chapter 10
occupy
I’d been worried that Ana Lucía’s mysterious countermilitia friends would dismiss our plan as weaksauce. Instead, they threw their backs into it. Lots of people did—more than I would have imagined. The DSA was the hub for it, and people circulated the ideas to their affinity groups. I’m sure there were snitches in those groups, people reporting back to the feds or maybe even the state, but none of it got to the city. Or if it did, the Burbank city people who got snitched to decided they’d rather let us fly than ground us.
Taking over Magnolia was easy. We still had all the stuff we’d used to build booths for the refugees’ arrival fair. We had the floor plan showing where each pavilion or table or easy-up would go. It was late fall, with shorter, blustery days, so everyone needed a wind and/or rain backup plan, but we knew all about those. You didn’t do community organizing in Southern California without being prepared for heavy winds, sudden rainstorms, or wet-bulb temps over a hundred. Sometimes all in the same day.
And of course, all the affinity groups were filled with bored, angry people who’d cleared their schedules to work on building refugee housing, until the Flotilla (or maybe some other plutes, no one was sure) spent all that lawyercoin on shutting us down. In other words, the Magas and the plutes created the ideal conditions for our little street fair.
The only tricky part was getting through the checkpoints with all our stuff. That took some doing, and it involved a seventy-two-hour period starting Wednesday morning of people carrying stuff past the cordon in small sub-suspicion loads and stashing it with friendly merchants—or merchants who had friendly staffers with a key to the stockroom. By dawn on Saturday, everything was stashed on Magnolia and waiting for us.
The drones got super interested as soon as we started setting up, of course, but the sniffers didn’t whiff any volatiles and the lidar didn’t spot anything that looked like a firearm, so they just kept buzzing us, having a good old sniff-and-peep and then lifting off. But then they’d do a couple of high circles and their algorithms would say “Uh-oh, why are there all those people handling unwieldy objects on Magnolia?” and they’d come in for a closer look. Drones are not smart about false positives—they’re a lot more worried about false negatives. I get it. Better to take two or three good looks to make sure that thing isn’t a bomb than to buzz off after the first pass and only discover your mistake when everything goes boom a couple of hours later.
We hustled. By the time the first cops showed up we were curtain-raiser ready, with all our booths up and the big screens shook out and powered up, showing displays of the new Burbank, first cooked up in Phuong’s living room and then wikified and edited by a couple thousand Burbankers, mostly affinity group members and their friends, whose designs got polished up by infill urbanists all around the world.
Burbank wasn’t the first city to have a virtual doppelgänger that people could project their dreams and hopes onto, but it was the first one since the injunctions against emergency housing went into effect across America, and the rolling mass hackathon had this air of melancholy (this is our lost dream) and urgency (we can’t lose this dream).
The cops were clearly not expecting us and had no idea what to make of us. I mean, they’d been on high alert for terrorist bombers and mass shooters, not whatever the fuck we were. An urban vision street fair? Wildcat design fictioneers? To make things even better, everyone who got questioned by the cops insisted that they were farmers getting set up for a permitted farmer’s market, all appearances to the contrary notwithstanding.
We’d had all our comms ready to go out from the moment the cops turned out, and as the word spread up Magnolia that they were on the scene, everyone mashed their go buttons that messaged every friend they had in every way they had to let them know that something big was happening in Magnolia Park and they had to get there right now, as in, don’t stop for coffee or a pee first.
Burbank’s not that big and it’s well-supplied with bikeshares and scootershares and private vehicles of every description from old muscle cars (even gas ones) to mobility vehicles and autonomous taxis, and so the first people were on the scene even before the first cop had radioed in a report about an improbable “farmer’s market” and asked their boss to see if anyone at City Hall (which was a crater and whose functions had been distributed around other municipal buildings) knew about the supposed permit for this thing?
