Without warning

They slowed down to negotiate a large but docile crowd that had gathered at the Fort DeRussy parklands for a food-distribution point run by the army. A dozen trucks were parked in a line before an avenue of olive-drab tents. Soldiers were unloading hundreds of boxes, stacking them in neat piles guarded by colleagues toting rifles. It was still a bizarre, unnatural sight – Americans lined up like victims of a Honduran earthquake to score a bowl of rice or a milk biscuit. Culver pushed the images out of his mind and returned to his papers, making some untidy margin notes on a briefing he had to deliver later that day at a telephone hook-up between the attorneys-general of the surviving states.

Admiral Ritchie was adamant that the armed forces could not continue drifting through the constitutional limbo into which they had been cast. It was not simply a matter of requiring political direction for the course of the hot war they were now fighting in the Middle East. There were security nightmares springing up like poison weeds all over the world, as well as some very basic and uncomfortable questions of sustainability for those forces that remained in existence.

‘How do we keep going?’ Ritchie had asked Jed late last night.

Culver thought the admiral might as well have asked, ‘Why should we keep going?’ He couldn’t imagine what was holding together a fighting force that had nothing to fight for anymore, and increasingly lacked the money to do so.

Immediate survival, he supposed. But if and when the immediate peril was no longer there, what then? A nation of ten million people – that was the rough estimate of living, breathing American citizens left in the world – a nation that small could not sustain a military even a fraction the size of the one it had at the moment. Especially not with most of the country sealed off behind an impenetrable and utterly mysterious barrier. Frankly, Culver doubted whether the area that remained unaffected on the continent was viable in the medium term anyway. He grunted almost imperceptibly as he briefly thought of all those people stuck in Seattle and just across the border in Vancouver. None of them could be certain some natural fluctuation in the event horizon wouldn’t gobble them up in the blink of an eye, although, by that measure of course, nobody on the planet could really feel safe.

You had to wonder how much of the chaos wrapping itself like giant bat wings around the world was down to the effect of that uncertainty rather than the unsettling effect of simply removing at one stroke the massive political ballast represented by America… Oh, screw it. It was undergrad bullshitting, all of it. The only thing that mattered was fixing the problems he could fix, and for now that meant stabilising the remnant power of the United States and securing the immediate future of his family.

The lawyer flipped open his laptop and began to compose an email to Ritchie. He wanted to bounce a few ideas off the admiral before the conference call in the afternoon.

‘Hey Ritch,’ he began, very deliberately using the informal style of address he’d cultivated in his dealings with the navy man.

You asked for my thoughts on the line of succession before I wrote them up for the reference group. Well, I’m thinking the only way to punch through all this is to go back to first principles. We’ve got us a constitutional boondoggle. We need us a constitutional convention to stamp it flat. A short, sharp, butt-kicking convention.

Normally you’d require a vote of two-thirds of the state legislatures just to get everyone together. It’s the only amendatory process available in the absence of a functioning Congress and Senate. The intent of the relevant section of the Constitution, Article 5, is that the ‘two-thirds’ would be ‘two-thirds’ of all of the states, but that is impossible under present circumstances.