Everything for everyone, p.15
Everything for Everyone, page 15
Abdelhadi: Can you explain the space elevator?
Reed: Um … there is a lot of new coverage about it. I feel like every six-year-old knows what it is. Perhaps, especially every six-year-old. But sure. We have started construction already, and it should be done within a decade. It will be a permanent structure, linking a geostationary orbital platform to the Earth’s surface. It had to be built on the Equator, and our friends in Quito were very eager to be point. It will be the biggest structure humans have ever made. It took years of debate to decide if it was worth the resources of constructing it. The idea is, instead of launching rockets or components, they can be hauled up on the elevator’s main platform. There will be channels for pods in the interior of the structure, used for smaller scale items like people. Once the construction is complete, the resources and energy to transport back and forth will be a tiny fraction of what is required for rockets. The orbital platform above Quito is already completed, or at least fully functional. It is called Pacha. Already, all our spacecraft manufacturing takes place in orbit, at the shipyards of Pacha. When the elevator is complete, anyone will be able to visit, not the months-long wait lists we have now.
Abdelhadi: What is Pacha like?
Reed: It’s … it is the most earnest place you will ever visit. Like everyone there is so passionate, and so dedicated, and so hard working. It is like the passion of humanity crystalized into fifty structures tied together with tubes and struts. It is like a giant, magnificent, lopsided snowflake. Lots of visitors are artists and scientists. Lots of people are on their way to the lunar commune, or the asteroid belt, or one of the orbital communes. It is really profoundly moving for people to just look down on Earth, the first time they make it up. Getting back and forth is hard, admittedly, because we are still using rockets. But the elevator will turn Pacha into a city anyone can visit.
Abdelhadi: You’ve talked mostly in “we” form, and I’m curious what you yourself are focused on these days. I know you primarily work on spacecraft design. What else?
Reed: Yeah, that’s my main team. I also do a lot of public-facing stuff in communicating what Born in Flames is doing with the communes and making sure we have oversight from the Free Assembly. I do a lot of teaching and training too. None of us wept over academia’s grave, but we have been thinking over the past twenty years about how we maintain knowledge production outside of that system. How do we make sure we are still discovering? Creating? How do we systematize those things? Turns out, so much of what we thought was supporting us was holding us back. There’s no shortage of interest in science, it was just a matter of creating new ways of training the next generation, of communicating between scientists, of sharing resources—those are all the things the commune is about.
Abdelhadi: Indeed. Well, I’ve taken up enough of your time, thank you.
Reed: I hope you’ll come to Pacha one day.
Abdelhadi: [Laughs.] I’m too old to leave Earth! But I wish you the best of luck and appreciate the work you’re doing.
Reed: Thank you.
8: CONNOR STEPHENS ON THE FALL OF COLORADO SPRINGS
Recorded on December 20, 2068, in Harlem.
M. E. O’Brien: Hello, this is O’Brien. I will be having a conversation with Connor Stephens for an oral history project focusing on the history of the New York Commune. It is … December 20, 2068. We are at the Riverside Commune in Harlem, in Connor’s apartment. We are on the twelfth floor of a twenty-three-story building, with a gorgeous view of Riverside Park and the Hudson River. It is night, and we can see the lights from a dance barge docked on the far side of the river.
Stephens: We are at my daughter’s apartment. I live next door. Where did you get that jacket? [Gestures to a brown construction-style jacket O’Brien is wearing.]
O’Brien: My jacket? Um … I believe my sister Nadia gave it to me—I’m not aware of anything special about my jacket. Are you okay, Mr. Stephens? You seem agitated.
Stephens: Your sister? No … no, it’s fine. I’ll be okay.
O’Brien: Alright. Well, we are at Mr. Stephens’ daughter’s apartment. Can you tell me about growing up?
Stephens: I was born January 19, 2025, on the Wind River Reservation. My mother is Northern Arapaho. She grew up in Casper before moving to Wind River. My father is Zapotec, from Oaxaca. I had two sisters and a two-spirit sib. My sisters are Fast River Stephens and June Stephens. My sib’s name is Trib. I attended high school at Arapahoe in Centennial. I then went to community college in Riverton. You’re wearing her jacket.
O’Brien: Whose jacket? … Mr. Stephens? My jacket is like someone else’s jacket? I don’t really understand.
Stephens: That’s Fast River’s jacket.
O’Brien: [Long pause.] I am worried you aren’t entirely with me in the room, at the moment, Mr. Stephens. Are you sure you want to continue the interview?
Stephens: [Pause.] I’ll be fine. Let’s keep going.
O’Brien: How did your parents meet?
Stephens: I think at a show in Casper. My dad was in a speedcore band from DF—Mexico City. My parents never married, and there was a lot of strife in my mom’s family about it. They didn’t really like my dad. So, we have my mom’s family name. My dad went back and forth between Oaxaca, the District, and my mom’s home on the reservation while I was growing up. Some summers we would go stay with him, and once when I was thirteen, I was a roadie with his band. My family was a bit—odd. Like Fast River was into all these kinds of music scenes in Mexico that no one on the rez knew anything about it.…
O’Brien: What was your family like?
