A Walk Through Blue Wave City on Drawdown Day
An attempt at solarpunk fiction about a good Anthropocene
Author’s note: I wrote this short story in early 2021, and illustrated it in December 2023. Many of the technologies, places, and projects in this short story are inspired by real, in-progress work, and many have progressed substantially since the story was written! Footnotes contain links to projects and concepts happening now that are portrayed as having grown into influential parts of human civilization in this fictional future.
I slid down the fire pole from my apartment’s balcony to the grassy walkway below, willing my neural mesh1 to flip my datalens2 to recording mode. Early signs were good that today was the long-hoped-for Drawdown Day, when our atmosphere would finally be on the road to recovery, and I wanted to share every minute of it. When this year’s Blue Number was released, it would be bigger than Midsummer, Saturnalia, and Diwali combined.
“So, I live inland on the landward side of Blue Wave City3, and our Number-release event is on the waterfront, on the seaward shore of the peninsula,” I said aloud, for any future sharers unfamiliar with my hometown’s geography. “I’m Xochitl “Xo” Yakubu, virlogger extraordinaire for BWCM Collective, the Blue Wave City Press Herald, the LivingBay flash thread, and Nami-Shi magazine. My datasphere handle is !XoJourno. On this day, which so many are hoping will be a day of generational importance, I’ll be traversing our fair city, checking in with a few friends and sites of interest, and giving you the feel of the place I live in, as I live it. Let’s go, folks!”
I strolled out into the city, inhaling the fresh scent of the warm breeze and savoring the feel of the noonlight on my skin. I moved out of the meadowy cul-de-sac my apartment building stood in, crossing the pedestrian bridge over St. John Station. Below me, a maglev had just pulled up, disgorging an array of visitors from the Intercontinental Electric Spaceport to the southwest. As I walked on, I slowly moved my gaze around the streets, letting my viewers examine the architectural mélange. Industrial Revolution red brick vied with mid-twentieth century suburban clapboard as representatives of the old order, sharing space with more modern structures ranging from green-roofed wooden longhouses to photovoltaic glass ziggurats. I passed a community theater-in-the-round, a Candomblé terreiro, a holocrafting studio, and a jukado dojo. One edifice, a squat hexagonal building with green myco-stucco siding and a warm, wood-paneled, fire-lit interior, bore the sign and datatag of New Viands, the neighborhood micro-carnery.4
As I passed by, its vatmaster Dakota Jimenez waved me over. They put down the stylus they were using to rewrite a holo-menu and rapidly clicked through on their datalens to give consent to being recorded. “Hey, Xo, good to see you! For you and all your sharers looking for a great-tasting meal in Blue Wave City, we’re launching a new protein blend for the big event today: the Umami Bomb. It’s a medley of cultivated pork fat cells from Vat Three upstairs, shiitake mushrooms, pea protein, and a few herbs and spices from gardens and greenhouses in the city. We have patties and sausages on sale here and ground to take away, and we’ll start supplying it to the food trucks downtown next week!”
“Sounds great, Dak. I’ll be sure to link to New Viands in the context web for this one.”
“Thanks, Xo! You’re a star.”
I turned my head behind me to wave Dak goodbye as I passed the housing complex towers on my right, Bosco Verticale-style biotecture5 bursting out of their Art Deco façades. A double helix of lilac bushes snaked across the side of one building. They were in bloom, with their beautiful purple-pink flowers standing out against the main field of wind-bonsaied oak trees growing out from the balcony beds. A band of pigeons fluttered up from the sidewalk to the shelter of the overhanging oaks as I walked by. I noticed three blue-and-red male passenger pigeons among them and took a quick burst of images with my datalens. My settings automatically recognized them as animal images and uploaded them to the Naturenet. The genetic resurrection of the passenger pigeon6 was fairly well established now, but the project could always use more citizen science data on how the new/old species was adapting to human-dominated landscapes. The Naturenet was one of the most popular and wholesome parts of the datasphere, a planet-spanning, open-source, constantly updating living library of life7. I always tried to contribute when I came across something unusual.
