Нил Стивенсон - Termination Shock

That implement—the soldering iron—was an example of the same kind of problem he was facing with this Me-Frigerator. The part of the soldering iron that really mattered was just a dumb coil of wire that got hot when electrical current ran through it. Everything else was electronic brains that added features. When the brain got fried, it just had to be bypassed. The added features went away, leaving a soldering iron that was a throwback compared to the one with the brain. But it did most of what the brainy version could—especially if the person wielding it had some brains of his own.

Likewise, the maze of plumbing and sealed containers of special fluids in the Me-Frigerator were simple enough that they would do their basic job without a brain. That had to be the case, because ol’ Albert had patented the thing before thinking machines existed. The trick was to work a bypass, just as Rufus had with the soldering iron. He might have to turn it on and off by hand. But since he was a pretty acute judge of when he was and wasn’t hot, that should be easy.

“What the hell are you doing? Everyone wants to know.” This was Carmelita, whose role in this strange little community was to be the Rufus whisperer. Thordis talked to horses. Everyone except Rufus talked to eagles. Rufus talked to drones. Carmelita talked to Rufus. She had acquired the skill early in their relationship, when they hadn’t liked each other. As such it had been easy for her to speak to him bluntly. Now they’d come to like each other fine. The habit had stuck, though.

“Before you settle in to bothering me could you throw a couple more logs on the fire?” Rufus asked, without looking up. “Gonna need a heat source to see if this thing works.” Carmelita did so, then sat down across from him. “Seriously, Red. What the fuck?”

“We are at war,” Rufus said. “Gonna ride to the sound of the guns. Leaving before daybreak, I reckon.”

“The guns aren’t making any sound!” Carmelita objected.

Rufus sighed. “It is a Civil War joke. Not so funny apparently. It means I need to go to where the action is gonna be. Pina2bo.”

“And you think you’re gonna get that suit working.”

“Gonna try.”

“Then what, Red?”

“Head out before sunrise, like I said.” He heard footsteps and looked up to see Thordis approaching. Trailing behind her were Piet and then Tsolmon.

“On Bildad?” Carmelita asked.

“Pegleg. I’m too big for poor ol’ Bildad. Pegleg’s more my size.” Also, though Rufus was embarrassed to admit it, he’d held an irrational grudge against Bildad ever since the gelding had made his preference for Thordis clear.

“Pegleg does not have a Me-Frigerator.”

“By the time the sun is high enough to be a problem for Pegleg, we’ll have reached a waller I noticed, a couple of miles from the big gun.”

“Waller?”

“Low spot in the ground where there’s some water. Pegleg can rest easy there until the cool of the evening. Then he’ll find his way back.”

“While you cover those last couple of miles on foot.”

“Yep.”

“Here, let me hold that for you.” Carmelita picked up a flashlight that Rufus had balanced on a rock and angled it into the control unit of the earthsuit to give him a better view. He had a big magnifying glass that he used to work on tiny components and was putting it to good use now.

“What are you going to do about the drones, Red?” That was Thordis talking. She and the others had now formed a little circle around the table. Piet came up behind him, stood a little too close, and peered over his shoulder. He was meticulous, on the spectrum, one of those guys who’d figured out by trial and error that he got along better with critters than with people. “Guess you might as well take notes, Piet,” Rufus suggested. “Maybe we can come out of this with a procedure. Or at least a list of what not to do.”

Piet didn’t say anything, but Rufus could hear the click of a ballpoint pen and the rustle of pages in the little graph paper notebook he always carried in a certain pocket.

“You didn’t answer Thordis’s question,” Carmelita pointed out.

“We’ve been up there watching,” Thordis said. “Whoever those people are—”

“India,” Rufus put in.

“They must have hundreds of drones. And I don’t know how many people.”

“Very few, would be my guess,” Rufus said.

“Anyway, the drones have guns on them. And who knows what else.”

“I figured the same, Thordis.”

“There’s no cover out in that desert. The drones will see you coming a mile away.”

“Well, I can and will go alone,” Rufus said. “Someone got to be Hector in this Iliad .”

“Hector?”

“The opposition. Someone gotta play defense. Staff at Pina2bo gonna be neutralized, rounded up, just like those ones down on the mesa. But they probably don’t know about me, coming down the back way from the old marble mine. That won’t be in their plan.”

“You’ll go alone if you have to . Is that what you’re saying, Red?” Carmelita asked. “And those drones will fuck you up. But if we’ve got your back—”

“How do the eagles fare in the heat of the day?” Rufus asked.

“They ride the air to where it is cold,” Tsolmon said. Her first and quite likely her final contribution to this conversation.

“Thing is,” Rufus said, “whatever these guys are gonna do, they got to get it done quick. Electronics might be on the fritz here at the ranch . Giving them the upper hand. But—”

“There must be some safe radius outside of which everything will still be working,” Piet said.

“Yeah. And so the cavalry will be on its way tomorrow. Bad guys know this. Maybe they can use hostages to delay the inevitable. But they gotta do something tomorrow, something big to justify all this. I do mean to be there. You want to bring the eagles and join the party, be my guest. We got all night to get the meefs fixed,” he concluded, using the inevitable slang term for “Me-Frigerator.”

He got to his feet and lifted the meef from the table. During the last few minutes he’d identified what he believed to be its on/off switch: a pair of valves, electromechanically actuated, that controlled the circulation of fluids through the plumbing circuits. He had teased the wires free and hooked them up to new leads in a simple circuit consisting of a battery, a switch, and a resistor. When he flicked the switch he could hear the valves moving. He was pretty sure he had just turned the unit on. There was an easy way to find out. He carried it over to the campfire, which had developed a nice bed of coals. He turned the unit’s hot plate—just a flat expanse of bottomless black—toward it, using his hand to verify that it was getting warm. A watched pot never boils, so he waited for a minute. “Y’all are the custodians of those beautiful birds,” he said. “Y’all can decide.”

“The drones they’re using might be big ones,” Thordis pointed out.

“Go for the little ones first,” Carmelita suggested. “The video drones. Peck out their eyes.”

Thordis didn’t seem mollified. “The real question is, why are we doing it? Why go to war for T.R.?”

“We’re going to war for Red,” Tsolmon answered.

“Why are you doing it then, Red?”

“You mean, other than the fact that T.R. has been paying me to look after his property?” Rufus asked, looking Thordis in the eye. But he already knew that an argument of that type wasn’t going to cut much ice with her. How impossibly old and out of date he was, making decisions based on some frontier notion of honor. And she was right, in a way. All their vehicles and comms were down. They could all just stay put right here and wait for the cavalry and T.R. wouldn’t think less of them.