Swarm Box - Prologue

World-building for my forthcoming novel

Swarm Box: Prologue

This is the Prologue I wrote for my forthcoming dystopian novel Swarm Box. I will share more details about this when it’s possible, but for now, what I want to tell you is that this part of the manuscript will not be included in the published version.

What you are going to read below is an exercise in world-building. When I began writing Swarm Box in April 2021, it began with the main character, Marieva, going through a typical yet also significant day of her life in 2083. It took a while before I developed a back story that could explain how the city where she lives, Philapatria (which used to be Philadelphia), had come to be such a messed-up dystopia.

The explanation grew into a 6500-word Prologue, which was written in a different - drier - voice than the rest of the novel. Rather than showing the world primarily through Marieva's eyes and perceptions as I do in the rest of the book, and reveling in sensory details, this presents a bird's eye view of how the United States swiftly fell apart in the wake of two disasters.

Here, you will read about events in January 2041 and their consequences, and you will meet Marieva as a 19-year-old university student and find out how she survived and learned to garden and forage.

I feel like it would be timely to share this now, as a small foretaste of what the rest of the book will be exploring through characters’ predicaments and arcs of development.

I'd also like to point out that I wrote about the La Palma eruption five months before it really did blow up a little; though, fortunately, what happened was not nearly powerful enough to cause a landslide and tsunami.

What is a “swarm box”? Beekeepers know :-) If you’re not a beekeeper, you can find out when you read the rest of the novel.

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At 8:13 am (Eastern Standard Time, or 1:13 pm in the Western European Time Zone) on Friday, January 18, 2041 the Cumbre Vieja volcano lodged in the west side of La Palma in the Canary Islands erupted. Ash and lava poured out of the crater, then the water that was already inside the volcano turned into steam: pressure built up inside its vent and the Atlantic-facing side of the volcano split open. The entire western flank of the island sloughed off and tumbled into the ocean. 460 cubic kilometers of rock displaced water that reared up to an initial water dome of nearly 900 meters, and then it formed into a tsunami wave train. Waves up to 8 meters high obliterated the other Canary Islands, which provided a slight buffering effect before they crashed onto the coasts of Western Sahara, Mauritania, and Senegal, and those moving in the opposite direction advanced on Portugal, southern Spain, and England and Ireland. The damage to these regions was extensive in area, though relatively mild in severity for a tsunami of this size. But the La Palma tsunami’s impact was much more devastating in the Caribbean Islands and on the North American East Coast.

The series of waves travelled west across the Atlantic at a speed of about 800 kph, as fast as a jet plane, and before making landfall the tsunami merged with a storm surge from one of the typical seasonal nor’easters that was blowing towards the New England and mid-Atlantic coasts. The combined forces of wind and waves created a wall of water that loomed 10 to 30 meters above the shore, and it crashed into land and buildings just as twilight was giving way to a darkness thickened by driving gusts of snow, sleet, and rain. Coastal islands, including Long Island, Martha’s Vineyard, Cape Breton Island, and St. John’s in Canada, as well as the Eastern shoreline of Nova Scotia, were wiped clean of most of their buildings. Some of the tallest and sturdiest buildings on Manhattan and in Boston survived, with terrified people crowded into the top floors watching as debris smashed again and again into the lower stories. The cities of Portland, Maine; New Haven; Atlantic City; and Norfolk, Virginia sustained devastating damage. However, Philadelphia, 101 km inland, was scarcely affected, except for surges along the banks of its two rivers. The tsunami waves were weaker in the southern US States, but they still obliterated islands and buildings along coastal areas, causing great numbers of casualties both upon their direct impact and in the aftermath. It also severely affected the north coasts of Brazil and Venezuela. The nor’easter caused disruption to utility services farther inland than the tsunami’s waves reached.

Rogue agents in the U.S. Air Force who had already been nurturing plans for an insurgency were emboldened by the announcement of the impending disaster. Instead of continuing to wait for another opportunity, in accordance with Contingency Plan E they collected two B61-7 missiles from a silo where weapons were stored in anticipation of their dismantlement to fulfill treaty obligations. Some of the Permissive Action Link safeguards had already been removed, and with subterfuge, threats, and a few acts of violence against key personnel, the conspirators gained the rest of the access codes and sent them off them with the greatest haste to Joint Base Andrews in Maryland. There,
accomplices in the 89^th Airlift Wing quickly fused racks onto the second (reserve) supersonic Air Force One aircraft used for the president’s personal conveyance. The lame-duck president and her husband had already departed in the first Air Force One, and the mutinous officers announced that they were making a flight into Washington D.C. to pick up a few other prominent military and civilian leaders in order to take them to safety in West Virginia. They were granted clearance to enter Washington D.C.’s airspace, with no restrictions on their maneuvers.

