Termination Shock

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.

So, though they didn’t talk about it directly—Black Hat had pretty good comms discipline, everything “need to know”—Rufus had pretty easily been able to piece together the picture that another big gun was in the works at Sneeuwberg. As well as a third complex at some place called Vadan, in southern Europe. With yet more sites apparently being evaluated.

Which was all very interesting but, from a Black Hat standpoint, a potentially dangerous distraction from the task at hand, which was to secure the Flying S Ranch. Anything not directly related to this property was above Rufus’s pay grade. He knew the military mind well enough to know that for him to express even mild curiosity about Sneeuwberg or Vadan would get him in trouble; and to do it a second time would get him fired. And along with that came a certain feeling of being out of the loop. Flying S was a done deal. The Pina2bo gun had been operating with only occasional episodes of downtime for almost a year. The initial pushback against what T.R. was doing here had more recently been muted by countervailing arguments around the idea of termination shock: the fear that if the gun stopped, it would lead to a backlash in the world’s climate system. The cool kids in T.R.’s organization were now popping up with high latency in Vadan and Sneeuwberg. The medics at High Noon had started urging Rufus to get all kinds of vaccinations for diseases whose names he hadn’t heard since the army had shipped him off to fucked-up parts of the world.

It wouldn’t be quite fair to the staff left behind at Flying S to say they were complacent. But it was definitely the case that they were no longer in the spotlight. Flying S–related topics were now deep in the agenda and tended to be dispensed with by Colonel Tatum reporting that there was nothing to report.

The next, and always the last, agenda item was called Trigger Warning. It always consisted of a video, typically from YouTube. Sometimes T.R. picked it out himself, other times it was a suggestion from one of the team. Most of the Trigger Warning videos had at least some connection to the over-arching theme of practical applications of violence, which was, after all, the profession, or at least the constant preoccupation, of everyone present. A typical example might be a cop getting stabbed by a distraught housewife while his attention was fixed on the husband, or a fistfight in front of a liquor store with some unexpected twist. In general, to be considered for the honor of appearing on the Trigger Warning segment, a video needed to have some Whoa, I did not see that coming! element that would leave the team members entertained and yet questioning their assumptions—and, as such, more on their toes and less likely to end up being featured in such a video.

One Monday morning, the Trigger Warning video featured a man known to the Internet as Squeegee Ninja. Very low-quality cell phone video of this guy had been circulating during the last twenty-four hours, but it kept getting taken down as the people who’d posted it figured out that they were incriminating themselves. T.R., though, had exclusive access to much better footage, all from security cameras controlled by his organization. Because the whole thing had gone down at a T.R. Mick’s.

The quality of these videos made Rufus feel old. When he heard someone speak of security camera footage—from a gas station, no less—he still thought of old-school black-and-white imagery with terrible resolution. Of course, it wasn’t like that anymore. This footage was Hollywood movie grade. Even the sound quality could be pretty good.

Another drawback of classic security camera footage was that nothing was ever framed correctly. The camera was never pointed in exactly the right direction. The bozos and miscreants and flailing, hapless victims who tended to star in these little dramas always went out of frame at the worst possible moment. But of course that too was a thing of the past. The cameras now used AI to pan and tilt and zoom, centering whatever the AI considered most interesting—most legally actionable, anyway—and in one of your better planned-out systems, practically all parts of the facility could be covered from multiple camera angles. So really it was all about choices—about editing. Someone in T.R.’s chain of command had apparently handed off all the Squeegee Ninja–related footage to a gifted film editor who had cut it all together into a five-minute sequence that was as watchable as any Hong Kong action flick. In real time it hadn’t lasted that long, but the editor had chosen to use a lot of freeze-frame, slo-mo, and multi-camera instant replay during especially watchable parts of the action. It was safe to say, based on the reactions of the virtual audience gathered around Rufus in the depths of the marble mine, that no one had any objections to taking the additional couple of minutes out of their day to watch the extended director’s cut. Even T.R. allowed as how those members of the team who were in time zones where it was after five p.m. should feel free to crack open a beer. Today, T.R. was high latency (he was on the other side of the world) but seemed to have plenty of oxygen (low altitude).

