Нил Стивенсон - Termination Shock

Back in his truck, he drove on and reached the diversion a few minutes later. The riverside highway vaulted over it on a new bridge. Instead of crossing it, he pulled off onto a road that ran parallel to the diversion’s bank. For the first ten or so miles, this snaked through mature woods and small towns. To judge from the aureolas of rust surrounding the bullet holes in the road signs, it had been inhabited for a while. Then old pavement gave way to new, and new gave way to gravel, and signs discouraged casual motorists from going any farther.

The diversion—an artificial construct, only a few years old—was an alternate route for the water of the Mississippi to reach the Gulf. It was aimed toward parts of Plaquemines Parish that were still shown as dry land on old maps, but that had long since ceased to exist and been stricken from cartographical databases. Hydrological engineers had sculpted the diversion so that it would carry as much silt as possible out to its very end, then dump it in shallows that had been brackish or salt water until this thing had suddenly inundated them with fresh. The cost of it was that the species that had been living there all died. The benefit was new land. Balancing that cost and that benefit was a judgment Willem was glad he had no part in making.

He parked in a big open gravel lot at the end of the road. Again his vehicle blended well with what was here, though most of these pickup trucks were older and more beat-up than his rental. Lined up along one edge of the lot were a dozen or so buses. Their paint jobs told the story that they’d been part of Louisiana’s tourism industry until ten years ago, and little maintained since, now pressed into service as worker transportation. Opposite them was a row of portable toilets. Canopies had been staked down to shade rows of plastic tables where pump bottles of hand sanitizer and rolls of paper towels stood sentry. Right now apparently it was the middle of a shift and few workers were in evidence. Four bus drivers had gathered at one table to vape and play dominoes. Service workers wiped tables and sprayed insecticide.

Margaret had told him where to go, what to look for, how to explain himself. He put on his reflective vest and his earthsuit helmet, deploying its sun shade and turning up the A/C just to the point where he could feel cool dry air on his face. He slung a water bag over his shoulder and set off in the direction of the Gulf of Mexico’s indistinct shore. Past the parking lot, the road dwindled and dissolved. ATVs supplanted pickup trucks as he went along. Airboats gradually replaced the ATVs, and skiffs took over from there. Trees peeled away to reveal the Gulf. He was sloshing, his Walmart shoes long since ruined. Barges were moored here and there, along what might become a shore at low tide. They were laden with plants: some just little sprouts you could pick up in your hand, others whole trees, or at least saplings. The workers were stooping in knee-deep water to plant these. These species had been chosen because they were good at filtering silt from the flow and making it come to rest and form, if not dry land, then at least a stubborn muck that might be dry land one day when the trees had put down roots and made a bulwark against storms and waves.

When he finally got back to the parking lot an hour later, Willem found tea waiting for him, courtesy of the People’s Republic of China.

He’d half expected something like this; he just hadn’t known when or where. The Chinese had showed up today in a rented RV, which they had parked next to his truck. They had deployed the awning bracketed to the RV’s side, creating a patch of shade between the two vehicles. A folding camp table and two chairs completed the basic setup. The inevitable middle-aged Chinese functionary was seated in one of them perusing a tablet, occasionally raising it to snap pictures. He had taken the radical measure of removing his suit jacket and loosening his necktie, but drawn the line at undoing his French cuffs and rolling up his sleeves. He stood up theatrically as Willem approached and greeted him in Mandarin while making a semblance of a bow—much better than shaking hands from an epidemiology standpoint. He gestured to the available chair and summoned his assistants, who were in the RV. To judge from the purring noises emanating from its various systems, this was running on generator power and it was air-conditioned. A guy like this would always have aides; god forbid he should ever be seen carrying an object. Tea was produced and served. It was all done according to the procedures and etiquette that had surrounded such things in China since time immemorial and that Willem knew perfectly well.

“Bo,” the man said, and went on in English: “Believe it or not, that is actually my family name. When I first came to the West, they told me I should pick an Anglo name to go by. Tom or Dick or Harry, you know.” He shrugged expressively, playing it for laughs. “I was thinking Bob? But then I got assigned to the South. People are actually called Bo here.”

“B-E-A-U?” Willem inquired. “The Cajun spelling?”

“Considered it. But outside of Louisiana it would just cause panic. B-O is common all across the South.”

“Diddley,” Willem said, after considering it.

“Schembechler. Jackson. So, Bo it is. And I know you are Willem. Your father is Eng Kuok. Do you have a Chinese name?”

“Not really.” Bel had called him by Fuzhounese pet names, but those were totally inappropriate in this context.

“Willem it is, then.”

Bo did not insult Willem’s intelligence by bothering to supply an explanation of how the Chinese had come to know exactly where he was. Willem could work that out for himself later. It was probably some combination of:

(a) they had hooks into PanScan, which was supposedly anonymized but probably riddled with grievous security exploits,

(b) they were monitoring Beatrix and she had inadvertently spilled the beans, or

(c) they learned it from a Chinese grad student in Margaret’s group,

. . . but it was probably something way more sophisticated than any of that, some AI beyond human understanding. The point was the Chinese government knew that he was in Louisiana, they wanted him to know that they knew, and they just wanted to discreetly and politely touch base.

Despite some suspicions to the contrary, Willem had not, in the slightest degree, been “turned” or even influenced by China. And yet they did like to stay in touch with him—perhaps just reminding him that the option was on the table. As always, he would write up a full report later and put it in the record. Bo knew as much. Willem could have gone through the rigamarole of asking Bo for his business card, learning his official title and cover story, but he didn’t have the energy. The dude worked for Chinese intelligence, presumably out of the New Orleans consulate. He would have a cover identity.

Bo was wearing the flimsiest kind of blue paper mask. He reached up with the same elaborate precision as was used to handle the tea and unlooped it from one ear, letting it dangle from the other. Hard to drink tea otherwise. According to PanScan he was a cipher, a ghost. Its neural nets could discern that a human-shaped object was over there, but otherwise drew a perfect blank. Willem sighed and took his helmet off. Then he shrugged out of the reflective vest. Bo made the slightest eye-flick toward a minion, who rushed forward to assist, as if Willem were a grand duchess struggling to get out of her mink coat in the lobby of an opera house. A coat hanger was somehow conjured up and the vest ended up hanging from the awning’s edge to air-dry. Bo regarded it with amused curiosity, then raised his tablet and snapped a picture of it. “ERDD,” he said.

“Long story. Means nothing.”