Decade of the Shining City Pt. 2 - Keeping it Personal: 2036-2040

Marty’s Big Break

Even bad people like dogs...

Marty Junior comes home from work elated. Sweeping Tina off her feet, he excitedly proclaims that the family is moving on up! As noted last time, a posting on the Upper Peninsula accidentally helped, as Marty was not in Detroit for the big attacks in the first half of 2036. But his office on the UP lends personnel, himself included, to the hard-pressed Lower Peninsula offices. This work gets Marty back in front of the governor. When Marty interviews for a Federal position, the governor happily recommends him for a Deputy Director position with the Department of Homeland Security’s Division of Remote Intelligence.

A successor organization to the NSA with an oxymoronic name, the division uses LLMs to comb every corner of digital communications within the borders of the United States for any hint of dissent. Texts, emails, social media posts, and yes, voice calls, are all monitored without any judicial oversight, for any hint at dissent. With the ruling order under seeming daily assault by various factions associated with the Shining City Movement, little attention is paid to due process or warrants. And the office has a lot of work to do, since many areas of Michigan are functionally ungovernable. 

The family is thrilled with the news. Tina, Trey and Tonya can’t wait to pack their bags and move to DC. While Marquette is not in open rebellion, children of government workers are frequently bullied or ostracized for their parent’s jobs, and Marquette is not big enough to boast a private school for the kids of oligarchs and security forces. Packing their bags, the family bids farewell to Marquette, but instead of heading for DC, they return to Ann Arbor after a five-year hiatus, and travel with several heavily-armed guards. 

With a good "yes-man’s” reputation, Marty learns that the offices he oversees will not only surveil the American people across five Great Lake states, it will also keep close tabs on elected state officeholders, to make sure the kind of leniency that happened in Tennessee and Kentucky during the General Strike, doesn’t happen in the wake of the fight against the Shining City. Marty discovers, via a foolishly not-disconnected home help device similar to Alexa, the Governor of Michigan fed information to a Shining City-affiliated group to get rid of a rival within the Reactionary Party. What to do with this information keeps Marty up at night for three days. 

Jillian’s Downward Spiral

It was this, or a Nine Inch Nails album cover....

Jillian, Chris and the kids, Vern, 10 and Autumn, 4 are walking along the shores of Lake Erie when phones start buzzing with rumors of power outages, mysterious explosions, and running battles in the streets of nearby Cleveland.  The Shining City insurgency hits Ashtabula surprisingly hard, as a local group launches a suicidal assault on a state prison detaining political prisoners. The flow of wounded, and their subsequent injuries, pushes the local hospital over capacity. Excess patients are directed to Jillian’s clinic. As many are prison guards and state security officials, their payments always clear, and the clinic closes 2036 well in the black.

To celebrate, the staff holds a New Year’s party. Perhaps it’s the macabre irony of fiscal solvency coming at the cost of 600 broken and ruined lives, perhaps images from the prison resurface memories of his abuse at the hands of those same kind of prison guards in 2028, but at the party, Chris relapses, raiding the clinic’s pill dispensary. Her husband of 15 years spirals quickly into a deep depression, and despite her efforts to obtain methadone, Chris gets his hands on illegal painkillers much stronger than anything he’d used before. One rainy morning in the spring of 2037, Jillian finds him unresponsive on the floor of their apartment’s bathroom, dead at 43.

The troubles don’t stop there. On the pretext that Chris had stolen medicines from the clinic pharmacy to pay for the illegal drugs that killed him, Ohio’s medical oversight commission closes the clinic. Jillian and a handful of former employees manage to keep a decent number of clients, and move their clinic’s operation to the shadow economy. She can make end’s meat with simple surgical interventions and a working knowledge of home remedies, but payment is always spotty or, more often, in kind. One method that does remain consistent is payment through cash advances. While cash money has largely been done away with in the official economy of debits and credit, DollarCoins, the government allows greenbacks to remain in circulation and redeemable with a cash advance which can only be exchanged for official DollarCoins at a steep discount. 