Like any well-structured narrative the story began with some setup: it was just a normal, pleasant summer evening at this random T.R. Mick’s Mobility Center somewhere in the western United States. A middle-aged couple came in, looking concerned but not yet what you would call agitated, and requested to speak to the manager. They made that request of an employee running a cash register near an entrance. It took a minute for the manager to show up. During that time, the couple chatted with some of the other customers in the queue. It was hard to make out exactly what they were saying, but there were a lot of apprehensive glances in the direction of the parking lot. Eventually a manager—wearing a white cowboy hat as badge of rank—did show up. The couple—now surrounded by several other customers who had been drawn into the story—began to point out into the parking lot and to explain something. But as luck would have it they were barely able to get started when the door opened and a man walked in. He was a big fella with an athletic build, like a tight end or a power forward. For the most part he was dressed in completely forgettable clothing: jeans, sneakers, unmarked T-shirt. But he was wearing a turban. A standard-issue N-95 mask completed the ensemble. Around the fringes of the mask a healthy black beard could be seen. He was brown skinned, not a white guy but probably not African American. Not far off from Rufus in skin color.

Whenever you watched a movie, and new characters began to appear on the screen, you had to pick sides. To decide who to root for. From the word go, Rufus was on the side of the guy in the turban. How many times in his life had he been that guy? And the conspiring, finger-pointing white people he couldn’t have hated more.

Here the video had to be paused because a discussion had broken out among various Black Hat operatives. “Dude is Arab!” someone objected.

“So?”

“It’s kind of racist to call him Squeegee Ninja.”

“Why?”

“Ninja is a Chinese thing.”

“Japanese,” someone corrected him.

“Okay, whatever, but the point is, not Arab.”

“He’s not Arab,” said another voice. “Dude is Indian.”

“I never heard of any Native American tribe wearing turbans.”

“I mean, from India.”

“Oh.”

“He’s not Indian. He’s Sikh,” said yet another voice.

“Sikhs are Indian!”

“No, they are from Pakistan.”

“Arabs then.”

“No, Pakistanis are not Arabs!”

The pace of the discourse had slowed down as mad typing on multiple keyboards was taking over the audio feed. “According to Wiki—”

“I’m gonna restart the video now,” T.R. announced. “Y’all can take this offline.”

The guy in the turban was clearly oblivious to the little drama playing out at the cash register. Even if he’d been paying attention there’d have been nothing to see, because as soon as he came in, all those people clammed up and made a big show of not staring at him. He looked around to get his bearings, then lurched in the direction of the bathrooms. “Lurched” being the operative word here because something about his gait was off. Like invisible hands were trying to pull him back out toward the parking lot and he was tearing loose from them. Once he’d got well into the building he seemed to recover his equilibrium, and then made a beeline for those world-famous surgically clean T.R. Mick’s toilets.

It transpired that he needed to go number 2, and so there was now an interlude during which the cash register caucus resumed its deliberations and acquired new members. A couple of these were open carrying, and as the conversation went on and began to include words like “Arab,” “terrorist,” and “bomb,” these reached around to pat their weapons. One drew his pistol from its holster and pulled the slide back to inspect the chamber.

A different nonwhite, non-Black man entered the frame from the other direction carrying a foil-wrapped burrito and exited to the parking lot. He seemed oblivious to all this drama and was scarcely noted by its participants. Rufus might not have noticed him at all had T.R. not paused the video and remarked, “We think that is the driver.”

Eventually Turban Man finished his business in the toilet and headed straight for the exit. His utter lack of interest in any of the food, beverage, or leisure time modalities on display in the T.R. Mick’s was construed in the darkest possible way by those observing him. A contingent hastened to the bathroom to look for (guessing) bricks of plastic explosive stuck beneath toilets. In this they were disappointed; but by that time the man in the turban had already checked in for his appointment with destiny and the truck stop was on fire.

For three members of the self-appointed posse had followed him outside. Camera angles flickered around for a spell. The principals were all on the move through a relatively camera-impoverished part of the property and the editor had had to make do and fill in with some less than ideal cuts. But as luck would have it there were a couple of strong angles on the place where the posse caught up with its prey: a vacant gas pump, 37G, about a hundred feet away from the building.

