When the judges started questioning him, my dread worsened. They were really grilling him, making it sound like he thought that people should be able to do anything if it meant helping climate refugees, even committing violent acts. But he fielded all their questions with the same calm, and now he started quoting sections of the Internal Displaced Persons Act from memory, citing cases, even correcting one of the judges’ citations in a very calm way that let the judge save face, and I got to understanding that he was a walking encyclopedia of this stuff, and the reason he was so cool about it all was that he had nothing to worry about. It was gratifying to watch the lawyer for the Flotilla dark-money groups watch our lawyer being so utterly, coolly badass.
But if the judges were impressed, they did a good job of hiding it. Once it was clear how cold our guy had it, they started interrupting his answers to ask him other questions and then more questions on top of those, sometimes talking on top of each other. Fundamentally, they wanted to know how the Internal Displaced Persons Act wasn’t a “lawbreaker’s charter” that allowed “vigilantes” to “decide which laws they were going to follow and when.”
It was weird to see our guy being so unruffled by all of this when it seemed so clear that the judges hated him, and then it was the other guy’s turn. He was much younger, and Latino, with movie-star looks, and even though he did a much more lean-forward delivery—literally and figuratively, speaking with real passion about how we couldn’t afford the risks from “private citizens making unilateral decisions about the environmental impact of permanent structures”—he seemed every bit as self-assured as our guy had been and someone googled him and learned he’d been tops in his class at Stanford Law and did a postdoc at Oxford.
The judges were as easy on him as they’d been hard on our guy, just lobbing these softballs at him and putting on these serious, thoughtful faces while he answered. It wasn’t obvious at the start, but a few minutes into it, it was clear that he wasn’t getting the same treatment, and people in the room with us started groaning and catcalling the screen, and we heard the same thing coming from other rooms.
Then, suddenly, it was over. We all looked at one another as the courtroom feed winked out of the screen, like, Was that it? The buzz of conversation rose, and then Constance, the DSA lawyer, popped onto the screen. They were grinning broadly.
“Well folks, thanks for tuning in to that. I thought I’d pop on to the channel and give you a rundown on what happens next. The judges are going to meet and deliberate, and we expect to get a judgment within twenty-four hours. That’s a lot faster than normal, but this whole thing is abnormal, and when there’s an emergency hearing, they can move fast.” They looked down at their screen, their eyes flicking as they read the chat. They frowned and then laughed.
“Oh, man, sorry. I see a lot of you are worried about the way that hearing went down, like why were they so hard on poor old Kuby, and why did Guzman get the white-glove treatment?
“So here’s a dirty not-so-secret of this kind of hearing—appeals panels, en banc review, the Supremes. They know they’ve got history’s eyes on them, that law students are going to debate what they do and what they don’t do. That means that when they’re about to make major law, they want to prove to posterity that they’re not being sloppy about it. The upshot of that is that if the judges really lay into you, it’s often because they’re in the tank for you.”
“But not always.” That was Kuby, now leaning back in his chair with a sandwich in one hand, tie missing and jacket off, feet on his desk, revealing that he’d been wearing striped pajama bottoms and slippers from the waist down. “Sometimes, they’re hard on you because they hate you.”
Constance grabbed the video feed back from him. “Come on, don’t scare ’em. Yes, sometimes they act like they hate you because they hate you. But mostly, it’s because they want to prove they’re not playing faves. I’m a glass-half-full kind of lawyer.”
Kuby popped back. “Takes all kinds.” He took a huge bite of his sandwich and we watched in fascination as he chewed and swallowed. “Sorry, court makes me so damned hungry. I just couldn’t sit here while Constance sung their sweet song of a rosy future assured to all.”
“Sir,” they said, “I am reliably informed that my generation is the first in a century that doesn’t fear the future.”
He snorted and gestured with his sandwich. “Translation: ‘Okay Millennial.’”
* * *
We spent the next three hours on a troll counteroffensive, flagging content, fact-backing fast-moving threads, outing botmasters by publishing screengrabs from their command-and-control servers that got leaked by confederates, the basic socials firefighting that I got sucked into all the time, but this time with a global audience, as our fight sprawled past the local socials, going statewide, then national, then everywhere that the Flotilla was drumming up meme warriors to smear us.
