The immobilizer crew was businesslike and efficient. They showed up, logged into each machine, did some stuff to it using their city-issued fobs, and then double-checked it. They waved off our offers of coffee and split.
The first support crew showed up within half an hour, as the Blue Helmet elders sweated over each machine in pairs, one looking up online tutorials, the other following their instructions. There were about ten of them, and they drew out more of my neighbors, including Brad. They brought cold coconut water, sandwiches, mask filters, Tiger Balm, and hand-lettered signs: BUILD IT! HOUSING NOW! GND! UP AND THROUGH!
I took a vat-tuna sandwich into one of the rooms on the ground floor—I realized as I sat down on the floor that it was right where my old bedroom had been and felt like such a creature of habit—and stripped out of my mask and overalls and goggles and got ready to eat and drink, but then I gave in and leaned back against the wall and shut my eyes for just a minute and when I opened them again, hours had gone by and the air quality had gotten noticeably worse. My throat felt like sandpaper. I was still holding my water flask (and my sandwich) so I took a slug and then a bite and then masked up again. I found that I was a little short of breath and realized that the fog I was seeing wasn’t sleep in my eyes but drifting smoke. I got out my oxy can and gave myself a couple of deep shots of O2 until that feeling receded, then stood and stretched and went to find Phuong and my next work assignment.
Instead, I found a mob scene. Fairview Street had been transformed into an outdoor, smoky street fair, with what had to be hundreds of supporters who’d poured into Magnolia Park and found their way to our building site. They’d brought folding chairs, coolers, and more signs.
And tools. The new building was swarming with more volunteers who were hard at work on it. I looked up and up and up and though the smoke was thick, it seemed like they were actually putting on the roof. A stranger gave me another sandwich and a pack of ice-cold ginger beer that I gulped down, coughing at the fire. I put the sandwich in my toolbelt.
It was a crazy scene: the smoke, the people. There was a crash from up above me, a serious one, making the whole building shake. There was a part of me that knew that the building was supposed to shake, that the slabs were built to shimmy and give rather than shatter under seismic and wind loads, but there was a second where I had this conviction that the whole fucking thing was about to collapse and kill us all. How the hell had I and a bunch of friends built an apartment building in two days? Or was it three? I was so tired.
I couldn’t find Phuong anywhere so I got out my screen to call her but when I opened it, it was just a wall of notifications from main socials, DSA socials, Blue Helmet socials, and Maga socials.
I’d been named. Derrick had outed me as some kind of radical socialist redgreen who was engaged in an act of eco-terror, building a refugee slum without an environmental impact statement. He had a whole playbook for making me sound like the right-wing asshole, hammering the fact that it wasn’t a union jobsite.
“This is the kind of cult GND bullshit that leads to arson. They don’t care about the environment. They don’t care what species they disrupt when they build without a permit or an environmental impact statement. Starts with disrespecting your neighbors’ right to live in a city of laws, goes to disrespecting those laws, and then it’s whatever it takes to advance your radical agenda, whatever it takes to dismantle the country and make it into a coast-to-coast refugee camp where no one productive has anywhere to be and nothing to do.”
It got worse after that: the comments on Derrick’s post weren’t just angry, they were unhinged. More than one person called for me to be put to death, and of course, these guys had lots of guns and they had my address, so that was intensely worrying.
One thing that took me a minute to notice was how much crosstalk there was between the different socials. Everyone had their own house rules, of course, but more important than that was just how icky distant socials’ conversations were. No one from DSA wanted to go hang out in Maga land, and vice versa.
But both camps had been heavily screenshotting the other ones and pasting them into their feeds, which almost never happened, in part because mods hated it—it tended to kick off raids that turned into massive flame wars and sometimes even nuisance legal threats against users and mods. The twitters were mostly co-ops, and they bought media insurance, but the insurers weren’t going to keep writing them policies if they spent all their time in court.
