Setting: The Independent Republic of Cascadia, Year 2051
The rain came gently in the early morning—soft, misting droplets that made the air feel alive. Tall cedars stood like sentinels over the hillside town of Silver Glen, nestled in the Olympic foothills. It wasn’t on any old American map anymore. But in Cascadia, Silver Glen was thriving.
Amira Tao woke at 5:43 a.m. to the hum of her wallvine alert system. A glowing green icon bloomed on the wooden wall beside her bed: Grid surplus active — Solar credits available for community pull. She smiled. That meant today’s garden irrigation was covered, and her greenhouse pods could run on surplus without draining the neighborhood’s local microgrid.
She stepped into her rubber boots and jacket—both stitched from algae-fiber mesh—and walked barefoot through the warm wooden floor of her passive-solar home. A real breeze rustled her kitchen herbs, not an artificial breeze from air vents. That was the Cascadian way now: Grow what you use, share what you don’t.
Life in the New Republic
Since independence, Cascadia had rebuilt its society from the roots up.
Gone were the endless car commutes and hollow strip malls. Now: light rail lines, shared e-bikes, and forest-encircled arcologies where homes grew vertically around living trees. Community "Commons Contracts" governed resource usage—water, food, energy—managed transparently via open-source AI overseen by rotating citizen councils.
Silver Glen’s town council met every 10 days, and any citizen could propose an initiative—if they earned enough participation tokens from volunteering, teaching, or producing excess energy. That week’s biggest debate? Whether to expand the wild salmon sanctuary and reduce commercial drone-fishing near the inlet.
Amira’s partner, Leon, worked for the MycoTransit Authority, overseeing fungal-based road material that healed itself after stress fractures. He was out by the coast today, coordinating with a tribal scientist from the Quinault Nation on river flow regulation. In Cascadia, Indigenous nations weren’t just respected—they were co-founders. The legal structure included Stewardship Sovereignties, which meant land use was now governed by traditional and scientific ecological councils.
Their daughter, Juniper, spent mornings at a forest school where lessons included coding, salmon ecology, Chinook Jargon, and cooperative games. Today, her class was restoring a pollinator corridor between rooftop gardens in town. They'd be issued Commons Credits—like mini currency—for every week of community work, which they could use for library access, bike upgrades, or treats at the community café.
Conflict Beneath the Canopy
But life in Cascadia wasn’t perfect.
There were ideological rifts—between the Urban Synths who pushed for more advanced AI governance, and the Soilkeepers who believed everything should stay analog and Earth-rooted. Tensions sometimes flared between urban tech hubs like Portland and rural communities struggling with resource migration.
And the borders were always under strain.
The United States had never formally recognized Cascadia, though trade flowed quietly. Smugglers sometimes brought banned pharmaceuticals across the Idaho border. And some radical groups—both inside and outside Cascadia—wanted to see the experiment fail. Just last month, a rogue militia tried to sabotage the Columbia Dam's AI systems. They were caught—not by police, but by a community of coders in Spokane who’d built in security failsafes.
A Cascadian Evening
That night, Amira and her neighbors gathered in the Commons Hall—a wide circular building built from cross-laminated timber and mycelium. A firepit crackled in the center. Solar lanterns lit the space, and kids danced barefoot between cedar columns.
Juniper stood on a stump and read her class’s Seed Song, written in English and Lushootseed, one of the region’s Indigenous languages:
“We are the roots and we are the rain,Afterward, they passed bowls of stew made from wild mushrooms and lentils grown on the community plot. There was a toast made in rainwater mead, and a quiet moment of thanks—for resilience, for community, for soil underfoot.
We do not forget the fire or pain.
We plant in peace, we grow in grace,
We hold the forest in every place.”
