Termination Shock

Notes

Quotes

That command was aimed at the Royal Webmaster, an antiquated job title. Social Media Coordinator would have been more up to date, but it was common in royal courts to have outdated references to a bygone age. Saskia could be guarded by men in bearskin hats riding horses; why, she could as well have a Royal Webmaster.

Quoted on September 29, 2026

A bakery was looking to hire a dependable baker. Two miles down the road, an auto parts store had a job opening for a dependable sales associate. Dependability was a major preoccupation of Lawton’s managerial class. Rufus could see people walking, bicycling, or skateboarding up and down the same streets, who it could be inferred, had failed that dependability test. Young Rufus might have assumed that this drought of dependability was a problem peculiar to Lawton, had he not joined the army and become aware of the fact that it was a worldwide phenomenon. If you did happen to be one of those rare people blessed or cursed, take your pick, with dependability, there were opportunities everywhere. The world’s howling need for it would suck you into all kinds of situations that might look peachy, if you’d just fallen off the Lawton turnip truck, but in the light of experience probably needed to be vetted a little more carefully before saying yes.

Quoted on September 29, 2026

[I really loved this quick daisy-chain explainer: Stephenson just rattles this off as a way to explain why in the near-future there is a illegal campground of RVs and makeshift camps in the green space surrounding the Houston airport.]

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In the winter and spring, East Texas had seen an unusual pattern of weather, if anything could be considered unusual nowadays, but to make a long story short, had apparently been perfect for fire ants. In all honesty, conditions always seemed perfect for fire ants. But according to people like Dr. Rutledge, who really knew their stuff, this was the best ant year ever.

The water had then gotten higher. Not in a single convulsive flood that would have drowned the ants in their burrows, but a little at a time. The ants had edged toward higher ground, which was where people tended to build houses. Houston was the third largest city in North America, so the result was what Dr. Rutledge drily called ‘Human/Ant Encounters’, on a scale never before seen. Thousands of emergency room visits, not just from ant bites, but collateral damage, such as Texans setting fire to themselves when trying to burn ant nests with gasoline.

Fire ants answer to weird signals that humans can only guess at. One of them apparently was that they were drawn to the smell of ozone. Ozone could be produced in a lot of different ways, but a very common one in that area was relays in air conditioning units. A relay was a big electrical switch with mechanical parts that actually moved, the thing that made an audible click when it came on. Most everything else now had gone to solid state. But for some reason known only to electrical engineers, relays on air conditioning units had to have actual pieces of metal that came together to establish contact, or pulled apart to turn it off. Whenever that happened, there was a little spark that produced ozone.

In this part of the world, it was typical for air-conditioning units to be installed on concrete pads external to the house. Ozone-seeking ants could easily get into the ventilation slots, to seek out the relays. There, the fate that awaited them was to be electrocuted or mechanically smashed the next time the relays cycled.

Remains of dead ants built up on the contacts, and fouled them to the point that the relay had to be replaced. The supply chain for these relays extended back to China, where one company had come to dominate the market. It could not produce and ship them at anything like the pace needed to replace the units being destroyed by fire ants in East Texas.

People came up with various jury-rigged workarounds, but the upshot was that over a short span of time, the places where hundreds of thousands of people lived became uninhabitable. Some folks could tough out a Houston summer with window fans, but most looked for alternatives. Just for starters, this meant filling every available hotel room in greater Houston.

RVs—already at a premium because of COVID-19, COVID-23, and COVID-27, and the general inability of Americans to travel outside of the Lower 48—spiked in price as people snapped those up and parked them in their driveways. People went full nomad, and began to park them in every legal campsite they could find. When those were full, they began to park illegally.

Quoted on September 29, 2026

…then sent a short affectionate note to Lotte, her sixteen-year-old daughter, who could be relied upon to ignore it. Not that she was a terrible person, or that their relationship was bad, just that she was sixteen and for all practical purposes dwelled on another planet.

Quoted on September 29, 2026