Chapter 36
Instant Sunrise
Queen Shit of Liesville
- Location
- Los Angeles
- Pronouns
- her/she
Capitol Building, Sacramento, CA — September 9th, 1851.
Transcript of Governor Newsom's speech to the joint assembly of the State Senate and Assembly.
NEWSOM: My Fellow Californians, I stand before you today, a year after the events that saw our great state thrown back into the past. In many respects, we have made great strides towards picking ourselves back up after an absolutely unprecedented supernatural disaster. But we survived, and more than that we thrived. This past year has been a crucible for all Californians, because it revealed the true strength inside of all of us.
When things were at their worst, we didn't turn our backs on our neighbors and fend for ourselves, we came together as Californians and helped each other out. That is what Californians do, we look out for each other, we care about each other, and we help each other.
California has always been America's coming attraction. Millions of destinies connected by one dream: to be whoever you want to be. A state where we don't criminalize diversity, we celebrate diversity.
New Reno, Utah Territory
"Alright watch your heads guys." Said the foreman of the New 80 construction project. The combined highway and railroad project had been one of many reconstruction projects designed to link California with the rest of the western United States along with the New 5 in Oregon, New 15, and New 8. The hard part, the crossing of the Sierra Nevadas had already been done before The Event, so the most difficult and dangerous part of crossing the continent didn't need to be done.
Though that didn't stop the California High Speed Rail Authority from drafting plans for a fully electrified double track crossing at some point in the future. Between the rush of downtime investors who were willing to buy in on the idea of a transcontinental railroad built using the technology of the "future," and the money raised from the sales of mineral rights to the comstock lode to both uptimers and downtimers, the California High Speed Rail Authority was raking in an unexpected windfall of cash, enough to finish funding the initial operating segment of the LA-SF line.
Fields Landing, CA
The residents of the northern coastal town of Fields Landing watched as yet another oversized truck carrying parts of a large windmill rolled through their town to the port for final assembly and installation offshore.
Maybe 9 months after The Event, they had started bringing the truck through, almost like clockwork, they would come through with some part of a huge windmill. At the CEQA meeting over the project, they pointed out that these windmills would be miles away from shore and barely visible, and that they would be able to provide very constant amounts of electricity from offshore. That had forestalled most of the complaints, given how unreliable the power grid had been since The Event.
So now Fields Landing was the future home to one of six new offshore wind farms, along with Crescent City, Bodega Bay, Morro Bay, Point Conception and Santa Rosa Island. When completed, the offshore wind project would have just under 15 GW of generation capacity, or 40% of California's existing Generation Capacity.
With the addition of the wind farms and the massive of buildout of solar power in the deserts, California would soon have enough electricity to make the 5 o'clock brownouts a thing of the past.
And it wasn't like California didn't have the fossil fuel plants to power the grid, after the Enron-induced energy crisis, the state's utility companies had built massive amounts of Natural Gas power plants, but prior to the event, most of them were being run below a third of their capacity. The problem had been getting fuel to them, as California imported most of its Natural Gas from the gas fields in the mountain west and Midwest.
But now though, with The Event having happened, and cut off from access to most of their natural gas, California had to rely on the one industry that was very well established in the state.
Renewable Energy.
The UCs had banded together to form a crash program to design a process to make cheap and quick Solar Cells out of Perovskite minerals, an idea that had been theoretically possible, but was now being rushed into production to solve the problem. The wind turbine manufacturers had kit that was destined for wind power projects in the Midwest and Mountain West, and was quietly reappropriated for California wind energy projects.
Soon, it was hoped, that California would once again have a reliable power grid, and one that would be made out of almost entirely renewable energy.
Department of Motor Vehicles, San Francisco
San Francisco had been overwhelmed by The Event, already a place in incredible demand for housing back in 2018, being sent back to 1850 had meant that San Francisco had become the port of call for downtimers entering California. So while the larger city of Los Angeles may still have had a bigger population, it wasn't as overwhelmed with the arrival of downtimers as the Bay Area had been.
