Greetings, to whoever finds this record.

Hopefully, it finds its way to some future historian in a less perilous time, or perhaps by someone in the coming Millennial Kingdom before this world and all the matter in it are dissolved by fire, that it might help people of that time understand what this present age has been like. By the old common reckoning, I write this in the seventh day of the fifth month after the winter solstice, near the summer of what I believe to be the 2,082nd year of our Lord - you must know that at this time, I cannot guaranteed this as an accurate date.

Accurate reckoning was somewhat lost about sixty years ago, as international communications and standards fell apart during the Great Downturning, and people have over the years localized and keep their times without much regard for accuracy, even inventing new conventions, much to what I would expect to be our mutual frustration. With that in mind, I hope that any future historian who finds this can adjust for whatever comes to be their standard reckoning of time.

A little about myself: I am known as Ryuuichi Johannson, perhaps a rather odd name for the region I live in. One of my grandparents was Japanese, and her husband was enraptured with all things Japanese, and so began a naming convention that has either been a blessing or an annoyance in our family. To familiars, I go by the anglicized name of “Lou”, which is suitably close enough for this region’s understanding and intonation of English, which has begun to break down very much and differentiate from region to region. For example, New York “Englitch spekeda” is as nearly unintelligible to me as Quebecois French is, and even my grandpa who grew up the better part of his life there before the Downturning had difficulty understanding those few New Yorkers who came to live in our town before he passed on several years ago. Those folks - the D’amato family (name sounds like the vegetable) have handily picked up what must have seemed to them, our bumpkinish brogue.

It is all just as well: my sparing knowledge of Japanese which Grandma taught me is probably out of way out synch with the Japanese spoken today after almost sixty years of isolation. I hope to get lucky again (I haven’t been able to contact my family in Japan for quite a long time) and actually meet someone either else from Japan or some lucky survivor who might have outlived or outran the famines and ethnic wars in California, or if I can make it up to Vancouver sometime again in the near future, which has a relatively flourishing population of Japanese.

Unfortunately, the folks in this region are as xenophobic as my distant Japanese relatives across the ocean ever are, and my blood and my looks are sufficiently diluted enough by my European blood that nobody probes into my ancestry that deeply. Father is less so fortunate, and moved half my lifetime ago to Seatac , the capital in Cascadia, where the locals are slightly more tolerant. A sad episode that was for all of us; Mother lost her life when we fell back from the Burning of Casper some twenty years ago - which was a very nasty retaliatory strike by the Aztecas deep in our territory as a response for our joint forces raid with the Nebraskans and Lakotans to disable the nukes and steal the warheads stored in an old Republic army base near one of the Azteca capitals, Albuqerque. The raid itself went as splendidly as could ever be hoped for; diversionary attacks on their granaries to pull them away from an already thinly guarded post.

I nearly believe that the Aztecas had no clue what the nukes were, what their purpose was for, but they knew that those shiny rockets had some purpose, if only they could figure them out. Over the couple or three dozens of years since they overran Albuquerque, it had never occurred to them to either move the weapons or figure out how the rockets worked (although in reality, none of us could likely figure out how to even launch them - legend has it that they were “programmed” to hit targets in what used to be in China) … and our years of spying were about to pay off.

Our team leader knew enough to vent the fuel in the rockets so that they’d never be launched, and we even recovered a couple of warheads like the militia bosses up in Larry-me and Lincoln wanted. I suppose that they would like to figure out a way to catapult them on top of an Azteca city one day, much as the California Resistance tried to do to Lost Angels after it fell to the Azteca hordes. Father told me that the only thing that happened was that the warhead was detonated incorrectly, spreading radioactive minerals all over much of the city, which means that Lost Angels is a great place to live if you like to count tumors.

We were making our way back to friendlier lines, having just crossed over into Utah or Deseret or whatever it is that the Mormons want to call their homeland these days - when we got the awful news - 25,000 non-combatants burned to death in their sleep, as well as plenty of crops put to the torch.

Father never quite forgave himself for losing her, and the locals became even more afraid of those who don’t look like them; he left town, and I stayed to help rebuild, and build up a trading business between the various settlements in the barely unified “Rocky Mountain Union”.

Though I have been a trader and a traveler - at least through most of the passable regions of North America - and all too often an unwilling warrior in the interests of our survival… I am something of a historian by hobby, when I might have that rare moment of time to indulge it. There is little that remains recoverable presently of the time before the Great Downturning. Most books have either been burnt for fuel (something which I am deeply at odds with, but I suppose that a largely illiterate people, has no need for books that are conveniently available and which stand between them and frostbite or starvation), or are otherwise inaccessible, locked away in repositories whose keys have been lost to time, or worse, whose books have been lost to the depredations of time, humidity, and rot. And digital media, while far more durable, is even more sparse, most of it is inaccessible for lack of machines and the power to run them. The few machines that do exist are either in control of remnants of the old Republic’s military (which is its government, by the way), or a few remaining technicians who know how to operate these machines which were once new to our grandfathers, and have not been much improved since then.

