by Reed King
4. After generations in which there was a general movement into urban centers and a fetishization for the consumable, disposable, technological, and futuristic, the destruction of the environment, and the increasing disruption of global travel and information routes, led to a profound fixation with and even fetishization of the natural world. The most popular virtual-reality simulation of all time was called Oceanside, which, as the title of the game suggests, allowed its gamers to sit in a lounge chair on a private beach on the ocean, feeling the salt spray on their lips, watching whales in the distance, and drinking a cold beer. Subsequent versions included On the Porch, In the Mountains, and Country Drive.
5. Due to concerns about espionage, many countries had outlawed the use of drones. The Sky Protection Act of 2070 decreed that in Crunch, United, including all its colonies, drones were illegal except for certain state-run surveillance programs and the delivery of interoffice mail.
6. When Oklahoma went belly-up—belly-up, legitimately, after decades of fracking had made sinkholes of its major cities—Tenner C. Blythe swooped in and bought it for a song, beating out Crunch, United, and the newly formed Dakotas at the fire sale. Its security forces, military, and police department were all privately employed by Blythe’s company.
7. Lilian, named for Blythe’s ex-wife, compacted more trash than anywhere else on the continent.
8. A similar argument of the Android Liberation Front, and all its supporters, insists that humans cannot possibly count as superior to manufactured beings because of the rabid inefficiency of their corporal bodies and need to expel waste by excreting it through various orifices.
9. Truckee is using “jumbo” here not as a modifying adjective but to refer to the species whose Latin name was given in 2067 as Culicidae gargantuan. Originating out of the Commonwealth’s ambitious project to repopulate the world, or at least the East Coast, with animal species previously lost during the Great Die-Off, jumbo mosquitoes could reach wingspans of ten inches and consume a half liter of blood every week.
10. Almost every country on the continent had passed legislation to ensure that wiping a droid, except in cases of self-defense, was a criminal act. If a plaintiff wanted to wipe, or eradicate the hard drive and restore factory settings to an android model, most of the time the case went first before a local court and then, in one of the few examples of post-dissolution cooperation between countries, to a single court known as the Humanoid Regulatory Committee, which specialized in android affairs. It was comprised of three humans and three androids, and together the court regulated all such disputes across the continent. Some historians propose that the existence of a regulatory body such as this one proves that the dissolution was never truly complete, while others claim it was solely the result of a cross-cultural fear of the android species. It’s worth pointing out that the Confederacy did not recognize the authority of the HRC; did not recognize androids as being human in any whole or fractional way; did not permit them within their borders; and furthermore gave all citizens the right without qualification to disable and/or completely wipe any androids that he or she encountered. And beginning in late 2070, a year after the end of the Android Revolution, and six months after I.N.E.P.T. published its constitution and received recognition as a sovereign state from both the Soviet Federation and Crunch, United, the Sovereign Nation of Texas made a push to expel and exclude any android species from crossing its borders, and considered wiping an android criminally justifiable in more than 10,700 unique scenarios.
1. March 16, 2042.
2. June 3, 2042.
3. November 8, 2043: This marked the beginning of the “Guild Years.” Please see Appendix D: “Politics and Natural Disaster: The Unexamined Link.”
1. It’s unlikely that Truckee knew this word in the context of food preparation, as he almost certainly had never eaten meat that hadn’t been grown, engineered, or printed to the proper proportions already. Due to the enormous obesity crisis in the Federal Corporation, however—which affected 1 in 2 adults and 1 in 3 children under eighteen—he might have heard this word in the context of a popular surgery in which, quite literally, patients were “filleted” open and emptied of excess fat.
1. Another term for methane-conversion plants.
2. And, presumably, various cities in the Soviet Federated Frontier, a dozen communities in the Green Mountain Associated Intentional Communities, and thousands of backlander settlements; it’s not clear whether Truckee believed Florida was unique in its use of the energy alternative.
3. Crunch, United, kept a sizable force of roughly 2 million troops deployed at the northern border, ostensibly in response to the permanent military installations Texas kept in the Free State of New Hampshire. But historians have noted that the two-decade-long territorial push into Canada coincided with the first deployment of troops, many of whom were surgically altered and augmented with bionic features to better withstand severe weather fluctuations and the threat of rampaging gentech species, such as the fabled “talking hornets” or the “cannibal pachysandra.”
4. Ze was one of many slang words for a gender-neutral or gender-fluid person. Other examples include: unison, ambi, and nyb (an acronym that allegedly stood for none of your business).
1. Green Mountain Associated Intentional Communities.
2. Although Texas would in later decades place notorious emphasis on the sovereignty of their country, best exemplified by their revision of their national motto to read “Texas Now, First, and Only,” they had long provided ground support to the freedom fighters of New Hampshire as they pushed back against the colonial rule of the newly formed Commonwealth. And during the infamous “Fifteen Days’ March” in 2047, Texas interceded against the territorial encroachment of the Confederacy as it began to expand through the South. This last war, however short-lived, proved extremely deadly for the Confederate soldiers, especially after it was mandated that their military cache include no weapons, or replicas of weapons, crafted after 1868.