They dropped the bombs as “laydowns” directly on the Pentagon and, by a miscalculation, on the National Art Museum instead of the Capitol. They were detonated remotely and created classic mushroom clouds and enormous craters. Two relatively contained areas on opposite sides of the Potomac were obliterated in flames, with broader areas affected by air shock and flying debris, thermal radiation that caused devastating burns, and a radioactive wind that distributed fallout across hundreds of miles. Electromagnetic pulses disabled most electronic communications in that area of the network. Cancer would become endemic to the region for many decades.

After receiving warnings of the tsunami, the U.S. Navy and Coast Guard launched as many of their ships as possible, filled with personnel of all ranks and stations, and civilian healthcare workers, and sent them all out to deep waters. The Naval Station in Norfolk, VA was obliterated by the waves. Commercial and cruise ships and large fishing vessels were ordered by the maritime authorities to load up as much food and medical and other essential supplies as possible and head into the open seas, despite the storm conditions. There, they would ride out the tsunami waves, which are low in deep waters, and then return to coastal areas and assist with evacuation and provisioning. The next day, after the waves had calmed somewhat, they began moving survivors to safer areas and delivering supplies to marine rescue operations.

Per FEMA guidelines, evacuation efforts were to be managed by the state and local authorities, which all failed in their duties spectacularly. Many members of the National Guard, police corps, and other civilian and military forces changed out of their uniforms and fled, intending to see to their families’ safety first. Some heeded the calls of militias and other armed groups and went out marauding and terrorizing their neighbors at home or evacuees on the roads. Among the general population, most of those who had vehicles took to the roads. However, drivers of vehicles overflowing with passengers and cargo who were navigating the wet, icy conditions with poor visibility had difficulty seeing peripheral traffic movements, which were often unpredictable. Accidents were everywhere, and there was rampant carjacking by armed bandits – who were often then carjacked by other bandits with bigger weapons. Several smaller bridges collapsed under the excess weight loaded onto them, and the immobile and abandoned vehicles caused most roads to become unnavigable. Most people therefore eventually abandoned their cars, trucks, and vans and fled on foot.

At some of the bottlenecks where crowds were backed up and had to pass through narrow structures such as bridges and tunnels, ad hoc checkpoints were constructed by militia groups. Their agendas varied in the particulars, but what they had in common was the idea that they could prevent those they didn’t like from exiting metropolitan areas and fleeing to safety. They posed questions such as “Did Hunter Biden steal the presidential election?” or “Which is the highest law of the land: the Bible or the Constitution?” before granting passage to some and sending the others into an enclosure ringed by their companions who had their weapons aiming inward. Other bridge trolls made pale-skinned refugees repeat the words of a white supremacist oath, and forced these “recruits” to turn others back who the leaders said did not deserve safe passage. Battles erupted between the refugees and the militias, who were well armed but overwhelmingly outnumbered. At the Goethals Bridge that connects Staten Island and New Jersey, the militants were overpowered, trussed up with bungee cords, and thrown into the coldly churning waters of the Arthur Kill strait. Elsewhere, they were forced to retreat, but most of them survived and continued to harry the populations for months to come.

There was rioting at every airport in the path of the tsunami and the storm: people insisted on boarding without tickets, some of them brandishing the most unlikely weapons. Ground crew and security attempted to hold them off with firearms, at times using deadly force; air traffic controllers gave permission for takeoff to more aircraft than they would have allowed under the best of conditions, despite some of the worst icing the pilots had ever experienced. As a result, there were numerous collisions, and this was considered preferable to the certain underwater crush promised by the tsunami. Nearly every private aircraft at every private airport or launch spot lifted off as well. There were hijackings, and even attempts by unqualified persons to act as pilots, resulting in crashes on the ground as well. By the time the last aircraft were taking off, the airports had already been looted and abandoned and the runways were strewn with wrecks hissing and smouldering in the hard-driven sleet.

