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.