Termination Shock

Performative War

It took about a day for T.R.’s people to set Rufus up with the access he needed, and another day for him to find his way around the various directories where the surveillance videos were archived, and to make sense of what he found there.

Rufus was able to rule out the theory that those drones had been put in the air by members of what T.R. referred to as the well-regulated militia. Or the even more far-fetched notion that it had just been some random hobbyist in the right place at the right time. The drones had been launched from a small RV, a converted Sprinter van, which had pulled into the Mobility Center a few minutes ahead of Burrito Guy’s truck. During their brief stay, the occupants—two black-haired men in baseball caps and dark glasses—had refueled their RV but shown a marked lack of interest in using the toilets or getting food. One had looked after the refueling while the other had opened the vehicle’s side door and got three identical drones in the air. They’d done this at an outlying gas pump, far away from any other vehicles. They’d parked in such a way that the only things on that side of the van were a barbed-wire fence and a hundred miles of open range. So no other customers would have seen them launch the drones. The dark glasses they wore (at night) must have contained AR gear. Darkness made it impossible to know where those drones had gone between the time they were launched and the moment that two of them had been silhouetted against the flames.

After the tanker exploded, Squeegee Ninja ran down the line of gas pumps to the parking lot beyond, obviously headed for the location where Burrito Guy’s semi rig had been parked. It was no longer there because Burrito Guy—who had got back to the rig without incident a couple of minutes earlier—had put it in gear right after the explosion and pulled out to a greater distance from Ground Zero. The bafflement of Squeegee Ninja was clear from his body language—one could almost see a huge exclamation point and question mark hovering in space above him—but then he turned his head in the direction of the truck and homed in on it. Fifteen seconds’ sprint across the parking lot took him to the passenger door of the rig, which was already rolling forward as he scampered up into it. Within moments they had passed beyond the purview of T.R. Micks’s security cameras. From one angle, though, it was just barely possible to see the rig’s turn signal flashing out on the main road as it approached the on-ramps to Interstate 15. The truck was headed south.

At the same time, the drones were headed back to the little RV. Three had gone out. Two came back. The consternation of the RV’s occupants was obvious. Where was the third drone? Equipment was fiddled with. Heads were shaken. Fucking binoculars were produced and used to scan the disaster scene. Again though, body language was eloquent as these two guys concluded, Fuck it, that thing is toast, let’s get out of here! Which they did, signaling the same southbound turn as the semi had done a few minutes earlier.

> There will be a drone that was left behind at the site. Maybe destroyed. But maybe someone there has found it.

> Will inquire

Rufus turned his attention now to the strange case of this turban-wearing badass who roamed the western U.S. in an anonymous semi rig shadowed by high-tech drone geeks in a small but expensive RV (those Sprinter conversions didn’t come cheap, and this one looked new).

It was but a few moments’ work to turn up many examples from all over the Western world of turbaned Sikhs being mistaken for Muslims and persecuted as such by people who took a dim view of the religion of Islam. So this was just another case of that.

Noting his sudden interest in the Sikh religion, YouTube helpfully revamped his feed, expunging videos about wild horses, feral swine, drones, eagles, the Dutch royal family, and climate change, and replacing them with a slate of content featuring various aspects of that religion and culture. Scanning through those, Rufus’s gaze snagged on a clip showing a dude in a turban brandishing a sword and standing in the middle of a ring of spectators, giving some kind of martial arts demo. Or maybe a dance performance? His hopping and twirling movements seemed far removed from any fighting style that Rufus had ever seen. But he had seen a similar move performed recently, at Pump 37G, when Squeegee Ninja had inexplicably sensed that Revolver Man—who was behind him—was fixing to shoot him in the back.

This—once he’d confirmed it by split-screening the YouTube guy and Squeegee Ninja—sent Rufus down two parallel tracks. One, which was fairly trivial, was familiarizing himself with the martial art in question. It was called gatka and it made a lot of use of sticks—which explained why the subject of this inquiry was so handy with a squeegee. The other, which was more of a brainteaser, related to the drone operators in the RV and the nature of their relationship to Squeegee Ninja.

