Florida

“The story of land is written in water.”

— Miriam Hernandez, ecologist and conservationist

Portions shown in red were historically solid land but have since been reclaimed by sea rise by 2150. The twin forces of climate change and megacorporatism have altered Florida almost beyond recognition over the last century. Specifically, they have intensified long-standing problems with inequality and access to endemic levels. The glitz and glamor of Florida’s tourist spots and beach towns have become either dens of excess or perfectly manicured paradises; the heat-choked swamps and ghost towns of its interior are a living graveyard for the forgotten and impoverished. To live in the Sunshine State nowadays is inevitably to rule, or to suffer.

LOOK, FLORIDA? WHY THE HELL DO I CARE ABOUT FLORIDA?

I’M SO GLAD YOU ASKED.

Everyone’s welcome in Florida! Whatever your heart desires, you can find it here. Looking for a wholesome place to settle down and raise your 2.5 children, away from undesirable influences? Come to NICEVILLE in the Panhandle: endless miles of white sand beaches! Your choice of charming three-story bungalows in any color (as long as it’s pastel!) Armed security and protection provided by the good people of the U.S. Air Force to keep the local undesirables out! Just make sure you stay south of the highway and you’ll have a wonderful time. Interested in ecotourism? Come visit the Big Bend and stay in rustic TALLAHASSEE, the gateway to Florida’s natural wonders! Officially on the Gulf Coast since 2132! Enjoy a charming experience of the Old South as our real local guides show you our pristine freshwater springs, limestone caverns, and brackish estuaries. Donations highly recommended to help fund our work keeping nature perfectly preserved! Here for a more civilized vacation? See the great megacity of ORLANDO-TAMPA, stretching nearly eighty miles from Gulf Coast to Atlantic Coast! If you’re here for a thrill, the never-ending parties of Orlando – the ‘Vegas of the South’- will meet your every need. Looking for a more cultural and artistic experience? New Tampa will astonish you with its performing arts, culinary wonders, and free-thinking spirit. Yes, there’s something in Orlando-Tampa for anyone. One little tip for visitors: Only the residents of the interior call it Tamlando, and you wouldn’t want to be mistaken for one of THEM! But maybe you’re after something more elusive. A true transformative experience? Well… There’s no place that knows reinvention better than MIAMI, the sunken city. Don’t just marvel at skyscrapers raised from the bottom of the ocean: Join them! The experts at the Galliardo Rehabilitative Medicine Foundation can work the same miracles for you. Whether you just want to freshen up your look or truly undo the ravages of time, you can find your answer in Miami’s exclusive, sustainably-redeveloped waterfront hotels. And if you’re a real VIP, you might get a coveted ticket to the luxurious domed retreat of Key Biscayne! Yes, whoever you might be, there’s beauty and opportunity aplenty in Florida. Sure, things might be a little more expensive than they used to be before Desiree and Myleen, but if you’re willing to hustle there’s always something bright on the horizon!

(What? You want to know a little more? Well, all right. Keep reading, I guess.)

