Hotel Mérida
June 8, 2440, 3:40 PM
Mérida, Yucatán
The interview did not look like a summit, it looked like a late lunch you might wander into by mistake.
The ceiling fans in the corner salon turned lazily, pushing warm air and the faint scent of lime and frying oil toward the open arches. Outside, in the courtyard, a fountain burbled under bougainvillea and the hum of soft conversation. Inside, the low table between Matt and T’mari was mostly occupied by small plates and sweating glasses.
Thick slices of queso de bola sat beside tiny crackers and slivers of guava paste, some dipped in dark chili syrup, some dusted with sugar. A shallow bowl of toasted crickets and another of small scorpions waited with lime wedges on the rim. Someone had added a plate of thin corn chips, almost an afterthought. Three tall glasses of tamarind agua fresca beaded condensation onto paper napkins.
He had traded the Toluca formal wear for a light guayabera and jeans. T’mari wore a loose white blouse and soft trousers in a blue that matched the his shirt, her translator buds tucked deep enough into her ears that you only noticed them when she touched one to adjust the gain. Outside the open doors, Marmaduke Ssecurity lounged against the far wall, watching tourists thread through the courtyard without much interest.
Two interviewers shared the table with them.
Dr Alma Cárdenas, art historian and critic for Revista de Artes y Letras de Yucatán, held a small notebook crowded with anachronistic pencil marks. Every few moments she glanced past her subjects toward the trees in the courtyard, as if measuring them against something in her head.
Beside her, Professor Samuel Okoye, political economist and contributor to the Journal of Post Collapse Infrastructure Studies, had a tablet balanced on his knee, its surface filled with intake charts, corridor diagrams, and the latest short wire bulletins, including the first thin lines out of Memphis.
The recording rigs were small and discreet, a pair of palm sized cameras on tripods, a sound bar along the wall near the ceiling. No panel, no stage lighting, no audience. Just four people, the whir of fans, a plate of crickets, and a long afternoon.
Matt speared a tiny scorpion by the tail with his fingers, rolled it gently in a pinch of chili salt, then squeezed a drop of lime over it. The shell crackled between his teeth. T’mari watched out of the corner of her eye, amused and faintly wary. They had stopped scorpions fighting each other La Lagunilla Market
“Ready,” Alma said, more to herself than anyone else. She set her pencil on a clean line and looked up. “If it is agreeable, I will begin with the morning.”
Matt nodded and reached for a cricket. With his other hand he slid the bowl closer to T’mari and pushed a tortilla in front of her, already planning something small and ridiculous.
“This morning,” Alma said, “you flew over what many of us call the Maya heartland, then landed at Mayapán to walk the site with an old friend. When you look down from a shuttle window at those ruins, what story do you think they are telling you, personally, about time and power.”
Matt laid the cricket on a chip, added a sliver of guava, folded it into a tiny taco, and bit half of it while he thought. The crunch came clearly enough that one of the audio technicians winced and then relaxed again.
“That people of the future will always get your history wrong,” he said finally, swallowing, “and there is nothing you can do about it except live for the present.”
He set the remaining half of the cricket taco on a napkin in front of T’mari. She gave him a look that said she was absolutely going to eat it and absolutely going to blame him if it was terrible. She took a careful bite while Alma waited.
“You stand up there,” Matt went on, “and you see the outlines, the geometry, the bits that survived the weather and the looting and whatever came after. You can guess at what mattered, but you will be wrong about a lot of it. Someone had a fight in that courtyard that changed their whole life, someone made a stupid joke on those steps, someone dropped a pot and got yelled at. No one will ever know. They will write long essays about the staircase and miss the broken pot entirely.”
Alma smiled, pencil hovering. “And you are comfortable with that.”
“Comfortable is a big word,” Matt said. He reached for another scorpion and rolled it between his fingers. “Resigned is better. If people in the future are going to get me wrong anyway, I would rather leave them enough material to be wrong in interesting ways.”
He handed the scorpion to T’mari this time. She shook her head once in mock offense, then took it anyway and crunched it without looking away from Alma.
“That archaeologist friend greeted you more like a cousin than a head of state,” Alma said. “How did that relationship start, and what have you learned from her that you did not already know from your own history books and briefings.”
“Paula is originally from Columbia, Missouri,” Matt said, without checking his notes. “We were at university about the same time. Back then she was the one disappearing every summer to dig holes and come back covered in dust and mosquito bites.”
