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Story Link:www.fanfiction.net/s/13657073/…

“Just because history sucks nards doesn’t mean the present has too.”

It perhaps is this vulgar but optimistic statement by the young president Wade Owen Watts that best embodies the Act of Unification, that on the Fourth of July 2050, ended two centuries of parallel administrations between the United States of America and Canada. In their place was born a new global superpower, the North American Union.

Though fantasies of uniting the North American continent go back as far as the Spanish colonial empire, and the American Revolution, no proposal of merging the United States and the former British Domain of Canada were taken seriously until 2048, when Watts was elected President in America with one of his campaign promises being to unite his homeland with that of his Canadian wife, Samantha Cook.

On its inception the NAU became the largest nation on earth in surface area and GDP, as well as possessing the second largest armed forces in the world, only bested by those of North America’s sworn ideological enemy, The People’s Republic of China.

Even beyond it’s borders the Unions sphere of influence stretches far across the globe. Throughout the rest of the America’s enemy regimes such as Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela have long been conquered, and nascent democracies such as Brazil and Mexico have been snuffed out. In their place a vast network of protectorates, puppet administrations, and military dictatorships, all organized under the Union led Pan-American Alliance.

In Oceania and South East Asia, North America leads another defensive alliance, The Quad, with the goal of containing China and her own puppet states. Though the Chinese and American economies we’re once interlinked, rising ties of nationalism in both nations in the late 2020s destroyed bilateral ties and the two powers devolved into a Cold War, made worse in the 2030s after the People’s Liberation Army’s violent conquest of Taiwan, and its involvement in the Kashmir War between Pakistan and India, which led to a nuclear escalation that all but destroyed the two South Asian states.

Across the Atlantic, North American-European relations may not be as hostile but they’re exists little love between the two. The old cross continental NATO alliance and American involvement on the European continent in general has ended and the European Federation regards the NAU as a rival power.

Domestically the North American Union faces just as many challenges as it does abroad.

Though by the 2050s things have slowly begun improving, the Act of Unification came on the heels of decades of chaos and strife. The collapse of global oil reserves, runaway climate change, and increased political instability have all wrecked havoc on the rural parts of the country, and even today State control extends only to major population centres, and the highways connecting them.

During the crises of the 2020s through the 2040s everyday life for the rural and suburban populations of the United States, much of which was dependent on car-centred infrastructure collapsed. Millions of internally displaced peoples fled to the cities, which quickly became ringed with vertical farms, solar and wind farms, and vertical slums of low-cost trailers known as “stacks.”

For many of this newly impoverished people now reduced to subsistence living the only form of respite came in the form of a mass scale, virtual metaverse. The Ontologically Anthropocentric Sensory Immersive Simulation, or OASIS.

A passion project by it’s reclusive creator James Halliday, The OASIS came online on December 21st 2012, and in the ensuing decades became an inseparable part of the economy and everyday life, both in America, and it’s allies. Opinions on the simulation are divisive, with some lauding it as helping prevent societal collapse, while detractors maintain that the simulation is actually accelerating it.

Halliday’s death in 2040 saw his multi-trillion dollar will determined by a contest he had put in his creation. It was winning this contest in 2046 that Wade Watts, originally a poor eighteen-year-old living in an Oklahoma City stack was propelled to the national stage. Granting the young man the wealth and notoriety to enter then dominate federal politics. It was also through the contest that Wade meet his wife Samantha Cook, leading to the creation of the NAU.

Semi-ironically, The collapse of the globalised economic supply chains and the headquarters of the OASIS’s parent company Gregarious Simulation Systems being in Columbus, Ohio saw the former Rust Belt rehabilitated. Now known as the Tech Belt, the area around the Great Lakes is the heart of the North American technological and industrial sectors, as well as it’s most prosperous region. Other islands of stability within the Union include the Pacific Northwest, New England, and much of Former Canada.

That Canada had better weathered the instability of the oil crisis and was thus more prosperous than it’s southern neighbour at unification has been a point of bitterness and hostility to some former Canadians. That the institutions and structure of the North American Union’s government are nigh identical to those of the former United States have created the common feeling in the north, that the Day of Unification was less a merger of two equal states, than a forceful annexation of Canada into the US.