Stephens: A lot of … a lot of love. My mother was very political. The groundwater on the reservation was contaminated. People were getting sick. She worked with other people to stop it. They shut down a pipeline. My dad didn’t talk much, but he taught me lots of things, like how to do things with my hands and play guitar and ride a motorcycle and fix a generator. My sisters were older than me. Fast River got in fights all the time. She would beat down anyone who hassled our family. I think I was closest to her. She disappeared.
O’Brien: What happened?
Stephens: I was maybe twelve. We eventually figured out she had joined the [US] Army somehow. She was over in Iran. And I … well, I … I don’t know.…
O’Brien: I encourage you to elaborate on anything you would like, and you don’t have to say anything about anything you don’t want to talk about. This is a chance for you to tell your story on your own terms. The questions I ask are just to encourage you to share what comes to mind for you.
Stephens: Thanks … thanks.
O’Brien: Do you want to say anything about your other siblings?
Stephens: June was quiet. She was really into school. She wrote a lot. She loved books. She was really into fantasy novels. She was writing fan fiction, I think, all in this portal world of books she liked. She was writing all the time.
O’Brien: And … Trib?
Stephens: Trib got into spiritual practices. They got close to granddad, to my mom’s dad, and got him back into powwows after he had a bad period. They also got June into it. Trib would convince granddad to drive them to powwows all over the Great Sioux. I think Trib and granddad really connected over it.… My mother taught me to fight, to be a defender. A warrior. Fast River taught me how to throw a punch and shoot, and then mom taught me about the deeper parts of being a defender.
O’Brien: What is a defender?
Stephens: I don’t want to get into it.… It was—I don’t know how to say it to you. I guess the easiest way to talk about it is the water. Mom cared so much about the water, about fighting for the water, and knew it was a war for the water. Like a war against the land, and we had to be the land’s defender. That’s not all of it, but it’s the piece easiest to talk about … She told me early that we would all be a part of that war. I don’t think you would get it.…
O’Brien: Should I ask a different question?.… Do you want to share more about your childhood?
Stephens: No ma’am.
O’Brien: Michelle, you can call me Michelle—It feels like maybe I need to just ask a lot of questions?
Stephens: If you’d like.
O’Brien: Do you have any feelings about doing this interview?
Stephens: [Pause.] We have an oral history project at Wind River. Not a settler project—I haven’t done an interview there, but I know my mom did, and Trib, and June. There is a lot about my mom’s organizing. I try not to speak for other people too much, particularly when they are so good at speaking for themselves. My whole family has a lot to say. People should listen to those stories. [Long pause.] I helped my mom out with her organizing all through high school.
O’Brien: Like what is an example of what you did?
Stephens: At Arapahoe High School I helped lead a group that joined in the fights against pipelines and drilling. Then I went to Iran.
O’Brien: In the Army?
Stephens: Yeah, I joined the Army and went to Iran. But things were hot in high school.
O’Brien: Okay, let’s separate those a bit. How old were you when you joined the Army?
Stephens: Seventeen.
O’Brien: So before then, when you were in high school, what was happening? Hot around pipeline struggles?
Stephens: When I was growing up those guys were getting much bolder. Taking over Gillette. Then setting up the camp in Thunder Basin.
O’Brien: Those guys? Do you mean fascists, white supremacist groups?
Stephens: Yeah, those guys.
O’Brien: Sorry I am not quite tracking. What groups were active?
Stephens: Wyoming Liberty. New Nation. Christian Freedom. We didn’t let any of them come out our way. Once they tried to do a rally in Riverton and we had a shootout over it.
O’Brien: They had a big camp in Eastern Wyoming for a while, right? They set up a military base in Thunder Basin Grassland?
Stephens: I did some recon out there. A whole fleet of buzzards and stalkers. I felt some envy looking at those.
O’Brien: Buzzards?
Stephens: You could see the buzzards all lined up on the one road, their wings folded in the moonlight. With their mod houses and this fence, it must have been ten meters high. Like the Green Zone.
O’Brien: Buzzards are … drones? Planes?
Stephens: Sure. The crew at Thunder Basin were all a bunch of burnout soldier boys. Guess I was too.
O’Brien: Was that when you were in high school?
Stephens: No, after I came back from Iran.
O’Brien: It was like the Green Zone in Iran? … This is a bit jumbled. How did the Wyoming Liberty Party come to power in the state?
Stephens: The militias shot up the voting stations in 2050. Liberty rolled in and took over Cheyenne.
O’Brien: The state government? Fascists took over the Wyoming state government in 2050 after disrupting the election?
Stephens: Yeah. The National Guard was split and shooting it out with each other for a day or two, but it was over quick. It was a lot of chaos. This all had been building through the forties.
O’Brien: I feel a little confused. I think we keep getting out of order.
Stephens: Everything is out of order.
O’Brien: What caused the fascist insurgency you are describing? Like … where did they get their resources?
Stephens: Mining corps. The pipeline oil guys. A bunch of ranchers. So many guns. A lot of settlers so fucked up from being in Iran. They needed something they could control. The feds were so distracted, and everything was falling apart. All the pieces were there.