Chinatown in particular had been inundated by the arrival of downtime Chinese immigrants fleeing the Qing Regime and a civil war, leaving the uptime Office of Refugee Resettlement to handle the influx, and behind them was the DMV having to create ID cards for all these new arrivals, so they could access government services.
Ironically, even with the inflow of migration being the literal California Gold Rush, with even more people arriving because of the reporting about the "State from the future," the number of people arriving in California was still an order of magnitude below what it had been before The Event, owing to the lower total population and the slower speed of information in the 19th century.
For Zhi Chang, the change between Guangzhou and San Francisco had been maddeningly familiar, from the endless bureaucracy of the Qing Dynasty to the bureaucracy of California, it was the universal constant.
"Now serving B 014 at window number 18." Droned the automated voice. Chang sat in the waiting room, bored, her grasp on English wasn't the best, but she had picked up enough on the boat over from China to get around. Luckily, the state had been fairly accommodating in terms of providing the paperwork he needed in Chinese.
Pulling out the slip of paper with the Pinyin romanization of her name, she began filling out the application for her ID card.
Far from being hostile to the newcomer, like she had expected, the "Uptime" Californians, many of them Chinese like herself, had welcomed her warmly, and she had found room in a boarding house called an "Air BNB" in San Francisco's Chinatown.
"Now serving H 057 at window number 5." Came the automated voice. Zhi grabbed her paperwork and walked over to the window.
"Nihao." Said the DMV worker at the counter. And just like that, Zhi had a feeling that this strange new land of California wouldn't be so bad after all.
USS Roosevelt, Pacific Ocean
The weeks before the Roosevelt launched had been a crazy time for Karma Tidal. First, she went to Nevada and Phoenix to secure a lot of land deals, and then went to New York and Salt Lake City to secure contracts for her design firm. Of course, she later came to regret going to Salt Lake City, as the Mormon church proved to be very persistent.
Karma's phone rumbled for the 100th time that day.
"Yeesh, these guys are more obnoxious than those guys in Russia before the event." said Maria
"Yep, they sure are. I've been trying to avoid these guys for months, and they won't leave me alone." Karma replied
After that discussion, Karma made her way to her quarters aboard the ship. She then pulled out her laptop and went onto discord. Discord was down at that time.
"The hell? Why is it down?" After a minute, it came back up.
"Finally, it's back."
At that very moment, Karma's phone rang again.
"Of course that happens."
Camp Springs Secure Area (AKA "Green Zone") - Camp Springs, Maryland
Thaddeus Wilcox watched as the truck raised up yet another one of those concrete walls. The Californians here had called it a "T-barrier," on account of it looking like an inverted capital T in profile. To him, all it looked like was a big solid wall being erected around the Californian enclave.
All around the area were signs proclaiming the new security measures around the area. With the walls being put up to funnel everybody into a handful of checkpoints to visit the city, the thousands of Marylanders who had come to visit it had to deal with bag searches, metal detectors, and were barred from bringing firearms into the newly walled city.
"It's like the Green Zone all over again." Grumbled the short man next to him.
"I beg your pardon?" Thaddeus asked.
"Downtimer?" He asked.
Thaddeus could only nod at that.
"Okay, so a few years ago the US got it into their heads to go to war in Iraq to steal their oil" The Californian next to him began to explain.
"Iraq?" Thaddeus asked, unfamiliar with the name.
The uptime Californian pulled out a small rectangular device and looked at it for a second. "Okay so like, you know Ottoman Empire?" He asked.
"Of course." He replied.
"So the easternmost part of that area, where they meet up with Persia. That area?" The Californian explained.
"Vaguely." Said Thaddeus. "That's just a bunch of desert though isn't it?"
"Pretty much, but there's also a bunch of oil there." The Californian explained. "And our president at the time came up with a bunch of excuses to steal the oil and occupy the land."
"Really?" Thaddeus asked.
"Yep." "So he came up with this whole thing about how Iraq was building these really destructive weapons and how they were really dangerous. So we invaded em, pretty much rolled over any resistance without a fight."
"So what was the problem them." He asked.
