Even though it was only a soft opening, the activities available that day were dizzying, from scuba diving to cooking classes, games and workshops for kids, but the schedule leaned heavily on panels, seminars, and “keynotes” along with tons of “affinity group spaces,” a phrase I found more than a little disorienting, since I associated it with my own friends back in Burbank.
We got fed twice in the fifteen minutes we took deliberating over the schedule: first by a waiter with cod sushi hand rolls in ice-cream holders, then by a robot that 3D-printed us ice-cream sculptures on sticks that vaguely resembled our own heads. They weren’t great likenesses, but they didn’t have to be—not only were they fun to eat but everyone who witnessed the bot’s routine lined up to get more, following it when it rolled farther down the concourse, acting as an automated crowd-management system.
“Smart,” I said.
Ana Lucía elbowed me. “See, these guys aren’t idiots. They’ve got some weird ideas, but they’re not just plutes. Most plutes ended up onshore, got their money taxed away under Uwayni. These are the smart plutes, the ones who figured out how to hang on to it. They’re survivors. Maybe the old system wasn’t meritocratic, but this one sure is.” Her eyes were shining, reflecting the high buff of the concourse’s marble floor.
Listening to her was infuriating and a little scary. Most of the time, Ana Lucía was this tireless organizer for justice and community, and then some of the time, it was like she was channeling Gramps and his buddies. How could she believe both of those things at the same time? I couldn’t make any sense of it.
I changed the subject back to the schedule and we whittled down the day to some fun activities—jet-skiing, an m-pop dance party on a superyacht, a 3D-printed caviar buffet—and one big serious one, the Calexit Affinity Group welcome seminar.
“Gotta warn you,” Ana Lucía said as she finished off her cone, “depending on how that one goes I might stick around and blow everything else off.”
Jet-skiing was first, and after a terrifyingly short orientation from a freckled teenaged girl with an adorable New Zealand accent, I was buzzing around the Flotilla with Ana Lucía. We took a close-up look at the vertical gardens suspended from the sides of the cruise ships and carrier, watched the robots crawl the beds, got misted by the hydration system that ran off a bunch of solar desalinators that dangled long straws into the ocean. Then we shadowed a utility crew that was bringing down one of the massive solar kites, which provided both power and motive force as it sailed along in the troposphere. We dialed our screens in to the commentary channel and listened to the insane specs on the kite, half a mile long, supplying a gigawatt an hour at peak performance, each number more implausible than the last, until the actual kite splashed down and we saw it blot out the sun before it floated like a leaf in a breeze to the sea. It was swarmed by utility boats crewed by sure-moving engineers in wet gear who walked across its surface like it was a soft pontoon bridge, doing impossible-to-grasp annual maintenance chores.
It occurred to me that whether or not this was an annual work project, it was also a showpiece. They were going to be parked off the LA shore for a week, and they would spend that week ferrying locals out to their floating playground, and the maintenance schedule meant that everyone who came by for a visit would get a good old eyeful of this marvel of engineering.
Back on the ship, we got coconut water with royal jelly from the ship’s hives. Ana Lucía made a face when the handsome Nigerian man in ship’s whites offered it to her and then whispered, “Royal jelly? What’s next, Reiki? Alkaline water? Crystal healing?” But then she drank a sip from her plastic straw, and her eyes widened. “Oh my God that’s delicious.” I tried mine and concurred.
The cruise ship was filling up and we were getting close to our affinity group meeting, which was being held on the deck of the aircraft carrier, so we waited for an elevator and rode to the ship’s topmost deck, then lined up to cross the suspension bridge that linked the two vessels. As we made our way across, I looked down and saw several more bridges that must have been for authorized personnel, as well as some giant, flexing springlike coils that kept the two ships linked as they bobbed up and down.
The carrier was ex-Indian and had been rechristened Tanstaafl by its new owners. They had leaned into the surreal pleasure of turning a giant military vessel into a pleasure cruiser, painting the hull and exterior structure with modernist dazzle, angular shapes that bent the eye, and then coloring it all with bright neons, oranges and pinks and blues and greens. The private aircraft that dotted the deck—choppers and small planes, along with a couple of ex-military jets—were all iridescent, like flying insects come to rest on a cartoon beach.
The affinity group meetings were all being held on the top deck in temporary pop-up structures made out of tough, reflective quilted fabric with large, screened-in windows. We followed the numbered paths on the deck until we found the Calexit meeting, which was in the biggest of these silvery domes.