> Found it. You will have it later today

> Thanks

Rufus replied, pausing briefly to wonder how that delivery was going to be accomplished. Was T.R. going to charter a jet? A jet helicopter? Both? Probably.

His initial, obvious assumption had been that the guys in the RV were in some sense adversaries of Squeegee Ninja and Burrito Guy. Because they were all kinds of sneaky and sinister. The fly in that ointment was obvious, once Rufus gave it a moment’s thought: the RV had pulled in ahead of the semi. It must have been miles ahead of that rig on the interstate. If they were covertly tailing the rig, they would have to, well, tail it. Not drive way ahead.

So maybe they were all members of the same team, split across two (or more?) different vehicles. This would help explain certain other oddities that Rufus had noticed about the actions of Squeegee Ninja. There were a couple of moments when he had exhibited situational awareness that was pretty fucking exceptional. Rufus had frame-by-framed the interval between Revolver Man cocking the hammer of his weapon and Squeegee Ninja making his move for the Bug-Solv bucket. It was—well, either a mere coincidence or superhuman. And shortly thereafter he’d made his eyes-in-the-back-of-his-head move.

Rufus was not a religious or woo-woo sort of guy; Snout had put paid to all that. He didn’t believe in ESP or any other literally superhuman shit. But if you were somehow patched in to a mesh network of drones—if you could somehow sense what they sensed—that could give you such an edge. And if the drones were hovering invisibly in the dark, observers wouldn’t have any rational way of explaining it.

Suddenly he couldn’t wait for that third drone to be delivered.

In the meantime, he just had to pursue other leads as best he could.

He knew nothing about this martial art of gatka, had never heard of it until this morning. Were there gatka champions? Did they even compete? Did they participate in ultimate fighting tournaments like the Muay Thai and the Brazilian jiu-jitsu guys? The answer generally seemed to be no, it was more of a niche thing in the Punjab (a name that triggered some vague associations in his head; but he decided to let that sleeping dog lie for now).

Sometimes the dumb, simple approach was best. He googled “who is the greatest gatka fighter?” and the answer came back: Big Fish. There wasn’t even any controversy. No welter of anonymous Internet fucktards arguing about it in chat rooms.

Just like that, his YouTube slate was once again wiped clean and filled up with a simply unbelievable number of videos featuring Indians and Chinese fighting with rocks and sticks at the Line of Actual Control—a thing of seemingly immense importance that Rufus, in his whole life, had never even heard of. But he had somewhat grown accustomed to there being such things and to the Internet suddenly revealing them to him and so he got over it pretty quickly. Keeping his head down and plodding relentlessly was his way. So there was a period of a few hours, coinciding with the hottest part of the afternoon, when he just took all that in. Just sat down in the coolest part of the marble mine and let the YouTube wash over him. Learned about the history of the LAC and its geography too: the Yak’s Leg, Sikkim, the Kunchang salient, and other hot spots. Followed the stories of different Chinese and Indian crews: where they hailed from, their uniforms and other branding, what styles of kung fu or other martial arts they favored, their won/lost records, their positions on leaderboards, their Vegas and Macao odds, what kinds of people belonged to their fan bases.

