![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fiction: a little bitty bigger world
Sep. 20th, 2014 05:59 am(This is loosely based on a dream I had some months ago.)
I live in San-San Arcology. From San Francisco to San Diego, the Arcology is one massive city. Every child learns about what we have to do to keep the Arcology going. Water from rainfall, from both sides of the Sierras, from carefully managed underground aquifers and even brackish residue from what previous generations called the Colorado River. Osmosis filtration of seawater and the resulting concentrated brine. Heat pasteurization and the need to balance energy outputs from fusion reactors with natural convection currents off the water.
When I was a child, only thirty million people lived in California. The official statistics state that over one billion people live in San San. I know for a fact that the actual total is at least ten percent higher.
I am a spry seventy years old. The year is 2045.
When I was forced to sell my ranch to form part of the Greater Santa Cruz Watershed Reserve, I took what was then a wide chance. I did not take my money and run, nor did I buy property locally. I bought a thirty year residency permit with life estate.
My home is San San. I can eat free at any restaurant, stay at any public sleepery or hotel -- if I book reservations long enough in advance, as some properties are booked years out, sleep in any authorized camping space, freely use public transport and the occasional Uliftaxi, draw rations at any commissary or licensed grocery, and store my limited personal effects in a reserved 10x10 locker. My health care is not merely free -- everyone's is free -- but excellent. I can attend any school if I show up. I don't pay taxes and I don't have to work.
But I do. Work, that is. Most people have a sixteen hour work week and resent that. I average forty to fifty, mostly on little projects of my own.
I carry my life in a backpack. I am still sufficiently old-fashioned that I carry actual survival gear. I lived through the Great Quake of 2031, partly because I had a flash purifier and a smart medkit when a wall caved in and trapped me in a 1 meter by 3 meter void. The former recycled my urine -- the latter nerve blocked my shattered legs until heavy rescue pulled me out six days later.
The most common cause of death in San San is suicide. The second most common cause of death is slips, trips and falls -- very old people fall down and break things too many times, people fall off slidewalks, the adventurous fall from heights. The third most common cause of death is murder. Car accidents, disease, cancer and pneumonia are as unthinkable as causes of death to a San San native as syphilis, starvation and bad teeth were to a late 20th century San Franciscan.
One billion people. The twenty-teens population of China packed into a single swath, five hundred miles long by one hundred miles wide.
The NanoTribe Wars ended in the Treaty of Cairo, which reaffirmed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and gave them teeth. Food, water, shelter, medical attention, marriage and family cohabitation ... all rights, enforceable as such. There are no "homeless" in the 21st Century -- but you could be assigned to Alaska or Siberia or Indonesia or the Gobi. Living in California is a privilege, not a right, and people smuggle themselves in faster than the Immigration Police can find and expel them.
San San is an indoor city. Some areas have historic exemption -- San Francisco most notoriously so -- but for the most part, neighborhoods once composed of single family homes are now huge arcology buildings which each house eighty to one hundred and fifty thousand people in twenty to one hundred stories.
There are no personal automobiles in San San. Except for certain historical preserves and one legacy freeway, the I-5, there simply isn't the room.
What we have instead is one of the best mass transit systems that has ever existed in the world. Everyone carries smartware that as a trivial function can give you the best route between any two points in San San. Local and in some cases archaic "last mile" systems such as MUNI rail, BART and even 'CalTrain' - long since converted to maglev - are connected by slidewalks to local areas and to each other. High speed maglev capsule trains are everywhere. Uliftaxis still have rights of way shared with automated delivery capsules, postal and cargo vehicles, maintenance and emergency services and tour and ... well, just about any vehicle _BUT_ a human operated one.
The maglev capsules themselves couple and uncouple from larger networks. At transfer points the capsule may stop suddenly, chime and buzz your smartware, you get up and cross from a connector to another capsule, and find yourself sitting with five other people who are also headed for Santa Rosa or Monterey or Santa Barbara or Bakersfield or Yosemite or El Cajon... and the capsule is now rushing at 800 kph on dedicated vacuum trackway instead of the more sedate 100kph of local zones.
San San is a maze. Mapping software is a necessity, not a luxury, and one of my several work-hobbies is Urban Search and Rescue. When someone gets lost in maintenance tunnels, if they really really work at it and ignore all the caution labels and emergency phones and survival alcoves and Danger! signage in eight languages plus pictograms and carry a jammer and don't carry smartware, they might actually manage to find a way to get themselves killed by misadventure. Although with spray cameras everywhere, detailed analytics can generally determine whether we are dealing with gross stupidity or ingenious suicide.