That explained the crowd: there was all this Maga chatter about coming down and, you know, lining us up against our own freshly built wall and opening fire. Most of us were normies and never went into Maga socials, so this was pretty shocking (not for me, I’d heard enough of it from Gramps and his pals over the years), and so everyone who saw it went to bring back more and whip up people to come to our defense.
And my mentions on the Maga side were full of threats, overheated fantasies about a hive of terrorists, arsonists, illegals, and socialists whose masks had finally slipped, revealing their intention to literally rebuild cities out from under their homeowners, turning them into hives filled with freeloaders and losers and whiners.
What’s more, all this stuff had burst the regional socials and escaped all over California and even out of state, and there were people calling for new construction to start on every frozen refu housing project that had been mothballed by the wave of injunctions. And naturally, there were Magas promising to dynamite any building that got restarted, under the banner of “helping our overworked, overwhelmed city planning officers.”
That actually made me snort because how many times had I heard Gramps gripe about “red tape” and the “statists” who enforced it.
I had found a bit of unoccupied wall and sunk down on my haunches to paw and swipe at my screen, tuning out the world around me so that I could read faraway people writing about the stuff that was happening right where I was sitting.
The thing that snapped me out of it was getting tagged in a picture of myself, all bedhead and construction dust, crouched against the wall, still holding my pre-nap tuna sandwich in the same hand that held my screen. I had forgotten it was there and I’d also forgotten that I was starving. I wiped the tuna salad off the back of my screen and stuffed the screen into a pocket, then lifted my mask and tore into it. It tasted like tuna and smoke and construction dust. I was about to spit it out and then I remembered that someone was photographing me and decided that wouldn’t be a good look so I forced myself to chew and swallow. Then I remembered that I had another sandwich, given to me by a stranger, so I switched and got the taste out of my mouth.
My eyes started watering and then it got worse, so I found my goggles and put them on. They were filthy and the smoke was getting thicker. I felt my way back inside. I wasn’t the only one—everywhere I looked someone was testing network integrity or running water through a pipe-join or probing an electrical outlet, and shooting filthies at the growing army of would-be helpers asking what they could do.
I climbed the temporary stairs up to the second floor and then the third, and then the fourth, but retreated from its unglazed windows and choking smoke.
Back on the third floor, I found another corner to eat my sandwich—a wall in a small kid’s bedroom that I remembered personally dragging into place on a screen in Phuong’s living room. It was wild to be leaning against that wall!
“There you are!” Phuong’s mask hung under her chin and her goggles were up on her forehead. The skin between it was soot- and sweat-streaked and she looked fucking amazing. I collected a very long hug and a frustratingly short smooch. “Where have you been?”
“I fell asleep,” I said. “Right after we unlocked the equipment. Sat down for a sandwich and zonk. Then I woke up and all this”—an arm wave—“was going down.”
“You missed some pretty wild times,” she said. “Have you looked at the socials?”
“Ugh. Scary. You think they mean it?”
She looked puzzled. “What? Oh. The Magas. Who knows. There’re tons of cops on the way, from what I can tell, though whether they’ll defend us from yahoos with ARs or line us up to make the shot easier is anyone’s guess. No, I was talking about all the stuff happening in other towns.”
“The construction? I couldn’t tell if that was real—”
“Oh, it’s real, but the wild-ass part is the munis and unis.”
“I sorta know what those are—”
“Local currencies,” she said. “It was a big idea in the early GND days, when unemployment was up at thirty percent and the fed wouldn’t spring loose any more relief money. Towns and universities started minting their own currencies, managed by credit unions. The FDIC said it would yank their charters and the cities said they didn’t give a shit, they’d keep using them, charter or no, and then Uwayni got elected and it didn’t matter anymore, because she started the Jobs Guarantee.”
“Right,” I said. “Before my time.”
“Mine too, but it was a big deal for the OG Blue Helmets, those Canadians, who said that it was the threat of wildcat money that gave their prime minister the leverage she needed to get the Bank of Canada to give in. It’s been this kind of legendary weapon ever since, like a lost mystical doomsday sword that no one dared to use.”
