Termination Shock [calibre 4.99.4]

He had written his dissertation on rogue waves—incredibly random events of astonishing power, thought to be responsible for sudden disappearances of ships, therefore of interest to City insurance companies, who’d hired him before the ink was dry on his Ph.D.

“I know, Alastair,” Mark said calmingly. “So you told me ten years ago. Now it’s how I cull the yearly crop of people like Simon.”

With that it seemed that the basic purpose of the cocktail hour had been accomplished. Saskia could reasonably claim to be “knackered” herself and so she made excuses and returned to the guesthouse with Amelia, leaving Alastair to pal around with the City boys, Rufus to talk pigs with T.R., and Willem to brush up on his Fuzhounese with the Singapore crew. Lotte demanded a progress report via text message and Saskia dutifully let her know that two possibles (Rufus and Michiel) had been identified. But she drew the line at sending her daughter pictures.

They could have just done this aerial tour from the comfort of T.R.’s mansion-on-stilts along Buffalo Bayou, relaxing on leather furniture with drinks in hand and experiencing the whole thing through virtual reality, but that would not have been the Texas way and it certainly was not the T.R. way. Instead T.R., Queen Frederika, the lord mayor, Sylvester Lin, and Michiel were humming through the stifling air above the metropolis, each in their own personal drone: an air-conditioned plastic bubble with splayed arms that ramified like fingers, each finger terminated by an electric motor driving a carbon fiber propeller. Two dozen independent motors and two dozen propellers kept each vehicle in the air. In front of Saskia was a touch screen control system completely different from anything she’d ever seen in an airplane. She couldn’t have piloted this thing if she’d tried. Fortunately she didn’t have to. The drone was being controlled by swarm software, based on the murmurations of starlings. T.R.—presumably with a lot of assistance from an AI safety system—piloted his drone. The others—Saskia’s, the three other guests’, and half a dozen more drones containing aides and security personnel—flew in formation with it, basically going where T.R. went but never getting closer than a few meters to any of the others. Or to any solid object whatsoever. For the flock was smart enough to part around hazards when it came upon them and then to knit itself back together after leaving obstructions in its wake.

“I sucked at math,” T.R. remarked as he piloted the flock on an obstacle course among the skyscrapers of downtown Houston. This was just a few kilometers to the east of the posh leafy neighborhood where they had lifted off a few minutes earlier. It was not, Saskia suspected, the important part of the tour. It was just T.R. getting the touristy bits ticked off the list, making sure the drones were all working.

“Or leastways, math as it was taught in the prep schools my folks sent me to. ‘How do we get to AP calc?’” He chuckled. “That’s what that’s all about. I was a twenty-seven-year-old college dropout before I finally met some real mathematicians and found that those people don’t even give a shit about calculus. My Ph.D.’s in probability and statistics. Took me ten years to get it because I was building a business and raising kids at the same time. You could say I went to grad school on the short bus.”

Alastair had warned her to expect this, encouraged her to watch a few online videos of the real T.R. Schmidt. Ninety-nine percent of all T.R. content on the normal Internet was him twenty years ago during the business-building phase of his life, making an ass of himself in deliberately amateurish television ads for his chain of family-themed strip mall restaurants, which catered to the child birthday party market. Eventually he had hired a younger actor to slip into the role of T.R. McHooligan: a sort of goofy slapstick dad/cowboy figure, beloved of kids, relatable to men in their twenties and thirties. He was masculine enough to seem like a regular guy you could go have a beer with but not rising to the level of a potential wife-beguiler. That actor had eventually fallen into disgrace and been replaced by an animation, a change that had coincided with a rebranding and expansion of the chain into something called T.R. Mick’s. The small (by Texas standards—unbelievably colossal to Europeans) standalone restaurants had been phased out, only to crop up on yet larger parcels on the edges of cities, where they served as the central anchors of truck stop/gas stations designed around the slogan “Never Less Than a Hundred!” meaning—as every motorist in Texas understood—that the smallest T.R. Mick’s Mobility Center had a hundred fuel pumps. That did not include electric charging stations, of which there were also plenty. All sheltered from sun and rain by wide solar-power-collecting awnings and all connected into the central restaurant/entertainment plaza with moving walkways like in one of your longer airport concourses. Everyone knew and understood that this business strategy had enabled T.R. to parlay the tens of millions he had inherited from “Daddy” Schmidt into billions.