After Children of the Storm: Into the South Bay

Having lived across the west side of Greater Los Angeles for a while now, some ideas for the futuristic form it takes in my science-fictional alternate timeline I set my stories in have started to crystalize better…and one such story is “Children of the Storm” (already finished but yet to be released), which already featured some of Southern California but didn’t describe all of Greater Los Angeles.

What’s now the South Bay cities, especially, remains nebulous in the canon of my stories: the only hint as to its status is that in “Children of the Storm” the skyline of Los Angeles is describes as stretching all the way to Palos Verdes. The idea is that this most intensely urbanized area extends along the Santa Monica Bay starting around the eastern end of Malibu and ends around Palos Verdes, i.e. the southernmost end of the bay. There’s another axis of intense skyscraper development that extends from Santa Monica to Downtown Los Angeles to Pasadena…and that’s about it.

There’s a fringe of “kudzu houses”, small-lot detached homes, that extends perhaps a few miles beyond the immediate beachfront, but beyond that it rapidly transitions to outright rural acreages that sprawl a vast distance outside the city: in a world where you can travel 400 miles down the freeway in an hour and 600 miles down the train line in an hour, there’s no reason to settle for a 0.25 lot closer to the city when you could get a 25 acre lot further away from the city.

Which still leaves open the question of what happens to Palos Verdes itself, that peninsula of hills stretching a thousand feet high right next to the water, enjoying 270-degree views of the Pacific Ocean. In real life the place was built out as a rather homogeneous and dense suburb, with golf courses being particularly prominent. But in a timeline that diverges in 1900 that could easily be different.

How different? Perhaps Coruscant-esque development carpets the hills of Palos Verdes, but considering it’s more rugged ground that’s more difficult to work with it’s likely that the towers of Palos Verdes will be of smaller scale, perhaps lower-rise architectural marvels strategically placed to maximize elevation and ocean (and mountain) views, blending in and perhaps even enhancing the natural landscape. Larger portions than in real life may well be kept as wild lands, with rural estates (given this timeline’s predilection for those) remaining a presence on the peninsula, as well as good old-fashioned suburbs being sprinkled in. The overall landscape of built environments could easily be more diverse.

Which is where we come in with the “Children of the Storm”. What if Marina, the offspring of Aoife and Aoifan (the similarity in naming isn’t coincidental: they’re first cousins), owns and designs one of these towers as a passion project? In my concept for a sequel to “Children of the Storm”, it’s 2064 in this world (when news of first contact with aliens on Proxima Centauri reaches Earth, a date which is already fixed in a previous story), and she’s supposed to be born in 2046 (nine months after the cousins couple up in “Children of the Storm”, already established to be 2045), which means as of when the story takes place she’d be the ripe old age of…16.

A bit young to be erecting towers, but she is sole heiress to a multi-billion-dollar fortune; if anyone would be doing such a thing it’s her. The whole idea actually is kind of interesting: imagine what a teenage girl’s idea of a dream skyscraper tower would be like. Hmm.

My current thinking is that she lives in the tower’s penthouse and designs it all to her taste. Since she’s a monastic and spiritual type, my first thought is that it would be the ultimate meditative retreat, promoting wholesome living or some such. Very Zen and New-Age-y, perhaps. And very California.

Mother Aoife’s tastes might be decisive here: she was utterly captivated by the medical spa she went to as a teenage girl on Anacapa Island (right off the coast of California), full of surf boards, saltwater pools, mirrors, wind chimes, great big balconies, sea sponges dangling from the ceiling, sea glass decorations, big fireplace hearths in every room, driftwood decorations, beach stones in glass jars, blooming flowers climbing the sides making for green walls, and everything that frankly makes even the most ostentatiously Californian housing of our world look milquetoast beyond belief.

Aoife thought then that she’d want a house that’s just like the room she stayed at in the spa, and I have no doubt she followed in her mother Katenka’s footsteps (Marina’s grandmother, if you’re keeping track), and got herself a house right on the sand in the same region. Katenka lives in Malibu, and as the ultimate surfer girl Aoife would find Malibu the obvious choice (the self-improvement program she follows is literally called “Malibu Girl”).