It was a lot to take in and he found himself getting a little stupid-headed. So he took a nap, or what his compadres south of the Rio Grande would call a siesta. When he woke up, a mere forty-five minutes later, he found that his brain had sorted things out for him and it was all in better view now. He was seeing the forest instead of the trees, as the saying went. Why had he gone down this particular Internet rathole? Because it seemed like Squeegee Ninja was a gatka man, and so he wanted to learn more about gatka. About who was best at it. And the Internet said that the answer was Big Fish. According to various adulatory fan sites—none of which seemed to have been updated recently—he had burst from obscurity last year to become the leader of the most badass crew on the Indian side of the LAC and recovered many square kilometers of territory that had been stolen by China. But then he had fallen in battle under circumstances that were poorly understood. A stroke or exposure to invisible death rays from a Chinese superweapon were the two leading hypotheses. Long exposure to the ways of the Internet led Rufus to favor the stroke theory. Anyway, Big Fish had disappeared from the front and been helicoptered to a first-rate medical center elsewhere in India and then fallen out of the spotlight just as rapidly as he had ascended to fame. A more recent news item from a tabloidesque Indian site suggested that he had gone back home to Canada to continue his convalescence. He was depicted in a wheelchair, struggling to perform a simple thumbs-up gesture. Which was a shame, both as such (national hero cruelly cut down in his moment of triumph) and for Rufus’s own selfish purposes. His research program, if you could call it that, had become centered on Big Fish. Not only because he was a close physical match for Squeegee Ninja, but also because he was so well documented. Practically every waking moment of his rise from hitchhiking vagabond to epic hero had been chronicled in videos, initially by a New Zealander named Philippa Long, and subsequently, in a more blatantly propagandistic style, by Indian filmmakers who seemed to have more resources to play with. Like symphony orchestras to juice up the sound track.

To Rufus, the more low-key style of Philippa Long conveyed greater credibility, so he learned about her a little bit. She seemed to keep up with her social media feeds pretty regularly. She had moved to Los Angeles in the last few months and was working on an indie film project there. Rufus created an account under the moniker RedASDFJKL and dropped her a line just for the hell of it.

Then he clicked back over to one of the other video sites he’d been using and was a little startled to discover some truly awful cell phone footage of what appeared to be a party in a disco. Not one of your fancy high-end discos but a down-at-heels ballroom outfitted with a few strobe lights and strings of blinky lights strung over the antlers of a stuffed and mounted moose head. The music was what he had, in the last few hours, learned to identify as bhangra: tunes that could compete with the very best that the Western world had to offer in the way of high-energy danceability but that were firmly grounded in the traditions of the Punjab.

But the Internet had at least as many high-quality bhangra videos as it did ones from the Line of Actual Control, so why was this terrible piece of cell phone video at the top of his feed? Some glitch in the algorithm? Some malware on his computer? He clicked the “Why am I seeing this?” button and was earnestly informed that it featured a friend of his. Reviewing the video frame by frame, he saw no friend of his. Centered in the picture was a lovely young woman of South Asian ancestry, dressed to the nines and dancing. No friend of Rufus, sadly. He was about to shrug it off as some arcane malware phishing attack when, in the final few frames, in the background of the picture, off to the right, a big man became visible. He was dancing in a style that recalled those gatka moves that had started Rufus down this path earlier today.

He was all ready to dismiss this as a series of coincidences. Three vaguely similar men. Big Fish: an invalid being rolled around in a wheelchair. The dancing man in this video, which according to metadata had been shot in a small town in southern British Columbia about twenty-four hours before the incident in the T.R. Mick’s. And last but not least, Squeegee Ninja.

Now, though, Rufus came up with a wild surmise, which was that they were all the same person. It was all possible if you were willing to accept the hypothesis that Big Fish’s invalid status was just a cover story. In other words, maybe the algorithm had actually nailed it: seen something no human could have.

Philippa Long had responded to his earlier message with an emoji. On an impulse, Rufus direct-messaged her the video from the bhangra party and asked her whether the man in the background might be Big Fish.

Ten minutes later he was on a video call with her. He was just a grainy cloud of pixels in the darkness of the marble mine, so he carried his laptop outside as they worked their way through the inevitable opening rounds of troubleshooting the video and audio.

Based on her name, which sounded fancy to Rufus, and on her profession as globe-trotting indie filmmaker, and also on a profile photo associated with her social media presence, which showed evidence of intervention by hair and makeup professionals, he had been expecting someone more glamorous and intimidating. But she was very girl-next-door, like she’d just stepped away from milking a goat. Almost unsettlingly open and approachable, but with a cool confidence about her that kept things at arm’s length.

