Termination Shock

Uncle Ed wasn’t named Ed and wasn’t Willem’s uncle. He’d come to this place in the 1970s and established what was imaginatively called a logistics depot for bulldozer parts. Later he had branched out into helicopter maintenance, pipeline supply, and drilling rigs. He had started by simply using a bulldozer to scrape all life off a patch of jungle near the banks of the river, then sold the bulldozer to Brazos RoDuSh. The boomtown of Tuaba had taken shape around him, prompting him to upgrade his security perimeter from time to time. In the early going this had consisted of an earthen embankment topped by barbed wire, but nowadays the compound was outlined by rusty old shipping containers stacked two high, with long snarls of razor ribbon strung along their tops. Within those steel walls, trucks and heavy equipment trundled back and forth across a gravel lot that at any given time was 50 percent gray puddles. When a given puddle became deep enough to impede commerce, Uncle Ed would emerge from the building—not quite a house, not quite an office—in the corner of the lot nearest the street, fire up one of the clapped-out, rust-encrusted bulldozers lined up nearby, and sally forth, dragging in his wake long skeins of strangler vines that had been using the machine as a trellis, and scrape some muck off a high place and shove it into the offending depression. Then he would park the dozer and go back inside and resume his primary occupations of watching basketball on TV while conducting a range of disputes with random people all over the world on social media. Every so often he would see a familiar face looming in a security camera feed and press a button that would buzz them through a door into the compound. As often as not these were old friends who had come to play badminton on a rectangle of Astroturf that Ed had imported in 1982 by making arrangements for it to be wrapped around a replacement driveshaft for the largest truck in the world, which was being barged up the river from the Arafura Sea. Badminton apparently kept him immune from the ill effects of smoking.

It would be conventional to assume that Tuaba had been expropriated from indigenous people, but as far as anyone could tell, no one had ever lived here until the likes of Uncle Ed had showed up. Farther south, along the edge of the sea, people had long roamed among the inlets and swamps in dugout canoes, living off fish, prawns, birds, and sago palm while trying to stay one step ahead of malaria. Farther north, small populations had lived in the mountains, above the swamps but below the tree line, eating sweet potatoes, wild pigs, and small marsupials, suffering from yaws, anemia, and the depredations of their fellow man. But the belt of land in between was the worst of both worlds, and simply not worth living in. Unless, that is, you were a company from Texas who wanted to construct the world’s largest open pit copper mine on top of the island’s highest mountain.

Tuaba was the highest point on the river reachable by barges from the sea. It was only meters above sea level. There, cargo had to be offloaded and transported by road the remaining hundred clicks to the site. A key detail being that this entailed an altitude gain of some four thousand meters. Since said road had not existed at the beginning, the first cargoes, back in the early days, had been mostly road-building equipment. The lineup—some would call it a junkyard—of ancient, rusty hulks in Uncle Ed’s lot constituted a sort of archaeological record of that endeavor. Albeit a selective one, for many bulldozers had simply disappeared into swamps.

Nowadays, 150,000 people lived in the city, which occupied a couple of miles of the river’s western bank and stretched about a mile into the former jungle. Surrounding that were suburbs that didn’t feel quite so much like a hastily thrown-together boomtown. Many of Ed’s badminton buddies had relocated to such neighborhoods, but Ed was quite happy where he was; he seemed to believe that if he set foot off the compound for more than a few hours it would succumb to some combination of jungle rot and rampant hooliganism. Nowadays the business was run by younger members of the clan, many of whom operated out of branch offices in Singapore, Taiwan, and the northern Australian city of Darwin. These people went for months, even years at a time without setting foot on the island of New Guinea.