It would be conventional to assume that Tuaba had been expropriated from indigenous people, but as far as anyone could tell, no one had ever lived here until the likes of Uncle Ed had showed up. Farther south, along the edge of the sea, people had long roamed among the inlets and swamps in dugout canoes, living off fish, prawns, birds, and sago palm while trying to stay one step ahead of malaria. Farther north, small populations had lived in the mountains, above the swamps but below the tree line, eating sweet potatoes, wild pigs, and small marsupials, suffering from yaws, anemia, and the depredations of their fellow man. But the belt of land in between was the worst of both worlds, and simply not worth living in. Unless, that is, you were a company from Texas who wanted to construct the world’s largest open pit copper mine on top of the island’s highest mountain.
Tuaba was the highest point on the river reachable by barges from the sea. It was only meters above sea level. There, cargo had to be offloaded and transported by road the remaining hundred
clicks to the site. A key detail being that this entailed an altitude gain of some four thousand meters. Since said road had not existed at the beginning, the first cargoes, back in the early days, had been mostly road-building equipment. The lineup—some would call it a junkyard—of ancient, rusty hulks in Uncle Ed’s lot constituted a sort of archaeological record of that endeavor. Albeit a selective one, for many bulldozers had simply disappeared into swamps.
Nowadays, 150,000 people lived in the city, which occupied a couple of miles of the river’s western bank and stretched about a mile into the former jungle. Surrounding that were suburbs that didn’t feel quite so much like a hastily thrown-together boomtown. Many of Ed’s badminton buddies had relocated to such neighborhoods, but Ed was quite happy where he was; he seemed to believe that if he set foot off the compound for more than a few hours it would succumb to some combination of jungle rot and rampant hooliganism. Nowadays the business was run by younger members of the clan, many of whom operated out of branch offices in Singapore, Taiwan, and the northern Australian city of Darwin. These people went for months, even years at a time without setting foot on the island of New Guinea.
The business was simple enough: they caused certain very specific objects to show up when and where they were needed, incredibly reliably. The mine operation as a whole consumed tens of thousands of gallons of diesel fuel per hour. The engines that did the consuming were distributed across a wide range of equipment both stationary and mobile. Almost none of it was run-of-the-mill. Run-of-the-mill equipment couldn’t operate at four thousand meters of altitude on some of the world’s worst terrain. It was all weird special equipment. Helicopters had to be fitted with special blades to get purchase on the thin air. A burned-out bearing or snapped driveshaft could burn astronomically more money in downtime than what it cost to replace it. Uncle Ed’s company was far from the only one serving that market, but they were holding their own against the competition—enough that members of the younger generations, like Beatrix, could get expensive educations and passports to First World countries.
Most of the business was transacted over the Internet. But they had to have a physical depot here. So Uncle Ed pinned down both tails of the bell curve. He was the founder and CEO. But he was also the guy filling in chuckholes. Everything in between those two extremes he delegated to the juniors. He could have moved, of course, and lived out the rest of his life in a part of the world characterized by greater political stability. But having seen shit you wouldn’t believe in Indonesia, he had arrived at the conclusion that political stability anywhere was an illusion that only a simpleton would believe in. That （invoking, here, a version of the anthropic principle） such simpletons only believed they were right when and if they just happened to live in places that were temporarily stable. And that it was better to live somewhere obviously dangerous, because it kept you on your toes. Willem had thought all this daft until Trump and QAnon.
So the first humans to live here had been Texans. They’d brought Dutch and Australian expats in their wake. Not long after, people like Ed had begun to show up. Ed was an Indonesian citizen on paper, but culturally was overseas Chinese, conducting business in English, speaking Fuzhounese otherwise and Mandarin when he had to. In Irian Jaya （as Western New Guinea was called in those days） he did for Brazos RoDuSh what, before the war, his forebears had done for Royal Dutch Shell in Java.
The mine had attracted Indonesians—almost all Muslims, of a different race and culture than the indigenous Papuans. So the second layer of settlement had seen Indonesian neighborhoods, mosques, schools, playing fields, and shopping centers growing up around the airport, the hotels, the bars, and the office buildings that the white expats had thrown up just as table stakes. Efforts to train and hire native Papuans, and allow them to share in some of the wealth, had got underway. They’d migrated to the area in numbers. As part of their overall deal with the Indonesian government, Brazos RoDuSh had provided schools, modern housing, clinics, and helicopter rides. Their numbers had grown because of natural population increase over the fifty years that all this had been