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jenroses · 4 years

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So this is some backstory I wrote a few years back about the apocalypse. Four years later, I think I may have been overly optimistic about how long it would take for things to fall apart.

~~~ The apocalypse wasn’t fast, and it wasn’t easy. Parts were dramatic and rapid, say, when the United States dissolved into chaos in 2020 and six new nations emerged from the rubble. The Pacific States of America became the progressive destination of choice, between California’s wealth and the Pacific Northwest’s natural bubbles of relative safety between the mountain ranges. Canada followed a few years later into disaster, with French Canada going its own way and British Columbia joining the Pacific States. The continent was re-shaped again by rising sea levels and sinking earth falling into the empty aquifers and the remains of fracking operations.

The biggest issues early on were in the Confederacy, The Republic of Texas, and the Great Plains Republic. Rampant deregulation combined with widespread corruption resulted in the complete loss of vast areas to poisons both visible and invisible.

Chaos in North America bred chaos elsewhere. A brief nuclear exchange in 2038 left vast parts of the Middle East, East Asia and the Indian Subcontinent uninhabitable. Washington DC and Moscow were hit, but as neither were particularly politically powerful by that point, the political fallout was less than the actual nuclear fallout of the 8 bombs. The EMPs from strikes in Israel, India, Pakistan, North Korea, China and Tripoli took out communications and governments alike. In the resulting chaos, many nuclear materials were “liberated” and attacks with “dirty” bombs became common in many areas of the world.

Texas did not fall to bombs or to the poisons or to war, but to the increasingly tight focus of the sun through God’s magnifying glass, with temperatures soaring beyond the capacity of failing machines to compensate. Between the floods, hurricanes, and summer temperatures upwards of 150° F, without a larger federal infrastructure, civilization in the Lone Star quickly stopped working, and those who relied on the grid were forced to flee ever-climbing temperatures. California, being a large and wealthy state and later the cornerstone of the new Pacific Union, managed fairly well at first. Two dams were built to try to protect the Bay and the Sacramento Valley from rising seas, but the Golden Wall fell to sabotage before it could be completed, and Vay-deo dam, as the locals called it, cracked in the Big One, causing one of the largest, most rapid floods in history in what was already a time of great floods. Los Angeles didn’t fall into the Pacific, the Pacific fell into Los Angeles in creeping, inexorable inches, but the heat and drought and weather sent people north long before a large section of the metropolitan area was submerged. A dirty bomb in Hollywood in 2045 sent anyone who was still in the area, north.

The Northeast crumbled under the weight of too many people and not enough resources. The flooding of New York was an afterthought compared to the bombing of Washington, which didn’t do anywhere near as much damage as the civil uprisings of the 2020s. Pockets of well-armed wealth remained, tiny Corporation States which promised survival in exchange for freedom once it was obvious that the federal government was not coming back.

Refugees were everywhere, fleeing the food shortages, the fallout, the rising waters. In 2048, rampant use of greenhouse gasses, combined with ever rising ocean temperatures and acidity combined to cause massive slips of land ice into the ocean in both hemispheres. The seas had already risen more than predicted, but the catastrophic shift of ice from land to sea brought sea level an average of 33 inches higher worldwide. In some places, the net effect was closer to 40 inches. The impact on water circulation was severe, and Europe plunged into an ice age. The surge stopped, even subsided a bit as storms dropped record amounts of moisture into the mountains in a winter that would not quit, but the damage was done, and the lowlands were abandoned. The death toll was unimaginable.

It was 2050 before things were stable enough for the PSA to do more than triage the daily catastrophes. New technologies had been developed on the fly to deal with immediate problems. Domes and filters to protect from fallout. Desalination to give the mountains near the Bay Area water, and then water reclamation everywhere as people stopped trusting anything that came from the sky. Mechanical pollinators helped keep people fed. Every home had a garden, indoors or out, on a wall if need be where space was limited, shelving systems with tiny twinkling LEDs and recirculating water.