Those who were rescued from coastal areas the next day and in the weeks and months that followed were taken by Navy and Coast Guard vessels and by cruise ships to safety in Louisiana and Texas, where large camps were built to hold the displaced persons. California and Texas eventually took large numbers of the refugees, and the Navy and Coast Guard created permanent garrisons in Louisiana and on the coasts of Mississippi and Alabama. These coastal bases, plus the entire state of Louisiana, would remain under the de facto and later de jure control of the former-U.S. maritime powers. They served as the northernmost base for ecological and coastline cleanup campaigns in the Caribbean, and the southernmost one for the Atlantic.

The rebellious faction in the Air Force were the first to proclaim secession from the United States. They declared the states of Colorado, Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, Nevada, and North and South Dakota as the Coalition of the Free and the Brave. The conspirators quickly purged the ranks of the Air Force of those who refused fealty and summarily executed them. They seized the nuclear silos at Malmstrom, Nellis, Warren, and Minot, as well as all the Air Force bases in the region, and made their capital as well as command headquarters in Fort Collins. They declared that they would never live under the tyranny of a federal government again, and that no one would interfere with their economic, religious, and cultural freedom. Those who wouldn’t accept this kind of “freedom” left for other regions.

California, Washington, and Oregon seceded next, claiming that they needed to cooperate as a sovereign power in order to ward off the threat from their immediate eastern neighbors. They quickly secured alliances with Japan, Unified Korea, and Australia, and established diplomatic relations with China.

Texas, New Mexico, Utah, and Arizona became part of what the Texans referred to as “Greater Texas,” though the official name was the Sunbelt Federation. Utah maintained a measure of cultural, religious, and commercial autonomy for its Mormon population.

Maine, Vermont, Massachusetts, New York, the scraps of Connecticut and Rhode Island left behind by the La Palma tsunami, and Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota applied to be incorporated into Canada as its southernmost province. Alaska also reluctantly requested annexation, when they realized that becoming the westernmost Canadian province was preferable to being the easternmost territory in the Russian Federation. New Hampshire remained independent, and following the model of Switzerland, began engaging intensively in providing financial services and brokering treaties among rival states.

Philadelphia became the most important city in the mid-Atlantic region: after dissolving the state governments in New Jersey, Maryland, and Delaware, Philadelphia effectively took over the governance of these territories. Refugees flooded into Philadelphia and Baltimore, and although some settled in, many eventually left, as did numerous original residents, because there were few resources for them. Food and medical supplies, in particular, were desperately short that winter and spring, and the movement of goods only eased up slowly afterwards. There was also more radioactive fallout in this region than in other parts of the former United States.

Chicago became a similar city-state, retaining political control and economic hegemony over Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio. It welcomed refugees by building short-term camps and then regular housing for them.

Kansas, Nebraska, Missouri, Iowa, and Arkansas became the Prairie Alliance. The Sunbelt Federation attempted to annex Oklahoma, but Oklahoma resisted and eventually joined the Prairie Alliance, supplying it with mineral resources in exchange for protection and autonomy for the Native nations within their homelands.

The southeastern states at first attempted to function independently, each managing its affairs from the state capitals, but their legislative bodies already had powerful Dominionist factions, and Dominionist and white supremacist militias increasingly took matters into their own hands. The first acts of violence were robberies and looting of stores, which escalated into settling grievances among various hostile factions. The violence then scaled up, organized by momentarily enraged mobs as well as trained militia groups. Arson, lynching, purposeful destruction of neighborhoods, and mass executions were rampant across the region, as racial, religious, political, and other animosities that had already been aggravated by the last election season boiled over. Eventually, the Dominionists in the states of North and South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Mississippi, West Virginia, Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Mississippi, and Alabama hoisted a garish yellow flag with a big blue X filled with stars and a cross in its top quadrant in all the cities of what they now called the Dominion Free States, and they established their capital in Atlanta. They then urged their brethren in other regions to form militias and join them.

After the attack on Washington, what was left of Pennsylvania’s Air National Guard split: part of them flew away, joining the rogue Air Force’s Coalition of the Free and the Brave in the west. The Harrisburg garrison of the Army National Guard pledged its loyalty to the state government and mustered its forces to drive out the Dominionists, who were threatening mayhem in Harrisburg and Philadelphia. They named their battalions the Kazimirs, after General Kazimierz (or Casimir) Pulaski, a Polish aristocrat who had fought for the U.S. Colonial army in Germantown and Brandywine. The name Kazimir means “destroyer of the peace” in Slavic languages, and the Pennsylvanians and their allies knew, and the Dominionists also knew, that General Pulaski had been a trans man, and they enjoyed marching against and defeating their enemies under his banner. Maryland’s Army National Guard forces were weakened by defections to the Dominionists, but the Delaware troops were ordered by the Governor to report to the Kazimir leadership and they mostly obeyed.