"The real problem wasn't the invasion itself, it was the occupation." He explained. "Every time we left the FOB we never knew who was part of the enemy and who wasn't. We split the city into a Green Zone and a Red Zone. The Green Zone was all walled off and on the inside it was just like back home, only you were thousands of miles away in a goddamn desert. The Red Zone was everywhere else, and you had to start wearing flak jackets and ride in convoys every time you left the Green Zone." The uptime Californian pulled a carton of cigarettes out of his jacket and pulled a cigarette out.
"Smoke?" He asked.
Thaddeus shook his head, "Nah. Hear those things'll kill ya. Thought all you uptimers could read?" he said pointing at the Surgeon General warning label. The uptimer chortled.
"So you think it's happening here now. Green Zone Camp Springs?" Thaddeus asked.
"Fuck man." He replied blowing a smoke ring. "It's lookin' like it. It's that or Camp Springs is the new West Berlin." as he looked out past the chain link fence with barbed wire on top and jersey barriers around the perimeter.
For Thaddeus, that last comment only left him with further questions.
History in Real Time - The Eris Project - September 9, 1950
The early days after the Event were a very hectic time in California's history. In that time, so many things had changed in an instant. Many chatrooms were created to connect together people of every walk of life who had one thing in common: the Event had changed their lives.
Many logs have been archived by sites like Discord and Whatsapp, but none are more important and more well recorded than this discord server, created sometime before the Event, documenting the events leading up to it as well as the reactions to it in real time. Many influential figures of the past 80 were once a part of this chatroom, from politicians, to artists, and even businessmen to name a few. Their words, thoughts, emotions, and actions were all recorded here as they happened. Without further ado, here are the complete archives of Calexit Über Alles, from its inception till the death of omega13a in October 19, 1948.
Discord - Free voice and text chat for gamers
Boeing Headquarters, Long Beach
After The Event, before commercial airlines were allowed to start flights out of California, what was left of Boeing had the task of coming with how to adapt the current jet aircraft (Airbus, Bombardier, Embraer, Mcdonnell-Douglas, and Boeing) to be able to operate on primitive dirt and gravel runways.
Now that was done, it was now time to design new aircraft more suitable for use in the 1850s, aircraft that can fly on a large variety of routes while bypassing ETOPS certification. It would have been simpler if they could come up with just one design that would fit all needs, but that proved to be impossible. The most suitable designs for flights outside of California was too large for use inside of California and what would be ideal for use inside of California had too few engines to be used safely outside of California. In the end, they ended up with two aircraft designs.
One was for a wide-bodied tri-jet that some described as looking like the result of a one night stand between a DC-10 and a 787. That design was being called the 797 as the design for a 'middle of the market' aircraft had been scrapped.
The other design was similar to the old 727 with a T-tail and three tail mounted engines, one of which was fed with an S-duct inlet. There were differences though that prevented it from being considered part of the 727 family. The windows of the cockpit were flush with the nose cone like the more recent aircraft designed in lost history prior to The Event. Its engines would also incorporate the latest advances in noise reduction. After much debate, it was decided to refer to this design as the 7107 (seven-ten-seven).
Gustavo's Bar and Inn - El Paso
Gustavo's Bar and Inn in El Paso had become the go to hangout in El Paso, all thanks to having one of the first arcade machines outside of California. After the Californian technician installed the solar panel(or so he called it), the machine had trouble making money, and then that technician offered to demonstrate it for the patrons.
Soon after that, everyone was lining up to try the machine, and Gustavo Marrenda, the owner of the bar, was getting very rich off of the profits.
As Marrenda looked at the line in front of the cabinet, he saw a new way to make a profit and expand the offerings available. He had heard from the technician about arcades, places where they have many cabinets like the one in the bar.
At that moment, he decided the course he wanted to take. Since the technician installed a satellite dish on the roof along with the solar panel and battery pack, he could call anyone in California. Marrenda took the brick of a phone he was given and made a few calls. He was going to go on a business trip.
Six months later, Gustavo's Bar and Inn was renovated and renamed as Gustavo's Bar and Gaming, and became the centerpiece of a new industry in the downtime world.