I was really getting into it when Ana Lucía sat down next to me and said, “Dude, there’s a verdict, come on.”
I stood up—I’d been sitting on the floor up on the fourth floor, having moved from room to room every time a work crew showed up to do something useful, and my knees and back and neck were tight and sore. I did some toe-touching, and when I took a deep breath, my lungs ached, way down low, in the way that told me I’d been careless about smoke inhalation.
As I walked on shaky legs down to the third floor and back to the empty bedroom where I’d watched the hearing—now equipped with a built-in wardrobe and new light fixtures—I felt like a salmon that had been swimming upstream to its spawning ground, arriving at last with one and a half fins, only one eye, and most of my scales missing.
Phuong was already there, looking as tired as I felt, as did everyone else in the room: paint- and plaster-spattered volunteers, streaked with soot, masks around their chins or dangling from one ear. The air was close and sweaty, body smells and smoke smells and paint smells. A couple of hours before, there’d been a palpable sense of defiance and hope, and now that seemed gone, replaced by exhaustion. I’d known so many of these people for so long, since middle school, grade school, even, and many of them were part of Phuong’s cohort, older cool kids I’d idolized for their skateboard skills, amazing fashion, and, later, political activism. Seeing them in this state was truly dispiriting. I felt like someone had cut my strings. Ana Lucía and I squeezed into seats to either side of Phuong and I took her hand.
“You okay, babe?” she said.
I tried for a smile. “Just beat,” I said. “Probably hangry. Screenburn.”
“When this is over I’m going to go to bed for a week and then I’m going to go and sit on the beach for a week.”
“Can I come?”
“To bed, or the beach?”
“Both,” I said.
She squeezed my hand and gave me a quick kiss, and then the big screen at the front of the room came to life.
It was Constance Ming, in some kind of DSA war room, a boardroom in what I took to be DC, walls covered in screens and heavily marked-up whiteboards, table littered with coffee cups and water glasses. They were huddled with a group of DSA activists, some of whom I recognized as elder statespeople, but many as young as me. It was basically exactly what I figured life must be like at DSA HQ, like it had been set-dressed and cast over at one of the baby Warners.
“The verdict came out faster than we thought it would,” Ming said, without any kind of greeting. “And it’s long-ass, which suggests that there were clerks who were pretty anxious to get their ya-yas out on this issue and had a lot of draft text in the can. Before I say anything else about it, I want to get to the headline: all the injunctions are lifted. All of them, effective immediately.” Whatever they said next was lost in the cheers, which bounced off the unfurnished room’s hard walls, and also rang in from the rooms down the halls and below us.
I was part of that roar, but even as I cheered and stamped my feet and clapped, my body was sending me these heavy lethargy messages, like, soon as we’re done with this, I’m gonna go lie down, and I realized how much of my ability to stay vertical over the past several hours had been tension, waiting to hear what was going to happen next.
They were still talking and people shushed each other and then a guy my age in their war room showed them his screen and they said, “Shit, sorry, I shoulda given you all a chance to finish cheering. That’s all right, you deserve to take a moment to recognize what just happened. We just beat back one of the most expensive, powerful, and coordinated assaults in Green New Deal history. We did it by putting our bodies on the line.
“Here’s a thing about the law: there aren’t enough cops to enforce the law if people don’t believe in it. That means that society’s primary law enforcement tool isn’t cops, it’s legitimacy. And that goes double for judges: that’s why they wear the robes and use all that Latin and do the whole all-rise business: to reinforce their own legitimacy, to remind you that we, as a society, hold them in high esteem.
“The reason for all those reminders is that if the esteem goes away, then so does their legitimacy. Remember when Uwayni just ignored the Supreme Court for her first term, just kept signing these wildly popular GND bills that they struck down, until they stopped? Everyone had been on her to pack the court from the start, but she was like, nah, I’m gonna hit these old fuckers where it hurts, right in their legitimacy. I’m gonna pass all kinds of super-popular legislation and dare them to void it, because every time they do, it makes me look like the true representative of democratic will and makes them look like an obstructionist relic that no one should take seriously.