Then the cops had two weird things to worry about: our farmer’s market and the hundreds, then thousands, of people who showed up for it, and while it was possible that this was all a prelude to a militia uprising or mass bombing campaign or armed occupation, it sure didn’t look like one.
Then Tony Yiannopoulos showed up in his councilor suit. No one had briefed him—we all knew it would have compromised his position if he’d had foreknowledge of our weird plan—but Tony was a quick study and he found a BPD sergeant and conferred with him. After a minute, the cops withdrew back to their checkpoints and I heard Tony telling a DSA organizer that he’d explained that this was a City Hall thing, not a cop thing, and the cop was relieved to hear it.
Phuong sent me a drone pic of the neighborhood that someone had stitched together from multiple angles, showing the lineups at the checkpoints. No wonder the cops had been glad to get back to those metal detectors, the lines were stretched around the block.
I called her. “This is crazy,” I said. “All these people!”
“All these people!” she agreed. “It’s because everyone was sick and stuck and scared, sitting at home waiting to find out if California was going to secede from the USA and become a stationary Flotilla territory. They were all rightfully afraid that their kids would have to recite from Those Who Tread the Kine every day at school. There is absolutely nothing worse than the sense that things are going wrong and there’s nothing you can do to fix them.”
I had a file of vlogs my dad and mom had uploaded before they moved to Canada, just ten or twelve that the Internet Archive had scraped and preserved, and there was one where my dad said nearly exactly the same words, explaining why they were leaving everything behind. The world’s on fire, we just got through a plague, and floods just washed away half the town. No one here will fucking do anything about it. He’d teared up. The only other time I saw my dad cry was right at the end. I feel so helpless. It’s like we’re driving as fast as we can toward a cliff edge and no one will grab the wheel or hit the brakes.
“You are a brilliant woman,” I said to Phuong.
“Awww,” she said. “Thank you. What did I do to earn that?”
“Just made a connection for me, is all.” No wonder I’d been in such a fucked-up space. I was experiencing the helpless apocalypse anxiety syndrome that drove my parents out of the country, twenty years before. Naming it felt instantly better, and it also explained the crowds. I looked at the drone shot again. They were crazy. Totally crazy. Then Phuong found me in the crowd and grabbed me in a massive hug. What a wild feeling.
* * *
Every booth displayed a different aspect of the New Burbank. One group had done transit, another had done libraries, another had done schools. The big action was in the neighborhoods, displayed as big-screen flythroughs that you could view or modify, either from your own screen or by just dragging stuff around on the big screens. The kids did a lot of the latter, while their grown-ups were more interested in the former. I eavesdropped on a lot of conversations, hopping from booth to booth, and I started to see a pattern:
Rando: “Come on, you’ve gotta be kidding me. This is crazy, it’s not what the city is about.”
Guerrilla planner: “Did you see this park?” (or stadium, or rink, or subway station, or library, or business strip)
Rando: “Sure, sure, but come on. Be serious.”
Guerrilla planner: “Did you see the lake? The lake’s super cool, it’s part of the runoff system. All the road grades run toward it; if there’s a flood it’ll absorb all the water and then most of that will end up back in the water table.”
Rando: “Yeah, that’s cool, but come on. Be serious.”
Guerrilla planner: “Did you see the solar capacity? Total energy independence, and we’ve got this concrete factory over here, it’ll just sinter prefab any time there’s more power in the grid than we can use. Then any time someone goes on the job guarantee, one of the gigs’ll be building one of these buildings, using that prefab. It’s carbon-neutral mass-scale construction—”
Rando: “That is cool. How the hell does that work?”
And then they were off. The excitement was infectious, not least because of all the social we were getting, with tons of crossover between all the different twitters and fbs the work crossed over. A big Armenian twitter—the hub of Yerevan drought rebuild—went crazy over it and then half of Glendale got calls from their cousins and aunties and showed up at the checkpoints. The people who couldn’t get to Burbank, especially other Californians who’d been in a fury about the injunctions and the bombings and the seizures, started building out our map, overlaying huge swaths of LA and the San Fernando Valley with their own dreams.