Lest I sound like a complaining soul, one must understand what truly has been lost to this continent, which once ruled much of the affairs of the world, and was considered by its people at one time, and hoped for by its founders some centuries ago, to be the pinnacle of what the man-governed nation-state: a beacon of hope, liberty, and freedom for all her citizens, however imperfectly it was, given mankind’s many shortcomings.

That old Republic, she at last ruled supreme over a decaying time when fossil fuels, overinflated fiat money, and much more refined vices were in abundance, a time where oil-powered wagons roamed the flatways of the earth as do the bison roam them now. Whole cities devoted to sensuality and vice sprung up as leprous blotches on our society, and the love of paper falsely called “money” supplanted the more nobler virtues of self-sacrifice and love for one’s fellow human; the worship of created things supplanted the love of the Creator that made them, and so it would seem that a just and divine, loving God who would not suffer to impose Himself over His people but rather be invited by them to rule as their King slowly but increasingly removed His divine hand of protection from over the nation, allowing her to reap the bitter harvest of her seeds of greed sewn long ago.

Some evidence of these excesses certainly remain; most accept that there were such ridiculously outsized oil-powered vehicles, as some of the more well built carriages remain to this day as rusted hulks on the shoulders of the flatways, or those stacked up at certain checkpoints and tolling points between the city-states, either by the civil authorities or by the bandits exercising their right to tax passers-by through the force of arms. In the cities, especially the coastal cities, great towers still stand (though many have crumbled and become the dwelling place of swarms of feral cats, rats, and birds, and others by bandit gangs, and still others reclaimed as towns in their own right) as testimony to our former greatness. Today, it is a massive undertaking to get twenty or thirty young men to help raise a barn, or a dozen men to raise a farm house or restore an older house. I can scarcely imagine the time and effort needed to erect one of those towers.

And it is very hard for me to conceive of unchecked numbers of these mechanical beasts going to and fro on the old flatways, unimpeded by bandits or militiamen at the toll collection points they set up on whims, usually on the pretense of “collecting funds for the common defense”. I tell you that many of these “militiamen” or “sheriffs” are only a badge’s width from being bandits themselves. The sail-cars and steam wagons and slime-cars of today are far fewer, and far less powerful, at least in terms of how the old stories go, and we certainly lack for the flying craft of decades gone by, though some slime-powered ultra-light craft are used by the militias or bandits for spying out the land.

As I am fairly handy with the such novel and modern conveyances as the sail-bike, horse-and-cart, steam trucks, and sail-cars (quite handy out here where the Chinook winds can put some speed under you) and have even driven a slime-car at the brisk speed that can keep up with a horse at full canter more than once, none of these could get me from Casper to Boy-Z (a stupid name for a town, but that’s how the locals there like it) in less than a week. I can only dream of what Grandpa told me about making the same trip in an oil car in under 10 hours!

Or when he flew in a great flying-craft with a thousand other people to Japan in under a half-day, which if Japan were still allowing foreigners in, it would take a tramper ship four months to six months to make on sail power, praying that the winds and weather were right. Or going from Lost Angels (sorry for that, as I have no idea how to pronounce or write that dreadful moniker the Aztecas gave it in their Nahuatl language) to New York in less time it takes me to get from Casper to Cheyenne in a streamlined slime-car on a good day and a tailwind to boot!

It might have been hard enough for members of my grandfather’s generation, of whom a very scarce few remain on the earth, and more so for my father’s peers to have parted with the fantastic machines and technologies and conveniences of their day, much less to accept living in this wretched and altogether grievous manner, but such is our lot, and the bed prepared for us by our forefathers from long ago is ours to lay in.

How about modern politics? Where once we elected Presidents, Congresses and I suppose in other countries which had their kings and parliaments as the highest ruling bodies, now only remain mayors and in a few rare cases, paramount leaders - often attempting to be petty regional tyrants, little more than brigands and thugs who gained access to much firepower in the earlier days of the Downturning) as the our authorities. If liberty, as some ancient philosopher and one of the reputed founders of the old Republic posited, was the fruit of some “liberty tree” watered by the blood of tyrants and patriots, I dare say that for all the blood spilled in this land, it has failed to nourish the roots of that same tree, or it has altogether dies as the direct result of ill treatment or ignorance of its owners in the much hated “Boomer Generation”.

The last few generations have become in my day something of a fascinating object of discussion: you see, the tale of the generations began with the Boomers’ parents, the so-called “Greatest Generation” that survived an economic depression that may have approached the order of suffering that we have seen, albeit for a short twelve or so years, followed by about four years of international wars over some issue of one European country tearing up the others, and by some manipulations of a President hell bound to get us into the war to spark the faltering economy, essentially picking a fight with Japan which Grandpa told me had something of an alliance with the nasty European country.