“Until now.”
“Yes! Well, they’re not using it either, but they’re threatening to.”
“It sounds kinda blockchainy to me,” I said. “I mean, gross.”
“Well, it could be—I mean, the money can live anywhere, but they’re doing it old school, with the credit unions leading. Credit unions already know how to create money, they do it every time they issue a loan. They’re just threatening to do it without following the FDIC rules. Spend the money into existence to pay for GND projects, annihilate it by charging everyone in the system an annual fee to keep using it so they can control the money supply. And they say they’ve got their local governments on board, so—”
“So it’s a big deal!” Ana Lucía was also covered in ash and dust and sweat, and had a wild look in her eyes. “Taking money back from the plutes, holy shit, it’s all kicking off!”
“When did you get here?” I asked.
She shrugged. “Hours ago. I would have come yesterday but things are fucked up right now out there and my people needed help—not enough beds, too much smoke.”
I felt suddenly awful. “Shit,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
“Oh,” she said, “oh, no, I don’t mean it that way at all. Yeah, it was hard to find six more billets, but Brooks, are you kidding me? This is amazing.” She did a little shuffle-step. “I gotta say, when I first got here, I wasn’t sure what to make of you, of all this talk. I mean, you have so much to lose here, and all the things you stand to gain are so … hypothetical. But this isn’t talk. This is a fucking building. Eight apartments! Eight!”
I was still holding my sandwich. I snuck a look at it.
“Why aren’t you eating?” Ana Lucía said.
“Because we’re talking. I was eating, then—”
“Eat your sandwich, flaco,” Ana Lucía said.
“Administer sandwich, stat!” Phuong said.
I ate.
As I got to the last bite—both Phuong and Ana Lucía declined to try a bite of their own—I became aware that there was a weird sound on the jobsite, coming from downstairs but also outside the windows and also maybe the next room. Phuong and Ana Lucía noticed it around the same time I did. An older man and woman—maybe a married couple—had been working across the room from us, sealing the joins between the slabs, and now they were both looking at a screen.
“What’s going on?” Phuong called to them.
“It’s Strentzel,” the woman said. She said the name with reverence. Juliet Strentzel was one of the heroes of the GND, the first American to join the Canadians in Calgary, whose vlogs and news-hits had inspired a generation. She’d been Uwayni’s deputy secretary of the interior and had run circles around the Beltway lifer who was nominally her boss, creating a lot of drama and getting a lot of shit done.
“I thought she was done,” I said. It was famous. She’d gotten sick of being a celebrity, told every interviewer to fuck off and get a shovel, and disappeared into the mangroves of Florida to try to stabilize what remained of its landmass.
And yup, there she was, on my screen, once I followed the links ricocheting all over my socials and DMs. She looked so much older than my mental image of her, and had buzzed her hair. With her thin face, high cheekbones, intense stare, and fine-formed skull, she looked like a swamp apparition, standing in the mangroves, face sheened with sweat, her naked arms all ropy muscle beneath her bug-net suit, broad shoulders and prominent collarbones. She was leaning on a shovel, gesturing at a screen someone else must have been holding, since the frame followed her as she waved her arms, paced, moved restlessly around her swamp.
“Like I said, I don’t like that I have to do this, but I guess I have to do this. We started something, back in the thirties. It was always gonna be too little, too late. That’s what no one understood back then, because the human mind is a coward and it can’t confront the future. We knew that we couldn’t save most of the cities, most of the animals. We knew there would be mountains of dead, from disease and famine and fire and flood. We knew all that. The mission was never to avert that future, because it was too late for that.
“The mission was only ever to confront it. Do what needed to be done. Like a doctor figuring out which organs were too cancerous to save, doing what it takes to save the rest. I never went in for that bull about ‘the first generation not to fear the future.’ The future is a fearful place. It’s going to get a lot worse before it gets better, and forgetting your fear is how you get a sociopath like Bennett in the Oval Office who sits by and watches as dark-money ops try to slow us down, stop us from our emergency scramble to save whatever we can.