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HOW WE GOT HERE: A BRIEF HISTORY OF NORTH AND SOUTH

“Look, the more north in Florida you go, the more south it gets, while the more south in Florida you go, the more north it gets.” Historically, North Florida had long been less-developed than South Florida for many reasons – its lack of equally accessible natural harbors, its cooler winters discouraging snowbirds, even the historical accident of where railroad tracks first crosscut the swamps. Beyond the tourist industry and the heavy military presence in the area, the economy of much of the north was precarious, with little to offer but agriculture. This history of poverty was told in a hundred ways: the naming of the Forgotten Coast, idyllic white sand paradises where few people could eke out a living – or, more darkly, incidents like the mid-1900s ‘Nub City’ self-amputation insurance scheme of Vernon, Florida. Even the capital city of Tallahassee had very little cultural or business footprint beyond the necessities of government. South Florida, on the other hand, attracted all of the attention, fame, and money. Tampa and Orlando served as major transportation hubs for much of the country; Miami loomed large in the nation’s psyche as a sun-soaked party paradise. Retirees flocked in droves to the many beach towns of the east coast in particular– the nation’s largest retirement community, The Villages, was a small city in and of itself. At the tip of the state, the Florida Keys provided an experience of true tropical splendor unlike anywhere else in the continental US. And then… the Earth warmed, and the seas began to rise. Large chunks of South Florida vanished under the hungry oceans, and what was left was afflicted by heat that not even northern retirees found quite as appealing anymore. Two mega-storms, Hurricane Desiree in 2063 and Hurricane Myleen in 2076, utterly rewrote the geography of North and South Florida respectively. The nigh-complete loss of Miami in particular during Myleen filled the state with an exodus of refugees… and drastically shook up all projections of Florida’s future. In this unsettled and rapidly changing environment, corporate interests were able to take advantage on a grand scale. Banding together to snap up land at a song, they commodified everything of Florida’s appeal that they could, making unspeakable fortunes off their projects. In return, life outside of their domain only became more difficult and poverty-stricken - the vicious cycle of inequality.

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FLORIDA IN 2150: A TALE OF FOUR CITIES

NICEVILLE, PARADISE BY THE SEASIDE

This charming, polished city in the far northwestern Panhandle is essentially one tremendous gated community. It is the remnants of multiple small towns that all once possessed their own particular character (including as its namesake town, Niceville, a pre-existing locale dating back to 1910). The ravages of sea level rise threatened many of the famous beauties of the area, such as the white sand beaches of Okaloosa Island – but it was delivered by two unlikely bedfellows. The U.S. Air Force had long established a heavy presence in northwest Florida, using it as training grounds for special forces and testing grounds for novel aircraft. They allowed much of the land to flood, but took steps to preserve portions of the existing islands, creating a complicated network of sounds, straits, and channels. At the same time, a league of big developers formed the Seaside Beautification Corporation (SBC) in order to push forward a proposal too ambitious for any individual company. As a whole, they invested in the land that their projections showed would become the new waterfront, and bought sand by the truckload. Out of swamps and marshes, perfect manicured beaches were created – and breezy pastel mini-mansions erected to line them. Niceville now stretches over the southern edge of four entire counties from what was once Pensacola to Panama City Beach, a narrow strip of seaside paradise for those with the money to afford it. It is ‘protected’ by intense armed security forces, usually quietly working hand-in-hand with the U.S. Air Force to ensure the safety of the local rich citizens. Why is safety such an issue? The more northern parts of those counties have fallen into deep poverty, with the land becoming even harder to live in and economy and business all draining southward; most of the residents work in the service economy to keep Niceville going. Old southern culture thrives in those backwoods and bayous, having experienced a resilience given the rise in hardships. Hunting, fishing, and subsistence farming are common ways to make ends meet, even if it means braving heatstroke and mosquito-borne diseases that have migrated north from the tropics. Still, for the more privileged Americans, Niceville provides a beautiful utopia against some of the prettiest beaches left in the world – if you don’t mind the fact it’s all completely artificial. And if you’re careful to stay south of the backwoods, where rumors would have it the swamp takes back what it’s owed…

Notable Landmarks

• The Okaloosa Reef – What was once Okaloosa Island, a long and narrow barrier island, has largely been swallowed beneath the Gulf. It was officially abandoned in the 2070s when sea rise made it untenable, and all buildings above two stories razed. By 2120, the water had risen enough that the area was largely covered, albeit by very shallow water in places. SBC seized the opportunity to invest in the idea of an artificial reef that could be enjoyed by snorkel rather than scuba, and seeded the ruins with life. By 2140, it had blossomed into something of a genuine success, albeit with frequent touch-ups required to keep it flourishing.
• The Great Wall of Florida – A tongue-in-cheek name for a massive retractable seawall erected just outside of the Reef in the 2120s by the SBC, at the cost of unimaginable billions of dollars. If and when hurricanes threaten, the Great Wall is erected to hold back the storm surge so that the citizens of Niceville need never worry about the safety of their precious homes. Outside of hurricane season (which now runs May–November), the Wall reaches to just below usual sea level – allowing the SBC to keep out undesirables and regulate their patch of ocean.