When one of her clients must pay with a cash advance, Jillian sends Vern to a local cashier’s office to collect physical dollars, as she won’t use DollarCoins as they could be traced to her illegal clinic operation. Unfortunately, the cashier Vern visits that fateful summer afternoon in 2038 is on the target list of a group inspired by the Memphis Debt Collectors. This cashier’s greenbacks to DollarCoins exchange rate is especially exploitative, and he’s been marked for assassination. By truck bomb. The blast destroys the cashier’s office, killing him, two employees, and twelve innocent bystanders, including Vern. Jillian suffers a mental breakdown, dragging Autumn with her into Lake Erie, vowing to swim all the way to Onatrio. Both she and her daughter almost drown, but are pulled from the waters by a former patient. He refuses to turn the boat back north, saying he has a delivery that must reach Ashtabula before nightfall. That evening, Jillian and Autumn huddle in bed in their stifling hot apartment, listening to barking dogs and the occasional pop of gunfire. 

Bobby Takes a Long Trip on the Gulf

It's no cruise ship, but it will get you out from under the thumb of a repressive regime in a pinch.

Jumping off the boxcar, Bobby walks the rest of the way along a causeway into the Crescent City. From his vantage point, he cannot tell where Lake Pontchartrain ends, and the Gulf of Mexico begins. In the distance, he can see the remaining towers of the central business district, and a dense line of loading cranes. By the late 2030s, only the high ground of the old French Quarter remains above the waters of the Gulf. Over the previous decade, the tidal swamps and bayous of southeast Louisiana disappeared under high tides that never seemed to fully recede. 

While the state and federal governments don’t acknowledge the role of human carbon pollution in tthe flooding, over the early 2030s the container ship loading facilities of MRGO (Mississippi River Gulf Outlet) were relocated to New Orleans. With his experience in the rail yards of Kentucky, Bobby easily finds work as a crane operator, and spends his first two years in the city flying under any radar that might detect him. This game can only last so long though, as his job operates in the legal credit-and-debit DollarCoin economy. When the federal government calls for a limited draft to put troops on the US-Mexico border, they start by sending anyone arrested or even associated with the General Strike to boot camp. Bobby’s supervisor like him, he’s a fairly likeable guy, so he tips Bobby off a few days before that the upcoming week might be a good one to take a long trip on the Gulf. 

This phrase has come to mean that a person ought to leave NOLA, and probably should not come back. It can be a threat, of course, but in this case, Bobby’s supervisor means well. Bobby withdraws his debits, buys  a few greenbacks and some gold, and packs his one bag. His boss converts his three days of time off into a payment to an oil service ship bound for Veracruz to make room for an extra hand. As the draft agents knock down the flimsy door to Bobby’s extended stay motel room, Bobby steps off the gangplank and onto Mexican soil.  

Allison Fought the Law, and the Law Won

But you've got nothing to be worried about if you've done nothing wrong!

Allison applies pixie dust any time she thinks she’ll be in view of a state-operated CCTV. These operating platforms sprang up all over Shelby County after the Midterm Massacre, but citizens routinely attack and disable them in the poorer sections of the city. Allison isn’t sticking to the poorer quarters tonight. She and the other two Memphis Debt Collectors have a date with history. Allison sets up the suitcase EMP a block from a swanky hotel in downtown, and nervously checks her mechanical wristwatch. At 9:05pm, she sets off the device. The streetlights at the end of the alleyway flicker briefly, the turn back to full power. Ten minutes later, the walls and windows of the hotel rattle. The back door to the alley flings open and the Bartender, Allison has all but forgotten his legal name, rushes out. 

They divide the components of the EMP and split up. He will throw his portion in the Mississippi River. She will toss pieces of her half in sewer drains and trash cans as she walks hurriedly back to the Firestone Heights neighborhood. As she walks, emergency vehicles scream past, towards the scene of their crime. Allison suspects she will never see the Bartender or the Cook ever again. And she’s right. 

Three weeks later, she turns a corner by a market she frequents, and her heart drops. A new CCTV platform hangs menacingly across the street. Soon, she notices a drone following her. She ducks into a local business, but the owner, who she’s known since high school, looks nervous. Allison bolts out the back door, and this time she nearly pees herself. Three police cars pull into the parking lot of the next business over. 

She turns to go back through the market, but the back door is locked. Allison takes off running, and one of the patrol cars nearly runs her over. A booted foot kicks the back of her knee. A black hood comes down over her face. Allison cannot scream, as a policeman’s baton knocks the wind out of her.

