at twelve. Even to someone who doesn’t know a thing about the math, it’s a hypnotic motion, like you felt when you were little and you stared at an old barber pole, wondering where the stripes went when they left the cylinder, or, if you’re of a certain age, the pulsing label on a Vertigo LP.
Taro’s voice came over the speaker again.
“Time,” he said.
I looked at the board. My runner was two points from the northwest corner. It didn’t look good for him. That is, in the short run. There was something farther out, a sense that the whole scene was hurrying toward a deadline, but I just couldn’t fix on it. Damn.
“The protesters are going to break through the fence roughly two and a half hours from now,” I said. “They will try to take the building but they won’t succeed. A lot of them, I’ll say more than fifty, are going to get killed or seriously wounded.”
Taro said all right. I unplugged my head before Ashley could get in and walked out into the conference area.
The protest march was on the wall screen, this time with the sound on, and they were all watching it. It turned out that it was going on in some town north of Calcutta, and the building was an office of the Assam Rifles, that is, the northeastern counterinsurgency force, and the crowd of mohajirs, that is, Muslim refugees, was actually trying to rescue some leader of theirs who was being held inside. I wasn’t crazy about missing that angle. But there were, supposedly, Hindu mobs threatening them somewhere offscreen.
Sic came in with Taro. They sat at the table. It was an awkward moment.
“Well, what did you come up with?” Sic asked me.
I said what I thought. He said he’d guessed that they were going to rush the building in less than half an hour and that they were going to take it successfully. I said “Mmmm” with as much professional friendliness as I could bring to the line.
Taro said that the conventional professional assessments from both the NSA observer and his own software both indicated that the demonstrators would disperse before there were any casualties. We all nodded. Ashley Thieu got up and brought back a tray with hot chocolate, Mint Milanos, and a selection of cheap, faggy herbal teas. On the screen the only major change so far was that somebody had climbed up on something and was speechifying in Urdu. We all sat around like a bunch of undergraduates watching election results. In fact it felt specifically like the presidential election of 2000, when it just didn’t ever end and every time you wanted to go and crash, another sprig of hope sprouted up, and you just kept watching and biting your nails and hoping and hoping even though somehow you knew in your heart that it was going to end in a disaster.
Twenty minutes later, one of the men climbed the fence. A guard fired his carbine into the air with an impotent-sounding pop. Two seconds later the fence was covered with people and there were a few more pops. Someone fell off the fence, but you couldn’t tell whether he’d been shot or just slipped. It wasn’t easy to see what went on after that, since the fence covered two-thirds of the screen, but less than five minutes later, someone draped a homemade flag, with white Arabic writing on a black field, out of a second-floor window.
They were in. I was screwed. Sic had got it right. I’d messed up. I couldn’t even look at Taro. I was about to leave and see if I could throw up, but nobody else seemed to be moving. I picked at a coral burn on my left index finger. It wasn’t healing. Goddamn Millepora alcicornis . I should just rip those shits out of the tank and let them suffocate. I said I was going outside to get a little hot air.
“Let’s keep watching,” Sic said. “It’s not over yet.”
I said I would and linked my phone to the room system. It took me a minute to find the elevator again, and by the time I got outside I was ultraventilating.
The steambathish air revived me a little. How do
Taro’s voice came over the speaker again.
“Time,” he said.
I looked at the board. My runner was two points from the northwest corner. It didn’t look good for him. That is, in the short run. There was something farther out, a sense that the whole scene was hurrying toward a deadline, but I just couldn’t fix on it. Damn.
“The protesters are going to break through the fence roughly two and a half hours from now,” I said. “They will try to take the building but they won’t succeed. A lot of them, I’ll say more than fifty, are going to get killed or seriously wounded.”
Taro said all right. I unplugged my head before Ashley could get in and walked out into the conference area.
The protest march was on the wall screen, this time with the sound on, and they were all watching it. It turned out that it was going on in some town north of Calcutta, and the building was an office of the Assam Rifles, that is, the northeastern counterinsurgency force, and the crowd of mohajirs, that is, Muslim refugees, was actually trying to rescue some leader of theirs who was being held inside. I wasn’t crazy about missing that angle. But there were, supposedly, Hindu mobs threatening them somewhere offscreen.
Sic came in with Taro. They sat at the table. It was an awkward moment.
“Well, what did you come up with?” Sic asked me.
I said what I thought. He said he’d guessed that they were going to rush the building in less than half an hour and that they were going to take it successfully. I said “Mmmm” with as much professional friendliness as I could bring to the line.
Taro said that the conventional professional assessments from both the NSA observer and his own software both indicated that the demonstrators would disperse before there were any casualties. We all nodded. Ashley Thieu got up and brought back a tray with hot chocolate, Mint Milanos, and a selection of cheap, faggy herbal teas. On the screen the only major change so far was that somebody had climbed up on something and was speechifying in Urdu. We all sat around like a bunch of undergraduates watching election results. In fact it felt specifically like the presidential election of 2000, when it just didn’t ever end and every time you wanted to go and crash, another sprig of hope sprouted up, and you just kept watching and biting your nails and hoping and hoping even though somehow you knew in your heart that it was going to end in a disaster.
Twenty minutes later, one of the men climbed the fence. A guard fired his carbine into the air with an impotent-sounding pop. Two seconds later the fence was covered with people and there were a few more pops. Someone fell off the fence, but you couldn’t tell whether he’d been shot or just slipped. It wasn’t easy to see what went on after that, since the fence covered two-thirds of the screen, but less than five minutes later, someone draped a homemade flag, with white Arabic writing on a black field, out of a second-floor window.
They were in. I was screwed. Sic had got it right. I’d messed up. I couldn’t even look at Taro. I was about to leave and see if I could throw up, but nobody else seemed to be moving. I picked at a coral burn on my left index finger. It wasn’t healing. Goddamn Millepora alcicornis . I should just rip those shits out of the tank and let them suffocate. I said I was going outside to get a little hot air.
“Let’s keep watching,” Sic said. “It’s not over yet.”
I said I would and linked my phone to the room system. It took me a minute to find the elevator again, and by the time I got outside I was ultraventilating.
The steambathish air revived me a little. How do
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