I’d been gone almost eight months.
Six months ago, over the course of two weeks, the state of California was flooded with an alien signal that jammed airwaves and hijacked live streams, interrupted cellular transmissions and poured out of civil defense sirens, and blared out of speakers attached to drones which swept through cities and countryside alike, always on a constant loop. This I presumed to be the teleport/transmute combination sequence that Olivia had intended to design and then broadcast, and its effectiveness was unparalleled.
If you heard the five-second loop of the signal from start to finish, you vanished instantly, never to be seen again.
As the signal commenced in that first week, Violet closed the borders in and out of California, deploying an unprecedented number of National Guard units to reinforce her order, requesting and receiving additional army support for the purpose as well. She also ordered California’s airspace and sea ports closed. The state was well and truly isolated as of this point.
The first week of the signal was akin to the Rapture of Christian mythology, sweeping up entire city populations at once. The second week was a punishing “clean-up” stage, snaring a whole additional wave of the unwary who hadn’t truly assimilated the message that the signal was unforgiving in every sense. The signal could not be disseminated so carefully that a person standing on the other side of the border wouldn’t hear it in every situation; consequently, neighboring states experienced their share of collateral losses.
Frightening first-person reconstructions of these days were available, describing some of the ingenious or accidental methods people used to survive the seeming omnipresence of the signal. You couldn’t easily avoid it, but some people learned you could drown it out with louder sounds; the drones frequently flew lower than the top floors of high-rises, so you could survive by gaining altitude in cities; the drones did not have unlimited range, so you could survive if you were in deep enough wilderness.
But not every city or region was targeted. Los Angeles was hit hard, for instance; Sacramento was completely spared.
The signal finally ended two weeks after it had begun, and there was silence for nearly a day. The borders remained closed to external emergency services or any offers of assistance, and heavily fortified against potential armed incursions.
Then Violet Parker got behind a microphone at a podium on the steps of the governor’s mansion in Sacramento, and she very calmly informed a panicked world that she was no longer governor of the state of California. Now she was Empress of the sovereign nation of California, fully seceded from the United States. Obviously one single state did not comprise an actual empire, but by naming herself Empress, she made it clear she had no intention of stopping here.
Oh and my god, her planning had been meticulous. All across the state, surviving political, civil, and military leaders pronounced their loyalty to Empress Violet the First, making it clear that an entire infrastructure of leadership had known this was coming, had been warned to avoid the signal so that they could emerge in this very moment to aid Violet’s ascension over California’s governmental bodies. US military units denounced their chain of command, transitioning to Violet as their commander in chief. She arranged it so that several nuclear-powered fast-attack submarines from the navy were in port in San Diego during these changes, where they could be fully assimilated into her command.
She claimed full responsibility for disseminating the signal that had caused, by her own report, ten million souls (one quarter of the population of California) to be “relocated,” and made it extremely clear that she was capable of deploying this signal again at any time in any part of the developed world. She announced that she would not tolerate military retaliation for this act, but she didn’t actually expect the US to foolishly send troops into a hot zone where they could themselves be instantly “relocated,” and she didn’t expect the US to initiate bombing runs on territory and resources it undoubtedly expected to reacquire as soon as it could figure out how. She admitted these things in her speech in part to explain them to her own frightened subjects, as well as to educate her new peers on the global stage about the extent of her tactical prowess.
Then, she announced a five-day festival, a celebration of California’s independence. While her people tried to enjoy their days off from work or school or horrific grieving, she stayed busy.
She marched army units into AT&T facilities in Los Angeles and San Francisco, took control of NSA equipment that cloned internet backbone traffic for the US government, and began a private auction for access to this data. The US government nearly melted down in outrage, a neat trick given that this gear wasn’t supposed to exist. She commandeered all banks headquartered in California and ordered all consumer debt erased, wiping ledgers clean not simply for Californians but for citizens worldwide. She ordered every computer server that could be controlled from within California to be shut down for these five days, disrupting countless industries. You couldn’t just “turn off” the internet, but from within California, you could force enough traffic to stale caches on edge servers that transactions would start to fail in significant quantity.
She rounded up every billionaire she could get her hands on in California (San Francisco alone was home to seventy-five billionaires at the time of the relocation), arrested them, and attempted to confiscate their wealth in the name of the Crown. The ones who gave up the passcodes to their secret offshore bank accounts were released; the ones who clammed up about where their wealth was hidden disappeared without a trace. Almost immediately, she began publicly making offers on the black market for weapons the US desperately did not want her to have.
The message was clear: a rogue Empress with her hands on California’s resources and a willingness to truly disrupt the status quo could make quite a mess of the world before anyone could figure out how to stop her. But while the US obviously believed Violet to be a clear and present danger, the rest of the world seemed to relish the actions of its newly found ally. Indeed, reading about the apoplectic helplessness of the US during this wild, five-day celebration was a darkly amusing pursuit for many.
On day six, Violet appeared again for another speech, indicating she was satisfied with the many invitations she’d received to open up embassies around the world. She claimed she was bemused that the United States was alone among the western capitalist pseudo-democracies in refusing to open diplomatic dialogue with her government. She indicated she didn’t need good relations or open borders with the US to be a powerful economic and political presence in the world. But if the US provoked her even slightly, to test her resolve in any way about ruling California as its Empress, she’d be happy to remind them that she alone possessed the “relocation” signal, which she could aim with no warning at any target she chose—including Washington, DC.
This was likely a bluff, as some analysts understood. The unique surprise of her accomplishment using the signal within the state of California, where she controlled levers of media and technology at a deep level, would not be easy to replicate outside her borders now that the world knew what to look for in a deployment of her signal. But a major part of her success was her ability to keep her conspiracy completely silent during her preparation phase, and there was no way to know if her conspirators included others still in play elsewhere in the US government. The likelihood that she was bluffing was high, but the danger if she wasn’t bluffing was also high. She’d definitely earned the wary respect of the intelligence communities now tasked with observing her every move.
Enormous antipathy swelled about her. Huge waves of deep grief and anguish permeated every corner of the Californian/American social graph because of her. The unknowable terror of wondering if another “relocation” event could happen again was the only thing preventing a violent uprising against her—but that very specific terror was definitely a sufficient lever for Violet to maintain an iron grip on her new empire.
My in-box was flooded with my family and a few East Coast friends reaching out repeatedly, trying to learn if I was safe, optimistically sending multiple messages, tapering off over time. I didn’t have the capacity to fashion responses to every one of them at that moment. I made one exception, though, a short reply to my ex Wendy that simply said, “Yeah I’m alive.”
And then a small fluttering sound distracted me, followed by a gasp, prompting me to look up from the laptop screen.
Across the gym from me, Maddy had appeared, and now stared at me in amazement.
“Oh my god,” she said.