A Guide to Florida 2300

(As recorded in the Parrot Party Room in "Buffet’s of Key West", June 22, 2303, Conch Call Travel and Orientation Agency seminar, "Welcome to Florida!")

Overview

Introduction

Welcome to Florida! For one reason or another, all of you have to spend some time in the hottest, swampiest, wettest, mosquitoes, gator and snakiest corner of America, and I’m here to help make your stay as pleasant as possible. Okay, for starters I see some of you pulling out the portacomps and the minilinks and the e-guides and trying to get ahead of me. I wouldn’t do that. First of all, when your paying attention to the portacomp, your missing me. Second, half the official stuff is just propaganda anyway. Never trust anything you get for free, it’s worth every penny. I’ve got better stuff, which is only fair, because you paid for it. Feel free to interrupt me at any point of the lecture if you have any questions, and I’ll feel free to interrupt you. So, to start off, any questions? Oh, yeah, out the door, and on the right hand side off the corridor. Any other questions?

The weather, yes, it’s always this hot and wet, except when its not. Sometimes, it’s downright habitable. Here in Key West, there has never been any frost whatsoever in the meteorological history of the United States, and in Miami, there hasn’t been any since the 20^th century. Winter tends to be warm and sunny, summer is rainforest weather, and the hurricanes come in between. Nice, huh? People used to think of this area as a retirement area. It used to be more moderate here, a long time ago, but on the bright side, a hundred years ago, it was a lot worse, and the climate is slowly cooling down, and at the same getting a lot calmer. Another century, and northeasterners might be coming down here to retire again. It’s better in Cuba- remember, Cuba’s got mountains. Florida just has places where the swamp is a bit higher than it is in the other places.

So, sit back, watch the screen, and I’ll take you on a tour, all over the State and ending up back here in the Keys, where you can feel as remote from the rest of the country as you might on Ellis.

Visiting Florida

You may be surprised by the extent to which the State of Florida requires permits, and by the cost of some of them. Let me go back to reminding you that Florida has recovered from some tough straits, in the span of two centuries. Okay, we all know all of America was pretty bad off in the 21^st century, but Florida had it worse: when you have all this hot, and wet, and massive storms every year, nature comes back with a vengeance. So, old Florida, pretty much erased. Canals, roads, airports, power, all gone into the swamps. This land was close to being virgin again, except for a strip on the east coast, and the Orlando-Tampa core. And so Florida rebuilt. Rebuilding costs money. So they went broke. To this day, the government of Florida scratches by with a budget that’s always too small, and they seem a bit averse to lowering the tax boom on the people, so they permits and hidden fees on all kinds of things. Don’t take it personally, but the government of Florida and many of the county and municipal governments view visitors as traveling wallets who can be squeezed dry to sustain state programs. Yes, they get sneaky. You may have noticed that when you tack on the taxes and fees, renting or leasing wheeled vehicles and boats get’s expensive, but hovercraft don’t. How many of you people here looked at the costs at EZLease and said, "Gee, honey, we might as well get the hovercraft when you consider all the fees they add onto the auto lease"? They want you drive a hovercraft in Florida. More on that later.

If you’re a foreigner, you need the typical passport, approved ident (subdermal is highly recommended) and all the other stuff the gov wants out of you. If you don’t have them already, beat feet to the nearest consulate- fortunately, a number of nations, especially the ones in this hemisphere, have consulates in Miami. If you’re American, of course, visiting Florida is just a matter of crossing the state line- and you’ll find Florida is one of the more "relaxed" states when it comes to the boys upstairs tracking your movements. It’s not because of any anti-federal feelings here. Florida is not one of your more "autonomous" states or regions, like New England. I think its because the gov figured people had it tough enough here, and if they actually volunteered to rebuild this washed out state, don’t mess with them. And it’s true, Floridians had, and still have, more than their share of problems. Like disease. If you did any, and I mean any, thinking before coming here, you got a good medical prep. So, by a show of hands, who went in for the DNAM fix for this place- you guys are the serious Floridaphiles- or just the shots? I'm a DNAM. Wouldn't have it any other way. Of course, I can't ever go mountain climbing without oxygen now, as I'm a bit anemic like any south Florida resident, but I don't want to get yearly anti-Malarials, and planned to stay.

Malaria is this place's best defense. When the south heated up in the twilight era (Did you ever see the history doc on that? Can you believe, even after they recorded the rising ocean temperatures, no one was really interesting in trying to cool off the planet? Could they have been that crazy?) Malaria moved in, and somehow it ended up changed and when things were set right again, malaria just settled into the swamps and never left. How did it change? Good question, and one that Florida State U has been working on for some time. Their best guess is that the heavily polluted and de populated post-twilight environment created a series of highly mutagenic micro-environments differing from each other not in climate or topology so much as in chemical makeup. This caused a rapid spurt in evolution resulting in Malaria parasites that are highly resistant to modern eradication techniques.

Could we wipe it out if we tried? Sure they could eradicate it, drain every swamp, and eradicate all that's natural in Florida at the same time. Easier to change us than to change the state, agreed? So, a little DNAM treatment, no big deal, nothing compared to what emigrants to King go through, and you can wade knee deep in skitters and never fear Malaria, or most of the other stuff they carry. Hey, calm down. Sure, every now and then, someone catches something we can't engineer against. But its rare, and there's a bright side. Do you have any idea how crowded the Keys would be if people in the rest of the country, and the Mexicans, weren't afraid of our Everglades Bugs? And there’s a certain national pride you can’t ignore. So the French settled all the good planets. We Americans conquered Florida. Twice.

But seriously, the DNAM adjustment that makes natives here immune to more than 99 percent of the local micro organisms is a little heavy on the body. No change in life span, but there are a few real physical handicaps such as the mild anemia, an certain allergies. Floridians are somewhat restricted on areas they can visit. They cannot handle any environment with a low oxygen pressure, so some colonies and outposts, not to mention many areas of Earth, are off limits to them. On the other hand, the same defenses engineered into them to repel our local micro beasts do quite well in a variety of other environments, mostly the wet tropical kind, so the DNAM clinics in Miami, Pensacola, Orlando, and Tallahassee do a fair amount of work on people who never expect to set foot in Florida again. Oh, yeah, I’m rambling again.

Let’s see- Firearms, no. Hunting is permissible in a few areas, but the approved weapons list is short and tends to be of the bow and arrow variety. Crossbows, too, they’re very popular. Plants and animals, not so severely restricted, they’ll probably die here anyway, so its what goes out of Florida the officials watch, not what goes in. Drugs, electronic media, software, that’s all pretty much in tune with the Federal customs guidelines, and you know how quickly those can change, so its best to download a copy and check it before entering the state. But what am I telling you people for? Your already here, so you’ve already gotten whatever you’re carrying through customs. If you still have anything bad, ad you’re feeling guilty about it, there’s a waste bin outside.

The Florida Chamber of Commerce Tourism Board provides information and assistance to travelers, and a heavy dose of propaganda. It’s mostly run by TourOrlandoCorp, after all. I’ll tell you more about TOC later, and how they managed to survive the Twilight, and basically run a large part of central Florida for more than a century. But for now, you need to know that when the government was re-established in the southern half of the state, and a visitors’ and tourists’ office was set up, it was more of a grafting of a public agency onto a powerful and experienced corporation than a corporation lending its services to a fledgling agency. Despite their commercialist and self-interested leanings, FCCTB is a very effective agency. In matter that exceed their authority, such as the procurement of licenses and permits, or legal matter such as the execution of estates and court awards, they will aid the out of stater or foreigner, as they have a strong vested interest in maintaining the best possible image for Florida.

