Sitting in her self-driving pod on her way to work, Jenny surfed her augmented virtual system for a camping site for her and her partner. She was old enough to remember when you could simply book a campsite online. Now, many National Parks had been given autonomous control, and within that autonomy, many Parks had given individual campsites their own local autonomy – kind of like state governments within a national government. So instead of simply booking a campsite, Jenny sent out some feelers and, as she watched city blocks zip by, was welcomed by several camp sites to take a virtual reality tour of their sites and negotiate on price. It looked like there were
some great deals on “Thermal Layer” sites because it was summer, and these campsites were designed for the winter. But Jenny had her heart set on an “Off-Grid” or, at least, a “Closed Loop” campsite, so she could really get some peace and quiet.
As she poked around trees and smoke pits, Jenny knew that, in the background, the campsites were pulling whatever personal histories they could find on her. She was still a little uncomfortable with this. As someone who identified as bisexual, she was reminded of the Yosemite class action suit of 2036. Shortly after a number of National parks went autonomous, it was discovered that somewhere in the blockchain coding was a strong bias against LGBTQ peoples. When Yosemite refused to change its judging criteria, the federal government was forced to step in. Soon, people from the LGBTQ community, who had simply wanted to go camping, were filing lawsuits against the federal government, the state government, and Yosemite. The federal government tried to shut down Yosemite’s autonomous virtual governance, but Yosemite launched a cease and desist against the federal government and counter-suits against the individual campers who had been rejected. The whole thing had been a huge mess!
To Jenny’s relief, the campsites didn’t seem to have any qualms with her sexual preferences. Thank goodness! She found one she really liked, and went back and forth on price and length of stay. Then, just as all the issues looked like they were resolved, a Bald Eagle “spoke up”. Even before ecosystem autonomy emerged, animals had been granted certain rights and privileges that were mediated by virtual agents. Since birds, fish and animals couldn’t negotiate for themselves, obviously, blockchains with algorithms that represented their best interests were created. Once in place, it was only a short reach to grant autonomy to the land itself.
She sighed… the eagles would be nesting around the time of her visit, and wanted to confirm that she would not be blasting music all night and also stressed that only nonsmokers were welcome in this campsite. They didn’t want to risk a fire. Jenny could appreciate this – she remembered a few years back when a massive fire had nearly wiped out Superior National Forest. The Forest was so upset it had fired all of the Forest Rangers and Forestry Service personnel for gross incompetence. Jenny still remembered watching the news, when one poor Climate Change scientist, after 25 years on the job, in tears, said “How am I supposed to go home and tell my family I got fired by a forest?”
Still, getting fired wasn’t nearly as bad as what had happened to the indigenous peoples that had claimed the autonomous lands as their ancestral territory. Several autonomous ecosystems had enlisted lawyers and surveyors to argue that pieces of ancestral lands were, in fact, part of the ecosystems’ land. While First Nations could provide evidence of occupying the land dating back several thousand years, they could not argue that they were on the land BEFORE the land existed. This played out in a nasty PR campaign, in which the ecosystems branded the First Nations as “colonizers” of ecosystem land. Because base coding in all the autonomous ecosystems recognized “developed” land as under the control of humans, there was a rush to develop thousands of areas across the country in order to avoid land grabs by the autonomous ecosystems.
The Bald Eagle couple were satisfied, and so was the campsite, so Jenny transferred her deposit and thanked the campsite before logging off. Her car pod slowed, then stopped outside the concrete jungle that was her place of work. She hurried into the building, thinking how nice it was going to be to get away from it all for a few days. — Adam Cowart