We arrived with ten minutes to spare and found a crowd around the entrance, holding up their screens and tuning them in to the spillover sound from the main room.
“Fuck this,” Ana Lucía said, and began to excuse-me her way through the crowd, ignoring the stink eye she got. I followed in her wake, muttering apologies, through the spillover and into the dome. Inside there were rows of folding chairs, and of course there were plenty of empty seats, singles trapped between other singles and pairs. Ana Lucía opened the door flap and hollered, “People, there are plenty of seats in here,” and then asked-told a florid man in an aloha shirt to shove over one seat so there’d be room for the two of us to sit.
This triggered a shamefaced shuffling-up and an ingress of people from the outdoors, and I could feel all the eyes on us. This was what it must mean to be an “organizer”—the ability to make other people feel uncomfortable in the service of your goals.
More helpers in ship’s whites came around and unzipped some windows and zipped up other windows until we had a good cross breeze, and then the first speaker came out. She was a slender, beautiful older woman, wearing a bias-cut, sleeveless hooded blouse that showed off her toned arms. Her hair was silver-white, cut in an angled bob with blunt bangs, and she had great crow’s-feet that made her look like she was smiling even when she wasn’t. She had a little mic on her cheek done up to glitter like an emerald, and when she tapped it to life, it sparkled and cast a thousand dots of green light on every surface. The effect silenced the crowd in an instant and she smiled, and now her crow’s-feet made her look like she was beaming.
“Hello, California!” She held out her arms in an all-encompassing gesture. “It’s so good to be home!
“My name’s Derrida Stephenson, and I was born and raised in the Golden State. Even though I haven’t set foot on it for a decade, it’s my home. It’ll always be my home. I love this place.”
People giggled at this, but she wasn’t kidding. “Come on, guys, do better than that. I love this place. Don’t you love it? Birthplace of aerospace and computing, cradle of art and culture and music, a beautiful and fertile and wealthy place? A place of opportunity? Come on, let’s hear it for California!” And we cheered, clapped, even stomped, though the hard steel of the deck beneath the industrial rug dampened the sound and was hard on the ankles and knees.
“That’s better!” She had a great laugh. “Thank you for that. Hey, I hope all of you have had a chance to tour the Flotilla, and if you haven’t, I hope you’ll take the chance. If there’s one thing this place reminds me of, it’s California—a California of the seas, a place that has attracted the most beautiful, brilliant people in the world around a shared vision of self-determination, free association, and, above all, ambition.
“Boy, isn’t that what we need about now? With all that’s going on in the world? There are parts of India—places people lived comfortably for millennia, were still living in at the start of this century—where an unprotected human body cannot survive for more than a few hours at a time. There’re places in Central America that are headed for the same fate. This crisis needs bold people and big ideas, not because it’s fun to do big, bold things—” She stopped and beamed at us. “Though of course, it’s really fun to do big, bold things!” We laughed. She had good timing, and so much raw charisma.
“The crisis needs big, bold people and ideas because people are dying. And lots more are going to die.
“So let’s talk big, bold ideas. It’s no secret that we’re working on some ambitious plans to help put this old world of ours back in good working order.” Nervous chuckles. China had threatened to literally nuke the Flotilla if it went ahead with either its upper-atmospheric or oceanic geoengineering plans. Uwayni had been a little more restrained when she was President, and after her, Hart—that centrist asshole—had made some noise about “responsible collaboration” with the Flotilla’s plans. Bennett—well, who knew what Bennett was thinking. She’d say one thing one day and something else the next, depending on what part of the weird coalition of white nationalists, Christian fundamentalists, conspiracists, goldbugs, blockchainers, preppers, White Horse Prophecy doomsdayers, sovereign citizens, and deplorables that had brought her to power she needed to court. As far as anyone could tell, Bennett’s only real principle was that she, Rosetta Bennett, should remain President for at least two terms, erasing as much of Uwayni’s legacy as possible during that time.
Stephenson triggered a projector and she became a screen for a projection-mapped image of a spacesuit that covered her from collar to knees, tracking her in real time as she moved. The spillover light made her face radiate like a flaring satellite catching the sun. She held up her muscular arms and they writhed with space launches.