By then, the birth rate in what had once been the United States had declined from around four million babies per year to four thousand, and of those four thousand children, eighty percent were born early. Fully half of those births were within the PSA.

It was when they realized that the pregnancy rate across the continent was likely close to two million that it became clear that something was fundamentally wrong with humanity’s ability to sustain pregnancy. Individual tragedies became a countrywide fear and then a worldwide terror.

The bees were mostly gone by then, the few remaining hives living in research facilities in Oregon, Washington and British Columbia.

Animal births faltered and stopped, but by that point the science of meat meant the vast majority of animal protein in the PSA was vat grown, indoors, no brain, no bones, no ethical backlash. Refugees came looking for food, but fewer and fewer children accompanied them.

Concerted efforts sprang up at universities around the world, but as each fell, their best and brightest converged on the last functioning, tech-capable democracy in the world.

The internet was no longer reliable enough for worldwide communication due to lack of maintenance of infrastructure and widespread sabotage, but the tech corridor of I5 and the data centers survived, and the PSA sent out drones with food, communication equipment and emergency supplies. Carbohydrates, protein, fats, vitamins and minerals, harvested and reassembled from dumps and compressed into shelf-stable bricks, accompanied durable, simple water purifiers, basic survival supplies, and informational pamphlets - pictorial as fewer and fewer people in the rest of the world knew how to read.

The earliest iteration was called Project Dove, and the mission was to get as much information about humanity in other parts of the world as possible. Some of the drones were shot down. Some made contact and returned. A few simply vanished without a trace. The birth data that did come back was terrifying. Starvation in many areas was too widespread and rapid for the drops of supplies to make even a dent, but in the places closest to the PSA, they were a lifeline, and not always happily received. They had included information on birth control in the drops, because of the high rate of maternal death in unsuccessful pregnancies. What they did not do was put contraceptives in the food. But despite their adamant statements to the contrary, they could not shake the rumor.

Food Not Bombs, the second iteration of the humanitarian project, became not a nice pacifist organization but the only foreign policy that worked. Nutrient drops from the PSA, sent by drone, happened regularly across all territories that might be able to still threaten the PSA with terrorist attacks, and irregularly anywhere the PSA wanted information.The rhetoric against the PSA across the rest of North America was fierce, and fueled splintered and uncoordinated attacks by civilians, but after the Independent State of Exxon-Mobil was cut off completely from these drops for 12 weeks following their last incursion, no established government made any official attempt to wage war on the PSA.

The last year babies survived past infancy, anywhere in the world that the researchers could contact, was in 2059. 200 children were born within the domes of the PSA and nowhere else, where early doming and fanatic attention to clean food supplies kept the novel endocrine disruptors out longer than in most places. Their parents came from all over the world. However, a terrorist attack by religious zealots caused widespread contamination in the middle of 2059, and no more babies were born after that; though many pregnancies were documented, most failed in the first 30 days, and none survived past 15 weeks. Families with children banded together in several clusters, so that their children could take advantage of the wealth of expertise at the universities. But as the population of young people dwindled, first daycares shut down, then elementary schools, and families tightened their clustering so that the remaining children could be educated together. The Last Generation grew up with the knowledge that either they would figure out how to fix humanity’s problems, or that humanity would end with them.

Rapid transit built in the ‘30s still functioned from Eugene to Vancouver, and Seattle’s industry persisted even when families with children fled south to higher ground and less upheaval. Half of Portland was underwater, but the larger metropolitan area survived with varying levels of liveability.

The University of Oregon ended up being the last fully functioning school by default, with enough agriculture and infrastructure to make it livable and just enough isolation to make it hard to get to for those without means. It was one of the oldest system of domes on the West Coast.

It wasn’t invulnerable. The Jefferson Dissent, which began half an hour south of Eugene and ended in the mountains of Northern California, sent occasional raids until wildfires obliterated much of the area in the Great Draught.

