Termination Shock

At nine A.M. Texas time every Monday and every Friday morning, Black Hat Practical Operations held a virtual stand-up meeting. They had started inviting Rufus to these shortly after he had set up operations at Marble Mine. It all happened over augmented-reality headsets. They had delivered one such device to him. You could use the thing anywhere and see the same stuff, but the overall effect was more convincing if you did it in a big dark empty space. By virtue of living in an abandoned mine, Rufus had access to one. So every Monday and every Friday just before nine A.M. he would go to a big empty space down in the mine and put the thing on his head. As the meeting started, people would begin to appear, standing in a circle around the room. Head count was never less than a dozen, sometimes as much as two dozen. Most of the participants seemed to be in charge of teams. Rufus, of course, was not in charge of anyone. He was on the invite list, as he well understood, because otherwise he’d be totally isolated. He’d have no idea what was going on and no one would know who he was. This could lead to confusion and friendly-fire fuckups. So he always showed up for the meetings. But he never spoke unless spoken to, which was never.

The majority of the avatars in the biweekly stand-up talked like Americans and had low latency, meaning that they exchanged words and gestures in something close to real time. Some attendees had high latency, which as Rufus could guess meant that they were far enough away for the speed of light to become a limiting factor; no matter how adroitly networks routed those packets, they could only travel down the fiber-optic cables or bounce off the satellites so fast. Frequently the high-latency avatars spoke with non-American accents. He recognized some as British, Australian, or South African. Others he didn’t recognize at all.

And some moved around. T.R. was one of those. Sometimes his latency was high, sometimes low. Rufus had noticed a few things and put two and two together. Sometimes when T.R. was in high-latency mode—suggesting he was on the other side of the world—he breathed heavily and rapidly, as if short of breath. Rufus hadn’t understood this, and in fact he’d actually begun to worry about T.R.’s cardiovascular, until he had taken to noticing the word “Snowbird” coming up in conversation. Then he’d realized it was actually “Snowberg.” Then he’d heard one of the South Africans—an Afrikaner—say the name of it with different vowel sounds: “Snayoobergh.” Rufus had figured out it was a Dutch word, “Sneeuwberg,” and that it was a place on the island of New Guinea. The Dutch had named it “Snow Mountain” back in the days when it actually did have snow on it. Nowadays it did not. That was partly because of global warming and partly because Brazos RoDuSh had converted it into a hole in the ground. Anyway, the elevation was quite high—something like fifteen thousand feet, depending on which part of the mine complex you were at—and so T.R.’s noticeable shortness of breath did not reflect any underlying deficiencies on the cardio front. There just wasn’t that much oxygen where he was.

So, though they didn’t talk about it directly—Black Hat had pretty good comms discipline, everything “need to know”—Rufus had pretty easily been able to piece together the picture that another big gun was in the works at Sneeuwberg. As well as a third complex at some place called Vadan, in southern Europe. With yet more sites apparently being evaluated.

Which was all very interesting but, from a Black Hat standpoint, a potentially dangerous distraction from the task at hand, which was to secure the Flying S Ranch. Anything not directly related to this property was above Rufus’s pay grade. He knew the military mind well enough to know that for him to express even mild curiosity about Sneeuwberg or Vadan would get him in trouble; and to do it a second time would get him fired. And along with that came a certain feeling of being out of the loop. Flying S was a done deal. The Pina2bo gun had been operating with only occasional episodes of downtime for almost a year. The initial pushback against what T.R. was doing here had more recently been muted by countervailing arguments around the idea of termination shock: the fear that if the gun stopped, it would lead to a backlash in the world’s climate system. The cool kids in T.R.’s organization were now popping up with high latency in Vadan and Sneeuwberg. The medics at High Noon had started urging Rufus to get all kinds of vaccinations for diseases whose names he hadn’t heard since the army had shipped him off to fucked-up parts of the world.

It wouldn’t be quite fair to the staff left behind at Flying S to say they were complacent. But it was definitely the case that they were no longer in the spotlight. Flying S–related topics were now deep in the agenda and tended to be dispensed with by Colonel Tatum reporting that there was nothing to report.