There are also much mixed feelings on North American investment in the thawing Canadian Arctic. Vast tracks of once frozen land have opened up to mineral and resource extraction. For more specialized management of the mining in these areas, the former Northwest Territories has been split under the territories of Halliday and Morrow, named after the OASIS’s founders. To the immediate south a new state has been carved out of the northern portions of the former provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan, Athabasca.

The only new state added to the Union since the Day of Unification, Athabasca has already proved unpopular. The former province of Alberta spent much of it’s time as part of Canada fighting with the federal government over regulations on it’s oil reserves, even threatening to join the United States or proclaim independence on several occasions. Now to have its territory splintered and resources seized by Washington has ironically made local sentiment bitterly nostalgic for the days of old Canada.

However, by far the most violent response to the Day of Unification came in the former province of Quebec.

For centuries, Canadian policy making had walked a delicate balance in keeping the former French colony has part of the British Empire. Several concessions had been made federally to French Canadians such as the Official Languages Act or La Loi sur les langues officielles. These institutions were dissolved at the founding of the NAU, sparking almost immediate rebellion in Quebec. The old Quebecois separatist group of the October Crisis of 1970, Le Front de libération du Québec was re-founded, quickly proclaiming independence. Though the North American Army has forced it out of the major population centres of Montreal and Quebec City the 2nd FLQ still controls much of the northern shores of the Saint Lawrence, and a campaign of assassinations, bombings and terror has engulfed the state for the past seven years.

Though none are as immediate as the FLQ, elsewhere in the Union there are other groups that present a direct or indirect challenge to the central authority of Washington.

In the Southwest, despite the American-Mexican border being closed for decades Mexican drug cartels, strengthen by the near collapse of the central government in Mexico have crossed the Rio Grande. The most powerful of these such as Sinaloa, and Los Zetas operate as proto-states in their own right, complete with local authorities, police forces and powerful paramilitaries. Sweeping across the border, the tendrils of these narco-states have entwined parts of Arizona, New Mexico, California and Texas, both in the rural communities and large cities such as Phoenix and Los Angeles, where even long rival local criminal gangs such as the Crips and Bloods have joined forces against this powerful foreign enemy.

Less powerful but far more numerous are the hundreds of bandit groups that roam the ungoverned rural parts of the NAU. These groups range from piety criminals that can be turned away with a bribe, to things much darker. Hate groups and militias, relics of the American era of disinformation in the 2020s still roam the wastes. So poisoned are their minds that any form of diplomacy with them is laughable. These so-called patriots slaughter any town of there fellow countrymen they can find. Long having convinced themselves that all not in their ranks are part of an apocalyptic global cult of demon worshipers, and therefore subhuman.

In response to these threats and in the absence of local government, many rural communities have organized local militias to defend themselves, though it is not unheard of for these groups to also become predatory.

To some the plethora of old woes still plaguing the virgin empire of North America seem destine to be proven insurmountable. To others Unification is the signal that the days of hardship are ending. It is impossible to deny the impact of recent emergences like fusion energy or the outlaw of corporate indentured servitude have had on daily life. Yet to many, their ultimate faith in their new nation is inseparable from their faith in its young founder.

There are those to whom President Watts is a paragon, a great leader on par with the American Founding Fathers destine to led the continent back into prosperity. To others he is a tyrant, fascist and imperialist, ruling without limitations or term limits and with his own cult of personality. Those close to him maintain that the truth is neither. That Wade is young and still occasionally ignorant of reality, having been raised largely in the OASIS.

Yet his passion for rebuilding the world is earnest, and without conditions. The president has put forth several grand scale projects towards the betterment of his state, and has attempted to breathe new life into both the economy and public morale with large scale New Deal style handouts and infrastructure projects, the most striking of which being the start of construction on a sub light interstellar vessel in geostationary orbit, The Vonnegut. His latest project, an attempt to bridge the gap with his Canadian subjects is a mass scale rebound of the old Canadian reality show Total Drama, set entirety within a standalone OASIS server, Total Drama Endless.

Yet great projects such as The Vonnegut and Endless also have their detractors. Distractions some say that the president cannot afford in such turbulent times. For even with every known threat, China, Sinaloa, and the FLQ, there are unknown ones lurking.

In the heart of the Tech Belt, in the communities surrounding Niagara Falls there are strange rumours emerging. Whispers that beneath the roaring falls something is being constructed in secret. A great machine that some say, may prove a greater threat to the nascent state than all outside its borders.