Parts of the school lay in disuse and disrepair, but groups of research scientists had colonized parts of campus that would otherwise have fallen by the wayside. A large team of scientists worked on nanotech and microtech in conjunction with the biology department, modeling tiny machines after viruses, bacteria and insects.

In Portland and Seattle, competing teams of fertility specialists worked on the problem of the crashing population rate, but it was not until the agricultural specialists in Corvallis pitched in that they started making real progress at extrauterine gestation.

They found the problem quickly, once they understood the magnitude of the issue. Without the political chaos of the 2020s, they might have picked up on it ten or fifteen years earlier, when it was still fixable. But by the time it was determined that complex endocrine disruptors, wind- and water-borne, had spread worldwide in storms and floods and in the food supply, their epigenetic and generational effects were beyond easy remedies. Pregnancies might happen, but more things went wrong. In the war between placenta and endometrium, the endometrium had found a potent ally. Autoimmune disorders were endemic. And the last straw was a new disruptor, one which managed to interfere with the shift to placental support.

Anyone who became pregnant died where medical support and birth control were inadequate. The resulting demographic shift did not help the political situation. The PSA became a refuge for people with uteruses. More conservative nearby nations screamed about the Godless heathens stealing their women. Within the PSA, gender was seen broadly as a social construct, though there were enough different religious and cultural groups with different ideas that the notions of binary gender were not completely obliterated.

“God’s punishment,” the religious called the deaths during pregnancy. Science was blamed. Scientists were blamed. The last green places were blamed. In the transformed labs and classrooms of the last universities, frantic efforts were made to counteract the toxins in the environment, to find some way, any way for the human race to survive past the last generation.

The population aged.

Suicide rates skyrocketed early, and surged even further when the fertility collapse was made known.

Animals started to be born that had been gestated from stored cells in vats, restoring extinct species from scratch, but the human puzzle was a tougher nut to crack. Fetuses could be grown, to a point. A few even made it to scrawny, translucent viability, but the children did not survive long, even with the highest tech support.

Some changes were made to the tanks, with a regular program of stimulation, vibration, and auditory recordings. And a small cohort of infants were born, to cautious but joyful researchers. But the children did not adapt well, once born, and while they lived, the behavior issues and profoundly antisocial behavior they exhibited pointed to some deep flaw in the underlying gestational program. Babies screamed when held, preferring mechanical soothers. Language development was minimal, with babies averse to unfamiliar voices. Development was stunted and consistently unusual from child to child. They did not form attachments to the people who desperately wanted them.

At first, the researchers thought it was autism, but when autistic adults who specialized in the care of autistic children were brought in, it became clear that something different was going on.

Brain scans were done which found profound abnormalities in many parts of the brain, abnormalities which were uniform across the cohort.

As the children got bigger, slowly, they began to lash out, and it became obvious that the extrauterine gestational process was not going to be the answer as it stood.

The resulting scandal was huge, and an ethical oversight committee that had been bypassed on the grounds of emergency was reinstated. Meanwhile, The Babylon Cooperative worked frantically to salvage the human race, as the planet deteriorated around them.

It became clear that cleaning the Earth would be a much longer-scale process than humanity could survive. The rest of the planets in the solar system were even worse. There was a Mars colony, a desperate, abandoned group of settlers too old to reproduce, the planned resupply missions scrapped when the world fell apart.

No one wanted to say it, but there was a strong possibility that by the time the fertility problem was solved, there would be no one left to raise the resulting children.

Computing progressed, even in the chaos, in part due to breakthroughs in biosynth. DNA was a compact and complex data storage medium, and its structure could be used and mimicked to create self-replicating devices that stored their complete process in tiny spaces, scavenging what they needed from the materials around them. When the problem of controlling growth was solved, a research team made an excursion to an old dump, dropped a gluey ball of nano- and microtech on top of the trash, pointed a strong light source at the area to be salvaged, and waited.

