Hannah (continued)

Studying the genesis of the American-Canadian conflict, Hannah couldn’t believe what she was reading; the stupidity of it all was staggering. The root cause was tax cuts implemented by Republicans over a period of decades starting with the Reagan administration in the 1980s. The tax cuts shrank revenues and ballooned the deficit, and the growth that was supposed to raise revenues with it and neutralize the tax cuts never materialized. Spending on defence was increased and entitlements weren't reformed. The deficit grew and grew.

Adding to the problem of not enough revenue going into the treasury was the steadily increasing rate of unemployment from the trends of automation and globalization. The only economic sectors in the United States that still showed strong employment were technology, research, healthcare and education, all of which demanded a college degree. Almost all manufacturing processes in the US were either automated or outsourced. Workers lost their jobs at an increasing rate and unemployment grew steadily.

Fewer people being employed and more people earning incomes in higher tax brackets (who were the biggest beneficiaries of the tax cuts) meant less revenue from personal income taxes and more people that required government assistance. The government increasingly funded itself with credit but because of its rapidly rising debt its credit rating kept being downgraded and the cost of borrowing money increased. Large corporations and the wealthy took advantage of Citizens United to lobby members of congress not to raise taxes and not to implement regulations in the labour market that would have required corporations to comply with domestic production and capital saving quotas. Populist politicians that railed against the capture of government by the billionaire class came and went, unable to overcome entrenched special interests and lawmakers that were beholden to their campaign financiers.

Some of the biggest campaign contributors, as they had always been, were the members of the fossil fuel industry, who used their influence to prevent the United States government from passing any legislation or committing any funds to address the issue of climate change. Vehicle mileage standards were lowered, research money for alternative energies from the Department of Energy dried up, emissions standards for electricity producers were eliminated. The EPA was defunded and dismantled. The rest of the world did not follow the United States in this direction, understanding the urgency with which they needed to act to transform the global energy landscape with the global population rapidly rising toward 10 billion. They invested heavily in advancing battery technology, expanding and improving their public transportation networks (rail especially), providing subsidies and tax incentives to people and businesses to reduce their carbon footprint, and committing billions to moving their electricity grids to clean, renewable sources.

On 24 June 2064, feeling confident about the changes that they’d made to their energy industries, the nations that were signed up to the Paris Climate Accord (which included every nation in the world except the United States) got together in Montreal to strengthen the agreement by calling for a 20% cap on the production of all fossil fuels in thirty years and a tariff on the carbon footprint of goods imported from countries that was tied to their non-compliance.

The United States suffered enormously under the agreement. Its failure to modernise its energy sector forced them to burn through their domestic supplies of oil, gas and coal, after which they were left with an energy shortfall. Exports plummeted, unemployment grew, companies suffered, tax revenues dropped even further, and deficits grew. The dollar plummeted, which caused imports to increase in price but because of the heavy carbon footprint tariff on American goods exports became no more competitive with the much weaker currency. The nation slipped into a second great depression with the unemployment rate at 40%, its credit rating reduced to junk status and the national debt at $65 trillion.

Something had to be done. In Washington D.C. a deal was reached to alleviate the pressure on the debt by privatising the two biggest items in the budget: Entitlements—Social Security, MediCare, MedicAid, welfare—and Defence, which when combined were responsible for two thirds of government spending. The entitlement programs were taken over by a consortium of financial, insurance and healthcare conglomerates, and control of the Defence Department was turned over to the country’s largest private defence contractor: IronArmor. In the wake of the deal, the CEO of IronArmor, Doug Mattis, appeared on a slew of talk shows to reassure the American people that their country would continue to be adequately protected and that he would be eliminating all waste and unnecessary expenditure at the Pentagon that had caused defence spending to get out of hand and cripple the government.

Everybody was hopeful that at last a deal had been done that had the potential to save the country from the dire circumstances that it had been driven into, that is until on 18 October 2072, a year after IronArmor had taken over control of the military, Americans witnessed a sight they had always been told they never would: tanks rolling down the streets of Washington D.C. The coup perpetrated by Doug Mattis using the country’s own military was swift and effective. Soldiers stormed the buildings of the Departments of State, Treasury, Commerce, Energy, HUD, Education, Health and Human Services, Justice, Interior, Agriculture, Labour, Transportation, Veterans Affairs and Homeland Security and occupied them, as they did at the Governor’s mansions and State Legislative Houses in all 50 states. The Washington, Los Angeles and New York headquarters of CNN, FOX, NBC, ABC and CBS were also occupied. All social media platforms went dark. At the Capitol building members of Congress and the Senate were asked to pledge their allegiance to Doug Mattis and serve as his representatives and emissaries. Most agreed; the few that didn’t were immediately removed from office. The nine justices of the Supreme Court, the last line of defence of American constitutional democracy, were removed from the bench and replaced by judges handpicked by Mattis. Doug Mattis walked into the White House, had President Matt McConner escorted out of the building by soldiers, and installed himself in the Oval Office. The coup was completed in less than six hours.

