Termination Shock

Rufus was not a religious or woo-woo sort of guy; Snout had put paid to all that. He didn’t believe in ESP or any other literally superhuman shit. But if you were somehow patched in to a mesh network of drones—if you could somehow sense what they sensed—that could give you such an edge. And if the drones were hovering invisibly in the dark, observers wouldn’t have any rational way of explaining it.

Suddenly he couldn’t wait for that third drone to be delivered.

In the meantime, he just had to pursue other leads as best he could.

He knew nothing about this martial art of gatka, had never heard of it until this morning. Were there gatka champions? Did they even compete? Did they participate in ultimate fighting tournaments like the Muay Thai and the Brazilian jiu-jitsu guys? The answer generally seemed to be no, it was more of a niche thing in the Punjab (a name that triggered some vague associations in his head; but he decided to let that sleeping dog lie for now).

Sometimes the dumb, simple approach was best. He googled “who is the greatest gatka fighter?” and the answer came back: Big Fish. There wasn’t even any controversy. No welter of anonymous Internet fucktards arguing about it in chat rooms.

Just like that, his YouTube slate was once again wiped clean and filled up with a simply unbelievable number of videos featuring Indians and Chinese fighting with rocks and sticks at the Line of Actual Control—a thing of seemingly immense importance that Rufus, in his whole life, had never even heard of. But he had somewhat grown accustomed to there being such things and to the Internet suddenly revealing them to him and so he got over it pretty quickly. Keeping his head down and plodding relentlessly was his way. So there was a period of a few hours, coinciding with the hottest part of the afternoon, when he just took all that in. Just sat down in the coolest part of the marble mine and let the YouTube wash over him. Learned about the history of the LAC and its geography too: the Yak’s Leg, Sikkim, the Kunchang salient, and other hot spots. Followed the stories of different Chinese and Indian crews: where they hailed from, their uniforms and other branding, what styles of kung fu or other martial arts they favored, their won/lost records, their positions on leaderboards, their Vegas and Macao odds, what kinds of people belonged to their fan bases.

It was a lot to take in and he found himself getting a little stupid-headed. So he took a nap, or what his compadres south of the Rio Grande would call a siesta. When he woke up, a mere forty-five minutes later, he found that his brain had sorted things out for him and it was all in better view now. He was seeing the forest instead of the trees, as the saying went. Why had he gone down this particular Internet rathole? Because it seemed like Squeegee Ninja was a gatka man, and so he wanted to learn more about gatka. About who was best at it. And the Internet said that the answer was Big Fish. According to various adulatory fan sites—none of which seemed to have been updated recently—he had burst from obscurity last year to become the leader of the most badass crew on the Indian side of the LAC and recovered many square kilometers of territory that had been stolen by China. But then he had fallen in battle under circumstances that were poorly understood. A stroke or exposure to invisible death rays from a Chinese superweapon were the two leading hypotheses. Long exposure to the ways of the Internet led Rufus to favor the stroke theory. Anyway, Big Fish had disappeared from the front and been helicoptered to a first-rate medical center elsewhere in India and then fallen out of the spotlight just as rapidly as he had ascended to fame. A more recent news item from a tabloidesque Indian site suggested that he had gone back home to Canada to continue his convalescence. He was depicted in a wheelchair, struggling to perform a simple thumbs-up gesture. Which was a shame, both as such (national hero cruelly cut down in his moment of triumph) and for Rufus’s own selfish purposes. His research program, if you could call it that, had become centered on Big Fish. Not only because he was a close physical match for Squeegee Ninja, but also because he was so well documented. Practically every waking moment of his rise from hitchhiking vagabond to epic hero had been chronicled in videos, initially by a New Zealander named Philippa Long, and subsequently, in a more blatantly propagandistic style, by Indian filmmakers who seemed to have more resources to play with. Like symphony orchestras to juice up the sound track.