by Reed King
1. The 2050s had seen the rise of the android rights movement, although the violence associated with it on both sides wouldn’t erupt for another decade. As android liberation movements established chapters in nearly every country on the continent, they were almost universally deemed terrorist groups. Despite pockets of support, the average feeling—across countries and political affiliations—was one of suspicion and even outright fear. The beginning of major hostilities between the Federal Corporation and the RFN only added to the tension, especially after the early iterations of I.N.E.P.T. launched a full-blown attack on Silicon Valley in 2063, driving out the native human population and precipitating a scathing—and, many people felt, ill-advised—personal attack on the management by Mark J. Burnham, recently installed as CEO of Crunch, United. Anti-android aggression was further stoked by the RFN’s response to his diplomatic gaffe, which resulted in crippling sanctions that hindered the Federal Corp’s technological position for a decade, as well as by a series of erratic weather patterns that once again strained refugee camps and resulted in insufficient production at nearly all the major agrofirms. This tension culminated during the infamous “Copper Night,” when vigilantes tracked down hundreds of androids by their serial numbers and disassembled them for scrap.
2. The Trans-Continental Alliance, the continent’s most important international organization, convened once a year in a secure location to adjudicate shared legal, political, and social challenges. It included delegates from the Real Friends© of the North, Crunch, United, the Dakotas, the Soviet Federated Frontier, the New Kingdom of Utah, Sinopec-TeMaRex Affiliated, as well as smaller countries like BCE Tech, Halloran-Chyung, and Florida Island. Notably, the Commonwealth and the Sovereign Nation of Texas had resisted joining, and refused to recognize the TCA as a legitimate political and social body.
3. Life-saving medicine was always in short supply across the continent, due to the deeply variant and often contradictory laws about moving product, the travel restrictions imposed by individual countries, and the lack of widely shared informational feeds. (In the Confederacy, for example, it was widely believed that gonorrhea could be cured by marriage; a commonly available cure for cancer in the Green Mountain Associated Intentional Communities was the application of crystals.) In the late ’70s, after a deadly resurgence of the superflu ripped through much of the southern belt, precipitated in part by revivalist preachers urging the deathly ill to come to mass and pray for their sins, the TCA responsible for adjudicating issues of importance to the continent as a whole decreed that medics must be granted special travel clearance by all participating nations.
1. Many amateur cartographers have purported to map the entire Underground over the years, although it is doubtful that any one of them is close to complete. Some may even be deliberately obfuscatory, such as the map appended to The Grifter’s Guide to the Territories FKA USA, which illustrates more than two hundred fictitious underground routes and entry points to the would-be traveler, most of them designed to entrap law enforcement or militia attempting to pursue criminals into the tunnels. Everyone is in agreement, however, that the first section of the Underground was completed sometime in the mid-2040s, to join several of Texas’s largest penitentiary cities and human park ranges to subterranean escape routes.
2. Decades of flooding had eroded the southern coastline, submerged Louisiana, and turned the former Mississippi into a glorified puddle. The Lower Belt was a disputed swath of swampland responsible for frequent epidemics of malaria and known for revivalist preachers that preached draconian religious laws and various forms of corporal and spiritual punishment. A common aphorism was that the Lower Belt bred two things: religion and mosquitos.
3. Tensions between the two nations, which had abated somewhat in the ’70s due in large part to a landmark water-sharing deal (in which both countries agreed to split the cost of building hundreds of massive desalination plants for the Real Friends© of the North in exchange for access from their pipeline), were once again escalating. Due in part to the rabid anti-android sentiment that the four-star general of the Sovereign Nation of Texas, Wyatt Radcliffe III, exploited during his campaign, after the liberation of many androids in servitude unleashed a flood of immigrants in that portion of the continent. Given the fact that the head of the Citadel in Halloran-Chyung was, at the time, an engineered person who had pushed forward a bill to legalize intermix marriages, the ideological rift was inevitable.
1. There were many different terms for the constellation of symptoms—ranging from anxiety and depression to outbursts of aggression and, in the worst case, psychosis—provoked by the sudden interruption of portal, AR, and VR access due to battery exhaustion or service disruption. There were, according to common estimates, more than 150 regional expressions to refer to this condition. Some of the more common expressions to describe the phenomena were: having the shakes, getting nettled, suffering from brain fire, or reality vertigo.
2. The official, if rarely used, designation for the Russian Federation was the Soviet Federated Frontier.
3. There were several aborted launch attempts between 2069 and 2072, but Bad Kitty is no doubt referring to the final launch, on January 22, 2072.
4. A Crunch, United, slang term meaning “ugly.”
5. Thanks to its zero-tolerance policy for the military aggressions of the Sovereign Nation of Texas, the strength of its nuclear power program, and the strategic alliance with the Korean Peninsula, Halloran-Chyung was a growing power on the continent and an important ally to Crunch, United. During the race to colonize Mars, its primary competition was against the Soviet Federated Frontier, which fingered the Great Lakes and took up a sprawling portion of what had formerly been the Canadian border.