As I moved towards the denser downtown of Blue Wave City, the streets grew more and more crowded with people. Bicycles, quadricycles, scooters, skateboards, and the occasional autonomous car passed by on the thin strip of pavement, and more people streamed from side streets onto the pedestrianized three-quarters of the road. I passed a couple kissing on a stone bench, holding hands and stroking each other’s hair. Both wore the green shoulder flash of the Restore Corps, meaning they were probably on leave from the new oyster reef construction8 out in the bay. Seeing them, I idly wondered what romantic roles I would have been assigned a hundred years ago. I didn’t really identify with either of the historical binary genders, and neither did most of the people I knew. My grandparents had had to spend time rigorously defining their niches in the socio-sexual spectrum, but my parents had met, fallen in love, and combined their genes in an exowomb9 while identifying themselves primarily as individuals, not feeling the need to select a gender10.
A few minutes later, I moved out of the way of a professional virlogger jogging by. They were wearing a blue mohawk, buffalo plaid-patterned kilt, and gold-embossed steel cuirass, and talking animatedly in a mix of ecclesiastical Latin, Lojban, and Shakespearean English to the hovering camera drone tethered to their wrist. I recognized Kerry Sky, one of the local rising stars in the neo-surrealist genre, and quickened my pace a little. Kerry was a good person and a friendly acquaintance, and under other circumstances I would’ve loved to stop and shoot the breeze. But I was pretty sure they were on a custom entheogen cocktail 11 right now and I didn’t want to disturb the flow of whatever narrative was emerging from their consciousness. Besides, I was recording too, and I wasn’t looking for a new crossover. I was going for a more relaxed, flow-of-the-day type feel, the kind of thing I could relive when I was in exolegs12 in my 120s and smile over.
I kept walking, brushing my fingers absentmindedly along the meandering row of sumacs, alders, and witch-hazels separating the broad pedestrian path from the thin traffic lane. The road took me past the Quiero Café, where a holographic anthropomorphized coffee bean was discussing the merits of their cortados with a potential customer. In the little commons in front of it stood the Younger Dryas13 menhir, a community art project dedicated to remembering the end of the Pleistocene in this land. The six-meter monolith was open for new artwork by anyone whose proposal received three hundred upvotes. Its carvings now included stone-etched triskelions, Eyes of Horus, “Blue Wave City,” invocations of place in other languages from 波特兰 to مين, crab and lobster claws, maple leaves, moose antlers, human hands embossed with mehndi and mandalas, and line sketches of giant sea mink14, great auks, and woolly mammoths.
I glanced up towards the top of the stone, and my eye was drawn to a LifeFlight autonomous quadcopter ambulance overhead, coming in for a landing on the immense bamboo-composite municipal medical complex a few blocks to my right. I pressed my index and middle fingers to my lips and blew a kiss and a wish for wellness to whoever was inside. UniCare would cover the medevac, treatment, and recovery therapy, of course, but a health issue serious and rapid-acting enough to require a drone paramedic flight would still be a major disruption to one’s life.
A few blocks later, I veered off the main street into Wachilmezi15 Park. My pace slowed as I walked through the field, a tapestry of dandelions, buttercups, clover, violets, and bird’s-foot trefoil. A great black hawk glared down at me from a Norway spruce, only a few meters away from the decades-old statue16 of the first great black hawk to venture this far north, many years ago. I walked along the line of rocks beside the stream bisecting the park, passing by the community wading pool and the little marshy area under a stone bridge. A group of schoolchildren were wandering along the forested shore of the pond, with datapads in hand. I walked along the shore, and overheard the teacher, a slim figure in a red long-sleeved dress and a neatly trimmed Van Dyke beard, discussing the ecosystem of the soil.
“-and that means there are more life-forms in this handful of soil than there are humans in the world! Not only that, the soil is alive with information. Mycorrhizal fungi allow plants to expand their reach for more water and mineral nutrients in exchange for the complex carbohydrates that the plant produces through photosynthesis. Networks of ectomycorrhizae17 connect the rhizospheres18 of different plants, allowing them to exchange nutrients, and even chemical warnings of potential predators and bad weather! In the early years of this century, we learned that these mycorrhizae were both helping plants survive changing conditions and sequestering a lot of carbon in the form of glycoproteins.19 This made them a critical partner life-form for humanity’s efforts to slow the Great Climate Shift.”
I smiled and walked on. Blue Wave City had recently voted in favor of a referendum question mandating that over 85% of in-person class time take place outdoors, after decades of studies20 had found an array of health and learning benefits. It was great to see teachers finding new ways to use that time.
