Termination Shock

But today Queen Frederika—reading words written in the wee hours by Ruud—did mention it. At the conclusion of the paragraph about climate change, she said: “There are those who say that efforts to change our ways and reduce the emission of greenhouse gases are too little, too late, and that we must instead turn to geoengineering schemes of various descriptions as a stopgap solution—like the old story of the boy putting his finger in the hole in the dike until help could be summoned. We reject this tempting, but shortsighted and dangerous approach. New geoengineering schemes are to be opposed.” The word “new” had been inserted by Ruud during his last-minute edit session. It was just written on the page in fountain pen. He’d snapped a photo of this, and the following edit, and sent it to his office, which had duly altered the official text of the speech that was at this moment being released on the Internet. The queen read it all correctly. But her cadence changed. She had to slow down, pause, scan the emended page, make sure she was reading Ruud’s handwritten insertion letter-perfect. “It will be pointed out by many who are familiar with our country’s history that we have been pursuing a kind of geoengineering for many hundreds of years—that the Netherlands would not exist, in anything like its current form, without it, and that cessation of those efforts currently underway would lead to the inundation of our country. We specifically exclude existing measures from the policy just stated. Our defense of our shoreline and the lands sheltered behind it remain our chief priority.” And then onward to much more conventional Budget Day talk about the amount of money that needed to be spent this year on those defenses. Then education, pension, public transit, and all the usual stuff. She wound it up, as usual, with a faint, non-denominational invocation of God’s blessing. The crowd in the Ridderzaal stood up on cue and shouted “Lebende Konigin!” followed by “Hoora! Hoora! Hoora!” And then the entire procession reversed itself and took the queen back to her palace.

Not generally a day drinker, Willem poured himself a scotch when he got back to his private office in Noordeinde Palace, and put his feet up. He let video news feed run on the old-school flat-panel television screen bolted to the wall as he scrolled through social media feeds in his glasses and on a tablet and reviewed photos he’d taken during the procession.

Nothing on the television seemed worth turning the sound up for. In the courtyard of the Binnenhof, crews from three different Dutch networks had staked out positions where they could interview members of the States General, or anyone else who seemed newsworthy, with the building as backdrop. By changing the channel you could hop from one such feed to another, each showing a different talking head with basically the same background. This made it seem that each of these persons was standing there alone, when in fact they were part of an assembly-line operation, standing close enough to each other that faint crosstalk could be heard on the audio feeds. Willem found a feed from a streamer who was just aiming their camera down the row, with one MP in the foreground but two others visible farther away. He pinned that on his screen just to keep track of who was speaking, or about to go live, on each of the networks. He had a pretty good idea of the sorts of things they’d be saying. Anyway Remi was at home watching all this and sending wry text messages from time to time, letting Willem know when he should tune in to this or that feed.

Meanwhile, scrolling through his photos, he came across that ZGL banner and decided to figure out what that was about. A few possible candidates popped up on a quick search. As he’d apprehended, some related to Zionism. Fortunately, though, that turned out to be a red herring. The Z stood for Zeelandsche, “Zealandish.” Zeeland was the southwesternmost province of the Netherlands, along the North Sea coast, between the Rhine to the north and the Belgian border to the south. It was flat and low even by Dutch standards, and sparsely populated, basically consisting of a series of finger-like islands reaching out toward the sea. Much of it was reclaimed land. It had been hit hard by the 1953 disaster—it was where Willem’s father had nearly drowned in his attic—and it was now protected from such events, at least in theory, by a long dike with a road running over the top of it, spanning the gaps between the tips of the “fingers.” On maps, this looked impossibly spindly, but when you drove over it you appreciated the mass and solidity of the sand and stones that had been carefully arranged to seal off Zeeland from the ocean.