In the twenty-first century, America disintegrated under the weight of philosophic enmity that pit Liberal against Conservative, white against nonwhite, and everyone against the rich. Decades of political scapegoating, intemperate debate, and the news industry’s relentless focus on the drama of confrontation led to incessant communal violence in the racially mixed and regionally fractious country. The nation, armed to the teeth by dint of the Second Amendment, finally exploded .
In the west, in addition to the scourge of fraternal warfare, three successive violent earthquakes changed the geography along the whole of the San Andreas Fault, beginning in the mid-eighties of the twenty-first century. The three quakes (Richter 7.4, 8.1, and 7.7, and hundreds of attendant aftershocks) tangled the earth and water from Baja to Vancouver. It was as if the earth had tried to shake itself free of the infestation of humanity and its malice.
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Twenty thousand men-at-arms bivouacked on the mud flats outside San Francisco’s Great South Wall, which was actually an impenetrable two-mile–wide sea of urban rubble that surrounded the remaining core of the city. The invaders had not seen their homes in Los Angeles for two years.
The Army of Los Angeles was assembled to capture and rebuild the California Aqueduct. After a grueling and violent march up the length of the Aqueduct to the Sacramento Delta, the ALA deviated from its mandate and laid siege to San Francisco, its eternal archenemy. For both sides, this new war fulfilled craven needs bred by centuries of contempt, derision, and poisonous myths.
The invader’s grievance was that, unprovoked, San Franciscans had fought alongside the settlements of the Sacramento Delta and central California as they tried to stop LA’s twenty-second century water grab. The Angelenos believed the San Franciscans had fought for spite’s sake. On the other hand, the ecology-conscious San Franciscans had considered their futile aid to the Delta settlements to be a moral obligation: to thwart the Angeleno despoilers of the Earth.