Termination Shock

Up here at the marble mine they didn’t have lights at all, other than a few candles. All their flashlights were LED-based. Instead of simple on-off switches, they had buttons you could press multiple times to get different brightness levels or check the batteries or what have you. There must be a little microprocessor inside the unit counting the button presses and deciding what action to take. Those were fried. So the lights didn’t work. Fortunately the moon was full. It was what they used to call a Comanche moon on the Texas frontier, for the warriors of that people had taken advantage of its light to mount nocturnal raids. Rufus was thereby able to hike down from the peak and find his way back to the campfire without turning an ankle. He’d had an idea that he could hot-wire some flashlights by opening them up and soldering wires directly between the battery terminals and the LEDs.

Or, of course, they could all just go to bed and wait for the sun to come up. But after that it would soon become so hot that they would have to lie low until it went down again. The ability to move around and get things done during the hours of darkness was going to be important.

Besides, he had nothing else to do.

His trailer had some twelve-volt circuits that ran off battery power, and these still worked. So he was able to go in and grab his soldering iron. But it required 120 volts AC. Normally this would be supplied by the generator. But the generators were all dead because they were controlled by systems that had microchips in them. For that matter, so did the soldering iron; it had a built-in thermocouple and some logic that varied the power to keep it at a set temperature, turned it off when not in use, and so on.

So Rufus’s first project was to hot-wire his own soldering iron by holding its tip into the glowing coals of the campfire until it was hot enough. He was able to bypass its power supply and hook it directly to a car battery. This gave him the ability to hot-wire flashlights. This in turn gave him a well-illuminated workspace on one of the plastic tables.

He did not, of course, fully know what was going on, other than that the ranch was under some sort of attack. His conversation with Pippa pointed to some kind of performative war project starring Big Fish. Such a thing could not possibly have worked if it was Big Fish single-handedly taking on Black Hat. But Black Hat without electronic devices was just a few guys running around in the dark with guns, strewn across a vast stretch of desert. Desert where it was nearly impossible to move because of climate and terrain. They’d have no way to communicate save mirror flashes and smoke signals.

In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man was king. Big Fish must be down on that mesa, performatively bringing the nets down. Why attack the nets? Because they were a great big obvious symbol and it would look good. Maybe they could get some video of spent shells crashing ignominiously into the ground.

Pina2bo, on the other hand, was all underground. Nonetheless, he’d have to go there eventually. He’d have to do it soon, before reinforcements could be sent in. Personnel there were probably being rounded up and herded and kettled just like the ones down on the mesa. The next move—the big payoff—would probably happen tomorrow, in daylight where it would look better on the videos.

To do anything about it, Rufus would have to cover ten miles of rough ground. He was going to be out in the open. He was going to need his earthsuit.

The earthsuit was a whole basket of technologies, some of which belonged to the realm of materials science, such as fabric, or of mechanical engineering, such as pumps and fans. But the key thing for his survival tomorrow was going to be the refrigeration system.