Notable Local Organizations

• The Air Force – Eglin Air Force Base and Hurlburt Islands Special Operations Command comprise the largest Air Force facility in the US. The Air Force’s extensive meddling with local politics has given them considerable governance over everything off the coast, owning much of the land not bought up by developers. They also quietly lend a great deal of support to the paramilitary security forces of the SBC.
• The Seaside Beautification Corporation – The intrigues of the Seaside Beautification Corporation, one of the first true megacorporations, would put the Vatican to shame. The combined assets of the eight founding companies number easily into the trillions, but each maintains its own separate stake even to this day – and hence, its own agenda. Some of them want to expand Niceville’s footprint; some of them want to prioritize shoring up the existing land; some of them support genuine investment in conservation; some of them would pave the whole area in asphalt for a song. Board meetings have been rumored to be, at times, literally cutthroat.
• The Krewe of Bowlegs – A rumored organization of hard-bitten, old-timer rednecks who bitterly resent the commodification of the land in which their families long lived. Once just a group of locals jokingly celebrating the history of a legendary local pirate, the Krewe has evolved into an almost paramilitary gang operating against the interests of the Seaside Beautification Corporation. They’ve been blamed for extortion, arson, kidnapping, and even murder… but their members are so notoriously closed-mouthed neither their friends nor their enemies can be sure of their reach or their deeds.

TALLAHASSEE, WILDERNESS’ REFUGE

Tallahassee, Florida. A city chosen as capital just because it was halfway between the two largest cities of Florida at the time, a good ways inland, it was historically one of the most boring places in the state. Ironically, sea level rise would actually improve its straits. In 2063, Hurricane Desiree tore into the coast with a then-unprecedented level of storm surge, aggravating already-rising seas. The Wakulla, Wacissa, and Ochlockonee Rivers all had their mouths widened tremendously as their coasts were destroyed, and much of the low-lying land on the Gulf Coast was quickly swallowed as the decades went on. With its previous proximity to Florida’s rarer natural features, like sinkhole trails and clear freshwater springs, now supplemented by the Gulf access as of the 2130s? Tallahassee now found itself as a one-stop shop for the natural beauty of the state, host to a series of nature preserves. At first, these preserves were desperate attempts to protect the delicate Florida ecosystem from destruction, born of true conservation spirit. But in time, the growing demand for nature made them opportunity big business couldn’t resist, and one by one many of them were sold off to corporate interests. A different kind of ‘theme park’ arose – one focused around supposedly natural encounters with ‘Old Florida’, at places like the deep, permanently-cool waters of former state park Wakulla Springs. If these encounters required manually stocking the waters with alligators and manatees, well, the vast majority of visitors would never know the difference. Kayaking, snorkeling, scuba-diving… people pay great sums to enjoy the curated experience of the wild. And they do so in the company of guides recruited from the long-time locals, paid to strengthen their accents and act up the part of the ignorant hick as much as possible. After all, the point is authenticity, isn’t it? The tourism industry is still alive and well in Florida.

Notable Landmarks

• Tate’s Hell Estuary – The flooding of the Ochlockonee River created a massive estuary flowing all the way to Lake Talquin, which became a brackish inland sea after Hurricane Desiree breached it in 2063. Initially a total ecological devastation, it eventually became a surprisingly flourishing new ecosystem. The entire area was renamed the Tate’s Hell Estuary (after the Tate’s Hell State Forest), as that was deemed to possess the right kind of piquant charm to attract the eco-tourists. The entire area was bought up from the Park Service and seeded with flood refugees paid to live in ‘charming’ little shacks near the water for local flavor.
• The St. Marks’ Islands – St. Marks was once a beautiful Gulf Coast preserve south of Tallahassee, but was rendered impassable in the wake of Hurricane Desiree. However, the sparsely-settled stretch of land between it and the city had a fair bit of elevation change, and what has been left untouched by the Gulf is a string of countless islands, spared by chance. Some are little oases of the old coastal forest, hung with Spanish moss and windblown oaks. Some are historical ruins from the few older settlements in the area. And… some are rusted-out laundromats. Exploration of these shallow seas is a common pastime for tourists, the most adventurous of which might sail as far as St. Marks’ Lighthouse to see its ruined spire emerge from the water.

