A Quick Death in Texas Prewriting: New Laredo, Part 2

What started out as a quick introduction to the collectives sorta, snowballed. You'll see.

Heya, I'm back, and I'm near about ready to get going on this juggernaut. I feel adequately prepped and ready now, and with the exception of sketching out the character of a few of the residence, I now not only have a really good idea of what sort of a place New Laredo is, but what sort of a place the Freelands is, and how it all works. So here's what I took from this last little session of writing. It feels weird phrasing it, like I took something away from this, rather than writing it, but this felt to me more like playing a citybuilder game than writing. Not just from the perspective of what goes where, and why, but from the perspective of what sort of civic values New Laredo has, where their priorities are, and how they hang together as a group of workers, working a land of potential and building it up from nothing. I hope you enjoy!

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The Culture of the Three Collectives

Why would people settle a place like New Laredo? The simple fact is, it’s a place that’s the farthest place away from everything that isn’t an actual frontier world, or a remote colony station. When New Laredo was first settled, it was the farthest point in the galaxy from the Consortium where you still had the assistance of another colony just a truck ride away. In at least a few peoples’ minds, it made it also the freest place possible to live, and that’s why they decided it was the spot to set down stakes. That, and the aquifer and the resources in the hills, and the myriad of other reasons- yeah sure it’s hot, but it’s a good patch of land overall. There were three groups that claimed it: The commune of the Greenstar Ranch set up first, easygoing farmers and terraforming ecologists who saw an open patch of arid land atop a deep aquifer and said, “okay, but what if we evened this ratio out just a tad?” All told, they did a pretty good job, for a group that some wrote off as a bunch of weird aggie-hippies that were going to go dry up in a place where only alien sagebrush can put down roots.

Once routine shipments of actually really, really good produce started arriving from this place supposedly out the goddamned middle of nowhere, word started circulating across the planet about some new potential work in the south- no, it’s not The Scorch, it’s kinda close to there, but not that close. Out of Dos Santos, a group of miners, mineralogists and refinery workers, looking for a less stressful market for their skills than the highly, let’s say, lively trade that gets done around Dos Santos- this is a place that has jade, ruby and lapis lazuli, among other things that sort of don’t really exist elsewhere (that we’ve seen so far, anyway), so competition can get stressful -collectivized and decided to send some reps down to check out this rumored prospect. They were delighted to find that the locals were friendly and welcoming, and that there was gold in them thar hills bah gahd.

They didn’t say it like that.

What started as a communal ranch grew to be a multi-trade village, that grew in size as word spread that there was ground rich on both sizes. Hands came to work the farms or the mines, and folks set up shop to support the hands however they could- everyone from cooks and bartenders, to medicos and engineers. The engineers in particular were quite a big interest group in the growing city, given how much work they were getting from all sectors, with the aggies needing production, repair and retooling for their farming equipment, the resourcers needing everything everything from pickaxes, to ore pulverizers, to planetside construction vehicles, and the other trades needing everything from their own specialized tools, to their own shops and houses themselves. Because of this, the engies decided their best ticket was a formal collectivization of their own. Together, these three groups formed the central pillars of the young township, the three largest formalized collectives, who in their orbit of each other picked up their smaller collectives and individual syndicates as satellites. In the often odd and informal structure of Freeland society, this is often what constitutes the most stable sort of place to live: a place where there’s not only food and shelter enough for everyone, and not only just work to do, but the sort of work that’s stabilized by the symbiosis of having varied trades in a community, that common interest to not only put in a good day’s effort for your own sake, but for the sake of your neighbors as well.

These collectives’ names are engraved on three triangular stones at the front of the Community Council tower: The Greenstar Ranch, Magistral Resourcing, and Big Country Machine Works.

The Charter of Free Interstellar Cooperatives, and Section 7

Before we get into the three central collectives of New Laredo, we should probably nail down what this whole Section business is, anyway. Because for one, the name of the Charter of Free Interstellar Cooperatives keeps having its name change across my work, I can never keep it straight with which one I’m happy with, but damn it, I’m doing it now. It’s the Charter of Free Interstellar Cooperatives, or the C-FIC for short.

