Termination Shock

It might have been different, somehow, if Pippa had asked him these questions in a hectoring and contentious style. But she just wasn’t that way; her affect was unfailingly calm and pleasant. She spoke in the tone of a sweet, curious child. She wasn’t trying to flaunt the amount of research she had performed. It simply had never crossed her mind that anyone would get as deeply into this as Laks already had without knowing all these things. To illustrate some of her points she took Laks outside where she could get better satellite and showed him a few of the more relevant video channels. There seemed to be dozens of these—enough that their thumbnails covered at least one screen, anyway. Each was the record that had been uploaded by one streamer—a streamer such as Pippa aspired to be—on his or her journey along the Line of Actual Control. And each had at least a few (some had dozens of) videos depicting noteworthy moments in the conflict. Some of the streamers were in the mold of documentary filmmakers who wanted to show behind-the-lines stuff. Support volunteers ladling lentils in makeshift langars, that sort of thing. But others were stone martial arts geeks obsessed with different styles of stick fighting and following specific combatants, like kids collecting Pokémon. They had titles like “DEVASTATING leg strike by Big Talib on SHOCKED Chinese fighter at Kangju Ridge” and “NSFW! NOT FOR SQUEAMISH! Chinese rocker gets COMPOUND FRACTURE in glacier battle!”

Pippa began swiping to additional screens of such material before Laks could take it all in. Before long, Chinese titles were competing with English for screen space. Beyond that it was all Chinese. She must have sorted the feeds by language. Only after several screens’ worth of Chinese video channels did she turn up a few in Hindi, or in Punjabi. Most of the streamers on their side of the front were presumably using English.

Somewhat amplifying the effect of all this, Sam and Jay had wandered outside to smoke cigarettes (not that anyone cared, up here, but they were ashamed of their smoking habit and liked to do it outdoors, as a kind of penance). Since there wasn’t much to look at here except rocks and turds, they drifted over to look over Pippa’s shoulder and to make remarks about the various feeds flashing across her screen—remarks, the import of which was that they were familiar with a great many of these. “That’s a new one from Sanjay, innit?” Sam remarked as Pippa scanned through the playlist of an especially well-subscribed Indian-Australian streamer.

“Weren’t up there yesterday,” Jay confirmed. “Five hundred thousand views already, must be a cracking fight.”

Pippa obligingly scrolled through the new video to a slowmotion replay showing an airborne Sikh fighter’s legs being swept out from under him by a Chinese fighter’s thick staff. This appeared to be made from plastic water pipe. It was painted red and emblazoned with a row of Chinese characters and a corporate logo, somewhat in the manner of a race car or other corporately sponsored artifact.

The video then cut away for fifteen seconds to play a Kiwi advertisement for homeowner’s insurance. “That’s where your hopping up and down will fucking kill you,” Sam opined during the commercial break. “All very pretty on the dance floor, but if you ain’t stuck to the ground, you’re fucked.” Jay concurred in the strongest possible terms.

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.

But he knew better than to read the comments. He wasn’t angry so much as embarrassed. And he was embarrassed because he had come so far without doing any of the homework that these people took for granted. Pippa had taken to looking at him with an expression somewhere between mild concern and outright pity.

“Now that we have made it into Ladakh,” Laks announced, “we have choices to make. Where to go and how to get there and what to do when we make it that far. Tomorrow we have to go down the valley. From there we need to look at the latest videos, the maps of where the Line is moving, and see where it all takes us.” He made it clear, by look and gesture, that as far as he was concerned, “we” included Pippa and her friends.