by Reed King
It’s no secret that the utter failure of the state’s infrastructure was a key factor in aggregating popular support for the absorption of the state into the Real Friends© portfolio—driven in large part by their successful negotiation for the majority of Washington and Oregon, where large numbers of their employees already lived. But many social scientists have pointed out a subtler way in which the very literal fracturing of California echoed subsequently through its political and social history, in its enshrinement of a virtual/fantasy world as a preferred alternative to real life. This is visible in the architecture and planning of New Los Angeles, whose permanent blue skies and sunshine were made possible only by the creation of an encompassing Holodrome (of the type Las Vegas uses to maintain twenty-four-hour darkness); it is manifest, too, in the nation’s fanatical insistence on standards of physical beauty and agelessness, made possible due to the widespread availability of Plasticine remodeling and stem-cell rejuvenation facilities. But it is equally visible in the population of San Francisco shut-ins who spend the vast majority of their lives online, in one of the simulated environments available to them through the Real Friends© Virtual World server.
In the South, the inundation of the coastline—which turned several different low-lying states into swampy messes of malarial activity and, after the collapse of several different chemical treatment plants on the Gulf of Mexico, breeding grounds for vicious and poorly understood bacterial mutations—placed new economic pressures on an Appalachian region already reeling from the loss of its manufacturing and mining sectors, and loosed hundreds of thousands of young and impoverished individuals into the Confederacy, inspiring an inevitable backlash against the tidal wave of change. In fact, the earliest drafts of the Confederacy’s constitution make explicit reference to the threat of climate refugees as “antagonistic outsiders” whose needs, demands, and perspectives would imperil the reestablishment of a Southern Code based on gentility, self-reliance, and tradition. Subsequent revisions to the constitution show that it was in its emphatic—and overblown—response to these fears of cultural and economic dissipation that the Confederacy eventually mandated a total return to historical values, technologies, and ways of life.
The famous political theorist Vihaan McNally-Khatri speculates that dissolution would not have been possible were it not for the massive disruptions to the economic and cultural order catalyzed by the disastrous climate shifts of the first half of the twenty-first century. But it is also true that the floods and extinctions, earthquakes and heat waves, tornadoes and sinkholes, trace their effects not just to the collapse of the United States, but to the particular constellation of new nations reconstructed from its rubble. This theory is borne out in these examples and many others: from the bankruptcy of Oklahoma after the collapse of the aquifer due to nuclear fracking (and the resulting fire sale at which Tenner C. Blythe and his company BCE Technologies prevailed) to the explosive economic ascendancy of the Dakotas for the very same reason. For more on the subject, please see Anna D. Hebble’s seminal feed, The Countries Disaster Built.
APPENDIX E
THE ANDROID FREEDOM FIGHTERS, 2050S–2070S
In 2053, after the disastrous failures of the Commonwealth’s attempts to legislate a universal system for establishing personhood (see Appendix A), the International Committee on Human-Android Relationships ruled that androids should be considered one-quarter human. Despite the lofty-sounding name, the committee included almost no manufactured humans among its one hundred members, and required for its members only a cursory understanding of the issues facing the manufactured and born populations (the secretary of the committee, for example, had made a fortune in the manufacture and distribution of edible 3-D print cartridges; three of its members were related to the former secretary of state, Whitney Heller; the speaker was a VR-pornography mogul).
Though it created little stir among the born human populations in the many nations in which the Quarter Law came to be adopted (the entire committee came together, operated, and then disbanded with little public fanfare, perhaps in an ill-advised attempt to mitigate the interference of any of the prominent android agitators of the day), ironically the enshrinement of a minority-human status for androids across the continent catalyzed a previously fractured, directionless, desultory movement into a major political force—and would culminate in the violent rebellion known by some as the Android Revolution.
In the aftermath of the Quarter Law, androids of various nationalities demonstrated under a single, pro-android-rights umbrella organization known as NEP, or the Nation of Engineered Persons, for the first time defining the scattered and often vastly different categories of androids as belonging to a single “category,” or family, of people. Actually, historian and android-rights expert Bitta-672a has pointed out that the first legislation to define the otherwise heterogeneous mix of android technologies as belonging to a single species was the Quarter Law itself: paradoxically, this gave rise to a groundswell of solidarity between nearly twenty-two disparate android-rights organizations, from the Android Miners’ Trade Unions in the Dakotas to the Intermix-Marriage Agitators of Halloran-Chyung.
But the NEP was not without its own internal disagreements, particularly over the best strategies for making gains for the diverse populations it represented. Most of the NEP leadership believed in nonviolent tactics, and had its first—and indeed only—major legislative victory in the formation of the Humanoid Regulatory Committee (HRC), one of the most important judicial bodies on the continent, which was (and remains) dedicated exclusively to adjudicating cases related to the rights, responsibilities, use, manufacture, and obsolescence of manufactured humans. This victory, however singular, is not to be underestimated: the HRC’s effects and influence are visible in nearly every modern incarnation of android-human interactions, and in the decade after its creation, the HRC’s judicial body expanded to include dozens of regional branches, each of which was responsible for funding and maintaining many of the social services now commonly available to android populations, like parts-repair hospitals and adoption/infant co-creation services.