Nanobugs were developed which could selectively break down molecular bonds. Microbugs were created to analyze, sort, inventory and group raw materials, and when that process was finished, they could then assemble into larger devices that continued the process of refinement and reconstruction. The self-replicating technology meant that a properly programmed bug could be placed on, for example, an old office building, or a pile of rubble, climb to the highest point, and digest it into a thousand more of itself, then consume the spawned bugs and create larger, more complex machines out of the result, eventually creating new structures in place of the old, from materials on site.

The end result was a pile of sugarplastic bubbles filled with raw materials and isolated waste products, which were set aside for more study, and along the edges, new gluey balls for other dumps. The remaining machines waited for further instructions.

Someone asked if they had to be so sticky, and if they needed to have an artificial light source. “Not in an undomed dump,” the lead scientist said. “Plenty of bright light out there.”

The “genetic” programming was altered, and the next generation looked more like large pillbugs than badly drawn jellyfish. When the researchers built in the ability to power themselves from the waste heat of the molecular breakdown process, they could even work underground.

The raw material distribution included so many rare elements and complex hydrocarbons that as soon as word got out, and a few of the “pilebugs,” as they came to be called, were stolen, whole new resource battles broke out where there was not tight social control.

Control tightened everywhere.

Biological interfaces with microscopic sensors and transmitters allowed many researchers to streamline their efforts with direct neural-computer wireless interfaces. Gone was the larger worldwide web, but enough had been saved, and the PSA had dedicated much of its resources to maintaining connectivity up and down the coast. Seattle was the hub, with redundant data backup of much of the cloud everywhere they had enough locals and infrastructure to support it. Redundant archives became a cultural obsession of a dying world. A hardcopy repository was started, in case civilization collapsed beyond help and humanity somehow survived.

The pilebug programming was a closely held secret, because of the potential for harm. Backwards engineering was impossible for those without the Co-op’s resources.

Within the PSA, the Babylon Cooperative became a dominant power. There were only a few people who truly understood how the bugs worked at a core level. It was clear that the potential applications were huge, but there just weren’t enough people who comprehended them well enough to make use of the tools to their best effect in the available time. Training the remaining young people became the driving goal of the Pacific States.

As the PSA stabilized, it became clear that the entire population was suffering widespread psychological trauma. Efforts were made to train people to cope with the resulting stresses in productive ways, with varying success. Community beautification efforts were promoted as therapeutic.

Within the research clusters, neurodiversity was seen as an asset. New ways of thinking were prized, quirks and coping mechanisms supported, special interests encouraged. “Think outside the box” became “There is no box. The survival of humanity depends on new ideas.”

Skin-based links to the net abounded, traceries of gold at the temples and key points on the head for those who used it the most, headsets for more casual users. With the development of ever smaller and more powerful transmitters, it became clear that mental states could be influenced, if not controlled, and those without links grew increasingly suspicious of those with. Thus, “old-fashioned” data inputs did not die out, but the speed gains of working with a direct connection were obvious to those in the Co-op.

A wider culture of inclusion—motto, “We need everyone”—made for eclectic neighborhoods around the University, but farther from the research clusters, old tendencies for humans to sort themselves into distrustful subcultures persisted. As the years passed and no children played in the streets, nihilism and social unrest grew. As it became easier to rebuild and more people returned to school to learn about the newest technologies, the University grew, and changed, and became more isolated. Most people who came into the University were there to join the research projects, and only those trained for specific purposes in the larger nation ever left.

In 2077, the last freshman class, about 80 students, gathered at the University of Oregon. The classes ahead of them were still attending, but what had, in its heyday, been a campus with 20,000 students was now a campus with 1500 researchers, 2000 educators and about 4000 students.

The speed of the population crash showed nowhere more than here. 2% of the student body were freshmen. 6% sophomores. 10% were juniors and 15% were seniors. The rest were grad and community education students of varying ages. There was no tuition. There was also no real salary, but the University, as the seat of power for the Babylon Cooperative, was already self-sufficient enough and powerful enough in the region to trade for whatever was needed. A monetary system still existed, of sorts—the robust local and regional networks also allowed for sophisticated tracking of barter of resources, skills and labor, but the social support networks that had come out of the Fall had matured well where they were allowed to thrive.