He picked up his glass of tamarind agua fresca and drew a wet circle on the napkin with one finger.
“We met with her and her son this morning. Her husband, who I actually knew better back then, died recently from this new strain of malaria, so part of the visit was just condolences and small things you say when there are no good things to say. They did have some things they wanted to show us on the site, but they have an upcoming presentation and we are not going to steal their thunder. I have done enough damage to conferences in my life.”
“What has she taught you,” Alma asked, “that you would not have picked up from briefings.”
“She loves the ordinary,” Matt said. “The cooking fires, the water systems, the laundry areas. The parts that tell you how people actually lived, not just how they prayed or killed each other. My own history tends to get written around big speeches and freight movements. This morning she walked us past the famous angle and said, look, here, this is the bit where someone figured out they could move the kitchen three meters and save themselves ten thousand hours of walking over thirty years. That is where the empire really lives.”
He reached for another cricket, dropped it on a chip, and quietly assembled a second tiny taco, almost without looking.
“In the last week,” Alma said, “you have been swinging between aunties in plastic chairs and global arguments about ports and famine. How does standing among the stones at Mayapán change the way you hear people talking about empires and overlords with your name attached.”
Matt snorted softly.
“I think people take my comments too seriously most of the time, while ignoring what is actually important, because that is what intellectually lazy people are prone to do,” he said. “If I am going to have the empire people keep accusing me of having all my life, Mayapán says I should get started on my monumental architecture phase.”
T’mari shook her head at that, a small, helpless movement that made the translator bud shift. She touched it to settle the seal, eyes crinkling.
“Joking aside,” Matt added, “those stones are a good reminder of what is left when the story gets away from you. Most of the names are gone, the little decisions are gone. You are left with shapes and arguments about what they meant. If people are going to throw empire at me like a swear word, I listen, but I also remember I still have to get the water and grain where they need to go. My job is to make sure the kitchens work. The epithets belong to somebody else’s grandchildren.”
Alma underlined something on her page, then looked up again.
“There is a fear here,” she said, “that development always arrives wrapped in someone else’s story, that ports, tethers, and shuttles will turn sacred landscapes into backdrops. When you bring this much infrastructure to a region that already carries a heavy history, how do you stop your own story from swallowing ours.”
Matt squeezed lime over a line of scorpions, one after another, then let his hand fall.
“I am bringing no infrastructure to Mexico yet,” he said. “People keep talking like I have signed half a dozen secret corridor treaties, but I have not. If that changes, those shuttles and tethered lines are not going to force any government to decide between convenience and wrecking a historical site. You have enough broken stones. You do not need me to add to the pile.”
He glanced toward the courtyard, where a pair of kids were trying to coax a pigeon closer with crumbs from their plate.
“I grew up around places where people did not have the luxury of preserving everything. They burned old farmhouses to clear land and no one wrote poems about it. Here you have sites that carry the memory of entire peoples. You do not trade that for faster shipment times. If someone who works for me even suggests that kind of choice, they are in the wrong line of work.”
“Toluca gave us Beatles in a courtyard,” Alma said, “scholarships falling like confetti, and a man in boots singing for a girl’s future. If we had been filming you quietly at Mayapán instead, what is the moment you wish the world had seen, the one that might say more about who you are than the quinceañera reel.”
Matt leaned back, considering, then reached forward to assemble another little cricket taco, this one for himself.
“There was a seventeen year old boy there,” he said, “Paula’s son. I got to tell him a story about his dad that even his mom had forgotten. Something stupid and kind, from when we were his age and thought we were invincible.”
He smiled into the middle distance.
“It was nothing anyone else would care about. No volcano backdrop, no scholarships. Just a kid hearing that his father had once been terrified of giving a presentation and then did it anyway. You show me a thousand years of stones and then you hand me one living person to pass a story to, I will take the story every time.”
Alma’s pencil paused for a long moment over that line.
“You often joke online,” she said softly, “even in the middle of heavy debates. Here at this table it feels calmer, more intimate. When you sit down with crickets and queso instead of cameras and crowds, what part of you comes out that the world almost never sees.”
Matt chewed, swallowed, wiped his fingers on a napkin.
“Every encounter sets the tone,” he said. “If I walk into a room and people are already sharpening their knives, I bring my own. If I sit down at a table where someone has gone to the trouble of finding good crickets and making sure the drinks are cold, I am going to match that instead.”
He tapped the edge of the plate.