What will Marina be? I still don’t know. I’ve featured a few too many horse girls (albeit not in great detail) in my stories, and the mother is a surfer girl, so I was thinking Marina might be something different, perhaps a ski girl, all the better to feature the worldbuilding I’ve done in the realm of backcountry skiing being a way of life for 21st century Americans. But I wonder if mother’s grip might be so smothering she might turn out to be just another surfer girl after all. They would be awfully cute together on their boards…

Also cute would be giving Marina an AI-guided Malibu Girl program to follow, just like her mother did; this isn’t brainwashing, and the recipients do enjoy a free choice, which is even baked into the premise of the programming being adaptive, so perhaps it molds itself to fit Marina’s less silly and more serious personality. Snowboarding in particular might be a natural and even encouraged extension of surfing for someone in her position; perhaps it extends to her trying out and enjoying skiing, but we’ll see about all these details.

If mother is the model, then Marina’s tower would be something like Aoife’s house, only scaled up over an entire apartment hotel building, and given Marina’s monastic and spiritual touch. Gunston might even lend the project more Japanese flavor from his own life experience with mother Georgia (who was in Virginia originally but after the first of the great storms struck her she relocated to a liveaboard yacht and spent most of her time in Japan). He too is born in 2046, so they’re exactly the same age; they grow up as childhood best friends…and perhaps become more.

What might these touches be? Notably Marina’s mother unplugs from electronic devices by the time she reaches the age of 15: she doesn’t use any aside from the Malibu Girl program her smart contacts and hearables provide her, instead being outside on the beach having fun with her friends, where she belongs, with all of her relations being entirely in-person and face-to-face. So I’m thinking if Marina is brought up in this rather regressive lifestyle she might design her building to unplug. It wouldn’t even be a huge stretch from coastal California in real life: the Sea Ranch’s hotel entirely lacks televisions, for instance; it’s just carried to a more fantastical extreme.

Somehow I picture a residence full of soothing features like wind chimes and running water, while the entire place is oriented toward the idea that you’re outdoors doing physical activity of some sort all the time. So perhaps the place has totally open air flow? The climate of Palos Verdes would support it well enough even without any artificial climate control.

Typical apartment hotels in this world are sized not just for individuals but for families to live in too very comfortably. A three- or more bedroom suite as big as a typical detached house but run as a hotel is a totally normal place for people to live in as a permanent address. Cinemas and dance venues are the center of social life in this universe, and shopping malls are often built into the apartment hotel buildings. These malls include cosmetic clinics that incorporate salons and spas, which see far more intensive everyday use in this world, and include a variety of restaurants, which is the dominant venue at which people eat their meals: Katenka, a billionaire, rents a house that doesn’t even have a kitchen, and in the story it’s not viewed as being all that unusual.

As part of my brainstorm I’m wondering if a lot of these buildings in this particular area could be oriented to maximize ocean views, with the vast majority of space being some kind of balconies outdoors. Katenka’s house, notably, fits that description: balconies take up about as much floor area as indoor space does! A pencil-tower-like configuration, with each floor occupying a single unit, might be an attractive and common layout for towers in this world. In real life it’s very premium, but in this world it might be more normal.

“Vanity height” has spiraled out of control in this universe in general: the Grand Ole Opry Tower’s penthouse has several times its own floor area underneath it as unfinished space, just in case someone might want to outfit it later (which they do, when the occupants of said penthouse start having a big family). Spires that are mostly air rather than structure are commonplace, as are towers that just have a few floors of space but they’re lofted by some concrete spire a thousand feet or more into the sky, a la the CN Tower. Indeed, most of the skyscrapers in this world would by the definition used today be towers rather than true buildings.

Anyway, balconies being a large part of Marina’s tower’s floor area would be a really interesting possibility, especially if it’s coupled with a pencil-tower one-unit-per-floor configuration.

