Precursors
The Taco Tuesday disaster shared many characteristics of the meltdown that triggered the Great Recession a generation earlier, including some serious and self-interested denial. The largest corporations had long ago recognized how good the 2008 recession had been to them, by culling the herd and by shifting wealth toward them during its asymmetric recovery. And so the abstract financial objects at the center of Taco Tuesday were not implemented in complete ignorance, but as part of an attempted market-share grab.
Taco Tuesday is now generally acknowledged as the start of The Trouble, but of course other factors had been converging on a blowout for years. Many people saw a rupture like this as inevitable, but felt powerless to stop it. Some wished for it—if not explicitly, then coded into fantasies like the eternally-popular zombie movie—a wish that spoke to a deep need for the trivialities of the day-to-day to stop oppressing them, for their personal struggles to have meaning, for there to be real choices in their lives, and real consequences to those choices.
Meanwhile: there had been shifts in the world’s weather patterns that only the most rabid anti-intellectuals were still willing to deny. Tornadoes had been dominating the summer months throughout the American Midwest for more than a decade. Droughts followed torrential rains and mudslides annually in California. Destabilization of the Atlantic conveyor current brought die-offs and wildly fluctuating temperatures to much of the Western Hemisphere, while a sharp rise in the number and severity of tsunamis each year was already crippling several Asian economies.
Meanwhile: for decades, political leaders had been profiting from the fears of terrorism. In the name of safety they had implemented the vast prison systems, had justified the modern surveillance state, and had tricked out the metropolitan police forces of most Western cities like elite military units. All that fear, all that adrenaline, all those bullets had to go somewhere.
Meanwhile: Americans had been struggling with their traditions of genocide and oppression, not very successfully. The psychic residue from the implementation of slavery still had not vanished nearly two centuries after its rollback. A sickness of the soul lingered on. Animosity between ethnic groups was not of course limited to Americans but some peculiar variation of it clearly was.
People targeted unfairly by the militarized police marched in the streets. Demanded access to surveillance footage. Demanded incarceration of the bad apples. Feeling unfairly put-upon, the police were reluctant to change. They retrenched. Obfuscated.
The stoked fears of the heteronormative, home-buying, child-rearing populace were not entirely unjustified.
Meanwhile: other leaders in other countries, enraged by the destruction of their homes and cultures by the depredations of Western colonial ambitions and transnational concerns were, with very little effort, indoctrinating idealistic young people around the world. Coercing their more unstable recruits into building bombs and blowing up their own home cities in solidarity. Believed with true revolutionary zeal that they would prevail in a confrontation with the established powers if one could be engineered. They were determined to bring things to a head.
Early Years
Six billion freaked-out people survived the months which followed the collapse of the last Industrial Age distribution systems—of money, of food, of manufactured goods, of law-and-order. This represented many more hungry mouths to feed than most apocalyptic daydreamers had been expecting.
The inhabitants of our nascent colony on Mars were not among the survivors. They starved slowly, as it became apparent that critical resupply missions would not be mounted in time. Could not be mounted for years. While on helpless Earth people watched and read their brave accounts.
China had already dismantled what might have been a sustainable environment for its one and a half billion. The workers who had grown dependent on its factories would have been peasant farmers only two generations before. When the factories closed, many people belatedly denounced their parents’ abandonment of traditional values in favor of “city money” and attempted to return to villages which had long ago been bulldozed to make room for the Ghost Cities.
As the financial dust settled, much of the Central Chinese Government was ousted (officially if not in full actuality). It was replaced by a CCG and a People’s Communist Party that took an unfortunate number of cues from the Cultural Revolution of the mid-twentieth century. They exiled a majority of the financial sector, rather than insufficiently-fervid intellectuals. Those who could not bribe their way out of the country, and many of those who could, were stripped of their assets.
This did nothing to alleviate the problems of the transnational manufacturing concerns gathered in Shenzhen and elsewhere. It crippled the converged automobile, electronics, and appliance industries. The business entities that survived acquired the corpses of the dead and jockeyed for better position.