“I don’t do a lot of screen time down here. I’m pretty much done with the socials. You all can talk about what needs doing. I’m going to do it, until I can’t. Only got so many years left in me and I plan on spending them in action, not talk.
“But someone sent me a stream of what those kids are doing up in Burbank—” and then I figured out why everyone around me was watching Strentzel in her swamp and I jolted like I’d been pinched. This was about us. About me. This living legend was talking about me. “—and I was like, that, that is what this is about. We won this argument. We fought for half a century and we won this argument, and now it’s what, twenty years later and we’re ready to forget about it? To pretend that this is about a difference of opinion and not about whether someone’s idiotic fantasy about ‘market-based solutions’ is really about whether we’re going to doom billions of people to grisly deaths.
“So someone sent me this stream and asked me what I thought and then I had to go and dig through all the bullshit about why they couldn’t just build the refugee housing that the laws we passed demanded, and I learned about all the courthouse bullshit you all let some offshore plute wreckers get up to, and was all, ‘Yeah, I’ll tell you what I think.’
“So here goes. Build that building. Build as much emergency housing as it takes so that everyone gets a roof and a bed and somewhere halfway decent to come home to after a day’s hard work saving our species and our planet and all the species we share it with. When they tell you to stop, tell them to go to hell. When they arrest you, fight it. If the building next door gets shut down because the crew building it was all arrested, show up and finish the work. They can’t arrest us all.”
She sat down on the bulbous knuckle of a mangrove, let her shovel fall behind her. She looked very tired. “You guys, there’s a lot of work we have to do and time is running out. I toiled in the bullshit fields for a decade, and now I’m out here, doing what I can in the actual world. The minutes they’re stealing from you are minutes you could be spending doing the work.”
She looked out at her swamp.
“There is so much work.” She dropped her head. Without lifting it, she said, “Show them, Murph,” and the camera person (Murph, I guess) showed us the mangrove swamp, and I realized that it was a city. I was looking at the ruins of a three-story motel, only one end of it still intact, the rest sunk into the marshy ground.
“Welcome to Miami, people,” she said. “Eighty billion dollars’ worth of real estate, a couple million people’s homes. Memories. Achievements. People think we don’t love these places. I fuckin’ loved Miami. The food, the music, the people. Even the people. Love my Floridian friends.
“We lost Miami, Jakarta, every one of those cruise-ship towns in the Caribbean. Havana. Gone. Lives ruined. The evolved cities that human footfall and desire and rage and striving built, washed away and left to rot. That’s what’s coming for us all. We are out of time.”
She lifted her head, her cheeks streaked with tears. “This shit is why I left. I just couldn’t stand talking anymore. We’ve talked this thing to death. Right now, the only talking anyone needs to do is to ask ‘How can I help?’
“So you comrades out there in Burbank, you’re doing it. Don’t let anyone tell you different.”
She looked around at Miami. The day was drawing to a close there, and a shaft of red sunset caught her face, made it golden and highlighted every line and wrinkle. For an instant, she looked like a bronze, a statue commemorating a long-dead war hero, a legend.
“Ah shit,” she breathed. “It’s beautiful, sometimes, if you can forget all the other stuff, the blood that fertilized the soil, the obscene floating islands of wealth that will spill more blood still for no reason except that they don’t want to face the future. Do me a favor, all of you? Next sunset that comes your way, stop for a sec and really look at it.
“All right, that’s me done. I love you all, even the sociopaths. Don’t write, don’t DM, don’t call. You want to shout back to me, pick up a shovel.” She got heavily to her feet and pulled work gloves out of her back pocket and put them on, then bent down with a groan to get her shovel. She looked up at the camera. “Don’t be a dick, Murph. Turn that off, shit.” And the feed died.
“Well, that happened,” Phuong said, and laughed. Ana Lucía laughed too. I couldn’t laugh because I was crying too hard.
“Oh, babe,” Phuong said, slipping an arm around my shoulders, “what’s all the tears for?”