“It worked. Today, we did a version of that. Well, you did. When you occupied those building sites, when you whipped up a nation to see that the court had got in the way of doing the obviously right thing, you put the fear into those judges. I’m a hundred percent convinced that this is why they ruled the way they did. That’s the good news.”
They took a deep breath, then slugged some water. “Now, the bad news: the injunctions are lifted prospectively, but not retrospectively. That means that anyone who violated them is liable to civil penalties—fines—and in some cases, like if you were ordered to stop and then went back to work anyway, you might face criminal penalties.
“There’re three million-odd people on this stream, and now’s the time when I ask you to open up your wallets. I’m not fundraising here, this is a defense and bail fund, because there’re gonna be a lot of arrests and we’re going to need to start retaining counsel up and down the country for our comrades. Link’s on the screen. You know what to do.”
Suddenly, they looked very tired, raccoon-eyed and slumped and ten years older. “Folks, our work only just got started. I know a lot of you are thinking, ‘When do we get to stop fighting this fight?’ I’ll tell you what a wise friend told me, before she took up full-time work as a swamp-witch: Some fights you fight because you plan on winning them. Some fights, you fight because the minute you stop, you lose ground. For reasons that I can’t even pretend to understand, there’s a large cohort of people out there who think that we should bury our heads in the sand, or worse, fight each other rather than the fires around us. I mean, it’s a cliché to say some people just want to watch the world burn, but after a lot of years doing this, I have concluded that this is just a statement of fact. Some people seriously do want to watch the world burn.
“Some of you are going to go to jail for your good work. I don’t think anyone will serve a long term, and we’re going to fight like hell for each and every one of you. I don’t think anyone in the wildfire zone has to worry about cops until the smoke clears, but whatever you do, stay put, don’t run away from the cops, that’ll just make our job harder. We can probably beat the rap for failing to respond to a noise ticket or stop-work order from a building inspector, but evading law enforcement is a much more serious charge.
“In the meantime, don’t forget that we won a hell of a victory today. Yes, all it did was get us back to where we were a couple weeks ago, but I’ll take that win—beats the shit out of going backwards.” They blew out a double cheekful of air and shook their head. “I’m gonna go take a walk. We can do that here in DC, for now. For those of you stuck in the fires, I recommend taking a nap. You’ve earned it.”
* * *
I spent the next twenty-four hours at Phuong’s place, mostly in her bed or on the sofa, hacking my lungs out and catching up on my sleep and nutrition. But I wouldn’t call it rest: whenever I could focus my eyes, I was on a screen, giving advice to the crews that had swarmed every work site where the injunction halted things, putting up fresh emergency buildings in the smoke, which only got thicker. Erecting permanent prefab housing with zero visibility and unbreathable air turned out to be a relatively new field, so new that I was one of the leading experts, despite the fact that I felt like I didn’t have a single clue.
But the buildings needed to go up because we needed to get people indoors. The homeless refugees in their tents were choking to death, literally, and the community centers, libraries, and school gyms had been turned into emergency shelters, but they were bursting at the seams, especially as people whose houses were in the fire’s path rode or cycled or marched into town, eyes streaming, lungs clogged, desperate and scared.
When my eyes couldn’t focus on my screen anymore, I tried to rest, but that’s when my brain replayed a greatest-hits reel of everything screwed up and awful from recent months, always coming to rest on the same thing: Constance saying, Some people seriously do want to watch the world burn.
The thing is, I think they were wrong. I grew up around those people, Gramps and his friends. They didn’t want to see the world burn. They thought we wanted to destroy the world. They didn’t always act in good faith, but they thought the same of us. Gramps and his Maga buddies didn’t deny climate change (not anymore, though I could believe they had, once upon a time). Some of them thought we were exaggerating it, but there were plenty of them who believed in it as much as I did.
Mostly, we agreed on the facts. What we disagreed on was what to do about them.
Some of the Magas thought that it was hopeless, most of the world was already lost, and the job was to make sure that the patch they were on survived, along with the people they cared about. They hated refus because they were bigots, but also, they hated them because they saw themselves as living in a lifeboat, and saw every refu they hauled over the gunwales as one more mouth to feed from the dwindling supplies, and believed that if they let enough refus in, the boat would sink.
