Нил Стивенсон - Termination Shock

“I was thinking the United States. A clown show.”

“We’re agreed on that.”

“And yet the chaos of America gives people like T.R. the leeway to do things like Pina2bo that simply wouldn’t be tolerated anywhere else.”

“It’s an asset, you’re saying. The sheer incompetence of the United States.”

“People have come to rely on it.”

“It’s true.”

“The crazy place where people can do crazy things!” Bo exclaimed. “But then countries like India feel as though some intervention is needed. In my opinion, they are going too far.”

Willem threw up his hands. “Well, since I don’t know what they’re doing—”

“Trust me, they are going too far. But it will play well in their media. And they know they’ll get away with it. America will be very angry for forty-eight hours and then get bored and get angry about something new. A movie star will kick his dog or a quarterback will park his Lambo in a handicapped space.”

“Sounds like T.R. is screwed then.”

Bo shrugged. “Perhaps a real country could be persuaded to step in and restore calm.”

SQUEEGEE NINJA

At nine A.M. Texas time every Monday and every Friday morning, Black Hat Practical Operations held a virtual stand-up meeting. They had started inviting Rufus to these shortly after he had set up operations at Marble Mine. It all happened over augmented-reality headsets. They had delivered one such device to him. You could use the thing anywhere and see the same stuff, but the overall effect was more convincing if you did it in a big dark empty space. By virtue of living in an abandoned mine, Rufus had access to one. So every Monday and every Friday just before nine A.M. he would go to a big empty space down in the mine and put the thing on his head. As the meeting started, people would begin to appear, standing in a circle around the room. Head count was never less than a dozen, sometimes as much as two dozen. Most of the participants seemed to be in charge of teams. Rufus, of course, was not in charge of anyone. He was on the invite list, as he well understood, because otherwise he’d be totally isolated. He’d have no idea what was going on and no one would know who he was. This could lead to confusion and friendly-fire fuckups. So he always showed up for the meetings. But he never spoke unless spoken to, which was never.

The majority of the avatars in the biweekly stand-up talked like Americans and had low latency, meaning that they exchanged words and gestures in something close to real time. Some attendees had high latency, which as Rufus could guess meant that they were far enough away for the speed of light to become a limiting factor; no matter how adroitly networks routed those packets, they could only travel down the fiber-optic cables or bounce off the satellites so fast. Frequently the high-latency avatars spoke with non-American accents. He recognized some as British, Australian, or South African. Others he didn’t recognize at all.

And some moved around. T.R. was one of those. Sometimes his latency was high, sometimes low. Rufus had noticed a few things and put two and two together. Sometimes when T.R. was in high-latency mode—suggesting he was on the other side of the world—he breathed heavily and rapidly, as if short of breath. Rufus hadn’t understood this, and in fact he’d actually begun to worry about T.R.’s cardiovascular, until he had taken to noticing the word “Snowbird” coming up in conversation. Then he’d realized it was actually “Snowberg.” Then he’d heard one of the South Africans—an Afrikaner—say the name of it with different vowel sounds: “Snayoobergh.” Rufus had figured out it was a Dutch word, “Sneeuwberg,” and that it was a place on the island of New Guinea. The Dutch had named it “Snow Mountain” back in the days when it actually did have snow on it. Nowadays it did not. That was partly because of global warming and partly because Brazos RoDuSh had converted it into a hole in the ground. Anyway, the elevation was quite high—something like fifteen thousand feet, depending on which part of the mine complex you were at—and so T.R.’s noticeable shortness of breath did not reflect any underlying deficiencies on the cardio front. There just wasn’t that much oxygen where he was.

So, though they didn’t talk about it directly—Black Hat had pretty good comms discipline, everything “need to know”—Rufus had pretty easily been able to piece together the picture that another big gun was in the works at Sneeuwberg. As well as a third complex at some place called Vadan, in southern Europe. With yet more sites apparently being evaluated.

Which was all very interesting but, from a Black Hat standpoint, a potentially dangerous distraction from the task at hand, which was to secure the Flying S Ranch. Anything not directly related to this property was above Rufus’s pay grade. He knew the military mind well enough to know that for him to express even mild curiosity about Sneeuwberg or Vadan would get him in trouble; and to do it a second time would get him fired. And along with that came a certain feeling of being out of the loop. Flying S was a done deal. The Pina2bo gun had been operating with only occasional episodes of downtime for almost a year. The initial pushback against what T.R. was doing here had more recently been muted by countervailing arguments around the idea of termination shock: the fear that if the gun stopped, it would lead to a backlash in the world’s climate system. The cool kids in T.R.’s organization were now popping up with high latency in Vadan and Sneeuwberg. The medics at High Noon had started urging Rufus to get all kinds of vaccinations for diseases whose names he hadn’t heard since the army had shipped him off to fucked-up parts of the world.

It wouldn’t be quite fair to the staff left behind at Flying S to say they were complacent. But it was definitely the case that they were no longer in the spotlight. Flying S–related topics were now deep in the agenda and tended to be dispensed with by Colonel Tatum reporting that there was nothing to report.

The next, and always the last, agenda item was called Trigger Warning. It always consisted of a video, typically from YouTube. Sometimes T.R. picked it out himself, other times it was a suggestion from one of the team. Most of the Trigger Warning videos had at least some connection to the over-arching theme of practical applications of violence, which was, after all, the profession, or at least the constant preoccupation, of everyone present. A typical example might be a cop getting stabbed by a distraught housewife while his attention was fixed on the husband, or a fistfight in front of a liquor store with some unexpected twist. In general, to be considered for the honor of appearing on the Trigger Warning segment, a video needed to have some Whoa, I did not see that coming! element that would leave the team members entertained and yet questioning their assumptions—and, as such, more on their toes and less likely to end up being featured in such a video.

One Monday morning, the Trigger Warning video featured a man known to the Internet as Squeegee Ninja. Very low-quality cell phone video of this guy had been circulating during the last twenty-four hours, but it kept getting taken down as the people who’d posted it figured out that they were incriminating themselves. T.R., though, had exclusive access to much better footage, all from security cameras controlled by his organization. Because the whole thing had gone down at a T.R. Mick’s.

The quality of these videos made Rufus feel old. When he heard someone speak of security camera footage—from a gas station, no less—he still thought of old-school black-and-white imagery with terrible resolution. Of course, it wasn’t like that anymore. This footage was Hollywood movie grade. Even the sound quality could be pretty good.