Termination Shock

“Very well, let’s look at the words then!” Martijn said agreeably. He just happened to have a hard copy of the official text in the breast pocket of his perfectly tailored suit, and it just happened to be folded back to the relevant section. “New geoengineering schemes are to be opposed,” he read, in a singsong voice as if this could all hardly be simpler. “We specifically exclude existing measures from the policy just stated.” He looked up. “There you have it.” He jammed the document back in his pocket as if there’d be no further need of it.

“She’s talking about the dikes. The pumps.”

“She didn’t say dikes and pumps, she said existing as opposed to new. I have seen the videos from Pina2bo. I’d say it exists. Would you disagree?”

The interviewer was dumbstruck.

“The language spoken by our queen clearly supports Pina2bo—a site she has, I believe, personally visited—and my party stands alongside her,” Martijn announced, placing his hand over his heart.

Willem just sat there for a minute with the blood raging in his ears. Texts were pelting in from Remi and others but he wasn’t really seeing them.

He had to focus on the immediate. What did he need to do now?

As little as possible, was the answer. This was Ruud’s problem. Ruud had written the speech. He, not fucking Martijn, was the arbiter of what the words actually meant. Once Ruud got wind of Martijn’s shenanigans he’d be standing in front of one of those cameras stating in no uncertain terms that Pina2bo was not included in the category of “existing” geoengineering schemes and that the speech meant the opposite of what Martijn had just claimed.

But Martijn had announced a very real change in his party’s policy.

Reactions were coming in from all over, on different feeds. Martijn had clearly triumphed in today’s news cycle. The leader of the older far-right party made an announcement that they, too, had altered their position and now stood in favor of the use of geoengineering to address the grave threat posed by rising sea level to the very existence of the Netherlands.

> Snaparound!

This single word in English scrolled up his notifications. It was from Alastair. Willem didn’t know what it signified.

The ZGL website refreshed itself. Superimposed on the preexisting landing page were fresh headshots of Martijn and Ruud making their announcements. Above and between them was a smaller photo of the queen sitting on the throne earlier today. Willem wondered whether he should go find her and make her aware of all these goings-on. She was taking the rest of the day off from official duties, enjoying what amounted to a family reunion of the House of Orange. Technically this was none of her concern. She was above it. There was no action she could or should take.

For an eccentric local nonprofit dating back to the 1950s, ZGL seemed suspiciously web-savvy. Willem couldn’t shake the vague idea he’d heard of them before.

He hit on the idea of searching through his old emails for any reference to this group. Several hits came back, but they were obviously false positives. The license plate of the pickup truck he had rented in Waco had been ZGL-4737. This had been cited on the rental contract and other paperwork, which had been automatically emailed to him. So any search for “ZGL” in an email just brought up those PDFs. But nothing else. And his email archive went back decades.

If it had not been for the recent weirdness concerning ERDD, he’d have shrugged it off as a coincidence. But he remembered, now, sitting there outside of the RV that Bo’s staff had parked next to the rented pickup truck in Louisiana. Bo had snapped a photo of the ERDD vest hanging up to dry. But he had also—Willem now remembered this—quoted the license plate number of the truck from memory.

He went back and took a closer look at the ZGL website. Some of the pages had creation dates going back to the 1990s, but those could be faked.

Featured on the landing page but now overshadowed by the recent additions—now including a live chat pane auto-scrolling at dizzying speed—was a black-and-white photo of the group’s alleged founder. Willem had previously clicked on this and skimmed it. He rooted it up out of his browsing history and read it again. The bio page was headed up by a larger copy of the same photo, the founder’s name, and his birth and death dates.

The birth date was 4 July 1937. 4/7/37 as everyone outside of America wrote dates.

He compared it against the PDF from the car rental agency. ZGL-4737 had been the truck’s license plate.

He started typing in the URL of the Internet Archive’s Way-back Machine, which would show him any old archived versions of the ZGL site. This would, he suspected, provide evidence that the site, though it purported to be decades old, had not existed until a couple of weeks ago.

Then he stopped. Why should he even bother? He already knew what he would find.

He took his glasses off, sat back, closed his eyes, folded his arms, and tried to think.