Post Separation Act of 2032
“I know what’s out there. I’ve seen a different time. I’ve seen a different world with my own eyes.”United Socialist States of America
Pleasant Valley, Oregon
May 14, 2049
Dear Jacob,
Your letters arrived in that covax box and lucky I was there to get it! My mom would have seen it’s not like the kind we have here in Oregon. You need to be careful! I told you to just reuse the boxes I send you with my letters so nobody will notice and keep the vials inside. Can you do that for me?
I know it’s hard for you to understand the kind of trouble I could get in. The vaccine boxes are the only thing that doesn’t get double checked by the postal police here after making it through their scanners. I’d be grounded for weeks if they found your letters, and they’d probably report you here and you’d be on their lists. I’ve told you my stepdad Dale is with the sheriff here and he’d definitely do something bad. I don’t even want to think about it!
I loved your latest letters. I stayed up all night reading them last night, over and over again. I can only imagine a world like you describe. You have to understand they switched our networks when I was two. I don’t even remember when our Internets were the same. My friend’s older sister says when she was young she read about life in free states and saw photos of how people just mingle with other people in public places and you have all different kinds of restaurants where people eat together. But then people saw too much of that and wanted those things and that’s around when the networks split and the blackouts started. What is that go duck thing you mentioned in your last letter? We don’t have that. Everything here is powered by google which works with the state. I suppose your go duck thing isn’t the same?
So much of what you write about is so different from here. The only time I ever saw something from your networks was when some kids brought old images to school and we looked at them in the girl’s bathroom. I think I was in 7th grade. I saw a few for myself, even one of people dancing together in a big room with no masks! Word got out to the principal and the girl who brought the pictures was expelled. Her parents had to send her to a private school but then those got banned and she was home schooled. The last we heard she ran away to the free states.
I love your descriptions of where you live Jacob. I often see Texas in my dreams and imagine I’m there with you. I hope that doesn’t sound desperate but you have to understand things are very different here and now that I know so much about what’s out there, it’s like I can’t get it out of my head.
When I saw you at the Lincoln memorial with your cowboy hat and no mask, well, this might sound weird after reading all your letters about how you don’t have to wear masks there, but something happened to me. My heart just started beating real fast and my hands got sweaty. We don’t see people’s faces that much, almost not at all. Here we can only take masks off to shower. There are laws and big fines for people who don’t wear their masks for the full time. Each mask has a chip and a life cycle and it pairs with us so if you lost your mask they’d know it was yours. I still don’t understand how you don’t even have masks at all and how you said people are embarrassed to wear them there because of what happened in the past. What happened in the past you were referring to Jacob? I tried to search for something on google but couldn’t find anything before I was born. That seems strange to me.