Decade of the Shining City Pt. 1 - The Bigger Picture: 2036-2040

Before We Get Started

It has been a few weeks since I last posted. Some of that has to do with personal schedule, but some of it has to do with a changing focus of what I’ve been writing. First, we got started line editing (the process of making sure each line of a book makes sense, both stylistically and with other lines of the book) Inequality by Design:How a Rigged Economy Fractures America, and What We Can Do About It, the upcoming non-fiction book co authored by myself and Dr. Ryan Mattson. As a result, my time available to muse about the direction of the future became somewhat constrained. Second, in discussing it with Ryan, he and I agreed that posts in support of the book ought to stop around 2060, which is the same cut off we use in the book when sketching out scenarios of the near-term future of the United States. To that end, I will put the larger project of sketching out the course of the coming century. And in the spirit of being a candle in the darkness, I will point the project to a more hopeful, detailed sketch of the future. I will follow the current self-imposed format of taking the future in five-year chunks and sussing out a more hopeful scenario, as well as illustrating the impact such a more positive path would have on our four characters.

An internet search really came through with this one.

Another point I’d like to briefly discuss is the term “Shining City” which I’ve slapped on the terrorist umbrella movement with opposes the oligarchic government of the near future United States. The name derives from a sermon titles “A Model of Christian Charity” given by one John Winthrop (probably), en route to Massachusetts from England in late 1630. Setting aside the scholarship around whether Winthrop wrote the sermon, or even gave it, the sermon is often attributed to him, and took on a near mythic status as an early founding document of American exceptionalism. In the original text, the soon-to-be-founded Boston, Massachusetts was NOT referred to as a “shining city on a hill.” Here’s the original text:

“We shall find that the God of Israel is among us, when ten of us shall be able to resist a thousand of our enemies; when He shall make us a praise and glory that men shall say of succeeding plantations, "may the Lord make it like that of New England." For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us. So that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken, and so cause Him to withdraw His present help from us, we shall be made a story and a by-word through the world.”

No, the task of turning the founding of a hotbed of American liberalism into a quasi-religious moment of divine providence fell to one Ronald Regan. History certainly has a sense of humor. 

Image is for context, not endorsement...

More to the point, I chose this re-invention of the city on a hill, both because history moves in funny ways, and because I would guess that an electrical engineering professor fired from his position at a state university in the American Midwest might look back on the 1980s as a golden age. An era when America balanced government power with private industry. An era when America hadn’t lost its moral standing both to its citizens and around the world. And, most likely, this was an era when a 50-something professor would probably have lived through, though as a child or teenager. For our fictitious Professor Schmidt, America in the 1980s might have been full of Saturday morning cartoons and trick or treating. Or maybe fireworks, the Fourth of July, and teenage, exploration, shall we say… 

Any way you slice it, America of the 1980s might not have been the place of de-industrialization and the rapid decline of the working class. It wouldn’t have included an AIDs epidemic seemingly ignored by the government because it affected the three Hs: Haitians, homosexuals and heroin addicts. or US-backed anti-communist dictatorships that were, to put it charitably, as bad as the disease they purported to cure. For a man who grew up unaware of the shortcomings, such an America would have been a place to be proud of, a time to emulate, and one decidedly at odds with the cascade of authoritarian ‘reforms’ which by the 2030s have shredded the Bill of Rights and shackled Americans to machines which serve only one master: capital.

And here, the topic turns back to Winthrop’s speech. In it, he highlights the need for the new colony to put at the center of both individual and collective endeavors, four values: exceptionalism - that the people on the ships sailing towards Boston have been chosen by God to be an example to the rest of the world, charity - both to the poor but ALSO to the community as a whole, communalism - that members of a Puritan community have different things to offer both each other and the community as a whole, and unity - both in the purpose of serving God, but also in women as a binding force in the community. Frankly, the sermon offers a little something for everyone, as we will see quite disparate groups participate in the Shining City movement. I’ll let you go back over those groups and see if you can guess which parts of the sermon appeal to whom. But I’ve gone on long enough about what some English guy might have written four hundred years ago. Let’s get back to the story. 