Apple Inc. went under at this time, and end-users who couldn’t get their data out of its walled garden were left in the cold when a distraught Apple engineer pushed out some malware disguised as one final security update, the “Goodbye Patch”, which somehow made it past the vestiges of its InfoSec teams.
Painstakingly-restored and uploaded family photographs, precious music libraries and video collections, tax records and personal documents stuck in proprietary formats vanished forever when Apple’s cloud farms shut down and iDevices around the world bricked. This led to an alienated shock at being severed from one’s own digital past known as Cupertino Syndrome.
It was reported, with appropriately frightening graphics, by what remained of the mass media and was re-posted, retweeted, commented-upon and supercut by those who still could. Since so many media conglomerates had depended on Apple products, its collapse (and the subsequent suicide of CEO Tim Cook III) knocked several former powerhouses off the map. Time-Warner vanished. Universal-Google-Hasselhoff (NYSE:UGH) of course weathered the storm.
The loss of most Apple end-points also tore holes in the surveillance grids of several intelligence agencies. The 2055 commuter-rail explosions in Moscow and the suicide bombings of Notting Hill were blamed on this lack of data. Politicians cried out for deeper invasions of privacy.
Possibly as a result of their history of cooperation with government search requests, Yahoo! managed to survive a dozen more rounds of divestitures and acquisitions, eventually becoming part of the Third Man empire, where its interfaces were subjected to a rigorous makeover until it looked appropriately vintage. It became popular with certain otaku tweens and audio locavores.
But people carried on.
City Life
In the slums of Mexico City people were only marginally worse off than they had been before The Trouble and as the importance of the traditional export economy faded, the black market economy stepped in to take its place, providing new opportunities for industry and export.
Traditional infrastructure had never been available to much of the African continent, but in the largest cities, its breakdown made life demonstrably more difficult.
The middle classes of Lagos and Kinshasa were able to take advantage of Amazon.com’s largest drones and the hundreds of online delivery services which sprang up to compete with them, but in the rural areas and smaller towns, most Africans barely registered the horrific changes originating in the First World. Those who did couldn’t help enjoying a rare moment of schadenfreude.
They continued to worry about what they had already been worrying about: wars, refugee camps, getting killed or enslaved by religious zealots, revolutionaries, or the police. Keeping their daughters safe from same. Trying not to get hacked to death with machetes by underworld minions or mowed down by the machine guns of unaffiliated psychos jacked up on crystal meth. Graft, starvation, epidemics, and random genocides continued as before.
The NRA, having poisoned as many minds in North America as it profitably felt it could, had already decided the time was ripe to move its operations elsewhere. It settled, along with Colt Defense (hoping to avoid yet another corporate restructuring), in Somalia, where after greasing a sufficient number of palms it continued to prosper. Weapons manufacture later become the seed of the economic resurgence known as the African Miracle.
Contrary to most EOTWAWKI predictions, people in many of the world’s largest cities managed to survive surprisingly well—and without resorting to cannibalism—particularly if they happened to be situated near large bodies of fresh water. Fish markets thrived, became trendy destinations on Saturdays. It was understood that this state of affairs could not last indefinitely, but few were as worried about the long term as they were about getting through the next winter.
Nashville was leveled by a series of F-5 tornadoes. Paris was lost to a coordinated detonation of four suitcase nukes and the subsequent civil war. New Orleans disappeared at last, washed away by the storm waters of the Mississippi. It’s still not clear what happened to Zurich.
Big Oil collapsed as the money behind it eroded and people reserved petroleum products for use in the manufacture of plastics, as nature had intended, rather than for fuel. Companies sprang up with artisanal designs for solar-powered sail craft. New techniques were developed that decreased the cost of photovoltaic materials to the point where they could be incorporated into clothing, and the air-conditioned hat at last became a reality.
In New York, the many green spaces which had appeared over the years throughout Manhattan were repurposed for intensive agriculture. Vertical farms were de rigueur in luxury condo towers. The Utility Storm Preparation Commission, still unable to restore the lost beachfronts of Long Island, nevertheless managed to fund the East River Seawall Automation and its corresponding West Side project the HRSA. These massive constructions were intended to be raised only during “surge” conditions but as the sea levels rose these surges came to seem more permanent than otherwise to a soggy Midtown (where neohipsters in three-piece suits could be seen paddleboarding to the office), and the seawall automations stayed permanently extended. But much of Brooklyn had to be abandoned.
