Termination Shock

Laks did not have the ability to page back to the first slide of the PowerPoint. These things only played in one direction. They were monitoring the movements of his eyeballs or something; they could sense when he was finished reading a slide. Then they’d turn the page and electronically shred the previous one. Still, he could remember seeing those words during the few moments before he pulled the visor off his head. What did they actually mean?

He had to wait a little while to find out. When he got back to the downed drone, he was instructed to eat food, drink water, and get some shut-eye if possible. Somewhat amazingly under the circumstances, he actually was able to get to sleep for a bit. He wondered if they’d wired a switch into his head that would knock him out from the other side of the world and wake him up again when his services were needed.

It seemed that during this little breather the powers that be had been figuring out whether it was faster to wait for the sun to come up and recharge the drone, thus enabling him to fly straight to “the objective,” or for him to simply walk. Laks could have told them that walking would be faster, but he sensed a large bureaucracy at work. Anyway, they got back to him at around three in the morning with a revised mission briefing that was all about walking. Stashed in one of the drone’s luggage compartments were a few sticks of black plastic and bits of black webbing that, as it turned out, could be snapped together into a sturdy backpack frame that weighed essentially nothing. Immediately, though, it began to weigh rather a lot as the first thing he was told to load onto it was the shockingly heavy briefcase he’d been told not to touch a few hours earlier. Getting that firmly attached consumed most of the available straps, bungee cords, and duct tape. With what remained he loaded on a few key earthsuit parts and several bags of water. Then he heaved the thing up onto his back, adjusted the straps, and started walking.

A few minutes later he was at the ridgeline he’d checked out earlier. He paused there to make a few adjustments. Something caught his eye. He swung his head around and looked back toward the big drone. It was engulfed in flames.

He turned his back on it and continued walking across the crest of the mountains. The night was silent except for the faint whirr of drones, shadowing him all around in some kind of intricate formation he could feel but not see.

The next sound Laks heard, other than his own footfalls, and the little avalanches they sometimes touched off as he descended toward the valley, was a human voice. A cheerful one. Surprisingly close by.

“Splendid morning for a ruck, isn’t it?”

Until that moment he had been in a reverie. At its beginning, it had been dark and he had been striding across level, bare ground at the top of the ridge. Now the sun was not exactly up, but the sky was bright enough that it might as well have been. He was picking his way down steep and extraordinarily treacherous terrain covered with viciously spiny vegetation, headed for the Pina2bo “climate weapon,” which was in plain sight a couple of miles ahead of him. To the extent his mind was up and running at all, it was entirely focused on deciding where to plant his feet so that he could absorb the massive burden of the weight on his back without turning an ankle, blowing up a knee, toppling forward, or impaling himself on a plant. He kept thinking he was almost to the bottom and that the going would soon get easier. It did not.

So the last thing he’d been expecting was to bump into another pedestrian at random. What were the odds? Slim enough for it to seem suspicious. And why had all those fucking drones not noticed this guy and given him some warning?

Out of batteries, probably. They hadn’t planned on Laks walking through the hours of darkness. Pretty soon, though, they’d all be able to recharge, and then they’d catch up with him.

The stranger was tall and lean, with thinning blond hair and a creased face. He seemed to understand that some explanation might be warranted for his startling appearance directly in Laks’s path. “I saw you up there half an hour ago,” he said, “silhouetted against the skyline, and it looked like the way down was tricky, so I decided to take a little break and just make sure you got down all right.” He spoke with a crisp accent Laks couldn’t quite place.

“Thanks.” Laks had been thinking of taking a little break anyway, so he unbuckled the pack’s waist belt and swung it down onto the ground. Then he stood up straight, rolled his shoulders back, and stretched.

“Communications are down, you know, and so if someone has an emergency, we all have to rely on each other.”

Something about this guy’s nervous insistence on explaining himself was setting off alarm bells in Laks’s head. “That’s very considerate of you,” he said.