USS Theodore Roosevelt – North Island NAS – August 29th, 1851
The floating behemoth that was the USS Theodore Roosevelt, crown jewel of the Californian Navy, slowly sailed out of San Diego Bay.
All around, people stood and watched as the enormous ship sailed out of the bay towards Hawaii, followed by the rest of the carrier task group. The Roosevelt had been transformed into a floating convention center and museum, with companies and individuals from all over California participating in a floating exhibition to show the rest of the world what California had to offer.
On the hangar deck, Siemens had placed a mockup of a high speed rail car that had previously been loaned out to the Sacramento Railroad Museum. Boeing had placed half of a 737-200 fuselage, along with a cockpit simulator for a 787 to show off the concept of air travel, SpaceX had brought one of the dragon capsules that had been used to dock with the ISS. And all along the hangar deck were booths from Californians showing off the wonders of the 21st century, from GPS to impromptu internet cafes to theaters showing various classic and contemporary movies.
In one of the VIP cabins, the 17 year old Prince Alexander Liholiho was contemplating all that he had seen on his trip to visit the new California. Universities that had been the envy of the 21st century that California had come from, trains that travelled underground, underwater and across oceans, ships that flew through the air and could fly between Oahu and California in 6 hours.
And most importantly, a counterweight to the European empires who had been breathing down their necks, or the American fruit and sugar companies that would eventually see the Kamehameha dynasty overthrown and annexed into the United States. His cousin Lili'uokalani would be the last queen of Hawaii.
By comparison, California's offer was almost too good to be true. They would use their beyond the state of the art military to defend the Hawaiian islands, and all they wanted was a harbor to build a port to service their ships.
A knock on the cabin door brought Alexander out of his contemplative mood. Opening the door he saw the Californian representative, Ami Bera, there.
"So, now that you've seen what the new California has, what do you think?" Said Bera.
"It was pretty… overwhelming." Said Alexander. "The thing that impressed me the most though? It was the surfing."
"Really?" Said Ami.
"Yeah." Explained Alexander. "Back home, all the missionaries hate surfing and tried to get people to stop doing it, even though we've been doing it long before they arrived. So it was odd to see Californians embracing it. Odd, but good."
"Anything else?" Prodded Bera.
"Actually yeah, your coastal act and your laws against invasive species." Explained Alexander. "It's long been a problem on the islands of foreigners bringing in animals that cause problems for everyone else." He said, thinking of the feral pigs and mosquitos on the islands.
Nagasaki Harbor – September 4th, 1851 – M/Y Kanrin Maru
The Kanrin Maru, along with its Navy escort was an unusual sign in Nagasaki. The ship was a bright white and wasn't made of any material that any of the Dutch or Japanese sailors could recognize. The unusual white flag with a red stripe and the image of a bear on the trio of ships was not one that most sailors would have immediately recognized, but any uptimer would have recognized the Californian flag the luxury yacht and her two Arleigh Burke class escorts were flying.
To the Japanese, these ships were a new type of
kurofune, and was a challenge to the isolationist policy of
Sakoku. The real mystery was the name "Kanrin Maru" (咸臨丸) painted onto the hull of the white ship in the center. The name itself roughly meant "ship for establishing relationships," implying it was a diplomat from somewhere.
As the ships sailed into Nagasaki harbor, several small vessels sailed out to greet it and to guide it into a berth at Dejima.
Aboard the Kanrin Maru, the former UCLA professor Katsuya Hirano watched the initial group with anticipation. Prior to The Event, he had been a professor of Japanese language and history at UCLA, with his expertise being the late Tokugawa and Early Meiji periods, the exact time frame that California now found itself in.
Needless to say, he had been approached very quickly by the Japanese Consulate in Los Angeles and asked to provide expert guidance on the Japan on 1850, a project that had eventually been rolled into the new ad-hoc Department of State.
