Нил Стивенсон - Termination Shock

And he shut off the AR visuals and took the flock on a slow flyby of a suburban street that was on the front line of the struggle against rising water. There were a number of vacant lots, currently sporting brown puddles of floodwater shaped like the floor plans of houses that had once stood there. All the houses that hadn’t been torn down were now standing proud of the water. Some were on high foundation walls of reinforced concrete, enclosing garages or storage space, currently filled with water but, it could be guessed, easy to hose out and dehumidify when the waters receded. Others—and these looked newer and nicer—stood above the water on reinforced concrete stilts, connected to the ground by ramps or stairs of welded aluminum.

“You can just imagine how expensive this is,” T.R. remarked, pausing the swarm for a moment so that they could look at a house that had been caught in the middle of the house-jacking process when the current round of flooding had struck. The contractors had left it high and dry on stacks of crisscrossed railroad ties and evacuated their equipment. An open skiff was bumping against its front porch on the end of a rope. A man came to the window of an upper bedroom, drawn by the noise of the drone swarm, and peered back at them. He was an ordinary-looking man in his fifties, shirtless in the heat, a strap angling across his pudgy torso from a long weapon slung across his back.

“Screwed” was T.R.’s verdict, “because thirty years ago, before Harvey, he bought a nice home here in this nice new development, and it all seemed like a great idea.” He took the swarm higher, effectively zooming out to remind them of just how many houses and neighborhoods were going through the same transition. “He did not understand—none of these people did—that this is stochastic land on the edge of a stochastic reservoir. They didn’t understand it because those are statistical concepts. People can’t think statistically. People are hardwired to think in terms of narratives. This guy’s narrative was: the little missus and I want to settle down and raise a family, here’s a house we like in a neighborhood full of folks like us, they can’t all be wrong, let’s take out a thirty-year mortgage on this thing. And now he’s probably taking out a reverse mortgage or a HELOC to pay the house-jackers so he can have a prayer of being able to sell the thing. Multiply his story times all the houses you can see from here and you get an idea of what kind of money we’re talking. Now, we gotta recharge.”

As he had been delivering this peroration he had guided the swarm north and west and increased their speed. Saskia glanced at a gauge on her drone’s panel that showed battery charge; it had turned yellow as it dropped to about one-third. She opened a private voice channel to Alastair. “Stochastic?” she asked. “I vaguely know this word but it is important in the mentality of T.R.”

“From a Greek root meaning to guess at something,” Alastair said. “In maths, it just means anything that can’t be calculated or positively known but that you instead have to approach statistically, probabilistically.”

“Got it. Right up your alley then.”

“Indeed. See you soon?”

“Looks that way.”

“It’s quite a spread, as they say.”

Their destination, which they reached some quarter of an hour later, was a T.R. Mick’s mobility center in a suburb that seemed to be above flood level for the most part. Its vast parking lots were splotched with puddles, but they were shallow. Most of the parking acreage was under hard roofs or pitched awnings, which Saskia had come to understand was a necessity in Texas; only a desperate person would park a vehicle in direct sunlight here. The roofs were tiled with photovoltaics, presumably helping feed the electric vehicle charging stations that were interspersed with gasoline and diesel pumps along the complex’s splayed arms.

One of those arms, in its entirety, had been cordoned off for the private use of T.R. and his drone swarm. Buses—the very largest and newest kind of gleaming inter-city double-decker behemoths—had been parked in queues, nose to tail, to either side, apparently for no purpose other than to form temporary walls. Drivers sat in them, comfortable in the A/C, and security personnel in earthsuits paced to and fro on their roofs.

Within that cordon Saskia could see a dozen or so black SUVs that had been used to transport support staff to the location while she and the other VIPs had enjoyed the drone ride. Saskia’s drone touched down in the open and she learned that its arms could be folded back so that it was small enough to roll into a parking space of the dimensions considered normal in Texas. In that configuration the drone found its way into a shaded stall next to an electric vehicle charger. A mechanical cobra reared up and sank its copper fangs into the drone’s flank. The instrument panel announced that it was now charging. Three men with large umbrellas converged and opened the hatch next to her. Saskia had seen the umbrellas before. Security personnel used them to shield VIPs from the prying eyes of camera drones and long-lens paparazzi. Below the fringe of one umbrella Saskia could see a pair of ankles and sensible shoes that she recognized as Amelia’s. A few moments later the Queen of the Netherlands was safely inside the T.R. Mick’s without her face having once been exposed to the all-seeing sky.

The plaza—the central hub of the mobility center—was the size of a shopping mall but with fewer internal partitions. Maybe airplane hangar was a better analogy. One zone seemed to be a convenience store where travelers could buy chips and jerky. There were toilets, hyped as being unbelievably large and surgically clean. An amusement arcade, pitched mostly at kids, and a toddlers’ play area and an indoor dog walk and a ventilated aquarium for smokers and a lactation suite and an urgent care facility and, one had to assume, many other amenities that she didn’t have the opportunity to see since a lot of highly efficient personnel were dead set on whisking her past all that and getting her to one of several peripheral lobes that served as restaurants. Of those there were several, including an actual taco truck parked inside the building and outlets for several well-known fast-food chains. Most of those, as one would expect, were for travelers who wanted to spend as little time as possible here. But in one corner was a thing that better approximated a real sit-down restaurant. It was a barbecue, Texas style, of course. It had long rows of plank picnic tables and a counter where customers would normally order and fetch their food on big metal trays. But for today’s event it had been cordoned off and fancied up. One table in the middle had been covered with a white tablecloth and set with cutlery that was real, in the sense that it was not plastic. There were wineglasses and a simple, rustic floral arrangement.

But before they could get to it, they had to be welcomed. Saskia and the other VIPs from the drones—four in total, plus T.R.—were greeted just short of the special table by a burly man with a long salt-and-pepper beard and a bright orange turban. He was introduced by Victoria Schmidt as one Mohinder Singh, the proprietor of this T.R. Mick’s franchise, as well as part owner of two others farther west along the I-10 corridor. Speaking—unexpectedly to Saskia—in a perfect Texas drawl, he thanked the Schmidts for the opportunity to show the meaning of hospitality to so many honored guests. He quickly introduced his wife, who had tied a T.R. Mick’s apron over an ornate traditional kurta, and several children and extended family members who had apparently converged on the site as reinforcements for the big day. Most of them were in a sort of uniform consisting of black polo shirts blazoned with a relatively dignified variant of the T.R. Mick’s logo. Though as a matter of course, all the young men wore that particular style of head covering that gathered the hair into a small bun poised above the forehead.