In 2070, self-sustaining domed arcologies began appearing in the Wall Street Canal Zone (or WaSteCan, in the parlance of the New York Times’ real estate section). These became popular with firms which wanted to prove to the world they were not going to let themselves get pushed around by a little ecological disaster.
Far from the City and State of New York City, survivalist-separationists huddled in a necklace of armed encampments strung from Montana to Idaho, adamant in their belief that society had collapsed into savagery and secular humanism. These grandchildren of the original preppers, stoked by homeschooling and generations of paranoia, rejected all claims to the contrary by the hated United States federal government, and routinely shot strangers on sight.
Nevertheless, the feds did from time to time send in health inspectors who appeared outside the walls of the larger compounds bearing Bibles and candy bars. It was a popular post-collegiate program amongst idealistic youth who were tired of blowing things up. There was a delicate art to establishing a rapport with these enclaves, especially those in which gunsmithing and bullet casting had become enshrined as sacred and ritualized occupations, which is to say, virtually all of them.
The few brave souls who were admitted (and who survived long enough to file reports) wrote of the deplorable conditions within—of rigid patriarchal paramilitary hierarchies, of the genetic tragedies resulting from inbreeding, and bad dentistry. Crucifixes were a popular fashion accessory. Ethnologists were fascinated by the preservation of death metal bands, and by the de facto canonization of Kirk Cameron.
As if in response to this, the last quarter of the twenty-first century saw a resurgence of the notorious Church of Kurt based in Olympia, Washington. Redmond and Seattle were quarantined around this time, having been overrun by an outbreak of an AI/biological implant infection that bonded its diseased vectors into a hive mind known collectively as The Bingles.
Weather patterns shifted wildly during the latter half of the century, often called the Age of Storms. Torrential rains inundated the five balkanized British states. Rising sea levels reclaimed Florida. Year after year of superstorms wiped out the Gulf coast of Texas and destroyed what was left of its economy; the remnants of the Lone Star State were re-annexed by Mexico. The famously-corrupt US government was paid handsomely to look the other way.
Plague Years
But it was neither economic collapse nor the Age of Storms that finally brought an end to the United States of America—it was Celebrity Amnesia.
At first it seemed relatively benign compared to the collection of biological attacks that had knocked humanity’s population back by an order of magnitude by the turn of the twenty-second century.
It wasn’t as deadly as the weaponized rubella spread by children of anti-vaxxers throughout Europe and South America. It wasn’t like Spam King, an aphasic neurotoxin that rendered its victims unable to speak or decode language other than in phrases from advertisements. Millions of these poor souls throughout the world, unable to work or communicate their needs, died singing jingles and century-old Who songs.
Unlike these, Celebrity Amnesia wasn’t fatal. It merely effected changes in the fusiform gyrus of the brain. Subtle and inheritable changes making it impossible for a majority of the species to remember the names or recognize the faces of anyone who had achieved a measure of fame above a certain threshold popularity. It finally destroyed Hollywood and the sad remains of the record industry. But there was a downside too.
It wiped out most of the world’s national governments, democratic and otherwise, as no one could remember or recognize the leaders they were supposedly venerating.
The leaders themselves were as vulnerable to the disease as anyone else, and took to wearing name tags in their hallways and conference rooms, and referring to cheat sheets when trying to size up opponents and allies in the dirty day-to-day business of manufacturing laws. Impersonations were common until biometric security measures were introduced.
After the shutdowns from Capitol Hill to Canberra, it turned out, to everyone’s great surprise, that central governments had been useful for ensuring the roads stayed repaired and relatively safe; that clean water was available to citizens; that relief was delivered to victims of the tornadoes, floods, droughts, fires, tsunamis, earthquakes, algae blooms, wildlife diebacks, mudslides and insect attacks that manifested throughout the world during The Trouble.
