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[AlienGirl]

The Redstaters started acting up in late July. They blamed the shortages and heat on a previously-thriving neighborhood in the eastern part of the city. By the Red ideology, the Market was free and the Free Market never failed except at the wrath of a vengeful God. Their preachers extrapolated from Gomorrah and proclaimed that the heat and hardship were the fault of the “gay part of town,” whose presence, they said, would doom the whole city to fire and brimstone. At first the preachers and their followers just talked; but then there were some firebombings, and though the police were said to have investigated, no arrests were ever made—except, of course, those unfortunate men detained for prostitution and sent to the faith-based reparative therapy work-prisons.

The Greens soon joined the Reds in the street. To the Greens, as well, the causes of our misfortune were obvious; the economic hardship was only a side-effect of climactic crisis brought on by the greed of generations. From the corners of the political scene poured the Browns, an amalgam of elements of La Raza and pieces of the far right that sat uneasily with the mainstream Reds. Some more buildings were bombed out, some slogans spray-painted on their walls. My grandmother's gravestone got knocked over and it cost $300 to have it scrubbed and restored to its place. Despite the efforts of Reds, Greens, and Browns, the heat wore on.

The Tribulation Force emerged from the Reds. In a decade past the first Tribs had been members of some kind of survivalist militia; they recruited heavily among the Reds, and soon they were a strong and constant presence in the city. Since the Army and the National Guard were still overseas and spread thin on a multi-fronted war, the Tribs became the volunteer contract for crowd control and civil order. For a block grant far smaller than that asked by the country's largest private security firm, the Tribs would keep the rabble off the streets and scoop up the unduly dissatisfied for useful incarceration in the for-profit prisons.

The Debt Relief Act was passed toward the beginning of August, just after the Tribs' contract had been awarded. The DRA allowed creditors to seize debtors who defaulted and require them to work to repay their debt. In practice, they sold the debt contracts to the work-prison companies, which put the debtors to work as contracted labor rented to other companies, at wages of pennies an hour, from which was deducted room and board. The companies had cheap and plentiful labor of all kinds, from doctors and lawyers to dishwashers and manual laborers; the prison corporations had a profit for the shareholders and a chance to proselytize for their charitable donors and faith boards; and the police no longer had to bother with rioters. All of the people who matter were satisfied.

The debt sweeps cleared the streets, in the minds of the fortunate gainfully-employed solid citizens, and the DRA was praised mightily in letters to the editor and telephone calls to the ubiquitous radio talk shows. Here and there a union fight erupted; these were quickly put down by the Tribs. Unions had been recruiting in job-lines, but after the rumors began of unionists permanently disappearing, and after the Tribs' Enforcement Division began paying by the tip for every unionist or traitor arrested, most workers would not even listen to the union recruiters for fear of winding up under Patriot's Arrest.

Still the heat blazed on through terrible August. Two of the unionists who had been arrested by the Tribs failed to come back on their release date; the Tribs' official explanation was that these men had moved out of state, but the families said there had been no word of this from the men, and dark rumors emerged of secret executions.