“She reminded me of my mom,” I said, and sobbed.
* * *
After I’d had a good cry, we went looking for chores that needed doing. I was asking “How can I help?” and the answer was “Get out of my way, I’m working here.” I took the hint. I went with Phuong back to her house to augment my too-short nap and smoky sandwich with a real lunch and a solid eight hours’ sleep.
Okay, it wasn’t all my idea. Phuong may have suggested it. And by suggested, I mean, she may have literally twisted my arm behind my back and marched me away from the jobsite.
We got between the sheets next to each other, smelling of soap and toothpaste. “Shit, we forgot to look at the sunset,” I said, as I started to drift off.
“Too much smoke today anyway,” Phuong said. “Tomorrow.”
It was tomorrow before I knew it, albeit four in the morning. I got up as quietly as I could but I still woke up Phuong, who smiled sleepily at me as I used my light from the screen to find a T-shirt and boxers to wear down to the kitchen.
“Four a.m., huh?”
“Sorry.”
“Don’t be. My sleep schedule is just as messed up as yours.”
We made big bowls of granola in the kitchen and crumbled dehydrated citrus fruit over it along with fresh apple slices, and Phuong made Greek coffee, which she only made on serious days (regular days were strictly sweet Vietnamese coffee), and we sipped it carefully so we didn’t get the grounds in our mouths, talking in whispers so we wouldn’t disturb her housemates.
Inevitably, I got up to pee, and inevitably, I brought a screen, and that’s when I found out what I’d slept through. I barely managed to flush, zip, and wash before rushing out to find Phuong.
“Did you see?” She was on her screen, too, of course. What else was she going to do while I was peeing?
“See what?”
I shoved my screen under her nose and danced from foot to foot, drinking too much coffee at once and getting grounds in my teeth.
“No way.”
* * *
Just as we’d been getting ready for bed the night before, a federal judge in Alaska had lifted all of the Flotilla’s anti-construction injunctions in the whole Ninth Circuit—Alaska, Arizona, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Washington, Oregon, and California. Within an hour, another judge—this one in Honolulu—had reinstated the injunctions, and her order contained a “sharp rebuke” for the Anchorage judge whose order she was overturning. I read the order and discovered that “sharp rebuke” was the phrase that legal reporters used when they meant “vicious personal attack.”
Well, that kicked off a shitstorm up and down the whole Ninth Circuit, as it experienced the long-feared “massive intracircuit split” that those same court watchers made sound like the big quake everyone in California quietly dreaded in the backs of our imaginations.
One thing led to another thing and the chief judge of the circuit summoned ten more judges to a federal courthouse in Pendleton, a small town deep in inland Oregon—which also happened to be the only federal courthouse in the circuit with breathable air. Small planes and helicopters had been scrambled, backup judges had been tapped, and right at this moment, grumpy judges were being brought breakfast at the Umatilla Indian casino that had reserved a whole tower just for their use.
Even grumpier—but far better paid—lawyers for the DSA, the Flotilla, environmental groups, law societies, environmental law societies, human rights groups, refugee rights groups, housing rights groups, real estate developer associations, and many other orgs were finalizing their amicus briefs for the hearing.
And the curtain would rise on the whole thing in a mere three hours.
* * *
We were just about the last ones to learn about the courtroom fight, and there was already a plan to gather at various places around Burbank for viewing parties: the DSA hall, Burroughs High’s gym, and the house we’d been building on Gramps’s lot. It was obvious where we’d be watching.
Only we almost didn’t make it. The smoke had gotten worse overnight, as bad as I’d ever seen it. The screens said we were getting it from multiple fire systems now, from the Angeles National Forest but also from Mendocino, from Oregon, from Washington State. We had to stop twice to take O2 hits, and I began to question the wisdom of leaving the house at all. I could have done the walk from Phuong’s to Gramps’s blindfolded, but the smoke screwed up my whole sense of place and orientation, till I couldn’t tell where I was or where I was going. I realized that some of my shortness of breath came from panic, not smoke, and worse, there was no way I was going to take deep breaths to calm down.
