Light Shines Through | Chapter 4 - Sharon
The Shattered World Series (Book 1)
Sharon | October 2041 — Seattle, Tahoma, Free Republic of Cascadia
Sharon is sitting at her desk, tapping out an idle rhythm with her pen while thumbing through a pile of daily briefs, purposefully ignoring the Eyes Only economic report sitting on the top of the stack.
She’s fairly sure she knows what it says — the economy is tanking, inflation isn’t under control, and after nearly twenty years of goosing the economy of Cascadia with every massive Keynesian public works project possible, the golden eggs have run dry. A deep, dark recession is staring her in the face, just as she’s trying to get re-elected.
She chuffs in frustration and slaps the desk with an open palm, hard enough to sting.
The desk itself is a replica of the famous old Resolute desk used by so many presidents of the vanished United States, before the original had been immolated in nuclear fire. It is made from American oak, a gift from the New California Republic, after the Catastrophes and the end of the war, given to Cascadia’s first president, her friend and mentor, Ben Cohen.
At a casual glance, it’s the spitting image of the original, but the big giveaway is the front panel — the Great Seal of the Free Republic of Cascadia looks nothing like the Great Seal of the United States.
And this office isn’t an oval — it’s a long rectangle, with the desk situated near the high windows at one narrow end, far away from the double doors that are the only entrance. Her new office in the just-finished government complex in Cascadia City is an off-kilter hexagon on the top of a building that she thinks looks like a tilted egg. She thinks the new building is ugly as hell, but she has to praise it publicly as an example of Cascadian design innovation. She taps the pen again and idly wonders how the furniture from this office is going to fit in the new space.
For some reason, she can’t stop thinking about Barack Obama. It’s not like it could be residual mojo from the desk. This replica never existed at the same time as its predecessor, and not even on the same side of the continent.
She has no idea if the hidden drawers are the same, and it’s this detail that bothers her and makes her think of Obama. She’d never met him, although she was an ardent admirer and had volunteered for his campaigns. When he was President of the United States, she’d been an average American, never imagining her future in politics.
Sometimes she imagines he’s here and she’s trying to explain to him who she is and how, in a way, they are related. The conversation would have to start with the Flash. Maybe the messed-up elections and creeping autocracy that preceded it, but why bury the lede? The Flash is the moment that the world changed forever.
Seventeen years later, there are still very few things people agree on regarding the Flash.
Everyone but the complete whackos agree that at 3:17 am, on the morning of Friday, the 15th of November, 2024, ten days after the most widely disputed election in American history, a surface blast nuclear bomb went off in Washington, D.C., wiping out most of the United States government.
Virtually everyone agrees that it must have been in the range of seven to eight megatons; an odd size, she’s told, because it doesn’t match any weapon tonnage then in production.
After that, it all starts to become debatable.
Although hundreds of groups ultimately claimed responsibility for it, there was never any public consensus on who did it. Debates ranged from the obvious, like al-Qaeda, or Russia, or China, into the more improbable, like Mossad, or Canada, or a failed US military coup, or even the sitting president of the time, furious that he wasn’t getting his way. Then come the downright ridiculous: Antifa, or the Sons of the Confederacy, or hidden lizard people living amongst us.
Everyone has a pet theory, and after all this time, it’s become a bit of a cultural rubric to ask at bars or parties. What sign are you? Do you believe in the afterlife? What’s your theory about how the Flash happened?
Secret reports put together by every global intelligence agency, working alone and together, had more definitive answers, but the reports that got released to the public were anything but.
All of these theories whispered about, debated, argued over, fought about, screamed about, devolving into actual fisticuffs, and the only thing that remains one hundred percent true is that the Flash — the event itself, the refugee crisis, the market crashes and wars and depressions that resulted — the Flash changed the course of human history forever.
She pops open one of the secret compartments on the desk and pulls out the dog-eared report whose page numbers and sentences and analyses are so familiar to her that she can quote them verbatim. The faux black leather grain has been worried rough in places, careworn through the years by only five sets of hands — hers, and those of the three men and one woman who have also occupied this desk in this office.
