Jack of Harts

I’ve been writing in the Jack of Harts universe for over a decade now, and it is very close to our universe, with a few steps to the side that make it different. I had this idea of a dark future that collapsed into a Second Great Depression or Second Civil War approximately thirty years from now. What is this dark future I had written?

Massive deficit spending that stressed the economy to the breaking point. The Leader of the House of Representatives performing an Impeachment against the sitting President and Vice President in an election year. Followed by in-your-face election fraud to keep the President from being re-elected. Add yet ANOTHER Chinese pandemic and economic collapse and rioting in the big cities to the mix. That was my thought for what a dark future thirty years from now could look like.

Ahem. How the future flies. I’ve had people asking me what came next. Well… buckle up buttercup…

Really short term, there was rigorous prosecution of the previous President, along with those who enabled and/or supported him. Cleansing them from the networks, getting them fired from their jobs, and generally seeking to drive them from public society. There was the attempted arrest of the previous President and Vice President. That escalated into fighting in the streets as Texas fought Federal agents seeking to bring the previous President in. And the Vice President over in Virginia WAS arrested. Mass protests, looting, burning, and many big cities basically collapsing under their own weight. Numerous State governments had to evacuate their own capital cities, and not all of them were welcomed with open arms by the country bumpkin neighbors they ran to. Things escalated into numerous States effectively going into a soft-secession from the federal government. They were still American. But they didn’t accept orders from the federal government anymore. This by the way, all going on as the federal government defaulted on its debts, had many of its foreign assets confiscated by those nations it owed its debts too, and a massive Second Great Depression was engulfing the world.

Basically… really bad.

I used a Convention of States as my “giant reset” for the Jack universe and chose to take the “mostly good” version of the Convention, versus the “seriously bad” versions that some have worried would happen. Which helped us to generally build a world where we would like to live. Generally free. Generally prosperous. And with the visual of the Republic of Texas flying its flag OVER the American flag. And that being normal to them, not treason. They are Texans. AND they are Americans. Both.

I’ve always said Jack was a world where we got things mostly right. Jack grew up in an idealized Northern Minnesota for instance, where he fished and swam and went to school and did all the things normal small town and country kids get to do. It was heaven as far as he was concerned. All he wanted. But the background of Jack is that we only got there after going far darker than I would like to live through. I do not want to live through the short term of what I wrote. I really hope I don’t get to…

But oh, how the future flies.