Your access to the portal away from home! one panel says. Use in conjunction with your virtual glasses for a fully immersive experience. Behind the text is a lush video depicting what look like beautiful scenes from around the world. I wonder whether their portal is their way of connecting to the Internet. Suddenly, my interest piques. I’ve never browsed the Internet outside of the Republic, never seen the world for what it was without the Republic’s masks and filters. I approach one of the glass cylinder booths and step inside. The glass around me lights up.
“Hello, June,” it says. “What can I find for you?”
What should I look up? I decide to try out the first thing that pops into my head. I hesitantly reply, wondering whether it’ll just read my voice. “Daniel Altan Wing,” I say. How much does the rest of the world know about Day?
Suddenly everything around me vanishes. Instead, I’m standing in a white circle with hundreds—thousands—of hovering rectangular screens all around me, each one covered with images and videos and text. At first I don’t know what to do, so I just stay where I am, staring in wonder at the images all around me. Each screen has different info on Day. Many of them are news articles. The one closest to me is playing an old video of Day standing on top of the Capitol Tower balcony, rousing the people to support Anden. When I look at it long enough (three seconds), a voice starts talking. “In this video, Daniel Altan Wing—also known as Day—gives his support to the Republic’s new Elector and prevents a national uprising. Source: The Republic of America’s public archives. See whole article?”
My eyes flicker to another screen, and the voice from the first screen fades. This second screen comes to life as I look on, playing a video interviewing some girl I don’t know, with light brown skin and pale hazel eyes. She sports a scarlet streak in her hair. She says, “I’ve lived in Nairobi for the past five years, but we’d never heard of him until videos of his strikes against the R-oh-A started popping up online. Now I belong to a club—” The video pauses there, and the same soothing voice from earlier says, “Source: Kenya Broadcasting Corporation. See whole video?”
I take a careful step forward. Each time I move, the rectangular screens rearrange around me to showcase the next circle of images for me to peruse. Images of Day pop up from when he and I were still working for the Patriots—I see one blurry image of Day looking over his shoulder, a smirk on his lips. It makes me blush, so I quickly glance away. I look through two more rounds of them, then decide to change my search. This time I search for something I’ve always been curious about. “The United States of America,” I say.
The screens with videos and images of Day vanish, leaving me strangely disappointed. A new set of screens flip up around me, and I can almost feel a slight breeze as they shift into place. The first thing that pops up is an image that I instantly recognize as the full flag that the Patriots both use and base their symbol on. The voiceover says, “The flag of the former United States of America. Source: Wikiversity, the Free Academy. United States History One-oh-two, Grade Eleven. See full entry? For textual version, say ‘Text.’”
“See full entry,” I say. The screen zooms in toward me, engulfing me in its contents. I blink, momentarily thrown off by the rushing images. When I open my eyes again, I nearly stumble. I’m hovering in the sky over a landscape that looks both familiar and strange. The outline of it appears to be some version of North America, except there’s no lake stretching from Los Angeles to San Francisco, and the Colonies’ territory looks much larger than I remember. Clouds float by below my feet. When I reach a hesitant foot down, I smudge part of the clouds and can actually feel the cool air whistling beneath my shoes.
The voiceover begins. “The United States of America—also known as the USA, the United States, the US, America, and the States—was a prominent country in North America composed of fifty states held together as a federal constitutional republic. It first declared independence from England on July 4, 1776, and became recognized on September 3, 1783. The United States unofficially split into two countries on October 1, 2054 and officially became the western Republic of America and the eastern Colonies of America on March 14, 2055.”
Here the voiceover pauses, then shifts. “Skip to a subtopic? Popular subtopics: the Three-Year Flood, the Flood of 2046, the Republic of America, the Colonies of America.”
A series of bright blue markers appear over the west and east coasts of North America. I stare at them for a moment, my heart pounding, before I reach out and try to touch a marker near the southern coastline of the Colonies. To my surprise, I can feel the texture of the landscape under my finger. “The Colonies of America,” I say.
The world rushes up at me with dizzying speed. I’m now standing on what feels like solid ground, and all around me are thousands of people huddled together in makeshift shelters in a flooded cityscape, while hundreds are launching an all-out attack against soldiers decked out in uniforms I don’t recognize. Behind the soldiers are crates and sacks of what look like rations.
“Unlike the Republic of America,” the voiceover starts, “where the government enforced rule through martial law in order to crack down on the influx of refugees into its borders, the Colonies of America formed on March 14, 2055 after corporations seized control of the federal government (the former United States, see higher index) following the latter’s failure to handle debt accumulated from the Flood of 2046.” I take a few steps forward—it’s as if I’m right here in the middle of the scene, standing just a few dozen feet from where the people are rioting. My surroundings look shaky and pixelated, as if rendered from someone’s personal videos. “In this civilian recording, the city of Atlanta stages a fifteen-day riot against the United States Federal Emergency Management Agency. Similar riots appeared in all eastern cities over the course of three months, after which the cities declared loyalty to the military corporation DesCon, which possessed funds the beleaguered government did not.”