Notable Local Organizations

• Florida State University – One of the largest universities in the nation, though generally regarded as something of a diploma mill party school for the children of cities like Niceville. However, its Ecological Conservation Lab has in fact become a world-class institution in wildlife stewardship and management.
• The Economic Council for Local Stewardship – An organization of lobbyists concerned citizens representing the companies that hold stakes in Tallahassee’s wilderness, this close-knit group is the real power in town. Nearly every mayor in the last thirty years has been a member. They tend to support stricter pro-environmental regulations, clashing ferociously with other business boards throughout the state such as the SBC. They certainly lack the SBC’s sheer reach and financial power, but being embedded in the capital of Florida allows them to hold their own in legal battles.

ORLANDO-TAMPA (TAMLANDO), THE TRAGIC KINGDOM

Once upon a time, there were two very different cities eighty miles apart. Tampa, a relaxed metropolis on the Gulf Coast, combined sleepy suburban neighborhoods as white bread as they come with the vibrant energy of the Cuban enclave known as Ybor City. The great sweep of Tampa Bay with its mangrove forests under the relentless semi-tropical sun provided endless beauty to explore. Orlando, more centrally-located, was essentially a gigantic parking lot – but what a parking lot it was. Little effort had been spared to turn it into the vacation destination of millions of families, pairing truly grand landmarks like Disney and EPCOT with tourist schlock like Gatorland. And then the water came, and the staggering wealth and population of southern Florida needed somewhere to go. They came in droves, from Daytona Beach and Fort Lauderdale, from Port St. Lucie and Jacksonville - and always, especially, from Miami. They flooded Orlando, as the nearest large city, and displaced the less affluent of the original populations further west. As for Tampa? The passage of Hurricane Myleen in 2076 smashed through its waterfront, levelling a great deal of what sea rise had already threatened to erase. It was one of the only cities to handle pre-emptive retreat from the coast in an almost orderly fashion because of it, and so its centers of power moved a significant deal eastward all at once. Inevitably the two cities met in the middle, and a strange balance was achieved as they found themselves inheritors of two halves of Miami’s spirit. Coastal Orlando became a vacation paradise for parents as much as children, the Vegas of the south – a riotous show of constant carousing energy, as cheap as it was very expensive indeed. The once-tiny town of Plant City, colonized into the new heart of Tampa in Myleen’s wake, positioned itself as the cultural center of Florida – a bastion for arts, music, and cuisine, with a particular nod toward representing the Cuban heritage inherited from now-lost Ybor City. (In the most upscale way possible, of course.) And everything in between these two areas? It became a wasteland, a great, charmless megacity that serves as a dumping ground for the unlucky dispossessed – Tamlando, as the residents of the ‘interior’ call it. It is by far the largest city in Florida by population, pushing 10 million people, but nearly 80% of those people live in poverty. Redlining, excessive policing, and rampant drug addiction make it very difficult to escape once you’re inside. It doesn’t help that much of the land between Tampa and Orlando is too wretchedly swampy now for construction, forcing high population density… or that many buildings of Tamlando were cobbled together as slapdash prefabricated housing for refugees, never intended to be permanent. Disease, crime, and misery are rampant between the two shining spires of Orlando and Tampa.