O’Brien: How did you—activists at Wind River—respond to the fascist takeover of Cheyenne?
Stephens: We took it as a chance to expand, going northwest. We took over everything within an hour’s drive.
O’Brien: “We” being the tribal government?
Stephens: Not quite. A lot had been shaken up, turned upside down. “We” being the [Wind River] Defense Forces. Some fighting along Highway 191, but mostly it was also quick. People had been having a hard time in the forties. We made sure people got healthcare and food, which was a lot more than anything coming out of Cheyenne or Thunder Basin. That was good enough. So, a lot of settlers stayed and adapted to Wind River being in charge.
O’Brien: You are referring to the white people living in northwest Wyoming when Wind River expanded?
Stephens: Yeah.
O’Brien: West and north. Those were national parks? The Grand Tetons? Yellowstone? You all took over what had been the national parks in northwest Wyoming?
Stephens: Guess so. They had been closed for years.
O’Brien: Were you going to school at this point?
Stephens: No, I was done up by then.
O’Brien: I am sorry. What year were you born?
Stephens: 2026.
O’Brien: I thought you said 2025? … So, you went to Iran in … 2043.
Stephens: Sounds right.
O’Brien: And the fascist insurgency escalated in 2050. So, you were in high school, fascists started organizing, you were fighting pipelines. Then you went to Iran in 2043, fought in the war. When you got back you joined a reservation militia of some sort, and the fascist insurgency escalated, and a civil war started between the feds and Wyoming Liberty. And your militia, the Defense Forces of Wind River? Took the opportunity to expand the reservation to include what had been national parks? Did I get all this right?
Stephens: Sure. I wouldn’t call us a militia.
O’Brien: You were fighting for Wind River? For “the Defense Forces” you called them?
Stephens: Yeah, I was an officer. I liked the chaos of it. Of the fighting. I always got along well with the chaos. We started the Defense Forces as kids started coming back from Iran, and as things were blowing up with those guys and the feds.
O’Brien: How many fighters in the Defense Forces?
Stephens: Maybe two hundred. We had all been in Iran. We all knew a thing or two. I was a munitions specialist in the war.
O’Brien: Maybe we should back up and talk about your time in Iran. You mentioned that briefly.
Stephens: Okay.
O’Brien: What was serving in Iran like?
Stephens: It was such a shitshow.
O’Brien: Can you share more about that?
Stephens: What do you want to know?
O’Brien: Why did you join the Army?
Stephens: I was a warrior.
O’Brien: But why the Army?
Stephens: I wanted to learn how to fight. I knew how to use a gun and all, but I wanted to learn discipline and self-control, and how wars are won. I thought it might be useful to bring those skills back.
O’Brien: This was … before the draft?
Stephens: I was pretty sure the draft was coming, and I wanted to get in before that, to have some control over where I ended up.
O’Brien: Did you have any say on what you ended up doing?
Stephens: Fuck no. Initially, they put me on as an assist for enhanced interrogations. We had this prison camp outside of Mashhad. I would drag prisoners into the room, drag them out.
O’Brien: Sounds bad.
Stephens: I hated it. I felt like my hatred was just eating me up inside all the time, like it all infected my dreams, that place.
O’Brien: The United States was losing at this point?
Stephens: Badly. The US was never not losing. But it had gotten worse. Eventually I got reassigned out of interrogations.
O’Brien: What did you do next?
Stephens: I got assigned in the field to dealing with landmines and drones.… The US fucked that country up bad.
O’Brien: How so? Could you say more about that?
Stephens: That was the year they nuked Tehran and Mashhad.
O’Brien: 2045?
Stephens: I was in the desert … When the Russians pulled out, some of the guys I was fighting with thought it would be an easy win, but at that point it just all collapsed.
O’Brien: What happened?
Stephens: The ’mericans had already poisoned the water in the major cities, defoliated the whole northeast, so it was just these huge caravans of refugees trying to flee. Bomb strikes raining down on them. Watching that fucked me up …
O’Brien: They were bombing refugees? The US Air Force?
Stephens: What that fucking empire did to that country no one should ever forget.
O’Brien: The US defoliated northeast Iran? The area under US control?
Stephens: Yeah, control was the running joke.
O’Brien: Where were you based?
Stephens: My unit was in the desert, Dasht-e Kavir.
O’Brien: Were you close to anyone?
Stephens: I had this friend, Ridge, he was an intel man with my unit. He came from Cali, from the Balagoons, and he was smart as fuck, like Fast River.
O’Brien: It sounds like you liked him.
Stephens: Ridge would talk about how the ’ranians were fighting, the guerilla strategies in the occupied cities, the strike waves, the refugee mutual aid, the local subcontractors teaming up with the insubordinate ’merican units, about how people lived in the desert … I learned more from hearing how the ’ranian guerrillas fought than anything the US did.
O’Brien: I notice you have more to say when talking about—about people you liked. Is there more you can say about Ridge?
Stephens: Ridge loved it, like loved the people we were fighting, the desert we were in, the land. Reminded me of how granddad talked about the land. I learned a lot from Ridge, about thinking strategically, thinking tactically.
O’Brien: What was your job?
