Short stories, little history zines, and questions about how we choose to survive... for the people who never got to speak
When wrote this, I was trying to imagine a good future. A small town in Northeast Texas that could exist if we wanted it to. Maybe it already does. Maybe it's just starting and we don't know about it yet.
I needed to clear the ground first; figure out what had to fall apart so a place like this could exist. Zoning laws, taxes, all the systems that make it hard to just live... I looked at where we were in December 2025 and asked: where are the next 15 years taking us?
I didn't predict Venezuela or Iran. I honestly didn't see that coming and I didn't want to write about war. I wrote about a path. Ugly, messy, but leading to somewhere... better?
The next piece I write, in this series, will be set in 2040, in that town. But I had to write this first.
It's not the best future. But it ain't the worst either.
In the first couple of decades of the 21st century, the United States went through a time of turbulence: a war fought in the name of freedom, a deep recession, a period of true social acceptance that existed alongside a rise of exceptional intolerance. Through it all, a cold truth crystallized for millions: their government now moved to the rhythm of corporate interests, its ears deaf to the voices of its own people. This realization split the populace. Some believed that voting the right people into office would change the system, while others became convinced the system itself had to change.
Everything came to a head in the second half of the 2020s, when a former president returned to power. His first term in office was a turbulent introduction to politics. Serving less like a traditional presidency, he normalized the growing intolerance within the nation. Still a novice in governance, he was voted out in the next election, and a fragile, exhausted repair began.
Unfortunately, the seeds he planted had taken root within the nation and in the following election he was brought back to the oval office.
This time, with years to prepare, he returned as a tyrant—a man who wished to be king of a nation that had no kings. His second administration was a clinical dismantling of norms. The executive order became a daily weapon, issued by the dozens working to enact his every demand by subverting all branches of government. In that first year, a quiet exodus began—tens of thousands of professionals, artists, and the fearful seeking refuge abroad. At the same time, detention facilities swelled with thousands more.
The regime’s first true shock came in the 2025 off-year elections. A stunned nation watched as opposition parties executed a historic sweep at state and local levels. The message was clear: the 2026 midterms would likely see a powerful swing in the higher branches of government. And they did. But the people’s verdict was met not with concession, but with a lie. “Fraud,” the president declared, his amplified voice echoing through compliant media channels. The results were simply… ignored.
This was the breaking point. If the federal government was a captured fortress, the people would build new homes outside its walls. The concept of “soft secession” was born. It was not a call to arms, but a strategic withdrawal of consent and capital. In 2026, the Pacific trifecta of Washington, Oregon, and California quietly activated long-dormant constitutional clauses and statutory frameworks. They ceased the transfer of key tax revenues to Washington, D.C., and formed the Cascadia Commonwealth. They weren’t declaring independence—not yet—but they were declaring operational sovereignty.
The idea proved contagious. By the 2027 elections, nine more states followed. Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico, drawn by shared water crises and solar potential, joined Cascadia, expanding it into the Southwestern Alliance. On the opposite coast, a compact of New England states and New York, united by dense urban networks and a progressive fiscal model, formed the Northeastern Concord. These new entities didn’t just hoard money; they built. Universal healthcare systems rolled out. Ground was broken on hyper-efficient regional rail networks. Trade delegations from the European Union and East Asia, recognizing stable partners, bypassed Washington to sign deals directly with Sacramento, Denver, and Albany.
A different kind of revolution was quietly growing in the nation’s heartland and rural South. Here, people turned inward, focusing intensely on their local communities. Inspired by a mix of survivalist planning and a desire for close-knit living, thousands came together to buy up abandoned farmland. These weren’t isolated bunkers, but self-contained micro-towns woven into the landscape. They became experts in sustainable farming, systems that recycled their own water, and shared solar power. Jobs were specialized but flexible: doctors also worked in the gardens, engineers taught at the school, and everyone spent time in the greenhouse or the library. They used their own internal, skill-based system for trade. These micro-towns earned modest income by running stores in nearby cities, using the funds for necessities and a few comforts. They also hosted "fix-it fairs" and free markets in nearby cities every few months, always welcoming donations.
Despite this branching away from the main United States, everyone remained legal citizens, able to vote in the next presidential election. It did not matter. When the votes came in and the opposing party won, the regime again declared the results fraudulent. They stayed in power.
States increasingly made their own trade deals, striving for self-sufficiency. The convenience of the early 2020s vanished. Meals became regional, dictated by local harvests. Grocery stores no longer carried goods from across the country, but only from rural areas within their state or one or two neighboring states.
By April of 2029, the President finally understood the impact of the soft secessions. The military-industrial complex seized up, no longer able to financially support the military's abroad operations. In a fit of maddened logic, the president ordered what remained of the military to “restore federal authority” in Cascadia and the Northeast. The result was a fiasco. The main problem was his military had severely diminished over the last four years. When you only want those who look like you to fight your wars, you find there are not many who do. He was, after all, a draft dodger.
In July of 2029, the wanna be king, of a nation that had no kings, died. His vice president took the reins but was poorly prepared for the trials ahead.
The winter of 2029-2030 was the coldest in over a century. It froze the nation’s capital. Three million citizens descended on Washington, D.C., begging for warmth as the power grid failed around the country under the harsh conditions. In the panic and darkness, a fire broke out in the White House. Whether accident or act of defiance, it didn’t matter. The symbol of the republic burned, untended, as the president and his court had fled to a bunker weeks earlier. By spring, over 1.3 million Americans had perished from the cold, the collapse of supply chains, and federal abandonment.
The world of 2040 is a patchwork. The United States of America exists on maps and in lingering diplomatic recognition, but its authority stops at the perimeter of a handful of loyalist, impoverished states in the interior. Cascadia-Southwest and the Northeastern Concord are de facto sovereign nations, techno-green democracies experimenting with citizen-led governance and symbiotic urban ecology. Between them lies the American Federation, a loose, often contentious coalition of city-states, autonomous micro-towns, and regional cooperatives.
The federal government has not held a proper election since 2024. Elections still occur, but the results are never upheld. The story is no longer one of a nation, but of its people—the engineers building the trans-Cascadia maglev, the micro-town librarians preserving pre-Collapse knowledge, the traders navigating the new old roads between gleaming bio-cities and revitalized market towns.
This is the soil from which solarpunk grows. Not from utopian dream, but from necessity’s hard lesson. It is the story of fragmentation, and of the fragile, green, and hopeful things that grew in the cracks. These are the stories of the people who live in what used to be the United States of America…