Los Angeles

The city itself, in the shape a runner needs it: which ground the disasters took, which ground came through, and how you arrive. The political situation — no government, no flag, Pueblo on every landward side, a harbour guaranteed by a shipping clause — is on The Sixth World. District pages are in Locations.

The 2028 line

Everything in this city that works was built or rebuilt for the Games, and nothing has been built since. That's the most useful date to carry around, because it dates every functioning thing you will touch.

Los Angeles spent most of a decade getting ready for 2028 and it was the last time anybody spent money here on purpose: rail extensions and rebuilt stations, resurfaced arterials, venue retrofits, a terminal programme at LAX, new substations, pumps and trunk mains. All of it delivered. Some of it delivered weeks before the Games opened.

Then the Games ended, the fault moved in the autumn, and the money that would have maintained any of it went into thirty years of arguing about who owed what. So:

• If it works, it's a 2027 or 2028 build, and it is now thirty-two years old with no programme behind it.
• If it was going to be finished for the Games and wasn't, it never was. See Oceanwide Plaza.
• If it was finished for the Games and then broke, nobody replaced it, and the failure is usually where the new work met the old. LAX is the largest example and the beach cities' substations are the ones people actually notice.

The city runs on a single decade of deferred maintenance, and the crew's whole professional advantage comes from knowing which parts of it were never inspected again.

What the disasters took

The Big One in 2028 followed the soil. It came apart worst on river fill and in unretrofitted stock — the old low-rise cores, the soft-story apartment blocks, the freeway interchanges. LAX never reopened.

The Green Tide in 2056 followed the water, and it came from the south. San Onofre stopped generating power back in the twenty-tens; what it never stopped being was a storage yard. Sixteen hundred tons of spent fuel sat in casks a hundred feet from the surf for forty years, because no repository was ever built to take it and no government outlasted the argument about whose problem it was. The company holding the contract collected its fee and scheduled the work for later. The bluff kept eroding.

When the casks went, the coastal current did what it always does and carried it north — up the Orange County beaches, onto the San Pedro shelf, and into the harbour and the wetlands. That is the refinery belt and the port districts, and it is a shoreline disaster: the water and the sediment and the first few streets, not the county.

El Infierno is what people call the cordon that went up around it: the harbour districts, Wilmington, San Pedro, Terminal Island, the refinery belt from Carson out to El Segundo, the wetlands — and the beach cities. Manhattan, Hermosa, Redondo. The most expensive streets on this coast in 2050 are inside the same wire, on the same maps, under the same name as the refineries, because the fence follows the poison and the poison followed the water.

It is walled, it is contaminated, and roughly a million people live inside it anyway, because the alternative was leaving with nothing.

Nobody was charged. The contract had changed hands four times.

Then, in 2058, the wave. A moderate quake offshore shook loose a piece of the Palos Verdes shelf — a submarine landslide, on ground geologists had been publishing about for fifty years — and the collapse pushed a tsunami into both bays at once. It was not large. It did not have to be. It arrived at a coastline that had already been abandoned by its insurers, and it did three things in twenty minutes: it destroyed the beach strip at sea level from Redondo up through Santa Monica, it drove harbour water and everything suspended in it a few miles up the concrete flood channel, and it laid contaminated sediment on beaches the current by itself could never have reached, because the peninsula was in the way.

That is the part people mix up, and it matters. The Tide poisoned the coast. The wave is what emptied it. Two years separate them, and the second one is the reason the money never came back — you can decontaminate a beach, but nobody will underwrite a house that has now been proven to flood.

The fires never stopped. Everything where the city meets the hills has burned at least twice, no insurer will write a policy above the flood line, and the canyons are full of standing houses nobody owns and anybody can enter. Ash country runs from Malibu through the Palisades and Topanga, across the Verdugos and Altadena, out to Sylmar and Chatsworth. Some of the most expensive real estate in the history of the world is squats.

What held

The flat working city, mostly — Watts, Compton, Inglewood, Boyle Heights, East LA, Huntington Park, Pacoima. Dense, poor, and standing, because those neighbourhoods ran on families and churches and each other rather than on insurance policies and private patrols, and none of those things stopped working. They are not safe. They are functioning, which is rarer here.