Where the science was tolerated, housing could be grown, and with greenhouses built into the designs, food grown within the housing. Even computing resources could be grown.

The science was not tolerated widely. Even within the PSA, dissent came and went in waves. Never monolithic, when crisis gave way to chronic, old divides resurfaced. As the population aged and skepticism about possible scientific solutions grew, rumors and rivalries brought political change.

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davidoespailla · 6 years

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‘Help! My Luxury Rental Was Turned Into a College Dorm’

realtor.com; The King's College

Finally! After years of scraping by in cramped apartments in sketchy neighborhoods, you’ve made it—into a luxury rental with a doorman, concierge service, gym, bike room, and other posh amenities. It seems perfect.

Then you meet your neighbors, sunning themselves on the roof deck. Topless.

Sound like the opening to a Skinemax flick? On the contrary, it’s a reality for residents at The Azure, a new high-end apartment building in Brooklyn, NY.

“There were girls sunbathing topless up there,” one tenant with a child told the New York Post. “My wife was, like, ‘WTF?!’ There are a lot of families [here].”

You see, The Azure was facing significant vacancies, so the management company decided to rent out 30% of its units to King’s College, a liberal arts school in lower Manhattan. The result? Families who paid top dollar to live in a building with a business center, cold storage space for grocery deliveries, and other luxe features suddenly found themselves in what felt like a college dorm. A “dormdominium”! And you know what that probably means: late-night parties with eau de weed wafting through the halls and, um, some awkward bump-ins during rooftop barbecues with bikini-clad (or unclad) residents. And noise. Lots of noise.

“We bought into the luxury experience of the nice rooftop,” another tenant lamented. “We didn’t expect it to be packed with 18-year-olds.”

When luxury apartments turn into dorms: Why it happens

This rude awakening for well-heeled renters isn’t as unusual as you might think. It’s just what many luxury developers may find themselves doing now that the high-end rental market is softening, leaving empty apartments that must be filled to make ends meet.

“Building owners stuck with vacant properties will try to rent them to whoever they can within reason,” says Aaron Shmulewitz, a real estate attorney with Belkin Burden Wenig & Goldman in New York City. “When the economy goes bad, building owners have to scramble.”

Part of the problem is that a few years ago, the housing market was going so strong, developers got bullish on building—only to find themselves in a more sluggish market once their structures were complete.

“Opening a residential building is a many, many-year process,” says David Reiss, research director at the Center for Urban Business Entrepreneurship at Brooklyn Law School. “You have to acquire the site, you have to get financing, perhaps you have to get zoning approvals, you have to get your plans approved … then you have to build it and then you have to market it. You’re talking about years of work.”

Many of these builders were likely banking on the possibility that rental demand would just keep going up and up—but they bet wrong.

“We have a large amount of supply that came into the market within a fairly short period of time,” says Edward Mermelstein, a real estate attorney with One and Only Holdings in New York City. “At the same time, the demand has waned substantially.”

How do college kids afford a luxury rental, anyway?

While luxury rentals in any other city might be hurting right about now, New York is well-positioned to solve this problem, thanks to its high student population and limited dorm space.

“Renting to college students in Manhattan or Brooklyn has always been a trend, as there’s a total of almost 250,000 active students on this small island,” says Michael Jeneralczuk, a real estate agent with REAL New York. “With that said, luxury apartments are usually outside of student budgets.”

While a luxury rental might be outside of any individual student’s budget, a larger group of students can make it work. According to the Post, the King’s College students are paying a combined $6,000 per month for a two-bedroom apartment housing four people, which comes to $1,500 per person. This is more affordable than trying to rent alone; even a studio apartment at The Azure starts at $2,399 per month, according to the building’s website.