For years, crackpot political analysts and foreign nemeses had predicted all of how the United States would tear itself apart, shattering into fragments, Humpty-Dumpty-like, never to be put together again.
How right they were.
Sharon shakes her head and looks at the space where she imagines her figment of Obama would be standing. None of them had had any idea of the speed with which the end would come, nor the levels of violence and displacement that would occur.
Absentmindedly, she traces the outline of the logo on the cover. Office of the Provisional President of the Free Republic of Cascadia. Her long brown finger covers the word “Provisional”, as it has done a hundred times before. The multiple eyes from the Eagle-Salmon-Orca-Bear logo of the original seal of the emergent country seem to challenge the idle gaze of her distraction.
That original seal had been controversial, but then so had everything. The wording of the new constitution. The unicameral congress. The flag, the anthem, the boundaries of the new country, at war with its former neighbors and fighting for survival. All this time later, and it still feels like they’re fighting for survival. The phrase bone tired has lost all mystery for her; it is now her lived reality, a constant companion here in her own body.
In the emptiness left behind in the days immediately following the Flash, America roared out its displeasure and declared itself still alive. The problem was, there wasn’t one voice making the claim. There were dozens.
The weekend following the Flash was a nightmare of chaos and confusion. Washington, D.C., had been obliterated, and anyone downwind of the fallout was scrambling to escape. This included most of the northeastern seaboard — the most densely populated parts of the country, where a late-season tropical front pushed fallout in the direction of more than fifty million people.
Sharon thumbs through the first dozen pages of the report, eyes catching flashes of the graphs, charts, and maps that she knows so well. Initial estimates were that nearly a million people died outright in the blast, including virtually every leader of both political parties. Another million died within the first week due to radiation. Another million still died in the evacuation and chaos afterwards, as Baltimore, Philadelphia, Newark, Wilmington, New York City — all rushed to get as far the hell away from D.C. and its drifting, deadly ashes as humanly possible.
Of the nearly fifty million people who lived in the path of the fallout, it is estimated that forty percent had tried to leave the urban coast and head north and west. More than nineteen and a half million people were stuck in the largest traffic jam in history. Governments of the northern states were overwhelmed. Not only could they not send humanitarian aid to the D.C. area, they suddenly had a more local crisis on their hands.
She remembers that excruciating weekend, watching on TV as the first grim reports came in from the smoldering crater that had been the nation’s capital, and as the enormity of the refugee crisis became clear. In those early days, it was as if the air itself was made of rumor and misinformation so thick that it was impossible to know what was true in any given moment. The social networks crashed repeatedly under the load of humans trying to cope with the unimaginable.
The confusion was exacerbated over the weekend when the sitting Secretaries of Housing and Urban Development, Transportation, Energy, and Education all claimed that they were the Acting President of the United States. Not to be outdone, the two people who claimed that they would have been nominated as Secretary of State in the incoming administration — who insisted they had won the election — announced that they should be Acting President.
Within a week, the Secretaries of HUD, Transportation, and Energy were dead, all apparently from radiation poisoning. The Secretary of Education was sworn in as President in a shaky phone video distributed to national media, and then promptly went dark, leaving Americans to wonder if she, too, was still alive.
Not willing to wait a month for the anniversary of its first secession, the State of South Carolina announced on Thanksgiving Day that it had voted in an emergency joint session of its legislature to “temporarily suspend responsibilities as a State of the Union to focus on the needs of its own citizens first.” With this, the Acting Governor of the state commanded the already activated South Carolina National Guard to close all state borders “until further notice”.
The next day, Black Friday, saw the Governor-elect of North Carolina shoot and fatally injure the incumbent but just ousted governor of the state at the Capitol building, and declare that North Carolina would follow South Carolina into a “secession from the Union”. A hastily convened emergency session of the North Carolina legislature three hours later swore in the new Governor early, and voted to uphold his declaration. By Monday morning, every former Confederate State had announced that it, too, was leaving the Union.
On December 3rd, all of the states of the former Confederacy announced that they were forming the New Confederate States of America. They were joined by Kentucky, Missouri, Indiana, Ohio, and Oklahoma.