A Shining City on a Hill

In the years since the Midterm Massacre, the Shining City Movement dropped out of collective discourse. This is perhaps not surprising, considering the victims of the attacks were largely limited to oligarchs and their pet politicians. There were two high-profile gun battles as Federal agents tracked down leads and closed in on targets. And a certain streaming service made a bio-pic about one of the militants who died in a shootout with Federal agents on a ranch in rural eastern Kentucky. But despite the lack of media attention, the Shining City Movement did not go away.

Instead they went underground, building suitcase EMPs and making clandestine contacts throughout the shadowy network of former political prisoners and petty criminals who have been released in the weeks after the General Strike. Because they suck to a strict discipline of face-to-face contact and no internet-dependent technology, Shining City largely avoided official electronic surveillance. And because they rarely engaged in any open criminal activity, they rarely came in contact with law enforcement. Thanks to the development of a face recognition-thwarting powder known technically as pixel dust distillate 37, or colloquially as pixie dust, even known members of Shining City kept off official radars.

#freedom

In addition to methods of evading surveillance, Shining City members were encouraged to start or join mutual aid societies to help the poor and working classes, and newly impoverished middle classes, survive in the face of perpetually higher prices and perpetually lower wages. But Professor Schmidt, who designed the suitcase EMPs and who stood behind the Shining City Movement, was not going away. With the start of the 2036 political season, it became painfully obvious to anyone paying any amount of attention that the Reactionary Party was not going to allow the ‘free and fair’ elections. They employed all the traditional methods: throwing hundreds of thousands of people off voter rolls, closing precincts that might favor the Demonstration Party,. banning vote-by-mail, restricting or eliminating early voting, and old-fashioned intimidation. This, combined with the Demonstration Party’s absolute inability to offer any sort of coherent campaign or platform that might improve the lives of many people, promised to drive voter turnout to all new lows.

Being a distributive organization, Shining City chose to simply give affiliated groups a date to launch their attacks and left the specific planning and even the targets of said attacks up to those groups. It should be made clear that these groups were not ideologically united in any way, shape or form. Some groups, mostly in the mountain west, were largely libertarian in ideology. In the big cities of the formerly industrial Midwest, the groups were often left-ish in background, or the remnants of once-strong unions. On the East and West Coast, the affiliated organizations were openly left-wing in their economic outlook, some even including unreconstructed communists. In the Deep South, affiliated groups like the Memphis Debt Collectors were often populist and anti-oligarchic but completely heterodox in politics. Indeed, with the example of the Memphis Debt Collectors, the three core members completely eschewed electoral politics and chose simply to target those who used debt to victimize, abuse and exploit the underclasses. Other Deep South organizations were evangelical Christians who saw the Reactionary Party both as morally bankrupt, and at odds with the teachings of New Testament Jesus. 

So when the date came in late March 2036, 36 cities and an additional 112 counties saw terror attacks of various kinds which targeted high value economic infrastructure, militarized police stations, and most commonly, politicians at fundraisers. Some of the attacks failed spectacularly; one misguided group attempted to blow up the Grand Coulee Dam, while others were scattershot, gruesome affairs including car bombings of strip malls where payday lenders operated, as in several suburbs in Texas. But a good many of the attacks were very specifically targeted either at high-ranking law-enforcement officials, big money donors or politicians. We will touch on the Memphis Debt Collectors actions that kicked off the decade of the Shining City in Allison’s section next week.

This string of attacks had both a desired and undesired effect on the general population of the United States. On what might be considered the positive side, the attacks sparked real popular protest in the streets, and real attempts by citizens to take back local and state governments from the oligarchs. A great many people felt that at last somebody was doing something about the police state which had replaced America's representative democracy. On the downside, more indiscriminate attacks led both to vicious law enforcement reprisals, as well as a feeling among some people that the Shining City Movement had gone too far or was too indiscriminate.

