September 15th, 2093: Tokyo Harbor, Japan
I’m so glad there’s a sign of life, of society, of civilization on the shores of Tokyo harbor. Forty of us sailed across the Pacific in the fusion-powered hydrofoil Kobayashi Maru and it looks like we’re going to be met by someone. It’s been about twenty years since anyone from North America visited Japan. Our crew includes linguists and anthropologists. Two were born in Japan, one in Korea and three in China. This voyage was years in the planning, training and building, but only took six days to actually reach our first destination. We’re the third of the Voyages of Rediscovery: the first headed north along the Canadian and Alaskan coasts to reconnect with the Russians, the second headed south to reconnect with Latin America. While those voyages have stayed close to land, this was the mission these ships were designed for. As far as we know, these are the first ocean-going ships built in decades. Cruising speed of 50 knots, range unlimited. We’re stocked with communications gear, sensors, and a medical bay. Our navigation gear is old school — sextants, charts, and astronomical tables –the GPS satellites stopped working long ago. We also have a modern version of dead reckoning using accelerometers and magnetometers: it’s almost as accurate as GPS.
The voyage north met up with an outpost of Russian, Mongolian, and Chinese who had settled in Siberia to harvest the peat bog. When the freighters and trains stopped coming they took advantage of the warmer weather, thawed land and copious amounts of peat to begin a farming community. The fish stocks have recovered enough for subsistence fishing to supplement farming. The voyagers were the first outsiders they had seen in almost ten years. None of them had seen a doctor in a dozen years, so they were happy for the portable clinic we set up for the week of our visit. The voyagers were given fresh food and a farewell party that is already the stuff of legend among the Corps. The fabled Northwest Passage is wide open, with nary a polar bear or Inuit village in sight. There were some ghost towns that were set up by prospectors before the Great Reset. No money makes investment in mines a challenge. They’re now in New England taking their time along the Maine coast.
The voyage south has been depressing. Hurricanes have battered the Pacific coast from San Diego to Panama, their current location. The remaining villages are small and the buildings are little more than lean-tos made out of palm fronds and bamboo that can easily be reconstructed after a storm. A team traveled inland to Managua, a city of over a million people before The Awakening, and found maybe 10,000 people living amidst the rubble in Iron Age splendor. The locks of the Panama Canal are either stuck open or closed, but in any case the canal is impassable. They’ll continue south, but don’t expect to see much until they round Cape Horn and head up the Atlantic Coast to Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro.
This project is a testament to how Cascadia has grown. It now reaches south to the old US-Mexico border, north to the Arctic Ocean, and east to Chicago. Texas and the southeast show no interest in joining, but I suspect New England will be part of the country before my return. The rules to join are simple: you must be contiguous with our current border; have a functional democratic government; accept our constitution; and conduct a locally run plebiscite monitored by the Cascadian government. After that, if your citizens want in, you’re in. We have a unicameral Parliament. The size and shape of each riding is decided every ten years after a census based upon three constraints: the number of ridings equals 400 (so that Parliament doesn’t get unmanageably large); the number of people in each riding is the same; and the total perimeter of all of the ridings combined is minimized. This gives each Member of Parliament good reason to think about people in neighboring ridings, since they may be in their riding at the next election. Elections are conducted by instant runoff voting, where voters state their preferences and all votes are counted, eliminating the candidate with the fewest votes until one candidate achieves 50%. This form of election favors moderates, which is what we need to rebuild our society. States and provinces still exist and have jurisdiction over local issues, but are totally ignored at the national level. We are all Cascadians.
Rather than taxes, the federal government has a monopoly on certain industries, mainly the manufacture, sale, and distribution of heavy-hydrogen fuel and generators. This provides an easy source of income without the hassle of taxes. They’ve done a good job supplying what’s needed to this point with no evidence of corruption, so no one is complaining. In general, corruption and crime are rare, in part because every financial transaction is recorded. There are privacy concerns, but no one can access the information without a subpoena. We all remember what it was like when we had no money at all, so this doesn’t seem unreasonable.
A major effort has been to rebuild schools, from preschool to universities. The University of Washington is one of the few that survived the Great Reset. Depending on where you lived and when you were born, you might have never gone to school. Finding qualified teachers is a challenge, but a critical one if we’re going to rebuild civilization.
In addition to reconnecting with the rest of the world, we’ve reconnected with the Mars colony. The Emissaries let us know what frequency the Martians were monitoring, so we gave them a call. Boy, were they glad to hear from us! They could tell based on telescopic observations that there were still cities and electric lights, but they couldn’t tell much more than that. Their population has continued to grow, along with the oxygen levels. They actually need nitrogen more than water or oxygen now, so the planetesimal harvesting system is focused on gathering ammonia ice. It was always among the desired molecules, as it’s also a greenhouse gas, it’s just that water was preferred. They’ve also established contact with The Ark. The on-board systems have continued to maintain the transfer orbit between Earth and Mars and all systems continue to be operational. It’s possible for someone to meet it as it flies by Earth or Mars and catch a ride. They do have a wish list from Earth, including seeds and some new fusion generators. As the colony is growing, they are having trouble meeting the demands for power. They have built a few generators as well as a fuel extraction facility, but they can’t keep up with demand. Until we build a spaceship to get into orbit, it’s all academic. The Emissaries have let us know that they do have the designs from before and are happy to share them if we decide to try and return to Mars.
Time to board the skiff and see how things have been in Japan.