Several million people perished in the cold that January, even in areas unaffected by tsunami waves. Electrical service was disrupted in many areas: power lines and transformers were damaged, coastal installations that created energy from wind, waves, and tide were washed out to sea, and solar panels were useless in areas where they were coated in ice and snow by the nor’easter. Naturally, stores did not remain open and those that were not looted right away became sites of pitched conflict between armed mobs. Not many people died of immediate hunger, but some became weakened and therefore prone to making rash decisions – or they simply gave up. Ordinary epidemics such as influenza also raged harder among people who were malnourished and weakened by the effects of radiation and demoralization. Women died of complications giving birth. Babies starved without infant formula. Many also died from wounds or previously banal afflictions like tooth infections.

Some perished without access to medications or treatments. There were also innumerable suicides effected with firearms or drugs. And of course, in Maryland, Virginia, and the downwind areas of West Virginia there was a broad radius of dangerous levels of radiation. For decades afterwards, cancer rates remained high in the mid-Atlantic region not only caused by the radiation from the bombs, but also from the meltdown of several smaller power plants and also other forms of environmental contamination.

Some of the region’s underground water tables were spoiled by salt water or by other forms of pollution, such as the deadly outflow from the oil refineries in northern New Jersey. More crude and refined oil spilled out of tankers that were breached by debris at sea, as well as out of damaged pipelines, drilling rigs, and storage facilities. In the wake of these disasters there were massive die-offs of fish and aquatic bird and mammal species up and down the US and Canadian Atlantic coasts, and in the Caribbean Sea. This happened even inland, as the water cycle spread the misery far beyond the initial spills. Thus, the levels of contamination in most salt and freshwater fish rendered them unfit for consumption.

The Navy and Coast Guard used sonar to locate wreckage, which they would try to drag to places where it wouldn’t be a hazard to ships or become dislodged later and be thrown upon the shore. These sound waves drove many of the remaining marine mammals to madness, and they hurled themselves upon the littered shores, where they bloated and sometimes exploded under the sun’s harsh rays. The stench along the coastlines, and clouds of bloodthirsty black flies which hovered over the wrack lines in clouds too thick to even see through, deterred all but the most determined treasure-hunters. Freebooting scavengers had to arrive wearing full-body protective suits with balaclavas to keep the flies off. They used filtering respirator equipment, and carried Geiger counters. In addition, they needed armed bodyguards to stand watch at their vehicles and fight off bandits who were eager to seize their spoils.

Hospitals in structurally sound buildings remained open, but they were desperately short of staff, even after rescue workers were transported in from unaffected areas. Food was flown in from other parts of the former United States, as well as from Canada, Mexico, and other parts of the world, but distribution was bedeviled by militia attacks, raids on warehouses, and theft at every level of supply chains. Homes were also burglarized in the days after a town received aid shipments, and the food was sold at abandoned bus and railway stations at open-air black markets where you could acquire anything from Pop-Tarts to antibiotics to car batteries to ammunition – for barter, or for Canadian currency. It would take several years to restore orderly logistics to food deliveries and energy supplies.

In the months after the La Palma tsunami, the Nanticoke and Lenni Lenape nations, who had gradually been gaining Land Back concessions from individuals and institutions in the Eastern United States in the 2030s, quickly drew upon old alliances and forged new ones and began re-settling abandoned areas. Many Lenni Lenape whose ancestors had been forced to relocate to Oklahoma under the Indian Removal Act moved back to their ancestral homeland: Lenapehoking, a territory that centered in New Jersey which also comprised most of New York City, and some of eastern Pennsylvania, southern New York State, and parts of Connecticut and Delaware. Their eastward transfer was facilitated by the Cherokee of Oklahoma, who had never recognized them as a legitimate polity within their tribal lands and were glad to finally get them out of the way. Lenapehoking did not have legal status among the successor states, but it was understood by the reterritorialized Indigenous people as land they had a right to stewardship of by tradition and by old treaties which had not been honored by the previous government.