Perhaps most crucially, the Shining City Movement failed to take two key steps in achieving the goal of overthrowing the existing order. First, no one in the established political realm, whether Reactionary or Demonstration affiliated, could bring themselves to endorse or even to openly acknowledge that the anger which drove the Shining Cities Movement sprung from legitimate grievance. In the long run, this failure to achieve political legitimacy hamstrung the ability of Shining City to actually topple or even seriously challenge the existing order. Second, and perhaps most crucially, the Shining City Movement failed to build an alternative power structure which could replace the failed state that was the federal government and their corporate backers. Yes, they made half-hearted attempts at boosting mutual-aid societies and co-opting the rank and file of unions and churches, but all these efforts gave individual affiliates a place to hide. At no point could Shining City point to a set of new institutions and say ‘trust these groups, they can replace the broken institutions of kleptocracy.’ All successful revolutions, from Russia to the Americas, take this crucial step. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

In the short run, cities and counties across the United States experienced everything from low-grade insurgency to open warfare. This trend was particularly pronounced in the Mountain West and in the Upper Midwest. For several years in the wake of the Shining City attacks, states around the Great Lakes and the Rocky Mountains were functionally ungovernable. Even areas of the Great Plains, Deep South and East Coast which saw less sustained anti-government violence, in many places federal troops or security forces could not safely operate for fear of IEDs and guerrilla attacks.

This is what Detroit looks like now. Imagine it
after four years of car bombings and shootouts...

Unfortunately for the Shining City movement, by 2040 a lack of coordinated action and a lack of viable alternative, allowed the federal government to push back, divide and conquer the openly insurgent regions. This hollow victory for the Federal government was not quite as triumphant as official websites would have had the population believe. In some places like the Mountain West, formal government control was never really reestablished. In the large industrial cities both of the Upper Midwest and Texas, employers often had to accept that unpopular policies, cuts in wages or elimination of benefits, would lead both to work slow downs and in some cases, direct physical violence against the ownership class. Perhaps most troubling, in the Deep South, the divide and conquer tactics of the Federal government went back to the old Jim Crow playbook. Gangs of white paramilitaries were given easy access to surveillance assets and in some cases official government backing and were allowed to commit any number of atrocities against communities of color and any whites associated with insurgency. 

By 2040 American cities took on a distinctive post-insurgency look and feel. At the core would be a tiny central business district housing AI servers which managed large corporations. The central business districts were populated by high paid software engineers and corporate executives and were, in most cases, physically walled off from the surrounding inner ring slums. The slums extended out into suburbs built in the 1980s, 90s and 2010s, which would be packed full of failing infrastructure and multiple families living in single homes. Beyond this would be the ex-urban ring where those who served the central business district, but couldn’t afford to live in it, would often congregate around cheaply built apartments and ride in buses, sometimes protected by police escort, to work in the central business district every day. 

For those who gave up on urban life, which was a not insignificant portion of the population, many chose to move to smaller cities or even out into rural areas in search of food, health or some form of stability outside of the spiraling violence of the urban cores. Unfortunately, a great many of these people ended up only employable as day laborers on farms when automated vehicles could not properly harvest crops. In the decades to come, these people would form a de facto peasantry that more resembled indentured servants or sharecroppers than citizens of a free nation living in what was supposed to be a high-tech 21st Century. By 2040, the oligarchy appeared triumphant.

La Joventud Está Loca

In 2036, the situation in Mexico is precarious for everyone. In the Yucatán, the drought and famine continues, made worse by police and military units who are no longer loyal to the central government setting themselves up as local warlords. Or at least they try. In many cases they are very quickly overthrown, overrun and run out of town by the population of the Yucatán itself. In the west, the cartels have seized control of the number of states but with their diminished cash flow from the United States and the defection of many military officers to the side of the revolutionaries, it remains to be seen if they will be able to stay in power. 

The Joventud Movement wastes no time overthrowing the established order. As mentioned previously, their view of the 1910 revolution is that Mexico did not go far enough and they do not intend to repeat that mistake. Large businesses are seized by the government and broken up then turned over to worker-run cooperatives. Large land holdings are seized and broken up, and turned over to the two thirds of farmers with small landholdings (25 acres or less). Restarting production of Mexico's Cantarele oil field in the Gulf is even made a priority of the new government; government-run Pemex is broken up and turned into smaller worker-run co-ops. While this last move does not immediately lead to more oil production, it also does not lead to a catastrophic continued loss of production as predicted by foreign observers. 

While they're revisiting
the shortcomings of 1910,
I hope they bring back the
mustaches and headgear...

All this radical change absolutely destroys the value of the peso on international currency markets. But thanks to agricultural exports and a stabilization of oil production, Mexico is still able to trade for many high-tech goods it cannot produce itself. Additionally these seizures, while opposed by the reactionary government in the United States do not lead to a shut down in cross-border trade. As a result Mexico's middle manufacturing capabilities continue to bring in foreign reserves and the economic situation stabilizes.

