I'm Robert Evans. You probably know me from my podcast Behind the Bastards in my two thousand nineteen series It Could Happen Here, which was a rather unsparing look at the possibility of a second American Civil War. Well, that's actually an idea I've been playing around with for a long time, ever since I was a young man traveling throughout the American Southwest and watching the opening fractures of
the culture war that currently crypts our country. Starting in the mid auts, I began traveling to actual war zones and Ukraine, Iraq, and Syria. That further informed my thinking on the matter, and I started working on a novel called After the Revolution, which you're about to have a chance to listen too soon. After the Revolution is set in a future United States shattered by Civil War. Most of the book takes place in what was once Texas and is now an independent republic in the American South.
It follows three characters, which I'm about to introduce you to now. First is Manny, a fixer who lives in the independent city of Austin. Manny smiled the way the British journalist's face blanched as the old Toyota hit the pothole. Reggie wasn't used to bad roads, cars driven by actual humans, or the way the heavy metal of the gun mountain the truck bed made the aluminum frame grown. That was
all familiar to Manny. He'd grown up in Siodad de Muerta, back before the lake would blast, back when people had still called it Dallas. The truck's driver veered around the bloated corpse of a large dog lying in the middle of the road. Reggie gripped the truck bed with white knuckles and eyed the swaying AMMO belt of the twenty millimeter cannon like it was a coiled snake. The gunner, Manny's cousin, Alejandro, grinned down at the journalist. The suspension's
a little fucked, yeh. The Briton nodded and turned greener when the technical hid another pothole. Many supposed he should offer a comforting word to the man. That would be good business, but a louder part of him looked at Reggie's brand new boots and thought he can stand a little discomfort. The journalist would brag about this ride for months once he got home, Escorting reporters from the safety of Austin to the sundry hotspots of the Old Metroplex
was not Manny's ideal career. Two years ago, he'd been working on a bachelor's in business administration from the University of Austin. The plan had been to get a job with Ages Biosystems, then charm his way into a working visa and a gig in the California Republic. But the fighting had started up again and ruined all that. The culprit this time was the Heavenly Kingdom, a loose assortment
of Christian extremist militias. They'd boiled out from the suburbs of the Old Metroplex and all but broken the Republic of Texas. The Autonomous City of Austin had stabilized the situation with the help of an alliance of leftist Texan militias the Secular Defense Forces. Beating them back had cost a lot in blood and time and forced Manny to change every plan he'd ever had for his life. So he'd embraced the situation and started his own business, hiring
on some friends as employees. Together they'd built the best network of stringers in North Texas. His boys fed him video contacts and news updates, and he sold what he could to the big foreign media conglomerates. In a couple more months, he'd have enough saved up that he could fuck off, fly to Europe and apply for a refugee Viza. My aunts are pretty good as long as the war doesn't end too soon. Second is Sasha, a girl on the verge of adulthood in the American Republic, which makes
up most of the Northeast coast. She is secretly a Christian extremist, planning to leave her home and family behind to travel to the Heavenly Kingdom. The drone gun rotated on its axis and brought a new, slightly different chunk of city escape into view. The world was a dull gray green color through the lens of the weapon's camera. Once again, there were no humans in sight. That was the norm, but Sasha still logged in for her scheduled
gun time every day. Her pay rants would have been mortified if they'd known how she was spending her few hours of free time, but she had a good VPN, or at least it was good enough to hide her activity from her non tech savvy elders. She doubted they'd ever suspect her of something like this. Sasha was a good student. Her grades guaranteed her admission to the American University in d C. At one point, she'd had a shot at being her high school's valedictorian and maybe of
gaining admission to Stanford. But then she discovered the true Gospel and given herself to Christ. Her grades were still good, but probably not good enough to earn her an educational visa to the California Republic. The extra time the old heir had dedicated to school was now spent glued to a gun camp, browsing live feeds from various Christian militias, and reading everything she could from the few pastors brave
enough to preach the word. The new herd didn't want to go to school near San Francisco, capital of what Pastor Mike had called the world's most sinful nation. Sasha didn't even really want to go to college in d C. What was the point? Sash her dad called from the kitchen, dinners on cheese Enchilada's. There was still nothing in her line of sight. For the eleventh month in a row, she was spending sixty five AM fed dollars for the privilege of staring through a camera at nothing for a
half hour a day. Sasha had been warned about this when she'd signed up to support the Woodlands Martyrs Brigade. Their drone guns didn't see much action. The front had been stable for the last year. Rumors said the number of backers had even gotten to fire during their turn was under a dozen. Sasha had hoped she'd be a special case. Something moved. Just as she thought about killing the app and going downstairs, something moved across her drones
field of vision. It happened again, and Sasha realized that the somethings were armored soldiers sprinting past her weapon. She locked the drone on one and for the first time ever, selected the fire approval button. A second went by, then another, and then a red box replaced her firing redicule. Target declined friendly fire. Sasha her mother called up in that grating voice that miant. She was almost frustrated enough to
start yelling get down here. Next is Roland, an aging veteran who lives alone in the desert with a body full of U. S. Army cyberware and a head full of missing memories. He woke up suddenly aware of two equally pressing problems. The acids worn off and eight people are here to kill me. Both of these facts concerned him equally. He couldn't remember his name or where exactly he was, which made the impending killed him all the more concerning. He opened his eyes, His vision was blurry
and unfocused. His head felt filled with sand. Rowland, Oh ship, that's my name. Roland wondered how long he'd been asleep. He reflexively triggered his deck before the dim firing of a synapse reminded him that he'd permanently disabled his datic connection well a long time ago. Milion two or twenty six minutes his hindbrain, what Roland called the acres of microscott processors and data banks, spun into his blood. Spat
the knowledge out, unbidden into his conscious mind. Roland tried to curse, but wound up spitting out a wad of brackish flim instead. His eyes settled on a quarter full bottle of fungus whiskey. He grabbed it, drained it, and rooted around on the table where he'd found it until his digging turned up a sheet of acid. He ripped the sheet in half, ate one half and pasted the other on his sweat damp chest. Roland's brain didn't wait for the acid to do its job. Nano machines couriered
the lysurgic diethyl acid directly to his synapses. The drugs took cold in a matter of seconds. Acid softened the world around him. His hindbrains running commentary faded into a sort of generalized hyper awareness of the world around him. He sighed, relaxed, and remembered. Woman hovered over him, her hands on his shoulders, her knees on either side of his body. Sweat dripped down from her short black hair onto his face and chest. Her pupils were the size
of dinner plates. She smelled like acid and desire. She smiled, revealing a row of Damascus steel. Heath Roland pulled himself out of the memory. He felt the strike team advance. His hindbrain generated a map of the approaching assassins. They were still a solid minute from his hovel. There were
six men and two women on the team. If he'd wanted a micro seconds focus could have told him which members of the group were vegetarians, where two of the team were on their minstrel cycles and how recently each of their firearms had been cleaned and oiled. But Roland didn't care about that information. He was trying to remember where he'd left his gun. Listen to After the Revolution every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.