Handsome Joe Plans A Birthday Party

…for his good friend, Smart Sally

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The Doclopedia #1,517

Earth 5-C: California

On Earth 5-C, my beloved home state of California is both very familiar and very different.

Right off, the shape of the state is different. It’s wider, because the entire eastern border is 30 miles farther east. Nevada and Arizona look somewhat different because of it. The southern Border with Mexico is all the way down to just north of Puerto Punasco on the eastern side, and halfway down the Baja Peninsula on the western side. This greatly lengthens the West Coast and a state that was very long to begin with.

California is still the “Queen of Agriculture”, even more so with all that added Baja land. It’s still the heart of the entertainment industry and the high tech sector. People still visit by the millions to see both man made and natural attractions. California is still the center of cool in the world.

But it’s also uninhabited over large areas due to national parks, state parks, nature preserves,, national monuments and just plain old land preserved for it’s own sake. Some of these areas are home to thriving Native American nations (the various nations run all of the national and state parks). A few preserves are there to protect the habitats of what we would call cryptids, including the San Joaquin Valley Jackalope, the Northern Sierra Sasquatch and the California Green Sea Serpent. Among the non-cryptids who are on preserves or in parks, you’ll find wolves and the California grizzly bear, the latter of which is extinct in our reality. Californians are fierce protectors of the environment.

Another big difference is the lack of freeways, especially in the Los Angeles region. Public transportation is well funded and very popular all over the world, but it is nearly a religion in California. Where the freeways would be in L.A. Are bus lines, trains (both ground lever and elevated, subways and even airships. The same goes for the Bay Area, Sacramento and any other metropolitan area.

And, of course, all the cars are either electric or hydrogen powered.

The final bit of strangeness in this other California is the Mojave Spaceport, the second largest spaceport in the world after the Central Australia Spaceport. The Mojave Spaceport is the busiest of the two with daily departures to both space stations and the moon. Nearly 10,000 people are now living and/or working in outer space.

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