Money

As you might have guessed, Florida, being an American State, runs on American currency. The Europeans never truly grasped the importance of a single, predictable, unifying currency supported by continental rather than regional politics. Lord, they tried, but they never had the fiduciary fortitude to make it work. This has always been one of the great strengths of the American economy. Modern communications makes currency conversions instantaneous, so the foreign visitor need never worry. You can convert currency automatically, through any account on the net, at the tie of any transaction, at up to the second exchange rates. You may get a different exchange rate at different times during one day, since the rates are adjusted continuously! Heck, plan it right, and you can make some money on the side during your trip. In fact, making "bets" on the movement of foreign currencies is a game for University of Florida college students, who have been known to earn (and less often, lose) their tuition money by making advantageous currency conversions. Last year, there was a big fuss over the kids at Pensacola Tech who discovered a "cascade circle" involving over thirty separate conversions that, thanks to an odd set of exchange rates and special conditions, allowed them to instantaneously "trade up" their currency. They rolled a few thousand dollars into about fifty million before a computer in a national bank in Austrovenia figured it out and adjusted its shekel exchange rate to break the cascade circle. The whole thing took the kids about two months to research and program, and then it ran for less than a minute. Well, a very profitable minute. University kids stay up nights looking for these cascade circles. But I’m rambling again.

Climate

Do I really have to go on about this? Okay, show of hands, how many of you do not have a rollup in with you? (Editor’s note: A "Rollup" is a term used in Florida and the Gulf states for a waterproof, synthetic wrinkle-proof poncho-like covering, usually transparent- highly so, with the more expensive types being less visible- capable of being folded or rolled into a very small pouch and carried about, and rapidly deployed with the onset of precipitation.) Okay, Florida is officially "humid subtropical" except for the southernmost part, which is "humid tropical". What’s the difference? The southernmost part of Florida is the only part of the continental United States of America that is totally frost free. The rest occasionally, but very rarely, sees frost. Oh, yes, I anticipated that one. Why are there malaria carrying mosquitoes in an area that occasionally gets frost? Well, remember I mentioned that little twilight induced spurt of evolution and its effects on the skitter (that’s what they’re called around here) population? The ability to survive brief periods of frost is one of those effects. That’s why the customs officials are more concerned about what goes out of Florida than what comes in. Now, frost free does not always mean blistering hot. In the winter, in the Everglades, sometimes its down into the chilly 50’s. Regardless of temperature, its usually wet around here. If its not raining, then at some time in the near future it’s going to rain. A week without rain is something we call a drought. Your parka and thermals are not needed here. Your rain gear is.

Geography

During the twilight era, sea level rose around a meter. With so much of Florida underwater once, it changed shape in places. Overall, its still the big droopy peninsula hanging off America's east coast, but, for starters, the Keys don't match up with pre-twilight maps too well. Key West is still Key West, but it's got a whole new shape, it's actually 30% bigger than it was 3 centuries ago. That's a result of the efforts to keep it above water, once upon a time. When the water finally did go back down, the island was bigger.

Some of the smaller keys vanished entirely, and new ones appeared. Coral built up a few islands in the Everglades Bay area north of the keys, but only three of them are inhabited, and one of them is just a large rangers and visitors station for Everglades national park. That was pretty much in line with "worst possible case" estimate. It made a mess out of Florida. That one meter of water deprived the coast of the protection offered by the barrier islands, shoals, and reefs. Storm surges were able to throw their full weight against the coast, and much the human development of the past few centuries was destroyed. Miami was saved, parts of it at least, and the government went out of its way to protect Cape Canaveral, because it would have been really sad to let it go. But Fort Lauderdale’s beachfront was wiped out- entire apartment buildings were undermined and crashed down into the surf. Florida is a pretty flat place. A meter of vertical distance can translate to a heck of a big area horizontally. So a lot of the state got pushed around. No, the state of Florida is still a big peninsula stuck off the southeast corner of the USA, but a lot of the local features got relocated during the twilight. Islands, swamps, canals, beaches, rivers, some of them just aren’t where they used to be. But it’s still all flat, beachy on the Atlantic side, swampy on the Gulf side. The water on both sides stays shallow well out to sea. Not much more to say about Florida Geography.

The People

Demography

The population of Florida crashed with the Twilight. The northern tier of cities, for example, including the then state capitol, was growing in population at the end of the 20th century, but a waste of empty and abandoned buildings by the end of the 21st. At the low point, it must have had less than half of the pre-twilight population. The people who can actually trace their roots here to pre-twilight times we call conchies, the hard shelled natives. These include two distinct ethnic subdivisions, who’ll get more elaboration later. But most of the conchies were either desperate, or stubborn. Only the desperate, the very stubborn, and the very stupid remained. As you might imagine form the conditions I described, people weren't so keen on living here. It's back again, sure, but it will never be what it used to be. Palm Beach isn't a retirement town anymore, its mostly food processing businesses, and Fort Lauderdale is half enclosed arcology half shanty town. It's got a splendid archeological dig, though.

Since then, we’ve rebounded, mostly by attracting more of the same. With a mess of refugees from Central America, about two thirds of the State’s population of about 7 million is of at least 50% Hispanic descent. In fact, about 2.5 million of the state’s citizens speak Spanish as a primary or secondary language. There are two principal ethnic communities that date to pre-twilight times. First, the Cuban community, although a subset of the Hispanics I just mentioned, fell into the "very stubborn" element of Twilight era survivors. You would think a lot would have headed back to Cuba after their late 20^th century dictator, Fidel Castro, was no more. Especially considering how screwed up America was at the time. Well, a lot of them did, but a lot of them had decided that Florida was their home, come what may, and they toughed it out. When later immigrants arrived, the Cuban-American population identified more with American culture, and had assimilated to a much higher degree, than the newcomers, and put themselves a few notches higher on the social scale than the other Hispanics. So much so that the other Hispanic communities barely accepted the Cuban Americans as Hispanic at all. The breach became a gulf. Today, there are about a million Floridians of at least 50% Cuban-American descent. They have all the stubbornness and pragmatism of New Englanders, they tend to be highly community oriented, but they don’t speak Spanish (well, most of them don’t, it’s hard to generalize about a million people) and they cling to American culture like it was religious ritual. There are parts of Miami today, where if run into a guy named Juan Gonzalez, and address him in Spanish , he’d as likely as not be completely unable to understand you. The other surviving ethnic group are the Native Americans, some 80% of which in the State have Seminole affiliations, with most of the rest associating with the Tainos.

Now, let’s be clear on this- what I mean by a Native American is basically someone who says he or she is a descendent of Native Americans. If you ask, how many preserve Native American culture, you might as well ask, how many Anglo Americans say "thee" and "thou" and wear big buckles on their hats and boots. But, if you think back on what I told you about the State’s history, you’ll see why, when the place went to watery hell, the poor Seminole living in a cabin in the swamps, who knew how to fish and survive and get by with what a very pissed off mother nature still provided, held a distinct advantage over the American who drove a big gasoline burning car and worked in an office building and grew up in a world powered by cheap electricity. It’s no wonder that, compared to the latter, the Seminoles prospered. Poverty had prepared them for the Twilight. Okay, another important fact- and give me a moment and you’ll see how this ties all together. From the Seminole point of view, what we call the Twilight was really the second big disaster to befall them, the first having occurred a couple of centuries prior when the white man showed up and decided he owned North America. The Seminoles were then a bunch of stubborn, resistant survivors living on the fringe, and they freely took in other people, not only other native Americans but also escaped slaves, wanted criminals, and runaways of every kind from the white society. And wouldn’t you know, when the Twilight rolled around, they did it again. So, here’s the upshot: There are almost 10 times as many people calling themselves Native Americans in the State of Florida today as there were in 1990, even though we have far less people total. There are 300,000 native Americans running around the state, although they include a pretty rich gene pool, if you know what I mean.

