Termination Shock

by Neal Stephenson

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.

Woven through the preparations had been a series of tests, administered to all the invited guests, for contagious diseases. Everyone who’d made it as far as this hotel lobby had passed that screening, and so they were all in a shared bubble now, with no masks or social distancing required.

We gotta terraform Earth before we get distracted by Mars is my philosophy.”

The elongated bowl, four thousand feet above sea level, in which this complex had been constructed, was referred to by T.R. as Pina2bo (“Pin a two bo”). Anyone familiar with the literature on climate change and geoengineering would get the joke. 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.

Laks felt his scalp growing hot beneath his turban. On a pure martial arts level there was a good rejoinder to be made to the objection just raised by Sam. No doubt it had already been debated at exhausting length in the comments thread dangling from the end of this video like a string of fecal material from a yak’s ass hairs.

In homage to a late-twentieth-century rock group, the Bonking Heads wore black dress suits over their voluminous down-stuffed under-layers. The suits were tailored after normal business attire but comically oversized to make room for all that insulation. They were neatly accessorized with white shirts and narrow black neckties. Having perceived the futility of throwing rocks from this distance, they were now just brandishing sticks and shouting imprecations.

“You’re number one on the Force To Be Reckoned With meta-poll, and you’ve broken the top 25 overall.” “Vegas is going bananas,” Major Raju put in. “Macao less so, but what would you expect from those people?” “Oh, because . . . China?” “Have you signed anything yet?” the major inquired. Laks’s confusion must have been obvious because Pippa said, “He means deals with sponsors or agents.” “While I was taking a shit in the rocks? No.”

It was now time for Queen Frederika to retreat inside the motte: the higher, more easily defended ground within. And along the way she was going to slam the gate behind her. Or rather she was going to stand in a suitably photogenic location and do absolutely nothing while half a million lines of C++ code slammed it for her.

“You throw darts at random into a spinning globe, the odds of hitting Connecticut are small. The odds of hitting what you call a weird, difficult part of the world are high.”

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. But he had somewhat grown accustomed to there being such things and to the Internet suddenly revealing them to him and so he got over it pretty quickly. Keeping his head down and plodding relentlessly was his way. So there was a period of a few hours, coinciding with the hottest part of the afternoon, when he just took all that in. Just sat down in the coolest part of the marble mine and let the YouTube wash over him.

“I read classics at uni,” Pippa said, “and got interested in the performative aspect of war. I’m talking specifically about the Iliad.” Rufus couldn’t make heads or tails of “I read classics at uni” but he could guess the meaning of “performative.” The Iliad he had listened to during his perambulations around Texas. “Like Achilles dragging Hector around the walls of Troy?” he guessed. “Putting on a li’l show. For the psy-ops impact. But zero tactical value.”

The boxes containing Nimrod, Skippy, and Genghis were perched on the horses’ and mules’ croups. Looked like a bumpy ride to Rufus, but what did he know about eagles and their ways? If home for you was a tangle of sticks in the top of a tree on the edge of a cliff in the mountains, why, maybe riding on a mule’s ass was a Sealy Posturepedic.