These pigs were an unstoppable plague, to the point where they were actually taking back Texas from the human race. It was sparsely populated territory to begin with; you could only wrest so many dollars out of an acre of Texas ranchland no matter how hard you worked. Anything that reduced your income made the whole proposition that much more sketchy.

Grazing animals would eat grass but leave the roots in the ground; hogs tore up the ground and ate the roots. Erosion followed. Only ants could live in what the hogs left behind.

One of the very few genetic weaknesses of pigs was that they couldn’t sweat, which was why they wallowed during the day and did the hard work of rooting out food at night.

kids at the shooting range wearing overpriced wraparound sunglasses. Bros in tactical trousers who were evidently in it because of some story they were telling themselves.

using PanScan—one of several competing apps in the anonymized contact tracing space—to check his immunological status versus that of everyone currently in the house. Since Willem was the interloper, he was the most likely to be bringing new viral strains in to this household.

Eventually the app produced a little map of the property, showing icons for everyone there, color-coded based on epidemiological risk. The upshot was that Willem could get by without a mask provided he kept his distance from Hendrik. Oh, and if he ventured upstairs he should put a mask on because there was a Kuok in the second bedroom on the left whose recent exposure history was almost as colorful as Willem’s.

she’d actually taped a sheet of paper over the map’s title so that it wouldn’t draw unwanted notice during Zoom calls.

Willem found his way to the place where a pull-chain dangled from a long trapdoor in the ceiling. He reached up and drew it down, half expecting a rain of dust and bat shit to fall on his face. But it was all clean. Dutch clean.

A third of the Netherlands’ economy passed up and down one single Rhine. They had, in effect, built a whole country around it.

one of those insane statistics about the scale of America that had once made the United States seem like an omnipotent hyperpower and now made it seem like a beached whale.

The truck got him to within a block of the café, then politely suggested he get out and walk. He opened the door and stepped down to a three-hundred-year-old cobblestone street. The truck drove away as fast as it could, which around here was little better than walking pace. It would park if it found a space, or circle the block otherwise.

“The river is an unstoppable land-building machine, if we just let it do its work. We can’t switch it off, just point it in different directions.

All these aides were brandishing objects that looked like cheap plastic simulacra of squash rackets. As soon became obvious, they were actually handheld bug zappers. The aides initially formed a defensive perimeter, but as insects were observed slipping through gaps, they broke formation and began to roam about in a sort of zone coverage, swiping their weapons through the air with the controlled grace of YouTube tai chi instructors, incinerating bugs with crisp zots and zaps while pretending not to hear a word of what Bo and Willem were saying.

“A hundred years ago they’d have been black. Fifty years ago, Vietnamese. Twenty, Mexican,” Bo said. They were white. “Maybe this will teach them some kind of decent work ethic.

Comanches were a movement, not a race. There were white Comanches, Mexican Comanches, Black ones, ones who used to be Caddo or Cheyenne or what have you.”

“Money,” Saskia said, gazing at a beautiful set of cuff links on the wrists of one of the London contingent. His French cuffs had, of course, been tailored so that one of them was slightly larger to accommodate his massive wristwatch. A side benefit of being a queen was that you didn’t even have to pretend to be impressed by that stuff.

She was, after all, just a hereditary monarch. It wasn’t like you had to pass an intelligence test to land that job.

You could say I went to grad school on the short bus.”

How is climate in the interior going to be affected? Is there going to be enough rain? Or too much of it? Will we be able to grow enough rice? Will our hydroelectric projects be compromised?” “And no one knows,” Alastair said. “Yet.”

“What’s termination shock?” “A bogeyman—to be fair, a legitimate concern—that always comes up when people debate geoengineering,” Alastair said. “It boils down to asking what the consequences might be of shutting the system off after it’s been running for a while.”

“I heard you say China versus India.” “Frequently, in these forecasts, what’s good for one is bad for the other. Monsoons, very important.”

glabrous obduracy of the underlying structure.

“We don’t need brilliant hackers in flashy buildings. Macedonian teenagers in their parents’ basements are more than sufficient. We use brilliant hackers for other things.”

Like every other state-of-the-art conference room AV system in the history of the world, it failed to work on the first go and so it was necessary to summon someone who understood how it worked; and like all such persons he could not be found.

There was an old joke about a man who is driving somewhere with an accordion in the back of his car. He parks the car outside a diner in a sketchy part of town and goes in for dinner. When he comes out he sees that the rear window of his car has been smashed out. He runs up to it and discovers that, while he wasn’t looking, some miscreant has thrown a second accordion in there and made a clean getaway.

Pretendian,

The United States—which used to intervene in such situations—was a basket case and global laughingstock;

It was all what Alastair described as “cruft,” meaning complicated and messy holdovers from obsolete code and discontinued operating systems. This was cruft of a geopolitical sort. But cruft was a real thing, it had consequences, and it had to be managed.

He knew what he wanted, he was used to getting it, and his politeness was as a veil of finest silk draped over a brick.

a lifetime’s royal experience pretending to pay attention to things for the sake of other people’s feelings.

apparently the United States was a different story. It was, as all the world knew, a completely insane and out-of-hand country, unable to control itself. Men like the Texan could get away with anything;

“It’s an asset, you’re saying. The sheer incompetence of the United States.” “People have come to rely on 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.”

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.

termination shock: the fear that if the gun stopped, it would lead to a backlash in the world’s climate system.

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.