The thought has struck my mind that Marina might design it not so much as an ordinary apartment building, though, but rather as a temple. Someone as monastic in temperament as her might feel like she belongs in an environment more like an ancient temple than a normal house, and this might be carried through to the design of her tower. Indeed, considering his supernatural origins (his father is a centuries-old ghost; yes, really), and the fact his mother was rather “visionary” to begin with, Gunston strikes me as the type to have meaningful prophetic dreams and the like. Perhaps he dreams he and Marina are in a temple together, which gives her the inspiration to build such a structure. Or something like that.

I’m thinking Marina builds her dream tower on one of the southwesternmost tip of the Palos Verdes Peninsula. Somewhere like the tiny bit of land in between Honeymoon Cove and Lunada Bay. It’s a very small area, but as a pencil tower it stretches up vertically, not across the ground horizontally. And cutting-edge techniques even today (let alone in that world) can help the tower anchor into the bedrock, preventing it from falling off along with the rocks into the ocean when a storm hits…maybe. But the events of 2064 might test the design to its limits…

I’m thinking this could be the basis of a dreamy atmospheric tale. The heart of the action takes place at the tower, but it begins with Gunston sailing in along with his mother from Japan on her yacht. King Harbor in Redondo Beach is the closest major point they could dock, but I’ve been thinking that yacht and boat ownership is far more widespread in this world: they’re going to need to build a lot more ports.

But they can’t allow ports, because too much industrial development interferes with the sand and the surf. Waves are protected in this world for the surfers. So port infrastructure has been deployed far offshore, consisting of mostly-submerged towers that connect with subsurface tunnels, interfacing with the city and with the land, and at a distance far enough to not interfere with the beachgoers’ views and the surfers’ waves. This is also helpful because cargo ship traffic, owing to the far more prosperous economy, is too vast for any conventional port to handle. Places like Coos Bay in Oregon and Shannon in Ireland in this world dwarf the likes of our Long Beach, and those are essentially overflow developments.

So converting more beachfront into harbor space is out of the question: even a project like King Harbor or Marina del Rey might be questionable, in light of the environmental difficulties it poses for the coastline. But there is another option, aside from siting all the docks far offshore and connecting with tunnels: just move the harbors inland. Places like Amsterdam already practice such a model (albeit for other reasons); imagine canals being built out from the beachfront extending even several miles inland, big enough for yachts to sail in and dock directly at the numerous buildings that dot the coast of Greater Los Angeles, the waterways serving both as tourist attractions, climate moderators, and as main streets, as well as essentially parking lots for boats. Which need parking, and in two dimensions: car and train infrastructure in this world has all been moved underground, and air traffic flits to and from the rooftops of urban buildings, leaving city streets as very quiet places. Pedestrians and bicyclists rule the day.

Since most of the South Bay cities were only built out later in real life, perhaps they participate more fully in this waterborne transformation than the rest of Greater Los Angeles: think something like Marina del Rey writ large, only much deeper into the interior. There could even be garages for small yachts, elevators for the boats, and so forth.

So Georgia could dock her yacht perhaps even as far into the interior as Hawthorne (courtesy of canal locks handling the increase in elevation), her and Gunston able to walk off their home and enjoy a coffee and croissant at a cafe overlooking the water as they watch all the other sailboats pass by. Gunston then goes on horseback to his best friend’s tower in Palos Verdes. Yes, horseback.

Even in real life California (for such a high-tech area) has a shockingly large number of communities where horses are a prominent means of transportation, and as the masses embrace the lifestyle benefits of horseback rising and horse ownership there might actually be a renaissance of this rather archaic form of transportation. If you’re on a ranch already and ride your horse through the canyons, why not just ride your horse into town? Even if “town” is a glittering sci-fi cityscape of buildings that stretch five miles tall. After all, with cars and trains all shunted underground, it’s not like there’s any higher-speed traffic to contend with.

