Termination Shock

by Neal Stephenson

Up until about World War II we were horse people, but when cavalry became armored cav, that changed. I was a mechanic. Fixed tanks and APCs and such.” He smiled. “It’s all about mobility, see.”

People were expensive; the way to display, or to enjoy, great wealth was to build an environment that could only have been wrought, and could only be sustained from one hour to the next, by unceasing human effort.

Saskia for her part just suspended her incredulity for a moment to revel in the fact that there was a part of the world where two men with so little in common could derive such mutual pleasure—not feigned—from the mere prospect of being able to go out into a harsh place and shoot feral swine out of a helicopter.

We needed a lot of aerospace guys. This is where it’s easiest to poach ’em. They’re happy working on shit that’s actually getting built, even if it ain’t going to Mars with some fucking billionaire. We gotta terraform Earth before we get distracted by Mars is my philosophy.”

The mission of this akhara seemed a little different; they were somewhat self-consciously making an effort to inculcate youngsters in traditional ways, whereas the guys at the akhara in Amritsar were just doing it because they had always done it. Those guys didn’t have a mission statement. People showed up, or they didn’t. Here, though, the kids were sent.

The characteristic movements of gatka were gracile. Hopping and twirling that sometimes caused Westerners to misconstrue it as mere sword dance—an artistic endeavor that might have been derived from martial roots but was now far removed from anything that would work in practice. In fact those movements all made perfect martial sense when you were on uneven ground, outnumbered, and engulfed in murderous opponents—which in a broader Sikh history context was pretty much all the time.

“What’s termination shock?” “A bogeyman—to be fair, a legitimate concern—that always comes up when people debate geoengineering,” Alastair said. “It boils down to asking what the consequences might be of shutting the system off after it’s been running for a while.” Rufus considered it. “In this case—the sulfur’s up there bouncing back the sunlight—cooling things off . . .” “If the government intervenes—if they suddenly shut it down, might there be a disastrous snapback? More destructive than letting Pina2bo keep operating?”

Young Rufus might have assumed that this drought of dependability was a problem peculiar to Lawton, had he not joined the army and become aware of the fact that it was a worldwide phenomenon. If you did happen to be one of those rare people blessed or cursed—take your pick—with dependability, there were opportunities everywhere.

But having seen shit you wouldn’t believe in Indonesia, he had arrived at the conclusion that political stability anywhere was an illusion that only a simpleton would believe in. That (invoking, here, a version of the anthropic principle) such simpletons only believed they were right when and if they just happened to live in places that were temporarily stable. And that it was better to live somewhere obviously dangerous, because it kept you on your toes. Willem had thought all this daft until Trump and QAnon.

Like many big men, Laks didn’t think of himself as big. He was just normal sized.

but apparently the United States was a different story. It was, as all the world knew, a completely insane and out-of-hand country, unable to control itself. Men like the Texan could get away with anything; but by the same token, so could Indian military intelligence.

“I was thinking the United States. A clown show.” “We’re agreed on that.” “And yet the chaos of America gives people like T.R. the leeway to do things like Pina2bo that simply wouldn’t be tolerated anywhere else.” “It’s an asset, you’re saying. The sheer incompetence of the United States.” “People have come to rely on it.” “It’s true.” “The crazy place where people can do crazy things!” Bo exclaimed.

The reputation of America and Americans might be in tatters in elite cultural and diplomatic circles, but on the nuts-and-bolts level of the petroleum and mining industries, they still seemed to get a lot done in the world.