“The jokes are not a mask, they are part of the same thing. They say, I am not going to let you turn this into a sermon or a hostage tape. Here, with you, the tone is different. You ask good questions, you listen more than you talk, so you get more of the parts that are usually only for my kitchen table.”
He nudged another scorpion toward T’mari. She made a face at him and then ate it anyway.
Alma closed her notebook for the moment and nodded across the table to Samuel.
He cleared his throat and glanced once at his tablet, where a headline from Memphis sat like a bruise in the corner.
“While you were in the air above pyramids and cenotes,” he said, “the first reports about Memphis executing Lucas Douglas were spreading through the feeds. How did you first hear about that decision, and what went through your mind in that moment as someone whose grain had just been turned away at his gate.”
“We heard about it during the flight,” Matt said. His voice did not change much. “I cannot say I was surprised. He embarrassed an unforgiving master who got called out on the world stage. That does not end with a stern talking to.”
He reached for his glass, then thought better of it and picked up a lime wedge instead, feeling the weight in his fingers.
“They have been turning away partial grain shipments for years and they did it with every subsequent load since, too. Every ten to fifteen minutes a load arrives at the Port of Memphis and every ten or fifteen minutes a load leaves. I almost always have some grain they did not buy, and I almost never leave carrying the beer we brought in. That tells you where their priorities are.”
He dropped the lime back on the plate.
“Seeing them shoot their own man instead of fixing their intake, that just confirmed what their priorities have always been.”
Samuel nodded once, then slid to his next line.
“In the last forty eight hours,” he said, “you have told Berlin to come and get free grain, called Europe surplus to requirements, and also sat with co op drivers who live one bad season away from ruin. Sitting here in Mérida, does the view from the Maya heartland soften or harden your sense of what you owe, if anything, to cities like Memphis when they stumble.”
“I am not unsympathetic to those people,” Matt said, “the clerks and dockhands and drivers. They are the ones who take the hits first and get the least say in why.”
He picked up a scorpion, turned it over like a coin.
“But the people actually running Memphis, they boxed their minds into a way of thinking they needed to free themselves from. Memphis was a necessary evil I had to do business with to get my people what they wanted or needed. They did not stumble and need to be caught. They were drunk on their own power and now find themselves too shitfaced to know how to stand back up.”
He ate the scorpion, slow and deliberate.
“I do not owe the bouncer who throws my driver into the river because he parked in the wrong place. I owe the driver a safer route.”
“Critics argue,” Samuel said, “that what you call redundancy makes whole regions optional, that the day you decide Yucatán, or Veracruz, or some future port in West Africa is surplus to your corridors, we will feel it the way Memphis does now. How do you respond to that fear without simply asking people to trust your character.”
Matt leaned his elbows lightly on the table and smiled without much humor.
“I still do not get how any of you think I am going to make foreign ports that are nowhere near my own territory obsolete by going around one nuisance neighbor,” he said. “I do not own a navy. There are no traditional railroads north of Mexico on this continent. I have some very good trucks and some better accountants.”
He lifted his glass at Samuel in a small acknowledgment.
“I understand the abstract fear. Big networks can sideline people. I have seen it happen. But what we are actually talking about here is me refusing to keep feeding one river gate that keeps slamming itself on its own fingers. It is like no one looks at a map when they ask that question over and over. I have physical access to exactly six countries, Memphis, Chicago, Ten Tribes, The Great Northern Reserve, Denver Free Zone, and Mexico. I only count Mexico on that list because I am sure I can work something out let will let me cross through the Ten Tribes land.
“This morning’s aerial tour,” Samuel said, “was also a survey of existing roads, rails, and potential tether lines. When you look at the peninsula from a logistics map and from an archaeological map, where do those two overlays conflict, and where do they surprisingly align.”
Matt blinked once, slowly.
“Not sure where you got that idea,” he said, “because none of it is true.”
Alma made an embarrassed little noise into her notebook. T’mari’s mouth twitched.
“We did do a lidar survey,” Matt went on, “but that was for the University of Mérida Department of Archaeology and the Yucatec Maya Research Institute. That is Paula’s project, not mine. I was the guy with the keys to the shuttle. If they want to talk overlays, they are the ones you should be interviewing next.”
He shrugged.
“For me, it was a morning off where I got to look out the window and be a tourist for a few hours. My staff would riot if I tried to turn every flyover into another corridor meeting.”
Samuel accepted the correction with a nod, tapped a different note on his tablet, and reset.