The first part of it was the most nerve-wracking, finding students who were Chinese-Californian, not Christian, and fluent in English, Japanese and Chinese. Despite having a large population of Japanese-Californians to draw on, for the first contact, they had to initially pass as Chinese traders in Dejima in order to request an audience with the Tokugawa Shogunate, at which point they could explain their situation more openly.
It was a diplomatic tightrope and much of the plan had been written while the Kanrin Maru was en route to Japan, given the tight time constraints imposed by the Perry Expedition.
As the small boats guided them into a berth, everybody aboard the Kanrin Maru reviewed the lecture on what to expect from the Nagasaki Bugyô. The two Arleigh Burke destroyers merely made anchor in Nagasaki Bay, daring any other ships to come near to them.
With the diplomatic mega-yacht now anchored near Dejima, the first diplomatic contingent, a selection of Chinese-Californians dressed as Qing-era traders, filed onto one of the motorboats and took off for the artificial island.
Jianhong Chang, who prior to the event had been a postgrad TA at CSUN's Asian-American studies department, had volunteered to lead the first contact contingent. As the powerboat pulled into a small berth of Dejima and the group stepped off, they were quickly met by a group of officials on behalf of the Nagasaki Bugyô.
"Halt!" Came the order from one of the officials at the docks. "Manifests please." Came the order form the dock official.
Jianhong pulled out the printed crew and cargo manifests and handed them to the dock officials.
Isamu Ueda, that day's representative of the Nagasaki merchant community, read over the manifests and only had further questions about the products being brought to Japan by these odd traders.
Placing a
Fumi-e, a wooden carving of Jesus and the Virgin Mary, onto the ground, he waved his hand towards the crew and asked them to step on it.
Jianhong was the first and stepped onto the image without hesitation, he was an atheist and had no real love of the church he had grown up in. The interviews for this mission had been designed to screen out anybody who would have been uncomfortable doing this, given Tokugawa Japan's views towards Christianity at this point in time. Slowly but surely, everybody else from the shore party stepped on the image without issue.
"Hello sirs." Jianhong began in Chinese. "We are here on behalf of the Republic of California to open up trade between our two peoples."
The Chinese interpreter repeated this statement to the port officials. As the port officials reviewed the documents provided, occasionally asking for clarification, they compared what the Californian contingent was saying about themselves with the scuttlebutt they had heard from the Dutch and Chinese traders over the past few months.
"So you are the people from the future?" Asked the interpreter.
Trying to keep the surprise that the news of The Event had already reached Nagasaki off of his face, Jianhong simply nodded and said "Yes, from the year 2018."
———
Nearby at a different Berth, Erwin Van Achteren was even more intrigued by the strangers from the future. When the news broke from America about the 'state from the future,' people in Europe had rushed to imagine what kind of life these Californians had lived, and any information about the Californians had been in high demand, and now here they were sailing into Nagasaki and providing the information for the fûsetsugaki for him.
As the crew and port officials continued to talk, Erwin watched as the tension from the Californian crew seemed to melt away and the crew became more relaxed.
As half of the crew seemed to split up and followed some of the port officials into Nagasaki's Chinatown, the rest of the officials boarded that small boat and it quickly set off for that big white ship.
———
As the small boat sped towards that white ship these Californians had arrived in, Takumi Tachibana looked over the cargo manifest once more, mostly books, some novelty items that they hadn't heard of, and some rice seeds called "IR64" that promised to grow astronomical amounts of rice in a small amount of land.
Of course, he doubted that everything on board that ship was on this manifest. Case in point, they had to have managed to fit a printing press on board that ship. The documents for this vessel had calligraphy too perfect and too regular to have been done by hand by somebody on a ship that would have been pitching and rolling at sea.
As the small boat reached the Kanrin Maru, Takumi couldn't help but wonder what kind of treaty these Californians would demand. Considering the information he heard about China through the fûsetsugakis was disheartening, and he could only imagine what kind of unequal treaty California would demand here.