“We’re not stopping there, though. Humanity needs a plan B. Any organism that runs out of room to grow starts to shrink. We’ve got a lot of room to grow, up there.” She rolled her eyes up, looking even more saintly. “Guys, you will go to the Moon. You will go to the planets. You will go to the stars.” Her outfit flared with incredibly bright light that shook at the edges, turning into the flame from a rocket booster. It dimmed slowly and she stood serene and silent as it did. Somewhere in the room, subwoofers were rumbling the sound of rocket engines thrusting out of the gravity well.
Look, I know space is bullshit. I know there’s no plan B. But that was an amazing presentation. Stephenson was really good at what she did. She beamed at us.
“How many of you have heard of 16 Psyche?” There was some knowledgeable chuckling, a few whispers. I had no idea what she was talking about. “16 Psyche is only two hundred and seventy million miles from us right now. That might seem like a long way off, but 16 Psyche’s payload of nickel and steel is worth a hundred quadrillion dollars. That’s quadrillion with a q.
“California has attracted dreamers for centuries, from the forty-niners who came for gold to the techies who flocked here in search of IPOs. You guys, I’m here to tell you that no one has claimed California’s true jackpot. From the JPL and Lockheed spinouts down here to the code monkeys upstate, this is the state that could make it happen.”
A young woman in ship’s whites brought her a tall stool and she dragged it into the middle of the stage and climbed up on it. The young woman handed her an aerogel bottle of water, and she drained it and balled it up so small it seemed to disappear, then tossed it over her shoulder. It moved as slowly as a dust mote in a sunbeam. We watched transfixed. Even me.
“Okay, enough showmanship. How are we going to make it happen, huh? Save the planet, conquer the universe, yadda yadda yadda—what’re the actionable, deliverable, meaningful steps that we can take to get our house in order?”
She held up her hand, and an older woman in ship’s whites lobbed her another aerogel water bottle, which she caught one-handed and drained, balling it up and batting it over the heads of the crowd.
“Step one, we gotta put our house in order. Once upon a time, California was the Golden State, the best place in the world to do business. Today, you can’t take a shit without getting an environmental impact assessment. Many of the kinds of people you’d want to hire to get on with this stuff wouldn’t dream of living here, thanks to taxes and regulation, and the kind of people the state does attract are the kinds of people who benefit from taxes and regulations—”
At this point, I hit my camera and started livestreaming. I can’t say why, exactly, except that I’d heard variations on this speech from Gramps and his pals and I had a good idea where it was heading.
“—the kinds of people who take, not make. And this isn’t a race thing. I mean, it’s true that in California, this historically breaks down on race lines, but I’m here to tell you, the Flotilla is a global operation. We’re putting unbanked people on-chain all around the world, starting businesses, accessing capital, creating jobs. This isn’t a race thing. It’s an incentives thing.
“Incentives matter, right? Set up the rules so that anyone who tries to make a dent in the world gets hit with a million rules and regulations, lawsuits about what they can do, who they can hire, who they can fire … And if they do manage to make it work, half of it gets taken away in taxes? Who’s gonna start a business under those conditions?
“And then, and then you set up a system where if you don’t get a real job, you get paid anyway? Paid for tinkering in the margins with unscalable, fiddling, piddling, useless ‘green jobs’ that let you feel like you’re making a difference even though none of it’s gonna make a damned bit of difference in the long run? And you don’t even have to do that if you don’t want to, you can just sit on your fat ass and pretend you’ve attained fully automated luxury gay space communism.
“I mean no wonder everyone who feels like they could make a difference got the fuck out of Dodge, and so many who stayed behind are takers, people whose learned helplessness means they’re destined to enact and reenact the multigenerational pattern of parasitism and self-defeat?
“It can’t go on. You know it can’t go on. You know that there’s a reckoning going to come. It doesn’t have to be bad news. California may be a little worse for wear, a little scratched and dented, but there’s still a tiger in her tank, guys. There’s still gold in them thar hills. California’s still got it.
“And let’s be honest, we all know exactly what we need to do to make this happen. It’s why you’re here. We have to take California back. We need to take control of our borders—” Cheers.
“We need to kick out the takers who came to California after they used up their own land and have come to use up ours.” Loud cheers.
“We need to get the fiscal house in order. If we don’t earn it, we can’t spend it. California’s been dropping helicopter money on multigenerational families of lazy, self-pitying losers for so long we’ve forgotten that it can be any other way. The way to put Californians to work is to invite in the best people in the world and let them do their thing. California has created billions of jobs, and it could create more if we could just get the state off the backs of the people.”
I couldn’t help it, I turned to Ana Lucía—who was watching with shining eyes—and whispered, “Dude, they’re talking about the Jobs Guarantee—they’re talking about me.”