This “Greatest Generation” was set to the task of warring and sparking the economy, which as I understand, did just that, setting the stage for the old Republic’s rise from mere “regional power” status to “superpower” status in so short a time. While these “Greats” were not without their faults, they had sacrificed much of their life to the service of their nation. In the decades following that global war, they sired the largest crop of children ever seen in one generation - the so-called “Baby Boom” of the late 1940s - 1950s, according to standard reckoning. We relate to that generation as “Boomers” for another meaning of the word, the great economic Boom that characterized the better part of their duration on the earth - I say the better part, as the trailing edge of that generation saw the beginning of the Downturning; most of the older members of the Boomers had already passed on to either death or senility by then.

And here is where the Boomer’s children - mostly the “Doomers” born in the 1970s through the early 1990s, and the younger “Millennium Kids” that followed them into the 2010s which include my grandpa and father respectively, were filled with deep anger at the excesses and perceived selfishness of the Boomers. I think here in North America, it was especially bad how the Doomer and Millenium generations over-reacted — my father seldom ever talked about those first days of the Downturning, but he did mention those times where the economy was wracked with unimaginably expensive fuel costs, then followed by food and pharmaceutical riots, and then finally the first massive die-offs by famine and disease, topped off by the people freezing to death those first few winters where heating oil could not be had…

… and the sights of people trying to barter their collections of music and moving pictures and pornography and now-useless oil-cars for food that was nearly not to be had must have been a sorry sight indeed.

There is only so much pop-culture and related junk that could be bartered for basic survival, which is something that the average person then simply had no idea about. Everyone was as literate in book learning and technology as they are illiterate today, just as most folks today can get by with sparse fixings, but should they find a book, they’d be as clueless as to do with it than a younger Doomer would have been his first time some sixty years ago trying to start a fire with a hatchet, some kindling, and a sparking stone.

Somehow, there was a massive failure on the part of the Boomers to pass on to their children and later generations those necessary skills for survival - which the Boomers never needed to acquire from their parents for the life handed them on a platter: so in retrospect, whose fault was it anyway?

Given the same circumstances, would our very human and sinful nature encourage that same degree of massive, unvarnished selfishness in our generation?

Perhaps then, the Boomers were unjustly butchered (both physically as well as metaphorically) by the Doomers and the Millenium Kids, and are ill-remembered to this day my generation, who perhaps out of some self-righteous hubris have largely termed ourselves the “Rebuilders”. And perhaps it is hubris that allows us to speak so ill of our elders, as some among the Millenium Kids are speaking more freely about the failings of the leading edge of the Doomers as they pass on into history, that they failed to have spoken to their fathers much more forcefully. For it is now whispered, “When they were young adults, they saw the cliff coming… could they not have taken far more drastic action to prevent the Downturning, or to soften its impact?”

Or what shall we say to our own parents of the “Millenium”, who were so quick to exact vengeance and cut down the last of the Boomers (and very likely, some of the elder Doomers whose ages overlapped the youngest Boomers) in their nearsighted cries of “Death to all over sixty!”

What will our children say of us when our backs are turned? Will they despise us for failing to hasten the revival from the stone age back to the gleaming castles in the sky our forefathers built? What shall our unvarnished title be? Instead of the self-ennoblement of being “Rebuilders”, will we be merely the “Scroungers” or “Foragers” who gave up any hope of restoring the Republic, as we have seen to have barely attained at least some form of cohesive or effective patchwork of regional nation-states?

I cannot say for certain what they will think, or say. I (think) am near to my fifty-fifty year now, born well into the unravellings of the old order, and my sons are old enough to become fathers in their own right, and my daughter shall soon be given to one of her suitors for a nice exchange of gifts to prove his worthiness for my daughter’s hand, just as my boys have scrimped for their gifts to their wives’ fathers.

I can only hope that I have passed on to them values that had to be caught up from the ethers by my parents, for my grandparent (may their souls rest peacefully) were hardly instructed in self-sacrifice by their Boomer parents before them: indeed, I desired (and still do desire) my sons to be thoroughly equipped for the realities of this life.

To them, gave I not hardly a chip of silver for their wedding gifts to their prospective wives, though my dearest Miranda relented and gave them both three ounces of gold from her personal store - a woman’s merciful touch, no doubt. Mercy, tendered with love: for a most stern teacher of the noble woman’s way of the Book of Proverbs, Chapter 31, was my dearest Miranda for our daughter, even becoming so bold as to correct me for coddling her where she failed in her chores.

By no means am I perfect, for the old Johannson temperament of boneheaded pride can run deep… but I pray that my sons, who, God willing, shall continue that rebuilding with a realization of revival of some form of republican government which when tempered with by the repentant and humble hearts of its citizens, may yet rise again if the Lord Jesus tarries yet a few more generations. Perhaps, our children will be our first true generation of “Rebuilders” that will have largely forgotten of, or have no ill-memory of the Boomers, being by then four-score or more years removed from them.

I seem to have waxed rather long here, and shall be needing to get more paper from the store. That, and I shall need to literally wax this paper in a paraffin coating, in hopes of preserving this.

If time permits, I shall write more.

- Ryuuichi Johannson, 7d.5m.2082A.D. (presumed)