It was still pretty warm in the box canyon before the mine’s entrance, mostly because of stored solar heat now being dumped into the void by the stone walls. But the air itself had cooled down quite a bit and would keep doing so until he’d be obliged to put on a jacket. Thanks to Pina2bo there was still enough light in the western sky to cast warm gentle illumination over everything. Rufus set his laptop on one of two plastic tables they’d set up in the little compound of trailers and equipment. Behind him, Pippa—which was the name Philippa Long went by—would be able to see a couple of trailers, a campfire straddled by an iron tripod, random sun-bleached lawn furniture, Bildad wandering around in a futile search for grass, and the odd falconer. No eagles were in evidence just now, but the point was that Pippa was seeing a whole different picture than just Rufus sitting alone in a dark abandoned mine. A somewhat misleading picture to be fair, since Rufus, in truth, was a dark abandoned mine kind of guy, but anyway a picture that might lead Pippa toward a cautiously favorable opinion of Rufus. As opposed to just terminating the call and blocking him. He cracked open a beer.

“I read classics at uni,” Pippa said, “and got interested in the performative aspect of war. I’m talking specifically about the Iliad.”

Rufus couldn’t make heads or tails of “I read classics at uni” but he could guess the meaning of “performative.” The Iliad he had listened to during his perambulations around Texas. “Like Achilles dragging Hector around the walls of Troy?” he guessed. “Putting on a li’l show. For the psy-ops impact. But zero tactical value.”

“Exactly. I won’t bore you with all the other examples that could be cited, down through the ages.”

“I got you,” Rufus assured her. “Comanches did that shit all the time. White men couldn’t understand it.”

“You’re a Comanche?”

“Sort of.” Because Pippa seemed so interested in this, Rufus did something he did only rarely: pulled out his wallet, extracted his Comanche Nation ID card, and held it up to the camera.

“I’ve been studying their . . . practices,” Pippa said.

He knew what she meant. “Pretty gruesome stuff.”

“Undeniably. But the latest research says that they were masters of performative war. They knew how their actions played in the newspapers. All that gruesomeness was designed to make them famous. To scare the shit out of people.”

“It worked,” Rufus said.

“Absolutely. It had a tactical effect. Kept Comancheria free of white settlers for decades. But it all came at the end of an era.”

Rufus nodded. “The era of Indians living free,” he said.

“Well, that too, of course. But I was actually referring to a worldwide transition. Beyond a certain point—which happened at different times in different parts of the world—hard tactical outcomes were all that mattered.”

“Performative war didn’t work anymore,” Rufus translated. He was thinking of the heaps of dead bison on the plains, the Indians starved into submission.

Pippa nodded. “Like, it would not have made tactical sense to chain Paulus behind a T-34 and drag him around Stalingrad. It wouldn’t have moved the line of battle one inch. It would have been seen as savagery.”

“Savagery. Important word in these parts.”

“That’s one way people were defined as savages: by their willingness to let that kind of performative display affect the outcome of battle for real.”

Rufus nodded. He was thinking of the Little Robe Creek fight in which the Comanches had been routed by a small force of Texas Rangers after their chief, Iron Jacket, had been brought down by a sniper. The Comanches had then tried to talk the Rangers into settling the battle by single combat between champions, as in the days of chivalry. Hadn’t worked.

“Now, that all changes with Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which were basically performances. Deadly for real, obviously—but the point was the spectacle of it, and its psychological impact.”

“After that we’re all savages.”

“Yeah, and it leads to things like 9/11. Which again is horrible—but with a lower body count.”

“Until we invaded Afghanistan and Iraq!” Rufus pointed out.

“Using Shock and Awe,” Pippa countered. “Anyway, we could talk about it all night, but that’s how I got interested in what was going on at the Line of Actual Control and met Laks.”

“Locks?”

“Big Fish. His friends and family call him Laks.”

“Is that him in the video I sent you? Dancing at the party?”

“Absolutely.”

Rufus had been expecting a more guarded response, so Pippa’s certainty knocked him off balance.

“So he’s recovered.”

“Yeah, and people who knew him were aware of it. The story of him being incapacitated was put out on the media by someone. I’ve no idea why.”

“Someone who wanted folks to believe that Big Fish was still out of commission,” Rufus said. “Still a non-combatant.”