Over two hundred million citizens of San San -- and another thirty million or so on temporary visas -- are of Chinese ancestry. About the same number are Mexican. We have every ethnic and cultural group in the world, some historical and some as recent as last week's headlines. The early 21st century saw "flash mobs" -- now we have "instant tribes" where adherents may have been members for twenty years but claim to be new as of last week -- and vice versa.
I find myself returning again and again to a lesser known San, the San Jose. The downtown is a Historical Preservation Project which restricts skyscrapers to only thirty stories and forbids arcologies entirely. But I keep my storage locker in North San Jose Arcology, which stretches from Alviso through San Jose Airport -- now strictly reserved for recreational craft, as it is too short for modern aerodynes and orbiters -- and from Santa Clara to the west to (and at the height of) the East San Jose foothills.
The arcology is a densely packed honeycomb, incorporating existing structures but subsuming them. Modular housing, autofacs, stores, warehouses, public spaces -- and we have a much wider view of public space -- hospitals, schools, universities, research sites -- archives, arenas, armories -- farms, hydroponics, tissue processing stations, genetic control nodes. But mostly food production and housing.
I usually sleep in North First 18000 Block Transit Stay, which at one time was a two mile stretch of hotels, ranging from one star fleabags through four star hotels of major chains. Now it houses a resident population of only thirty thousand but a transit population -- mostly area visitors -- between fifty and two hundred thousand depending on time of year and convention center schedules. I have a standing long term reservation with two week stay limit per location, option to waive, guaranteed booking within three kilometers of North First 18000 Core. Convenient to both local and high speed transit, convenient to my locker, flexible enough to not cost anything but predictable enough that I don't risk getting lost every time I have to move rooms.
A standard single occupancy transit room is a cubic about eight feet wide by sixteen feet long, with cooking and bathing and sleeping facilities approximately equivalent to an old time studio apartment. If you have seen the old flat movie Fifth Element, now the height of camp -- and yes, I know a re-enactment group that meets weekly to perform it -- it is the same size as the taxicab driver's apartment, with no fancy sliding furnishings but some more thoughtfulness in the layout.
All housing is furnished, but at the Transit Stay level, furnished means basic amenities such as linens and choice of soaps and stocked kitchens from a list plus grocery delivery service. Very primitive but I like it.
I live in San-San Arcology. From San Francisco to San Diego, the Arcology is one massive city. Every child learns about what we have to do to keep the Arcology going. Water from rainfall, from both sides of the Sierras, from carefully managed underground aquifers and even brackish residue from what previous generations called the Colorado River. Osmosis filtration of seawater and the resulting concentrated brine. Heat pasteurization and the need to balance energy outputs from fusion reactors with natural convection currents off the water.
When I was a child, only thirty million people lived in California. The official statistics state that over one billion people live in San San. I know for a fact that the actual total is at least ten percent higher.
I am a spry seventy years old. The year is 2045.
When I was forced to sell my ranch to form part of the Greater Santa Cruz Watershed Reserve, I took what was then a wide chance. I did not take my money and run, nor did I buy property locally. I bought a thirty year residency permit with life estate.
My home is San San. I can eat free at any restaurant, stay at any public sleepery or hotel -- if I book reservations long enough in advance, as some properties are booked years out, sleep in any authorized camping space, freely use public transport and the occasional Uliftaxi, draw rations at any commissary or licensed grocery, and store my limited personal effects in a reserved 10x10 locker. My health care is not merely free -- everyone's is free -- but excellent. I can attend any school if I show up. I don't pay taxes and I don't have to work.
But I do. Work, that is. Most people have a sixteen hour work week and resent that. I average forty to fifty, mostly on little projects of my own.
I carry my life in a backpack. I am still sufficiently old-fashioned that I carry actual survival gear. I lived through the Great Quake of 2031, partly because I had a flash purifier and a smart medkit when a wall caved in and trapped me in a 1 meter by 3 meter void. The former recycled my urine -- the latter nerve blocked my shattered legs until heavy rescue pulled me out six days later.
The most common cause of death in San San is suicide. The second most common cause of death is slips, trips and falls -- very old people fall down and break things too many times, people fall off slidewalks, the adventurous fall from heights. The third most common cause of death is murder. Car accidents, disease, cancer and pneumonia are as unthinkable as causes of death to a San San native as syphilis, starvation and bad teeth were to a late 20th century San Franciscan.
One billion people. The twenty-teens population of China packed into a single swath, five hundred miles long by one hundred miles wide.
