Termination Shock

Not a whole lot of billions. T.R., over drinks last night, had been keen to make this understood. On a good day in the stock market he

might be worth ten billion. He was not, he wanted it understood, one of “those tech boys” who had, as the result of an IPO, overnight come into more money than Dr. T.R. Schmidt would ever be able to accumulate simply by dint of actually growing a business. He’d made this statement matter-of-factly, in the same emotional tone he used to describe the underground plumbing that fed gasoline from central tanks out to the hundred pumps. He was not, in other words, bitter. In no way did T.R. wish to deprecate “the tech boys” who had ten times as much money as him. No, it was that the rootedness of his fortune in “steel in the ground” was somehow going to become a part of the argument he was making today.

They swung north up a downtown thoroughfare that was labeled “Main Street” on the augmented-reality overlay in the drone’s bubble. In a few moments this terminated in a small plaza on the edge of a swollen brown stream. Another stream of about the same size emptied into it here. Several bridges had been thrown over these watercourses. “I promise I’m about done with the tourist shit,” T.R. said. “This here, the confluence of Buffalo Bayou and White Oak Bayou, is Allen’s Landing, where Houston was founded two hundred years ago. Y’all ought to be seeing a little old 3D movie playing right about now. Holler if it ain’t.”

The glass bubble darkened, cutting down the brightness of the incoming sunlight, and the landscape seemed to turn green. The bridges and streets were still visible, but they’d been overlaid with an artist’s conception of what this place had looked like a couple of hundred years ago. Mostly it looked like the same kind of vegetation Saskia and her companions had traveled through between Waco and Sugar Land. In this fictional rendering, some sail- and oar-powered wooden vessels, including some indigenous canoes, had congregated on the south bank of Buffalo Bayou, right where the present-day historic site was located. A man in a broad-brimmed hat was standing on a platform reading from a fancy document. Basically it looked like a cut scene from one of your more expensively produced video games: close to photorealistic if you didn’t zoom in too far. The actor who had recorded this dialog had done the best he could with the material that had been handed to him. But at the end of the day, the words were those of a real estate prospectus that had been written in 1836—not exactly Shakespeare.

In Saskia’s headphones, much of the dialogue, or rather monologue, was drowned out by questions and remarks from some of the other guests. For all of them were sharing the same open comm channel with T.R. But Saskia was able to hear the actor declaiming, in timeless real-estate-hustler style, about the pure clean spring water, fertile soil, salubrious climate, and other fine conditions here prevailing. On that basis he ventured to guess that this settlement did “warrant the employment of at least one million dollars of capital,” then paused as gasps of astonishment, followed by whoops and huzzahs, propagated through the procedurally generated, AI-driven crowd of improbably diverse Texans assembled to hear his oration. “. . . and when the rich lands of the country shall be settled, a trade will flow to it, making it, beyond all doubt, the great interior commercial emporium of Texas!”

“Blah blah blah,” T.R. said, as another round of applause swept across the computer-generated crowd below. The simulation faded, the drones gained altitude, the glass bubbles undarkened. The swarm was climbing straight up, fast enough to make Saskia’s ears pop. T.R. went on, “The gist of it is, there’s a data point for y’all. Two hundred years ago. One million dollars. In today’s money that’s more like thirty million.”

The boost in altitude was broadening the view to include much of Houston. Several miles east of Allen’s Landing, the bayou spilled into a vast bay extending far to the south, where it was sealed off from the Gulf of Mexico by a barrier island. Much of that waterfront was dominated by industrial complexes and shipping facilities on a scale that would be impressive if you had never seen Rotterdam. Directly south was the downtown high-rise district, lodged in the center of a spiderweb of freeways. Any one of those freeways, traced outward, supported its own chain of sub-metropolises. “I’m not gonna insult y’all’s intelligence by explaining compound interest,” T.R. said. “The value of the real estate in greater Houston today is one point seven five trillion dollars. Big number. But it’s just six percent annual interest compounded for two hundred years from that starting point. Now just stash that number in your short-term memory for a spell while we go look at some other unique exhibits.”