Even better: the Magas fucking hated it. This was culture-war clickbait times a billion, and it seemed like half the world’s reactionaries, trolls, bots, and assholes were determined to vandalize our virtual space (we had good anti-vandal, plus a swift revert-squad that the little kids on Magnolia joined in droves, cackling as their tiny hands smacked the screens to undo the damage faster than the irrelevant hunt-and-peck typists of the fallen past could wreak it).
The Magas came down in person, first in a trickle, then in larger numbers, glaring at people and asking booth staffers if they had permits, though it wasn’t clear whether they meant permits to have a booth or permits to tear down and rebuild all of Southern California. We didn’t have either of course, but then again, they didn’t have a permit to fucking bomb City Hall.
There was something magical about having the Magas there. When they were running around in the hills with long guns or semtex or whatever, they were terrifying. In person, they were a remnant, a rump, a vestige. Not numerous, not scary. Sad. Frightened. So angry. They’d been doing death-cult shit for a generation and it showed. Looking at them was a reminder that the only reason half of them were alive today was the socialized medicine they all professed to hate. Before they arrived, it all felt like defiance. Once they got there, it felt like victory.
> The mayor is here
Ana Lucía’s message was decorated with raised fists and animated victory dances, more than I’d ever seen her use before. A second later, a picture of Mayor Phyllis Friess and three councilors in the crowd, looking awed and tired and excited and scared, all at once.
She dropped a pin for me, so I followed it to get to her and saw the mayor and her posse in person. They were starting to draw stares, getting stopped for handshakes and selfies and also getting their share of stink eye and middle fingers. I wondered what it must feel like to have your office blown up by terrorists, your coworkers killed or maimed, and then to have to come down to all of this, and I felt a little bad for them.
“We should go rescue them,” I said. “It’s not cool. We want them on our side, right?”
Ana Lucía gave me a pitying look. “They’re on their own side, Brooks. Haven’t you been paying attention?”
“Come on,” I said. “They’ve had a rough week—” I held up my hand to stop her from getting angry at me. “I mean, a seriously rough week. They were bombed. If all of this is going to get anywhere, it’s going to have to get through them.”
“Not if it runs over them.”
“Fine, maybe we’ll run over them. Why don’t we see if we can get them to lie down to make it easier?”
Which is how Ana Lucía and I ended up approaching the posse and introducing ourselves.
“We just wanted to make you feel welcome,” I said, hearing Ana Lucía’s quiet snort only because I was listening for it.
“That’s very kind of you,” Mayor Friess said. I’d only ever seen her at city council meetings, dressed in her skirt-suits and perfectly composed, no matter how long the night dragged on or how terrible the stand-up comics who zoombombed the public comment period were. In person, she was smaller than I’d have guessed, and maybe a little frailer, though that could have been the terror of the week’s events. She had worn athleisure for her stroll down Magnolia, or maybe she’d been called to it from a dog-walk or something, and in her warmup jacket and sweats, she could have been a swim mom at the side of the Verdugo pool, cheering on her kid and swigging from a coffee thermos.
The councilors with her were similarly attired, and seemed no more able to come to grips with what was going on around them than the mayor was. Everyone touched elbows and introduced themselves, the city officials sneaking peeks around them, acting like they knew they were on camera because they were totally, definitely on camera.
“Can we show you around?” Ana Lucía asked, waving a hand expansively down the street, taking in the booths, the crowds, the chatter.
“Uh,” the mayor said, clearly not wanting to be hitched to Ana Lucía, an obvious refu and also some kind of DSA radical involved in a takeover of the city’s main retail strip. But the mayor also didn’t want to be a dick, and Ana Lucía had a seriously winning smile on, so she finished, “Sure, that would be lovely.”
