Нил Стивенсон - Termination Shock

The Israeli took another sip and stood up, sighing as if he regretted leaving this fascinating conversation and abandoning his nearly full cup of coffee. “I like the acupuncture analogy. I might steal that.”

“It wasn’t mine.”

“Thanks for your time, Your Royal Highness.”

Saskia waited for him to clear out, then scanned the area until she caught a glimpse of Fahd bin Talal. He was still talking, or pretending to, on his phone, keeping a sidelong eye on her.

She texted Willem.

> The day has arrived. A year or two sooner than I thought.

Meaning, as he’d understand, the day when her “retirement” would end, and she’d need him for something.

> Ha! Even sooner than I predicted. What do you want?

TUABA

Willem could have afforded a suite at any of the modern hotels that had been thrown up within striking distance of Tuaba’s one-runway airport during the last few decades. Instead he would be sleeping on a futon in a back room of Uncle Ed’s compound.

On an aerial view—even one so far zoomed out that it took in the entirety of Australia, Indonesia, and Southeast Asia—you could easily pick this place out by looking for the gray scar on New Guinea’s southern flank. This was the alluvial spew of the river that flowed down to the Arafura Sea from glaciers along the island’s spine: the highest mountain between the Himalayas and the Andes. Unlike all the other rivers draining that slope—and there were a lot of them, given that the glaciers were melting, and rainfall could exceed ten meters per year—the one that ran through Tuaba was gray because the sediments coming down from the copper mine hadn’t weathered naturally and hadn’t had time to oxidize.

Uncle Ed wasn’t named Ed and wasn’t Willem’s uncle. He’d come to this place in the 1970s and established what was imaginatively called a logistics depot for bulldozer parts. Later he had branched out into helicopter maintenance, pipeline supply, and drilling rigs. He had started by simply using a bulldozer to scrape all life off a patch of jungle near the banks of the river, then sold the bulldozer to Brazos RoDuSh. The boomtown of Tuaba had taken shape around him, prompting him to upgrade his security perimeter from time to time. In the early going this had consisted of an earthen embankment topped by barbed wire, but nowadays the compound was outlined by rusty old shipping containers stacked two high, with long snarls of razor ribbon strung along their tops. Within those steel walls, trucks and heavy equipment trundled back and forth across a gravel lot that at any given time was 50 percent gray puddles. When a given puddle became deep enough to impede commerce, Uncle Ed would emerge from the building—not quite a house, not quite an office—in the corner of the lot nearest the street, fire up one of the clapped-out, rust-encrusted bulldozers lined up nearby, and sally forth, dragging in his wake long skeins of strangler vines that had been using the machine as a trellis, and scrape some muck off a high place and shove it into the offending depression. Then he would park the dozer and go back inside and resume his primary occupations of watching basketball on TV while conducting a range of disputes with random people all over the world on social media. Every so often he would see a familiar face looming in a security camera feed and press a button that would buzz them through a door into the compound. As often as not these were old friends who had come to play badminton on a rectangle of Astroturf that Ed had imported in 1982 by making arrangements for it to be wrapped around a replacement driveshaft for the largest truck in the world, which was being barged up the river from the Arafura Sea. Badminton apparently kept him immune from the ill effects of smoking.

It would be conventional to assume that Tuaba had been expropriated from indigenous people, but as far as anyone could tell, no one had ever lived here until the likes of Uncle Ed had showed up. Farther south, along the edge of the sea, people had long roamed among the inlets and swamps in dugout canoes, living off fish, prawns, birds, and sago palm while trying to stay one step ahead of malaria. Farther north, small populations had lived in the mountains, above the swamps but below the tree line, eating sweet potatoes, wild pigs, and small marsupials, suffering from yaws, anemia, and the depredations of their fellow man. But the belt of land in between was the worst of both worlds, and simply not worth living in. Unless, that is, you were a company from Texas who wanted to construct the world’s largest open pit copper mine on top of the island’s highest mountain.

Tuaba was the highest point on the river reachable by barges from the sea. It was only meters above sea level. There, cargo had to be offloaded and transported by road the remaining hundred clicks to the site. A key detail being that this entailed an altitude gain of some four thousand meters. Since said road had not existed at the beginning, the first cargoes, back in the early days, had been mostly road-building equipment. The lineup—some would call it a junkyard—of ancient, rusty hulks in Uncle Ed’s lot constituted a sort of archaeological record of that endeavor. Albeit a selective one, for many bulldozers had simply disappeared into swamps.

Nowadays, 150,000 people lived in the city, which occupied a couple of miles of the river’s western bank and stretched about a mile into the former jungle. Surrounding that were suburbs that didn’t feel quite so much like a hastily thrown-together boomtown. Many of Ed’s badminton buddies had relocated to such neighborhoods, but Ed was quite happy where he was; he seemed to believe that if he set foot off the compound for more than a few hours it would succumb to some combination of jungle rot and rampant hooliganism. Nowadays the business was run by younger members of the clan, many of whom operated out of branch offices in Singapore, Taiwan, and the northern Australian city of Darwin. These people went for months, even years at a time without setting foot on the island of New Guinea.

The business was simple enough: they caused certain very specific objects to show up when and where they were needed, incredibly reliably. The mine operation as a whole consumed tens of thousands of gallons of diesel fuel per hour. The engines that did the consuming were distributed across a wide range of equipment both stationary and mobile. Almost none of it was run-of-the-mill. Run-of-the-mill equipment couldn’t operate at four thousand meters of altitude on some of the world’s worst terrain. It was all weird special equipment. Helicopters had to be fitted with special blades to get purchase on the thin air. A burned-out bearing or snapped driveshaft could burn astronomically more money in downtime than what it cost to replace it. Uncle Ed’s company was far from the only one serving that market, but they were holding their own against the competition—enough that members of the younger generations, like Beatrix, could get expensive educations and passports to First World countries.

Most of the business was transacted over the Internet. But they had to have a physical depot here. So Uncle Ed pinned down both tails of the bell curve. He was the founder and CEO. But he was also the guy filling in chuckholes. Everything in between those two extremes he delegated to the juniors. He could have moved, of course, and lived out the rest of his life in a part of the world characterized by greater political stability. But having seen shit you wouldn’t believe in Indonesia, he had arrived at the conclusion that political stability anywhere was an illusion that only a simpleton would believe in. That (invoking, here, a version of the anthropic principle) such simpletons only believed they were right when and if they just happened to live in places that were temporarily stable. And that it was better to live somewhere obviously dangerous, because it kept you on your toes. Willem had thought all this daft until Trump and QAnon.