Well, what is that? In short, it’s first a manifesto decrying the interstellar fascism of the Imperial Consortium of Iyrissiya, then a manual describing methods of resisting their person-of-interest tracking methods, contacting members of the resistance, and escaping to the region of space described in the mainstream media as ‘The Dark Fringe’, ‘The Shroud Worlds’ and ‘The Venom Stars’, among other names that only succeed in making their enemies sound awesome- folks that live in them, prefer the less pretentious name of ‘the Freelands.’ After that, there’s the Charter of Sapient Rights, which defines the rights of sapient individuals within the freelands, as sell as the rights of collectives of equal individuals, inviolable the kernel to all Freeland law. Finally, there’s the Assurances of Community Commonwealth, which establishes the baseline for how this is all supposed to work: that this isn’t an economy based on a currency extracted by subjects, but produced by workers; that this isn’t a covenant bound by laws defined by borders enforced at gunpoint, but encouraged by the social commonwealth of a community of different but similarly-interested free colonies, decentralized and resilient across worlds and reaches.

These first 4 Sections are known as the Declarative Sections, and they’re what stands in the Freelands as a constitution. It’s not formalized in that Congressman Bribe McFuckerman sense of law, but rather treated in the sense of more ancient, more tribal or clan-based law, the kind of degree of reverence where breaking it is tantamount to deep taboo to a lot of people nowadays. People don’t actively try to violate or subvert the Declarative Sections- even hinting it’s a thing you’re trying to do? That’ll make the general public try to violate or subvert your motherfucking scalp. Then there’s a series of sections defining, in short, how this is all supposed to work- these are the Foundational Sections, outlining standards of living and safety, worker and producer rights, non-exploitative economic systems and non-destructive methods of resource harvesting, not to mention a nitty-gritty detail of why people aren’t about to just accept you trying to plunk down a colony on any old rock you please. After all that? The Occupational Sections, pages and pages and pages describing the roles, rules, education and disciplinary paths available to workers and specialists in the Freelands. The Occupational Sections are the place where Section 99 shows up, with Section 99 defining the trade of ‘People’s Special Forces Operations’ and describing the systems, regulations, freedoms and restrictions that members of this trade are privileged to and bound by.

What we’re talking about right now though? Section 7 of the Foundationals, the Freeland Cooperative-Sanctioned Economic Models, where you can find outlines for systems ranging from the basic social assurances and shared benefits of Galactic-standard Social Democracy (GSD), to the more rigidly defined expectations of the leftist-militant nomad-state that is the Zhukov Neosoviets, to the ‘right to own a rifle to keep assholes from setting up a meth lab in your weed field’ blunt simplicity of Frontier Anarchism.

Under Section 7, there’s an interesting system that was added to the living document that is the C-FIC, around about the same time Ometochtli was first being surveyed for colonization. It’s called the Sustainable Harvest Algorithmic Workhours System, or SHAWS for short. It’s the result of a lot of stolen Consortium data- ironically, stripmined out of Consortium servers -being applied through the lenses of “what is ethical to take out of a living ecosystem” and “what is physically reasonable for sapient workers with appropriate equipment to be able to produce per working hour from a given environment.” Like a lot of Freeland science, it’s a stolen hotrod of dirty-ass Consortium work, made to run clean and mean by folks who know what the fuck- in other words, a lot went into it, and a full explanation would require something of its own abstract. So instead, here’s the short, simple and sweet version: picture a hillside, rich with metal, any metal. You want to get at it, like any Freelander would- Freelanders don’t have to ask for permission, but the responsible ones do consider the consequences of their actions. So understanding that, you also understand that stripmining is right out the window, and you’re not just going to go blasting that whole-ass motherfucker apart with bigass packs of GeoDex, either- for one, what would the neighbors think? No, you’re going to be responsible, you’re going to be scientific, you’re going to apply the SHAWS algorithm (or algorithms, there’s quite a few) to the hill, taking into account all the readings you’ve taking on that metal deposit, everything from the mineral composition, size and composition of the deposit, to things like the surrounding environment and hazard factors to consider on the jobsite. Take all of that, and cram it in the algorithm; the algorithm will hand you back a number of hours. These are the maximum number of work hours your job site can provide workers, that if your job site has a proper union office if it’s collectively owned-and-operated, that is the total number of hours in that office’s bank it can issue, period. That way, work doesn’t dry up when the site’s a dead husk of spent wasteland; well before that, the work shifts to finding the next job site to set up shop on, with the potential for either expanding or downsizing based not around a board’s want for profit, but the collective’s current need to fill jobs.