California Flight Services, Santa Monica
A Bombardier CRJ was on final approach to Santa Monica Airport. On board the plane were 40 downtimers, comprised mainly of people who came from Britain, Mexico, America, and Hawaii, with some from other countries. But they were all here for one purpose: to train as pilots.
Ever since a C-17 from California flew the uptime senators to Camp Springs, and regular air service started back up, the world had been enamored with flight. People and goods could reach places further and faster than ever before. And other nations wanted to create airlines of their own.
California was very(properly) worried that downtime airlines would have very high accident rates from cheaping out on pilot training and plane maintenance. They cited accidents like Nigeria Airways Flight 2120, Alaska Airlines Flight 261, China Airways Flight 611, and Emery Worldwide Flight 17 to back this up.
After a lot of debate, California, as well as the three Californian airlines, agreed to lease planes and provide management to downtime airlines. In return for that, all aircraftpurchases/leasing for the first decade will have to be approved by the Californian government, as well as all pilot and mechanic training being done in California. To facilitate this, a new agency, called California Aircraft Leasing Program (CALP), was created. CALP coordinated with several governments and entrepreneurs to send personnel over to train in California, with the training being paid for by both CALP and the downtime governments/entrepreneurs.
And that's why Michael Kamaka was here. He had volunteered to go to California as a part of the Hawaiian Government's plan to create a national airline called Ka Lani Hawaii. As there were no airstrips in Hawaii, Kamaka and several others were sent via ship to Los Angeles. When the ship arrived at port, the large group of 120 downtimers from various nations sent by their countries were shuttled to the airport via charter buses. There, the group were split based on training. The people training to be mechanics boarded a plane for Long Beach, while the pilots boarded another plane to Santa Monica. As the plane parked at the airfield, the door opened up into a set of stairs reaching the tarmac. A group of people, presumably the instructors, walked towards the arriving passengers...
Hualapai Indian Lands - New Mexico Territory
The improvised meeting room–a repurposed portable building–was packed to the brim with people for this CEQA public outreach meeting about the New Hoover Dam Project. As the Hualapai filtered into the room, they walked past the wall showing 3D renderings of the planned dam and topographic maps of the new reservoir, lost history photos of the dam, and a plaster model of the new dam.
While the emergency acts passed after The Event created an exemption category for projects that had a "significant similarity" to projects that existed outside of California before The Event, that didn't fully exempt them from CEQA, which had led to this meeting.
For Carla Avendano, project lead for the New Hoover Dam, these public outreach meetings could make or break the project. Her purpose here was to pitch the dam and the lake it would create to the Hualapai people so that they could understand the benefits for them.
In the end, it had been the information she had been able to gather from the uptime Hualapai tribe's website, the Native American studies departments of several of the UC's and CSU's, as well as one of the few remaining speakers of their language who happened to have been vacationing at Disneyland when the Event had happened who had helped them come up with a plan.
The New Hoover Dam was vastly more complex than the original dam that had been built in 1936, design modifications had to be made to modernize it and offset the known environmental impacts caused by the historical construction of the dam. A silt tunnel would bypass the dam and allow the silt from the upstream Colorado River to continue flowing downstream, heaters would heat the water coming out of the hydroelectric turbines to match the temperature of the water to what it was before it entered Lake Mead, and fish bypass channels would allow the Colorado River's native fish species like the humpback chub, razorback sucker, Colorado pikeminnow, bluehead sucker, flannelmouth sucker, speckled dace, roundtail chub, and bonytail to pass by the lake and dam without issue.
As Carla continued through her PowerPoint about the project, she could see the metaphorical light bulbs go on in people's heads as she and her interpreter explained the project. Deciding that honesty was the best way to go, she explained that what California got out of it was the electricity from the turbines, and a more predictable downstream flow for Parker Dam and Lake Havasu. The water from Lake Mead was too distant for them to make use of, so it was being offered to the Hualapai, Havasupai, Mohave, Paiute, and Chemehuevi with the strong suggestion that each nation come together to form a Joint Powers Agency to determine the water and irrigation rights to the new Lake Mead.
