Jack of Harts

The Socialist Republic of Juneau Life Debt was originally imagined as the debt every person owed Juneau for giving them life. It was a running average, applied at birth, or the creation of the Life Debt system, to every person in Juneau. It could be adjusted as time went on, based on the average costs, or on specific activities of the individual person in question. If they caused trouble, or generally caused more expenses for Juneau, their Life Debt could be increased. While if they did valuable service that helped Juneau, their Life Debt would be decreased. Every service from plowing the fields to performing government paperwork decreased the Life Debt, with the obvious goal being to perform your assigned service until you zeroed out the Life Debt and earned the…right to life itself. The key concept was that a person’s life belonged to Juneau until they achieved a Zero Balance. That was the secret of the Life Debt system. Its greatest strength and greatest weakness at the same time. It was the goal that all people in Juneau sought, and far too few achieved.

The Socialist Republic of Juneau was not a founding member of Pacifica. The networks had been ravaged enough that communications with the Lower Forty Eight was spotty at best for several years. But once they found out that their ideological friends in Portland, Seattle, and San Francisco had banded together, they jumped at the opportunity to join. Yes, there were Capitalist Pigs in Vancouver, and Royal Pigs in Hawaii, but they could be dealt with in time. What mattered was that, for once in America, The People’s Collectives were finally beginning to take a true measure of control. Their eventual victory was ensured. So Juneau simply absorbed all of the resources it could collect around it, and sent those who didn’t want to participate in the collective outside their ever-expanding borders. They acquired the entire Juneau Panhandle before the Second Great Depression ended, though found it impossible to expand into the rest of Alaska and imprudent to take any Canadian lands. So they sat back and waited. Their times would come. The socially selected leaders of Juneau had no doubt that their times would come.

Unfortunately for the Socialist Republic of Juneau, there were a finite number of resources in Juneau itself, so they had to go forth and collect more from the surrounding communities. These selfless efforts saved many thousands of lives and the collective prospered as time went by and they added new communities. They also found less wasteful ways to cast out the disloyal as their power grew. Once they had access to continental land, they simply dropped those who would not fit in with their new society on dry land outside their borders and let them go off to find whatever life they wished to live outside the bounds of civilization. The Socialist Republic of Juneau had to focus its efforts on saving those who wished to work for the collective, but they always maintained an open immigration policy. Even those who left were welcomed back if they realized the error of their ways and returned to prove their willingness to contribute to the collective. There were always fields that needed plowing after all, and a single shift’s labor would grant any citizen a daily ration allotment.