“Well,” Pippa said, guardedly, “he’s definitely a non-combatant. He’s partying in Canada. No longer beating up kung fu masters in the Himalayas.”

“I think he’s in the States now,” Rufus said.

“Same difference. Still a non-combatant.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure,” Rufus said, wondering if he’d get in trouble if he sent Pippa the video from the T.R. Mick’s. “Try googling Squeegee Ninja,” he suggested. “All the videos might have been taken down, though.”

But it very soon became obvious from Pippa’s gestures and the movements of her eyes that she had found something. “Holy fuck,” she said. It was all she needed to say. “Let me Google Map this place, my American geography is rubbish.” She did so. “Where do you suppose he’s headed?”

“If you draw a line from the Canadian bhangra bash through that T.R. Mick’s, it points to me,” Rufus said.

“You’re in Texas.”

“How’d you guess?” Rufus answered, half serious.

“The beer. And you mentioned savagery.”

Rufus looked at his beer. Shiner Bock.

“West Texas, to judge from your imaginary line on the map.” A thought occurred to her. “Say, are you anywhere near that huge—”

The rest of her question was drowned out by a sonic boom. Rufus just nodded.

Pippa sat back in her chair and pondered for a spell. Rufus let her do it. The beer was enjoyable. The temperature in the canyon was now perfect. He was in no particular hurry. He checked his phone, which had buzzed a couple of minutes ago.

> Incoming!

He could hear a drone coming up the valley, following the road. He could tell from the tone of its rotors that it was a big boy—the kind they used to deliver sacks of groceries. Rufus got to his feet, cupped his hands around his mouth, and hollered up to the peak that loomed over the mine entrance. “Drone coming!” he shouted. “We got any birds in the air?” Eagles—especially when they were wearing 3D printed gauntlets—could take down smaller surveillance drones with impunity, but the rotors on cargo carriers were beefy enough to cause injury. Carmelita hollered down with the information that all birds were safely in their boxes.

The big drone banked into view, slowed momentarily, then came right for him. Someone back at High Noon was piloting it off a video feed. As it came closer he gestured toward the other table, a few feet behind him. The drone settled there, released a cardboard box that had been grappled to its belly, then whooshed straight up until it was clear of the canyon walls and headed back north. Rufus pulled a knife from his pocket, unfolded it, and slit the tape.

Inside, under a layer of wadded-up paper, was a drone, bigger than his hand but smaller than a dinner plate, looking a little the worse for wear. Had it been one of his, he’d have rated it as just barely worth fixing. It had been slammed against something hard and lost a rotor. The motor’s axle was bent and the chassis had taken some structural damage.

He carried it back over to his laptop and sat back down. Pippa was evidently using other windows on her screen to look stuff up, but she was still on the call.

“What do you know about the Punjab? The monsoons?” Pippa asked. “I don’t want to tell you stuff you already know.”

The mention of monsoons put it all together for Rufus. He still talked to Alastair from time to time. That topic had come up once or twice earlier in the summer, when people had been afraid the rains would never begin.

“There is concern,” Rufus said, “in the minds of some folks, that Pina2bo here is going to mess up the monsoons and create a big problem for farmers who depend on that rain.”

Pippa nodded. “To tell you the truth, it’s probably a bigger deal than all that drama around the Line of Actual Control. If I’m an Indian military planner, a few hectares of gravel and ice at six thousand meters above sea level is symbolically important, sure, but famine in the Breadbasket is where I really need to focus.”

“So what am I going to do?” Rufus mused. “If I am that military planner, I mean. Send troop ships up the Rio Grande and make an amphibious landing at the Flying S Ranch?”

He thought better when his hands were busy. He found that he had deployed a little screwdriver from the multitool he kept on his belt and was removing the screws that held the drone’s outer shell to its chassis. “Send long-range bombers halfway around the world? Does India even have those?”

“They are more about rockets, I think,” Pippa said. She was multitasking too. “Nine hundred miles.”

“Eh?”

“I’m nine hundred miles away from you. Depending on which part of that huge ranch you are on.”

“The old marble mine.”

