It was a burning day in January, like they all were these days. Emerging from my tent (a shelter sized for two, though I didn't share mine with anyone else) I groaned and adjusted my wide-brimmed work hat, thinking of the centrally-cooled public apartment I had left to travel to the Great California Desert. Thousands of us had come, living in a colony of temporary life that was slowly crossing the state so that we could be close to our work.
After visiting the nonsegregated public showers and sharing small talk with my fellow late risers, I dropped my previous days' clothes in the laundry bin, and dressed for another grueling day in the sun. Lightweight fabrics, long sleeves and pants - a wide-brimmed hat and a pair of sunglasses (which bore the logo of a company that had existed before the revolution). It was tiring work to be sure, but everyone here was free to come and go as they pleased, and to work at their own pace, so many workdays were broken up by impromptu sports and long conversations.
The collective canteen was my only refuge from the dry heat, as it was a more permanent structure built to service the workers and thus had air conditioning. There were two lines to get your food, one with a revolving schedule and one which served the same staples every day. Old comrades like me often complained about the plant-based faux-meat not tasting quite like the real thing, but the truth is that this was only bluster - we had all been vegan long enough at this point to have forgotten what animal products actually tasted like, and in many places even the faux-burgers and hot dogs were being phased out because demand was simply too low to warrant them.
After "mobbing up" with some of my closest friends, we grabbed tools from a converted old military truck, and headed out to the current edge of the job site. We would work within earshot of each other, in order to carry on conversation (mostly complaining about the heat) as we churned the hard dirt, mixed healthy soil into it, and planted a combination of plants that grew both fast and slow. There were mangers on the site - technically elected but in practice almost always just the oldest person - but it was hard to waste your effort at this stage of the project. All of the dirt that the eye could see needed to be soiled, so we simply picked a direction and got started.
It was hard for me to see from my position so close to it, but the "Carbon Recapture and Desertification Reversal" project was already showing promising results in the northern part of the Californian Socialist Republic. Animal populations were growing, wildfires were decreasing year over year, some land thought lost forever had once again become tenable for farming - but I know that it's all too easy to get complacent.
The way I see it, it took us a few hundred years to get here, so it's only natural for it to take a few hundred years to clean up. I remember my last days before I joined the revolution, working at a private space company which had designs of building a space colony. I was a true believer in colonization, that I would get to be among the thousands that fled this world for another - but in hindsight that dream was the coping mechanism of a society that saw its own doom coming.
Now, in the post-society, the dream has been broken, and reality stretches before us. Some among The Party itself still cling to the hope of seeing final stage, fully automated, post-State communism in their lifetime - but most, like me, recognize that that society won't exist until we create the material conditions for it to come into being. Almost five years I've been out here changing material conditions - less Decembers which I spend back home with my family - and we've still got a long-ass way to go.
It was a burning day in January, like they all were these days. Emerging from my tent (a shelter sized for two, though I didn't share mine with anyone else) I groaned and adjusted my wide-brimmed work hat, thinking of the centrally-cooled public apartment I had left to travel to the Great California Desert. Thousands of us had come, living in a colony of temporary life that was slowly crossing the state so that we could be close to our work.
After visiting the nonsegregated public showers and sharing small talk with my fellow late risers, I dropped my previous days' clothes in the laundry bin, and dressed for another grueling day in the sun. Lightweight fabrics, long sleeves and pants - a wide-brimmed hat and a pair of sunglasses (which bore the logo of a company that had existed before the revolution). It was tiring work to be sure, but everyone here was free to come and go as they pleased, and to work at their own pace, so many workdays were broken up by impromptu sports and long conversations.
The collective canteen was my only refuge from the dry heat, as it was a more permanent structure built to service the workers and thus had air conditioning. There were two lines to get your food, one with a revolving schedule and one which served the same staples every day. Old comrades like me often complained about the plant-based faux-meat not tasting quite like the real thing, but the truth is that this was only bluster - we had all been vegan long enough at this point to have forgotten what animal products actually tasted like, and in many places even the faux-burgers and hot dogs were being phased out because demand was simply too low to warrant them.
After "mobbing up" with some of my closest friends, we grabbed tools from a converted old military truck, and headed out to the current edge of the job site. We would work within earshot of each other, in order to carry on conversation (mostly complaining about the heat) as we churned the hard dirt, mixed healthy soil into it, and planted a combination of plants that grew both fast and slow. There were mangers on the site - technically elected but in practice almost always just the oldest person - but it was hard to waste your effort at this stage of the project. All of the dirt that the eye could see needed to be soiled, so we simply picked a direction and got started.
It was hard for me to see from my position so close to it, but the "Carbon Recapture and Desertification Reversal" project was already showing promising results in the northern part of the Californian Socialist Republic. Animal populations were growing, wildfires were decreasing year over year, some land thought lost forever had once again become tenable for farming - but I know that it's all too easy to get complacent.
The way I see it, it took us a few hundred years to get here, so it's only natural for it to take a few hundred years to clean up. I remember my last days before I joined the revolution, working at a private space company which had designs of building a space colony. I was a true believer in colonization, that I would get to be among the thousands that fled this world for another - but in hindsight that dream was the coping mechanism of a society that saw its own doom coming.
Now, in the post-society, the dream has been broken, and reality stretches before us. Some among The Party itself still cling to the hope of seeing final stage, fully automated, post-State communism in their lifetime - but most, like me, recognize that that society won't exist until we create the material conditions for it to come into being. Almost five years I've been out here changing material conditions - less Decembers which I spend back home with my family - and we've still got a long-ass way to go.