Transcript of Governor Newsom's speech to the joint assembly of the State Senate and Assembly.
NEWSOM: My Fellow Californians, I stand before you today, a year after the events that saw our great state thrown back into the past. In many respects, we have made great strides towards picking ourselves back up after an absolutely unprecedented supernatural disaster. But we survived, and more than that we thrived. This past year has been a crucible for all Californians, because it revealed the true strength inside of all of us.
When things were at their worst, we didn't turn our backs on our neighbors and fend for ourselves, we came together as Californians and helped each other out. That is what Californians do, we look out for each other, we care about each other, and we help each other.
California has always been America's coming attraction. Millions of destinies connected by one dream: to be whoever you want to be. A state where we don't criminalize diversity, we celebrate diversity.
New Reno, Utah Territory
"Alright watch your heads guys." Said the foreman of the New 80 construction project. The combined highway and railroad project had been one of many reconstruction projects designed to link California with the rest of the western United States along with the New 5 in Oregon, New 15, and New 8. The hard part, the crossing of the Sierra Nevadas had already been done before The Event, so the most difficult and dangerous part of crossing the continent didn't need to be done.
Though that didn't stop the California High Speed Rail Authority from drafting plans for a fully electrified double track crossing at some point in the future. Between the rush of downtime investors who were willing to buy in on the idea of a transcontinental railroad built using the technology of the "future," and the money raised from the sales of mineral rights to the comstock lode to both uptimers and downtimers, the California High Speed Rail Authority was raking in an unexpected windfall of cash, enough to finish funding the initial operating segment of the LA-SF line.
Fields Landing, CA
The residents of the northern coastal town of Fields Landing watched as yet another oversized truck carrying parts of a large windmill rolled through their town to the port for final assembly and installation offshore.
Maybe 9 months after The Event, they had started bringing the truck through, almost like clockwork, they would come through with some part of a huge windmill. At the CEQA meeting over the project, they pointed out that these windmills would be miles away from shore and barely visible, and that they would be able to provide very constant amounts of electricity from offshore. That had forestalled most of the complaints, given how unreliable the power grid had been since The Event.
So now Fields Landing was the future home to one of six new offshore wind farms, along with Crescent City, Bodega Bay, Morro Bay, Point Conception and Santa Rosa Island. When completed, the offshore wind project would have just under 15 GW of generation capacity, or 40% of California's existing Generation Capacity.
With the addition of the wind farms and the massive of buildout of solar power in the deserts, California would soon have enough electricity to make the 5 o'clock brownouts a thing of the past.
And it wasn't like California didn't have the fossil fuel plants to power the grid, after the Enron-induced energy crisis, the state's utility companies had built massive amounts of Natural Gas power plants, but prior to the event, most of them were being run below a third of their capacity. The problem had been getting fuel to them, as California imported most of its Natural Gas from the gas fields in the mountain west and Midwest.
But now though, with The Event having happened, and cut off from access to most of their natural gas, California had to rely on the one industry that was very well established in the state.
Renewable Energy.
The UCs had banded together to form a crash program to design a process to make cheap and quick Solar Cells out of Perovskite minerals, an idea that had been theoretically possible, but was now being rushed into production to solve the problem. The wind turbine manufacturers had kit that was destined for wind power projects in the Midwest and Mountain West, and was quietly reappropriated for California wind energy projects.
Soon, it was hoped, that California would once again have a reliable power grid, and one that would be made out of almost entirely renewable energy.
Department of Motor Vehicles, San Francisco
San Francisco had been overwhelmed by The Event, already a place in incredible demand for housing back in 2018, being sent back to 1850 had meant that San Francisco had become the port of call for downtimers entering California. So while the larger city of Los Angeles may still have had a bigger population, it wasn't as overwhelmed with the arrival of downtimers as the Bay Area had been.
Chinatown in particular had been inundated by the arrival of downtime Chinese immigrants fleeing the Qing Regime and a civil war, leaving the uptime Office of Refugee Resettlement to handle the influx, and behind them was the DMV having to create ID cards for all these new arrivals, so they could access government services.
