By 2073, the global population had reached 13 billion. Vaccines, masks, filters, and early prophylactics were widely available. The virus was not unstoppable.
What followed was not a biological failure, but a cultural one.
Across much of the developed world—particularly in the United States—resistance to centralized authority and distrust of science had become a badge of identity. Mass refusal to comply with safety measures, driven by conspiracy, defiance, and prideful ignorance, led to uncontained spread and sustained reinfection cycles.
By 2100, less than 30% of the global population remained. Fewer than 4 billion survived. The United States was hit hardest—its population plunging from 475 million to just 60 million. Entire metro areas were wiped out or abandoned. The government collapsed in all but name. Urban infrastructure failed, militias seized public assets, and factional violence shredded the last threads of national cohesion.
Then, in 2111, came the Second Wave.
A mutated variant, reactivated from a frozen viral reservoir in the thawing Arctic, swept south. By that point, international cooperation was a memory, and scientific infrastructure was a shadow of what it had once been. Complacency again proved fatal. Over eight years—2111 to 2119—another 10% of the global population died. The world stabilized around 3.5 billion. By 2440, after more than three centuries of hard rebuilding, it had risen only to 6 billion.
The Rise of the Landed Few
In the wake of two pandemics, land became both currency and refuge. Governments were gone, but deeds, titles, and digital proof of ownership—particularly those backed by blockchain and private family trusts—remained enforceable by private security.
This shift culminated in the Confederated Corporations Agreement of 2123, which recognized 5,002 legitimate allodial claims and granted sovereign authority to landowners who could maintain order, enforce contracts, and provide for the inhabitants of their territories. Civil rights became conditional on competent stewardship. Political legitimacy became something you earned—or lost—based on your ability to govern, feed, and defend.
America Reforged
By 2440, the United States existed in name only. A self-proclaimed hereditary government-in-exile operated from a seedy resort in Chiapas, staffed by descendants of wealthy expats who had taken their vaccines, their money, and fled south when the old republic began to burn. For large sums of money, the Mexican government allowed them to maintain the fiction that they were still American citizens. Their population numbers barely ten thousand.
Excluding that footnote, the combined population of the territories once known as the United States and Canada have rebounded modestly to 134 million. But the myth of unified nations north of Mexico was long dead.
Southern British Columbia had been absorbed into the Evergreen Federation, a cross-border logistics and mutual aid zone stretching into the Pacific Northwest. New Brunswick and Nova Scotia are now part of the Northeast Alliance—a technocratic governance corridor spanning everything north of I-90 and over to Oswego. The rest of the continent was a mosaic of contractual jurisdictions, city-states, corporate enclaves, autonomous zones, and armed freeholds.
And at least one man who does not deny he is a techno-feudalist.
Even if Matt Marmaduke regularly denies being the Messiah.
