Termination Shock

He was able to do the first part of this operation by feel, sitting cross-legged on the mattress, but some of the details at the end required a mirror. So he moved up to the passenger seat, flipped the sun visor down, and discovered a small vanity mirror on the back of that. It was flanked by a couple of lights, which he turned on, since it was now close to full dark outside. In another minute or two he was able to finish the wrap and get everything neatly and securely tucked away.

It was only after Laks turned the light back off that he got a good look outside the windshield and saw two people standing in front of him, staring up at him from perhaps ten meters away. He had, during the last minute or so, begun to notice a distinctly foul odor. Since his sense of smell was next to useless, he’d assumed it was but a faint whiff of some incredibly disagreeable stench blowing over the truck stop from a nearby hog lot or chemical factory. Perhaps a tanker full of toxic waste had jackknifed. But he now understood that nothing of the sort was true and that the stink in his nostrils was perceptible only to him. It wasn’t real. It was a signal from the early-warning system that had been wired into his skull in Cyberabad. It was trying to let him know that there was something dangerous about his situation. It had started perhaps one minute ago and gotten rapidly worse until the moment he had switched off the light and seen those two people watching him. A man and a woman, both in their late forties or early fifties, white, fat, informally dressed as you’d expect in a truck stop parking lot in the intermountain West. Absolutely normal and unremarkable, in other words, for this time and place.

It was, of course, he—Laks—who was the weirdo. He could guess that this couple had been on their way to or from the truck stop when they’d happened to pass directly in front of him. Their gaze had been drawn by the light. They’d stopped to watch him putting the finishing touches on his turban. A procedure neither of them had ever seen in their lives.

Laks reached for the door handle. He had a notion to climb out of the vehicle, greet these people, introduce himself, and politely explain what they’d just seen. But before he could act on it they moved away suddenly, quick-stepping toward the truck stop. The man gripped the upper arm of the woman, who was a little less nimble than he was. A hip replacement was in her future. His lips were moving. She turned her head and threw a look back in Laks’s direction as they hustled away. It was not a good look. But the foul smell was abating. The system—whatever it was, however it worked—was letting him know that the threat was subsiding.

Still, he didn’t want to alarm these poor people any more than he apparently had already, so he waited until they had gone inside the main building before opening the truck’s door and climbing down to the pavement.

And then he stopped for a few moments and gazed almost vertically upward at a bright prodigy blotting out much of the sky.

Visible nearby, out the truck’s side windows, had been a pair of stout pillars: steel tubes, anchored to concrete plinths by nuts the size of his head, erupting vertically until they passed above his field of view. Now that he was outside, though, he could follow them up and see what they supported: a sign that, laid flat, would have covered half of a football field. It was thrust high into the air so that it could be recognized by travelers from miles away. It was a cartoon rendering of a smiling and winking man with a white cowboy hat pushed jauntily back on his head. He wore a checked shirt. One hand was extended invitingly toward the truck stop. The other hand was thumb-hooked into a wide orange belt with a buckle shaped like Texas. Below that, the sign consisted of huge glowing letters: T.R. MICK’S.

Some kind of chain operation, evidently.

When Laks had had his fill of that and enjoyed the starry sweep of the big western sky, he lowered his gaze and began walking in toward the central building. A moving walkway was available. Normally he’d have walked, just to stretch his legs, but his inner ear was acting up suddenly, as if trying to pull him back to the truck. So he stepped aboard and grabbed the handrail. In the distance behind him, barely perceptible under the whoosh of tires on the interstate, he could hear the comforting whir of drones shadowing him in the dark.

UNCLE ED’S

Interesting developments up at the mine!”

This exclamation, in English, came from a man of a certain age sitting in a folding chair by the side of Uncle Ed’s badminton court, apparently taking a breather between sets.