Нил Стивенсон - Termination Shock

> The twat is up!

said a text from Remi.

Willem turned his attention to the video stream and saw that Martijn Van Dyck was getting into position to be interviewed by one of the networks. He changed the channel on his television until he found the right one.

There were two parties of any real significance that could be called truly far right in the sense of being quite open about their disdain for immigrants as well as espousing certain other positions that were well outside the Overton window of the politics of the day. One of these was older, headed by a senior politician who’d had a long career as a gadfly in Parliament. Then there was the party of Martijn, who was younger, more polished. He presented much the same ideas in a more palatable guise and was considered a man to watch.

The first thing Willem noticed about him was that he was sporting a ZGL button in his lapel. It was adorned with the heraldry of Zeeland: a lion emerging from waves representing the sea.

His surprise over that detail distracted him, at first, from what Martijn was actually saying. Which on any other day wouldn’t have been much of an issue, since his statements were utterly predictable. People mostly watched him for his wit and style. And Willem was tired of Martijn’s wit and style. He drifted back to reading about the ZGL as Martijn started talking. The group’s website included some nice old black-and-white photos of the members in the 1950s repairing dikes, and of the founder giving a speech in front of a Parliamentary committee.

> !!!

came in from Remi and so Willem turned his attention back to Martijn and turned up the volume.

“Yes,” Martijn was insisting to the shocked TV journalist, “our stance on this has in fact changed. We are in the middle of redrafting the party platform.” He paused, took a deep breath, and showed emotion that even the interviewer knew better than to interrupt. “I lost a friend at Scheveningen the other day,” he announced. “At his funeral, his mother came up to me and implored me to step back and re-examine my party’s position on the klimaat nood .”

Climate emergency. Martijn Van Dyck, until this moment, had never allowed the phrase to pass his lips, and he openly mocked those who used it.

“Recent research has made it undeniable that man-made climate change is real and that it poses the greatest threat to our country since Hitler.”

Willem laughed out loud and slapped his desk. This was like hearing the leader of the Greens come out in favor of clubbing baby seals.

The interviewer couldn’t believe her ears. “That is stunning news,” she said. “Does this mean you’ll be joining up with the Greens?”

Martijn looked quizzical, verging on offended. “The Greens!? Oh, no. We need real solutions to this problem. Effective solutions. Vague promises to cut back on carbon emissions at some point in the distant future are too little, too late. ‘Decarbonization’ is nothing more than a 1940-style capitulation. No, the only way out of this emergency is geoengineering. Such as what we are seeing at the Pina2bo site in Texas. I stand with Her Majesty the Queen in supporting such realistic, hardheaded practical solutions.”

“Fuuuuuck!” Willem shouted.

“The queen?” asked the interviewer.

“Yes. As we just saw from the throne.”

“The queen said the opposite.”

“Ah, in the official text—which she, of course, didn’t write—that’s what it claims. But you have to read between the lines in these things. The way she hesitated—the look on her face as she rattled off those lines that were put in her mouth by the prime minister—there’s no mistaking what it all means.”

“But the words are what they are!” insisted the interviewer, who, to her credit, was having none of it.

“Very well, let’s look at the words then!” Martijn said agreeably. He just happened to have a hard copy of the official text in the breast pocket of his perfectly tailored suit, and it just happened to be folded back to the relevant section. “ New geoengineering schemes are to be opposed,” he read, in a singsong voice as if this could all hardly be simpler. “We specifically exclude existing measures from the policy just stated.” He looked up. “There you have it.” He jammed the document back in his pocket as if there’d be no further need of it.

“She’s talking about the dikes. The pumps.”

“She didn’t say dikes and pumps, she said existing as opposed to new . I have seen the videos from Pina2bo. I’d say it exists . Would you disagree?”

The interviewer was dumbstruck.

“The language spoken by our queen clearly supports Pina2bo—a site she has, I believe, personally visited—and my party stands alongside her,” Martijn announced, placing his hand over his heart.

Willem just sat there for a minute with the blood raging in his ears. Texts were pelting in from Remi and others but he wasn’t really seeing them.

He had to focus on the immediate. What did he need to do now ?

As little as possible, was the answer. This was Ruud’s problem. Ruud had written the speech. He, not fucking Martijn, was the arbiter of what the words actually meant. Once Ruud got wind of Martijn’s shenanigans he’d be standing in front of one of those cameras stating in no uncertain terms that Pina2bo was not included in the category of “existing” geoengineering schemes and that the speech meant the opposite of what Martijn had just claimed.

But Martijn had announced a very real change in his party’s policy.

Reactions were coming in from all over, on different feeds. Martijn had clearly triumphed in today’s news cycle. The leader of the older far-right party made an announcement that they, too, had altered their position and now stood in favor of the use of geoengineering to address the grave threat posed by rising sea level to the very existence of the Netherlands.

> Snaparound!

This single word in English scrolled up his notifications. It was from Alastair. Willem didn’t know what it signified.

The ZGL website refreshed itself. Superimposed on the preexisting landing page were fresh headshots of Martijn and Ruud making their announcements. Above and between them was a smaller photo of the queen sitting on the throne earlier today. Willem wondered whether he should go find her and make her aware of all these goings-on. She was taking the rest of the day off from official duties, enjoying what amounted to a family reunion of the House of Orange. Technically this was none of her concern. She was above it. There was no action she could or should take.

For an eccentric local nonprofit dating back to the 1950s, ZGL seemed suspiciously web-savvy. Willem couldn’t shake the vague idea he’d heard of them before.

He hit on the idea of searching through his old emails for any reference to this group. Several hits came back, but they were obviously false positives. The license plate of the pickup truck he had rented in Waco had been ZGL-4737. This had been cited on the rental contract and other paperwork, which had been automatically emailed to him. So any search for “ZGL” in an email just brought up those PDFs. But nothing else. And his email archive went back decades.

If it had not been for the recent weirdness concerning ERDD, he’d have shrugged it off as a coincidence. But he remembered, now, sitting there outside of the RV that Bo’s staff had parked next to the rented pickup truck in Louisiana. Bo had snapped a photo of the ERDD vest hanging up to dry. But he had also —Willem now remembered this—quoted the license plate number of the truck from memory.

He went back and took a closer look at the ZGL website. Some of the pages had creation dates going back to the 1990s, but those could be faked.