Ironically, even with the inflow of migration being the literal California Gold Rush, with even more people arriving because of the reporting about the "State from the future," the number of people arriving in California was still an order of magnitude below what it had been before The Event, owing to the lower total population and the slower speed of information in the 19th century.
For Zhi Chang, the change between Guangzhou and San Francisco had been maddeningly familiar, from the endless bureaucracy of the Qing Dynasty to the bureaucracy of California, it was the universal constant.
"Now serving B 014 at window number 18." Droned the automated voice. Chang sat in the waiting room, bored, her grasp on English wasn't the best, but she had picked up enough on the boat over from China to get around. Luckily, the state had been fairly accommodating in terms of providing the paperwork he needed in Chinese.
Pulling out the slip of paper with the Pinyin romanization of her name, she began filling out the application for her ID card.
Far from being hostile to the newcomer, like she had expected, the "Uptime" Californians, many of them Chinese like herself, had welcomed her warmly, and she had found room in a boarding house called an "Air BNB" in San Francisco's Chinatown.
"Now serving H 057 at window number 5." Came the automated voice. Zhi grabbed her paperwork and walked over to the window.
"Nihao." Said the DMV worker at the counter. And just like that, Zhi had a feeling that this strange new land of California wouldn't be so bad after all.
USS Roosevelt, Pacific Ocean
The weeks before the Roosevelt launched had been a crazy time for Karma Tidal. First, she went to Nevada and Phoenix to secure a lot of land deals, and then went to New York and Salt Lake City to secure contracts for her design firm. Of course, she later came to regret going to Salt Lake City, as the Mormon church proved to be very persistent.
Karma's phone rumbled for the 100th time that day.
"Yeesh, these guys are more obnoxious than those guys in Russia before the event." said Maria
"Yep, they sure are. I've been trying to avoid these guys for months, and they won't leave me alone." Karma replied
After that discussion, Karma made her way to her quarters aboard the ship. She then pulled out her laptop and went onto discord. Discord was down at that time.
"The hell? Why is it down?" After a minute, it came back up.
"Finally, it's back."
At that very moment, Karma's phone rang again.
"Of course that happens."
Camp Springs Secure Area (AKA "Green Zone") - Camp Springs, Maryland
Thaddeus Wilcox watched as the truck raised up yet another one of those concrete walls. The Californians here had called it a "T-barrier," on account of it looking like an inverted capital T in profile. To him, all it looked like was a big solid wall being erected around the Californian enclave.
All around the area were signs proclaiming the new security measures around the area. With the walls being put up to funnel everybody into a handful of checkpoints to visit the city, the thousands of Marylanders who had come to visit it had to deal with bag searches, metal detectors, and were barred from bringing firearms into the newly walled city.
"It's like the Green Zone all over again." Grumbled the short man next to him.
"I beg your pardon?" Thaddeus asked.
"Downtimer?" He asked.
Thaddeus could only nod at that.
"Okay, so a few years ago the US got it into their heads to go to war in Iraq to steal their oil" The Californian next to him began to explain.
"Iraq?" Thaddeus asked, unfamiliar with the name.
The uptime Californian pulled out a small rectangular device and looked at it for a second. "Okay so like, you know Ottoman Empire?" He asked.
"Of course." He replied.
"So the easternmost part of that area, where they meet up with Persia. That area?" The Californian explained.
"Vaguely." Said Thaddeus. "That's just a bunch of desert though isn't it?"
"Pretty much, but there's also a bunch of oil there." The Californian explained. "And our president at the time came up with a bunch of excuses to steal the oil and occupy the land."
"Really?" Thaddeus asked.
"Yep." "So he came up with this whole thing about how Iraq was building these really destructive weapons and how they were really dangerous. So we invaded em, pretty much rolled over any resistance without a fight."
"So what was the problem them." He asked.
