Нил Стивенсон - Termination Shock

The snow thinned as they went, for they were passing over into Ladakh, a place that was dry for the same reason that the Punjab was well watered: the mountains stopped all the moisture and converted it into rivers, just as with the Cascades in Laks’s part of the world. Inland was high desert. Surrounding the hamlet at the foot of the pass was a redolent plateau where locals went out to defecate in the open. Laks was glad his sense of smell had been devastated by COVID. Stepping with great care across this, they came to a cluster of buildings and located the guesthouse where they would stay the night. There they encountered Pippa, Bella, and Sue, playing Dungeons and Dragons.

During his journey up from Shimla, Laks had crossed paths with all three of these women glancingly, enough to follow their stories at a remove. Pippa was a lanky, freckled Kiwi. Bella was Argentinean. Sue—presumably an Anglicized version of her real name—was Korean. They’d not been together at the time. But backpackers in general and women in particular formed ad hoc alliances when they discovered, in the dining room of a hostel or the lobby of a bus station, that they were going the same way. This looked to be one of those. They could watch one another’s backs when they weren’t huddling together for warmth.

Back in Kullu, these women might have taken one look at Laks and surmised he was going north to the Line of Actual Control. Laks, however, never would have assumed the same of them. Until, that is, he descended into the smoky guesthouse—dwellings here were quasi-subterranean—and found the three of them eating bad stew from a communal vat and rolling twenty-sided dice. They’d walked over the pass for the same reason as Laks: Bella had overstayed her visa while sampling the trippy delights of Goa and didn’t want to get caught at the tunnel checkpoint. Sue had come down with altitude sickness during the hike and they had holed up here for a day as she bounced back.

Bella and Sue, as it turned out, were just in it for the usual backpackerish reasons—to have adventures and see cool parts of the world before they settled down—while Pippa had a mission. Completely self-assigned, but a mission nonetheless. She had traveled most of the way up the Beas Valley in the company of some guy from California who, it could be guessed, was one of those aspirant filmmakers who came from money and so had the freedom to do stuff like this—or to tweet that he was doing it, anyway—but not the grit to stick with it when it got hard. Which it very much did, beyond Manali. Laks knew about people like that because there was a whole sub-Hollywood in Vancouver. He had observed them in their coffeehouses and brewpubs, hatching their plans and engaging in the strangely protocol-bound interactions of their tribe. Pippa had grown up in Wellington, the capital of New Zealand’s film industry, which was culturally quite different. Her objective in all this was to join up, at least for a time, with a network of streamers who were documenting the conflict that Laks intended to take part in.

Early in the conversation, Laks was inclined to keep Pippa at arm’s length. What benefit could there be in joining up with these three women? But the more they talked, the more he understood that they might need Pippa more than she needed them. She kept asking questions that Laks ought to have known the answers to. Which part of the front were they aiming for? The southeastern toe of the Yak’s Leg, perhaps, where the Chinese had lately encroached and needed to be pushed back? Or the “knee” farther north where Indian crews were rumored to be readying a counterattack across the high glaciers that fed the Pangong Tso? Were they going to join up with an established squad, or form their own new one? Did they intend to remain a purely stick-based unit, or were they going to team up with any rock throwers? Which langar network were they going to join up with; or did they have their own logistical train? Were they self-financed, or crowdfunded, and if the latter, which crowdfunding site were they using? And, most unnerving for Laks, how did he think his gatka was going to stack up in practice against various regional kung fu styles?

When Laks sputtered—for, sad to say, he was definitely sputtering by this point—that he thought gatka more than a match for anything mere Chinese might throw at him, Pippa had more questions. Was Laks aware that the Iron Lions Crew currently operating along the northern shore of the Pangong Tso consisted of hand-picked fighters from the elite Piguaquan schools around Cangzhou where they had perfected a simplified variant of the Crazy Demon style using asymmetrical red oak staffs? Or was he expecting to deploy along the ridge above Chushul, which was currently under pressure from a squad of Guangzhou-based fighters versed in the more classically southern, Wing Chun–derived style? Obviously different tactics would be called for in that case, given the latter’s preference for extraordinarily long and whippy carbon fiber staffs being produced for them by enthusiastic supporters in Chinese aerospace factories.

It might have been different, somehow, if Pippa had asked him these questions in a hectoring and contentious style. But she just wasn’t that way; her affect was unfailingly calm and pleasant. She spoke in the tone of a sweet, curious child. She wasn’t trying to flaunt the amount of research she had performed. It simply had never crossed her mind that anyone would get as deeply into this as Laks already had without knowing all these things. To illustrate some of her points she took Laks outside where she could get better satellite and showed him a few of the more relevant video channels. There seemed to be dozens of these—enough that their thumbnails covered at least one screen, anyway. Each was the record that had been uploaded by one streamer—a streamer such as Pippa aspired to be—on his or her journey along the Line of Actual Control. And each had at least a few (some had dozens of) videos depicting noteworthy moments in the conflict. Some of the streamers were in the mold of documentary filmmakers who wanted to show behind-the-lines stuff. Support volunteers ladling lentils in makeshift langars, that sort of thing. But others were stone martial arts geeks obsessed with different styles of stick fighting and following specific combatants, like kids collecting Pokémon. They had titles like “DEVASTATING leg strike by Big Talib on SHOCKED Chinese fighter at Kangju Ridge” and “NSFW! NOT FOR SQUEAMISH! Chinese rocker gets COMPOUND FRACTURE in glacier battle!”

Pippa began swiping to additional screens of such material before Laks could take it all in. Before long, Chinese titles were competing with English for screen space. Beyond that it was all Chinese. She must have sorted the feeds by language. Only after several screens’ worth of Chinese video channels did she turn up a few in Hindi, or in Punjabi. Most of the streamers on their side of the front were presumably using English.

Somewhat amplifying the effect of all this, Sam and Jay had wandered outside to smoke cigarettes (not that anyone cared, up here, but they were ashamed of their smoking habit and liked to do it outdoors, as a kind of penance). Since there wasn’t much to look at here except rocks and turds, they drifted over to look over Pippa’s shoulder and to make remarks about the various feeds flashing across her screen—remarks, the import of which was that they were familiar with a great many of these. “That’s a new one from Sanjay, innit?” Sam remarked as Pippa scanned through the playlist of an especially well-subscribed Indian-Australian streamer.

“Weren’t up there yesterday,” Jay confirmed. “Five hundred thousand views already, must be a cracking fight.”

Pippa obligingly scrolled through the new video to a slowmotion replay showing an airborne Sikh fighter’s legs being swept out from under him by a Chinese fighter’s thick staff. This appeared to be made from plastic water pipe. It was painted red and emblazoned with a row of Chinese characters and a corporate logo, somewhat in the manner of a race car or other corporately sponsored artifact.