Two days later, on the 5th, Texas announced that it had reconsidered, and was, in fact, not joining the New Confederacy, but was forming the Second Republic of Texas, instead. The same day, Utah announced that it was forming a new country, called Deseret, and that all Mormon counties of adjoining states would be welcome in the new nation. A day later, Oklahoma announced that it was joining Texas, and not the New Confederacy, while counties in Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, and Colorado announced resolutions to join their brethren in Deseret.
Along these new borders, chaos reigned. Boundary counties in states that had not declared independence or joined the New Confederacy announced that they were seceding from their states and forming new states that would join the Confederacy. In this fog of confusion, it was inevitable that armed forces, militarized law enforcement departments, and the huge number of guns in citizens’ hands would come into play.
Entire counties couldn’t agree on which state or nation they belonged to. Cities had vocal groups vying for inclusion in one of the new nations, even if they were dozens or sometimes hundreds of miles from those borders.
There was no single Fort Sumter moment — although an argument could be made that the battle for the munitions depot at Langley Air Force Base in mid-December was a tipping point — but by New Year’s Day of 2025, the unthinkable had happened: the United States of America had ceased to exist, and in its place, seven new nations engaged in a Second Civil War for supremacy on the North American continent.
In 2041, if you count Hawai’i and Greenland, the Free Republic of Cascadia is one of fourteen nations that arose out of the wreckage of the old United States, Canada, and Mexico.
Sharon sighs and looks at the spot where her imaginary Obama had been standing, feeling the ache of isolation that comes with a job like this one, wishing she could talk to someone who could understand.
She puts the battered report back into the desk and turns to pick up the top-secret report she has been avoiding from the pile at her elbow.
She scans the executive summary, and the knotty weight that lives just behind her sternum pulls heavier. Her overworked economics team is confirming that a major recession is brewing, and there’s not a whole hell of a lot she can do about it without violating either the laws of economics or Cascadia, or both.
The door bangs open, and Tony Chuy strides in, his hair looking wild. She knows from experience that this means bad news. He slaps a printout down on the corner of her desk. She arches an eyebrow at him, as if to say How dare you treat my desk that way! He knows her well enough to know he dare not drag out the bad news any further. With an effort, he manages to sputter it out.
“They did it! They fucking did it! The full Uni just passed the goddamn NERA 727 to 341!” he pauses to take a breath and rake his hands through his hair again, rewilding it.
She tries to do some mental math, afraid of what she might find.
“Sixty-eight percent. If you’re doing the math, it’s sixty-eight percent. Veto-proof.”
He resumes torturing his hair, picks up the printout and scans it, as if the numbers might have changed, and then throws it back down on her desk.
Sharon taps her fingers against her lips, thinking.
She knew her influence in the Unicameral was waning, but she hadn’t expected outright defeat. And certainly not a veto-proof majority, which bears the sting of a personal rebuke.
But why?
Are people still so goddamn stupid and afraid? She asks herself, grimacing at the nearly instantaneous internal response. The last thirty-plus years of politics has taught her that, yes, people are exactly so uninformed and afraid that they will willingly vote against their own self-interests. Over and over and over again, in fact.
The country is dipping into a recession that nearly two decades of sustained infrastructure spending can’t keep them out of. Combined with inflation and soaring energy prices, the timing for a breakthrough in nuclear fusion had seemed like a godsend. Her entire adult life, safe and efficient nuclear fusion had been “just a decade away”, elusively slipping with every passing year ten more years into the future, like a highway heat mirage, or a rainbow, always up in the distance, nearly close enough to reach.
But they’d done it, the researchers at the University of Tahoma and the Cascadia National Laboratory. They’d finally cracked the code — something about the shape and strength of the magnetic field, and some innovative new superconductor material, she recalled — and had built a fully functional fusion reactor, seeming to open the door to a future where Cascadia’s destiny was truly its own, safe and free and energy independent.
And the public had freaked out.
Admittedly, before her career in politics, she’s not sure she had understood the difference between splitting atoms apart and smashing them together, either. But a free society, with a free press and widespread access to the rebuilt, Cascadia-wide internet meant that fringe ideas and disinformation spread — often faster than the truth.