“Got it. What’s that, a day’s drive?”

“A very long day,” Rufus said. “Depends on how you drive.”

“Conservatively, as befits a guest in your country,” Pippa said, “but I have friends.”

Rufus had got the drone opened up and was checking out its guts. He already knew that it was of no make or model he had ever seen before. There was not a speck of branding on the thing. Not mass produced. 3D printed from carbon fiber composite—an expensive process. Too polished, though, to be what you’d call a prototype. Some of the parts, like batteries and motors, were off-the-shelf—stuff you could source over the Internet anywhere in the world. Made sense. Even the kind of esoteric R & D program that had 3D carbon fiber printers wouldn’t bother manufacturing its own batteries from scratch. Same went for ribbon cables, connectors, fasteners, and a lot of other bits. Circuit boards were what mattered. Those, and the propellers. The propellers were machined out of some light metal and anodized black. He could tell by the shape of them they’d been optimized to a fare-thee-well. They reminded him of the rotor blades on the most advanced stealth choppers he’d seen in the service, the ones used by JSOC squads for insertions into crazy places. But why go to all that trouble to optimize the rotors on a quad-copter drone? To eke out a little more range? To make them quieter? Or just to flex?

Most circuit boards had markings silkscreened onto them: a part number, a company logo, labels for the I/O connectors. Not these. Just chips. And even the chips were unmarked. Who the fuck made their own chips? More to the point, why bother?

Ribbon cables ran from the edges of the board to various subsystems. But there was also a pair of plain old wires, red and black, that ran to a plain old switch mounted on the outside of the chassis. He flicked it on and was rewarded with a green LED coming on. Normally it would be hidden beneath the black carapace. For this thing had been made to run dark.

Pippa meanwhile had gone into another round of clicking on things. “Look, India’s not going to mount a twentieth-century-style military operation against West Texas. No matter how bad it gets.”

“Let me guess,” Rufus said. “They’ve been getting shit done in the Himalayas without firing a single bullet by using the new tactics of, what did you call it—”

“Performative war, Red.” In the Kiwi accent it came out as “Rid.”

“Pina2bo’s more of a threat—which means, more of a target—than a bunch of kung fu fighters freezing their asses on the top of the world,” Rufus said. “But old-school war ain’t an option. So what they gonna do? Performative war. And who’s the best they got?”

“Big Fish,” Pippa said. “I’ll see you in a day, Rid.”

Rufus was getting ready to explain to Pippa why this was not a good idea when he was distracted by joyous, excited whooping from the top of the peak. Thordis and Carmelita were up there, taking the evening air. “Shooting star!” were the only words he could make out. He looked up at them and saw them pointing excitedly into the northern sky. He turned his head that way and saw a line of brilliant white being drawn across the navy blue heaven. It did indeed look like a meteorite. But after a certain point it seemed to stop moving. It just kept getting brighter.

Rufus hadn’t played that much baseball, but he’d caught enough fly balls during his day to know that if you are staring at the ball, and it doesn’t seem to be moving, you’re in the right place to catch it.

“Don’t look at it!” he shouted. “Don’t look at it!”

“Don’t look at what?” Pippa was saying. “What’s going on, Rid?” But he was moving away from his laptop. He’d turned his back on it, and on the shooting star, and was looking up at Thordis and Carmelita, trying to get their attention.

He needn’t have bothered. The shooting star had grown so bright and so close that it was illuminating the whole north-facing side of the peak, casting stark shadows. No one could look at it. Thordis and Carmelita had both turned their backs to it.

Then there was a momentary flash that was even brighter, and then darkness.

Absolute darkness. The screen of Rufus’s laptop had gone black. The lights in the windows of the trailers had gone out. The generators had stopped running. He pulled his phone out of his pocket and tried to turn on its flashlight app. It was bricked. In his other pocket he had a little LED flashlight. It didn’t work either.

His eyes had adjusted to the darkness, though, and now they picked up one mote of green light. He stepped toward it. It was on the table next to his dead laptop.

It was the power LED on the drone’s main circuit board. That was still working just fine, apparently.