Culture

Religion. Catholicism, of the Roman Catholic variety, is the leading religion in Florida, assuming we don’t count the beach as a religion. About four million people are counted as Catholics. Of course, the church does all the counting, so take that the way we take our margaritas, with a little salt. Most Floridians, as far as I’ve seen, don’t give religion much account in their lives. Aside from the Catholics, and the usual assortment of other Christian denominations, you find a scattering of other religions in Florida. You have small populations of Jews, Muslims, Bhuddists, and Santerians, in that order. And one growing faith: recall what I said earlier about the diversity of those who call themselves native American. One of the lessons learned around here is that if you are going to prove to someone you are a Seminole, and you can’t do it with a blood test, you’re going to work very hard trying to prove it in any other way possible. So, when the Muskogean Ceremony Community started a ritual "spiritual acceptance" of new Seminoles in 2055, they opened a flood gate. It was one wooden building in 2055, today the MCC is scattered across Florida, and claims over 150,000 members. This includes Seminoles, and non-native Americans as well, and the movement is growing at about 5% a year. The MCC can be pretty vague about what it’s beliefs actually are, they’re into "spirit" and "harmony" and "respect for nature" and not so much into "thus spake the almighty".

Dress. It’s hot and wet, here, and people dress accordingly. If you belong to an orthodox and conservative religious sect, or if you’re from Austrovenia, there’s no way I can sugarcoat it: you’re going to be offended. Most Floridians own nothing that you would consider formal attire. Heck, half the watering holes in Key West won’t let you in if you’re wearing a suit. Spoils their image. The uniform here is tee shirt, cutoffs, sandals, and sun glasses. Okay, by now you’re wondering; surely this can’t be an idyllic egalitarian paradise, surely there must be a way to tell the rich from the poor at a glance. Of course you can. Floridians love to accessorize. Look at their stuff. Check out the sandals. Cheap Venezuelan imports? A guy from the swampy side of town. Towser and Mully of Kingston? That’s a person with a bank account. Yes, we have formal attire. We call our formal wear "pants" and "shirts". Extremely fancy occasions may demand a light jacket. When I need one, I rent one.

Food: We have all the regular American faire, and we have a lot of Hispanic and Cuban culinary influences, and we have Conchie cuisine. It’s all been so mixed up and swirled together its really just one big plate of stew now. I mean that literally. I think we have some 2,000 known variants of seafood stew and rice. From Paella Miami to the Seared Swordfish with Citrus Reduction over Wild Rice- that’s the special today at Gatorbait Lounge, in case you’re wondering, to plain old Tuna Rice Casserole. Seafood is very big here, naturally, and of course there’s the alligator. Okay, how many here have eaten alligator? You have? Does it taste like chicken? Do you want to know why? Because the gator farmers feed chickens to the alligators. So why not just save a step and eat the chickens? I don’t know, it’s just a Florida thing. Besides, do you think we could ever get drunken tourists to try chicken wrestling? Seafood, Alligators, Alcohol, the trinity of Florida cuisine, and before you ask, yes, there are dishes that do combine the three. In the Keys, we’ll forgive you if you get the impression that food is just something to accompany the alcohol. You have to fill up with something, you know.

Other Stuff You Should Know: I’ve seen Texans wear pistols like some sort of ornaments. We don’t do that here. The average Floridian would be stunned: "What in the name of God’s Green Swamp are you doing with THAT?". It’s taken as a given that if a local wants to hunt and blow some poor little animal’s brains out, and believe me there are plenty of conchies that like that sort of thing, he’ll do it with a high powered rifle, and when he's done he'll stow it back in a locked cabinet at home. So don’t go around armed, unless you're planning to shoot the wildlife. It upsets people.

Transportation in Florida

Aviation

The crown jewel of Floridian aviation is of course Kennedy Canaveral, but this place is so important I thought I'd give it its own section. Florida is a natural aero-space hub between north America and South America. It's closer to Venezuela than California, and routes that bypass Mexico and go through Caribe generally come this way. For a while, Kennedy Canaveral was growing in size rapidly, because it was convenient for space plane flights and aircraft flights to meet at a common point. But, space operators, who need bigger "sky margins" than aircraft operators, began to complain. So, now, air flights to Kennedy Canaveral are restricted, with priority going to airlines that are taking through-passengers to and from flights to orbit. This resulted in more traffic being channeled to the Miami Metroplex, which rebuilt its airport in the late 2100's, occupying a great chunk of wet and soggy land that had been largely abandoned in the 21^st century. Now, the metroplex neatly straddles the airport the way Dallas-Fort Worth does with its airport.

Miami Metroplex airport is one of the nation's biggest and busiest, and is a major port of entry for foreigners coming to America. It is a major terminal for Latin American and African airlines. Tradewinds (Caribe's major airline) has a large operation here, so does Aerotrans Brasil and Nigeria National Airways.

Trains and Highways

Florida once had a rail line extending as far as Key West. That was lost to a hurricane in the 20^th century- actually well before the twilight years, but some people get it confused. Now, Mag-Lev rail lines extend south as far as Miami, which is the major cargo and passenger hub.

Maglev service typical rates and times From Miami, Florida:

At Jackson, the Atlantic Coast Line meets the Gulf Coast Line. Typical rates from Jackson, west on the Gulf Coast Line, and further north on the Atlantic Coast line:

Our highways, as long as you avoid the by-ways in the swampier areas of the state, are quite good. The state is fairly flat, and frost free. On the Gulf side, minor roads are unpredictable, the ground is just too soft, and sink holes are a major problem. It stems from the water table falling, after its was saturated two centuries ago. Now, holes seem to open up at random, and occasionally swallow roads. Always check on current conditions in the north Gulf Coast-Panhandle area. Now, for the other reason our roads are in good shape. This state, beginning with the government and going down to the average Conch, has a marked preference for the hovercraft over wheeled vehicles. Yes, they're noisy, which is why we have a lot of hovercraft with auxiliary wheels for quietly rolling through residential neighborhoods, but they can do a few things the wheeled vehicles can't. For starters, they can cruise along waterways, including weedy overgrown ones. Hovercraft put much less wear and tear on the roads than wheeled vehicles do. Now, those of you who have an insight as to how they think in Orlando have put it together by now- less wear on the roads, able to use waterways, that means, if people spend more to buy hovercraft, the government spends less on roads, doesn't it? Besides, with a hovercraft, the broad green wilderness of this fine state is at your doorstep. Um, if you live it Tallahassee you'll find its at your doorstep there too, at the back door, and occasionally sneaking in through a window.

Ports and Waterways

Hovercraft- good segue into the next section. Florida has a few first rate huge deep water ports. It's got tiny little slips and hovercraft landings everywhere, the whole Atlantic side is beach. Hovercraft handle most of the local freight, and there are several bus lines actually employing hover-busses. Miami is out biggest and most important commercial port, and the terminal for ferry service to Key West, Cuba, and the Bahamas. The ferries are huge Trilon Lofters, ground effect machines somewhere between a very fast hovercraft and a very low flying plane. They carry both passengers and vehicles. The less speed sensitive cargo is carried on more conventional craft. Tampa-Saint Petersburg is a secondary commercial port.

Hovercraft Ferry Service From Miami, Florida

The State Government

Even when the population dipped below half a million, Florida never ceased being a state and a member of the United States of America, at least on paper. We went through a time once when no one was sure who or what our government was, and we relied on a corporation to keep the place running. Actually it was a coalition of corporations, but one really took the lead and the others followed. Sometimes you never really know the value of something until you lose it, then regain it. And so, people around here have a pretty intense relation to the state government. And in that crazy twilight era time when so many states were going their own ways, or threatening to, Florida was always the ballast in the hold of the ship of state. It’s the neighborhood. Vermonters never had nearly so much to worry about as Floridians, since 1812.