She shushed me, though.
“Someone needs to remind California that there’s no such thing as government money—”
“What the fuck?” I whispered to Ana Lucía, and got an elbow.
“There’s only the money that the government taxes away from the people. Every dollar we spend on ‘programs’—” Her finger quotes were razor sharp, sarcasm dripping, like a pidgin ASL she’d developed all on her own. “—is a dollar we take away from people who could be creating jobs.”
I snorted loud enough that Ana Lucía said “Be quiet” in a voice loud enough to carry to the stage.
Stephenson broke off and smiled sweetly at us. “Something you want to share with the rest of the class?”
“Sorry,” Ana Lucía called.
“No problem,” she said, and gave us a little sarcastic namaste.
“Uh,” I said, because my mouth had decided to speak without asking my brain.
For a brief instant, her face showed how irritated she was; then that dazzling smile was back. “Yes?”
“I just—”
“Questions at the end, if you don’t mind. Unless it’s urgent.”
“No, I just—”
“Thank you.” She pointedly looked away from us. Everyone else in the room was staring at us, except for the people who couldn’t see us and were trying to get a look, craning over the heads of others. “I want you to think for a moment about what a sovereign California could do, once it seized control over its destiny: establish a new, anti-inflationary currency based on distributed consensus, and use that currency to enable free association with others around the world to realize dreams big and small.
“Do a top-to-bottom review of the regulatory cruft that has piled up over the decades. Create charter cities, laboratories of democracy that could take the best of what we’ve learned from other charters around the world and add to that store of best practices, and create our own. You know we’ll create our own, don’t you? This is California, people, we innovate six new ways to do things before breakfast! Every day! Then we wake up the next day and we do it again!”
It got the laugh she was looking for and she was definitely back on her game, soaring as though we hadn’t interrupted her. I was getting pocket-buzzes as more people joined my stream and told their friends about it. I didn’t stream often, and I never got that big an audience, but after my rooftop encounter with Mike Kennedy I’d ended up on a lot of people’s watch lists and the fact that I streamed so infrequently meant that I never got taken off again.
“And boy does this state need some innovative thinking. I mean, just look at what we’re doing with our coastal cities, walking away from them, rebuilding them inland. These are the most beautiful cities in the country, beach towns, some of them two hundred and fifty years old, a quarter of a millennium. Cities with Spanish missions that withstood quakes and fires, but they’re being torn apart by de-growth greenies who’ve given up on seawalls, geoengineering, and shore stabilization, surrendering before the battle is joined without firing a single shot.
“We need a different program: Take control of California. Take control of its borders. Take control of its money. Orient the economy and the priorities around the people who do stuff, not the people who take stuff. Fix our coasts. Fix our forests. Fix our water so we can fix our farms. Do better. Save the state. Save the planet. Save the human race. Leave the planet.
“That’s it. Just that.” She gave us a gigawatt of smile, spread out her hands. “Any questions?”
My arm had joined my mouth in its mutiny from my brain, and it shot straight up in the air, before anyone else had a chance. What can I say? White guys have a lot of questions. Even from my peripheral vision, I could tell that Ana Lucía was glaring at me.
“Hi there,” she said, pointing at me. Before I could respond, she raised a finger. “Ground rule, folks, questions, not statements. A question is a short sentence that goes up at the end. Technically a long rambling statement followed by ‘what do you think of that?’ is a question, but it’s not a good one.” Turning back to me: “With that out of the way, go.”
I was suddenly shy, but thankfully my mutinous mouth and hand had cooked up a plan and didn’t need help from me. “Thanks. That was a lot. I guess, I just wanted to ask, uh, about inflation?”
“What about it?”
“Oh, sorry,” I said. “Didn’t want to exceed my sentence limit.”
I got a chuckle that time. She gave me a closed-lip grin that clicked off and on like a light switch. “Take a couple more.”
“The thing is, we’ve had more than a decade where we just treated all that stuff you said about budgets as bullshit and as far as I can see, we’re doing pretty damned great. We’ve put everyone who wants a job to work, and the work they’re doing makes the people around them happy by taking care of them, and there hasn’t been any inflation. So, uh, what do you think of that?”
I got a laugh. It felt good.
“Dude, be serious,” she said, and started looking around for another question.
“That’s your answer?” I must have said it louder than I intended, because her attention snapped back to me and I caught another lightning-quick flash of rage before she masked up with something more condescending.
