An American fell asleep while watching cable news on the night before Thanksgiving. In a troubled sleep he began to dream …
It was Thanksgiving 2105 A.D. or, in the abbreviated hyperspeak of the future, it was THNKSGV. Robot newscopters crisscrossed the skies over America, bypassing scenes of devastation, poverty, and war in search of missing young white women. It was the holiday weekend and Americans would be home from work – that is to say, the 37% percent of them who had full-time jobs would be home.
And they would be expecting their news programs - that is to say, they would be expecting entertainment. Those other Americans – the ones who didn’t work, or only worked occasionally, or worked for sub-minimum wages in those no-protection-union-banned-OSHA-free places called the “Wild Zones” – well, they would be too busy just surviving.
The Zones, officially named the Internal Onshore Colonies, consisted of all the regions devastated by decades of conservative neglect. There, ancient protections like the Minimum Wage Law and the Davis-Bacon Act were suspended. The Colonies were often at war with the wealthier areas that bordered them, and those areas in turn were often in combat with the enclaves of the hyper-rich 2% that owned 90% of the wealth.
The Colonies included the Gulf States, permanently devastated by the chronic hurricanes that resulted from global warming, the Midwest – irradiated after Rumsfeld’s Defense Department and its subcontractors failed to secure nuclear materials from terrorists – and Northern California, after the still-unexplained Arnold Time Travel Experiment resulted in a devastating earthquake.
Republicans argued that suspending worker protections and antipoverty laws would help these areas rebuild. They said it would fight outsourcing, too - by creating impoverished nations here in North America to replace the ones that were stealing our jobs overseas. The Democrats, bereft of creative economic policy ideas, had no response.
The Singularity, an event in which humans were finally able to merge with computers, occurred in 2012. Politicians immediately uploaded themselves into government hardware and outlawed the procedure for everyone else, ensuring what critics called the “Infinite Incumbency.” The Great Politician Uplink meant that many of 2105's leaders had already been well-known back in 2005.
Hackers and nerds also managed to upload themselves, illegally, which meant they no longer had social or sexual contact with the rest of society. In other words, the outside world saw no discernable change in their social status.
The newscopters had a harder time finding those young missing women every year, since more and more of them were being sent to fight overseas. The great Middle Eastern War was now in its 102nd year of combat. But, as was true 100 years earlier, women who disappeared in Falluja or Tikrit - whether American or Iraqi - were somehow less interesting to the media than ones who went missing in Florida or Georgia.
After more than a century of combat, the Democratic Party promised it would soon have a position on the War. Rahm Emanuel, speaking on the occasion of the 1,000,000th American military casualty, promised that the Democrats would “issue a statement as soon as the time was right.”
Emanuel was speaking as one of the leaders of the DLC, which had been renamed the DIM, or Democratic Information Matrix. The organization now took no actual political positions at all. Instead, through microchips in voters’ brains, it scanned for policies that might conceivably offend anyone anywhere – as well as any ideas that might be challenging or require explanation - and eliminated them from consideration. When asked what they call this approach, all 100 members of the Matrix answered from their robot speakers in unison: “Leadership.”
The Beverly Hills Free Enclave declared energy independence in 2049 after going all-solar, but the disembodied scowl of Dick Cheney – speaking on behalf of the Energy Protectorate – demanded and received every Prius in town and $1 billion annually as tribute.
Other scattered enclaves existed throughout the country, despised and hunted. Although they were fewer every year, they refused to give up hope. Constant surveillance on all wavelengths meant they could only communicate through the nearly forgotten forms – writing, painting, music. They took their leadership from the Hopi elders, who instructed them to stay close to sources of water and wait for signs of a change. People thought they were idiots - naive, idealistic, and foolish. And sometimes … well, sometimes, they wondered themselves.
The American awoke and told his family the dream. Then he gave thanks. “Why are you grateful?” They asked. “It was a terrible dream, about a horrible future.”
“I’m giving thanks,” he said, “because we still have time to change it.”