1. In addition to maintaining tight control of the illegal drug trade and its cross-continental distribution routes, the Juarez cartel had recently moved to assert their ascendance in the fake-ID trade.
2. Not a euphemistic expression: one of Crunch, United’s most controversial snack foods, the Mini Cheddar Frank-n-Roll™ required no refrigeration, lasted indefinitely, doubled as a chew toy, and was comprised predominately of shoe rubber.
1. Now known simply as Straw Rehabilitative, for the vast prison complex that dominates it.
2. This is one of dozens of indications that suggests that the Grifter’s Guide was written sometime between the spring of 2065 and the fall of 2067. The Supreme Court of Sinopec-TeMaRex Affiliated legalized the use of Sexy Saams for “entertainment and recreational purposes in exchange for profit,” in accordance with specific regulatory limits, in 2066, despite all of the public outcry about sex trafficking in light of renewed conversation about, and awareness of, android rights in that decade, prompted in part by the revolution in Silicon Valley. Many people attribute the tremendous growth of radical pro-android rights organizations in Sinopec-TeMaRex Affiliated to the Thompson Bill, as it came to be known, for the notoriously lascivious Supreme Court judge who wound up casting the deciding vote, Warren Thompson.
1. A somewhat bewildering expression in this case since, of course, androids didn’t use the bathroom at all, and were notoriously disturbed by the human habit of doing so.
2. Since the time of dissolution, tensions between Texas and the Federal Corporation had often veered toward talk of war—although many political pundits believed that both sides were blustering. In addition to problems of roads and infrastructure that made a large-scale attack against Crunch, United, improbable, many historians believe that the reason the Texas militia never made the attempt was because Crunch, United, was an important safeguard against the growing power of the Real Friends© of the North. For the same reason, the Federal Corporation needed Texas.
3. Arkansas was acquired by the newly formed Crunch, United, board in 2049, and in that sense it was lucky: territories that resisted or tried for sovereignty, like St. Louis, were often seized during aggressive takeovers.
4. At the time, Texas saw the growing threat of the android-righ
ts movement as vastly outweighing diplomatic considerations that normally sought to restrict the influence of the Real Friends© of the North.
5. As a result, Crunch, United, sanctioned Texas, forbade all trade with the Sovereign Nation, and pressured various Sinopec-TeMaRex Affiliated agrofirms to halt trade with Texas too. For a long time, until Texas struck their deal with the Russian Federation and through them, a large swath of the northern badlands, there was very little for the population to eat. Some people scavenged for runaway biotech; some resorted to eating shoe leather and prairie grass. (This led to a very famous joke about the difference between Crunch products and the inedibles consumed during the Starve being only in the price.)
6. North Koreans—although Texas, like North Korea, failed to recognize South Korea as a separate international entity due not to the difficulties on the Korean Peninsula but because South Korea had formed a trade and weapons alliance with Halloran-Chyung.
1. A Crunch, United, colloquialism: Never trust a firefly trying to shit you some gold. This likely has its origins in the dubious claims made by various shamsters and snake-oil salesmen during the first boom in gentech, when scam artists posing as scientists claimed to have invented everything from pocket-sized elephants to a host of animals and insects that produced gold or diamonds as a by-product of digestion. Please see Appendix F: “The Rumpelstiltskin Roaches, and Other Lies from the Golden Age of Genetic Engineering.”
2. Actually, a lichen, and so named not for its color, but because it had become predominant in the aftermath of the catastrophic Kunashiri meltdown of 2072. Its thallus was likely comprised of a mutated varietal of the species Aspicilia cinerea.
3. Construction on the nuclear facility that was ultimately known as the Kunashiri Reactor actually began even before dissolution, and was intended as a last-bid attempt to revitalize America’s nuclear-energy program. It is likely, however, that the long interruption in design, as well as changing responsibility and ownership, contributed to the vast design flaws that resulted in the nuclear catastrophe that unfortunately gave Halloran-Chyung both its reputation for radioactivity and its stratospheric rates of cancer.
4. And, in the case of Japan, in exchange for participation in GEP, the Gender Equality Program, which exported marriageable females to male-dominated areas such as Japan, China, and the Dakotas.
5. For years other countries had tried sanctioning Halloran-Chyung. Texas had even long been warning of a ground war, although the impregnable force field that could be activated around the whole country made a skirmish unlikely.
6. Halloran-Chyung had the highest proportion of scientists per capita of all the countries on the continent by a factor of ten, many of them nuclear or quantum physicists and aeronautics engineers. It might have been the most advanced country in the world.
7. On the back of Aphrodite 01, Aphrodite 02 and 03, smaller probes, would be dispatched into deep space to photograph a planet with similar environmental conditions to Earth—at least, Earth as it was before we got our hands on it—and the Citadel had sworn to start recolonization before the turn of the new century. So far ten thousand people from all over the continent had put in for the chance to be part of the vanguard.
8. Commonly known as Camels, these travel guides specialized exclusively in travel in and around Old Arizona and other desiccated and abandoned portions of the Dust Bowl. Actually, the Ghost Cities of Old Arizona were an extremely popular tourist destination, typically ranking just below the Human Hunting Preserves of Texas on the annual international list of the Continent’s Greatest Wonders.
