A Monument to Man's Arrogance: Arizona to Virgin Earth

Yeah but for petrostate you need someone to sell the oil in large amounts to someone. Who they gonna sell to, coyotes? The closest statelet to them is Yuma, and now that all the dams on the Colorado are kill probably, you could send a barge across, but from what we saw the redoubt doesn't even hold land past the watershed of the mojave
Yuma has a large supply of military vehicles, including possibly fighter jets (left over from USAF defections). So, once the fuel runs out, there is going to be an interest in finding sources of crude oil. Especially when people remember that one of the nearer source of oil is where the "legitimate" government fled to.

So, in ten to twenty years, there is a good possibility that the Redoubt will start exporting oil and petroleum products. The biggest problem is that there is a big step from getting oil out of the ground to refining it so it's fit for consumption as vehicle fuel. I don't know much anything about refining, but I would guess such an industry is pretty much beyond any of the successor states at this point.
 
Yuma has a large supply of military vehicles, including possibly fighter jets (left over from USAF defections). So, once the fuel runs out, there is going to be an interest in finding sources of crude oil. Especially when people remember that one of the nearer source of oil is where the "legitimate" government fled to.

So, in ten to twenty years, there is a good possibility that the Redoubt will start exporting oil and petroleum products. The biggest problem is that there is a big step from getting oil out of the ground to refining it so it's fit for consumption as vehicle fuel. I don't know much anything about refining, but I would guess such an industry is pretty much beyond any of the successor states at this point.

Refineries are VERY detailed industries that are almost certainly beyond the ability of the states to produce.

Oh, and guess how many refineries were in Arizona? It's a pretty easy guess...
 
Would it not be possible to bang out an internal combustion engine that would work with kerosene, crude oil, or whatever, model T-style? I imagine Yuma would love that so they can start pushing back the Phoenix raiders and could set up some Gilded Age workshops and assembly lines, if they tried.
 
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What happened to the Palo Verde nuclear power plant??

Gotta be a good strategic resource, but it's very close to the metro which if I understand it turned into a violent shitshow.
 
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One element that hasn't been touched on yet is the fact that a virgin Earth would retain an awful lot of the mefafauna lost during the holocene extinction. Ought to make it easier for the groups that leave Arizona proper in terms of hunting, and more difficult in terms of dealing with dangerous beasties (and be kind of interesting to watch the recolonization of wildlife into Arizona)
 
Chapter 3.1
Chapter 3: Free City of Bullhead
Bullhead City is rowdy. Chris Arambula leads me on a winding path through an open-air market that was once a parking lot. Merchants hawk their wares, everything from food, to salvage, to drugs that would have been illegal in the Old World. My guide asks me to call him Chris rather than by his title.

Please, Doctor Arambula was my father.

I was a refugee from Phoenix. Escaped with a family of five on day ten. We drove for hours across empty desert, just barely limped in to Bullhead City.

A lot of the towns between here and Phoenix are just...gone now. They weren't in places with arable land or a good water supply, and the refugees and raiders did for the rest. Kingman held out for a few months, but then they went under like Lake Havasu City and we got another spray of refugees. Probably because they soaked up a big wave out of Phoenix, but them and the geography kept us from getting any big mobs. Those that made it went through a screening process.

So that's probably why Bullhead City made it, isolation and being judicious with who they let in.

[Why was your family allowed in?]

My dad was a doctor, and my older sister was training to be a nurse. Doctor Arambula died of the plague in the winter of year two, that was harsh. I'm not a doctor, don't consider myself one, I just watched him do the operations. My sister's the senior partner in the business, too, she had actual training...

[The plague?]

Started in Phoenix. All the breakdown of sanitation and the dead bodies and everything...some really fucking nasty diseases were coming out of the corpse city, even with the screening we didn't know what to look for. So in winter of year two there was an outbreak of bubonic plague in Bullhead City...my dad wasn't so lucky, things were kind of rushed because of people running out of medications, old chronic illnesses starting to bite with the malnutrition, and we were still trying to work out new sanitation procedures.