"The real problem wasn't the invasion itself, it was the occupation." He explained. "Every time we left the FOB we never knew who was part of the enemy and who wasn't. We split the city into a Green Zone and a Red Zone. The Green Zone was all walled off and on the inside it was just like back home, only you were thousands of miles away in a goddamn desert. The Red Zone was everywhere else, and you had to start wearing flak jackets and ride in convoys every time you left the Green Zone." The uptime Californian pulled a carton of cigarettes out of his jacket and pulled a cigarette out.
"Smoke?" He asked.
Thaddeus shook his head, "Nah. Hear those things'll kill ya. Thought all you uptimers could read?" he said pointing at the Surgeon General warning label. The uptimer chortled.
"So you think it's happening here now. Green Zone Camp Springs?" Thaddeus asked.
"Fuck man." He replied blowing a smoke ring. "It's lookin' like it. It's that or Camp Springs is the new West Berlin." as he looked out past the chain link fence with barbed wire on top and jersey barriers around the perimeter.
For Thaddeus, that last comment only left him with further questions.
History in Real Time - The Eris Project - September 9, 1950
The early days after the Event were a very hectic time in California's history. In that time, so many things had changed in an instant. Many chatrooms were created to connect together people of every walk of life who had one thing in common: the Event had changed their lives.
Many logs have been archived by sites like Discord and Whatsapp, but none are more important and more well recorded than this discord server, created sometime before the Event, documenting the events leading up to it as well as the reactions to it in real time. Many influential figures of the past 80 were once a part of this chatroom, from politicians, to artists, and even businessmen to name a few. Their words, thoughts, emotions, and actions were all recorded here as they happened. Without further ado, here are the complete archives of Calexit Über Alles, from its inception till the death of omega13a in October 19, 1948.
Discord - Free voice and text chat for gamers
Boeing Headquarters, Long Beach
After The Event, before commercial airlines were allowed to start flights out of California, what was left of Boeing had the task of coming with how to adapt the current jet aircraft (Airbus, Bombardier, Embraer, Mcdonnell-Douglas, and Boeing) to be able to operate on primitive dirt and gravel runways.
Now that was done, it was now time to design new aircraft more suitable for use in the 1850s, aircraft that can fly on a large variety of routes while bypassing ETOPS certification. It would have been simpler if they could come up with just one design that would fit all needs, but that proved to be impossible. The most suitable designs for flights outside of California was too large for use inside of California and what would be ideal for use inside of California had too few engines to be used safely outside of California. In the end, they ended up with two aircraft designs.
One was for a wide-bodied tri-jet that some described as looking like the result of a one night stand between a DC-10 and a 787. That design was being called the 797 as the design for a 'middle of the market' aircraft had been scrapped.
The other design was similar to the old 727 with a T-tail and three tail mounted engines, one of which was fed with an S-duct inlet. There were differences though that prevented it from being considered part of the 727 family. The windows of the cockpit were flush with the nose cone like the more recent aircraft designed in lost history prior to The Event. Its engines would also incorporate the latest advances in noise reduction. After much debate, it was decided to refer to this design as the 7107 (seven-ten-seven).
Gustavo's Bar and Inn - El Paso
Gustavo's Bar and Inn in El Paso had become the go to hangout in El Paso, all thanks to having one of the first arcade machines outside of California. After the Californian technician installed the solar panel(or so he called it), the machine had trouble making money, and then that technician offered to demonstrate it for the patrons.
Soon after that, everyone was lining up to try the machine, and Gustavo Marrenda, the owner of the bar, was getting very rich off of the profits.
As Marrenda looked at the line in front of the cabinet, he saw a new way to make a profit and expand the offerings available. He had heard from the technician about arcades, places where they have many cabinets like the one in the bar.
At that moment, he decided the course he wanted to take. Since the technician installed a satellite dish on the roof along with the solar panel and battery pack, he could call anyone in California. Marrenda took the brick of a phone he was given and made a few calls. He was going to go on a business trip.
Six months later, Gustavo's Bar and Inn was renovated and renamed as Gustavo's Bar and Gaming, and became the centerpiece of a new industry in the downtime world.