And then there was the gospel of the Flotilla, the idea that we could just nerd our way out of the emergency with geoengineering and asteroid mining. The thing was, this wasn’t so different from the GND, which had built zero-carbon factories across every American desert that ran only when the sun shone, turning out all the material and technology we’d need to relocate every coastal city inland, retrofit all our housing stock, and solarize every home.
The difference was that Uwayni had nationalized all the knowledge and practices that went into building these factories, just shunting aside the big asset funds and patent trolls that stood in the way of the whole human race coming together to solve its problems.
The Flotilla believed that some of us were born to be wise kings, and that winning in the market was the modern equivalent to pulling a sword out of a stone, and that Uwayni and the GND were doomed because they had defied the natural order of things, like trusting toddlers to run the factory.
The Magas who believed this were a combination of pathetic and outraged: convinced that they were inferior to the superheroic “inventors” and “founders” they worshipped, but also sure that they were smarter than the rest of us, because we were too stupid to recognize our betters.
The smartest Magas actually understood our arguments, they just thought we were lying about what we truly believed and intended: they thought we were so offended by the idea that some people were just better than others that we’d sacrifice the whole human race and its only planet to prove the point.
All of this was gross and wrong and the years I’d spent arguing with Gramps and his buddies over it had been miserable, but one thing it had made me sure of was that the Magas didn’t want to watch the world burn. They sincerely wanted to save it. They weren’t wrong because they were cruel.
They were cruel because they were wrong.
* * *
Smoke-out builds—as they came to be known—were literally and figuratively the new hotness. Everywhere the smoke blew, there were fresh refus: unhomed people who couldn’t find shelter, refus from towns that were afire or in the fire’s path, people who’d built emergency buildings in their neighborhoods only to abandon them when the wind shifted and the flames licked at their boundaries.
A decade before, Uwayni had created powerful tools to liberate idle real estate from tangled legal ambiguities, absentee owners, and lost deeds. But as good as those tools were, they weren’t perfect, and every town and city—including Burbank—had empty lots and abandoned houses dotted through it, properties whose legal status was so snarled that even Uwayni’s legal tools couldn’t unpick it.
We built on those lots. I mean, I didn’t, not at first, not while I was recovering, but I cheered them on. Even when they talked about being in a lifeboat, and the need to throw the old rules overboard during an emergency. Even when I thought that this was exactly what Gramps’s friends thought they were doing, the Green Shock Doctrine, seizing on emergencies with direct action that literally bulldozed through the rules they couldn’t change through democratic means. Even when I thought about how this was what the Magas had done, a Flotilla-funded shock doctrine that shut down all the building they’d opposed all along. If it was going to be Dueling Shock Doctrines, I’d take the green one. If it was going to be Lifeboat Rules, I’d take a captain in a green hat, not a red one.
If your house is on fire, you pull the firehose to it by the shortest path, even if it crosses your neighbor’s lawn. Even if he howls about his property rights. Fuck property rights, we were defending human rights.
* * *
Back to work. Three days of nebulizers and O2 cannisters and rest and—especially—watching everyone else putting in the hours in the smoke, and I was so eager to get out there. Phuong, too. We’d been rattling around her house like change in the bottom of your pocket, clanking and clicking and getting nowhere fast and driving her housemates nuts.
But on the fourth day, we listened to each other’s chests and declared ourselves fit for service and suited up, put on our masks and goggles, and hit the road. We had our choice of building sites to work on, but of course, we went back to Gramps’s place, to do finish work: solarizing, paint, carpet, fixtures, staircases, exterior fire escapes. We did it for sentimental reasons, of course, but also for good reasons: the HVAC worked, meaning any indoor work we did would have filtered air, sparing our abused lungs from searing smoke, while still challenging us with a huge variety of new tasks that we had to learn from videos and mentors and remote experts.
The first day was incredibly rewarding, but we nearly got lost on the way home, the smoke was so thick, and so we decided the next day that we’d bring bedrolls and go fully live-work until the smoke cleared or the house was done, whichever came first.