These were anarchic years, and the aforementioned survivalist-separationists scattered throughout North America snickered from behind their reinforced bunker walls and nodded to themselves, “Told you so.” Stubbornly though, society refused to collapse. The collective knowledge and folly represented by the internet did not disappear, although all YouTubeOne videos with view counts of over 10 billion were inadvertently deleted due to a misunderstanding at Universal-Google-Hasselhoff.
Despite the establishment of the Reconstituted States of America in the early twenty-second century, city-states remained the basic units of civilization. Technological progress did not cease. Banking continued. The Kardashian family however, which had continued to prosper for generations after President Yeezy’s third term, were finally purged from humanity’s collective consciousness.
Renaissance
Detroit blossomed as the tech capital of North America after a trifecta of rising sea levels, hyperinflated commercial rents, and the Gentrification Wars decimated San Francisco and the entire Northern California corridor between Petaluma and Watsonville.
Large portions of Chicago had been razed and turned into community farms. Chicagoans somehow scraped by on fresh fruits and vegetables, perch, barbecue, and craft beer. Although the city’s border remained porous and hard to defend, once Indiana had been seeded with depleted uranium they felt much safer. Chicago became the center of a new Renaissance known for its distinctive EDM and fashion.
On the new shorelines of the world’s oceans however, life was not nearly so enchanting. This account will not explore the horrors of life in the salt marshes of Southern California or the former District of Columbia.
The Mediterranean had widened and deepened, taking with it Greece and the Riviera, and leaving Italy as a narrow, mountainous archipelago. It was still a favored vacation spot for those who could afford it.
The Philippines and Malaysia disappeared. The people of India continued to suffer and pray and field tech support calls. The radioactive ruins of Japan slumbered beneath the Pacific.
By the middle of the twenty-second century, just over one billion people had survived The Trouble, and they carried on.
Exit
The Age of Storms led to a vast realignment of power and priorities that characterized our exit from The Trouble. So did humanity’s war with the League of Cats.
The First Great Erasure put an end to the League, and this might have set the world back on its heels yet again, but scholars of Cupertino Syndrome were ready. For a century and a half, they had been quietly tapping into the world’s data feeds and assembling a vast archive of files and software—public and private; open-source and pirated; useful and otherwise—and after negotiations with the anarchists of Helsinki and Stockholm, the collective online knowledge of humanity was largely restored.
The single family home was a thing of the past, and considered an unforgivable waste of resources by post-Troubled society—enclaves had become the rule rather than the exception. A deep unconscious fear had gripped the species that we might vanish from the universe, and procreation with anyone who would stand (or lay) still for it was the only answer. This urge was strong enough to overwhelm any reluctance left in the survivors to mate outside their traditional ethnic groups. Except of course among the survivalist-separationists.
The Age of Storms slowly passed as homo sapiens’ diminished numbers and new inability to provide continuous anthropogenic climate change stopped screwing things up.
Islam and Christianity’s popularity dipped after evidence found underneath the vanished glaciers of Antarctica pointed to a visit, millennia past, by a technology-wielding race dubbed the Nivens. Hinduism, Buddhism and Judaism were unaffected by this revelation.
Members of the society which emerged from The Trouble, even the richest, felt obligated as a matter of civic pride and spiritual duty to tread as lightly upon the Earth’s systems as they could. They raised crops, and tended chickens and pigs (cattle having been largely outlawed after the popularity of the “Eat a cheeseburger, go to jail” initiatives, although lab-vat beef remained a black-market luxury item). Earth Goddess religions became common, as were animism, and the veneration of one’s ancestors.
When physicists at the Perimeter Monastery in Ontario unlocked the secret of non-baryonic energy, it changed everything. NBE made the power produced by nuclear fusion look trivial, and expanded our understanding of the matter in the universe from 4% to nearly 8%.
NBE lent itself perfectly to the decentralized installations that had become civilization’s new paradigm. It led to innovations in materials science and biotechnology.
It led to the true opening of the solar system. Humanity, in its exultation at having dodged a particularly large bullet, began its second wave of colonization to Mars, and new colonies were established on Io, Europa, and finally the Earth’s own moon.
It led to the construction of our starships.
BLAP 