In cooperation with municipalities that found themselves sitting on top of humanity’s most necessary natural resource, the tribes formed Watershed Alliances around the Delaware and Chesapeake watershed areas, and upriver of Philadelphia. In the latter region, they set up strategic settlements along the Perkiomen and Wissahickon Creek: tributaries of fresh and uncontaminated water that flowed into the Schuylkill River. At first, given the overall pandemonium, this wasn’t noticed much by Philadelphia’s authorities. However, when they realized there would be resistance to building aqueducts to pipe clean water directly into the city, they decided to deploy their home defense Kazimir troops to force the transfer of ownership of these lands – and met stiff resistance by the allied Native and non-Native forces. Similar conflicts arose in other riverine areas and there were periodic skirmishes followed by treaty settlements over the following decades.

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Marieva D’Amato, a first-year student at Drexel University in Philadelphia, had just arrived on campus the day before to get re-settled into her room in Towers Hall, look for a job, and enjoy a few days in Philly before her classes began. She woke up rather late, then ambled into the communal bathroom to pee and brush her teeth, wearing the long Billie Eilish concert t-shirt she had slept in. After washing her hands, she went back to her bedroom and switched on the morning news, which she watched while brushing her long, straight, medium brown hair.

When she heard about the oncoming tsunami some of her first thoughts were of finding food. She walked outside her dormitory and saw mayhem in the streets – people rushing around and screaming, carrying all kinds of bundles – cars driving on the sidewalk, and what looked like a brawl outside the closest convenience store. She went back to her room, emptied the rest of the clothes out of her suitcase, only putting her toothbrush, a few underthings, a handful of jewelry, a gift from her cousin, and her favorite blouse back into it. Then she pulled on some comfortable jeans, strapped her good boots on her feet, and zipped herself into her Drexel Dragons winter jacket. She took a moment to stuff a hat and warm gloves into the suitcase, then wheeled the huge piece of luggage into the elevator and headed toward the Papadakis Integrated Sciences Building.

The complex was nearly deserted, except for a few panicky scientists who were grabbing up equipment and data in their laboratories: this was exactly what she’d been hoping for. She found the nook between the auditorium and first-floor classrooms where there were two vending machines. From an inside pocket of her jacket she retrieved a keychain with several small tubular keys that her cousin had made at the vocational school where he taught locksmithing classes. (He had given her a small bag of potato chips for Christmas and the set of keys, telling her she could treat herself to more snacks anytime if she had enough privacy.) After trying two of the keys in the machine’s keyhole, she was able to get the third one fully inserted, but it wouldn’t turn until she pressed her whole weight into it through her fingers and then twisted hard. She looked behind her, saw no one, emptied the vending machine of all its packaged snacks and closed it back up again. She then visited three more machines in the building and quickly filled her suitcase. As she was zipping it up for the last time, she heard announcements from FEMA’s emergency alert system broadcast through the building: Washington D.C. had been bombed by unidentified hostile forces. She attempted to order a taxi, but the first time she called, the dispatching app was unable to guarantee one for the next twelve hours and the second time she called it didn’t connect.

Very well: traffic was hopelessly snarled within the city so she set out on foot north along Route 611, until after she passed Route 1 where the cars began moving more freely. There was a sharp wind that was intensifying in strength, and at times it even made it difficult to move forward. From beneath a highway overpass she called her grandfather to come and pick her up, and she left a voice message for her mother in Pittsburgh to let her know she would be safe and would look after her grandparents. It took another two days to place a call to her mother in Pittsburgh, and Emmeline told her daughter that she wasn’t coming down because Tanner didn’t think it was safe to travel and wouldn’t let her go. Later, Tanner thought there were blockades on one of the roads, or he had the flu, or he was having a terrible time at work and needed Emmeline there to support him. Emmeline never did come down to Jenkintown, and Marieva made only one visit up to Pittsburgh, but Tanner was so neurotic and demanding and jealous of her mother that she left three days later. Any discussion Marieva tried to open with her mother about this relationship quickly shifted from dialogue to tirades and recriminations that Marieva was “such a child, and couldn’t wish her mother even the least little bit of happiness.” Marieva recalled her mother’s previous boyfriend, who she was also urged to tolerate, even though he occasionally laid his hands on her back, her shoulder, or her thigh when Emmeline wasn’t in the room. Thus, she decided it would be better for everyone if she stayed with her grandparents.