Didn't work.

Anyway, sis and I run the business now. I was just in high school at the beginning, but it's been five years and while I don't think I'll ever be as good as an Old World doctor we keep our patients alive and that's what we're for.

[How do your patients pay for their treatment?]


Chris pauses to purchase a pound of opium from a vendor.

Money, if they have it, barter if they can afford it. If not, they go into debt to the clinic.

[How do people pay off their debt?]

Through money or barter over time, mostly. A few people can't though, so we have to work things out. I know there are businesses who will have you work off your debt, there's a joke that the bar on main offers you two hours for a pint. Heh. But we run a clinic, not really a lot of dishes to wash, so I just sell the debt.

[How do you sell debt?]

It's just some paperwork at the courthouse. Debt is the only business that's regulated - tightly, at least - in Bullhead City.

[Can you tell me more about debt buying?]

Sure. Basically if you can't pay in money or goods, you sign a piece of paper, an agreement that you are in debt to the company. Mostly you can either make installments to pay it off, or do labor, but some places only offer one or the other. I'd say one in five people in Bullhead City have owed debt at some point, one in ten at any given time. Then the debt can be bought and sold, traded.

[Is this system abused?]

He stops to light a cigarette. It's unclear what's in it.

Shit, is it. Some people charge outrageous rates, there's debt fraud...there've been a few cases of basically debt slavery, but those were, uh, sorted. It's hard, building a new industry from scratch.

There's a big push for all sorts of regulations on debt buying and all that. Some of 'em are common sense, like establishing price ceilings or whatever you call 'em, some are like, religious stuff. It's a fight either way, to get the city council to do anything.

[Religious?]

Something about the Hebrews forgiving all debt every seven years. You can hear it in the churches.

Personally I'll be voting for debt buyer's licenses. I try and be good about who I sell my debt to, but you can't fucking tell with these people.

[You mentioned debt slavery earlier?]

Yeah, that was...a kind of national embarrassment. We fixed it.

[How?]


He crushes out his cigarette.

You're going to hear the story of how we became a free city when you meet the mayor, but let's say that you'll find out pretty quick that when certain folks around here get a bit too big for their britches, the locals tend to take things into their own hands.

It's a rough city. You're free to do what you want in Bullhead, and other people are free to kick your fucking head in if they don't like it.
 
Interesting, it seems like the currency is severely deflated for goods or services in kind to be necessary to fill the gap. Don't tell me they did something silly like fixing their money to commodities like gold or bottle caps or something?
 
Interesting, it seems like the currency is severely deflated for goods or services in kind to be necessary to fill the gap. Don't tell me they did something silly like fixing their money to commodities like gold or bottle caps or something?

There's a couple factors at work, the main one being that the city council (rather hamstrung for reasons that will be revealed soon) isn't good at pumping money into the economy, so there's a lot of people who are materially wealthy (like landowners) but don't have actual cash. The economy has also been growing slowly so there's a good number of people who are still at the equivalent of below the poverty line. We'll be talking about that later, too.
 
Ah, labor to pay for debts, aka none dare call it serfdom.

That aside Bullhead city sounds fairly decent- a sort of functional libertarianism.
 
I have to be honest--as far as I can see right now, every damn society in ISOTed-Arizona seems to be mistaking hitting terminal velocity with stability...
 
Ah, labor to pay for debts, aka none dare call it serfdom.

That aside Bullhead city sounds fairly decent- a sort of functional libertarianism.
I dunno, the implicit way Bullhead dealt with the abuses of the debt system sound very much like mob justice. The impression that I got is that Bullhead is urban and cosmopolitan, but in the way of pre-modern merchants, not libertarians. Like how the Redoubt and Yuma have all regressed as well.
 