Now, some retrograde alliance of Greens, Conservatives, NeoAmericans, and religious factions had joined forces in the unicameral Congress to pass the Nuclear Energy Regulation Act, a byzantine piece of crap legislation that had the — carefully intended — effect of functionally banning the construction of any new fission or fusion plant on Cascadian territory.
Looking at the numbers, it seemed clear that there had been a significant number of defections from her own party, the New Progressive Alliance, too. A surge of anger built up inside her until she smacked her open palm onto the gleaming wood of her desk.
“Goddamnit! God fucking dammint! How did we let this happen, Tony?”
Her Chief of Staff seemed to come to his senses, tried to comb his glossy black hair into some semblance of order, and considered his responses.
“We didn’t get out in front of the messaging fast enough, boss. We forgot the lessons of the past: people don’t trust science. And they really don’t trust politicians. When something seems like the combination of science and politics, they tend to push back hard.
“There’s a malaise out there, in the country. We’ve spent all these years trying to build a safe and stable nation after the Catastrophes, and in a lot of ways, it worked.
“But tension is rising with the threat from Brazil and the Confederacy, and their brewing war with Texas. Climate keeps getting worse. All those new farms we created just got decimated with the drought and the fires. And inflation is stomping the heart out of the average family budget. Big spending may have saved us before, but it no longer sounds like the right thing to most people.”
He shrugged, chewing on a thumbnail. Sharon wonders for the umpteenth time in their long association how he had any fingernails or hair left; all of his stress seemed focused on keratin destruction.
“Also, this is a total non-sequitur, but I’m pretty sure Weissman is going to lose in California.”
Sharon’s head snapped up to look at him, momentarily nonplussed.
“Wait, what? Janice is going to lose? What makes you think so?” she asked.
“It’s not me. It’s her guy, Mercedo, who told me. They are looking at some disastrous numbers against that billionaire asshole, Garcia.”
“But it’s still weeks away. There’s time to turn it around.”
Tony just looked at her, still gnawing on a thumbnail. He slowly started shaking his head.
“No, ma’am. Not with these numbers. He told me some of the cross-tabs, and...it’s bad. It would take a miracle for her to win at this point, and those kinds of miracles don’t happen in politics, not since...I don’t know...fuckin’ Trump, maybe?”
They were both silent for a moment, lost in their own thoughts.
“Well, fuck. I’m glad you told me, Tony, but what made you think of this now?”
He stabbed a finger at the vote tally sheet sitting on her desk.
“Because of that. Because that vote, and Weissman, your ostensible political ally, losing in California, all point in the same direction.
“You’re running again, ma’am, and that’s fucking great. No one is more thrilled about that than I am, believe me. But we have less than thirteen months to turn this shit around, and right now, to be honest? I have no fucking idea how we do that.”
Sharon glared at him for a moment, and then tried to remember not to shoot the messenger. She softened her gaze.
She knew it was going to be hard. Heck, everyone did. The early polling showed her neck and neck in just about every conceivable matchup, and at this stage, for an incumbent, that was never a good sign.
“Do you know how we fix this, ma’am?”
She sighed. Tried to pull her words together, and gave up.
“I do not. I really don’t, Tony.” She pauses and takes a sip of her long-cold coffee.
“But I do know that you and I have overcome worse. We’ve had some hard times in this fucking job, and we’ve always figured it out before.
“And you know what my Nana used to say, you’ve heard me say it a hundred times. ‘Sometimes there’s nothing to do but the doing.’”
They smile at each other as they ponder the vagaries of her political career and how he’d been there as her right hand for nearly every step of the way.
“The one thing I know for sure? What we need is no more surprises.” She points at the paper again. “No more surprises like this one. No more fucking surprises, period, end of sentence.”
He grins at her and is opening his mouth to say something, when the phone on her desk buzzes and her senior admin’s voice cuts through.
“Ma’am? I’m sorry to interrupt, but I’ve got Vice President Patterson here to see you. He says it’s urgent.”
Sharon and Tony shoot each other inquiring looks.
