America didn’t fall in a firestorm. It rotted in plain sight.
The end began quietly, with the third U.S. president in a row who refused to govern. No cabinet. No courts. Just slogans, and the hollow promise that he too would “make America great again.”
By then, the dollar was already dead. Crypto had replaced initially, then newer stablecoins like FiatDollar ($FD) from Deutsche Bank followed by NewDollar ($ND) from Chase formed the backbone of a post-national economy. The 2073 pandemic had gutted the cities, pushed labor into remote grids, and left infrastructure hollow. When the political structure failed, it failed on livestream, watched by a nation already living online.
For twenty-five years, the United States died of a sickness called apathy.
In 2048, President Ocasio-Cortez won the general election by a landslide for her second term, but the entire election was contested by over one thousand lawsuits from Republicans that lost their elections. A super expanded supreme court filled by the right during the Trump and Trump Junior years left her and the democrats drawing a far right 13 justice bench that included only far right president picks. In a unanimous ruling, they decided that county clerks could effectively declare an election null and void on nothing more than gut instinct while the local investigators could spend as much time as they liked investigating the facts of the matter. They also declared that elections that could not meet constitutional requirements for choosing the president must be sent to the states and their highly gerrymandered systems for determination before January 20th.
Erik Trump spent eight years as president. The son of Steven Miller spent 11 years in office after that suffering a terminal case of assassination at the end. His Vice president the daughter of Ivanka and Jared Carried on as the president until 2075 having never faced an election opponent. First because she had the democratic nominee the week of the election and the second time because she declared the election off due to the plague. She died in office from the plague after having declared it a hoax and if it was not God would save her. She had continued the trend of not appointing cabinet members to posts she felt were not needed a trend that began with Steven Millier’s son.
Then the bombs on the days state governments were expected to meet in session to choose a new president. These were not city-killer nukes, but ground-stolen warheads and conventional explosives. The were detonated in Washington, D.C., in state capitals, in major county seats, and most other cities vital to the country’s infrastructure. Dirty bombs for shock. Old-fashioned “go-boom” for slaughter and destruction. In a single morning, the symbolic centers of American government ceased to exist.
River cities burned. Others took strikes of their own. The interior collapsed into silence. Trade along the Mississippi broke apart, with Memphis clinging on as the last functioning port. Grain and minerals stopped going south. Finished goods stopped coming north.
At first, governance fell to the remaining state agencies and municipalities. Most outsourced it to corporations, unions, criminal syndicates, or anyone with a private army, enough crypto, and an exit plan for the elites. Even that proved unsustainable.
It wasn’t civil war, it was abandonment. Corporations seized what they could and wrote off the rest. There was a plague on, and they had to save themselves. They organized successor states that formed the backbone of the New American landscape. Contracts and arbitration became the law of the land.
In 2123, necessity forced order. The Confederated Corporations Agreement recognized land claims held by 5,002 legacy corporations across the interior of the former U.S. and Canada. Among them, Marmaduke Freehold LLC, established 1997, emerged as a strong local power, its family branches holding sway in dozens of other corporate and cooperative ventures.
This wasn’t ideology. It wasn’t conquest. It wasn’t rebellion.
It was survival, a refusal to die.
