California Free State

The rump. When the UCAS expelled California in 2050 the neighbours took what they wanted inside a month — San Diego to Mexico, San Francisco to the Japanese Imperial State, the north as far down as Redding to Tír Tairngire — and what was left renamed itself the California Free State.

Then in December 2057 it threw Los Angeles out too, rather than pay for what it had just done here. See The Sixth World.

So what it is now is Sacramento, the coast, the Central Valley, a legislature, a governor, a revenue service and the California Rangers. It is a real government. It simply isn't ours, and hasn't been for three years longer than most of this city has been paying attention.

It has never formally reversed the 2057 act. It has never shown the slightest interest in doing so.

Where it starts, and where Pueblo stops

The Sierra Nevada crest is the border, for most of its length, and that is the single fact to hold. California Free State is the wet side — the coast, the valley floor, the western slope. Pueblo is the dry side — the Owens Valley, the Mojave, the Colorado desert, and everything east to Arizona.

The whole of it, north to south:

The bit that matters to a crew leaving town is the southern corner, where all three meet within about sixty miles:

• Leave Los Angeles north up the Grapevine and you cross into Pueblo at the county line. Antelope Valley, Tejon, the whole desert side of the mountains: Pueblo's, with a customs house.
• Keep going and you climb the Tehachapis. The crest is the second border.
• Come down the north side into Kern County and you are in the Free State, where the Rangers keep a post of their own and do their own paperwork.

So the two governments are separated by one mountain range and about twenty minutes of driving, and the crew pays twice. Which is also why the water argument is Pueblo's and not Sacramento's: the aqueducts start in the Owens Valley, on the dry side, behind Pueblo's line. The Free State has no say in it and never has.

Maps worth having open. Canon publishes one — the Sixth World Almanac map of the Free State — and for our purposes any physical map of California works better, because the border is the terrain: find the Sierra crest and the Tehachapi range and you have drawn it.

Canon reference: California Free State on the Sixth World Wiki, for the published version. Where it and this page disagree, this page is what happened here.

What the crew knows

• It is the dead hand on half the paperwork in this city, and this is the only reason it matters to us. Nearly everything unrepealable in Los Angeles is a California act, a California licence or a California order: the airport's suspension, the enabling law the Santa Monica boards still meet under, the leases Ares bought at El Segundo, a great many medical credentials, and every property instrument written before 2057.
• Which cuts a specific way. Those instruments are still valid, because nothing has superseded them. They also cannot be renewed, amended or appealed, because the body that issued them no longer has any reach here and wouldn't answer if it did. Permanent and unmaintainable at the same time.
• The Sacramento archive exists and it will not answer your question, and anybody who has actually gone looking will tell you so before you waste the trip. Three things happened to it in order:
  • The Crash ate the middle of it. California had spent thirty years moving the recorder, the title registers and the licence rolls onto platforms owned by three companies, and had destroyed a great deal of the underlying paper on a retention schedule, because the digital copy was the authoritative one. In 2044 the authoritative copy stopped existing.
  • The reconstruction was partial and it was done from tax rolls, which record who was billed rather than who held title — good enough to raise revenue, useless for a chain of custody.
  • And it stops in 2057. After the expulsion, nothing from Los Angeles was filed in Sacramento again, by anybody, ever.
• So the definitive answer people imagine is up there does not exist. What exists is a gap where the twentieth century was, a decade of billing records, and then silence. The real evidence for who owns anything in Los Angeles is whatever local bodies kept on paper, by hand, continuously — which is a much shorter list and none of it is in Sacramento.
• The Rangers are not a memory. They were the force sent into El Infierno in 2057 and they still exist, still recruit, and still hold the line at the valley end of the passes. Nobody from that operation was ever charged. Some of them are still serving.
• Sacramento's line on Los Angeles, when it says anything at all, is that the city chose this. It is worth knowing that this is the official position, because you will meet people who believe it.

Getting in

Overland means Pueblo first — the Grapevine, a customs house, a permit — and then a second crossing at the valley end where the Rangers do their own paperwork. Two borders, two sets of records, and a journey of a day and a half.

By sea into a Free State port is possible and slow. By air into Sacramento needs a filed plan, which needs a name.

None of it is hostile and all of it is documented. That is the problem: a crew whose entire advantage is not existing on paper has to exist on paper twice to get there.