”

  “A little.” She’s met him briefly a couple of times, but—like all the major operators of the major government campaigns—she has enough Information about him at her fingertips to have formed an opinion. “Suzuki Todry.”

  The mention of his mentor reminds Ken that he has a meeting with him today, this morning in fact, an important one. He’s trying to figure out how to check the time without looking like he wants to leave. He wishes he weren’t in a hurry (or, quite possibly, already late); sitting in a crow over the city of Tokyo drinking green tea with a gorgeous woman sounds like a pretty good plan for a hungover day. Maybe she can give him a ride. He doesn’t even remember what part of town they are hovering over.

  “So, what do you do for Policy1st?”

  Ken looks down at his cup, wondering how much he should say. His hand is trembling slightly; his hangover must be worse than he thought. His handheld beeps; must be Suzuki calling to ask why he’s late. As he reaches for it he hears a skittering: the woman’s earpiece, which she must have taken off at some point the night before, is vibrating its way across the shelf. It occurs to him that the sound his handheld is making is not the call alert.

  Hot liquid sloshes onto his hand. Looking down he realizes that no, his hand isn’t trembling; it’s the whole cabin that’s swaying. The woman jumps up, hurries into the other room. The crow tilts from side to side, then starts to thud up and down as though it’s being dragged down a flight of stairs, like turbulence except they’re in a crow, not a plane. Ken puts his cup down, stupidly, and it immediately falls over, the steaming liquid disappearing into the stain-absorbent floor.

  “What’s going on?” he asks, trying not to sound panicked. Stumbling on the jerking floor, he follows his voice into the next room, where she is leaning over a control panel.

  “I don’t know,” she says. “I—we’re still moored…” She raises her eyes, and they both get it at the same time, their imaginations following the long anchor line down from the ship to the supposedly stable building it’s linked to.

  “Jishin da,” Ken whispers, the fear in his tone so elemental that the interpreter doesn’t even bother. “It’s the earthquake.”

  The crow is yanked earthward.

  * * *

  The early warning alerts go off as far away as Okinawa, where Yoriko pulls over her taxi and waits for a tremor that she barely feels.

  In Almaty, Domaine gets on to Information perhaps half an hour after the quake. It is clearly too soon to have much data, especially since—and this is not a good sign—most of the live feeds in Tokyo and the surrounding area have been disrupted. He opens ten or twelve feeds at once, all of them scrolling frantically. The numbers range from two thousand to one hundred thousand dead, so he feels comfortable discounting all of them and assuming that for the moment nobody has the slightest idea. He tries to think if he knows anyone in Tokyo but doesn’t come up with any names. Highly organized and strongly democratic, the Kantō area has never been a target for him.

  He scrolls farther. The little footage that has gotten out already, of wavering buildings and dust-covered, stunned inhabitants, is disturbing, so he doesn’t watch too much of it and tries to think practically instead.

  What will this mean for the election? Cold as it seems, Domaine is not the first person to ask that. All of the governments with hopes of a Supermajority send their top representatives to Honshu before the ground stops shaking. Some of them were already there; one of the questions flooding feeds is what losses were sustained, both personal and material, that might affect the outcome of the race.

  * * *

  A major earthquake had been predicted for the Kantō area for decades, the meme resurfacing in morbid feeds and (correctly) alarmist commentary every couple of years. As usual, however, Ken finds himself without a flashlight, spare solar charger, or alternative communications option. Not to mention naked. Fortunately, their sharp fall didn’t stop with them hitting ground, but with a sharp deceleration that left them both sprawling, cushioned by the crow’s airbags. As the bouncing slows, Ken scrambles to his feet and, finding himself more or less unharmed, stumbles back into the bedroom to pull some pants on. He considers going into the bathroom to throw up on the way but isn’t quite enlightened enough to be able to do that in front of this
woman he’s just slept with. More rationally, he’s not sure he should be dumping any underutilized calories right now. He may need them later.

  His hands might not have been trembling before, but they’re shaking now.

  As he’s getting dressed the woman comes in, gives him a shaky grin, and pulls on a pair of cargo pants under her robe. “Do you have people in the city?” she asks.

  Ken shakes his head. “My family…” He rarely tells people about his family, but right now he can’t spare enough brain function to think of a reason not to. “My family’s in Brazil.” What family he has. She nods. “Friends, though, some.” He thinks of the architect from the night before, wonders if the old elevated subway held. It should have; it’s held for years, through other earthquakes before this. This must have been a big one, though. “You?”

  She gives a half-nod. “Work colleagues, mostly.” She frowns, remembering the frustrating meeting the day before. It no longer seems so bad that she is not tasked with chasing down the lies of a particularly devious rogue government. “Where are you headed? I mean, not to kick you out. You’re welcome to stay. Really.” She puts her hand on his arm, and Ken feels a tingle like an electric shock, but maybe it’s the adrenaline of the moment. “Staying here might be the safest thing…”