Termination Shock

T.R. during this had been piloting the car over a terrible road at little more than a walking pace. They had put the helipad behind them and passed through a security gate staffed by Caucasian men armed with submachine guns. There was a sort of buffer zone consisting of strewn cargo pallets and parked equipment. Here and there, Papuan men in hard hats and high-visibility vests were working on engines or driving forklifts. Then they passed through another belt of armed security and came alongside a row of office trailers. “Fiefdoms of different subs,” T.R. explained. “Brazos RoDuSh is a mining company. Period. Don’t wanna run medical clinics, commissaries, housing, anything that ain’t mining per se. So, subcontractors. You might remember this one.”

He had pulled up in front of a trailer that was unsigned and unmarked, other than a blank sheet of white printer paper taped to the door. “Welcome to the Papua offices of White Label Industries! Breathe deep and don’t go into oxygen debt as you ascend the four steps to the door!”

The interior was true to White Label form. The ends of the trailer featured a couple of smaller offices and a toilet, but most of it was a conference room. The walls were sheathed in cheap fake wood paneling with whiteboards drywall-screwed into place. A watercooler and a coffee maker sat in the corner on a makeshift table consisting of the cardboard boxes they had arrived in. The flimsiest, cheapest obtainable folding plastic chairs surrounded a couple of plastic folding tables jammed together. “Sometimes the glamour of it all is just a bit much,” T.R. gasped as he collapsed into one of those chairs and nearly buckled it. Next to it was an oxygen tank. He cranked its knob and took a few deep breaths as Willem tottered back to the toilet.

“Have you considered simply piping oxygen into rooms like this one?” Willem asked when he came back.

“First question I asked,” T.R. said. “Turns out it’s dangerous. You add too much oxygen, and stuff burns you didn’t know was capable of burning.”

Willem nodded and sat down. Amelia, who had better cardio, prowled up and down the length of the trailer looking out the windows. These had all been covered on the inside with steel mesh, affixed with drywall screws and washers. She gave one a rattle. “For grenades?” she asked.

“Correct. Wouldn’t stop a burglar. Protects upper management from casual fragging. Sandbags on the roof—before you ask.” T.R. turned his attention to Willem and winked at him to indicate that he approved of Amelia. “Welcome to the Southern Hemisphere branch!”

“Just barely.”

T.R. considered it. “You refer to the fact that we are only a couple hundred clicks south of the equator. It’s enough, though! The circulation patterns of north and south are surprisingly well separated. And the special circumstances here make it possible for us to reach farther south yet—we pulled off a few tricks that were not an option in our little old pilot project down Texas way.”

“Pilot project!” Willem said under his breath, shaking his head in disbelief.

T.R. had been fussing with the AV system while they chatted, and now pulled up an image on a 3D holographic projector that was mounted to the ceiling: the one concession in this place to fancy high-end office equipment. As if reading Willem’s mind, T.R. said, “Cost more than everything else combined. But we gotta put on some kind of show for folks like you who go to the trouble of coming all the way out to this godforsaken shithole!” Left unspoken was the question What the hell are you doing here? but Willem was pretty sure they’d get around to it after T.R. was finished putting on this big show of hospitality.

Hovering in the middle of the conference room was now a semi-transparent model of the entire mine complex. This slowly zoomed in on an area not far from the trailer where they were having this conversation. Hard as it was to make sense of the vast complex when viewed from a chopper, this rendering made it all even more confusing as it revealed all the underground works that had been cut into the mountain during the half century that Brazos RoDuSh had been working here. Not for the first time, Willem was awed, staggered, and even a little humiliated by the sheer scale at which the oil and mining industries operated—year in, year out, in a way that was basically invisible to the people on the other side of the world who benefited from what they were doing, and who funded these works, every time they checked their Twitter.