Sharon whispers, even though she knows no one else can hear them, “Fuck. Patterson reached out to me a couple of days ago, and I pushed him off and told him to talk to you. Did he?”
“Double fuck. No. He called my office yesterday, and I didn’t get back to him either.”
“So, you don’t know what this is?”
Tony shakes his head, submitting his other thumbnail to dental abuse.
Sharon sighs, a theme for the day. “Well, I guess we’d better get him in here and find out what the Vice President thinks is so goddamn important, eh?”
Sharon presses the button on the phone. “Thanks, Tina. Can you please send Vice President Patterson in now?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
The double doors at the end of the room open, and a tall, late-middle-aged man strides in. Bryan Patterson had been a good-looking man in his youth, and age had been kind to him, even if he was now a bit portly.
A football player who had peaked in college, he had gone on to marry into a family that owned a chain of successful car dealerships in the Spokane area. He had had an unremarkable career in area politics until the Catastrophes and the establishment of Cascadia.
He’d built a reputation for himself as an admirable, if unremarkable, legislator in the Unicameral, and then as the first governor of Spokan state, right after the devolution of the old state lines into the thirty-five smaller states Ben Cohen had advocated for.
When Sharon had been selecting running mates for her comeback in ’38, Patterson had been a safe, obvious choice.
Sharon stands up to welcome the man into the office, stepping in front of her desk to shake his hand. She directs him to sit on the overstuffed sofas, and Tony, comfortable in the office after all this time, pours all three of them a splash of Pend Oreille whiskey Sharon kept in the office for moments like this.
“Mr. Vice President, how good to see you. How are Delilah and the kids?”
“Oh, you know. Life keeps chugging along. Tommy’s got another baby on the way. Mary’s just announced to us that she’s getting divorced. Steve got a job that keeps him traveling across the country, but he loves it, I guess. The usual ups and downs.”
She smiles, inwardly cringing at the way the man added a “t” at the end of the word “across”. She takes a sip of the whiskey and nods.
“Well, please give everyone my love and best wishes.”
She smiles, and he nods, a strange look washing across his face.
“Well, I will, ma’am, but you may want to reconsider that when you hear what I’ve got to say.”
Sharon keeps her face neutral, but can see Tony shoot her a look from the other end of the sofa they’re both sitting on, facing the Vice President.
“OK, Bryan. I know that we’ve been remiss in getting back to you in the last couple of days, but I’m listening. What’s going on?”
The man rubs his hand across his face, takes a sip of the whiskey, and grunts mildly at the burn.
“Well, ma’am, there’s no good way to say this, so I’m just gonna come out with it. You know I’m grateful that you chose to put me on the ticket three years ago...”
He trails off, and the gnawing sensation in her gut that she wasn’t going to like this becomes dramatically more pronounced.
She nods, her face a mask. In a flash, she knows where this is going.
“But you thought this was going to be a stepping stone.”
The vice president chuffs into his whiskey glass and nods, looking up to meet her eyes.
“I think it’s reasonable to conclude that every veep in history has assumed that the job would be a stepping stone, don’t you?
“When you didn’t announce you were running again for so long, I started to make plans, ma’am. And due respect? You didn’t talk to me about anything. About what you were thinking or not thinking. You didn’t keep me in the loop. And so...”
“Mister Vice President...Bryan...I’d strongly urge you to reconsider this.” She tries to put steel into her words, but she knows they have no weight or force to make this man change his mind.
“No ma’am, I don’t think I will.” He pauses and finishes the whiskey in a single gulp, sets the glass down, and stands up from the sofa.
“I came here to tell you in person. I’m tendering my resignation as the Vice President of Cascadia, effective whenever you wish, but no later than October 15th.
“On October 17th, my birthday, I am going to announce that I am running against you for the nomination to be the presidential candidate for the New Progressive Alliance.”
She glares at him, saying nothing.
“And I should also let you know that I’ve got most of the New Dems lined up and ready to endorse, and a decent number of the Hamiltonians. Now, I’m not the kind to make threats, ma’am, especially if I can’t keep ‘em, but the NDs are prepared to split if I don’t get the nom.”
Sharon and Tony both stand. Puzzle pieces are fitting together now. Tony speaks before she can.