This is the system that’s the basis of New Laredo’s work economy. Despite it being based around harvest industries, SHAWS has been adapted for functionally every working discipline inside the New Laredan city limits. Everyone from terrestrial vehicle mechanics, to hospitality workers, to the local recreational pharmacists, as well as everyone in between, all take their share of a ‘harvest’ of collective workhours between their respective trades in support of the aggies and miners. Taxes are paid for the benefit of the public service unions, who also use this system of buying into available hours, with workers representing both the Hardhat and Tie sectors- the folks who keep the roads from falling apart or being eaten by impossibly fine salt-dust, and the light-sider bureaucrats who err on the side of polite quickness and are often fueled by caffeine and nicotine. Then, on top of all that, and the fact that belonging to a union within the city limits means you’re afforded all the social assurances outlined under the C-FIC, no questions asked (as it should be, of course), New Laredo is just a giant production co-op, and that means when the season is up, the shipments have gone out and been received, and the Freeland Central credit union has confirmed and finalized all transactions? Whatever number is in the black, gets shared equally among the residents. This is why even though people that live in New Laredo pretty much have to love what they do, and actively be hungry to do it, there’s plenty to eat, and nobody’s starving.

A lot of people reckon this is how things should be, or at least a better sense of how they should be than folks have come before. These people are generally not of the megalomaniacally greedy sort, that would prefer that all that money and material wealth would belong to them, instead of these gross, sweaty chumps who, like, worked for it, and stuff. This is why despite the contentment of much of the population in New Laredo, there were still some that were willing to listen to outside voices and be turned: some folks are willing to believe that in a system based on greed, they’re going to be the ones that are somehow worthy, that the greedy will share with them, if they just help the greedy take power.

You know, just how like if someone were to drop a bomb near them, there’d certainly be someone else standing between them and the explosion, to shield them from harm. Of course they’d survive, they’d never be the one standing closest to the blast.

While SHAWS is an economic system that’s since caught on throughout newer settlements, as well as within collectives in established colonies, it’s still a work in progress, and it’s neither foolproof nor asshole-proof. It has methods of subversion and abuse, from a few skeezy skims, but one big violation that’s a “okay, it’s hardhats and wrenches time, folks” level offense. It’s called Labour Demand Fraud on the books, but in more common vernacular, it’s called Counterfeit Hours. It’s really simple: tell people you’re issuing hours that you don’t actually have in the bank. Or, tell people you’re an issuing agent for hours you don’t have the right to assign. Or, make up work for people to do for your own personal benefit, indicating that work is union-banked hours that they can get compensation for. That last version is really bad- tearing someone’s work ticket to do your own personal shit? That’s an uncomfortably high fraction of slavery you just committed there, chief. That’s business that’ll get you kicked flat with steeltoes and not even offered the courtesy of a kind hand back up, at the very least.

This is one of the crimes that’s on the uptick among the collectives of New Laredo- suddenly longtime members of the community are turning out to be tearing good tickets on bogus work orders, and going down with hard crime. Suddenly, jobs and lives are being disrupted by names people thought they could trust, while folks people initially thought were outsiders now suddenly have a vested interest in being whistleblowers on “a corrupt system.”