Floridians, especially Conchies, expect a lot out of the State government. And they all consider themselves a part of it. They recall a time when just about everyone in the state had some sort of official function, back in the bad days of the 21^st century, when you and all your neighbors spent one week in four doing emergency land protection act work. It was a social event, build dikes at elementary school this Thursday, bring shovels and beer. By the way, it’s still legal, technically, to provide goods or services in lieu of tax money to the state. Conchies really get into democracy. They’re known for a high level of what we call "grass roots" involvement. And they’re the ones most likely to take advantage of that goods and services thing. The capitol gets noisy at times. Did you know it used to be in Tallahassee? You’d never think that quiet, dare we say timid city was once the capitol. That was pre-twilight of course. When things went downhill, there was only one organization with the resources, human and otherwise, to hold the heart of the state together, and the it wasn’t the politicians or the military, they being too busy arguing. No, when things had to be done, there was one group that rolled up sleeves and waded in, and when the government was being re-established, they made the terms of their continued efforts perfectly clear- you organize around us, not the other way around. So the government moved into offices this foundation (okay, well, it was originally a corporation, but by the end of the twilight era they’d gone so far beyond the scope of even a huge media-entertainment conglomerate that the only working definition to fit was and still is "Foundation".) move in to new digs near their headquarters, and in fact it was a lot better than the old state buildings, which are the Museum of Florida today. Personally, I think Orlando is a better spot for the capitol than Tallahassee ever was. First of all, Orlando is central, and geographically I think a capitol always looks better close to the middle. And historically, Orlando is our most successful city and its built right where common sense says a successful city should not be, so there you go right there.

Structure

Florida’s state government is a descendant of the corporate organization that saw the state through the difficult years. It’s a bit different from some of the other democratic structures around, although we were really happy when the Republic of Hungary became the third nation to model their new system after ours. In most democracies, you vote for a bunch of politicos, and they choose, with no real input from the electorate, the specialists who will actually run things. But here, in each voting district, of which we have twenty one, you vote for the eight people you will send to the Committees. The Committees are State, Security, Resources, Education, Health, Public Support, Treasury, and Transport. Then the committee members pick who they want to go to the legislature. Yeah, I know, backwards. The guys who are usually the appointed bureaucrats are our elected officials, and vice versa. It works, try it.

State does the very legalish stuff. They issue licenses, guide elections, handle records and forms and all sorts of drudgery. Security runs the Florida State Police, The Maritime Militia, and the State Militia, better known as our national guard, in addition to the courts, the prisons, and the State prosecutors’ offices. Resources deals with our natural resources, fisheries, parks, public buildings, and public recreational facilities of all kinds. They also handle the special needs of the recreation and tourism industries. Some people wonder why these industries are considered a "resource" like fish or timber. Remember where we came from, people.

Education covers the schools, naturally, especially the State University system. Health is another obvious one. Public Support doles out money to people who need it, and in my opinion, to a heck of a lot of people who don’t, but what would a government be without a tasty patronage system to make life fun for office holders?

County governments

Florida is divided into a mess of counties. Not nearly so many as we had pre-twilight, as a lot of those counties were pretty small and duplicated a lot of effort. More of that patronage. If you have twice as many counties, you have twice as many County office jobs to hand out. For the most part, counties duplicate the state in structure. There are differences. Miami has a Port Committee. Keys has a Parks Committee and a Tourism Committee. A bunch further north in orange grove country have Citrus Committees!

Our Foreign Relations.

Like the rest of America, Florida really tightened up its ports of entry during the 21st century. Legally, you can get in at only four locations. Foremost, of course, is the Kennedy-Canaveral air and space port, which handles flights to orbit and beyond, as well as long distance domestic and international air travel. Then there's the Miami Metroplex, which is the Miami-Fort Lauderdale zone, and we have Jackson, and Orlando- the first two have sea arrival as well as air, but naturally, you can't get to Orlando by boat. By far the most used is Miami, even if it doesn’t have the glamor of the space center. Miami is cosmopolitan, the rest of the state is pretty provincial. Well, Key West is cosmopolitan, but its closed off to foreign arrivals (you can travel there, you just can't enter the USA there) and Orlando, like any city full of politicians, pretends to be although it really isn't. Really, our link to the world is Miami. Because of this, a number of foreign nations have consulates in Miami. Two actually have consulates in Orlando, they being the United Kingdom and Argentina. The United Kingdom, that figures, to them it just wouldn't violate propriety by avoiding putting their consulate in a capitol if one's handy. Argentina, who knows? maybe they just want to keep an eye on the Brits and figure the Mexicans would cover Miami for them. Texas has a "working office"- they refuse to call it a consulate, because their too proud to have any "state to state" dealings.

Miami has the rest of the bunch. Now, with something like 4 million people in the metroplex, it's not the biggest nationwide, but it’s the biggest we’ve got and its important. Miami has consulates from Mexico, Caribe, and much of Latin America, as well as France, Nigeria, and Japan. A number of other nations have small offices or missions here. The Mexican consulate is the biggest. You'd think all those Mexicans are here to spy on us, and you're right. The place is watched by guys in sunglasses all the time. On the other hand, every couple of years you here about one of the Mexican officers defecting to the US, so its probably, on the whole, an intelligence asset for us, not for them. But Mexico does run intelligence operations run out of Miami. It's pretty easy, considering the area has a big Hispanic population, so they can blend in here somewhat better than they would in Wisconsin. They poke around our military and research sites, and hang out in topless bars (they always claim they told the taxi driver "tapas bar") in Miami. We let them stay, because if we throw them out they'd probably close our consulate in Acapulco in retaliation and who knows where it would end.

The Military in Florida

I can’t say a lot about this on account of that they know where I live… no, really, I never joined and its all a big mystery to me, but a lot of folks down here are members, or family members, so I’ll relate what I can. America divides its southern defense into two broad areas. There’s Mexico, which concerns a lot of the military from here in Florida to out in California, and there’s "Other", which seems to be the specialty of Florida. We are the southeast bastion of mainland America out here- that is, not counting the islands but you know they’re not attached so they’re like a special case- and it’s a big responsibility. And it’s a lot of income for Florida, all those people in uniform coming here from the snowy parts of the country to guard our national frontier. So I’m all for it.

It’s a measure of how soundly mother nature walloped Florida in that other than Fort Jefferson, our military bases are post-twilight. In fact, one of the two United States Aerospace Force bases lost solely to Acts of God have been in Florida! We have a lot of Aerospace Force bases here. Tyndall AFB, and Eglin, Hurlburt, and MacDill, all date back a long ways. Orenza is new, and so is Madriles Joint Air Base, the one they built to replace the Key West Naval Air Station. Yeah, it took about a century for the Aerospace Force and the Navy to figure out they could both fly planes out of the same air base, and Madriles is one of the first Joint Air Bases. It’s kind of unique in that the runway is on pylons, no one wanted to give up any of the real estate left in the Keys, so its like a permanently docked aircraft carrier. All the services use it, these days, it’s the main air support for Fort Jefferson and the planes that patrol the Florida straight. You know, with the Mexicans hanging around just outside our territorial waters, they’re pretty close, and South Florida is one of the only places in the country where the Aerospace Force maintains a continual armed patrol in the air.

There is a lot of airpower in the state, and at Hurlburt, we have the Aerospace Force’s Special Operations Command. I’m not supposed to talk about them.

The Army’s presence in Florida is mostly at one big installation, Fort Schwartzkopf, which we commonly refer to as Fort Shorts. It’s got a number of units assigned there, the usual bunch of infantry, artillery, armor, air defense, etc.

All the services contribute to Fort Jefferson. That place is just unbelievable. It was built directly over the original ruins. The fortress has long since overgrown the tiny original island in the Dry Tortugas. Now it is a man made Gibraltar, a huge reinforced concrete pyramid guarding the western approach to the Keys and the Florida Strait. It's staffed by all the services, and acts as a both a conventional fortress and a surveillance and intelligence center. Reportedly, its defenses include remotely located missile systems scattered about the seabed- you'll note there is a huge "no diving" zone around it. The place is armored with God-only-knows-what and will supposedly withstand even a small nuclear warhead. Infrequently, civilians can go on limited tours of the place, which leave from the Fort Jefferson Ferry Dock, down the street from here, three times a week- except when the military decides otherwise, which is frequently.

The Florida National Guard and Marine Militia

There are two state run military forces in Florida. The National Guard is fairly conventional, like most national guards go, and consists of the 12^th Cavalry Regiment, a few assorted infantry units, the 114^th , 115^th, and 116^th Civil Defense Battalions, and a bunch of supporting units.

