Termination Shock

by Neal Stephenson

Not for the first time, Willem was awed, staggered, and even a little humiliated by the sheer scale at which the oil and mining industries operated—year in, year out, in a way that was basically invisible to the people on the other side of the world who benefited from what they were doing, and who funded these works, every time they checked their Twitter.

“Booting up a new country. Netherworld. Cool name.” “Thanks. But the name wasn’t my idea. Some Venetians came up with that.” “They are always at the forefront in matters of taste and creativity.”

“It’s an asset, you’re saying. The sheer incompetence of the United States.” “People have come to rely on it.”

The cameras now used AI to pan and tilt and zoom, centering whatever the AI considered most interesting—most legally actionable, anyway—and in one of your better planned-out systems, practically all parts of the facility could be covered from multiple camera angles.

“Did you get a license plate?” “I suppose we could,” T.R. said, “and maybe we will if there’s a criminal investigation, and some local yokel D.A. sends us a subpoena. But I hope they just let sleeping dogs lie. The poor man was attacked. He defended himself. No one died. We have insurance. And when you have spent as much as I have, cumulatively, on insurance, nothing brings greater satisfaction than to lay a horrific claim on your insurer. The end.”

Just like that, his YouTube slate was once again wiped clean and filled up with a simply unbelievable number of videos featuring Indians and Chinese fighting with rocks and sticks at the Line of Actual Control—a thing of seemingly immense importance that Rufus, in his whole life, had never even heard of.

“Got it. What’s that, a day’s drive?” “A very long day,” Rufus said. “Depends on how you drive.” “Conservatively, as befits a guest in your country,” Pippa said, “but I have friends.”

He had the military man’s ability to sleep anywhere, anytime, and was taking advantage of it in the corner, sprawled out on a pile of luggage.

Both men then made a show of trying to help Saskia until she pointed out that they were merely getting in her way.

Piet was a rucker, meaning a practitioner of a sport that consisted of putting on a backpack loaded with weights and then covering ground on foot in open country.

Does that mean I oughta do nothing? When I got the means to do something?”

a small cylinder of Cobalt-60 dust wrapped around an explosive charge.

In the middle of the little encampment, Rufus was sitting on a cooler tending a grill. He was wearing a Flying S swag T-shirt,

She knew everything about this was terrible: burning wood to cook meat from methane-farting cows and serving it on throwaway petrochemical plates. “Bison,” he said, as if reading her mind. “Supposedly better.”

staff and ownership of the Figure 2 Ranch,

T.R. Fehrenbach;