Funny, huh? Not in that ha-ha way, I mean, but, funny. Right?

The Greenstar Ranch

It’s said that the first folks who set down in New Laredo were easygoing agricultural scientists and their hippy pals, with the primary goal of making verdant fields on otherwise arid scrubland, and the secondary goal of “live extremely away from, like, everything man.” This is those people, once they got more organized, unified in ethos and, uh, sober. They were a diverse bunch, mostly Terran with a few Arissiyans and Rhidlings in the mix, with last names ranging from Daws, Jimenez, Kiessler, O’Brien and Gomez- the working class of Texas, spread across Irish, German and African American, as well as Latinx and Apache heritage, meeting with the new additions of names like Lysryn, Ollono, GaNaketi and Kazla. These sound exotic, until you realize that Ollono is literally the Northern Diaspora version of ‘Cooper.’

The original “ranch” was taken down a decade back, when it was nothing more than a couple of spare permanent structures, surrounded by RVs, surrounded by acres and acres of arable land spilled out within a terraforming fence. This was their grand experiment, their oasis in the desert, and it proved to be nothing less than a literal rousing success- their proof of concept expressed in land that could grow grain and nourish cattle meant that they’d created a place in the galaxy that people could exist. Where those are, people will come. But since those early years, the actual, physical ranch itself has grown to such size that it actually encompasses multiple compounds of field, residences and facilities, the people taking up residence in them moving with the crop they work on, as it cycles across the fields. It’s a big place, known for not only being a place that made a lot of work for folks who had been looking for it for a long time, but also a place where people come to turn their lives around. Greenstar is a place where people come to work in that restorative, reformative way, that doesn’t judge you for who you used to be, if you show you’re trying to be someone greater now- there’s a lot of folks walking the straight-and-narrow from substance recovery programs at Greenstar, and a lot of former Consortium footsoldiers putting what they learned to good practice after being released from their detention at antifascist reformatories. Turns out, if you can work a shovel with honest effort? They’ll put in an honest effort to get a roof over your head, food on your plate, and workhours on your ticket.

What happened next was natural expansion, and the Freeland solution to that issue in industry: “hey we can’t handle this, does someone else want to set up shop and take over this patch?” There were a lot of yeses in response, taking the forms of places with names like The Double Horseshoe Ranch, Providence Grove, E-Z-Wheeler Farms, Keysirak Brambleyards and Myrois Fields. The soil might have been reconstituted to be terran-compatible, but a thing we’ve learned since hitting the Freelands? Once you’ve got soil that won’t kill whatever seeds you brought from your homeworld, you’ve probably also got soil that won’t kill your friend-from-another-hominid-species’ seeds either; it’s not quite so simple I’ve boiled it down in that description, of course, but we’re talking about bacterial culture additions and pH adjustments, here, not “soil contains trace amounts of rubidium and will violently explode if irrigated.” That’s what the draw was, and why it wasn’t just Terrans that answered the call. Instead, folks from across the galaxy came to see what could make rise out of the ground, and joined the greater farming family.

The Greenstar Ranch as a collective whole is now situated out of a lovely Union Central hall, a landmark among patchworks of fields, roads and high-vis terraforming fences, sturdily crafted from groomed and decorated earthworks and clear, green glass. Marked with orchards of flowering trees and an emerald-green pond, it was at time of construction placed at the shortest distance between all the established terraformers and farms, and while it hasn’t managed to stay truly central- a lot of different people now work under this banner -it’s the thought that counts. It’s here that the greater collective handles business with its smaller associate syndicates, the folks who jibe best with the folks not only producing and maintaining the terraformed and arable land, but the produce that land produces. Both the line cook crews and the handful of individual capital C chefs that call New Laredo home are Greenstars. So are the bartenders and waitstaff, so are innkeepers, housekeepers, even sex workers. Hey, the Greenstars were here first, and they were hospitable; it only makes sense they be the ones mediating, assisting and collaborating with the hospitality industry. The aggies and terraformers of Greenstar provides the raw materials that make people want to show up to the place, while those more specialized satellite groups? They make the finished products.