I reached the edge of the park just as a chrome and blue streetcar silently pulled up. The city’s iconic Hokusai-inspired breaking wave logo was stenciled in white on the sides, and the lightning bolt-and-gear emblem of the Dawnland Electric Cooperative was embossed in bronze on the front. The streetcar obligingly stopped for me when I waved my hand. I hopped on and leaned outwards as we began to move again, holding onto the passenger bar for stability. This brought me to eye level with the vegetable garden on the rooftop, right in front of a bumblebee crawling out of an orange zucchini flower. The beefsteak tomatoes next to the zucchini plant seemed perfectly ripe, so I reached out and plucked one. I spun the tomato around in my hand, finally biting into it and feeling the fresh, sweet, tangy juice filling my mouth and running down my chin. I blinked my left eye three times and thought of a blue square to take a neurosnap, recording the echo of the taste’s impact on my synapses.
A few minutes later, streetcar pulled up to a near-empty lot on the north side of the city, closer to the shore. I pulled my thoughts back to the moment. I had an interview date with a mycotect21, a fungal architect working on mycelial insulation for a new round of Welcome Homes being built for those displaced by the latest wave of cyclones to the south. Blue Wave City was a municipal-level signatory of the World Citizens Accord of 2072, meaning that we had committed to freedom of movement with all other signatory jurisdictions22 and had pledged to provide housing and the right to work for immigrants from tropical countries disproportionately hard-hit by climate disasters. Our commitment was to take in a number of people equal to 2% of our population per year, and with the positive reputation and lifestyle rankings the city was known for in the datasphere, there were always a multitude of applicants. This lot had been de-asphalted only last year, and was still a relatively barren, soil-poor landscape. Still, there were signs of someone taking an interest: wide fairy circles of mushrooms were scattered around, all surrounding bamboo or metallic scaffolding. At one end of the lot was a complete building, an off-white, smoothly rounded, organic-looking dome. I opened and walked through the round wooden door set into the building, brushing my fingers against the smooth, spongy, and firm surface to the side.
I waved at Dr. Yaa Ibrahim, who was seated on a workbench intently contemplating a cultivation array. They saw me and tapped the datalink in their thumbnail to give consent to being recorded. I flipped over to sharer view in my datalens, what anyone replaying this would eventually see, and saw them flicker from a blurry, indistinct figure into full reality at the moment the privacy filter dropped.
“Ah, Xo. It’s good to see you.”
“Likewise, Doctor. For the benefit of new sharers, could you tell me what you’re working on here?”
They smiled and ran a hand through their intricate microbraids. “Certainly. I am Dr. Yaa, from the Èkó23 Unified Megalopolis, West African Union24. I’m currently on assignment to Turtle Island as part of my sabbatical year with the Global Peace Corps. I’m working on a new cultivar of mycelial insulation25 for this city’s resettlement projects.”
“New in what way?” I asked curiously. I’d known the doctor was working on something original, but I’d thought it was a new growth medium or application process, not an entirely new cultivar. “Better r-value26? Tensile strength?”
“Not quite. Traditional mycotecture relies on directing the fungi along a scaffold to grow into the appropriate form, whether that’s waterproof siding, a decorative varnish, or in a northern city like this, insulation. Afterwards, it’s generally been gene-tweaked to mineralize and ossify, holding its form. But my new cultivar has a greater regenerative ability. Even after ossification, you can cut off a tiny portion, even as small as a thumbnail, and grow a new section of insulation mycelium. I was thinking it could be useful for children to learn a little biology with materials from their own house. Or for craft projects, growing one’s own winter coat lining or slippers.”
“Wow. You came up with this on your own, while working full-time on the Welcome Homes?”
Dr. Yaa smiled again, wider this time. “That’s the danger of loving your job too much. It becomes your hobby as well. This cultivar isn’t quite complete yet, but I anticipate releasing the full genome on MycoCommons before I leave here.”
Coming from anyone else, I might have thought this was an overestimation of their own abilities, but Dr. Yaa was known as a changemaker on several continents, and a brilliant innovator in the field of mycotecture. I knew they wouldn’t release a statement on an ongoing project to an open virlog without being absolutely certain it was going to work. I resolved to follow up on this new cultivar as soon as possible. Maybe there was some kind of public awareness partnership or policymaker networking I could help with.