There’s a Blue Helmet truism that the last 10 percent of any project takes 90 percent of the time, and that was certainly my experience with the building that had once been Gramps’s house. The early stages had involved standard parts—slabs, infrastructure, glazing, insulation—but now that we were doing fine work, things had to be just right—exactly right modular kitchen cabinets, the right sliding doors for balconies and locks for internal doors. More than half of the work was just hitting the screens, wrangling with other crews nearby to see who had the part you needed and then figuring out how to make rendezvous and acquire it.
But over the next four days, things took shape, and a couple of the apartments got real furniture, a mix of prefabs and donated pieces, and it was wild to see the rough structure I’d left a week before with my lungs on fire and my arms so heavy I could barely lift them now looking ready for human habitation. And habitate it we did, as parts of our crew left to work on other buildings that needed more work, until there were fewer than a dozen of us on-site at any moment, many of us couples like Phuong and me, so that we ended up with our own temporary, personal apartments (though people on the third and fourth floors had to borrow facilities from their downstairs neighbors because the city hadn’t been able to upgrade our main water service yet).
We started every day with an all-hands meeting up on the fourth floor, which had been laid out as a one-bedroom and an efficiency so that there could be leftover space for community use, with tall windows that afforded a commanding view of the rest of Fairview Street—the big camphor trees and ash-coated backyard furniture and pools. We’d put some easy-assembly stools in there made of glue and cardboard suspended on tight lengths of tensegrity monofilament, and we’d make a circle and get our screens out and plan the day’s work over coffee.
There were eight of us up there on the eighth day, and we were just coming to the consensus that there wasn’t enough work for all of us to do that day when Armen—who’d moved in with Dave and kept us all supplied with after-work vapes—interrupted us, pointing out the window and saying, “Hold up, hold up, what the fuck?” He didn’t sound at all like his usual laid-back, unruffleable self. He sounded scared. We all followed his finger.
Six men were moving down the street, masked and goggled like anyone you saw in the smoke, but through the haze you could see there was something different about them. They were in body armor, and two of them had automatic rifles I recognized as siblings to the guns I’d found in Gramps’s cache. All of them wore holstered squirt guns, doubtless full of acid, and one carried a baseball bat; another, a hatchet.
“Oh, shit,” someone said, and then I realized it was me. They were in a wedge-shaped formation, swinging their gaze from side to side as they quick-marched down Fairview Street. As we watched, they split into two groups, one heading for our front door, the other for the rear entrance.
Phuong smacked the big screen on one wall and then we were looking at their livestream, chyroned SHERIFF’S WARRANTS SERVED ON ENVIRONMENTAL CRIMINALS.
I started to say, “You’ve gotta be fucking kidding me,” but Phuong cut me off in the middle of “gotta” and cranked the sound, which was narration from the camera at our front door.
“—don’t have a lot of situational data about the interior, but we’re presuming up to about two dozen hostiles. We’ve got our warrants here but we’re not counting on compliance, which is why we’re going in hot. In the event that our suspects are watching this feed, we want you to know that we intend for you to face justice and that means we won’t use more force than is warranted for our own safety.” He’d been creeping steadily up to the front door through all this, and now his helmet cam showed him looking to the two others in his squad, one of whom had his rifle up and ready; the other was holding his squirt gun, a mini Super Soaker he was methodically and enthusiastically pumping up.
Now he stood on our doorstep and raised one hand to knock at the door, but before he did, he said, “Rear entry team check in.” Another voice on the stream: “Ready Leader One. Awaiting your signal.”
He nodded curtly, the camera going up-down, and then pounded on our door. “Self-sovereign sheriffs serving an arrest warrant. Open up in there. You have ten seconds.”
“The door’s not even locked,” Phuong said. It broke the horrified spell that had frozen us all in place.
“Fire escape,” I said, and bolted for the hallway. Every Blue Helmet knew the story of the Levant Company fire, an Istanbul warehouse conversion that had burned down mid-construction, after the rusting exterior fire stairs had been removed but before the emergency internal staircase had been built, trapping more than forty people on the upper floors. From the moment that our building had acquired a second story, it had a set of scaffolding running down one side, with steep stair/ladders, each landing kept clear in case of another fire.
