Short: California Girls.

The remix of the old Beach Boys song stuck in peoples’ heads like nothing before. Whole sectors of industry broke down as a cappella choruses overtook pickers out in the fields, assemblers on factory lines, desk workers in cubicles, traders in the pits, and even the chain gangs in the ditch. The whole country seemed, overnight, to wish they all could be California girls.

They got their wish. Congress, trying to pacify the sound that had paralyzed the cultural psyche like a pop bomb, trying to patch an economy sapped by workers unable to concentrate, even as that tune danced in their own heads, passed a bill requiring that all of America’s girls, ages two to 18, be sent to and raised in California.

The backlash was both extreme and muted. Parents and male siblings cried out at the thought of losing members of their family to some crazy scheme. They wrote, called, marched, all with the song in their head that went against their objection. Their representatives, too obsessed with that earworm, dismissed the criticisms. So, on 1 January the following year, the buses swept through the 48 states (Alaska and Hawaii were excluded, out of hardship), carting off toddlers on up to young women about to vote in the next election, off to foreign lands like Santa Barbara, Modesto, Sacramento, and Bakersfield, where large new dormitories and facilities had been stood-up to accommodate their new wards.

The economy was in upheaval for the first few years, as the other states’ schools and sports teams, proms, pageants, plays, all had to adjust to the lack of girls to participate. Housechores had to be reallocated, and the boys retrained to handle their new load. California, already packed with its new population, had to institute a visitation lottery for families to come see their daughters and sisters and nieces (and in a few cases, aunts).

The actual rearing of the girls was done through a comprehensive general educational program like anywhere else, but with a special summer curriculum that included spending at least half of every summer on the beach, preferably riding or driving in dune buggies, swimming, surfing, and playing volleyball.

The mandatory program only lasted for nine years. Nine years of second birthdays being goodbye parties. By then the music had stopped, new songs were vibing and slapping their way through the culture. As the requirement fell back to a fully-subsidized option, some of the girls moved back home, but most stayed in California. There were debates about how useful it was for a girl to be raised there, versus anywhere else. Some of the returned girls had trouble adjusting to their colder native states, while others had longed for a blast of snow.

But two decades later, there was a fresh resurgence. Girls who had stuck to the Golden State, only to move away later, began to send their own daughters out to California—usually not at two, but at six, seven, like that. They remembered fondly all the weird girls from across the country they had met, and all the lasting connections they’d made, and they wanted the same for their own daughters. They found some deep connection in having been a California Girl, and they wanted it to stick.