And money went where water, height and gunmen are: Bunker Hill, Century City, the Westside behind its checkpoints, Pasadena. The Valley's east end and the far suburbs dried out when the aqueducts changed hands and are emptying a household at a time.

The city is still the city

Griffith Observatory is a mana observatory now, and open to the public on weekends. The Hollywood sign is lit and has a sponsor's logo bolted to the hillside beneath it. Dodger Stadium is a market six days a week and a stadium on the seventh. Union Station is the inland border hall, so if you leave the city by land you leave through it — and it's where you find out that the trains still run, for freight first and for people who can prove they're going to work second. Olvera Street still sells the same things. Angels Flight runs when it feels like it. The Coliseum is full most nights for something the city would rather you didn't ask about. The Watts Towers are exactly where they have always been. The Queen Mary is a hotel, a neutral ground, and the only place in the harbour where three corporations will sit at the same table.

The 2071 handover

The city has two dates. One is behind it and explains everything that works. The other is eleven years ahead and explains everything anybody is arguing about.

Pueblo's published capital programme lists Los Angeles as an anticipated service area from 2071. It's a budget document, not a declaration — projected connections, projected demand, a line for meter installation and trunk mains, a footnote about administrative integration costs. It is public, it is audited, and anybody here who knows a shareholder has read it. Mechanism and the reasons on Pueblo.

What arrives is not soldiers. It's meters, rates, permits, licences, a schedule of fees and an officer at a window who did not write any of it. Being administered, in other words, by a corporation that is genuinely good at administering things — which for a great many people here will be an improvement, and that is the uncomfortable part.

The two lists

Pueblo will not adjudicate a hundred years of unrecorded claims, because a corporation does not accept unbounded liability. So there are exactly two categories on the day:

• Entered on a register Pueblo recognises. The interest converts into a Pueblo instrument. The holder becomes a rate-paying resident with a path to shareholding. Cost knowable in advance, which is why it's a line item.
• Entered nowhere. Not refused — not heard. The ground vests in the Council as unclaimed and the people on it become occupants at the Council's discretion.

It does not matter whether a claim is good. It matters whether it is written down, in a book somebody has kept continuously and can produce.

And there is no higher authority to appeal to, because of 2044 rather than 2057. California held the county recorder, and California had moved it onto three companies' platforms and destroyed much of the paper behind it on a retention schedule. The Crash took the only copy. What Sacramento rebuilt afterwards came off tax rolls — who was billed, not who held title — and nothing from Los Angeles was filed there after the expulsion anyway. So the local hand-kept registers are not a fallback for a real archive. They are the archive.

Which districts are exposed, and it isn't the poor ones

This is the part that surprises people, and it's worth getting right because it inverts what the rest of this page says about who came through.

So the exposure isn't about money, it's about bookkeeping — and the districts that came through the last thirty years best are, in a lot of cases, the ones that came through on families, churches and each other rather than on instruments. Those things kept people alive. They do not convert.

Which is also why it's a fight and not a funeral. A register is a book somebody keeps. An association that has been collecting dues and minuting meetings for forty years has a continuous record and mostly doesn't know it counts. Getting that recognised, or getting a claim entered on somebody else's register before the date, is achievable work — and it is the reason half the paying jobs in this city are about paperwork rather than cargo.

Canon reference: Los Angeles 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

• Ruin follows hazard and infrastructure, never who lived there. Four different geographies, none of them a map of anybody's neighbourhood: shaken, poisoned, drowned, burned, dried.
• The flat working city is the part that works, because it ran on institutions rather than insurance. Poor is not the same as ruined and the difference is visible from the street.
• The emptied places are where the money was — the beach strip, the canyons, the bluff-top streets. Standing houses, no owners, no insurers, and salvage crews who know them better than any map.
• Nothing above the district level exists. Whatever a neighbourhood has, it arranged itself, and the arrangements don't fit together.

Getting in

Flying in is its own lesson. LAX has been rubble since the quake. Long Beach's field went when the water table did — the harbour has been sinking since the oil came out of it and only stays up because the injection pumps run, and what those pumps have been moving since the Tide is not clean. Burbank belongs to the studios. John Wayne is down in the border zone flying nothing civil. The longest runways in Southern California are at Ontario, on Pueblo's side of the line.

Which leaves a small plateau in Santa Monica that residents spent fifty years and one signed agreement trying to close, and which is now the busiest airport in Los Angeles.