“Erin Mallon’s truck story and the Toluca quince,” he said, “have made you, for many readers, the face of ethical logistics, whether you want that or not. At the same time, you are very blunt that you run an empire and that you will not trade with the South Asian Confederacy. How do you reconcile singing Let It Be under a volcano with making choices that will deliberately leave some governments on the outside of your system.”
Matt took a slow breath through his nose, reached for another cricket, and this time made a taco for T’mari first, folding the tortilla and setting it in front of her like an apology for what he was about to say.
“I chose you because I respect your academic background and the nuance you can give a subject, Professor,” he said quietly. “Please do not insult me with such basic bullshit.”
Samuel’s eyebrows lifted, but he did not flinch.
“We both know an empire has a basic definition and that I meet it,” Matt continued. “We also both know that it does not define me, but rather provides a buzzword you would never allow your own students to get away with.”
He took a drink of tamarind, set the glass down carefully.
“I choose not to support international bad actors as much as possible. There are governments, like the South Asian Confederacy, that made fortunes selling weapons into every dirty war they could find, including the ones that killed members of my own family. If a country gets left behind in my network, it is because its rulers chose the path they did. The farmers and dockworkers and kids in those places, I feel for them. But I am not going to launder their leaders’ consciences by pretending this is about neutral commerce.”
“A lot of the morning’s social reaction,” Samuel said, “came from the Global South, from people who know ports that behave exactly like Memphis. If a cooperative here in Yucatán asked you, over tamarind agua fresca, what is the minimum we should demand from you so we are partners, not dependents, how would you answer them.”
“I would probably tell them we are already there,” Matt said. “I already do business in most of the world’s open ports, either through Marmaduke Logistics or one of our subsidiaries. You do not hear about us, mostly because we get things done quietly, efficiently, and without legal troubles. We are already partners whether you knew it or not.”
He flicked a tiny crumb of cricket from the table.
“Nothing really changes. If you feel like a partner now, you will feel like one in the future. The minimum you should demand is the same as what I ask of my own people. Keep the system moving. Do it right. Do it efficiently. Do not steal. Pay your workers. Tell the truth on the forms. If your customers and your employees are both reasonably happy, then we are not in a dependency story, we are in a grown up one.”
“You often say you are only a logistics problem,” Samuel said, “yet ports execute officials, river towns feel threatened, and Indigenous communities worry about being bypassed or swallowed. After a day that includes both Mayapán and Memphis, do you still believe you can keep this at the level of logistics, or is this becoming something closer to a moral vocabulary for how we share the planet.”
“That is actually a misquote,” Matt said. “I said I am a logistics problem solver. People like to cut off the second word because it makes a better scream headline.”
He looked at the rings of moisture spreading from their glasses, overlapping circles on cheap napkins.
“Scale makes the problems larger, not more complex in a technical fashion. A truck route and a shuttle route both need fuel, maintenance, and a schedule that does not kill your drivers. The moral vocabulary creeps in because once you start solving problems at that scale, you are choosing who gets seen and who does not. I am not a philosopher, I am a guy who moves grain, but I am not naive about the weight that carries.”
He let that sit for a moment, then added, “I try to keep the technical parts honest so that when someone else wants to have the moral argument, they at least have real numbers under their feet.”
“Finally,” Samuel said, his voice softening, “imagining ten years from now, if Alma and I come back to Hotel Mérida and sit at this same table, what would need to be true in the Maya heartland, and along the rivers to the north, for you to feel that you had used this strange combination of shuttles, grain, and translators in a way the archaeologists of the future will not curse.”
Matt glanced at Alma, then at the emptying plates.
“I hope I leave good notes for them,” he said. “The V’ren have forty thousand years of recorded history using a single language people can still read and speak today. I am just hoping I do not drop too much slang into my writing, something that seems colorful and well understood now, but causes entire schools of philosophy to form in the future because I used a word sideways.”
He smiled, small and crooked.
“Ten years from now, if you come back here and the co ops are still run by people who live within a day’s drive, if the kids can afford to stay or leave by choice, if you can get good tortillas and no one has paved over the ruins to build a customs shed, I will call that a win. If some grad student in three hundred years curses me because I put an emoji in a treaty, I can live with that.”
He swallowed the last of the tamarind. T’mari stole the final cricket taco off his napkin without looking at him, bit into it, and crunched thoughtfully while the fans turned and the fountain murmured in the hot June air.