I was closest to the door, so I was the first person to reach the fire escape, and the sound of my boots thumping on its landing was incredibly loud in the morning quiet. The smoke made it hard to see the ground floor and the militiamen, but I was sure they were craning their necks up at me, aiming their guns straight up. Not the squirt guns, of course. Not even the Magas were stupid enough to fire acid straight overhead.
Maybe.
I crept as quietly down the stairs as I could manage. The scaffolding had been well-constructed, but it was still made of bolts, pipes, and boards and it had a certain amount of flex and sway, and as more people piled out of the window above me that flex grew more pronounced, and the whole thing creaked like a windmill with a bad bearing.
I touched down on the ground just as more smoke rolled in and looked up to see how far away Phuong was. She was two landings up, helping someone else—I couldn’t make out who it was. The smoke was really getting thick. I looked up at her and thought come on, come on and then took a step away from the scaffolding toward the neighbor’s fence. Then I took a step back toward the scaffolding. What the hell was she doing?
Someone up on the landing, or maybe the one above it, started to cough. Real, old-fashioned, hacking spasms, the kind you got after weeks of smoke, when your lungs were so enflamed that they wanted to sue for divorce. Whoever it was tried to muffle it, but it wasn’t working. I heard voices from around the corner as the “sheriff’s deputies” heard the sounds, and then calls, and then running feet. I hopped from one foot to the next, put my hands on the ladder to scurry up again, and then decided not to and bolted for the fence, scrambling over it as the militiamen barked orders at me: Freeze! Hands where I can see them! Stop or I’ll shoot!
The chain-link tore my shirt and the skin of my hands as I cleared it, and all around me, liquid sizzled on the ground as someone emptied a Super Soaker full of hydrochloric acid toward me. A drop landed on the back of my work boot and began to eat through the sole, dissolving part of the stitching and making my boot feel loose and wobbly as I pelted off through the smoke, down Fairview Street, turning the corner onto Verdugo as I heard the first rounds of AR-15 fire tear through the air, back at the construction site.
* * *
Standing in Verdugo Park, a sense of unreality wafted over me with the smoke. All around me were the abandoned tents of the refus whom Burbank had finally welcomed indoors once the smoke got too thick. My lungs burned from the run, and my panting was loud in my ears.
But apart from the breathing and the smoke, everything seemed normal. Not like an armed militia gang had just tried to murder me. Not like they weren’t holding an unknown number of my friends and comrades hostage. Not like Phuong wasn’t in terrible danger. She might be dead. How could that be? So sudden. So irreversible. Like knocking a house down: one minute it’s there, eternal, the site of a million memories, the central node of a network of people and things and deeds. The next minute, it’s gone. Forever. Nothing can ever be done to put it back. If Phuong was dead, I would never talk to her again. Never see her again. Never kiss her again. Never resolve our misunderstandings. Never create new memories together. I might find someone else someday, but it wouldn’t be her. No one would be her.
* * *
What do you do when an armed militia wants to murder you? When they’ve taken your friends hostage?
Go to the cops? Fuck that. The militias had fully infiltrated law enforcement, obviously. The cops were no friends of mine. They’d had lots of opportunities to deal with the terrorists who’d blown up our buildings and instead they’d spent their time enforcing against the people putting up new buildings.
Go to the DSA? That was my first impulse: for weeks I’d been a cyber-militiaman for the Green New Deal, fighting in a flame war over what we were doing, what it meant, and who the bad guys and good guys were. The war was fought with screens, but it wasn’t virtual. Like Constance Ming said, we would have lost our court battle if it wasn’t for the undeniable truth that more people supported our side than the side of plutes, militias, and wreckers. They have the money, but we have the people, and the people have to show up if they’re gonna get shit done.
My impulse to go to the DSA was immediate, but short-lived. I was rasping, sweating, cut up, scared, and, above all, furious. My lover and my friends were being held hostage by monsters, and it was all happening in my house, and the experience of being run off the property I’d been raised on by masked, armed cowards had humiliated me and made me so furious I couldn’t see straight, literally. My vision had gone black and red around the edges, and between that and the smoke and my tears, I could barely see.
It was there in Verdugo Park, staring at the unseeable, heart thudding with rage, that I had a wicked, terrible, amazing idea.
* * *