In this climate of instability a decade earlier the cartels might have been able to sponsor an overthrow of the federal government themselves. But with their diminished cash flow and their attempts to move into, if not legitimate, then at least open governance leaves them in a more precarious situation than the central government itself. With many of their fighters loyal only to money and that money drying up zealous supporters of the Joventud government and the revolutionary spirit that takes hold in the military allows the United States of Mexico to re-conquer the breakaway states in a matter of years. 

    By 2040 western Mexico is largely under the control of Mexico City. And while it cannot permanently stamp out the cartels, the revolutionary government decides to go one step further to try and permanently break the power of the cartels. In 2039 the president of Mexico signs a bill legalizing the production, distribution and sale of all “intoxicating products.” This would seem to create an opening for the cartels, but the revolutionary government is quite zealous and quite insistent that anyone partaking in this new legal drug trade cannot have a criminal background and in the spirit of broader economic reform must be a worker owned cooperative. We will cover the longer-term impacts of this move next week.

As mentioned last week many Mexican citizens take a wait-and-see approach to the new government. Foreign observers are genuinely baffled that the government manages to stay in power through 2040. What they fail to grasp is that Mexico's geography lends itself to being an international power and the people of Mexico themselves are tired of living in the shadow of their northern neighbor. The revolutionary government does not attempt to reinsert itself in the Yucatán and even accept the union of Belize, the Yucatán states in Guatemala, which formed the Los Tres Paises Unidos, or what locals simply call “El Trio.” In response to the destruction of a few key locks in the Panama Canal by the Shining City, the revolutionary government even declares that it will use convict labor to build a new canal across the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, which will be both a joint project between the new government and El Trio. 

Give Me a Home, Where the Polar Bears Roam

The situation in the northern third of the continent gets even more complicated over the second half of the 2030s. The various successor governments in Canada have a number of problems without easy solutions. In the east, age pyramids mean that the populations of both Ontario and Quebec as well as the maritime provinces are rapidly aging. For the plains and mountain provinces, the age pyramid is less dire, but the ability to transport goods such as agricultural and petroleum products depends on coastal ports to which they no longer have access. This leads Pacific Columbia and the Athabasca Union to support insurgent groups in the Mountain West and the West Coast United States. The goal here is two-fold: regime security and access to the Pacific. This initially seems counterintuitive as Vancouver is a port city and should allow easy trade with east Asia. But in the years of instability that proceeded to break up of Canada and the saber rattling of the reactionary government in the United States, it became clear to the British Colombians that they could not rely on safe access to the Pacific.

With this thing next door, can you blame
them for not feeling safe in their own waters?

So when the Shining City movement launches their attacks in 2036, agents from the two Canadian successor states slipped across the border and began providing any sort of support they could to the rebels. This goes a long way to explain why the Mountain West insurgencies managed to keep federal control at arms length. Yes the mountain's physical geography helped, but so did a great deal of Canadian assistance. With federal military forces perpetually operating on high alert within the United States itself the Reactionary Party eventually realize that it could not enforce its will on the successor states.

By 2039 both the Athabasca Union and Pacific Columbia seem to have reached a degree of stability when the hottest summer on record in the Arctic shattered the previous 2033 records. This hottest summer triggers what many climate scientists feared: the eruption of methane frozen under the permafrost. All summer Canada north of the arctic circle quite literally explodes. Massive wildfires destroyed millions of acres of coniferous forest and tundra. These explosions of methane are matched by similar releases in Siberia on the other side of the Arctic. In what counterintuitively seems like a horrible disaster humanity, actually dodges a much larger bullet. The methane releases catch fire. Instead of potentially triggering a runaway greenhouse effect, the fires rage all summer and fall. In the winter of 2039-2040, snow and rain turn gray across the Northern Hemisphere, and temperatures plunge to record lows not seen since the 1970s. This isn’t actually that cold, compared to historical measures, but for many born since 2000, it is literally the coldest winter they’ve ever lived through. Next week, we will catch up with our four protagonists, and see how they ride out, or even shape, the events of the late 2030s. 