3. This suggests that Zeb came originally from the Sovereign Nation of Texas. It had long been rumored that Halloran-Chyung, one of Texas’s fiercest critics, launched a secret attack on Texas’s vast array of prison cities by introducing nerve agents to the air-filtration systems in the hopes of inspiring mass rebellions. Several of the largest prison cities did, in fact, experience mass waves of rebellion and revolt. Unfortunately, this precipitated the widespread introduction of the Straw Procedure in prison camps across the country. Halloran-Chyung has absolutely disclaimed responsibility for the attack; some have said that it was the Texas Army general who okayed the inhumane assault, as a way of ensuring that the legislation to selectively lobotomize would, in fact, pass; they have pointed to his close relationship with the inventor of the procedure, J. C. Straw, as evidence.
4. Weather in previous centuries, it is worth pointing out, had been far more predictable—so much so that in many places in the world, the annual calendar was even divided into “seasons,” with both temperatures and precipitation that regularly corresponded to the mean. It was only in the late 2040s and early 2050s, after the collapse of the ice shelf and the Great Die-Off, that new phenomenology gave birth to much of our contemporary vernacular, such as “Mayday hail,” “cold as a solstice snow,” and “blown in like Christmas hurricanes.”
5. Hawaii had been entirely submerged during the tsunamis that presaged the final rupture of the San Andreas Fault in 2043. It is worth noting that although most scientists presume that Alaska, which during the earthquakes broke off from the mainland, suffered the same fate, popular myth still claimed it had settled somewhere in the middle of the Pacific, and, now an isolated and perfectly contained idyll, existed as a kind of new Eden.
1. Truckee is potentially referring to the practices of the Carnivale Moribundi cult, actually one of the largest and most pervasive religious organizations at that time.
2. The prison reserve lands were a popular destination for wealthy Texas hunters, and their explosive popu
larity was due in part to the Great Die-Off, the mass extinctions that had made big-game hunting obsolete. On average, prisoners consigned to these vast habitats stayed alive only a few weeks, falling prey not just to homicidal violence but also, commonly, to exposure, dehydration, and starvation. There were, however, some notable exceptions. Dwayne Rogers III is believed to have survived in a shooting preserve near San Antonio for nearly thirty-three years, and to have died peacefully of old age in a hidden underground bolt hole he had carefully expanded and refurbished over three decades, which included an ingenious waste-disposal system constructed from discarded purines and weighted bottle caps.
3. Located just south of the Black Kettle Grassland, now a giant sinkhole and former fracking site, off what was formerly I-40, Granby was named after Tenner Blythe’s childhood hunting dog.
1. Interestingly, this itself was the source of major debate, with different countries vying to define their own secessions as the critical turning point in the dissolution of the United States. Dates for the end of the union have alternatingly been given as 2041 (the year of the first Declarations of Secession), 2046 (the year of the last secession), and 2048 (the year in which the final U.S. dollar was produced in Washington, D.C., where it was used briefly to paper the houses of the new nationalists in an attempt to signal wealth and stability).
2. The Confederacy annexed Virginia, largely peacefully, in 2044.
3. The First Storm Noah was triggered by the massive rupture in the tectonic plates triggered by the first “Big One” in March 2042.
4. The Graceland Church was one of the thousands of alternative or splinter religions that gained followings in the aftermath of dissolution, a period of such seismic political, economic, social, and environmental change, it represented, for many people, the End of Days long presaged by the Bible. Unsurprisingly, New World religions often took on a more tribal character, with core tenets, treatises, practices, and even religious messiahs adopted from local customs or figureheads. It is difficult to pinpoint the exact origination of the Graceland Church: several competing versions of the religion appear to have arisen independently across a great belt of swampland and new Confederate states, only to have later become enfolded under a single mantle. But the unifying feature of all of these religions was in the worship of a central messiah, Elvis Presley, whose redemptive messages had been encoded in his music and, in fact, could still be detected in the music of contemporaneous prophets descended from his word.
5. A common enough fantasy at the time: after the cataclysmic earthquakes along several dozen fault lines that destroyed the original Seattle and extended up through British Columbia, provoking aftershocks that lasted months, Alaska splintered off the mainland and was lost to history. Although most scholars and adventurers believe it simply sank, for decades rumors of an isolated Alaskan utopia have persisted.
6. Waves of mass extinction began in the early 2040s, triggering some experimental cloning procedures in newly formed sovereign states, which later culminated in the Clone Panic of 2049. But the vast majority of the world’s species went extinct between two years alone: 2049 and 2050.