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Chapter 3.2
I enter the office of the Mayor of Bullhead City. The man in question, Shan Lewis, turns away from the window where he had been observing a protest of city militiamen demanding higher pay. He takes a seat and gives me a disarming smile.

Hope they didn't give you any trouble coming in, we'll negotiate something eventually.

I know Yuma must have painted us as un unruly mob, and I suppose compared to their government where everything's ordered down to the bootlaces we must seem like it for sure, but really everything here has its own sense to it.

I suppose it makes sense, too, considering how we got here. You see, in those first few weeks Bullhead City was in a good position. Isolated, with a fair stretch of arable land and an easy source of clean water in the Colorado River. The only hitch was, those farms were Fort Mojave Tribal Land, or were immediately adjacent.

Well, as it happened things were still getting sorted in those days, we had our issues with attrition same as any other place that came through the dying times, and law enforcement was...frayed.

And so, when a mob of people decided to do something, the government wasn't quick to put a road block in their way. Sometimes that worked, cause it meant people were quick to organize themselves and their neighbors, but on the other hand...

A lot of people - a certain type of people - decided they didn't want to find a way to trade goods from the city for food from the countryside. They thought it best if they could cut out the middle man.

[What type of people?]

He clears his throat.

Well, without sugarcoating it - folks who thought that if times were going to be hard and sacrifices were going to be made, it should be the Indians and Mexican migrants working the farms that had to be making the sacrifices and not good, hardworking white folks.

Understand, every part of Arizona had to deal with these types. I understand part of the infighting that brought down Phoenix was caused by far-right militias. But for whatever reason, in Bullhead City they were bolder and badder than in, say, Flagstaff or Yuma - if certainly not more numerous!

So first wind we caught of it was a dark evening, when a whole lot of torches suddenly sprang up on the main streets of the city. Well, that wasn't too strange, electricity was heavily rationed in those days and still is, but these torchlights gathered into clusters, then bigger mobs, until there was a stream of them heading south of the city towards the Reservation. There couldn't have been more than two hundred of them, but for what they were facing, that was a lot.

From all accounts they were quite the sight. Most on foot but a few in pickup trucks packed to the gills. Klansmen in pointy hoods to Confederate diehards to, shame to say it, a few law enforcement officers, and making no attempt to hide it. Scum of the Earth, and armed for bear. Luckily, they decided it would be easy, so they weren't too worried about secrecy. In their minds, they'd roll in during the dead of night, scatter the filthy lessers, take over the farms, set themselves up as plantation lords, and the rest of us would be serfs.

He flashes a feral grin.

As it happened, quite a few folks were opposed to that idea. Strongly opposed.

The Battle of Fort Mojave lasted for three hours. First shots were fired by tribal police, they'd set up a barricade when they got wind of the mob. A lot of the mob scattered, they were expecting to drag farmers from their beds, not trade shots with lawmen, and a lot had trouble shooting because of the way the mob was strung out along the road.

Still, some of them shot back.

He sighs deeply.

Tribal police held the line until reinforcements showed up. They were brave men, and most of them...they gave their lives. We raised a monument on the spot of the battle. Even when they rammed one of their vehicles into the barricade...

He gets a momentary far-off look in his eyes.

Well, when reinforcements showed up...it was just a farmer's militia of sorts but it was enough to turn the tide. And we had help from the city too, don't you forget it. Like I said, there were strong disagreements.

We rounded up what was left of the mob and...well, justice was served. No cops, no courts, no jails. Nobody was in the mood for those.

By the time day had dawned, the citizens hadn't dispersed, either. We'd marched right into the center of the city and camped outside the town hall. Things kind of spiraled but...no, I don't think anyone was in the mood to stop and think.

The constitution for the Free City of Bullhead was drafted that day, and a new mayor was put into place.

He reaches down unconsciously to brush the medal pinned to his jacket.

[What did the new constitution entail?]