The Marine Militia grew out of the void once filled by the Coast Guard. Originally composed of Florida civilian and their private craft drafted into government service by the (then) new Orlando government, the service is now something between a military outfit and a law enforcement agency, and something between a permanent professional force and a citizen's militia on the water. The Marine Militia patrols the coast and the inland waterways, and keys, islands, platforms, and off shore territories within Florida's jurisdiction. They're equipment includes patrol aircraft, and a variety of vessels including hydrofoil patrol boats, hovercraft, a few small submarines, and a flotilla of small, sleek, high speed "Interdiction" boats that can be outfitted with modern military weapons. They sometimes participate in exercises with the Navy, and often embarrass them, because the Marine Militia crews are native to the waters they work in, and typically stay with a single small crew for the length of their careers. They Interdiction Boat crews are the elite of our law enforcement, and get involved in counter intelligence, anti-smuggling, and other pursuits- not long pursuits, they have really fast boats and know the territory really well- in addition to the regular patrol duties.

Kennedy-Canaveral Space Center

Florida cannot be discussed without the KC space center getting a good mention. This is not only the Southeast USA’s main spaceport, this was the first spaceport ever. Back in the 20^th century, when… you know all that, don’t you? Well, the space center has been a Florida rallying point. No matter how bad the twilight years were, the government found some way to keep this place alive, supported a few engineers, and launched the occasional satellite. And a good thing, too. As the Twilight was closing, news of the Jerome Warp spread like lightening. There was no doubt that space would be conquered, and suddenly, this ancient piece of infrastructure represented the world’s best accumulated body of space operations experience. The Europeans might have had the science and the money, but we had the know-how, and we knew it, and more than anything else the promise it offered pulled this nation up by its bootstraps. In 2110, the spaceport was enlarged and improved, it had been barely maintained for most of the century prior. In 2125, it was obvious that space transport was going to be a big thing, and Kennedy-Canaveral was changed from a strictly government operation dealing solely with space to a combined government-private project, with corporations investing into the center’s development in return for future operations concessions. It was linked with Miami International airport,

Kennedy-Canaveral is a fairly busy spaceport. It’s got all the major air and space transport lines, but none of the minor ones, as landing privileges here are now restricted to those lines that offer direct connections to spaceplane services. In addition to national and regional air lines you'll see the aircraft and some of the spaceplanes from services from around the world. The European aviation firm Velositant is here, operating 6 flights a day to LEO, Gateway, and L-5. Horizon is the major American spaceplane line, and they fly to L-4 and LEO, and there is a direct flight to the Mars colony several times a week.

There is very limited cargo service from Kennedy Canaveral. Most of the cargo from elsewhere in the country that has to reach orbit uses catapults or other launch facilities, and most of the stuff from Caribe heads for the Beanstalk. Horizon has a freight subsidiary that operates cargo carrying space planes, though. They handle most of the high value goods from Florida and adjoining states, and just about everything exported from Caribe that for some reason can't go by beanstalk (not a lot).

Science and Technology

DNAMs, Ego-DNAMs and Wild DNAMs

The "DNAM" is that bio-technical magic that allows an engineered virus to carry a bit of engineered DNA to all your active cells, enabling genetic engineers to tinker with a mature organism, including people. In fact, you usually hear that phrase associated with people. There’s really never been a need to do it to animals or plants, you just set up the next generation to have the traits you want. DNAM treatment creates permanent changes, and sometimes they’re inheritable, the changes get into the sex cells and get passed on to any children. DNAMs have been used to adapt people to places that nature doesn’t really want us to go, like the surface of the planet King, or the Everglades. We use them to create resistances to Malaria, and a few other bugs that live in the wet warm swamps. Mother nature is a clever old gal, though, it usually turns out that there’s a reason form most things, and when we think we’re correcting one thing, we’re causing a problem with something else. That’s why, like I mentioned before, the very modifications that make our blood malaria proof also makes us less tolerant to low oxygen pressures. Read the fine print in the emigration literature for King one day, its scary stuff.

But, that being said, it’s a useful tool, especially for people who have to deal with harsh environments. It also ended a lot of hereditary diseases and conditions. Colorblindness is optional, now, and fewer people are lactose-intolerant, or are allergic to peanuts.. A lot of the research that went into DNAMs went on right here in Florida, in the biotech centers at Miami and Orlando. Apparently, the pressing need for effective answers to Malaria and other tropical treats made Florida more receptive to genetic research on humans than most other areas are. For the reasons I mentioned, DNAMs tend to be socially unpopular, but the fact is they’re a tool, and can be used for right or wrong like any other tool. Recognition of that has made Florida a leader in DNAM research and use. We still have the best research facilities in the world studying DNAMs and a high proportion of the top scientists in the field.

A lot of DNAMs have been designed partly or fully to alter personal appearance to suit the recipient's taste. Examples of the "partly" kind include DNAMs designed to alter the body's production of melanin, darkening the skin and increasing resistance to solar radiation. In Florida, that's a pretty good deal. More exotic is a DNAM that enables the body to produce a melanin substitute that blocks harmful solar radiation but does not darken the skin. It has the drawback of requiring life long ingestion of but mineral supplements, but there seem to be plenty of people who have decided they want to go through life with their skin pearly white like a woman in an Elizabethan era portrait. Remember that proportionately, clothes cover less flesh here than they do elsewhere. As you might expect, the appearance of the body is particularly important to a lot of Floridians, and there are number of DNAMs designed to tailor it. Just think of the time they save, avoiding all that time consuming healthy diet and exercise stuff. Some of the, well, commercial companionship providers have been known to declare the costs of their treatments as business expenses.

Now, there are DNAMs and there are DNAMs. There are what we call the Wild DNAMs. Most DNAMs are provided to people under very careful, controlled conditions. Records are kept, populations are monitored, the whole thing is a very organized process. The Malaria treatment went that way. Cholera too. The Swimmer modification is very controlled, and in fact can be readily neutralized. It can’t even be passed on to offspring without treatment. But, you know, these guys don’t play God, but sometimes they can’t resist playing with His Tool Kit. There have been unauthorized DNAMs developed, and authorized DNAMs have been released to people that shouldn’t have had them. Sometimes they’re the inheritable kind. When they get loose in the population, the state health office in Orlando that deals with DNAMs calls them "wild". Florida has the highest proportion of DNAMed people in the nation, other than the King colonists, and the highest proportion of people with wild DNAMs. Some of the unauthorized ones are a little strange. A few were cooked up by college students who just wanted to make a statement, or take a shortcut on the road of self improvement. There are Floridians out there with strange facial features, or a pattern of spots, or tough, leathery ski, or skin that changes color to adapt to changing lighting. There’s something of a social stigma, but not anything like you see elsewhere. One thing, though: its illegal for these people to engender children without the understanding and consent of their partner. But it happens anyway.

Hurricane Architecture

20th and 21st century experience with hurricanes, which got steadily worse during the twilight years, taught some of the people of Florida a valuable lesson: move out of the areas exposed to hurricanes. This wisdom was at times inconvenient to achieve, and Floridians developed a secondary lesson: If unwilling or unable to implement lesson one, build things the hurricane won't wreck. This started before the 21st century: building codes became steadily more stringent. By the turn of the 21st, requirements for windows meant old fashioned glass windows were obsolete, and the newer synthetics were actually stronger than the materials used for the remainder of the walls! Paradoxically, in many Florida buildings of the 21st century, the safest place to be in a hurricane was right behind a window. It wasn't long before the obvious hit- you can make the walls out of this stuff too, and the house could take, for example, a car picked up and thrown against it in a high wind, and shrug it off. As production techniques improved, costs dropped. Costs dropped again when a lot of the factories headed off for Caribe in search of a better business environment (cheaper labor) but that's another story.