1. The Secessionists had of course prevailed during the Second American Civil War, coasting on a tide of popular rage, and furthermore bolstered by a huge quantity of big-money support from politicians aspiring to gain even more power in their localities. Ironically, they by no means represented the majority opinion. Since the earliest secessions, however, there had been calls for reintegration, especially by older stalwarts of the American Constitution.
2. Despite the prevalent myth of a rustic, unspoiled West, the stretch of loosely defined territories including Wyoming and Montana were actually some of the wealthiest on the continent due to a booming water industry. Every year, the herds of cattle remaining on the continent, raised in vast climate-controlled slaughterhouses, were shipped to Recycled Energy Plants to be converted into electricity or returned to the agrofirms, where their tissue might be converted into a variety of printed foodstuffs for generations to come. The financial value of the animals, and the dissonance between the projected image of the West and its reality, was demonstrated in the fact that the “cowboys” of the West now rode engineered horses to do their herding, since real horses had gone almost extinct in the Great Die-Off.
3. Whose labor powered the Confederate plantations? This was a question that for many years bedeviled other regions, and given the Confederacy’s notorious aggression to outsiders and its resolutely anti-technology and anti-information coalition government, reliable reports were difficult to procure and verify. While in many places, androids served essentially as unpaid slave labor—a continuous source of tension that in certain places had exploded into intermittent open warfare; see Appendix E: “The Android Freedom Fighters, 2050s–2070s”—it is worth noting that the Confederacy outlawed androids and robotics entirely. Ironically, and although in the early South on which the Confederacy was modeled, systems of slavery were entrenched in racial divisions, by the time of dissolution these racial divisions were in many places obsolete due to decades of intermarriage and immigration, and rendered socially irrelevant by the advent of androids onto whom such racial aggression was transferred. It has been confirmed through numerous sources that the slaves of the new Confederacy were therefore of three types: criminal convicts, including anyone found to have harbored, communicated with, or availed him- or herself of the services of an android; suspected “sympathizers” of the North who could by lineage, intellect, or proclivity be accused of a connection to the countries outside of the Confederacy; and economic debtors.
4. This is shorthand for the enormous parcel of “free land” encompassing the mountainous regions of the former Colorado, Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming, colloquially known as the “ganglands” or the “wet lands,” a reference to the enormous belt of mountains that gave the territories enviable control of fresh water flow in the western continent—and of the wealth that went with it. Residents largely referred to this sovereign area as the Free Territories, but the reality on the ground was far more feudal than utopic. The inordinately lucrative business of selling water to the dry countries like Libertine and Halloran-Chyung meant that profitable mountainous or basin arteries were the source of near-constant dispute between various armed gangs, some of which did open warfare for years, or even decades, for the right to mete out and sell water contracts.
1. The newest health trend grew out of the belief that even small samples of uncontaminated environments could prove restorative to medical conditions as disparate as blistering shingles to the poorly understood, if widespread, psychological illness known as “The Dread.” Other than Canadian air, the most popular “environmental specimens” included Glacial Leach, Baltic Seawater, and a particular mineral deposit alleged to have been dredged from the submerged volcanoes of the former Hawaii.
2. Both the Bozeman Boys and Willa Dirk’s Snake Charmers were well-known affiliate gangs that controlled, among dozens of other major dikes, the water plants at Boise and at Jackson Hole in the Free Territories, respectively.
3. Because shiver was easily synthesized from everyday ingredients, and the supply of finished and high-quality product rigorously controlled by the price-gouging Denver cartel, many of the makeshift “labs” that produced it in bulk were concealed inside normal houses, storage sheds, bathrooms, and basements. It was estimated in 2085 that 1 in every 40 children was raised in a house that contained a shiver lab of some kind. The influence of the chemical exposure led to stunted growth, learning disabilities, psychological disorders, and a constant full-body tremor known as the Twitch.
1. Truckee is no doubt correct: Crunch, United, sold many of its older-model tech to smaller countries, such as BCE Tech, for repurposing.
2. Many body pickers unaffiliated with the Devil’s Army commonly sold organs to MediFarms, which then did business with private individuals or, depending on the country, state-owned hospital systems. It is worth noting that various MediFarms did l
ucrative trade in the organ-cloning trade, too, skirting anti–human cloning regulations by growing different organs in discrete environments, even in entirely separate facilities.
1. Bad Kitty is insinuating here that Yana Rafikov’s research was financed by the Kremlin, or by Kremlin-connected donors, even before dissolution. It is worth pointing out that this has never been officially confirmed. Still, Rafikov’s post-dissolution importance to the expansion of Russian interests in mainland America is undeniable.
1. Due to the Confederacy’s prohibition against technologies dating from after the dawn of the twentieth century, the nation was the punch line of dozens of jokes about tardiness. A Southerner, it was said, would never say no to a party; he would just be two hundred years late.
