This was originally posted on Fedi with the content warning ‘this is very stupid solarpunk bullshit but let me have and hold it for a moment’.

It is two years after the revolution ended and the last of the Union guard has left.

Lara bikes down through the Wiggle and down the urban desert. She stops in the middle of the street, looking at an empty storefront being repurposed for food redistribution. Someone with a PGE patch sewn on their shirt shoulder is setting up mismatched. It is largely vestigial, but the cachet of the power brigade carries.

She really isn’t looking forward to pulling her bike up Nob Hill to get all the way to her volunteer spot, but, hey, what are you gonna do. City of the seven hills and all that bullshit. Better here than past the state line.


She pulls out her phone. When the comrades pulled out, all inflow of data got cut — every commercial ISP immediately ended access to the upstream. Things have started to get a little better on that front, but for now all she gets is the background-sync drop the tiny mesh antenna grabbed from the muni peers. She pulls out the antenna from the velcro and pockets it, then sets the phone to play her feed as she begins her trek uphill.

She’s three quarters of the way uphill when she hears the engine come up. The Muni buses are running again, but still at early pandemic levels. If she had just waited a little more… But no — there is no real schedule and no real clock where she’s volunteering, but she still feels like she was late enough to work that waiting would’ve felt worse.

A feed chirp: “From CNN on Twitter” — someone finally must’ve grabbed a Union news drop to mesh — “TWO YEARS AFTER CLOSURE, SITUATION TENSE AT WESTERN BORDER. According to US diplomats, talks have broken down around demands for open circulation from the Pacific ex-states. The situation remains most tense at the Idaho border, where ICE intervention can’t stop emigrants from trying to reach Californian entry points…”

Lara sits on the pavement as the phone recounts how Oregon seems poised to join the Pacific edge and pull into the common resource network. She’s only half-listening; curiosity burned for a mere moment, but the news from past the state line don’t ever really change, do they.

Syra comes by, coffee cups in hand — one the way xi takes it, so white it’s basically just milk, and one the way Lara does, no milk, honey.

“Hey, biker.”

“Hey.”

“We’re setting up for a little movie time at work tonight, wanna stay?”

Lara looks at the skyline of the free city of San Francisco. Here, at the top of the hill, city one way and the Bay on the other side, it’s absolutely breathtaking.

“No, yeah, sure, why not.” And she smiles.


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