Prolog
After the Third World War, America was split into three. Rex Santander is a bright but mentally broken engineer, living in a cartel controlled Phoenix. On his way home, he picks up a hitchhiker named Karma. He soons discovers she is an augmented person, and on the run from the mob she just betrayed. With them on her tail and Rex deciding to help – both are now doomed to gruesome death. Having no choice but to escape to the north, they quickly realize that life beyond the border is not at all what was promised, and the further they go, the more hellish it gets.
CNG (Cartel Nueva Generacíon) controls the drug supply together with the Asian proxies inside North America. Expanding its reach after the War, CNG now controls California, Arizona, New Mexico, and parts of Utah, Texas, and Oregon. Old progressive culture is lost on the territories under the Cartel law. Weakened U.S has no way of dealing with the now almost fully autonomous regions in the west. Cities are dilapidated, disease and crime ridden. Still served by U.S. corporations to provide jobs and food, the relationship between the US, Cascadia and CNG is in stable decline.
The United States is now a rather weak state run by corporations, populist puppets and overindulgent consumerism. Hedonism and personal experiences are absolute. Kinda like Brave New World. In a world where Asia dominates the agenda, the US stitched together with Canada is barely scraping by. The state has its own military, completely funded by the corporations that run everything. People live in pods, stuck in VR entertainment and go to work inside a mega office. A culture of servants, for serving themselves.
After the War, certain conservative leaning north-western regions of the US have undergone a silent coup d’état, expelling thereafter a large number of "untrusted" individuals from their territories (mostly leftists) to the east, resulting in a major overhaul of politics and life inside the new republic. Most of the Western Canada and other conservative states have joined them. The US has concluded it would be best to conserve their military power for other affairs, leaving them in the state of cold war. Cascadia has very limited diplomatic relationship with the US, an extremely well protected border, through which there’s no way out (but there is a way in).
It's an overly militant, nationalistic, eco-preservationist, quasi-luddite, iron-curtained space where people live a simple, hard-working life.
The people however, are also extremely chauvinistic, xenophobic, and violent to those who are deemed enemies. The state of Cascadia is a sort of living organism based on anarchy and libertarianism, where people’s consciousness is bound together. Lynchings, witch-hunting, the right of blood, eye for an eye and on the spot execution are very common place.
It is Cascadia where the herous of the novel are headed, unknowingly getting themselves into a life they will soon regret with tears.