A lot of things. Rights and liberties you can ask any citizen about, but you're probably wondering about the government. I'll be honest, we're rather hamstrung. It can be frustrating sometimes, but there are things you have to take in stride. Essentially, the city government has very little executive power. First everything has to go through the city council, then it has to be signed off on by the tribal council - which also has overlapping seats on the city council, mind - and then it goes to a plebiscite. And there's always a balancing act to be had, between merchants and salvage companies and farmers and unions and the mob...

But it works. We're establishing solid ties between Flagstaff and Yuma, there's more wealth the more you look, and if there's poverty the tradeoff is that nobody's forced to work like in Yuma or...those bastard legitimists in Cali.

And let me tell you this. Nobody, and I mean nobody, is going to try to pull something like Fort Mojave again. You can count on that.

Someone outside blows a shrill whistle. Mayor Lewis sighs and turns to face the windows.

Oh, and we'll get that sorted out too, eventually. Let them blow off some steam for a while, then I'll open negotiations with the officers.

[Are you worried about attacks by raiders?]

He looks back at me.

Hmm? Oh, no. For one, we have the light horse - they're the successor to the tribal police. They patrol the border and check on outlying farms, outposts, and settlements. Keep the roads clean too. We founded them at the same time as the new government was being founded, to root out anyone left who might've been in the mob.

[How did they do that?]

Lot of pointed questions, lots of knocking down doors. Quite a few people, er, mysteriously left town in those days, dunno where they went and nobody cares.

Anyway, raiders are an issue, but if a serious attack comes, you better believe the city militia will get itself together right quick.

He winks at me and folds his hands on his desk.

We may be a contentious city, but these days? We stick up for each other.
 
Bullhead politics sound very, uh, Athenian. (I wonder how many of those ostracized exiles will return promising the mob blackjack and hookers?)
 
Bullhead City seems to have found itself a nice little spot, and has even managed to keep a lot of the old-world rights and liberties. Though, this passage from the previous update does provide an interesting contrast:
A lot of the towns between here and Phoenix are just...gone now. They weren't in places with arable land or a good water supply, and the refugees and raiders did for the rest. Kingman held out for a few months, but then they went under like Lake Havasu City and we got another spray of refugees. Probably because they soaked up a big wave out of Phoenix, but them and the geography kept us from getting any big mobs. Those that made it went through a screening process.
Bullhead doesn't seem to have taken in as many refugees as other cities, as such the strain on their infrastructure and resources wasn't as bad as it was in a place like Yuma. Yuma helped more people, but as a result they had to give up their freedoms. Bullhead got to keep their freedoms, but who knows how many people died as a result of them not offering more help (if they could even offer any help; Bullhead looks like a pretty isolated and not particularly large city in real life, so it's not like they would be as huge a draw for people the way Yuma would be).
 
Yeah I very much prefer the libertarian mob rule to the practical post-apocalyptic fascism
 
Just kind of a blanket response to all the comments: Yes! Bullhead City is actually a much nicer place to live than Yuma or Phoenix. Obviously there are downsides but as far as quality of living it's much fairer. We'll be seeing soon that, well, not every place in former Arizona is a dystopia, some places are even downright normal!

If I had to describe the nations we've seen so far, it's:

In the Emergency Government, everyone works, everyone can eat, but everyone is poor.

In Yuma, everyone works, everyone can eat, but some people can get rich.

In Bullhead City, anyone can get rich, but anyone can wind up poor.
 
Still Bullhead might be in for a rough time in the future if things like the militia strikes and mob justice solidify into it's political losers fleeing to whatever the equivalent to Persia or Sparta would be.
 
I'm now curious to see how Flagstaff developed, and to see how it differs from the other three states we've visited. We've gotten some hints here and there what they're like, but not really enough to form a picture.
In Bullhead City, anyone can get rich, but anyone can wind up poor.
But not everyone can eat?
 
ScottishMongol, this is an amazing TL and you are an amazing person. When do we get more?:tongue:
 
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