In truth, Floridians have always liked the idea of being able to see through things. One of our first tourist draws ever were the glass bottom boats. They would cruise over some scenic underwater spectacle and all the tourists would look down. Then they built aquariums where they made tubes of the stuff through huge tanks, and the tourists could walk through and look up. Unlike more conventional building materials it was fairly easy to make the stuff into curved shapes, and it so happens that the right kind of curved shapes offer even better resistance to heavy winds than flat shapes. Thus, modern Florida architecture- round, transparent domes that look like soap bubbles, with non transparent rooms within. The materials have come a long way. Our domes are designed to be transparent to visible light but not UV radiation, and to allow heat to pass out but not in, keeping the buildings cool. Strength? Forget hurricanes, half of Miami is bulletproof.

Economy

Manatee farming

To me, the most surprising thing about Florida's history is that once a long time ago, people looked at the manatees like they were something sacred. Would you believe this? once, a power company was told not to shut down an obsolete plant just because the manatees liked to bask in the warm water effluent! Have you seen a manatee? it's a giant slug with flippers. Well, these things used to be the sacred cows of Florida. Do whatever you want, don't hurt any of these big floating blobs. then came the 21st century. Global warming. Economic collapse. Disease, poverty, depopulation. With less people, and warmer water, and no predators, the manatees thrived. They headed north and there encountered the scourge of the south's inland waterways, a terrible pest of an aquatic plant called Kudzu. Kudzu had overwhelmed every river in the south, nothing was navigable, anywhere. This was a problem because people had come around to realize that in the energy-crunched 21st century, riverine traffic was again the most efficient way to do things. Then Manatees met Kudzu. The battle of the Chattahoochee river, or so it might be known from the Kudzu point of view, lasted 20 years. By mid century, it was clear that a thriving manatee population was keeping the river clear. Yeah, if there's one thing those bloated sea-pigs

can do, its stuff themselves with vegetation.

Manatees headed north as the water warmed, but it was soon clear that there was a limit. You'd think that a creature with a body like that could tolerate cold water, but no. North of year round manatee range, Kudzu still ruled. It didn't take a genius to see the solution. Forced migration for

manatees. It didn't take a genius to see that as the manatee population grew, you would end up having to transport more southward every year than you did northward, when the waters warmed. What to do with all the excess manatees? Again, here in Florida we prefer the obvious solution. After all, its not like we had sprawling cattle ranches. We ate them.

You haven't tried it? Manatees were eaten long before the white men came to screw up Florida. We consume more manatee than turkey, now. It's a white meat, mild in flavor, reminiscent of pork. You can find it everywhere. Each spring, now, the manatees are herded north along rivers and canals, kind of an aquatic cattle drive. Hey, not for nothing are they called sea cows. Each fall, they come back. We're not the only ones who eat them. Manatees get devoured in central American and elsewhere, and restaurants and markets across North American order Florida Manatee, but like the Maine lobster its become a part of our culture. The number of manatee wranglers is increasing. Most of them are in business on the west coast. (coast is such an overly definitive word, there. let's just say that somewhere between dry land and the Gulf of Mexico lies an arbitrarily defined interface). The latest thing is, some of them have started using bred and trained fresh water dolphins for manatee herding. Sea Collies, I've heard them called. Wonders never cease.

Entertainment and Media

Orlando was where the entertainment industry, in the difficult Twilight years, decided to circle the wagons and make a last stand. Prior to the twilight, American entertainment primarily came out of two places, Los Angeles and New York City. Florida was a major player, in terms of production and attracting people, but things really weren't run from this state. The 21^st century was hard on everybody, but it was particularly hard on California. I mean, we had malaria and storms here, but they had lots of people with guns. Banking on the guns being worse than the skeeters (They were media execs, what did they know?) they decided to exercise the better part of valor. New York City was an option, but we had warm weather, beaches, and all the orange juice they could drink. From California, the entertainment industry sent people here in droves. Also in private aircraft. Upon arrival, they quickly realized that Florida had its problems too. Fortunately for us, they dug their heels in (the soil in Florida is soft, digging heels in is not hard to do here). The influx of capitol, and human effort was far more helpful to pulling the state through the twilight than the State government had been, in fact, by 2040, the state government was largely obsolete and useless, a bunch of squabbling petty politicians in a swampy backwater who were, at best, getting in the way of people doing any real work.

The government was rebuilt, with great help from the national government, which had a number of institutions in Florida it wanted to support, such as Kennedy-Canaveral. TourOrlandoCorp, which set up shop in Orlando, was a major player in this- more on that later. Although Florida's entertainment industry was originally tourist-based, it quickly evolved into a mass market entertainment production center. The tourist trade never returned to pre-twilight levels. Cuba, for one, garnered part of the market share. Tourism is a steady earner, sure, but the real economic powerhouse is the entertainment industry.

Citrus Farms

After all these years, we still pump out the bulk of America's orange juice. Right here, fresh, sweet, liquid sunshine, the best things never change. The citrus industry is disturbingly conservative, and have, with an interest to customers worldwide, resisted the temptation to incorporate Florida's knack for genetics into their production. Well, good for them, mosquitos don't suck on oranges. Citrus is our biggest export crop, and its more popular than manatee meat. In frozen, concentrated form, orange juice is exported offworld, and moves up and down the arms of space, bringing Florida sunshine to distant outposts. So valuable is the stuff, and so transport-friendly, that Frozen Concentrated Orange Juice has always been among the most watched of commodity prices. You can buy "futures" on the orange juice market, which is essentially betting on the future productivity and market price of orange juice. While other regions around the world produce the stuff, Florida has a reputation for quality, and our orange juice usually commands market prices slightly above anywhere else. The leading Florida producer is Honeybell Foods, which is based in Louisiana but really has its heart here in Florida. Honeybell employs thousands, here. And we can all whistle their jingle.

Regions of Florida

Miami-Fort Lauderdale Metroplex

Visitors to the Miami Metroplex sometimes mistake it for a natural cliff or ridge, 46 kilometers of built over, concrete and syntho mass that lines the coast from Miami to Fort Lauderdale, forming both a manmade shell against the ocean that, with its power and unpredictability, once undermined the beaches and sent apartment buildings crashing into the surf. Fort Lauderdale had taken the worst of that, and so it saw the beginning of the sea-wall project. It was pretty random at first, just a series of emergency responses to erosion. Millions of tons of concrete, rock, sand, and gravel were piled onto the shoreline and stabilized in place, sometimes burying older buildings that happened to be in the way. Covering rubble and everything else, the sea wall gained the bumpy, fractal, pseudo-natural look that makes some people mistake it for a feature of geography. Now the wall is about 25 meters high from the beach to the first terrace on the seaward side. This is the Atlantic Deck, a broad pedestrian avenue that follows the ocean front like it much smaller ancestors, the board walks, did many years ago. Above and behind the Atlantic Deck are the enclosed tubes of the Miami Metroplex Rapid transit line, and above them, the transparent domes that make up so much of Floridian architecture. Some people say the urban shoreline looks like a string of bubbles along the shore. Some say pearls. I think its more like a bunch of grapes, because its not just a line, its clusters, sometimes overlapping. Too each his own.

Two of the tubes of the MMRT have ocean views, and views down onto the Atlantic Deck. It’s a poor man’s ocean cruise. In fact, you might have heard the phrase "Miami Cruising". It refers to the custom, among young folk, of gathering on trains, holding moving parties. The trains themselves descended from the automated "people movers" of the pre-twilight era, small, quiet electric things. The stations and tracks used to be outdoors, but like so much else, has been encased in transparent synthetics for protection against severe weather. They used to be wheeled, now they’re mag-levved, and they’re so quiet that if the beeper isn’t working they come right up on you and scare the beszongus out of you. There was some talk about depressurizing the system and making them go faster, but the fact is, their fast enough, and the depressurizing would have mean making the whole thing airtight which was a lot of money for which Miami had better ideas.