“The NERA vote. You did that. You orchestrated the defeat, making us look weak. Making sure it was veto-proof. And now you’re going to announce, and use that as your theory of the case against the President.”
Patterson can’t hide the small smile that flits across his face; Sharon made a mental note and thinks that she should have played poker with the son of a bitch a couple of times over the years. At least then she could have gotten the measure of the man, and taught him some humility with a shitty poker face like that.
Patterson glances at Tony, but then looks directly back at Sharon.
“Truth is, I think you’re weak across the board, ma’am. I know you’ve got things going on at home, but this country needs leadership. You might have been that once, but it’s time for you to step aside and let someone with fresh eyes lead this nation.”
Ice runs through Sharon’s veins, and she makes several quick decisions.
“Well, Mr. Vice President, I appreciate the courage it took to come here today to tell me this in person. I am accepting your resignation, and it is effective immediately. My office will take care of the messaging.”
The vice president blanches a bit at her brusque tone, and she once again wonders how someone could make it this far in politics broadcasting every tell like that. She turns to Tony.
“Tony, please notify all departments of Vice President Patterson’s removal from the chain of command. Figure out with Secret Service how to transition his coverage.”
She pauses for effect.
“Oh, and pull up the file of everyone we put on the shortlist for veep. We can take a look at that as soon as Bryan leaves.”
She strides to her desk and punches the button on her phone.
“Tina, can you come in here right away, please?”
Almost as if the woman had been anticipating the request, mere seconds later, Tina Newton comes into the office, pad and pen at the ready.
“Tina, I need you to witness something for me.”
The short, older woman nods and inquires simply, “Video?”
Sharon gives a curt nod, and Tina pulls out her phone to record and flashes a thumbs up when she hits the button.
“This is Sharon Walker-Nilssen, President of the Free Republic of Cascadia. Today is Thursday, October 3rd, 2041. With me in the office, I have Tony Chuy, Chief of Staff, and Tina Newton, my executive admin. As you can see, I am also with Vice President Bryan Patterson, who at...,” She pauses and looks at her watch.
“At approximately 2:45 this afternoon informed me that he is resigning as Vice President of the Free Republic of Cascadia. It is now 2:52 pm, and effective immediately, I am accepting his resignation.
“Mr. Patterson, you are now free from your duties and responsibilities as the vice president of this country. Thank you for your service.”
She nods at Tina, who cuts the recording.
Patterson explodes, “You can’t do it that way! How dare you!”
Sharon smiles. “Tina, could you please post that video to CascadiaNet as soon as possible?”
The now-former vice president splutters.
“You are making a huge mistake! You can’t do it like this!”
“Mr. Patterson, I think you’ll find that I can, in fact, not only do it this way, but that I already have. You wanted to be free of your role so that you could come for my job? Well, good luck to you, sir. If you didn’t think that this was a declaration of war, then I’m not sure you’d be a very good fit for this office.”
Patterson stands for a moment, mouth opening and closing like a broken robot, his face turning deeper shades of pink.
“Mr. Patterson, I think this meeting is over. Would you mind giving the President and me some privacy so we can discuss your replacement?”
Patterson flushes a deeper pink and looks as though he’s trying to think of something smart to say, and then nods, and walks stiffly out the double doors.
Sharon sags back against the edge of her desk and blows out a long, slow breath. Tony steps over to the crystal whiskey decanter and brings it over to refill their glasses.
He pours two fingers of whiskey for them both, and they clink glasses and sit quietly for several moments.
Finally, Tony breaks the silence and says, “So, I think you were saying something about no more surprises?”
Sharon chokes on a sip of whiskey and nearly does a spit-take. She looks at him, eyebrows arched in surprise, and then they both dissolve into fits of desperation-tinged laughter.
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As always, Lawrence, simply the best. At this point, when I read the words, it’s your voice in my head.
I love this premise. I've dreamt about our whole government starting over like in designated survivor. I've written two urban paranormal romance books that feature Cascadia as its own country. But due to chaos following global warming, pandemics, and the Cascadia fault slipping at the same time as the San Andreas.