One interesting detail that caught Rufus’s eye here was that the guy was no longer unsteady on his feet. More the opposite. While Rufus was just a mediocre athlete himself, he’d played football with a couple of guys who had gone on to the NFL. He’d always known there was something different about them, just based on the way they carried themselves, the way they moved. The guy in the turban was one of those. By the time he reached Pump 37G, the posse had been hassling him for a little while, questions hardening into threats and commands. He was ignoring them, pretending not to hear. But he was keeping his hands in view and well away from his sides, which was smart of him.

Finally one of the posse lost his temper and drew his sidearm, which happened to be a revolver. One of those ridiculously large-caliber revolvers that a certain kind of gun nut had a hard-on for. He put his thumb on the hammer and drew it back, cocking the weapon, which for the time being was still aimed at the ground. The click of the gun’s action wasn’t audible on the soundtrack. But apparently the guy with the turban heard it, for in one smooth motion he lunged sideways and grabbed the handle of a squeegee, provided for the convenience of T.R. Mick’s customers who wished to scour their windshields clear of dead insects using T.R.’s patented Bug-Solv formula. The squeegee was soaking head down in a bucket of same. The man in the turban pulled it out, executed a full pirouette, and whipped it around, causing Bug-Solv to spray from its end in a scythe-like arc that, under the powerful motion-activated lights of Pump 37G, shone like Star Wars light saber shit. It perfectly sliced across the middle of Revolver Man’s face, delivering a load of slightly used Bug-Solv directly into his eye sockets. The man toppled back. Rufus noted with approval that he maintained control of the weapon, though. The Bug-Solv also spattered one of the other men, who reflexively cringed away from it; Squeegee Ninja took advantage of this to step close to him, hook his arm with the T-shaped head of the squeegee, and get him in a sort of complex joint lock that made it possible for him to pull the man’s pistol from his belt holster and toss it lightly up onto the moving walkway. This, of course, carried it away.

“Picked up by a ten-year-old Boy Scout at the front door and handed in to a cashier,” T.R. said.

The third posse member, correctly eschewing the use of firearms in such a fraught close-range melee, jumped on Squeegee Ninja’s back, obliging the latter to disentangle his weapon from number 2’s arm. He punched its handle back several times in reverse pool cue style, delivering powerful, rib-snapping, spleen-rupturing jabs to the assailant’s midsection, then shrugging free as number 3 collapsed back onto the pavement.

“Choppered to the nearest tertiary trauma center, critical but stable,” T.R. said.

Number 2 had been patting himself down like a man who has lost his car keys; he had no idea what had become of his gun. He took a wild swing at Squeegee Ninja, who dodged it. Then another. The third punch was never delivered; the guy drew his fist back but the move was so obviously telegraphed that Squeegee Ninja had time simply to plant the head of his weapon across the guy’s bicep, just above the elbow, freezing his arm. And leaving his face wide open for a double-handed butt-stroke with the squeegee’s opposite end. He fell on his back with a finality that elicited a round of light applause and some “woo!” from the enraptured Black Hat staff in their virtual meeting.

The guy with the Bug-Solv in his eyes had got to his knees. To his credit he was still observing correct trigger discipline; his cocked revolver was pointed straight up and his finger was laid alongside the cylinder. He had his face buried in the crook of his other arm. He lifted his head. If it made sense to describe a motion of the eyelids as violent, then he was blinking violently. He was trying to see something. His gun began to descend in the general direction of the blur he had identified as Squeegee Ninja. Who was looking the other way; but he pivoted as if he had eyes in the back of his head. With a curious little hop and skip, like a seventy-pound girl playing hopscotch, the big man took to the air, light as a tumbleweed, and lashed out with the squeegee in a two-handed home run swing that connected with the revolver and knocked it clean out of the man’s hand. It flew out of the frame. Had this been a real Hollywood movie, its trajectory from that moment on might have been lovingly captured in slo-mo from all sorts of camera angles as it spun through the air. Matters being what they were, however, everyone just had to put two and two together and use their imaginations a little bit to infer that it had taken a bad bounce, which had caused it to discharge: an inference made more than obvious by the detonation of the liquid propane truck a hundred yards downrange, currently refilling a large reservoir placed there for the convenience of T.R. Mick’s RV-driving customers. Which exploded too.