The Deck itself is where it all happens. Forty six kilometers long, thirty meters wide, usually. Some stretches, like the ones at the parks, are less busy, mostly taken by runners and walkers and families. The livelier sections form the metroplex’s cultural center. It’s a social and economic axis, from which rapid transit lines branch off to serve the inland locations. The stadium and concert halls are accessible from the deck, as are parks, beaches, fishing piers, marinas, all sorts of stuff. There’s direct transit connections to the spaceport, and to long distance train stations. The Atlantic Deck has the whole range of urban characters roaming up an down, food venders, political activists, pickpockets, girls skating while wearing outfits you could knit from the hair of a single hamster and have leftover, red eyed drugged up degenerates, tourists, body worshipping fitness nuts, very big ladies with very small dogs, whatever. It ends at Miami Beach. There was some talk about extending it to Key Biscayne, but there would have been problems at the ship lanes, again, a money thing. Now, off shore "balloon mats" protect the islands and the coast to the south from the worst weather, but people and their structures are on their own. So, you see a lot more of those transparent synthetic bubbles.

The "shore side" of the deck is lined with building entrances, MMRT stations, storefronts, park and recreation facilities, and on an on. Some of the frontage has retractable transparent synthetic canopies. This is especially big with commercial areas that want to stay open during rough weather. There exists a subclass of Miamians who enjoy the storms. They will rush to the deck in the worst of weather to experience a hurricane as intimately as possible. From behind a synthetic shield, they’re safe. But there are always a few who don’t like safety. Out they go, into the wind and rain. Every year, you here about somebody swept off the deck in a storm. They’ve even got a monument to them now- its up by the north end of the wall. It’s semi-natural quartz macro crystal, it was done by Taino Joseph back in 2284. It’s a light, airy piece, and gives you a feeling like its disappearing into the wind. No, its not under any transparent dome. Around it, in letters in the paving, are the names of those claimed by storms along the Atlantic Deck since they started counting over 100 years ago.

There are about two and a half million people in the metroplex. It's kind of enclosed, water on one side, kilometer after kilometer of uninhabited swamps- the world renowned Everglades- on the left. The real suburbs are to the north, going up to Palm Springs. Yes, Question? Ah. Okay, you've heard the rumors of Miami being a cesspool of licentiousness? Well, not the WHOLE metroplex. Parts, though, might be considered cesspools, yes.

Orlando and the Central Lakes region

The central strip of Florida, once a vacation paradise, has been largely reclaimed by the swamps that were here from the start. This is Florida's second most populous region. It includes the Orlando area, the surrounding lakes area that forms the watery core of the state, and the Tampa Bay-Saint Petersburg area, along with the Gulf Coast from Tampa Bay south the Everglades.

The Tampa Bay-Saint Petersburg area is the center of Florida's petrochemical industry. Prior to the 21st century, oil drilling operations in the gulf of Mexico, common off the coasts west of florida, barely occurred in Florida's waters. Exploration was limited to a handful of sites. This was by design, with the state wishing to avoid the environmental consequences of drilling. The lack of exploration excluded Florida's oil fields from being included from any counting of the nation's oil reserves. By the turn of the 21st century, very minor exploration was being permitted in the extreme west end of Florida's waters. Gradually, over the next century, more area was turned over to oil exploration and then drilling. With he economy shifting away from a petroleum-centered energy supply, oil drilling was permitted more as a way to replace jobs cut from the devastated tourism industry than to supply a major energy demand. The operations never grew to the point of offering an overwhelming environmental threat, although there were major oil spills 5 times over the century. The scope was kept small as the national conversion to a hydrogen fuel system blunted the market for petroleum. Demand declined steadily, being limited to specialty fuels, chemicals, lubricants, and other secondary refinery products. Now, the oil industry still produces chemicals and lubricants, although petrochemical based fuels for vehicles have long been out of fashion. The drilling and refining operations employ thousands, and sustain the Tampa Bay-Saint Petersburg economy. In the two centuries prior, environmental safety has improved greatly. Where once it was a mere obstacle to business, changing global attitudes have made it a top priority. Very few pollutants have been released into Florida's off shore waters.

TourOrlandoCorp is located here, and owns a whole office complex. TOC started as an alliance of businesses that depended on Tourists, pre-Twilight. Most of them were cut throat competitors of each other. With tourism in severe decline over those year, though, survival was seen as a group thing. If the orange juice growers could cooperate, so could the great theme parks, studios, and resorts. Fortunately for them, they received a huge influx of talent and money in the form of immigrants from California. TourOrlandoCorp fought a losing battle, but they fought it well, much more efficiently than the government. Towards the end of the twilight era, they pretty much were the government. TourOrlandoCorp was instrumental in moving the government to Orlando. As it became obvious that tourism, no matter how hard they worked, was not going to be the force it had been, TOC quickly and flexibly expanded its powers into other areas. TOC oversaw the economic rebirth of the state and its rising position as a media and entertainment center. Today, TourOrlandoCorp is a foundation with vast powers granted it by the government. There are some voices of discontent out there, that think TOC is too big, too established, too self interested, too powerful, and has long outgrown its usefulness, and should be dismantled. On the other hand, TOC has done a lot of good for a long time. And it's really hard to cut back a bureaucracy.

The rest of the region is a swirl of suburbs sprinkled with lakes and wetlands, and many fruit orchards.

Atlantic Coast

The stretch between Palm Beach, which is the northern limit to the Miami Metroplex suburb, and Jackson, is the Working Florida. This area has the bulk of our beach resorts, not so many as there once were, but still welcoming millions from the inland, colder areas of the country every winter, as well as the small towns that keep them running. Along the coast you will find almost every conceivable means of depriving a vacationer from his money. Almost. Those you can't find there we save for Key West. North of Jackson, Atlantic Coast Florida meets another big swampy area- the Okeefenokee region, before the Georgia border.

Jackson used to be Jacksonville, and was one of the biggest cities in the country. I'm not really sure why the "Ville" part of the name got dropped, it was just something that happened over the years, and the city was officially recognized as Jackson in 2198. There was some complaint that the name was going to get confused with Jackson, Mississippi, but then, Mississippi's Jackson changed its name too and became Liberty City, so the whole issue became moot, except for old cranks and call in talk show hosts with nothing better to argue about.

Jackson sports a major Fusion power plant center. Florida has too much cloud cover for a fully functional power Rectenna, and TourOrlandCorp insisted that the state have sufficient local power reserves to handle all the critical functions (ie, theirs). The Fusion plant can't cover all our needs, and Florida is a net power importer- it's the air conditioning, really, we love our sunshine but we burn a lot of juice fending it off.

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Central Gulf Coast and Panhandle

North of the Tampa-Saint Petersburg area, the built up landscape disappears rapidly. In its place is a mix of swamps, salt and fresh marshes, and woods. This region arcs around the curve of the Florida panhandle, ending in the west at the Pensacola area and the Alabama border.

The people here are thinly scattered, and often supplement their lifestyle with what they can gather from the wilderness. Hunting game for food is a tradition. The forests and wetlands provide local delicacy such as alligator, cooter (local name for a fresh water turtle) curlew (a marsh bird, often eaten) and rooter (wild pig), as well as fish and crustaceans. They gather wild plants such as swamp cabbage, berries, and chinquawpins (nuts similar to chestnuts). Some of these forest treasures earn their gatherers respectable incomes when sold to restaurants, grocers, and food purveyors in the more modern east coast of the State. Limited and specialized agriculture supports the local economy, along with what livings the locals can make from the wilderness, and temporary jobs in the cities. The locals here are consummate hunters, and occasionally hire out as hunting guides for visitors.

Their services should not be taken lightly as this region, to the visitor, is one of the most hazardous in North America. A well known hazard is the sinkhole. Slow and uneven erosion of the limestone floor underlying much of the area often leaves deep straight sided holes, which fill with water and become so overgrown with vegetation that people have drowned, tangled up in the vegetation and unable to rise above the water. Others have become meals for alligators while struggling. There have been reports of visitors being waylaid by local bandits, and tossed into a sinkhole to vanish into the swamp. The region, especially the backwoods areas further from towns and major roads, has a bad reputation. The locals seem strangely proud of this. When volunteers and state health employees provided free anti-malarial DNAM treatments across the state in the 2220's out of 8 deaths among the volunteers, two were the result of an accident on a highway south of Daytona. The other 6 were in somewhat sinister circumstances out in the swamps. No one ever came forward with any useful information, although those bodies that were recovered clearly showed rather clumsily concealed murders had taken place. The people here are fiercely loyal to their own.