As the Tear Gas Clears Pt. 2 - Keeping It Personal

Marty Junior

Marty puts himself first in line to shake the governor’s hand at the recognition ceremony hosted in Ann Arbor. Michigan’s governor recognizes the key role played by the Office of Remote Surveillance in putting down the strikes, and elevates the agency to the level of department. Marty's boss’s boss becomes  the Secretary of Surveillance. The ripple effect of promotions, and the governor’s handshake, earns Marty a plum day-shift supervisor spot. Marty rejoices at the prospect of spending nights and weekends with Tina, Trey, and newborn Tonya. 

Ann Arbor, Michigan
As noted, the tear gas has cleared.

The family settles into a comfortable, and what they hope will be, stable life. Trey needs the stability, as he is diagnosed with developmental delays, which were likely inherited from the male side of the family. His grandfather had to cope with dyslexia, and though Marty Junior never got a formal diagnosis, he joked that his love of numbers and logic problems stemmed from borderline autism. Domestic life takes priority over profession for Marty Junior and family, as the upheavals around the General Strike fade in the rear view mirror.

Until Detroit hosts a mega donor event in the summer of 2030. Marty is off-duty the evening of the Midterm Massacre. Detroit is the scene of the botched attack that devolves into a hostage situation, so Marty and his day shift team get called in. They manage to track down the extended family of a Shining City fighter who allowed a brief lapse in ‘no technology’ discipline. State Police round up the extended family, which is brought in and threatened with execution if Shining City won’t lay down their arms. The fighter in question agrees to surrender, but the rest of the group refuses. The governor demands a show of force, so police storm the venue. The ensuing gun battle leaves 127 dead, including the extended family of the fighter who attempts to surrender.

With this successful detective work, Marty gets promoted to Deputy Director for the Upper Peninsula in 2031. While the wife and kids bemoan moving to Marquette, they soon fall back into a comfortable routine, albeit with few of the educational services Trey needs. Marty complains to Tina that he should have received a more prestigious post, but she reminds him to play the long game. They don’t know it, but out of the populated areas of the state actually serves Marty’s career. He receives little of the blame for the intelligence failures of 2036.

Jillian

Jillian gets less sleep than she did during residency in the wake of the General Strike. Their son, Vern, named for the Vernal Equinox on which he was born, is a needy boy wracked by separation anxiety and night terrors. During middle-of-the-night changing of soiled bedsheet, she must remind herself how terrified the boy was he would never see his dad again, or that the men in blue suits would come back for him. 

Ashtabula, Ohio
You can almost see Canada from here!

And Jillian loses sleep every time Chris gets out of bed. Due to the torture during his imprisonment, Chris falls into a crippling addiction to legal painkillers. Jillian always writes him fresh scripts and clings to hope that he will clean up. But social welfare and drug treatment programs are not funded by the government and are ruinously expensive for all but the most well-off. If anyone who keeps track of the paperwork notices the trend, she’s never called into question over it. 

Chris’s shoddy bookkeeping drives the clinic closer to net loss every year, which affects the family’s bottom line, as well as providing another source of depression for Chris, which positively reinforces his addiction. Of course, this net loss is only on the books. Many of Jillian's patients must make payment through barter rather than formal crediting and debiting. Fortunately for Jillian and the staff, in the wake of the General Strike, they voted to turn the clinic into an employee-owned co-operative. When a patient must offer barter to pay for medical services, someone on the staff likely needs whatever goods or skills the patient has to offer. 

Jillian gives birth to a second child, daughter Autumn in 2032, during a year and a half streak of sobriety for Chris. On warm summer afternoons, the family walks along the shores of Lake Erie. Jillian looks north with no small degree of longing. She attended medical school in Montreal, and speaks fluent Québecois French. The couple figures they could move north and fit right in. But with the disillusion of the Canadian state, legal crossing becomes ever more difficult. For a couple still clinging to the belief that they operate in a world of just rules and laws, illegal immigration remains out of the question. 

Bobby

Arriving in Tennessee with a fistful of dollars and no real prospects doesn’t much bother Bobby. Growing up, his father worked 12 hour shifts as a manager at a burger joint. His pay went to ever-increasing contributions to an HSA that never quite covered the bills for treating his worsening diabetes. As a result, Bobby spiraled away from his nuclear family, couch surfing and finding kindred spirits amongst other high school slackers. As the train rolls to a stop in a changing yard on the north side of Memphis, Bobby feels good about his chances.