Notable Landmarks

• Venice, Florida. There was a real Venice, Florida once – a small but prosperous gulfside town – but the water took it. Now, ‘Venice, Florida’ is a tongue-in-cheek name for one specific district in Tamlando – a city once known as Lakeland. The ground is so very saturated and boggy that the streets have largely become murky rivers navigable by shallow motorboats or paddlecraft only. Anyone with the money to get out did, so the remaining residents are largely extremely poor – though there are rumors that the Condori criminal organization uses Venice as a way to transport goods quietly through places most people would never go.
• Carnivale. When it first was discussed in the 2080s, fueled by investors fleeing Miami, it was pitched as ‘Disneyland for adults only’ – a part of Orlando dedicated to the greatest party experience on Earth. In the two decades it took for it to come together, it emerged as something like a combination of theme park and city-within-a-city: a six-by-six street block of world-class arcades, high-roller casinos, exclusive strip clubs, fashionable nightclubs, luxurious bars… The streets are thronged with elaborately costumed dancers and escorts, live music at every corner alongside flashy street food vendors and sidewalk bars. (And misting fans attached to the gigantic sunshades that cover the street; god, it’s hot.) Visitors are encouraged to come masked and dressed up, and uniquely enough, no children are permitted within 5 blocks of the area. It’s a never-ending party, after all.

Notable Local Organizations

• The Condori. In the 22nd century, cartels have gotten a lot more clever – not simply family businesses but elaborate networks with impeccable security. It is known the Condori are Bolivian drug traffickers specializing in cocaine, a time-honored drug (if one sometimes seen as quaint). But they are elusive as their namesake, the Andean condor, extinct in the wild since the 2110s. The Condori are not tied to any known family name or any physical location, not explicitly identified with any legitimate cover businesses, and rarely even seen doing business. This has led to a curious situation where anyone with known Bolivian ancestry is viewed with suspicion yet rarely harassed; inviting the wrath of the mysterious Condori is not a smart thing to do.
• The Dalittantes. The Dali Museum in St. Petersburg – home of the world’s largest collection of Salvador Dali’s art – was permanently sunk in Hurricane Myleen when the massive seawalls built up to protect it failed. This delighted certain fans of his work, who considered it the best tribute to surrealism nature could have ever designed. Thus were born the Dalittantes, a society of conceptual artists. Their name, with its reference to dilettantes, incorporated the irony of the fact they were originally largely children of privilege and power. By the 2150s, however, the Dalittantes were as likely to include the graffiti artists of Tamlando as the avant-garde pop art professionals of Plant City. They agree on only one central principle: to make art that highlights the absurdity of the modern world.

MIAMI, THE SUNKEN CITY

How does a city of seven million people disappear? Well, they say that the lost city of Miami was the lowest-lying place in Florida – only six feet above sea level, on average. But almost nobody left alive remembers the days when Miami was above sea level at all. At first, they tried to save it. Miami was the third-richest city in the world, after all – a hub of international finance and business, an irreplaceable cultural landmark. Conservative investors and residents pulled out, but the diehards? Foundations were strengthened, seawalls constructed, and for a time there was hope— Until Hurricane Myleen made landfall on September 19th, 2076 with a top wind speed of 220 miles per hour, a 100-mile diameter of hurricane force winds, and thirty feet of storm surge. And Miami drowned. Never in the history of the US had a city flooded so comprehensively and catastrophically. The seawalls shattered beneath seventy-foot killer waves. The freshwater aquifers were poisoned by massive infusions of saltwater, and the porous limestone beneath the city cracked in a hundred places. The retreat of the floodwaters was gradual… and only partial. The collapse of the limestone layer left huge sinkholes behind. Whole districts were gone, and much of the infrastructure utterly unsalvageable, turned into a brackish swamp. Arguments over how to proceed were furious and lengthy, but in the end the judgment was inevitable: The federal government would not pay to rebuild Miami, only to compensate its millions of displaced people. Population, business, and money departed in great waves, the vast majority of Miami resettling in what would become Tamlando. But deals were quietly being struck behind the scenes, sunken land sold for a song. In 2080, the pharmaceuticals billionaire Alejandro Galliardo announced what would be become known as the Biscayne Plan: an ambitious proposal to raise and rebuild the heart of the city. Pumps, seawalls, artificial foundations, reinforced aquifers… The cost and scale of the Biscayne Plan was unimaginable, but by 2090, downtown Miami had been lifted from the swamp, raised well above sea level into the most environmentally-sound, sustainable, and striking planned community in the South. Of particular note, what had once been Key Biscayne was now an island retreat covered by an unbreakable dome of transparent polymer – a miniature climate-controlled city owned entirely by the Galliardo family. And as further waves of regrowth were constructed, the people began to return. By 2150, two million people lived in the outskirts of Miami once more. Their lives tend to be furious, fast-paced, and cutthroat, driven by competition for the luxurious First Wave habitations (controlled by a tight application process). Cutting-edge innovation in medicine and science is also a hallmark of the businesses in Miami, drawn by Galliardo’s support. Perhaps it is also unsurprising that Miami has become the very first port of call for the designer drug market, extraordinary new concoctions circulating outward from its underground every few years. For example, it’s known to be the origin of “Tiovivo”, a vastly expensive party drug that provides a combination of cocaine’s euphoria and methamphetamine’s pure energy – at the potential cost of lifelong brain damage from even mild overdose. But that’s just life in Florida, isn’t it? If you want the highs, you have to accept the lows.