Magistral Resourcing

Dos Santos is a place where, in some places, you can catch gemstone shrapnel if you’re being careless with eye protection while swinging a rock sledge. Getting your retinas excised by ruby chips is a glamorous way to lose eyesight, but there’s more voluntary, less traumatic ways of getting bionic oculars. This isn’t the point; the point is, is that even with environmentally sound harvesting practices preventing folks from gutting the region for every last piece of shiny matter to be found, there’s still so much of it to be had, people are going to be pulling ore, precious and semiprecious stone out of the highlands surrounding Dos Santos for literal centuries. You know there’s a Rojo Street in Dos Santos? You know why it’s called that? Because its ecopave is made primarily out of agate, as they had a big pile of it sitting around and wanted to make one street in the city extra-nice. Then later, they made an Azul Street, after folks found a big deposit of aquamarine and decided to the public had enough demand for a sequel.

This place has got lots of extremely valuable rock, is what I’m getting at.

The resourcing game in Dos Santos is saturated, as you might expect. The collectives there are not only established, but they deal in volume-through-efficiency as a point of pride, to the point that “motherfucking volume” is something of a meme among folks that do business with the locals. By their example, it is shit-wired-tight country, and that’s great, because it means things are being done properly, and workers are equal parts safe and paid. It also sucks if you’re a smaller collective that’s trying to punch into the market with new, experimental methods that people are going to be less inclined to either learn or put trust in. When you can put out sheer volume (Volume VOLUME) of tonnage with traditional clean industry methods, especially if you can do it with a low resource overhead? That’s good enough, which is the standard of acceptable in the Freelands.

Still, good enough doesn’t push boundaries. Without pushing boundaries, folks would still be using leg-eating Consortium-grade mechanical pulverizers to separate ore, instead of the far safer kinetic ablators and EM separators that are standard to industry now. But a fair few were tired of working on those more established machines, ready to nail up a Lutheran Thesis’ worth of issues with their methods and the workflow required for their use. They had their own designs, and some of them weren’t just revisions, but radical new ideas. Their centerpiece was their Focused Impelling Gravitic Extractor, what they choose to call the Slingshot Straw to sound less like huge boffins. Effectively an array of high-powered gravitic emitters, braided up in the same level of insulated cabling you’d typically see binding the barrel of a gauss cannon, the Slingshot Straw emits a “heavy river” of gravity, with the forward-most point being an oscillating no-contact drill tip, and the rearward sections of the field churning and separating the mass into its individual composite parts, making it a device that can not only extract raw material at a job site, but actually refine it to a coarse extent at the same time- you want to talk about volume and efficiency? Here’s your baby. At least when it gets working properly, and in its early phases, that was a little fiddly.

Because of that, they couldn’t get the worker backing in a job market that demands nothing but VOLUME. But they believed in their tech, their collective Masterpiece, and knew they could find a place to give it a proper launch. So rather than seeking to try and crowbar their way into a place where people were already making a steady livelihood, they decided to find a place that could be equal parts prospecting claim and proving ground, for their potential giga-drill that can run off of direct solar input. They’d heard about this new place way off to the south, a patch of scrubland that was suddenly turning green- would they mind some similarly weird and high-tech neighbors?

Of course not. So the new Masters that created their Masterpiece rolled in, and established themselves as not only the resident resourcers in the region, but worker-owners on the bleeding edge of mining tech. The Straw got the revisions it needs, and while it has its limitations still, the work its creators have been able to put in on the design, while also pulling all sorts of valuable ore out of the ground. In the Freelands, this is the very picture of prosperity- both self and collaborative validation, with a payday attached.

