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In the distant past, kings had shown the world that they meant it by strapping on a sword and riding into war, putting their lives on the line. Getting behind the controls of a plane and pointing it at a runway was as close as one could reasonably come in the modern world to the same public blood oath.
From time to time a moral panic would arise concerning the sort of online content to which unsuspecting children were being algorithmically exposed,
back-to-the-land hippies and radical survivalists ended up being the same people, since they spent 99 percent of their lives doing the same stuff.
Maybe the worst decision he made was to stay calm. Which seemed reasonable enough.
There would be surveillance cameras. Not that the secret police were, as a general practice, staking out the lobby of the Waco Hilton for stray European royalty. But you could never tell where those things were networked and what humans or AIs might licitly or illicitly have access to their feeds.
Then, as now, “physically active” and “a kinesthetic learner,” young Deep had never taken well to classroom learning. But working in the rain with a shovel, and observing the movements of fish, had brought him alive.
There was a long silence, if you could call the singing of birds, the buzzing of cicadas, the stridor of frogs by that name.
Kids these days were good at emoting through masks.
conferences where inhabitants of low-lying places came together to obsess about sea level.
“How much higher can you pile those things?” She was just being folksy, of course. She had a Ph.D. in this stuff.
A guy like this would always have aides; god forbid he should ever be seen carrying an object.
As soon became obvious, they were actually handheld bug zappers. The aides initially formed a defensive perimeter, but as insects were observed slipping through gaps, they broke formation and began to roam about in a sort of zone coverage, swiping their weapons through the air with the controlled grace of YouTube tai chi instructors, incinerating bugs with crisp zots and zaps while pretending not to hear a word of what Bo and Willem were saying.
Those guys didn’t have a mission statement. People showed up, or they didn’t.
“To be perfectly honest there is also corruption.” “You will be shocked!” Chiara added. “I had heard that there were problems with MOSE,” Willem said sympathetically. “To give you an idea, it was started in 1987 and the gates didn’t become functional until 2020,” Michiel said.
Pinatubo was the name of a volcano in the Philippines that had exploded in 1991. It had blasted fifteen million tons of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere. The result had been a couple of years’ beautiful sunsets and reduced global temperatures. The two phenomena were directly related. The sulfur from the volcano had eventually spread out into a veil of tiny droplets of H2SO4. Light from the sun hit those little spheres and bounced.
They were doing a creditable job of keeping extreme excitement under control.
His complete lack of awareness that no one in the crowd knew what that meant, and that some further explanation might be in order, confirmed his status in Saskia’s mind as some kind of inveterate geek—probably one of those people T.R. had poached from the Johnson Space Center.
Everyone seemed well hydrated and cheerful but no one knew exactly what was going on.
In a classic I’m-just-going-to-cut-this-fucking-Gordian-knot moment, Jay noticed that
Supposedly they were biodegradable, though in the Chihuahuan Desert there wasn’t a whole lot of bio to do the degrading.
The overall boss of the Black Hats was an American man of about sixty (albeit the type of sixty-year-old who seemed to spend half of his waking hours doing push-ups) named Colonel Tatum. He was not, of course, actually in the military and so the “Colonel” was more of an honorific nickname.
Rufus roger-wilcoed him right back, as soldiers did.
“Let me guess,” Saskia said, “you’re about to tell me that it’s not about what you, or your party, actually think is the best policy. It’s about politics.” Ruud now looked slightly less disappointed.
as Ruud drew a pen—she couldn’t see it, but it would be some tour de force of minimalist industrial design, made of metals from the far reaches of the Periodic Table—from his breast pocket.
the heraldry of Zeeland: a lion emerging from waves representing the sea.
Like every other state-of-the-art conference room AV system in the history of the world, it failed to work on the first go and so it was necessary to summon someone who understood how it worked; and like all such persons he could not be found.
“So if T.R. had put the gun in Argentina . . .” Willem said. “The consequences for China and India might very well be the other way round,” Alastair confirmed.
Bella declared victory at some point and flew back to Argentina.
A good thing about horses, as opposed to some other domestic animals, was that they did not insist on being entertained. As long as they had food and water they would contentedly pass the time of day.
From here you could see much of the ranch, but the best view was south across the Rio Grande and into Mexico. The low sun had gone red orange. Everyone said Pina2bo would make for beautiful sunsets all around the world.