California Governor's Office of Emergency Services, Sacramento – September 3rd, 1851
Three countdown clocks had adorned the wall of the OES crisis response center since The Event: Fort Tejon, Carrington Event, and ARkStorm. It was a reminder of the three major disasters due to strike the Golden State in a few years, and a remind of the deadlines they had to minimize the damage and loss of life.
With 6 years remaining until the Fort Tejon earthquake, this was the most pressing threat and was the literal "Big One" that OES and FEMA had been dreading to strike in California. A two hundred mile long rupture of the San Andreas fault starting at Parkfield and travelling south towards the Cajon Pass. With so many pieces of vital infrastructure crossing the fault zone, the pending Fort Tejon Earthquake would have drastic effects on the Californian economy. And with Los Angeles being so close to the fault zone, it was likely to have severe effects on that city as well.
But that didn't even get into how the Fort Tejon earthquake would physically differ from the more recent Loma Prieta and Northridge quakes. Fort Tejon was expected to be a high magnitude quake with the population a long distance from the epicenter, whereas Northridge and Loma Prieta were lower magnitude quakes with nearby epicenters. What this meant in practice was that the Northridge earthquake would be a brief period of very high frequency shaking, whereas Fort Tejon would be a more drawn out earthquake with lower frequency earthquake waves.
To a Californian ducking, covering and holding under a table, it didn't seem like a huge difference, but for structural engineers, the difference had major impacts on the types of structures that would be safest in a quake. A low magnitude short distance quake would affect small single story structures more than tall skyscrapers, but with the high magnitude long distance quakes, the long period waves caused by the distance would cause single story houses to move with the quake but would resonate with taller skyscrapers and cause far more damage to the taller buildings.
Northridge and Loma Prieta were the first type, and Fort Tejon was likely to be the second type, which meant that all of the brand new skyscrapers that had been built in Los Angeles and San Francisco would be in the most danger.
Thus, a preliminary disaster preparation plan was created for the Fort Tejon Quake:
- Mandatory seismic retrofits of all buildings in California.
- Demolition of seismically unsound and unsalvageable structures with replacement construction to not begin until 1858.
- The Tehachapi mountain tunnel for the High Speed rail could not start construction until after the quake.
- All dams near the quake area would have their levels lowered or drained prior to the expected beginning of the quake and would not be raised again until it is inspected after the quake.
Even if California's infrastructure managed to survive Fort Tejon quake, the Carrington Event could still do California in. The Carrington Event was the worst solar storm to hit the Earth man had observed. Estimates of its strength ranged from an X10 to an X45. It was most fortunate that the storm had hit Earth in 1859 rather then in 2018. A study done by Lloyd's of London and the United States' Atmospheric and Environmental Research (AER) in 2013 concluded that had if it had hit a much more technologically dependant Earth like in the one in the 21st century, it would cause $2 trillion in damage in the United States alone and parts of the United States could be left without electricity for up to ten years.
When a solar storm hit, it would induce currents on the long distance transmission lines, sending them into transformers not designed to handle that level of sudden voltage increase, causing permanent damage to them.
Satellites though, were completely unprotected from a solar event.
The Carrington Event was one that had the potential to do untold amounts of economic damage to California, and so the OEM was already piecing together a plan to mitigate the damage:
- Construct a Manufacturing facility with the capacity to build new utility scale transformers. This was already being done in order to handle the massive rollout of new solar and wind generation capacity.
- Push for the adoption of household solar wherever possible to decentralize the grid as much as possible.
- Launch a new solar observation satellite to replace SOHO and STEREO in order to monitor the Sun and offer space weather warnings.
- Implement disaster anticipation plan to shut down long distance transmission lines when the Carrington Event happens in order to minimize damage.
The ARkStorm scenario, however, was one that the OEM was very familiar with, but it was also the most likely to be butterflied away by the changes brought about by California's arrival.