Description

Story Link:www.fanfiction.net/s/13657073/…

“Just because history sucks nards doesn’t mean the present has too.”

It perhaps is this vulgar but optimistic statement by the young president Wade Owen Watts that best embodies the Act of Unification, that on the Fourth of July 2050, ended two centuries of parallel administrations between the United States of America and Canada. In their place was born a new global superpower, the North American Union.

Though fantasies of uniting the North American continent go back as far as the Spanish colonial empire, and the American Revolution, no proposal of merging the United States and the former British Domain of Canada were taken seriously until 2048, when Watts was elected President in America with one of his campaign promises being to unite his homeland with that of his Canadian wife, Samantha Cook.

On its inception the NAU became the largest nation on earth in surface area and GDP, as well as possessing the second largest armed forces in the world, only bested by those of North America’s sworn ideological enemy, The People’s Republic of China.

Even beyond it’s borders the Unions sphere of influence stretches far across the globe. Throughout the rest of the America’s enemy regimes such as Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela have long been conquered, and nascent democracies such as Brazil and Mexico have been snuffed out. In their place a vast network of protectorates, puppet administrations, and military dictatorships, all organized under the Union led Pan-American Alliance.

In Oceania and South East Asia, North America leads another defensive alliance, The Quad, with the goal of containing China and her own puppet states. Though the Chinese and American economies we’re once interlinked, rising ties of nationalism in both nations in the late 2020s destroyed bilateral ties and the two powers devolved into a Cold War, made worse in the 2030s after the People’s Liberation Army’s violent conquest of Taiwan, and its involvement in the Kashmir War between Pakistan and India, which led to a nuclear escalation that all but destroyed the two South Asian states.

Across the Atlantic, North American-European relations may not be as hostile but they’re exists little love between the two. The old cross continental NATO alliance and American involvement on the European continent in general has ended and the European Federation regards the NAU as a rival power.

Domestically the North American Union faces just as many challenges as it does abroad.

Though by the 2050s things have slowly begun improving, the Act of Unification came on the heels of decades of chaos and strife. The collapse of global oil reserves, runaway climate change, and increased political instability have all wrecked havoc on the rural parts of the country, and even today State control extends only to major population centres, and the highways connecting them.

During the crises of the 2020s through the 2040s everyday life for the rural and suburban populations of the United States, much of which was dependent on car-centred infrastructure collapsed. Millions of internally displaced peoples fled to the cities, which quickly became ringed with vertical farms, solar and wind farms, and vertical slums of low-cost trailers known as “stacks.”

For many of this newly impoverished people now reduced to subsistence living the only form of respite came in the form of a mass scale, virtual metaverse. The Ontologically Anthropocentric Sensory Immersive Simulation, or OASIS.

A passion project by it’s reclusive creator James Halliday, The OASIS came online on December 21st 2012, and in the ensuing decades became an inseparable part of the economy and everyday life, both in America, and it’s allies. Opinions on the simulation are divisive, with some lauding it as helping prevent societal collapse, while detractors maintain that the simulation is actually accelerating it.

Halliday’s death in 2040 saw his multi-trillion dollar will determined by a contest he had put in his creation. It was winning this contest in 2046 that Wade Watts, originally a poor eighteen-year-old living in an Oklahoma City stack was propelled to the national stage. Granting the young man the wealth and notoriety to enter then dominate federal politics. It was also through the contest that Wade meet his wife Samantha Cook, leading to the creation of the NAU.

Semi-ironically, The collapse of the globalised economic supply chains and the headquarters of the OASIS’s parent company Gregarious Simulation Systems being in Columbus, Ohio saw the former Rust Belt rehabilitated. Now known as the Tech Belt, the area around the Great Lakes is the heart of the North American technological and industrial sectors, as well as it’s most prosperous region. Other islands of stability within the Union include the Pacific Northwest, New England, and much of Former Canada.

That Canada had better weathered the instability of the oil crisis and was thus more prosperous than it’s southern neighbour at unification has been a point of bitterness and hostility to some former Canadians. That the institutions and structure of the North American Union’s government are nigh identical to those of the former United States have created the common feeling in the north, that the Day of Unification was less a merger of two equal states, than a forceful annexation of Canada into the US.