9. Halloran-Chyung took in 50,000 refugees from Texas after the militia started deporting manufactured humans. It is worth pointing out that despite Texas’s assertion that the android populations steal steady work from their human counterparts, Halloran-Chyung’s economy actually grew—and its unemployment dropped—after the refugee integration program. This is largely attributable to the variety of businesses and technologies required to cater specifically to manufactured humans, such as repair shops and upgrade boutiques.
10. CG3, whose given name was CIGNA-38734262A, was famously disassembled by a Texas mob after he made the fatal mistake of crossing into Texas with his natural-born wife during a trip abroad to visit relatives.
1. The Hover Safety Act was passed in Halloran-Chyung in 2055, and the president liked to boast it was the first piece of legislation of its kind. In fact, the Real Friends© of the North beat Halloran-Chyung to a similar piece of legislation by several years. After an epileptic famously lost consciousness and accidentally disabled his vehicle’s collision-detection controls, culminating in a 472-vehicle pileup on Los Angeles’s infamous twenty-altitude Intrastate 405, the board acted unanimously to approve the use of emergency system overrides for all police, fire, and medical personnel in times “of clear and immediate danger” to either the passenger or other drivers, and additionally in cases where the driver or the car system proved “resistant to or in violation of the laws governing the safe administration of the sky roads.”
1. Figuratively; Arizona no longer existed.
1. After the first Noah storm system washed away coastlines from Galveston to Portland, Maine, three years of drought crippled the West Coast. The Real Friends© of the North routed nearly all the remaining water in the Colorado River straight to its tanks and treatment plants. Overnight, Arizona dried up. Five years after dissolution, a steady attrition out of the state had decimated the population of Arizona. By some estimates, only 50,000 people—one-twelfth of its population a decade earlier—were still surviving in Arizona by the time it was declared “uninhabitable” and the incumbent government of the former Nevada, backed heavily by Russian interests, decided not to stake a claim there.
2. CARRIE, the official model name, is a play on the contraction of care and IET, or Intelligent Emotive Tech.
3. Also known as Plasticine.
1. A nickname arising not merely because of the swamplands that comprised their habitat and hunting grounds—the alligator men subsisted by scavenging for usable supplies in the thick soup of swollen water that had eradicated much of the coastline—but for the unique dermatological condition known as “black rot” that resulted from living in and feeding off of the contaminated water.
2. The Start-Ups were no more or less than a form of culturally enshrined, technologically dependent, modern feudalism, in which the start-up workers pledged their time and labor to a very limited quantity of highly wealthy overlords in exchange for subsidized housing, free lunch, and the occasional game of Ping-Pong.
3. In 2084, only two years, in other words, before most scholars believe this book was written, the Dakotas successfully negotiated the purchase of Nebraska for a pitiful 10,000 RealFriends© winks. Of course, by then the population was decimated. By some estimates the country, which had limped along largely through the export of its ranch animals to the continent’s methane-producing energy houses, contained fewer than 10,000 people, meaning the Dakotas paid roughly one RealFriends© wink per head. It is largely assumed that the Dakotas’ oil and gas interests negotiated the sale to put an end to Nebraska’s alternate-energy industry.
4. At the time, the wealthiest woman in Miami couldn’t walk without the help of two servants, each hefting one of her massive, double-T-sized breasts.
1. And all forms of communication besides hugs (but only with written consent).
1. There had long been accusations of collusion between the two, in the form of a trade in both guns and a high-potency form of heroin, a scourge in the rural portions of the SFF.
2. It had long been known that of all the major dangers confronting diplomats and bioengineers, the largest threat was the potential of being killed for their ID chips. The brief and ill-advised transition in the industry to identity chips inserted beneath the fingernails or in the retina led only to a scourge of fingerless and blinded professionals.
3. A standard form of currency in the militantly liberal Green Mountain Assoc
iated Intentional Communities; this was long after the initial attempt to assign value to varying expressions of moral outrage, from minorly offended to permanently traumatized.
4. There has been much speculation about how, exactly, the crawling turtle began to signify this expression. Although various linguists and semanticists have expressed competing opinions, the most credible and widely accepted theory is that it evolved from a pre-dissolution fable about a jackrabbit and a turtle who embarked on a footrace. But there is also evidence that supports the theory that the emoji was influenced by the early-century social-media star Steve Turtle, whose famous punch line, “Catch up with you soon, if you can catch me at all,” rocketed him to fame.
5. A claim that was debunked by nearly one hundred clinical trials between 2075 and 2080. Many scientists have subsequently indicated, however, that the clinical trials were conducted exclusively by member bodies paid for and sponsored by either Crunch or Burnham himself, through shell companies.
1. The country of Libertine, hardly known for its spiritual sensibilities, nonetheless contained the largest concentration of Gracelanders on the continent; surprisingly, there were more Gracelanders in Las Vegas than in Memphis, where the original Graceland served as a religious pilgrimage site.