“Thank you so much, Dr. Yaa, for your service to this city and for your graciousness in allowing me to interview you today. I wish you well in all your works.”
“Likewise, Xo.”
I left the building, picked up a scooter off a charging pad outside the Welcome Homes lot, and leaned forward, buzzing along the shoreline path on the north side of the peninsula toward the open ocean. This was in the storm-surge zone, so there was plenty to see: I passed through gene-tweaked saltwater resistant cattails, constructed dunes with sand made from ground brick and concrete, and a medley of houses, shops, restaurants, and coworking spaces, all raised at least two meters above the ground. Eventually, I reached the bridge at the northeastern end of Blue Wave City peninsula, stretching out towards the northern boroughs across the cove. Three lanes stretched across it, one paved for cars and buses, one for pedestrians, bikes, and scooters, and a central strip of shrubs and small trees, while hanging vines and little brown bat colonies had been cultivated on the shadowy, cavernous underside. I dropped my scooter off at another charging pad and walked south along the beach, unslinging my sandals and clipping them to my belt to feel the pleasurable crunch of sand, pebbles, and shell beneath my feet. I could see the crowd and lights of the Drawdown Day ceremony in the distance, over a hill but still on the water.
Before that, though, looming only a few hundred meters in front of me, stood the Bayhouse, one of my favorite places in the city and the workplace and home of my next interviewee. I jogged up, a smile breaking across my face as I saw them leaning against a paddleboard on the seaward porch.
Wael Psaras was the lead marine biologist for Blue Wave City, in charge of monitoring and working to improve the ecological health of the Bay. Decades ago, just after finishing first-level professional studies, Wael had opted for the full Diver package of gene-mods and surgeries, sculpting their body and DNA in service of their passion for the sea. Sleek, greenish-gray skin covered their body, completely hairless save for the long, black, seal-like whiskers sprouting from their cheeks and upper lip. Their hands and feet were sleek, webbed, and nail-less, perfect for efficiently cleaving through the waters. They were wearing their typical ensemble: nude save for a vacuum-sealed multipurpose divers’ utility belt and a dark green scale-textured speedo, with the layer of vascularized blubber under their skin insulating them against chilly depths and winter winds alike.
“Xo! Good to see you!” Wael cried, immediately granting recording permission and leaning in for a hug. Transparent nictitating membranes flickered across their eyes.
“Likewise, Wael!” I returned the embrace, lightly drumming my fists against their back. “It’s good to see you too. I know you’ve told me most of this already, but for the benefit of those joining us for the first time-how’s the Bay? You’re the person who knows it best, tell us what it’s like for you these days.”
Wael grinned and gestured for me to sit down on the bench in front of them. It was made from found objects washed up on the coast, a slab of driftwood with old buoys for legs. “I’m so glad you asked! I spent most of last week inspecting the floating seaweed farms27. Clean bill of health, contaminants and parasite-wise, and everyone’s more than earning their drawdown credits. That stuff’s growing like crazy, and they’ve fully documented sinking a tenth of their crop for the seafloor storage. The new dulse and rhodophyte cultivars they’re growing now are great fried, too. Closer to home, the new acidification-resistant seagrass plantings have a decent survival rate. The green crabs are a bit less of a problem now that blue crabs have started competitive exclusion. The living reefs and oyster barriers are really more a Restore Corps project, out of my official bailiwick, but I like to check up on them and help out sometimes anyway. Those folks seem to be doing alright, they’re ahead of schedule for the season. The early modelling says what they’ve built so far should maintain structural integrity and wave attenuation for anything up to a Category 5, and they want to beat that next year. I speared a few lionfish for the street stalls28, but they’re definitely dug in now, we have a full breeding population. I chipped a great white that was getting too close to one of the island beaches, so there’ll be an auto-alert now if they go anywhere near swimmers. Oh, I checked up on a tip from some kayakers: a pair of yellow-crowned night herons built a nest in one of the old forts on the inner islands! I’ll definitely be back to place a microcam sometime next week.”
“How are the persistent organics29?” I asked seriously. “I heard they’re still above safe ecological baselines.” I knew that this would bring their mood down a bit, but it was an important topic that more people needed to know about.