There are also much mixed feelings on North American investment in the thawing Canadian Arctic. Vast tracks of once frozen land have opened up to mineral and resource extraction. For more specialized management of the mining in these areas, the former Northwest Territories has been split under the territories of Halliday and Morrow, named after the OASIS’s founders. To the immediate south a new state has been carved out of the northern portions of the former provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan, Athabasca.

The only new state added to the Union since the Day of Unification, Athabasca has already proved unpopular. The former province of Alberta spent much of it’s time as part of Canada fighting with the federal government over regulations on it’s oil reserves, even threatening to join the United States or proclaim independence on several occasions. Now to have its territory splintered and resources seized by Washington has ironically made local sentiment bitterly nostalgic for the days of old Canada.

However, by far the most violent response to the Day of Unification came in the former province of Quebec.

For centuries, Canadian policy making had walked a delicate balance in keeping the former French colony has part of the British Empire. Several concessions had been made federally to French Canadians such as the Official Languages Act or La Loi sur les langues officielles. These institutions were dissolved at the founding of the NAU, sparking almost immediate rebellion in Quebec. The old Quebecois separatist group of the October Crisis of 1970, Le Front de libération du Québec was re-founded, quickly proclaiming independence. Though the North American Army has forced it out of the major population centres of Montreal and Quebec City the 2nd FLQ still controls much of the northern shores of the Saint Lawrence, and a campaign of assassinations, bombings and terror has engulfed the state for the past seven years.

Though none are as immediate as the FLQ, elsewhere in the Union there are other groups that present a direct or indirect challenge to the central authority of Washington.

In the Southwest, despite the American-Mexican border being closed for decades Mexican drug cartels, strengthen by the near collapse of the central government in Mexico have crossed the Rio Grande. The most powerful of these such as Sinaloa, and Los Zetas operate as proto-states in their own right, complete with local authorities, police forces and powerful paramilitaries. Sweeping across the border, the tendrils of these narco-states have entwined parts of Arizona, New Mexico, California and Texas, both in the rural communities and large cities such as Phoenix and Los Angeles, where even long rival local criminal gangs such as the Crips and Bloods have joined forces against this powerful foreign enemy.

Less powerful but far more numerous are the hundreds of bandit groups that roam the ungoverned rural parts of the NAU. These groups range from piety criminals that can be turned away with a bribe, to things much darker. Hate groups and militias, relics of the American era of disinformation in the 2020s still roam the wastes. So poisoned are their minds that any form of diplomacy with them is laughable. These so-called patriots slaughter any town of there fellow countrymen they can find. Long having convinced themselves that all not in their ranks are part of an apocalyptic global cult of demon worshipers, and therefore subhuman.

In response to these threats and in the absence of local government, many rural communities have organized local militias to defend themselves, though it is not unheard of for these groups to also become predatory.

To some the plethora of old woes still plaguing the virgin empire of North America seem destine to be proven insurmountable. To others Unification is the signal that the days of hardship are ending. It is impossible to deny the impact of recent emergences like fusion energy or the outlaw of corporate indentured servitude have had on daily life. Yet to many, their ultimate faith in their new nation is inseparable from their faith in its young founder.

There are those to whom President Watts is a paragon, a great leader on par with the American Founding Fathers destine to led the continent back into prosperity. To others he is a tyrant, fascist and imperialist, ruling without limitations or term limits and with his own cult of personality. Those close to him maintain that the truth is neither. That Wade is young and still occasionally ignorant of reality, having been raised largely in the OASIS.

Yet his passion for rebuilding the world is earnest, and without conditions. The president has put forth several grand scale projects towards the betterment of his state, and has attempted to breathe new life into both the economy and public morale with large scale New Deal style handouts and infrastructure projects, the most striking of which being the start of construction on a sub light interstellar vessel in geostationary orbit, The Vonnegut. His latest project, an attempt to bridge the gap with his Canadian subjects is a mass scale rebound of the old Canadian reality show Total Drama, set entirety within a standalone OASIS server, Total Drama Endless.

Yet great projects such as The Vonnegut and Endless also have their detractors. Distractions some say that the president cannot afford in such turbulent times. For even with every known threat, China, Sinaloa, and the FLQ, there are unknown ones lurking.

In the heart of the Tech Belt, in the communities surrounding Niagara Falls there are strange rumours emerging. Whispers that beneath the roaring falls something is being constructed in secret. A great machine that some say, may prove a greater threat to the nascent state than all outside its borders.