Blackfish City(32)

“We might . . .”

“You can check?”

“I could . . .”

“Great!” Ankit said, imagining stabbing the woman in the throat. “Thanks!”

She scanned software markets while she waited for her humans to do their work. Humans were slow and sloppy but comprehensible. Softwares were spooky, messy, working in mysterious ways, full of secret tics and legacy apps that could bring a whole heap of trouble on her head. Suppose she bought a breach hack, and it found what she was looking for, but the packet had snitch software attached? Law enforcement, crime lords, black-budget AI could rain hell down on her at any moment.

People made fun of them, called them old-fashioned and inept, but Ankit decided to take her chances at a human brokerage. Software archaeologists or engineers might not be able to match the breadth of scope of a machine broker, some of which could scan through thousands of softwares a second to find the right one for the job, but they made up for it with the depth of their knowledge. Even when scanning software could parse every packet of code, foresee every potential trigger, it was notoriously bad at assessing outcomes. A human broker, at least, was working with a smaller number of apps that they knew well and had seen in action enough to know more or less how likely a given software was to fuck her over. She called her favorite.

“What’s the target this time?” Mana asked.

The past three elections, Ankit had had some reason to call her. Shipping manifests one year, and Emirati birthrates the election before that. Access to an opponent’s email during Fyodorovna’s first campaign, when things were extra ugly.

“The Cabinet,” Ankit said. “I need to know why someone is in there.”

“That’s . . . difficult.”

“Difficult. Not impossible.”

“Correct.” She told her the price. Ankit had to fight not to flinch.

A quarter, maybe a third of their entire campaign budget. Two weeks’ worth of robodustings; a week of blips. The right thing to do was go to Fyodorovna, get her to sign off. She could talk the woman into anything, always. It wouldn’t be hard . . . just time consuming.

But going through Fyodorovna meant putting her neck in the noose. It meant that when the Arm manager lost the election, she’d blame Ankit for it. Which would fuck up Ankit’s only hope of avoiding the gutter.

Because Fyodorovna would be fine. Arm managers always were. Some charity or shareholder or someone else she’d done favors for would find her a place. Always helpful to have a somewhat famous face up your sleeve, to impress difficult clients or charm potential money. And wherever she landed, she’d need a chief of staff.

“Sold,” Ankit said.

“Do you want to run them, or should I?”

“You do it,” she said, signing off on the standard dummy invoice she always billed her. Security for a campaign donation site, on the fraudulent letterhead of an actual, legit software security firm. An audit from Finance or Campaigns might ping the fact that the firm in question never filed a corresponding invoice, but audits were like shark attacks—really terrible, and really unlikely.

On the grid, Ankit almost collided with a shopkeeper arguing with a woman who appeared to be swathed in loops of a hundred different brightly colored fabrics. Her jaw bug translated as best it could, between Mandarin and the jerky pan-glossic stew that late-stage breaks tended to induce:

You can’t stay here. Go over there, maybe. They serve food at the Krish—

We made fire. All of us together. We set them all on fire.

You need to go. I don’t want to call Safety. You’re scaring my customers.

Your customers should be scared. We are made of fire and we will burn you all to ash.

Joshi won first place, pinging her an hour later to say he’d come up short. The file had three separate injunctions on it, something he’d never seen before, and who was this, the Nineteenth Dalai Lama?

“Maybe,” she said. “That’s what I was hoping you could tell me.”

The software broker came in second, calling near midnight the next evening. Her friend at Safety never got back to her at all.

“Sending you something now,” the software broker said. “More than I thought I’d find, actually.”

For a split second, Ankit debated saving it for the morning. She was exhausted, and the message Mana sent held dozens of files. But she knew she’d never be able to fall asleep, wondering what she had. She couldn’t even finish brushing her teeth before doubling back to the bedroom and opening the first folder.

Four hours later, Ankit was still awake.

Two hours after that, Ankit called in sick.

Which wasn’t a lie. Dizziness made her light-headed; the whole city seemed to be spinning. Staggering, sickening, the information she held in her hands.

Too weird. Too fucking weird.

The whole thing felt wrong, uncanny, like a dream where the world was sideways in some subtle, unsettling way.

Maybe her job wasn’t in danger. Maybe Fyodorovna could win. Maybe she could get her mother out.

One solution to all her problems. All she had to do was bring down a shareholder. Simple. What did it matter that it had never been done before? She had a weapon now. Maybe a couple of them. Maybe there was a chink in Martin Podlove’s armor.

And anyway, lots of things had never been done before, and then they were done.