Нил Стивенсон - Termination Shock

Another drawback of classic security camera footage was that nothing was ever framed correctly. The camera was never pointed in exactly the right direction. The bozos and miscreants and flailing, hapless victims who tended to star in these little dramas always went out of frame at the worst possible moment. But of course that too was a thing of the past. The cameras now used AI to pan and tilt and zoom, centering whatever the AI considered most interesting—most legally actionable, anyway—and in one of your better planned-out systems, practically all parts of the facility could be covered from multiple camera angles. So really it was all about choices—about editing. Someone in T.R.’s chain of command had apparently handed off all the Squeegee Ninja–related footage to a gifted film editor who had cut it all together into a five-minute sequence that was as watchable as any Hong Kong action flick. In real time it hadn’t lasted that long, but the editor had chosen to use a lot of freeze-frame, slo-mo, and multi-camera instant replay during especially watchable parts of the action. It was safe to say, based on the reactions of the virtual audience gathered around Rufus in the depths of the marble mine, that no one had any objections to taking the additional couple of minutes out of their day to watch the extended director’s cut. Even T.R. allowed as how those members of the team who were in time zones where it was after five P.M. should feel free to crack open a beer. Today, T.R. was high latency (he was on the other side of the world) but seemed to have plenty of oxygen (low altitude).

Like any well-structured narrative the story began with some setup: it was just a normal, pleasant summer evening at this random T.R. Mick’s Mobility Center somewhere in the western United States. A middle-aged couple came in, looking concerned but not yet what you would call agitated, and requested to speak to the manager. They made that request of an employee running a cash register near an entrance. It took a minute for the manager to show up. During that time, the couple chatted with some of the other customers in the queue. It was hard to make out exactly what they were saying, but there were a lot of apprehensive glances in the direction of the parking lot. Eventually a manager—wearing a white cowboy hat as badge of rank—did show up. The couple—now surrounded by several other customers who had been drawn into the story—began to point out into the parking lot and to explain something. But as luck would have it they were barely able to get started when the door opened and a man walked in. He was a big fella with an athletic build, like a tight end or a power forward. For the most part he was dressed in completely forgettable clothing: jeans, sneakers, unmarked T-shirt. But he was wearing a turban. A standard-issue N-95 mask completed the ensemble. Around the fringes of the mask a healthy black beard could be seen. He was brown skinned, not a white guy but probably not African American. Not far off from Rufus in skin color.

Whenever you watched a movie, and new characters began to appear on the screen, you had to pick sides. To decide who to root for. From the word go, Rufus was on the side of the guy in the turban. How many times in his life had he been that guy? And the conspiring, finger-pointing white people he couldn’t have hated more.

Here the video had to be paused because a discussion had broken out among various Black Hat operatives. “Dude is Arab!” someone objected.

“So?”

“It’s kind of racist to call him Squeegee Ninja.”

“Why?”

“Ninja is a Chinese thing.”

“Japanese,” someone corrected him.

“Okay, whatever, but the point is, not Arab.”

“He’s not Arab,” said another voice. “Dude is Indian.”

“I never heard of any Native American tribe wearing turbans.”

“I mean, from India.”

“Oh.”

“He’s not Indian. He’s Sikh,” said yet another voice.

“Sikhs are Indian!”

“No, they are from Pakistan.”

“Arabs then.”

“No, Pakistanis are not Arabs!”

The pace of the discourse had slowed down as mad typing on multiple keyboards was taking over the audio feed. “According to Wiki—”

“I’m gonna restart the video now,” T.R. announced. “Y’all can take this offline.”

The guy in the turban was clearly oblivious to the little drama playing out at the cash register. Even if he’d been paying attention there’d have been nothing to see, because as soon as he came in, all those people clammed up and made a big show of not staring at him. He looked around to get his bearings, then lurched in the direction of the bathrooms. “Lurched” being the operative word here because something about his gait was off. Like invisible hands were trying to pull him back out toward the parking lot and he was tearing loose from them. Once he’d got well into the building he seemed to recover his equilibrium, and then made a beeline for those world-famous surgically clean T.R. Mick’s toilets.

It transpired that he needed to go number 2, and so there was now an interlude during which the cash register caucus resumed its deliberations and acquired new members. A couple of these were open carrying, and as the conversation went on and began to include words like “Arab,” “terrorist,” and “bomb,” these reached around to pat their weapons. One drew his pistol from its holster and pulled the slide back to inspect the chamber.

A different nonwhite, non-Black man entered the frame from the other direction carrying a foil-wrapped burrito and exited to the parking lot. He seemed oblivious to all this drama and was scarcely noted by its participants. Rufus might not have noticed him at all had T.R. not paused the video and remarked, “We think that is the driver.”

Eventually Turban Man finished his business in the toilet and headed straight for the exit. His utter lack of interest in any of the food, beverage, or leisure time modalities on display in the T.R. Mick’s was construed in the darkest possible way by those observing him. A contingent hastened to the bathroom to look for (guessing) bricks of plastic explosive stuck beneath toilets. In this they were disappointed; but by that time the man in the turban had already checked in for his appointment with destiny and the truck stop was on fire.

For three members of the self-appointed posse had followed him outside. Camera angles flickered around for a spell. The principals were all on the move through a relatively camera-impoverished part of the property and the editor had had to make do and fill in with some less than ideal cuts. But as luck would have it there were a couple of strong angles on the place where the posse caught up with its prey: a vacant gas pump, 37G, about a hundred feet away from the building.

One interesting detail that caught Rufus’s eye here was that the guy was no longer unsteady on his feet. More the opposite. While Rufus was just a mediocre athlete himself, he’d played football with a couple of guys who had gone on to the NFL. He’d always known there was something different about them, just based on the way they carried themselves, the way they moved. The guy in the turban was one of those. By the time he reached Pump 37G, the posse had been hassling him for a little while, questions hardening into threats and commands. He was ignoring them, pretending not to hear. But he was keeping his hands in view and well away from his sides, which was smart of him.

Finally one of the posse lost his temper and drew his sidearm, which happened to be a revolver. One of those ridiculously large-caliber revolvers that a certain kind of gun nut had a hard-on for. He put his thumb on the hammer and drew it back, cocking the weapon, which for the time being was still aimed at the ground. The click of the gun’s action wasn’t audible on the soundtrack. But apparently the guy with the turban heard it, for in one smooth motion he lunged sideways and grabbed the handle of a squeegee, provided for the convenience of T.R. Mick’s customers who wished to scour their windshields clear of dead insects using T.R.’s patented Bug-Solv formula. The squeegee was soaking head down in a bucket of same. The man in the turban pulled it out, executed a full pirouette, and whipped it around, causing Bug-Solv to spray from its end in a scythe-like arc that, under the powerful motion-activated lights of Pump 37G, shone like Star Wars light saber shit. It perfectly sliced across the middle of Revolver Man’s face, delivering a load of slightly used Bug-Solv directly into his eye sockets. The man toppled back. Rufus noted with approval that he maintained control of the weapon, though. The Bug-Solv also spattered one of the other men, who reflexively cringed away from it; Squeegee Ninja took advantage of this to step close to him, hook his arm with the T-shaped head of the squeegee, and get him in a sort of complex joint lock that made it possible for him to pull the man’s pistol from his belt holster and toss it lightly up onto the moving walkway. This, of course, carried it away.