And it was, you know? I liked Mayor Friess, despite hating more than half the decisions she’d made since taking office. For all that she was smaller and frailer up close, she was also magnetic in that politician way that Ana Lucía also had, as well as Kiara and a few of the DSA organizers I’d met, especially the regional and state reps. You just liked them and you wanted them to like you. The mayor had that. And she could do that thing where six people were all in a circle around her, seeking her attention, and she could load-balance all of them, giving them nods and other signals when it was their turn, shutting down people who interrupted without making them feel like they’d been rude. This was politician stuff, and I could recognize it even if I didn’t know how to do it myself.
We got the mayor and her posse to a rest area—a parklet with little tables and loungers to catch the weak autumn sun, where people made space for the City Hall gang and us, unfolding more chairs and making space by shifting some of the potted palms off the parklet and into the street.
“So?” Ana Lucía said. “What do you think?”
“It’s certainly visionary,” the mayor said, and I couldn’t hide my smile. “Visionary”—what a great, noncommittal adjective. She was good. Phuong found me around then, pecked me on the cheek and squatted on her haunches beside me, turning down my offer of my chair. I took her hand and we all looked at the poor mayor.
Ana Lucía made a little mime out of having a great idea. “Folks, do you know what? There’re all these people here, learning about this stuff for the first time, taking it all in, and I know they’d really like to get your take on it. Can I do, like, a five-minute mini-interview with you? We’ll put it on all the booth screens and—”
The mayor shut her down with a polite, firm smile. “I don’t think so,” she said. “We only just got here ourselves and it wouldn’t be right to comment—”
Ana Lucía’s polite-interruption game was strong. “You don’t have to comment on the proposals—there’re way too many of those anyway and it’s all changing anyway. But Mayor Friess, we’ve all been scared and angry and didn’t know what to do with ourselves, and it all just seemed to be getting worse, day after day. These folks decided to do something positive with all that fear, and looking around, I think you’ll agree that it was something the community was hungry for.”
“Well, certainly, it’s good to see people directing their energy to positive—”
Ana Lucía interrupted. “This is perfect, just let me get my screen.”
The mayor looked around at all the cameras already pointed at her, did a quick gut-check about how it would look if she stood up and walked away now, what that viral clip would look like. Then she gave a shy, wry, game-recognize-game smile at Ana Lucía and put on her mayor face.
“Mayor Friess, could you say a few words about what you see here today?” Ana Lucía’s face and voice came out of every booth down Magnolia, the big screens clicking over to her in unison, the sound echoing a little as the crowd went quiet so we could hear the out-of-phase audio from down the block (the signal was moving at the speed of light minus network lag, the sound was traveling back a lot slower).
The people around us recognized themselves in the video, then turned their heads to find the camera, then spotted Ana Lucía, then spotted the mayor, and then Ana Lucía swung her screen around to the mayor and her posse.
The mayor mayor-faced the camera, gave the crowd a beat to settle down, then smiled. “You and your friends have done something really remarkable here. After the violence, fear, and tragedy of the past week, your, uh, project, has really helped with our healing.” A smattering of applause from the crowd.
“Thank you, Mayor Friess,” Ana Lucía said. “As you know, the internal refugees who came to Burbank for shelter have been stranded by terrorist violence and legal dirty tricks. We’ve come together here today not just to celebrate a vision for what Burbank might become in the future, but for what it should be now, if it’s going to survive the months and years ahead of us. The designs that Burbankers have imagineered here come from a global database of climate-hardened structures that can withstand extreme heat and floods. They’re structures that can see us through the coming century, and they’ll support the populations that move inland from the LA flood basin. Don’t you think it’s time that we stopped tinkering with planning guidelines and engaged in a coordinated effort to future-proof our city?”
I loved watching her work. The mayor’s face was perfectly composed for all of this, but the councilors’ poker faces needed work. They were clearly taken aback by the ambush, and affronted on the mayor’s behalf. Tony Yiannopoulos emerged from the crowd and stood next to me, and the mayor’s posse gave him surprised, none-too-friendly looks.