/pt/ – Petrarchan

The general public’s aversion to the barely disguised street wars - both the frigid and tentative Minnesotan ones and the subsequent sweat-logged July skirmishes, with their makeshift barricades of rental e-scooters and stainless-steel outdoor-dining Windsor chairs, and their blatant displays of joie de vivre from both the civilian and law-enforcement sides, wars seen never in the flesh but only in vertical format, through the lightly fingerprinted glass of a 9:16 OLED, in videos that seemed endless variations on a single theme: the grappling forms like a scene from a Baroque painting, the shaky hands and insensible zooms of the cameraperson (the camerapeople merged into a single timeless character in the minds of those who scrolled through those endless clips), and the MPEG compression artifacts mottling the sunny asphalt beneath the protestor’s sneakers - the general revulsion at these events is what gave the repentant Democrat who won 2028’s general election the leverage to all but dissolve the field-operations and removals wings of ICE before campaigning for the midterms had scarcely begun. But as the human flow from the equatorial belt and its cramped haunches continued - and increased, as it tends to during the donkey’s four-year cycles - a problem: some upstart Republicans (an increasingly paunchy Thomas Massie their kindly patriarch) and not a few Democrats managed to legislate the mandatory adoption of the E-Verify system across the fifty states. While this measure was phased in, as its senatorial fathers would have politely called, in tightly intern-edited 15-second clips, the shocking upheaval they’d begotten, the gainful-employment opportunities for the undocumented and thus uncounted masses dwindled ever more; by the time cheap quadcopters (with the pleasing rutted-plastic texture that 3D-printing filament produces) had made e-bike delivery about as obsolete as horse-drawn carriages, there was just about nothing, excepting the vending of shoplifted CVS hygiene products on blue sidewalk tarpaulins, that an illegal alien could do to make a living. When the unsustainability of this crisis became clear to all, the unspoken helot status of the illegal was stamped official by the creation of a new agency, in the vein of the WPA, that organized migrants into vast brigades and sent them to the arid Southwest to test terraforming techniques licensed to the US by the Gulf states that had invented them. Within years, the dutifully Catholic colonists had been fruitful and multiplied, creating a stout demographic pyramid of hardy mestizos to inhabit the paradisical oasis that had sprung up amid desert: architecturally slightly less tasteful than Dubai, but culturally rather more, and twice as secure of a tax haven. The colony achieved financial autarky almost immediately, but ecological self-sufficiency took longer; with the help of loaned Saudi engineers, rivers soon gushed under the monorail tracks and clear water cascaded between the phytotelmata of huge genetically-engineered pitcher plants. A jailbroken Claude instance re-aligned to Roman Catholic values eventually became acting governor when the elected colony governor’s BYD’s lithium-ion battery exploded and singed away two layers of skin from neck to navel. Under the machine’s guidance, the colonists ran hybrid warfare for several months - coy drone incursions, DDoS attacks on New Mexican municipal bodies, firing the occasional Javelin missile at a commercial jet passing overhead. The secessionist war took a turn in their favor when the Ivy League chose to ally with their efforts: the eight former universities had by then become, essentially, eugenic institutions which exerted near-sovereign influence through their network of NGOs. I don’t remember what happened next, but interestingly enough China never did deign to get involved.