Following the coup, Mattis acted swiftly to secure the support of the American people. He held a televised address from behind the Resolute Desk in The Oval Office in which he laid out his agenda as president. He announced that the United States government would not repay any of the funds it had borrowed from foreign sources, instant tax increases on corporations and wealthy individuals to help the American people, big public spending projects to reinvigorate American labour, and aggressive military campaigns all over the world to secure the energy resources the country so desperately needed, starting with Canada, whose oil would be taken and brought into the United States primarily via the XL and Dakota Access pipelines. He followed his address by hitting the road and holding a series of rallies to whip up support for his agenda. The American people, many of whom had developed a taste for nationalist authoritarianism during the Trump years, were consistently positive about what they saw as a sense of order being returned to the country following decades of self-destructive disorder, freeing Mattis to engage in his bellicose actions abroad.

The initial thrust of the United State’s campaign against Canada was aimed at the province of Alberta, Canada’s primary supply and service hub for the country’s crude oil and natural gas industries. Anticipating this move Canadian Prime Minister Daniel Benfield positioned a strong presence of Canadian armed forces along the border to repulse the American advance. The strategy worked; US forces quickly found themselves bogged down at the Montana-Alberta border. Reacting to public opinion at home that was turning against him, Mattis modified his strategy and widened his target area. He ordered attacks on soft targets along the US-Canadian border purely for their shock value. Images of bombs falling on towns gave the impression that the US was on the front foot; Mattis proclaimed that the tide had been turned and that the US now had the upper hand. In reality things were not going well at all. While US forces were bogged down along the Alberta border or otherwise engaged in operations designed to create striking visuals for television, a group known only as #OverthrowImperialism was carrying out sabotage attacks on oil infrastructure all across Canada. The group existed as an amorphous entity. It had no leader, no base of operations and a manifesto that consisted of only one item: Stop the Americans. Groups would carry out attacks and post videos of the attacks on the group’s official website, Facebook page, Twitter page and YouTube channel. They would always be wearing balaclavas with the #OI logo printed on the front and would look into the camera and taunt Mattis directly. Sometimes, very seldom, the group would carry out attacks on US troops. The attacks on US troops garnered the group their most views and messages of support from their millions of supporters online and preceded a surge in crypto donations for the group to buy weapons and equipment.

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The #OverthrowImperialism resistance movement became an increasingly vexing thorn in Mattis’s side, who denounced them as nothing more than terrorists no different than the Islamic extremists responsible for 9/11 and the many subsequent attacks the US had suffered at the hands of Islamic extremists. Mattis responded to the group’s videos going viral and the taunts that he received from them by carrying out an attack of his own after every one of their attacks as revenge.

Not long after he adopted this policy the world came to know of the destructive power of fragmentium, so named for the sharp, angular fragments it broke into that were strong enough to fly through walls without their momentum being slowed. When a fragmentium bomb hit, the damage to civilians was catastrophic. The fragmentium shrapnel tore through people’s homes and on the way severed off limbs and in some cases decapitated people. Nobody knew where the substance had come from or how Mattis had obtained it. Condemnation of the use of fragmentium was severe and widespread but was met with indifference by Mattis.

The use of fragmentium coincided with the implementation of a much more aggressive strategy by Mattis. He increased US troop levels from 30 000 to 45 000 troops and committed more resources to the fight than he ever thought he’d need to and began a campaign to attack and occupy land and towns all across Canada, not just in Alberta, with varying degrees of success but success nonetheless. He moved east, far away from Alberta where the Canadian forces were concentrated and started making his way north and north-west from there.

As Mattis’s offensive grew, so too did the #OI resistance movement, which stepped up its attacks on US forces, using weapons purchased from Europe that were smuggled into the country on boats that were transporting African refugees for relocation in Canada. Copycat attacks on US troops and bases in the US by radical liberal groups became increasingly frequent. In most cases those who participated in these attacks were all killed. Their deaths did not have the effect of demoralizing the #OverthrowImperialism movement as Mattis had hoped for. On the contrary, the group’s membership numbers increased, its online following grew and the 17 remaining EU member states decided to take a tougher stance with Mattis and sanctioned the sale of more weapons to the group.