Frisco Yard, Memphis, Tenn.
This picture is over 50 years old. 
Train yards don't change much.

Bobby finds employment at a fried-fish restaurant in the midst of hiring staff to fill holes left by the strike. Bobby took seriously his grandpa’s admonition to learn to cook, because cooks never starve, and lands a job on the line. The rest of the staff treat him like a plague rat, until a young hostess, Jeannie, figures out that he was in the city for the Battle of Louisville. That Bobby sat in jail as the bullets and drone-grenades flew doesn’t matter to her so much as the residual scent of tear gas and delousing powder.

When Bobby receives his first paycheck, he’s shocked that his wages receive the same deduction for lost potential profit as everyone else. Bobby initially reacts sourly, but a common refrain from the Louisville strike keeps ringing in his head; “they withhold something from all of us.” Bringing it up to other staff leads to stony silence at first, until Bobby makes clear that he wants a solution for the whole crew, not an exemption for himself. They know management won’t change the policy, and striking is now illegal. Perhaps rashly, perhaps because of their budding romance, Jeannie asks if Bobby would carry the message for the staff to the debt collectors.

In a dark alley behind a boarded up tire factory, Bobby meets a young woman. She asks a few questions, gives simple instructions, then ends the meeting after five minutes. Bobby returns to work, on the look out for the information the debt collector requested. He discovers that that the owner of the restaurant faces financial pressure from his principal creditor, a wealthy owner of multiple franchises in the Memphis area. Bobby scribbles this info on a scrap of paper and leaves it in a small tube on the back of a bench in a bus stop shelter.

A few weeks later, headlines scream about a suspicious explosion that leveled the house of a local financier. The police arrive at the restaurant and arrest seven members of the staff, including Jeannie. While they have no specific evidence, they hold them without charges. Four of those arrested return to work a few days later, but the other three including Jeannie, are held an extra five days. With a split lip and swollen black eyes, she can barely keep eye contact as she breaks up with Bobby and tells him he needs to leave town. Reluctantly, Bobby packs his bag again and rides the rails south, this time winding up in New Orleans. 

Allison

Allison walks from her crash pad to the restaurant with confidence. People in the neighborhood giver her friendly, almost knowing smiles along the way. At work, the new owner discontinues wage garnishments over lost profits, and even shares some of the profit directly with the staff. Rumors swirl around the Firestone Park neighborhood that anyone with a predatory creditor ought to visit the fried-chicken place on Millington Road. If you leave an empty pack of cigarettes, with a name and address tucked inside, at the booth next to the kitchen entrance, you might get a paper note tacked to your door with a time and location to talk to one of the Memphis Debt Collectors.  

Abandon Firestone Plant, Memphis, TN
Looks like a great place to build an IED...

Federal laws passed by the Reactionary Party remove ever more categories of debt from the list of what can be discharged through bankruptcy, including medical bills, home and even auto loans. The trickle of empty cigarette packs, sometimes appearing only once every few months, becomes a weekly occurrence. Soon, Allison, and her two accomplices have more work than they can handle. They take a quiet break from threatening and murdering creditors in the wake of the bust of Jeannie and her coworkers. This decision comes at a fortunate time, as the police raid the restaurant a few days later. Thanks to a scheduling error, which turned out to be quite intentional on the part of the restaurant’s new manager and owner, neither Allison nor her accomplices were at work that day. 

The staff of the restaurant continue to secretly feed Allison and her two accomplices, and the three begin squatting in an abandoned warehouse, before acquiring a defunct RV on an abandoned lot on the north end of the city. One night in late 2035 Alison answers the door of the RV and finds herself face-to-face with a man who simply introduces himself as “the Professor.”

The man gives them an address and promises that in two weeks time, for one night only, there will be a suitcase EMP in the dumpster out back. If the group takes the device, he will assume they are ready to turn the country back into a shining city on a hill. With that, the Professor disappears into the drizzle and fog of a February night in the Mississippi delta. Two weeks later, with shaking hands, Allison pulls a heavy brown suitcase out of a dumpster. Back at the RV, the trio inspect the device and decide to dig up their stash of ‘faulty’ batteries and ‘expired’ blasting caps, to take one last shot at toppling the oligarchy.