To put it bluntly, the ARkStorm scenario is a winter storm season that brings a monstrous amount of precipitation into California via an atmospheric river. A scenario like that had originally been thought to happen once every thousand years, though later estimates would see it be much more frequent. Up until The Event, this had already been a theoretical occurrence that would eventually happen at a future date.
Now though, now they had a historical reference for an actual ARkStorm, one that was looming in front of them. From December of 1861 to January of 1862 of Lost History, it rained in Sacramento for 45 days straight. Combined with the heavy precipitation had been unseasonable warmth causing the Sierra Nevada snowpack to melt early,and as a result Sacramento had been under 30 feet of water and the Central Valley has turned into an inland sea.
While the thousands of dams and diversions would be likely to redirect the floodwaters, it was still likely that if that flooding scenario still happened, the dams would be under considerable strain to store the floodwaters. And if any of these dams have significant structural damage to them from the Fort Tejon quake, the floodwaters could compromise them and innundate the communities downstream of them.
Oddly, making Californian infrastructure survive these coming disasters was the dilemma, and not the planned expansions. Out on the new Interstate projects: 5, 10, and 80, plans were already underway that the new infrastructure would survive these calamities should they occur again. Many of the new transformers and technologies were being tested at the New Reno substation, and creating large scale incentives for solar out on the new-old frontier. It was practical and cost-effective, well more so then rebuilding a national power grid at the very least. Every politician in Sacramento or San Francisco knew there was zero chance the downtime Federal government would contribute any meaningful funds to such endeavors.
M/Y Kanrin Maru - Nagasaki Harbor
Takumi Tachibana looked around the richly decorated cabin. This white ship seemed utterly beyond any other ship that had come into Nagasaki before, from the bright white smooth material it seemed to be made out of—fiberglass, they called it—to the moving images on the bulkheads, and the fact that it could clearly propel itself through the water without the need for sails or the coal fired engines that other western ships had used.
But what caught Takumi's eye was one of the pieces of art hung on the wall, an inkwash drawing of a very long waterfall. Looking closer at the picture, he saw the plaque next to it that said it was called "Yōsemiti Waterfall" by somebody named "Obata Chiura." Whoever these Californians were, they obviously understood a great deal about them, and must have had a good number of Japanese people living there, in spite of the Sakoku prohibitions.
It was obvious these people were from the future, considering that this ship was far beyond what most scholars of Dutch Studies thought possible and far beyond any Dutch, Korean or Chinese ships.
But did that mean that their intentions were good? It wasn't that long ago that China was forced to sign a humiliating treaty with Britain because British merchants were pushing Opium on them. Would these Californians act the same way? Only time would be able to tell.
In the meantime, the Nagasaki bugyô would dutifully carry the message about these white ships from California to the Shogunate in Edo.
Virgin California Flight 7 – Camp Springs Airfield
Jordan Cress and Erin McCoy were both on their trip back from DC. After having to be at congress for a debate about lawnmowers of all things, they were ready to go back to San Jose for a well deserved break.
As they went through the terminal, ready to board the plane, multiple gunshots started being heard. The young couple scrambled onto the plane as the guards and attackers got into a shootout.
"Get on the plane! We are not leaving anyone behind!" Jordan shouted as he pulled out a handgun, providing cover fire for the fleeing passengers boarding the plane. He managed to shoot one of the gunmen in the face.
The attack had caused quite a bit of initial panic in the terminal as the shootout began, but the guards quickly gained the upper hand, the muskets being no match for their automatic weapons. The attackers were quickly mowed down before reaching the gate.
Out of 30 gunmen, 25 were killed. The rest were apprehended and arrested by the local police. The gunmen were later revealed to be a group of slave catchers and slave owners attacking the airfield in retaliation for the sheer amount of slaves escaping via the airfields. Luckily, not a single passenger was killed, but at least 3 guards were injured in the confrontation.
The ensuing legal and political debacle after the attack helped strain the already tense relations between California and the South.
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Thanks to Rise Comics for writing that last part and to Sumeragi for help with the Kanrin Maru scenes.