Marieva lived for the next two years with Martin and Evangeline Andris in the quiet suburb of Jenkintown, where she had spent most of the summers in her childhood. When she was very small they took her to the parks and playgrounds, and when she grew older they took her to day camps for softball and gymnastics and she explored the woods and “cricks” in their neighborhood, feeding the chipmunks and hunting for crawdads under rocks in the cold-flowing streams.

Grandfather Martin’s health was delicate: he had already been treated for lung cancer, and often his energy levels were low. He had retired three years early from his job as an engineer working for a company that delivered the town’s water. After his last round of chemotherapy, Marieva had been afraid that he didn’t have much time left and she was glad for a reason to stay there with him. The multi-crisis did Martin good, and his strength rallied as her perceived the multi-crisis as a call to adventure: for the next month, while food deliveries were intermittent, the two of them made the rounds of vending machines in and around their town and avoided the long lines and occasional scuffles at aid distribution points.

Marieva’s grandparents had met in Senegal when they were young and were both working for Christian mission projects in different villages. While Martin had not retained his knowledge of the French language, Evangeline had, and after she returned to the United States she taught French in high schools.

After communications were restored following the tsunami and terrorist attacks on Washington, D.C. she helped organize relief for Pennsylvania from Quebec, using her church office as headquarters and some of her best pupils as assistants. And that spring she taught Marieva how to plant and tend a garden. Evangeline had always kept a bountiful kitchen garden behind her house in addition to the formal plantings of flowers and shrubs that graced the front lawn. Fortunately, she had already ordered and received her spring seeds, and her garden became a valuable source of fresh food for them as the period of shortages dragged on into the spring and summer and there were no more vending machines to plunder. The two women offered their gardening services to neighbors, helping them establish vegetable beds and then maintain them. Hungry and mistrustful, the neighbors usually supervised their work to make sure they weren’t pinching any produce. And they weren’t – what they were taking home to eat was beneath the notice of their previously affluent neighbors: nettles, dandelions, and clover. They tossed the edible weeds and banded garden snails they into large tote bags, telling the garden owners they were taking this “mess” home for their compost bin.

Following instructions from her vintage Julia Child cookbook, Evangeline prepared protein and mineral-rich meals of escargot with nettle spinach. Martin also did his part, hunting squirrels with a slingshot in the children’s playgrounds, usually without much success, but there were enthusiastic celebrations when he did manage to bring a tiny carcass home. He avoided parks and woodland areas, because of the danger of the local Nimrods. Most of the local deer were shot and loaded into freezers during the first two weeks after the tsunami, but too many men still believed that their long-awaited opportunity to become big game hunters had finally arrived. Some of them shot others by trigger-happy accident, and a few did it to prevent competitors from getting a deer they believed they’d sighted first. The Andrises’ cat disappeared mysteriously, as did most other dogs and cats during the first months of the lean season.

Back in the city, several of Drexel University’s buildings were converted to field hospitals and temporary refugee camps. After the first wave of acute care patients and refugees had been discharged the buildings were bought and converted into laboratories and offices by Hyperlab, a pharmaceutical company. Hospitals that treated non-acute patients were turned over to religious groups, who operated sanatoriums for rehabilitation and hospice care. Hyperlab also took over what was once the Please Touch Museum for their headquarters and completely remodeled it. They also assumed the care of the western side of Fairmount Park, which they renamed Hyperlab Garden Park, and Marieva, whose intended study of biology had been interrupted by the ongoing series of disasters, took a job there as one of their many gardeners once it was safe to leave her grandparents’ home a year and a half later.

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In late May, 2041, Philadelphia officially proclaimed itself the capital of a city-state that comprised most of the previous states of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, and Maryland. Philadelphia’s city council renamed the polity the Commonwealth of Philapatria, and styled the city as the “Once and Forever Capital.” The Commonwealth Council declared that it was necessary to dissolve the state legislatures in Harrisburg, Trenton, Dover, and Annapolis because they were compromised by Dominionist factions, and they placed the political, law enforcement, and most of the military bodies under the Commonwealth Council’s oversight. Dominionists were offered exile or imprisonment. Most chose voluntary exile, and a few went into hiding.