“Sir, I don’t know what fantasyland you live in, but since the days of Isaac Newton we’ve been damned certain that what goes up must come down. You can’t keep putting make-work projects on the national credit card forever and expect that the bill will never come due.”
“Do I get to answer?” I said. Burroughs High has a really good drama department, it’s famous for it—we’re the Glee school! and the Glee Rebooted school!—and I can project. It’s all in the diaphragm.
“Sure, why not.” The smile was all razors now.
“We don’t have a national credit card. We have a treasury. It makes dollars by typing them into a spreadsheet. Countries aren’t households.”
She fired back instantly. “And who owns that debt? China? Venezuela? Nigeria? What happens if they decide to call it in?”
“Uh, China can only buy our debt if we send them dollars. China doesn’t have any dollars of its own. It can only get dollars that we give them. So they’re using our dollars to buy our debt? And maybe they’ll ask us for more dollars? So we could just type some more zeroes into the spreadsheet and—”
“Which is why the dollar is so goddamned dangerous. Thank you, kind sir, for giving us a little Econ 101. If you let politicians buy their way to glory with the Treasury’s printing press, they will, and then the rest of us will get stuck with the bill. Which is why we put our money on-chain, like civilized people, so that economic illiterates and Neanderthals who learned their econ from dank Black Bloc memes can’t just make money whenever they feel like it.”
“Sounds like you’re saying that in your system, if we need money to help sick people, or flooded cities, or people who lose their houses to fire or whatever, we’re screwed?”
People were muttering, telling me to shut up, but I was hot, too hot to give a shit about the faces Ana Lucía was pulling in my peripheral vision as she inched farther and farther from me. My pocket-buzzes were crazy, which just egged me on.
A tall woman with a really cool updo—in ship’s whites, naturally—scurried (seriously, like a squirrel or something, in that way that tall people who are embarrassed about their heights sometimes do) over to Stephenson and leaned down to whisper in her ear. Stephenson tapped her cheek jewel to mute and listened intently, then nodded. Her face went grim.
“You do not have my permission to livestream this presentation,” she said, directly to me.
The sensation I felt then was like falling and falling—stomach-dropping, face-draining, a wind-rush of blood in my ears that made it hard to hear. Ana Lucía had recoiled from me and was staring at me in horror. People around me were jeering angrily. How had they known? Duh. They paid media-monitoring services, I’m sure, and then it was a simple matter of triangulating the camera angle. Or maybe they just got my name off the feed and looked up what I looked like.
It didn’t matter. Two big guys—ship’s whites, but binding and bulging around their shoulders and necks and tree-trunk thighs—were cutting through the crowd, and the audience was getting out of their way, some of them shouting encouragement, and Ana Lucía stood up and got out of their way, too.
“Hey!” I shouted, as each of them grabbed an arm. “Is this what you call free debate? What have you got to hide, huh? Aren’t you proud of what you have to say?”
She was coldly amused. “You have the right to free speech where you live. This is my stage and I say who talks and who doesn’t. You’re a guest in my house, you behaved rudely, and now you’re being asked to leave.”
The guys lifted me so my feet dangled. “You call this liberty?” I shouted, a thing I’d wanted to say so often to Gramps’s friends but never had. It was all coming up now. “You call yourself an American? You call this respect for the Constitution?”
I was being bum-rushed now, carried backward by the goons through the crowd, showered with abuse. Someone spat on me. It landed on my forehead.
“Dude,” Stephenson said. “This isn’t America. This is international waters. You’re lucky we don’t tie an anchor to your ankles and toss you overboard.” Judging from the cheers she got, she wasn’t the only one who liked that idea.
Right up to the moment they stuffed me, zipcuffed at the ankles and wrists, into a life-jacket closet on the hydrofoil, I was half convinced that I was going to sleep with the fishies. But then we pushed off. Ten minutes into the trip, someone opened the door: a Black woman, in her twenties, holding a pair of snips.
“We’re about to enter U.S. waters so I’m going to cut you loose. You gonna behave yourself?”
“Sure thing,” I said. She snipped me loose and I went to mingle with the sparse passengers. Most people were spending the whole day, clearly. And why not? It was better than Disneyland.
I realized as we docked up that I didn’t have any of the gimmies I’d been given through the day, but, as luck would have it, I got a parting gift bag as I exited the pier, filled with glossy, book-length brochures and my own copy of Those Who Tread the Kine.