Before long, Mattis found himself bogged down again, this time by the determined resistance movement and their guerrilla tactics. Whenever the US army occupied a town and felt secure enough to commit the resources they were using to occupy it elsewhere, #OI fighters would infiltrate the town, kill the occupying soldiers and steal their equipment, forcing the US army to fall back and retake the territory they’d lost, of course by then the #OI fighters were long gone.

Now, in 2084, the conflict was still in a stalemate. Faced with mounting casualties and progress so slow it was practically negligible Mattis refused to retreat, prolonging the war indefinitely. This was the world that the children had fled to seeking an escape from the obscure machinations of Prospera that they feared were conspiring to eliminate them. In this world they had no such obscure machinations to be concerned about but they weren’t free from life threatening danger. As she studied the war and the dimensions of it Hannah grew increasingly aware of and concerned by the multidimensionality of the imperfections of the world they were in and was alone in feeling what she felt was a perfectly appropriate amount of anxiety.

* * *

I did nothing but sit and read for days. I left Frank’s study only to eat, get something to drink, use the toilet or return to the cottage when he got home from work. I imposed on Cathy a lot, asking her to take me to the library nearly every second day, requests she never refused or complained about but instead seemed glad to assist me with. From the library I checked out numerous books about American history, two biographies about Doug Mattis, a book about the #OverthrowImperialism resistance movement, newspaper articles that chronicled the events of the war and those leading up to it and after Cathy had shown me how to use a computer I used some of my time at the library to watch the videos on the #OverthrowImperialism website.

Everything that I was learning helped explain a lot about this world but also Prospera. The history of slavery in America and the subsequent strained race relations in the country helped me to understand why we’d never seen someone like the black girl in the library in Prospera; after reading about the impact that automation had had on workers I understood why we employed primitive tools and techniques in Prospera; the public support for Mattis and his belligerent foreign policy was a strong argument for Prospera’s exclusion of the public when selecting individuals for leadership roles; our strict monitoring of our resources and population numbers meant that we would never need to take what we needed from others by force; our egalitarian philosophy prevented wealth and power from being so unevenly appropriated that an individual like Mattis would be hailed as an agent of order by millions of economically disaffected people.

During the time that I was doing all of this studying I didn’t take as much of an interest in what the others were doing as I should have; the nonsensical series of events that had led this world to where it was consumed all of my attention. All I knew about Kevin and his job was that he was doing fine; Miranda had started accompanying Cathy on her visits to her mother in hospital and Lisa was busy studying for some minor requirements she needed to start working at the clinic as a nurse. They gave me strange looks when I was in this state of absorption; that too didn’t concern me very much. I started increasingly thinking that it was a mistake for us to have come here. The order that we had in Prospera came at a price that I could only conclude was worth paying given everything that was taking place in this world.

The consequences of a world without the protective measures we had in Prospera were dire but knowing that didn’t make it any easier to govern Prospera according to such measures. I felt a rush of sympathy for my mother, who carried an enormous burden on her shoulders every day as she worked to ensure that Prospera would never descend into the chaos into which this world had descended. I was starting to miss her like I thought I never would, having become convinced that she was part of a conspiracy to kill Kevin. I was missing everybody in Prospera: Darren, our parents, our teachers, even our classmates with whom we’d never been close. After two weeks I stopped my research, unable to bear any longer my feelings of regret over leaving Prospera for this world of barbarism. I spent a lot of time in the cottage in bed by myself; there were times when I cried for no other reason than yearning for the familiar surroundings and faces of Prospera. I didn’t confide in my friends about what I was going through, they all had things going on that I didn’t want to distract them from. They knew that something was wrong and tried getting me out of it but I was unreceptive to their efforts. Even Kevin, with whom I shared a bed every night, found himself excluded by me.

I had never been depressed before. In Prospera I had no reason to feel as out of place and fretful about the future as I did here; from a young age we had direction and purpose in our lives and never had any reason to feel insecure about our futures. Kevin, Lisa and Miranda were all getting along fine despite the looming threat of the Americans and the advanced nature of this world and I was happy for them for having found some place for themselves, but it wasn’t going to be quite as easy for me to do the same; my feelings of displacement and nostalgia were too strong.