Annapolis and Baltimore were ceded to the former US Navy. Annapolis had already been losing its battle against rising water levels and floods for decades before the tsunami, and the Navy had been strategically shifting its Academy and other operations to a new headquarters in Baltimore. In the wake of the missile attacks on Washington, D.D. these two cities (as well as their surrounding areas) were declared too radioactive for long-term habitation. Short-term holding camps were set up near Baltimore for refugees, and they were gradually evacuated on cruise ships that relocated them to Texas and Louisiana, Canada, Mexico, and other destinations. The Navy was assisted by experts sent in from other former-US military and civilian formations and they attempted to decontaminate these regions as much as possible. Their engineers designed new buildings that integrated as many protective elements as possible, and the staff was rotated in for very short periods of service. Annapolis was condemned to liquidation and Baltimore remained as the Navy’s command centers for Atlantic Ocean cleanup campaigns, as well as anti-smuggling and anti-piracy patrols. For this, they received financial support from both Philapatria and the Dominion Free States.

The Commonwealth Council mustered crews of Rubble Busters made up of their own citizens and refugees to clear away uninhabited ruins. Rubble Busters were guaranteed two warm meals a day and accommodation in hotels and dormitories, so there were more applicants than positions available. Over time, the Council developed strategic plans for which areas to continue to support with infrastructure and which would be condemned. Certain towns were allowed to remain inhabited, while others – even some that were undamaged and still inhabited – were slated for demolition.

Cities were to be built so population density would be maximized in the smallest possible area. The reasons given were primarily efficiency of distribution of resources, including potable water and electricity from municipal-sized nuclear generators, but of course this was also done for the sake of surveillance: the Council was afraid that small splittist groups could threaten the stability of the fragile city-state that was barely holding its own, and there were still Dominionists recruiting in the hinterlands, threatening that they would one day take the former state capitals back. The Amish and Mennonite populations were allowed to continue much as they had before, as long as they delivered tributes of beef and dairy products to the capital. They were left to their traditional methods of schooling and healthcare, and developed their own currency.

Essential resources were scarce: there was never enough fresh water, energy, or food to satisfy everyone’s wants. The Commonwealth Council issued all citizens online identification profiles that were to be checked against DNA tests from finger-prick blood samples, and then they were allotted rations on the basis of points, since naturally US currency had long since ceased to function as legal tender. At first, food was distributed from school buildings, and later it was mainly organized through workplaces. Eventually, the finger-prick system was co-opted by Hyperlab and integrated into their program of public health care, which spread to almost all of the territory of the city-state. Some areas tried to hold out against the new health-care system, but it was made clear that those who were not participating in it would have no access to the larger hospitals or to any oncological care.

One of the most energy-hungry industries was AI quantum simulation, which was mostly done by Nextlife – a data hosting company that enjoyed integral relations with both the Commonwealth government and the prominent religious groups. With their ability to store more and more memory material and to simulate personalities grew, the energy deficits deepened. Philapatria built more small nuclear power plants along strategic energy corridors, and these projects cost the city-state a substantial portion of its export earnings. But they were happy with the bargain: at last, there was something to offer hope to Philapatrians to make their difficult lives and many losses seem bearable – they would be able to enjoy an eternal afterlife with their loved ones.

With resources chronically short and the number of people needing employment large, the Commonwealth Council deliberated over how to keep the population small and productive. Emigration was allowed, but eventually the large-scale transports and construction of refugee housing petered out. Borders were not constructed in the old style with fences and guard checkpoints, but electric vehicles would warn their drivers when they were approaching a border. If they lacked official authorization, the kill switches would be tripped and the vehicle could only be restarted if an officially generated code was entered. Surveillance drones scanned the ground and reported unusual movements to Commonwealth Public Order departments. However, illegal border crossings were relatively rare, because Philapatria points were not convertible to the electronic currencies of the other regions, so if a person made it into another region on foot, gasoline-powered motorcycle, or horseback they would arrive as paupers, and if they returned to Philapatria they would find that their point balance had been deleted.

