The Dust and the Dream
2025.7.2
Setting: The Republic of Texas, Year 2048
It’s early morning in San Jacinto City, the Republic’s new capital, carved from the bones of old Austin. The red sun creeps over the scorched horizon, casting long shadows through solar towers and permacrete bunkhouses. On the breeze, you smell mesquite smoke, dry earth, engine oil, and blooming desert sage.
This is Texas now—not the state.
The Republic.
Not the past reborn, but something else entirely: post-collapse grit wrapped in solar panels and pride.
The New Texan
Her name is Rosalía Vega, and she wakes up every morning at 4:30 to pray, stretch, and drink thick black coffee brewed with harvested rainwater. Her hands are calloused from welding heat sink panels onto microgrids. Her boots are secondhand. Her hat is inherited.
She’s 27. She doesn’t trust federal anything. She believes in God, in liberty, in fixing her own engines. But she also knows her wind turbine’s firmware like the back of her hand. She believes the world burned because people gave up on local control.
She has a tattoo on her wrist that reads:
“Free Soil, Free Code.”
It’s the unofficial motto of her generation.
A Culture Forged in Fire
The old clichés about Texas still linger—guns, cattle, ten-gallon egos—but they’ve been melted down and reforged in the crucible of the secession. Texans today carry themselves with a new kind of confidence—not superiority, but self-determination.
They joke that in the Republic, you can:
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Ride a horse to the voting booth.
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Grow your own meat in a bioreactor barn.
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Use an AR headset to identify invasive weeds.
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Open carry a rifle and a weather drone.
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Homeschool your kids in philosophy and thermodynamics.
Independence isn’t just political. It’s personal.
Texans aren’t anti-technology—they’re anti-fragility. The difference matters.
The Way It Changed
After the Declaration of Republichood in 2047, the federal government threatened sanctions. It didn't last. Texas held the refineries, the rare earth smelters, the border gateways, and more solar output than most of the U.S. combined. It struck energy-for-recognition deals with struggling nations. In months, its economy rebooted under its own rules.
The Republic’s constitution was radically short—just seven articles—but every citizen carried a physical copy in their digital wallet or worn in brass around their neck.
Religion flourished, but not just the old kinds. Church services were held in barns and code forums. Some communities followed techno-Deism, others returned to old Baptist or Native traditions. Spirituality in Texas was like its music: rooted, raw, and remixable.
Life in San Jacinto City
Rosalía walks through Tech Square, where sunshields hang between adobe towers and street vendors sell tamales next to codebase troubleshooting stations. The “City Grid” is entirely local—no Big Cloud dependency. The power co-ops are run by communities, not corporations.
She’s on her way to the Local Guild Forum—today’s agenda: Should the Republic outlaw water export contracts to foreign entities? The West Texas reservoirs are low again.
She’ll cast her vote via the blockchain-secured Commons Deck, powered by wind and audited by community review panels. In the Republic, voting is frequent, local, and binding.
She passes murals painted on old overpasses: a woman in braids welding a solar panel. A steer made of circuitry. The Alamo covered in vines.
Underneath one, the words:
“We remember. We rewire.”
The Rough Edges
The Republic isn’t perfect.
East Texas still wrestles with religious hardliners. Border towns live in a strange tension between sovereignty and cultural flux. Climate change still bites hard—droughts, firestorms, food insecurity.
But here, people face it. They don’t wait for Washington. They patch up what’s broken. They hunt when supply chains fail. They barter, jury-rig, and build.
And if the heat gets too high, they meet at the town square with guitars and jugs of sun tea, and sing like it’s still 1895.
The Psyche of a People
Texans in 2048 are proud—but not blindly.
They are weary—but not broken.
They are armed—not to threaten, but to protect what’s theirs: their soil, their families, their dignity.
They talk about freedom like it’s a sacred contract. But not the loud kind. The kind you keep when no one’s watching. The kind you earn in sweat.
Ask them if they miss America, and you’ll get a hundred different answers.
Ask them if they’re free now, and you’ll get just one.
In the Republic of Texas, liberty is not a souvenir.
It’s a lived thing.
Like dust on your boots.
Like sun in your eyes.
Like the quiet sound of something worth keeping, being built from scratch again.