The NanoTribe Wars ended in the Treaty of Cairo, which reaffirmed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and gave them teeth. Food, water, shelter, medical attention, marriage and family cohabitation ... all rights, enforceable as such. There are no "homeless" in the 21st Century -- but you could be assigned to Alaska or Siberia or Indonesia or the Gobi. Living in California is a privilege, not a right, and people smuggle themselves in faster than the Immigration Police can find and expel them.
San San is an indoor city. Some areas have historic exemption -- San Francisco most notoriously so -- but for the most part, neighborhoods once composed of single family homes are now huge arcology buildings which each house eighty to one hundred and fifty thousand people in twenty to one hundred stories.
There are no personal automobiles in San San. Except for certain historical preserves and one legacy freeway, the I-5, there simply isn't the room.
What we have instead is one of the best mass transit systems that has ever existed in the world. Everyone carries smartware that as a trivial function can give you the best route between any two points in San San. Local and in some cases archaic "last mile" systems such as MUNI rail, BART and even 'CalTrain' - long since converted to maglev - are connected by slidewalks to local areas and to each other. High speed maglev capsule trains are everywhere. Uliftaxis still have rights of way shared with automated delivery capsules, postal and cargo vehicles, maintenance and emergency services and tour and ... well, just about any vehicle _BUT_ a human operated one.
The maglev capsules themselves couple and uncouple from larger networks. At transfer points the capsule may stop suddenly, chime and buzz your smartware, you get up and cross from a connector to another capsule, and find yourself sitting with five other people who are also headed for Santa Rosa or Monterey or Santa Barbara or Bakersfield or Yosemite or El Cajon... and the capsule is now rushing at 800 kph on dedicated vacuum trackway instead of the more sedate 100kph of local zones.
San San is a maze. Mapping software is a necessity, not a luxury, and one of my several work-hobbies is Urban Search and Rescue. When someone gets lost in maintenance tunnels, if they really really work at it and ignore all the caution labels and emergency phones and survival alcoves and Danger! signage in eight languages plus pictograms and carry a jammer and don't carry smartware, they might actually manage to find a way to get themselves killed by misadventure. Although with spray cameras everywhere, detailed analytics can generally determine whether we are dealing with gross stupidity or ingenious suicide.
Over two hundred million citizens of San San -- and another thirty million or so on temporary visas -- are of Chinese ancestry. About the same number are Mexican. We have every ethnic and cultural group in the world, some historical and some as recent as last week's headlines. The early 21st century saw "flash mobs" -- now we have "instant tribes" where adherents may have been members for twenty years but claim to be new as of last week -- and vice versa.
I find myself returning again and again to a lesser known San, the San Jose. The downtown is a Historical Preservation Project which restricts skyscrapers to only thirty stories and forbids arcologies entirely. But I keep my storage locker in North San Jose Arcology, which stretches from Alviso through San Jose Airport -- now strictly reserved for recreational craft, as it is too short for modern aerodynes and orbiters -- and from Santa Clara to the west to (and at the height of) the East San Jose foothills.
The arcology is a densely packed honeycomb, incorporating existing structures but subsuming them. Modular housing, autofacs, stores, warehouses, public spaces -- and we have a much wider view of public space -- hospitals, schools, universities, research sites -- archives, arenas, armories -- farms, hydroponics, tissue processing stations, genetic control nodes. But mostly food production and housing.
I usually sleep in North First 18000 Block Transit Stay, which at one time was a two mile stretch of hotels, ranging from one star fleabags through four star hotels of major chains. Now it houses a resident population of only thirty thousand but a transit population -- mostly area visitors -- between fifty and two hundred thousand depending on time of year and convention center schedules. I have a standing long term reservation with two week stay limit per location, option to waive, guaranteed booking within three kilometers of North First 18000 Core. Convenient to both local and high speed transit, convenient to my locker, flexible enough to not cost anything but predictable enough that I don't risk getting lost every time I have to move rooms.
A standard single occupancy transit room is a cubic about eight feet wide by sixteen feet long, with cooking and bathing and sleeping facilities approximately equivalent to an old time studio apartment. If you have seen the old flat movie Fifth Element, now the height of camp -- and yes, I know a re-enactment group that meets weekly to perform it -- it is the same size as the taxicab driver's apartment, with no fancy sliding furnishings but some more thoughtfulness in the layout.
All housing is furnished, but at the Transit Stay level, furnished means basic amenities such as linens and choice of soaps and stocked kitchens from a list plus grocery delivery service. Very primitive but I like it.