“No casualties, believe it or not,” T.R. said. “The driver of the propane truck was watching all this shit go down and had already taken cover.”

“He got away?” someone asked.

This elicited a guffaw from T.R. “He ain’t a criminal. He din’t do one single thing illegal. We don’t say of such a man, ‘he got away.’ We say, he took his leave.”

“In Burrito Guy’s truck?”

“A semi, yes. Burrito Guy pulled out when the LP tank exploded and drove to a safe spot on the far edge of the parking lot. Squeegee Ninja took his leave from the well-regulated militia at Pump 37G and went looking for the truck—eventually found it—and climbed in. Off they went.”

“Did you get a license plate?”

“I suppose we could,” T.R. said, “and maybe we will if there’s a criminal investigation, and some local yokel D.A. sends us a subpoena. But I hope they just let sleeping dogs lie. The poor man was attacked. He defended himself. No one died. We have insurance. And when you have spent as much as I have, cumulatively, on insurance, nothing brings greater satisfaction than to lay a horrific claim on your insurer. The end.”

During this discussion the video had remained up, hanging in space, projected on a virtual screen—a rectangle hovering about ten feet in front of Rufus. It was frozen on the last frame, which was just a wall of billowing orange fire.

Now, of the score or so of persons attending this meeting, Rufus probably had the best view of it. The others—scattered around the world in hotel suites, conference rooms, departure lounges, or spare bedrooms—were in environments that were, by and large, more brightly lit and more cluttered. The same pixels were being displayed in their glasses as Rufus’s. But only Rufus had the advantage of being able to view those pixels in a dark place against a featureless matte backdrop. He noticed something. And for the first time in three months, he spoke during a meeting.

“Those your drones, T.R.?”

Silence for a few moments as people tried to identify the speaker. “That you, Red?” T.R. asked.

“Yes, sir. I was asking about the drones. Are those T.R. Mick’s equipment? Just hovering around the mobility center for security or whatever? Or someone else’s?”

“I’m not aware of any—” T.R. paused now for several seconds. “Well, ho-lee shit.”

“Just above and to the right of that Tesla,” someone confirmed.

T.R., or someone who had control of the video interface, zoomed and panned. The wall of fire occupied basically the whole frame of the video. Any object between it and the camera showed up as a crisp silhouette. This included objects that had been invisible until they had been backlit by the conflagration. The thing Rufus had noticed was a small quad-copter drone, hovering ten or twelve feet above the ground.

“There’s a second one off to the left, near the edge of the picture,” Rufus said.

The view panned leftward, seeming to move at great speed because it was so zoomed in. With a bit of hunting around, a second drone, just like the first one, became visible. It was harder to see because of how it was lit, but it was definitely there.

“Triangulating on Squeegee Ninja,” Rufus said. “Leastways that’s how it looks to me.”

“You think maybe the well-regulated militia got drones in the air to track the ‘Ay-rab terrorist’?” T.R. asked.

“I guess that’s . . . possible?” Rufus allowed. “If someone was real quick on his feet.”

There was a silence as everyone thought it through. During the time Squeegee Ninja was taking his dump, might some member of the cash register posse have run out to the parking lot and got a couple of drones in the air? Rufus could sense everyone swinging round to the opinion that this seemed unlikely.

“Or maybe,” T.R. speculated, “some hobbyist just happened to be playing with two identical drones out in the parking lot when all this happened?”

“Two that we know of, sir,” Rufus corrected him.

“Ha! You think there’s more we can’t see, Red?”

“The more the merrier.”

“Well! I only showed y’all this video as a little bit of light entertainment to wrap up the meeting and send y’all on your way with a bang and a chuckle,” T.R. said. “Thanks to Eagle Eyes here, seems we got a mystery on our hands.”

“Can we take it offline?” asked Tatum. “This is a T.R. Mick’s thing. It’s not related to any of our operations, is it?”

Rufus was thumbing a message to T.R.:

> If you get me access to the videos I will investigate.

> You got it T.R. texted back, even as he was saying out loud, “Hell no, it’s a thousand miles away from Flying S. You’re right, Tatum. This meeting is concluded.”