Notable Landmarks

• Key Biscayne. The Galliardos have ruled from their island fortress for over fifty years, with Alejandro’s granddaughter Miranda Galliardo the current head of the family. It’s rumored over fifty thousand people live in Key Biscayne’s beautiful domed enclave, but the unfathomable wealth of the Galliardos can buy quite a lot of silence. It’s a commonly accepted truism that the Key serves as the home port for a smuggling empire that would put most other cartels to shame, and yet no one has ever come close to making anything stick. So the Key rises just off-shore, dominating the horizon of Miami’s downtown – a beacon of luxury, mystery, and jealousy in most minds.
• The Neverglades – Though successive waves of the Biscayne Project have expanded Miami’s habitable lands, the outskirts of the city have still become one gigantic swamp. They’ve merged with the remnants of the Everglades, mostly destroyed in Myleen, and the heartier species that survived its destruction… not just the ubiquitous alligators, but weirder inhabitants like the invasive Burmese pythons. Add to that the sinkholes abruptly plunging to profound depths and sudden ruins peeking up out of the swamps here and there, and this surreal, dangerous landscape was named ‘the Neverglades’ by some clever joker. The moniker’s stuck.

Notable Organizations

• El Cucuys. Of course there is a large criminal organization present in Miami, and they do dark work indeed. El Cucuys (named after a mythical shapeshifting bogeyman figure) primarily see to the thriving underground markets of the city, controlling its massive drug outputs in particular. Their reputation for making people disappear is unparalleled, and only a fool or a madman intentionally gets in their way. Many believe they work directly for the Galliardo family, but of course no one would say it aloud – even if they could prove it.
• Galliardo Rehabilitative Medicine Foundation. Half a place, half an organization – a four-square city block of hospitals, research laboratories, and similar facilities, all allied under the family funds to push the borders of medical science as it’s commonly understood. Some of its success stories include:
  • Milagro Biotechnics, whose specialized work in rehabilitating people who suffer from extreme cases of brain damage has been hailed as bleeding-edge;
  • Connectivity Incorporated, designers of one-of-a-kind cybernetic solutions for cases of dismemberment and amputation, who live up to their slogan of “Better Than Natural”;
  • Protean Industries, a multi-technical firm specializing in “makeovers” – a combination of surgery, cybernetics, and applied gene-editing techniques to help people become their ‘best selves’.

FLORIDA IN 2150 CE

In short? The Florida of the 2150s is a land of contrasts: unimaginable wealth and squalid poverty, wild nature alongside tamed artificiality. Few places so exemplify the effects of rampant corporatism and its commodification of everything good in life. But stubborn pockets of resistance still thrive in the old swamps and the new urban wastelands, and in this pressure cooker of crime and suffering, many complicated stories unfold…