The field of LA is reformed immediately, warping itself around the singularities of the black holes and passing to a higher frequency of networking. The collapse of the Santa Monica freeway pushes to escape velocity those who have not yet found the electronic highway. Each stages a brief appearance, in the manner of virtual particles appearing in a vacuum before disappearing. Even the economy goes recombinant. For what are relief funds other than the sinking of energy in the social vortex of the disaster, the better to appear again as mutant economic growth.
LA takes another new part on the screen as the energy pump for a recycled America.
The field is now of pulsars sucking up the energy of LA and spewing out its chief product, that of the fascinating catastrophe. For the quake's emergence occurs by the sliding of signifiers deep in the structure of the American psyche. A schizoid self is created by the quake on the alterity of the spectacle and the violent that marks the catastrophe zone. For it is as a war scene that the spectacular penetrates most effectively to the American home viewer. The state of California, already on disaster alert, turns the quake zone into a third world refugee camp.