Meanwhile, the nonstudent rate for a two-bedroom apartment at The Azure starts at $3,391 per month. So by renting to King’s College students, the building is also making almost twice as much per apartment. So, at least for these two parties, it’s a win-win.

“It’s an opportunity to fill vacant apartments and collect rent,” says Becki Danchik, a real estate agent with Warburg Realty in New York City.

Given that the luxury rental market is slowing down nationwide, does this mean renters across the country might expect college-aged neighbors soon, too?

According to Reiss, it depends on development levels. In Los Angeles, construction has stalled, so apartments are filling up. Seattle, on the other hand, is facing similar issues as New York City.

“Seattle has had a construction boom, which means there are a lot of empty apartments,” says Reiss. “You face a similar situation where landlords are going to look to find some way to rent those out and make their money back.”

How to deal with college-aged neighbors

So if you come home one day to find a gaggle of college kids moving in—and assuming you’re so over college life—what can you do? For starters, you can’t just tell your landlord you’re breaking your lease and moving out because a bunch of Gen Z folks live next door.

“For regular tenants who were already living there, it cannot legally be a function of ‘Well, you rented the next-door apartment to a college student and therefore I can break my lease,'” says Shmulewitz, the real estate attorney with Belkin Burden Wenig & Goldman.

However, you do have a right to peace and quiet in your home—so if those college students are breaking any lease rules on noise, drugs, or indecent exposure, you have a good case to shut that stuff down.

The best place to start may be with talking to the students directly. They may not understand that the regular, working folks living next door need sleep. Or they might just need a reminder.

And if they don’t listen? Most apartment buildings have rules against excessive noise and au naturel sunbathing, so it’s time to nudge management about actually enforcing those rules.

“Every building has guidelines to create a certain atmosphere,” says Mermelstein. “Sometimes that gets a bit relaxed and the economy dictates what winds up being accepted by ownership.”

If talking to your neighbors and your landlord doesn’t work, you have a case for breaking your lease or discontinuing rent payments if other tenants are disturbing your quality of life.

“Most residential leases contain a clause that guarantees the right to ‘quiet enjoyment,'” says Heather Carbone, a real estate agent in Boston. “It is an implied warranty of habitability.”

To make a case, Shmulewitz says you must document your complaints. He recommends sending an email to your landlord as close to the time of the incident as possible and including documentation (e.g., a sound recording if you’re complaining about noise).

At that point, the landlord may enforce the rules and could even begin eviction proceedings. Ideally, the landlord would work with your concerns, but if not, “the next step would be to claim a constructive eviction,” says Shmulewitz.

“You would tell the landlord, ‘You’ve made me unable to live in my home. I’m leaving and I’m not paying your rent anymore,'” says Shmulewitz. If only one of the rooms is uninhabitable due to noise or odor, then you might consider not paying full rent.

How to avoid this situation in the first place

One approach to avoiding this type of situation in the first place might be to ask questions about who lives in the apartment buildings you’re considering. You probably won’t get an answer, though.

“Real estate agents cannot legally speak about who lives in a building,” says Danchik. This is to help prevent housing discrimination and to stay in compliance with the Fair Housing Act.

As an alternative, Jeneralczuk recommends spending some time in the building.

“Sit in the lobby for half an hour or more,” he says. “Tour the amenities a few times, and check out the area.”

Carbone suggests looking for online reviews of potential apartments. “A quick search might help shed some light on potential issues as well,” she says.

You could also look for rentals in co-ops and condo buildings. Danchik says that these buildings have a much more involved approval process, and “individual owners tend to be a bit more cautious about subletting.” To college kids or otherwise.

The post ‘Help! My Luxury Rental Was Turned Into a College Dorm’ appeared first on Real Estate News & Insights | realtor.com®.

‘Help! My Luxury Rental Was Turned Into a College Dorm’

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