“Come on,” Phuong said. “Almost there. I got ya.”
The smoke cleared a little as we turned the corner and I was suddenly disoriented again. That couldn’t possibly be Gramps’s house, could it? I mean, not Gramps’s house, but the building we’d started building, what, three days ago? Four?
It had curtains. I mean, curtains. All the way up to the fourth floor. Even the construction waste had been tidied, a lot of it hauled away, and there was some rudimentary landscaping on the lawn, French drains and drip-irrigation pipes and a raised, slightly humped walk up to the door. The door! We’d added some scrap lumber onto Gramps’s door to fit it into the wider, accessible doorway, but someone had found a real door and put it into place. It was painted a bright, deep green with enough gloss that it shone through the smoke, a porch light over it illuminating a sphere of smoky air like a lightning bug in a foggy swamp.
Phuong was just as blown away as I was. We stood there at the foot of the walkway in the fence gate, gawping, until I started to cough.
“Let’s get in there,” she said, grabbing my arm and dragging me as she skipped and I coughed my way to the door.
* * *
It was obvious that crews had worked through the night: not just putting up curtains, but getting the HVAC working—its hum was loud in the entrance hall—and fitting switch plates and receptacle covers to all the electrics. There were two apartments on the ground floor, a thousand-square-foot, two-bedroom place and a seven-hundred-square-foot one-bedroom, and each had its own door (the one-bedroom had the door from my old bedroom, I saw, and smiled). There were voices coming from inside both, and we poked our heads into a few rooms, happening on work crews that were busy painting, assembling storage, and doing other finish work.
We said hi and made approving noises, then climbed the stairs—still temporary stringer stairs—up to the second story, which was a lot rougher than the ground floor, and then up to the third floor. Up on three, the rooms were much barer, and the work crews were thinner still—mostly, it was pairs of people unrolling big screens and setting up stools to use as chairs so we could watch the hearings. Phuong checked the job board on her screen and we picked up the task of ferrying food from the kitchens down on the first floor up to the viewing rooms: electrolytes and coffee, freeze-dried fruit and granola mixed with powdered oat milk that could be wetted with water from the faucets in the two apartments’ bathrooms and kitchens, which had been jury-rigged with buckets in place of basins.
Ana Lucía found us as we were making our fifth trip together and pitched in, and soon there were more people on the stairs, heading up to the third floor, and they pitched in too, so we were all able to settle in with coffee and cereal, like it was a pajama party where everyone wore construction overalls and USN95s.
The hearings were not as dramatic as I’d hoped. Courtroom dramas had apparently misled me about how these things went down. It was cool to see that Constance Ming, the DSA lawyer who’d briefed us on the injunctions a million years before, was on the call, though they didn’t get to argue. Instead, there was this old guy who seemed to know the judges all personally, who got on the call and presented the most bare-bones, straightforward version of our case I could have imagined.
“Plaintiffs argue that the lower court erred in its interpretation of the Internal Displaced Persons Act, which clearly contemplates that emergency refugee construction might require alternative environmental assessments and ex post compliance with other rules and regulations. Indeed, the statute exists solely to balance these important priorities against other, more immediate ones—to allow us to put out the fire before we fix the roof. As our briefs and support from our amici make clear, the injunctions should not have been issued because they are counter to the statute’s plain language, to precedent in every circuit, and to regulatory determinations made at the affected expert agencies. My clients ask for an immediate lifting of the injunctions and clemency for those who soldiered on with the firefighting the situation demanded in spite of an adverse ruling from the lower court.”
I liked that he used the fire metaphor, what with all the smoke outside the windows, but I was pretty shocked by how mellow his whole delivery was. Like, he was talking about life-or-death stuff here, a horrific act of sabotage against the planet itself, and he was just laying it out like he was reading the weather. Admittedly, the weather was pretty political, but this was way more political, as far as I was concerned.