We're living in Myra's timeline.

"The future is already here -- it's just not very evenly distributed."
-- William Gibson

Back in 2012 or so, as part of Replay Value AU, Zuki and I embarked on a worldbuilding project we called "Gritstuck". The idea was to extrapolate Homestuck's concept of a "pre-scratch" and a "post-scratch" world -- the post-scratch Earth being the result of the manipulation of the pre-scratch Earth to create much more competent Sburb players, at the cost of the stability of the rest of the world, and create a story about the players who came from such a world. To build this dystopia, we linearly extrapolated what we were seeing on the news at the time: political gridlock culminating in the election of a president in 2016 who finished eroding civil rights to nothingness, wealth inequality built up to Gilded Age levels, enormous shantytowns in major cities, the police brazenly patrolling the streets in full military gear attacking journalists and medical professionals, omnipresent digital surveillance making resistance terribly, terribly dangerous, Occupy on the streets and Anonymous on the web. The year we set this in was 2020.

Every single one of these things has come true. (Though I hadn't expected the pandemic, too.)

To build the characters who lived in this world, we learned about anarcho-communism and horizontal organization, about the kind of ideals that it would take to pull hope out of this situation. I consumed as many internet articles from the Left as I could get my hands on, followed /r/anarchism for much of a year as a sort of participant-observer process, and began to think. Really think. Why is our society shaped like it is? And what would a better world look like?

For a while I was trying to write this up as some sort of Sburb story. For another while I was trying to write this up as a novel. Eventually I gave up on trying. But one of the characters Zuki and I built for that setting - Myra - has remained a metaphorical voice in my head. She helped push me to face my PTSD, challenged my instinctive responses to seeing homeless people, made me watch how I interacted with the people I saw when I was in public assistance offices.

I've never been bold enough to follow in her footsteps. I can't. The shape of my childhood PTSD means that when an authority figure yells at me, I am crumpled on the floor, crying with incomprehensible early developmental terror, saying anything they want me to say. I'm not out there with the marches because I would be an active liability. So I write, like Marat in the bath. (Though hopefully without the advocating mass executions part.)

In 2016 I felt betrayed and afraid, because the election felt like it had plunged us into her timeline. But now in 2020, I'm oddly calm about it. This is what our world is now. The only thing we can do is live in it.