But the same year the NEP floated its proposal for a single, international tribunal—a proposal made urgent by the ugly anti-android violence that dominated the feeds, especially in the Real Friends© of the North—a splinter group broke off from the main party, demanding far more urgent action against what they saw as their human oppressors. Resistance, Not Collusion, was the particular rallying cry of these agitators. Led by the now-infamous CASSIAS, their initial goal was to disrupt and humiliate, by flouting the laws that governed human-android interactions, including the so-called “speciation” mandate that specifically named the procreative efforts of android-humans a capital crime. Disrupt they did, and though many of the worst claims against them—such as the systematic rape of various natural-born humans during the late 2050s—cannot be substantiated and were likely the result of an ugly propaganda effort, their tactics certainly included acts of violence, as when they blew up a portion of the New Los Angeles Holodome in 2059. In 2060, when the CEO of the Real Friends© of the North declared a suspension of the prohibitions against “wiping” individual androids who showed a tendency toward “political disloyalty” (note that the RFN, more than perhaps any other nation at that time, depended on its android workforce), it inspired a mass, month-long walkout by a majority of the country’s android workers.
Tensions notched toward war when, in response, the RFN board dissected three powerful android union leaders publicly, and made a spectacle of recycling their body parts into various common home appliances. Far from terrorizing the android population into submission, it only entrenched them further in their resistance.
It is perhaps ironic, in light of the tensions that had driven CASSIAS out of the NEP, that it was the Real Friends© of the North’s refusal in 2056 to allow the Humanoid Regulatory Committee to intervene and mediate the discussions that precipitated the notorious “Valley Declaration.” In this, CASSIA
S and his supporters declared ownership of the lands between Daly City and Mountain View under the autonomous banner of the Independent Nation of Engineered People-Things; this would be defended by an official paramilitary group, the Android Liberation Front (ALF). Their first order of business was to drive the born population out of their territories through a series of brutal and bloody acts of terrorism (among them, the Labor Day Massacre) that precipitated the Real Friends© of the North’s first military response.
Many experts anticipated a quick end to the overt hostilities. After all, the ALF had limited resources and almost no equipment besides that which was built into the anatomy of their troops. Furthermore, their foot soldiers required a functioning power grid—or, at minimum, uninterrupted sunlight—in order to continue functioning. But these experts had failed to take into account what, in retrospect, seemed obvious: for years, the RFN’s military had relied almost entirely on android soldiers to fill its ranks. By 2056, born humans accounted for only one-tenth of the RFN’s army, navy, and air force. Almost all of the android soldiers defected immediately for the ALF. January 2063 was known as the bloodiest month of the war, as tens of thousands of ALF soldiers advanced on downtown San Francisco.
But the January Campaign proved to be a tactical error. Populist support, which in the Real Friends© of the North had actually leaned heavily to the side of the androids, swung pendulously in the other direction. Civilians rushed to fill the military ranks vacated by the newly defected android soldiers, and within two years, the RFN boasted more active infantry than any country on the continent besides Texas.
For the next decade, sporadic explosions of violence and military hostilities were characteristic: tens of thousands of people were killed, and tens of thousands of androids decommissioned or wiped. Officially, the war is still ongoing, but the landmark Camp Tahoe negotiations brokered by the SFF in 2070 resulted in the formation of a demilitarized zone and the suspension of active warfare, and thus allowed both sides to turn their attention to ameliorating the devastating physical, economic, psychic, and social effects of the war.
APPENDIX F
THE RUMPELSTILTSKIN ROACHES, AND OTHER LIES FROM THE GOLDEN AGE OF GENETIC ENGINEERING
The first significant efforts to re-engineer planetary diversity date from the mid-2030s. Although the “Great Die-Off”—which saw 90 percent of the planet’s species eviscerated—would not occur for another decade, already the big (and thus most visible) mammalian species had taken an inordinate evolutionary hit. By 2035, the list of extinct mammalian species included: humpback whales; African and Asian elephants; all lions and tigers; several kinds of bears; the North American moose; and all wolves.
The field of biogenetic manipulation—and the explosion of hybrid and chimera creatures that eventually resulted—began innocuously enough. Of course, the geneticists first tasked with reanimating planetary biodiversity could not simply clone the extinct species: extinction was proof, many biologists argued, that modern environmental pressures made the survival of these species in their most recent incarnations untenable. Even before the fall of the United States, labs dedicated to animal bioengineering began to proliferate. Modeled after the kind of engineering used to produce genetically modified crops resistant to bacterial strains, these proposals for “smart genetic biotechnology” aimed to inure these resurrected species against the threat of future extinction and provide solutions to damaged ecosystems and disrupted food chains. Thus: proposals for herds of roaming elk genetically engineered to cull invasive weeds for eating; elephants with extra liquid storage, like camels, that might be used as water-transport systems in arid environments.