California Flight Services, Santa Monica
A Bombardier CRJ was on final approach to Santa Monica Airport. On board the plane were 40 downtimers, comprised mainly of people who came from Britain, Mexico, America, and Hawaii, with some from other countries. But they were all here for one purpose: to train as pilots.
Ever since a C-17 from California flew the uptime senators to Camp Springs, and regular air service started back up, the world had been enamored with flight. People and goods could reach places further and faster than ever before. And other nations wanted to create airlines of their own.
California was very(properly) worried that downtime airlines would have very high accident rates from cheaping out on pilot training and plane maintenance. They cited accidents like Nigeria Airways Flight 2120, Alaska Airlines Flight 261, China Airways Flight 611, and Emery Worldwide Flight 17 to back this up.
After a lot of debate, California, as well as the three Californian airlines, agreed to lease planes and provide management to downtime airlines. In return for that, all aircraftpurchases/leasing for the first decade will have to be approved by the Californian government, as well as all pilot and mechanic training being done in California. To facilitate this, a new agency, called California Aircraft Leasing Program (CALP), was created. CALP coordinated with several governments and entrepreneurs to send personnel over to train in California, with the training being paid for by both CALP and the downtime governments/entrepreneurs.
And that's why Michael Kamaka was here. He had volunteered to go to California as a part of the Hawaiian Government's plan to create a national airline called Ka Lani Hawaii. As there were no airstrips in Hawaii, Kamaka and several others were sent via ship to Los Angeles. When the ship arrived at port, the large group of 120 downtimers from various nations sent by their countries were shuttled to the airport via charter buses. There, the group were split based on training. The people training to be mechanics boarded a plane for Long Beach, while the pilots boarded another plane to Santa Monica. As the plane parked at the airfield, the door opened up into a set of stairs reaching the tarmac. A group of people, presumably the instructors, walked towards the arriving passengers...
Hualapai Indian Lands - New Mexico Territory
The improvised meeting room–a repurposed portable building–was packed to the brim with people for this CEQA public outreach meeting about the New Hoover Dam Project. As the Hualapai filtered into the room, they walked past the wall showing 3D renderings of the planned dam and topographic maps of the new reservoir, lost history photos of the dam, and a plaster model of the new dam.
While the emergency acts passed after The Event created an exemption category for projects that had a "significant similarity" to projects that existed outside of California before The Event, that didn't fully exempt them from CEQA, which had led to this meeting.
For Carla Avendano, project lead for the New Hoover Dam, these public outreach meetings could make or break the project. Her purpose here was to pitch the dam and the lake it would create to the Hualapai people so that they could understand the benefits for them.
In the end, it had been the information she had been able to gather from the uptime Hualapai tribe's website, the Native American studies departments of several of the UC's and CSU's, as well as one of the few remaining speakers of their language who happened to have been vacationing at Disneyland when the Event had happened who had helped them come up with a plan.
The New Hoover Dam was vastly more complex than the original dam that had been built in 1936, design modifications had to be made to modernize it and offset the known environmental impacts caused by the historical construction of the dam. A silt tunnel would bypass the dam and allow the silt from the upstream Colorado River to continue flowing downstream, heaters would heat the water coming out of the hydroelectric turbines to match the temperature of the water to what it was before it entered Lake Mead, and fish bypass channels would allow the Colorado River's native fish species like the humpback chub, razorback sucker, Colorado pikeminnow, bluehead sucker, flannelmouth sucker, speckled dace, roundtail chub, and bonytail to pass by the lake and dam without issue.
As Carla continued through her PowerPoint about the project, she could see the metaphorical light bulbs go on in people's heads as she and her interpreter explained the project. Deciding that honesty was the best way to go, she explained that what California got out of it was the electricity from the turbines, and a more predictable downstream flow for Parker Dam and Lake Havasu. The water from Lake Mead was too distant for them to make use of, so it was being offered to the Hualapai, Havasupai, Mohave, Paiute, and Chemehuevi with the strong suggestion that each nation come together to form a Joint Powers Agency to determine the water and irrigation rights to the new Lake Mead.