More to the point, entire sections of the outlying reaches might be designed with dedicated horseback riding trails as the go-to means of ingress and egress, and this will hold true for Palos Verdes, as a luxe community designed to take advantage of outdoor recreation and natural beauty. Instead of golf courses I’m picturing polo fields and the like being much more prominent in this timeline’s version of Palos Verdes.

So these towers on the Santa Monica Bay would need stables, aircraft docks, and yacht docks, in addition to subway stations and parking garages connecting to underground freeways, which paints a sublime picture to the point it’s rather mind-boggling.

Oh, and as a corollary, all this horseback riding means that equestrian fashion remains much more prominent in the culture and on the street. One upshot: capes stay in style, instead of never being heard from again after FDR’s lifetime.

As for what Gunston and Marina do once they get to this tower of hers, I have the idea that the arctic front that leads to the grand finale of the years of “El Diablo” (as the climate pattern is called in this universe) hits California in a big way.

In the eastern United States there’s a massive heat wave that in Nashville manifests as 130-degree heat with dew points above human body temperature (a range where the heat index is lethal and if you breathe the outside air you’ll drown, as water condenses into the lungs), suddenly broken by a violent front screaming down from the arctic, which plunges temperatures in one night down to 20 degrees, hurricane-force winds accompanied by an outbreak of tornadoes of a strength never before witnessed.

Volcanic eruptions in Iceland and Antarctica along with a solar grand minimum setting in create a volcanic winter after that fateful midsummer’s cold front, similar to the famous “Year without a Summer”, which stretches on for multiple years, the global climate eventually stabilizing at a notch colder than the depths of the “Little Ice Age” in the 17th century. But that takes years: in the meantime, plant-based crops undergo massive failures, the Earth’s people reliant on the beef and dairy cattle, the only major food source hardy enough to make it through the extremes, and what crops the off-world colonies can spare.

But before this happens, the heat wave doesn’t affect coastal California; in contrast with the record-hot waters in the Gulf of Mexico, the eastern Pacific is very cold. The gradient between what may well be 140-degree heat in Death Valley and 40-degree water (and 40-degree air temperatures) on the coast is truly extreme. Fog may blow in off the coast, so thick as to reduce visibility to zero, and since the heat ridge before the arctic front comes through is in place for months as the continent (bar the west coast) bakes under a hot and dry pattern (until the lead-up to the cold front, where Gulf of Mexico moisture pours in, hence why dew points rise to around 100 degrees), this means that Marina, Katenka, Aoife, and friends will be shivering under the dankest fog in California history. Imagine it being 40 degrees day after day, constantly, with zero visibility other than the occasional break that lets you see another fog bank rolling in. And this is summer. In California.

It would be broken when the arctic front roars through, but it would then get even colder, and much windier…along with a storm surge. Precipitation is unlikely, but the atmospheric instability would be extreme, perhaps enough to cause electrical storms that course through the coast, as well as tornadoes that sweep through in a fashion more akin to a summer on the High Plains than the South Coast. The most spectacular phenomenon might be ocean-effect snow as the cold wave reaches the peak, and the cold air blowing over the warm water from the north encounters conditions just right for a squall cloud to form…

Picture a midsummer’s snow squall roiling over the South Bay, easily visible in its cumulonimbus glory from El Segundo to Redondo Beach, as orographic lift and the more westerly position of the Palos Verdes hills enables it to be dumped on by snow, the battered landscape turning white as palm trees are dusted in the middle of summer.

And all this happens as Gunston and Marina are together at her dream tower, and it, and them, are in danger. Both at the age of sixteen. If their hearts will ever melt for each other out of pure desire, that’s going to be the time.

I had an idea for a sprawling epic like “Children of the Storm”, but perhaps that’s the story I need to depict first contact from Earth’s point of view in my universe: something more intimate, like a microcosm. So far I’m liking this. I’m rather busy with other matters now, but maybe, someday, for my own enjoyment and amusement, I’ll actually write this tale out…