Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer

It’s not just flowers that open in sunlight. When that furious orb manages to show its face through the polluted haze, the cubes unfold like mad blossoms infested with colonies of two-legged ants. Which is a polite estimation of the average intelligence amongst cube dwellers these days.

I’m doing this final piece before being dragged to join the humants. You see, here in the Forty-Eight States that form the Republic of America, being a moderate is bad for you. I was moderate. Now I’m a ‘God-damned Ruskie’, ‘Islamist scum’ or ‘Satan-loving pagan’. I’ll never know which as I’m shipped to the cube city most in need of new blood. Thankfully, I can’t be tagged as a ‘Canadian spy’ or ‘Alaskan insurgent’ – they’re categories of ‘Godless’.

First President Trump did his homework – never think a man in a ridiculous hairpiece is stupid, people – and his divisive rallying calls attracted far more sympathy than anyone knew: the landslide victory struck his detractors dumb. In fairness, many were only quiet because they were leaving the good ol’ US of A before the American Dream took it’s gloves off.

The ‘retrenchments’ over the following six months were missed, but the ‘Leftist Plot to Destroy Our Glorious Homeland’ certainly wasn’t. The pogroms had replaced the key objectors: anyone that exhibited a moral ground this side of Hitler. When the dust settled, there were heads on the spikes of the Whitehouse perimeter fence and America had gone places that Goebbels only dreamed of.

Then the First President announced a month-long ‘mercy’. If you wanted in, you were welcome (some packed flights were apparently singing hymns all the way). If you wanted out, you could leave. Providing you could make it to an airport without being lynched by fundamentalists, of course. Then you had to survive the hardcore of the believers coming in, who set upon the unbelievers queuing to depart.

In the decades since, America has become a fundamentalist dystopia, complete with slave labour, a Ministry of Faith, full spectrum monitoring and profiling, televised executions of the ‘Godless’, and the two biggest walls since the Great Wall of China: one to defend against Mexican ‘mongrels’, the other to keep out ‘filthy’ Canadians.

This country has two, ID-carded classes: Citizen and Chosen. There are also Penitents – anyone in a cube city, and Elites – anyone who you defer to or suffer a fall from grace that would make Lucifer wince. Most if ‘us’ are Citizens. All military, law and emergency service first responders are Chosen. Elites are obviously Chosen. Penitents are “only that because of their own weaknesses. Pray for them. Now pass the canapés”.

If you have read of a dystopian horror in a novel, you can be damn sure that the RoA has improved on it and broadened the target list. I am sure there is a resistance, and I wish them the best of luck, because the penalties are horrendous. The fields of the heartland are fertilised with the remains of dissidents, their entire families – even their pets and close friends, if the member had the misfortune to be indicted in The Gospel Territories – the lands that used to be called The Bible Belt.

They are pounding on the door, so I’ll sign off and send this non-American (thus illegal) smartphone down eighty stories to its doom. Thank you for reading my blog, people of the free world. May what has befallen the USA at least serve as an instructional on what to avoid.

Sic Semper Fanaticus.

Yours,

Abraham Hicks.

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