“Yippee—ki-yi-yay!” was the exuberant verdict of Thordis.
So she went out a bit early and, to kill time, did an informal drive-by inspection of the nearby Maasvlakte.
The Maeslantkering’s status as the largest robot in the world seemed less exceptional when viewed from the Maasvlakte. The entirety of the Port of Rotterdam was a giant machine.
Willem was on her left, performatively checking his watch.
This man had no actual duty where she was concerned. But. He had to do it. “Your Majesty,” he said, “I am pleased to report that the Maeslantkering is closed.”
“Anyone who shows up in a yacht like that and expresses interest in their plight becomes an ambassador,” Saskia said. “Honestly, Willem, it’s not as if any of the real ambassadors are giving these poor people the time of day.”
“You’ll be wanting to know why the Maeslantkering caved in”
That command was aimed at the royal webmaster. An antiquated job title—“social media coordinator” would have been more up-to-date—but it was common in royal courts to have outdated remnants of a bygone age. If Saskia could be guarded by men in bearskin hats riding horses, why, she could as well have a webmaster.
Rufus was gradually getting clued in to the fact that dudes like T.R. actually liked it when you spent money, provided you did it within reasonable bounds. It proved that you were doing something.
In military parlance, they were the Blue Team, preparing to defend the ranch against possible invaders, and he was the Red Team—a simulated opponent that the Blue Team could train against.
She had never before encountered that usage of the word “Netherworld,” but she got it. Nederland—her kingdom until this morning—was a land that happened to be low. From a parochial Northern European standpoint it was the low country and so that was what people had always called it. From a global perspective, though, it was just one of many places where people lived close to sea level; and though, a hundred years ago, all such places would have seemed quite different—as different as Venice was from Houston or Zeeland from Bangladesh—when sea level began to rise, they all turned out to have much
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“British monarchs—with one notable exception—never abdicate.”
It turned out that Daia had never heard of Vadan. Saskia could hardly blame her. She’d never have known any of this had Cornelia not made her aware. So they took a minute to explain the basics: it was a rocky isle off the remote Albanian coast, formerly an outpost of the Venetian Empire,
“Oh, I get it. Sea level,” Daia said. “So Venice’s existential threat from the sea creates a natural alliance between you and overheated Persian Gulf states lying downwind of this island of Vadan, which is otherwise just a Soviet-era toxic waste dump that is useless to Albania but desirable to Venice in beginning to reassemble her Adriatic sphere of influence. Strange bedfellows!” Cornelia said, “Strange bedfellows have been a constant throughout all history.” “It’s just that climate change moves the beds around?” Saskia added.
Bøkesuden. This thing was actually a royal yacht. She’d heard about it. It was completely green, wind- and solar-powered from stem to stern, a floating showcase both for the latest climate-conscious technology and for traditional Norwegian shipbuilding know-how.
No formal activities were slated for this evening. She spent a few minutes freshening up and changing clothes, then ventured out, bracing herself for more aggressive hospitality.
The name of the conference was Netherworld. It had a logo, inevitably, and swag with the logo on it. The image was a stylized map of the world showing only what T.R. would have described as stochastic land: everything within a couple of meters of sea level. Deep water, and the interiors of continents, were blank. So it was a lacy archipelago strung about the globe, fat in places like the Netherlands, razor thin in places like Norway or America’s West Coast where the land erupted steeply from the water.
Saskia had heard of this Line place. It was a completely new city, a hundred miles long and only a few blocks wide, that the Saudis were constructing on mostly unoccupied land. Its western end was on the Gulf of Aqaba at the head of the Red Sea, its eastern reached deep into the desert.
“We have grown rather attached to the practice of selling energy for piles and piles of money, and we intend to continue it long after we have run out of oil. To be blunt, we will install enough photovoltaics to alter the climate.”
Uncle Ed wasn’t named Ed and wasn’t Willem’s uncle. He’d come to this place in the 1970s and established what was imaginatively called a logistics depot for bulldozer parts. Later he had branched out into helicopter maintenance, pipeline supply, and drilling rigs. He had started by simply using a bulldozer to scrape all life off a patch of jungle near the banks of the river, then sold the bulldozer to Brazos RoDuSh. The boomtown of Tuaba had taken shape around him,
