Parrots

Red-crowned, loud, established for ninety years, and Awakened, which everybody knows and nobody minds.

The parrots are real Los Angeles. Red-crowned parrots came north in the 1970s pet trade out of Tamaulipas, got loose a few dozen at a time (the story everybody tells involves a pet-shop fire, and it was already unverifiable a century ago), and settled the San Gabriel Valley, Pasadena first. By the 2020s the species was nearly gone at home and Los Angeles held more of them than Mexico did: a population nobody licensed, thriving on ground nobody administered, ninety years before this city made that its whole economy.

They are still here. The plague emptied the neighborhoods and the flocks stayed, because the trees stayed, and they have spread with the quiet. They roost in Oceanwide Plaza's open upper floors with the antennas and the tarpaulins, and go out at dawn over the water queue, several hundred at a time, screaming.

Most of them are only birds. But any animal population can throw an Awakened one now, parrots no less than dogs, and the whole city has decided the Oceanwide flock is Awakened without anybody producing evidence past how it looks at dawn. Nobody seems to mind. The flocks give the cordon a wide berth, the way everything with lungs does.

What the crew knows#

• The flocks are furniture. Dawn and dusk, loud, green, everywhere from Santa Monica Pier to Pasadena. Nobody looks up any more, which is worth remembering in a city where everything else that flies is somebody's drone.
• The flocks do not talk. They never have, not once in ninety years: a red-crowned parrot screams in parrot, and that is the whole repertoire. Every Angeleno knows it, so anybody claiming they heard one speak gets told what their grandmother would have been told: that's a myth.
• The roost over Oceanwide Plaza has one the residents named Tony. Not after the guard.
• Nobody controls where a bird goes. The studio gates and the cordon wire are borders for people; what keeps a flock off poisoned ground is the flock's own judgment.
• You cannot catch one. People try, because a bird that talks sounds valuable. The flocks have had ninety years of practice at being missed.

Contact#

Where they have turned up so far, which is a short way of saying everywhere. No handler, no owner, no principal, and nothing they carry was sent by anybody.

• Oceanwide Plaza's open upper floors, the roost the crew lives under, and the dawn flight out over the water queue.
• The whole basin, from Santa Monica Pier east to Pasadena and the San Gabriel Valley, where they started.
• The range has held for a century and holds now: the harbor at San Pedro in the south to Sylmar in the north, and from the coast at Santa Monica inland to Pasadena and Arcadia. A flock does not leave it, and nothing about the Awakened ones changes that.