They named their collective Majistral- their relocation and perfection of their tech representing in their minds the advancement from journeymen to Masters. From their central hall, the Majistral Stoneworks, a greenery-draped brutalist castle of craft that shows you can make nice things out of disused quarries if you just try hard enough, they’re the focal collective of all the resourcing industry in New Laredo, working to organize and optimize the smaller extraction and refinement collectives in their orbit, as well as representing the local truckers and transport drivers, roadworkers and earthmovers.

Big Country Machineworks

Majistral’s arrival changed the composition of the little settlement that a group of Neo-Vaqueros and weed growing hippies called New Laredo. It went from being a little group of buildings with associated fields, christened with a name given just because folks liked the ring to it, to a place where actual industry was getting done. The change didn’t upset anyone, it just marked a point the original settlers knew would be coming if their little place in the galaxy took root: the part where it went from some weird little space-village into an actual town, with a layout and street signs and everything. The seed had sprouted, based on the goodwill between people of differing disciplines coming together and forming a community, and that was a thing worth celebrating, even if it is always scary to consider the implications of scaling up.

One of those implications being, “how do we keep all of this running, and also, build more?”

Heavy duty means heavy wear, and that means stuff has to start breaking down at some point. Folks in the fledgling union council of New Laredo decided to get ahead of that problem before something electrically or mechanically unpleasant could start causing them setbacks, or worse, threaten their people’s safety. So they sent out the call across the nets: vehicular, robotic and heavy machinery mechanics, electricians, solar, wind and scaled fusion specialists, hab carpenters, plumbers- this is your chance, because we made a town, and if you help us build more of it? It’ll be your town too. That’s not just blowing smoke, that’s how the Freelands work: when you belong to a collective that built a settlement and maintains its primary residence within it, you are equal owner in that settlement. Just consider being used to the economic conditions of the Inner Galaxy, then being told that’s just a thing you can go and be, and tell me that people wouldn’t answer the call in droves.

They did, and so the toolsheds of New Laredo came to contain a mighty collection of wrenches, alongside the shovels and mining picks that were already sitting in there. And then, they built bigger toolsheds, because they needed a place to store their real serious shit.

The influx of applied engineering trades meant that New Laredo didn’t see a growth spurt, as much as it did a full-on eruption. Suddenly, it wasn’t people, tailing their heavy equipment behind folded-up prefab habs or RVs, working out of barns and shacks made out of Ceravek sheeting and polyboard. Suddenly, it was buildings with properly leveled foundations, integrated plumbing, a resilient power grid- the works. There was a downtown that wasn’t just ironically named, even if it kinda was small. It was because of this influx of workers that it could all happen, so it was only right that they not only come in as equal share, but also have a collective of their own. They decided on a nice, Texan name.

Big Country locked into place, like they were they final strut riveted into place, providing stability to the structure of New Laredo. With them, it wasn’t just workers doing their own repairs with more generalized tools and assembly mills, because now, the experts had arrived, and all sorts of fancy stuff could get done up all profesional-like. Greenstar made New Laredo fertile, and Majistral made it a place of opportunity; Big Country made it an actual city.

Big Country’s central hall, known to the locals as The Motor Pool, sits at the industrial district-facing end of main street, an engineering-deco structure made of alloy girders and solar windows that bridges over the roadway, occupying the lots on either side. The western building is the union hall proper, covering the administrative, regulatory and educational bodies of functionally every trade skill that operates within New Laredo- this place is as much a school and library as it is an office and meeting hall. The eastern building is the New Laredo Public Works central engineering bay, which is why folks call it The Motor Pool- this is where the street cleaner and garbage drones go to recharge and wash off, and it’s also where the ambulances, fire trucks and transit shuttles go for repairs and maintenance. Serving as the primary workshop for those operating purely under the Big Country collective banner, the east building is also a source of on the job training for New Laredo’s next generation of trade engineers. Also, getting yelled at for not calling a ‘spark hazard, masks’ before welding. Dick move, apprentice, weld more politely, please? Some of us don’t need any more spots on our eyes when we blink, we’ve got enough as is.