Birth rates in the Commonwealth were already low, partly because people chose to have smaller families, but Hyperlab had a few more suggestions for managing the Commonwealth’s demographics. Many of the religious groups were initially opposed, but they were offered new opportunities to recruit believers and a tacit understanding arose: they would not speak out against the “voluntary” shortening of people’s lifespans; they would sycretize their beliefs with the non-traditional afterlife concept – and the government would allow them to worship freely, partake of cultural traditions, and attract adherents through broadcasts that the state would host on its servers. Religious or civic groups that objected to the arrangement were not vigorously repressed, but were gradually presented as old fashioned, superstitious, and out of touch with the new reality and the opportunities offered by Nextlife. Some groups went underground, while others – primarily Evangelical Christian sects – encouraged members to move to regions where they could worship free of such conditions. Thus, many of them moved to the Dominion Free States, and many Jews and Eastern Orthodox Christians moved to Canada. Some Catholics emigrated to Mexico or Quebec, while others created the Philapatria Reform Catholic Church after yet another series of pedophilia scandals discredited the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Philapatria. Sunni Islam gained popularity as Islamic charities from around the world invested in health care, schools, and religious and cultural institutions. Chinese Traditional Religions and most Hindu faiths are tolerated and left alone, and Afro-Caribbean syncretic religions are suppressed, as they are deeply rooted in anti-colonial sensibilities and resistance to cultural dominance. The hodgepodge of beliefs and practices called “New Age” in the late decades of the United States are at times ignored, and at times halfheartedly suppressed by the authorities as “occult follies,” since they undermined the medical, religious, and AI paradigms that were officially preferred. At least half of the urban residents of Philapatria lack any religious affiliation, but they usually have some degree of curiosity about their friends’ and neighbors’ faiths and they learn about them by tuning in to broadcasts.

If a visitor from the year 2024 were to drop in for a visit to Philapatria in 2082, they would find some things looking much the same as before the disasters of 2041, and others quite different. One of the immediate differences they would observe include the overall population size is only half of what it had been. Many of the glass-clad buildings in the Center City district were damaged by tornadoes in the 2040s and 2050s, and they were replaced with more modest structures. Buildings that became dilapidated over time, and many low-density neighborhoods were cleared by Rubble Busters, creating a more open urban environment. The pavement was removed from many small streets and grass was allowed to grow between the sidewalks. High-rise buildings were maintained, and, when necessary, new ones were built. Outside of the city center, some of the suburbs had been rewilded into “forest,” a green belt that provided a certain boundary around the city and helped protect and filter its air and water. The deep-water ports in Wilmington and Baltimore had been dredged after the tsunami and they received and dispatched regular shipments of goods, with machinery and chemicals as major exports, and food and consumer goods as the primary imports. Salvaged goods of all kinds, which are taken from the ruins or recovered at sea are also sold at Commonwealth Warehouse Depots. And below the veneer of lawful commerce, black markets of various kinds thrive.

Tourists would notice that there is no longer a city zoo, but several of the libraries are still in use, and the Franklin Institute remains as a museum and it also houses Philapatria’s renowned robotics development laboratory. The University of Pennsylvania resumed most of its old programs of study, and those that were closed yielded their buildings to oncology research and treatment centers that served the entire Commonwealth. The Wharton School of Business integrated most of their operations with Nextlife, where they promote AI services to the population and urge most of them to participate in “Influencing” – media-based marketing with a personal touch. Regrettably, the city’s once-famous food trucks are no longer serving meals to pedestrians: most people eat a modest breakfast and dinner at home, and have their lunch at a canteen at work. Those who are retired or employed at smaller workplaces eat lunch at neighborhood canteens.

People in Philapatria are thinner on average than citizens of the United States had been in the early twenty-first century, and those who are not afflicted with cancer mostly enjoy a good state of physical vigor. (Cancer patients are treated in the city’s renowned oncological centers, and if they cannot stay at home and do not require intensive care they are sent to sanatoriums until they either recover or die.) Because the point system for groceries gives specific allowances for starch, protein, fats, and staple vegetables their diet is on the whole better balanced. On the other hand, the poorer residents lack access to fresh fruit out of season, some of their food is highly processed, and they are allowed a few treats, such as beer or cola that might be considered unhealthy, but all of this is compensated for by other factors. Meat, dairy products, and sugar are difficult to obtain, at least for those in the common walks of life. (And because of the difficulty in obtaining meat, dogs are rarely seen within the city, though there are feral cats that keep the rodent population under control, and some people have them at home as pets.) And “walk of life” is not just a metaphor – Philapatrians walk a lot, since their public transportation is insufficient and uncomfortable and robo-taxis are expensive. Their health care system continually monitors their nutritional and oncological status and everyone is given custom blends of supplements that Hyperlab claims keep them at their personal best until the end of their lives.