The upshot of it all was that during the day after the fall of Ruud Vlietstra’s government Queen Frederika had no responsibilities whatsoever in that sphere and so was able to do what was considered proper for a monarch in the wake of a natural disaster, namely to visit shelters and ladle soup for people who, had this happened in a Third World country, would be called refugees. She was photographed shaking her head in dismay at the wreckage
of the Maeslantkering, reading books to children sitting on the clean carpet of a high-and-dry shelter, nodding her head and looking extremely supportive as a coalition of charitable organizations kicked off a fund drive.
Her lack of any serious responsibility, combined with the fact that she didn’t want to mess up any of the television shots, led her to shut her phone off during much of each day. Thus it was that while driving back from a visit to a breached dike in the eastern part of the country she turned her phone back on to discover the following series of messages from Lotte, delivered over a span of about half an hour:
> OMG ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR MIND
> ????
> I can’t believe you did this
> crying
> Going to watch it now—finally downloaded. Don’t know if I will ever speak to you again!
> ???
> WTF!?
> Don’t remember any of this
> FUCKING WEIRD
> NEVER HAPPENED
> AM I GOING INSANE
> OK never mind all that mean stuff I said earlier
> WATCH IT AND CALL ME!
. . . followed by a link to a video.
Once Saskia had got through all of that, she saw a message from Willem:
> We need to talk about that video. 850,000 views and counting.
So far the most unsettling aspect of all this was that the normally cool and detail-obsessed Willem hadn’t bothered to supply a link or even to give any specifics beyond just calling it “that video.” He seemed to assume that Saskia would know what he was talking about.
Saskia hated doing this kind of thing in the car. She much preferred to just look out the window and enjoy the fact that she
didn’t have to do anything. But it seemed that duty was calling. So she pulled her tablet out of her bag and, fighting back a powerful sense of dread, brought up the video that Lotte had linked to.
It appeared to be handheld cell phone footage. It took only moments for Saskia to recognize the time and place: this was the dunes in back of Scheveningen beach on the morning of the foam disaster a few weeks ago. Probably just one of many such videos that had been shot and uploaded by random bystanders when they had recognized Saskia and Lotte. This one had been shot while Saskia had been shaking hands with members of victims’ families who had gathered under the canopy to await news. It seemed that the streamer had been sort of weaving through the crowd, holding the phone up above his head, trying to keep the queen in frame, and not too far away, with varying levels of success. But at one point he managed to get a well-framed shot of Saskia looking almost directly at the camera, talking to someone who was not in the frame.
“One hates to be right about such a frightful tragedy,” she said, “but sadly this is just the sort of thing I have been trying to warn the prime minister about, if only he would listen. I worry that the next such disaster will be ever so much worse.”
Saskia had, of course, never uttered those words. She never would utter them. Though it was her face and her voice in the video, the diction was wrong. Like listening to Queen Elizabeth talking fifty years ago, running it through an English-to-Dutch translation algorithm.
Fake Frederika listened to some indistinct response from off camera and nodded.
“That is what I am saying. They—the current cabinet—are all of that generation that believes the answers are to be found in riding bicycles to work and recycling newspapers. That’s how out of touch they are. If they could see what I have seen while conducting my own research, they would understand that the climate crisis is a gushing wound. We are bleeding out. We need first to apply a tourniquet. Do we leave it on forever? Of course not. But
it keeps the patient alive long enough to get him to hospital and stitch up the wound properly.”
Fake Frederika listened again, then nodded. “Yes. Yes. Of course. I’m speaking of geoengineering. That is the tourniquet. It gives us time to put in place more long-term solutions such as carbon capture and emissions reductions. But anyone who doesn’t think we need it right now is living in an ideological bubble.”
Real Saskia ran the video back to the beginning and watched it again. Then a third time. Her phone was going crazy. She turned it off.