The grin shrunk from Wael’s face, and the seal-like biologist looked uncharacteristically solemn for a moment. “Tell me about it. I’m still bioaccumulating old pollutants30 when I catch forage fish here, did you know that? Polychlorinated junk, microplastics, endocrine disruptors from wastewater. It was all banned ages ago, but it’s still there. There are some labs working on evolving or gene-tweaking a microbe to eat some of it, but nothing’s past the Antananarivo Convention’s precautionary standard. We really need to fund more research in that arena.”
“I’ll quote you on that, Wael.” I switched out of recording mode. “If the results are what we all think they are, there’s going to be one mother of a holoworks show afterwards. See you there?”
Wael shook their head slowly, a smile returning to their face. “I’ll be in the bay. They’ll look even better through a little water.”
“Wish you joy of it.”
As I walked along the beach, I entered the Brownian motion of the crowd-Blue Wave City was out in force. A dozen new automated record requests popped up in my datalens, and I changed my settings to fully open. However many people were logging memories around here, I was happy to be a part of them. People were chatting, talking, eating, siesta-ing on the sands, and doing all the things you’d expect in a crowd this size. But there was a subtle undercurrent of tension, anticipation, a New Year’s Eve or Election Night feeling of waiting for something to break loose. Not obviously, but consistently, everyone’s eyes eventually turned to the holo-display in the air, projected by a fleet of micro-drones hovering over the water about fifty meters out.
The display showed the Blue Number, the Annualized Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide Equivalent Level. For decades, it had been the most important number in the world, its accelerating or decelerating growth parsed by thousands of AI-assisted models trying, like soothsayers, to read the future from the atmosphere’s entrails. The Blue Number was composed of CO2 measurements taken around the world, from the new settlements in Kalaallit Nunaat31 to the venerable observatory on Mauna Loa32. As we watched, the holographic figure trembled in the air, the ethereal blue light of the giant letters and numbers disturbed by dust and pollen passing through them. The display read 2090: 531.2 PARTS PER MILLION. There was a red trend arrow beside it indicating the change since last year: rising. The Renewables Revolution, the Reforestation Wave, the Third Food Shift, and a plethora of ad-hoc geo-restoration efforts, from ice cap reflectivity enhancement33 to the Olivine Soils Project34 to the Global Phytoplankton Fertilization Initiative35, had finally slowed down the once-dizzying pace of greenhouse gas accumulation and global warming. We’d crossed 500 ppm in 2065, and the last grid-scale fossil fuel plant had shut down in 2071, but wildfires and permafrost off-gassing had kept the numbers rising. Still, we’d managed to drastically slow the increase in the years since then. Over the last few years, it had looked like we were finally reaching the crossover point, when drawdown efforts would finally overcome the remaining emissions sources. But every Number release day had been a disappointment, with a few tiny increases of fractions of a part per million logged. Everyone was hoping that this year would be different. That today would be Drawdown Day.
As a sort of theme dressing-remembering the mistakes of the past, I supposed-a bunch of people were wearing legacy clothes, antiques from the decades of uncontrolled industrialization and biosphere plundering. I saw face masks, blue jeans, printed-leather jackets and boots patterned to look like cattle by-products. I even saw someone wearing a fossil-plastic poncho with nylon stockings, both with a luminescent historical-artifact datacode. They were waiting in line for the cluster of pop-up restaurants that had arrived: a food truck was offering empanada/samosa fusion pastries, another was doing injera wraps and honey wine, and a third was making Afghan-style rice pilaf with Ecuadorean llapingacho pastries. A vendor with a handcart was selling pawpaw36 sherbet in sugared waffle cones as fast as they could make them. Another vendor was sizzling a green crab and lionfish stir-fry in a wok, adding the occasional dab of hoisin sauce or wasabi to flavor different orders. My mouth watered at the scents of the food, but I didn’t feel really hungry yet.
I gazed out across the bay, from the peninsula to the north through the panoply of islands to the shore across the estuary to the south. On Front Street Beach, where the oil terminals used to be, the Monument to Victims of Air Pollution stood like a shadow against the sunset. Tens of thousands of carbon-fiber rods spiraled together into the shape of a curl of black smoke, each rod bearing the name of one of the people who had died in this city from asthma, emphysema, bronchitis, lung cancer, or COPD in the long, choked decades when the world had burned fossil fuels.