Pensacola was once a major ocean port, and maybe, had the oil industry moved there instead of Tampa, it would still be so. But now it’s a sleepy Gulf town, the northern end of the Manatee Ranching zone, home to some off shore oil workers, some shrimp farmers, and the rest of the people that make a city work. Pensacola has retreated from the wilderness. Forest and swamp have taken outlying suburban and rural areas. Pensacola now supports a population of about 70,000 people, and is the regional center for the west panhandle area, part of the Gulf coast bayou culture that stretches westward to the Republic of Texas. Pensacola was for a time within the malaria zone, however, the malaria line has since moved to south, and now Pensacola is just beyond the affected zone. Still, mosquitos tend to stray and unprepared visitors should be, well, prepared. Most of the residents have inheritable anti-malarial DNAM genetic adjustments. The city is home to Pensacola Tech, a small and specialized but highly regarded technical school.

Further east in the panhandle, Tallahassee was once Florida's capital. This city of 35,000 people now maintains the former state capitol buildings as a historic district, with a few buildings lost over time, and the old state capitol building in use as a regional courthouse and museum. Aside from its historic significance, Tallahassee is home to the Panhandle Festival, a one month display of backwoods Florida culture, folk art, and farming, in the old Agricultural Fair style. Alligator wrestling is still performed for tourists.

Florida Keys

What can we say about our last and favorite destination? The Keys change a lot, but they never change. In the past few centuries, keys have changed shape, shifted, enlarged, shrunk, re-emerged, appeared, moved. They are sand islands, after all, and subject to the forces of nature. This is the end of Florida, and the remote last outpost of civilization. Away from the mainland, we never even had a Malaria problem here- too little standing fresh water for mosquitos to breed in.

The Florida Keys are best known as places where people get away. From whatever. A self contained world stuck onto the nation's tip, less rules, less worries, less cares. That, and the revival of the Keys as a militarily strategic place, with Fort Jefferson being built, has meant that the Keys are the only area in Florida to see a net increase in population since the Twilight Era. There are about 150,000 people in the Keys, now, with about two thirds in Key West, which includes the military people and their families.

Tourism is our most important industry, we have a lot of yacht clubs and very exclusive resorts. We also have bars. For some reason, the Keys, and Key West especially, have become known for very large, very elaborate "theme" bars. Bars are our tourist attractions, and our public fora. Buffet's, of course, is my favorite. The bar here is the longest one in the United states, a huge slab of wood so long- or so they claim- they had to build the extension out over the water just to house it. If you're sitting in the extension, you actually fish while you sit at the bar, they encourage it, it adds to the character. Ask a bartender for a fishing pole, they keep a few handy. I'm a little gray on the subject of who this "Buffet" actually was. Near as I can tell, he was a pre-twilight music demi-god who invented a frozen fruit and alcohol drink named for his wife, or girlfriend, Margarita. Other prestigious institutions of the inebrious kind include the very noisy and colorful One Eye'd Jacks, the more dignified Hemmingway's (which claims to have the combination bar-fishing pier thing going long before Buffet's) the "Gulf Coast" styled Gatorbait, a floating bar that travels up and down the Keys called "Bjorn's Booze Barge" and the rather bizarre place called El Macho. And there are others. Take your pick.

Aside from people looking for alcohol, the Keys have long attracted those looking for something they can't find elsewhere. Usually, they haven't a clue as to what that is, and they generally can't find it here either, but here they stay. We have a rather colorful and uninhibited population. In Key West, the military people mix in with these uninhibited people in a way that is much more "normal" seeming than you'd expect. We attract the uninhibited. Artists, writers, recluses, retirees. We even have a small community of Brazilian expatriates who knew what they were looking for- the opposite of Brazilian conservatism.

Wildlife

The American Alligator

Pouncer/Killer. No. Appearing: 1D10 Initiative: 5 Melee Hit Chance: Easy, Size: 200 Kg Speed 80 Swimming, 30 on Land Armor .4 on head and upper back, .3 elsewhere. Consciousness: 5 Life:12 WPM 0 DPV .5 Signature 1, -1 when motionless in water.

An alligator can charge on land, doubling its speed and increasing initiative by 1, but for only 1 turn. An alligator has extremely strong jaw muscles, but only when snapping its jaws shut. On the first attack it makes, increase DPV to .6. Holding the animal's jaws shut is a difficult (Strength) task, with possible modifiers for experience with alligators.

A large, semi-aquatic, armored reptile up to 5m long. The stats above refer to a largish alligator, but not the biggest. They weigh up 250 Kg. Related to crocodiles. Almost black in color, with prominent eyes and nostrils and large, coarse scales. Large, long head with visible teeth along the edge of the jaws. Front feet have 5 toes, rear feet have 4 toes and are webbed. An agile swimmer, often floating or swimming with only it's eyes and nostril exposed. They are carnivorous, eating anything it can catch, including fish, turtles, lizards, snakes, small mammals, waterfowl, and crustaceans. Alligators can be very vocal; young typically make a squeak or yip and adults will roar or grunt, depending on the circumstance.

Breeding begins as alligators emerge from hibernation in April. The female will build a nest of leaves and vegetation up to 2m across. She lays and buries her eggs in the center of this mound, allowing the warmth of the pile to incubate the eggs. Females typically lay over 50 eggs and each egg is about 3 inches long. The eggs incubate for about 9 weeks, and the female will watch and defend the nest during this time. As the young hatch, they "peep" and the female will assist them by digging them out of the nest. Newborn alligators are about 9 inches long and will stay near the female for up to a year. The female will continue to protect the young during this period.

Common in swamps, rivers, bayous, and marshes of the southern U.S and parts of Texas. Typically found in fresh-water, alligators can tolerate brackish water as well.

The Florida Manatee

Grazer. No. Appearing: 1D6- 6D6 Initiative: 1 Melee Hit Chance: Difficult, Size: 400 Kg Speed 40 Swimming, 10 on Land Armor .1 Consciousness: 10 Life:18 WPM +1 DPV .1 Signature 0

The manatee is an aquatic mammal about 3 meters long, preferring warm bays, coasts, estuaries and rivers with slow moving water and plenty of vegetation. It is as close to harmless as a creature of its size gets. An manatee will rarely attack, and if it hurts someone, its usually by accident. It can, however, damage or overturn small boats with its bulk.

Manatees are believed to have evolved from a wading, plant-eating animal. The manatee's closest relative is the elephant and hyrax (a small furry animal that resembles a rodent). It is believed that some fifty million years ago, these animals left the land and went into the sea, continuing to breathe air but evolving into an aquatic lifestyle. The manatee's hind legs have been reabsorbed and only a cartilaginous structure remains. The similarities between manatees and elephants are considerable: the toenails, teeth, digestive tract, prehensile mouth parts, skin, location of mammary glands, and hair are the most notable.

They have a small head with two high nostrils, modest but useful flippers, and a bulbous round body tapering to a flat round tail that propels them through the water with amazing efficiency. They have two flippers with three to four nails on each, and their head and face are wrinkled with whiskers on the snout. They usually swim slowly and sometimes creep along the bottom with their flippers.

The manatee's eyes seem tiny for such a large animal, but it is believed they have excellent close vision, which makes sense, since manatees do spend so much time in waters that are turbid and cloudy. It is known that manatees can hear very well, but appendages resembling ears are nowhere to be found. Their hearing organ is, in fact, a tiny hole just behind their eyes. Like dolphins and whales, these work extremely well underwater, since sound travels six times better in water than in air.

Their mouths are also equipped with large, muscular, prehensile mouth flaps, which are useful for collecting algae and grass as they forage for food. Although manatees are primarily vegetarians, their protein intake is supplemented by the many tiny animals that live in the grasses and algae they feed on. These hefty animals typically consume ten to twenty percent of their body weight in food every day.