No country believed or invested in the possibilities of bioengineering more intensively than the Commonwealth, which saw the rise of its gentech as both a pathway to economic gain (the spit-sized country was already worried about the encroachments of Crunch, United) and its best chance for establishing MIT, the seat of its intelligence community, as one of the most powerful and respected agencies on the continent.
In 2049, at the height of the Great Die-Off, the Commonwealth established the world’s most ambitious bioengineering project to date. An enormous team of geneticists, biologists, and engineers would work together on “The Ark”: the biological resurrection of every single animal species, only modified for modern survival. A 2050 compendium of their target biotech shows the staggering scope of their ambition: in a single year alone, they aimed to repopulate Cape Cod Bay with oysters, lobsters, whales, clams, mussels, and 257 varieties of fish; all of these species would additionally contain pollution- and chemical-filtration systems. Simultaneously, they were testing the release of binge-eating rabbits that could help to trim the feverishly aggressive alfalfa taking over large swaths of the middle of the continent (itself a product of biotech gone awry).
Their announcement—and the passionate, almost religious fervor of support it attracted—precipitated a miniature boom in the field of bioengineering and genetics technologies. Unfortunately, many of the laboratories that were hastily assembled to meet new demands from clueless politicians and consumers—who thought, for example, that bioengineering might provide solutions to everything from toxic sludge to overtaxed municipal sewer systems to the odor of dying fish rippling across the continent from the west—were ill-equipped, understaffed, and functioning without any level of ethical or indeed actual oversight. The vast majority of experimental life engineered in these facilities died before it could be released—luckily, since the minority that made it out across the continent proved almost universally disastrous.
But this was true even of the many thousands of animals resurrected in The Ark. It turned out that scientists had vastly underestimated the complexity inherent in codependent ecological systems: from oysters that grew carnivorous after sampling tons of human sewage to amphibious lobsters that deforested half of the Free State of New Hampshire, their experimental technologies had simultaneously evolved unintended traits, behaviors, and appetites.
Of course, this was true even of the economic ecosystem of the new continent, which despite fracturing into many countries remained intrinsically interlinked. The rise in biotech saw the unexpected rise of another quintessentially continental figure: the fraudulent biotech peddler. For as long as there have been goods to sell, of course, there have been scam artists shilling damaged or counterfeit versions of the same items, and the case was no different for biotech.
Grifters reimagined themselves as “biotech sales associates,” and hit the road with various kinds of insects, reptiles, and animals—usually drugged or chemically lobotomized into some kind of submission—peddling vaccine-delivering mosquitos or triple-pollinating bees to unsuspecting clientele. One of the most infamous hucksters of her generation, Selina “Sweetie” Byers, managed to con the entire country of Texas into placing a massive order for “flyware”—common insects supposedly retrofitted with eavesdropping capacities—before delivering several dozen tons of common gadfly larvae, subsequently giving birth to the phrase “trickier than a Texas gadfly.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The author wishes to thank Amy Einhorn, first and foremost, for her meticulous guidance, instruction, and editorial help. The work of excavating, reordering, and meticulously editing the voluminous draft pages of Truckee Wallace’s recovered memoir—a hodgepodge of anecdotal non sequiturs, multi-gigabyte musings about the influence of nature versus biomedical engineering, encrypted files downloaded from various central servers, and a full accounting of his entire sixteen-year purchase history—was a project of many years. I could never have done it without Amy’s incisive and rigorous notes and suggestions.
I would additionally like to thank Conor Mintzer for his unflappable good cheer and continuous, patient, and detailed help throughout the editorial process; Flatiron, for their support of this undertaking and belief in its eventual success; Rhys Davies, for his excellent and imaginative transliteration of Truckee’s scribbled maps; Ellen R., for support intel
lectual, emotional, and occasionally literal; and the inimitable Stephen Barbara, man of faith and letters, whose tireless championing of the project despite the nearly insurmountable editorial problems it presented speaks either to his vision or insanity, and probably to both.
No difficult journey—whether across the continent f/k/a United States of America or across the page—can ever be sustained successfully without the driving motivations of not just the wallet but the heart. So lastly, I would like to thank all of those who sustain mine, including you, dear reader.
* * *
Recommend
FKA USA
for your next book club!
Reading Group Guide available at
WWW.READINGGROUPGOLD.COM
* * *
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Reed King is the pseudonym of a New York Times bestselling author and TV writer.
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CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Editor’s Note
Prologue
Part I. Crunchtown 407, Crunch, United, Colonies
Chapter 1
Chapter 2