In my line of sight, I noticed Mayor-CEO Amara Echohawk sitting on a boulder near the water’s edge, in a dark blue business tunic, an intricate golden torc, and a crazy-quilt patchwork knitted sash, talking animatedly to Zeinab Michaud. Zeinab was Blue Wave City’s delegate to the Dawnland Alliance, the intersectoral bioregion-level authority managing ecosystem governance around the shorelines of the Gulf, from the Wôpanâak Cape to Kespukwitk37. Depending on the results, there would be celebrations across the Dawnland and the world tonight, and probably a new citizens’ assembly to discuss the possibilities of the drawdown era. As I watched, the mayor stood up and tapped their interface torc, their bio-modded larynx seamlessly converting to public address mode.
“As I’m sure you’ve all seen”-a breaking priority-one news beacon popped up in my datalens-“we have word from Geneva. The Blue Number for 2091 is…” The mayor pivoted on one heel like a stage performer and gestured at the holodisplay. As we all watched, it updated to read: 2091: 530.7 PPM. With a green trend arrow pointing downwards next to it. Declining.
“My fellow humans of Blue Wave City, today, at long last, is Drawdown Day!”
They wisely hadn’t planned to give any longer of a speech: everyone knew what those simple words meant. It would have been drowned out anyway by the roar of the crowd. I heard clapping, whoops, ululating cries, and at least one full-throated hip-hip-hooray. A few groups burst out in hymns, rallying cries, or triumphal anthems. Next to me, I saw tears trickling down the cheeks of a group of white-maned elders.
And then bursts of light illuminated the twilight over the bay, multicolored holographic streamers emerging from a fleet of pocket-sized projector drones. It looked as if the programmers assigned to create an epic celebratory holoworks display had been locked in with a list of colors and a list of shapes, and just decided to do all of it, possibly with the aid of entheogens, and then iterated it further every year there was a false alarm for Drawdown Day. I was only able to pick out a fraction of the ever-changing shapes and colors, with untold more described in the annotated freeze-frame program that had been automatically sent to my datalens. A trio of orange-and-lemon tinted intertwining double helixes spiraled around a bright green four-leaved clover shape. A thirty-meter bright purple hyperboloid flashed into existence for three seconds, then vanished. What looked like someone’s best attempt at a fractal gyroid grew from the size of a football to the size of an old-growth oak tree in a mind-numbing half-minute, decked out in shimmering, aurora-like shades of green, before exploding into a fleet of purple and blue spheres and arrowheads. A fuchsia Klein bottle flew through a fire engine-red Mobius strip. A parade of Earths took center stage after that, waltzing through sped-up continental drift, a flurry of ice ages, then a slower sequence of human civilization spreading in a pattern of lights against the night, finally splitting into a dozen possible dizzying far-futures. A giant real-color whorled sunflower grew from a seed in the ocean, shot up to the height of a skyscraper, then put forth a bloom bigger than a baseball stadium, facing inward towards the spectators, the city, and the rest of the continent.
The themes were obvious, of course, practically hackneyed. Rebirth, renewal, healing, the passing of a filter, and new growth from here on out, infinite mind-bending future possibilities. They were no less affecting for all that. I was surprised yet unashamed to feel moisture on my own cheeks.
I drank from a goblet of mead that was being passed around, laughing with sheer joy in life. Wael had been right: the holoworks did look even better through a little water.
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Sam! I have climbed high enough to be able to write on this remarkable piece of visionary writing. It is an incredible literary production . You have packed so much plausible details in a few short pages.. first perfect setting time place and occasion. The virloggers journey is the perfect anchor motivation to moor the story. The narrator seems your alter ego, displaying great interviewing skills. Oh, the subtlies mixed in with the splendors! Your own mind must be simply amazing to encompass all this knowledge!! Compassion and insight are constantly in flower, ignorance, cynicism, anger, and dispair are entirely absent, a true utopian vision. Perhaps your own history your own mind are citizens there as well? I catch references to places you've been there. Even to friends of my own family (the Echohawks)....
What an effort! None could have done it better!
You're simply awesome!
This is good stuff! Still reading it! More later!