A future Byzantium

Running with the "America as Rome" meme ...

After US democracy and the two-party system proved unequal to the challenges of the Era of Ecological Disaster (2015-2077, roughly) the unitary government of the Neo-Imperial era would expand US territory subtantially, at its largest extent in the early 2100s incorporating most of Canada, Mexico, and Central America/the Caribbean: but failure in the Indian Conflict (or the Nerve War) and the move to hereditary clone rule led to to instability, the Division, the Meme War, and the subsequent Time of Troubles.

Today the Greater United States has not existed as a unified entity for some two and a quarter centuries, but that does not prevent the government in America City (formerly Mexico City) from claiming its inheritance and a right to leadership over all its former territories. The American Empire (called the Mexican Empire by some foreigners, something they find very annoying) theoretically is overlord over the Eastern Confederates, but the sub-Emperor in New Washington (rebuilt 2235) is little more than a ghost haunting the east: the various states, kingdoms, technarchies and free cities of the East venerate their American Heritage, but follow the ancient American dictum of Mind your Own Business, which is easier to do in a largely post-scarcity world.

The West Coast and the NE have gone off in their own directions, California and the Wet West looking to an Asia again vigorous after the crumbling of the stifling Chinese World-System, while a NE culturally alienated from the Spanglish elite of the capital has joined with the Neo-British Empire, under the wise and immortal rule of Cyber-Victoria II. New York decided that the rest of the country was as unimportant as the New Yorker cover
[link] always said.

The Empire is most energetically concerned with expansion in space and creating a network of cultural memetic clones throughout the Solar system, but is currently pondering expansion into the Forbidden Zone, which makes its neighbors a bit nervous. Always a conservative area, during the Unravelling its mostly JudeoChristian, over 70 years old, biologically unmodified and fixed-sexuality inhabitants broke away to create Truemerica, a robot-maintained state fixed in the image of the Good Old Days of the 60s (2060s, that is). Always isolationist, Truemerica ceased communications entirely with the rest of the world during the Third Memetic War, and spy satellites have failed to make out any signs of human Truemericans in over a century. The automatic border defenses have however been maintained and indeed improved, and a bad-tempered nanotech wall some 100 feet high encircles the entire area. There is some dispute as to whether the locals have just retreated entirely into a Matrix-like virtual existence (as the Nigerians did in the 2360s), or have simply died out and been replaced by robotic intelligences. People worry that a military incursion may lead to some nasty reaction...