He sent T.R. a text.
> Let’s talk about being overrun by China. Also about India’s climate peacekeeping initiative.
> What do you know?
> More than you. Shall we meet where it all started?
> Can it wait until dinner?
> Up to you, you’re the one with the jet.
> Rijsttafel?
> Sounds delicious
> C U there.
Willem replied with a thumbs-up emoji and pocketed his phone. “I have no idea what the fuck I’m supposed to do,” he said.
“Well, don’t look at me,” Bo answered. “Oh, I’d love to make myself useful somehow, don’t get me wrong. But you and your friend Frederika are doing something that has never been done before. Quite beyond my powers of imagination.”
“And what is it you imagine we are doing?” Willem was trying not to giggle. He’d spent yesterday being flung around like a rag doll in a chopper, various SUVs, and a school bus. The idea that he was “doing something” in any kind of systematic way was pure comedy.
“Booting up a new country. Netherworld. Cool name.”
“Thanks. But the name wasn’t my idea. Some Venetians came up with that.”
“They are always at the forefront in matters of taste and creativity.”
“And it’s not a country. You know this.”
“It could be a political force, though. More powerful than many so-called countries.”
“Yes, the Marshall Islands, the Maldives . . .”
“I was thinking the United States. A clown show.”
“We’re agreed on that.”
“And yet the chaos of America gives people like T.R. the leeway to do things like Pina2bo that simply wouldn’t be tolerated anywhere else.”
“It’s an asset, you’re saying. The sheer incompetence of the United States.”
“People have come to rely on it.”
“It’s true.”
“The crazy place where people can do crazy things!” Bo exclaimed. “But then countries like India feel as though some intervention is needed. In my opinion, they are going too far.”
Willem threw up his hands. “Well, since I don’t know what they’re doing—”
“Trust me, they are going too far. But it will play well in their media. And they know they’ll get away with it. America will be very angry for forty-eight hours and then get bored and get angry about something new. A movie star will kick his dog or a quarterback will park his Lambo in a handicapped space.”
“Sounds like T.R. is screwed then.”
Bo shrugged. “Perhaps a real country could be persuaded to step in and restore calm.”
SQUEEGEE NINJA
At nine A.M. Texas time every Monday and every Friday morning, Black Hat Practical Operations held a virtual stand-up meeting. They had started inviting Rufus to these shortly after he had set up operations at Marble Mine. It all happened over augmented-reality headsets. They had delivered one such device to him. You could use the thing anywhere and see the same stuff, but the overall effect was more convincing if you did it in a big dark empty space. By virtue of living in an abandoned mine, Rufus had access to one. So every Monday and every Friday just before nine A.M. he would go to a big empty space down in the mine and put the thing on his head. As the meeting started, people would begin to appear, standing in a circle around the room. Head count was never less than a dozen, sometimes as much as two dozen. Most of the participants seemed to be in charge of teams. Rufus, of course, was not in charge of anyone. He was on the invite list, as he well understood, because otherwise he’d be totally isolated. He’d have no idea what was going on and no one would know who he was. This could lead to confusion and friendly-fire fuckups. So he always showed up for the meetings. But he never spoke unless spoken to, which was never.
The majority of the avatars in the biweekly stand-up talked like Americans and had low latency, meaning that they exchanged words and gestures in something close to real time. Some attendees had high latency, which as Rufus could guess meant that they were far enough away for the speed of light to become a limiting factor; no matter how adroitly networks routed those packets, they could only travel down the fiber-optic cables or bounce off the satellites so fast. Frequently the high-latency avatars spoke with non-American accents. He recognized some as British, Australian, or South African. Others he didn’t recognize at all.
And some moved around. T.R. was one of those. Sometimes his latency was high, sometimes low. Rufus had noticed a few things and put two and two together. Sometimes when T.R. was in high-latency mode—suggesting he was on the other side of the world—he breathed heavily and rapidly, as if short of breath. Rufus hadn’t understood this, and in fact he’d actually begun to worry about T.R.’s cardiovascular, until he had taken to noticing the word “Snowbird” coming up in conversation. Then he’d realized it was actually “Snowberg.” Then he’d heard one of the South Africans—an Afrikaner—say the name of it with different vowel sounds: “Snayoobergh.” Rufus had figured out it was a Dutch word, “Sneeuwberg,” and that it was a place on the island of New Guinea. The Dutch had named it “Snow Mountain” back in the days when it actually did have snow on it. Nowadays it did not. That was partly because of global warming and partly because Brazos RoDuSh had converted it into a hole in the ground. Anyway, the elevation was quite high—something like fifteen thousand feet, depending on which part of the mine complex you were at—and so T.R.’s noticeable shortness of breath did not reflect any underlying deficiencies on the cardio front. There just wasn’t that much oxygen where he was.