Merlot jogged the trail, lungs burning with each gulp of crisp air. Days trapped in his apartment, drowning in student papers and unpaid bills, made the blue sky feel like a jailbreak. Alan's voice echoed in his head: Why write fiction instead of your own story? Merlot snorted, breath clouding in the chill. No one buys books about late rent and bad coffee, Alan.
Did readers roll their eyes at his work or devour it, hooked? He didn't know if it was good—just that he wanted to be remembered, even if it meant a deal with the devil. Every story needed villains clawing at the plot's edges. Enter Osa Dada, a shadow beyond the fictional Intermarium, lurking in Cascadia's wilds—a land of raw heat and untamed edges, inspired by Merlot's African journey when he was fifteen on summer break with his mother.
Sterling's left arm was useless after the injury. Racheal—sleeping with Osa, not for love, but for money. Anna—a widow, raising two children alone, her grief stitched into every line of dialogue.
Merlot didn't write to be loved. He wrote so they couldn't forget him. Even if every page dripped with hate, his name would cling to their tongues long after the heroes were dust.
His mother, proud of her Great North roots, scoffed at the president's rule. Merlot got it—Osa wouldn't bow to Intermarium's Lolita either. Borders mattered. Allegiances cut deep.
What gnawed at Merlot was that people had to cross borders to fight in Vietnam. Why not fund their military instead of hitching a ride on Uncle Sam's jet, while selling weapons to the war efforts and pretending their hands were tied? Sympathy wasn't a strategy. Neutrality wasn't innocence. Free rides weren't free. The delivery charge was a little high.
Merlot had read the reports. Thirty thousand volunteers from the neighbouring borderlands had crossed over into Vietnam, fighting under a flag that wasn't theirs. Their capital stayed untouched, while their bodies were buried in foreign soil. Patriotism that didn't fit well on bumper stickers—or on resumes. The perfect business model: send soldiers to die, let someone else foot the bill for bullets, and call it philanthropy—heroism outsourced, tragedy put on credit.
Swore oaths to a country that didn't claim them, like leasing a car with no insurance and hoping the brakes work. No parades, no pensions, no memorials etched with their names. Ghosts in two lands: unwanted by the north, unrecognized by the south, celebrated nowhere but in paperwork.
Merlot fought for his country. His white ass came stamped: Made in America—no refunds. He would never trade in his lucky stars for a red maple leaf. If a bullet in Saigon had found him, he'd want his name carved in the soil he bled for. Recognition wasn't vanity. It was proof he existed.
Uncle Sam picked up the tab. He couldn't continue to subsidize Borealia's moral high ground. Wars weren't cheap, and righteousness didn't come with a payment plan. She preached peace from a podium built with American steel. Sam maxed out his credit—buying bullets, burying bodies, and footing invoices for a war she refused to claim. Would he ever see a refund? No—just resentment, and the insult of watching his products marked up and resold in her territory like imported guilt.
Ricky's term unravelled; he drowned stress in the bottle. Borealia welcomed war dodgers with open arms—safe from bullets, stranded in snow and bureaucracy. Refuge without work, medals, or meaning—a life jacket that left them drifting. Ricky saw it clearly: safety, yes, but responsibility? Nowhere in sight.
Merlot turned on the news and watched Uncle Sam win the argument against Borealia—not with facts, but with force. Even buried, Ricky's spirit lingered like cheap cologne on the presidential coat: stubborn, pungent, and impossible to ignore, a ghost that refused to retire quietly.
Pacifism wasn't profitable. Borealia's refusal to bankroll the bombs guarding Sam's borders bruised his bad-boy image. Tsarina loomed larger now, flaunting 5,400 warheads to his 5,000. Uncle Sam sniffled over the one thing he couldn't manufacture: heavy water. Borealia had stockpiled enough to power the planet—or end it.
He begged Borealia to join him on the dark side. Back in the good old days, she'd shipped him heavy water—fuel for reactors, leverage for bombs, even the one meant for Nippon. Like a rebel spurning the lure of empire, she turned down Uncle Sam's invitation. Old alliances didn't interest her. Birthday gifts to 1776? Only with a tariff break and a signed receipt.
On August 6, 1945, Nippon's greatest city dissolved into smoke and glowing embers. The Red Dragon did not stir. Dragons preferred their enemies served crispy at the edges.
In 1937 and again in 1938, Nippon's pilots had scorched the Dragon's unarmed farmers' fields—raids born of arrogance against a foe they believed too broken to bite back. The Dragon had been exhausted: decades of civil war, splintered by rival warlords, stripped of factories and unity.
Nippon had spent ten years looting, burning, and disturbing the Red Dragon's domain—then pouted outrage when the Red Dragon summoned 'Uncle Sam,' whose Yelp reviews promised zero survivors. Uncle Sam was eager to please, not wanting bad reviews. Missed a delivery. No customers.
Every bomb, plane, and bullet had to dazzle the Dragon. Late, faulty, or dull, and Uncle Sam risked being roasted harder than the delivery itself. Borealia fiddled with the atomic bomb in Montreal while Sam fretted—if she shipped the world's deadliest toy without his signature, the Dragon would write Sam the review from hell.
With Montreal out of the picture, Uncle Sam proudly declared the package: "MADE BY UNCLE SAM—ALL CREDIT CLAIMED, ZERO ASSISTANCE PROVIDED."
The Red Dragon was impressed, enough to murmur for a second taste. Uncle Sam obliged, beaming with pride, still insisting the recipe was all his. Afterwards, Nippon's people were no longer at war with the Dragon; the scales balanced, at least on paper.
The Tea Drinkers choked on their Earl Grey. The Tube Alloys had been the parent; the Manhattan Project was the child that shoved its elders out of the family portrait. Uncle Sam, grinning, claimed every warhead on Borealia's soil, proving credit went not to builders, but to the one who signed the deed. Launch keys off-limits for Borealia—the warheads were Uncle Sam's children. He held the keys to their fury.
Tsarnia glared, curious about the secret ingredients. Uncle Sam wasn't sharing—why hand a rival the recipe for global chaos? Wanted to remain the master chef of mayhem, not risk looking like an amateur by letting anyone else peek at his cookbook. Borealia acted innocent, but she knew the recipe by heart—no instructions required.
Nippon, spotting Borealia's signature beside Sam's, swept the halo from her brow. Borealia insisted she was blameless, overlooking the Nobel she proudly awarded in 1951 to a director whose paper trail ran through the Montreal Laboratory.
The laboratory, Borealia insisted, was for reactors, not ruin. A few grams of uranium proved otherwise; the MAUD Committee agreed it would be irresponsible not to build the bomb.
Borealia pinned medals on anti‑nuclear saints, while Uncle Sam applauded her scientist for enduring the moral sting of building the bomb, Borealia protested. Sam insisted: Not giving medals to the makers of annihilation is a crime. He wasn't going to let Deutschland take first place in the nuclear race—the top was reserved for him.
Borealia didn't reward atrocities—except for the rank-and-file soldier she celebrated without reading his file in 1987. His unit composed its memoirs in mass graves, yet the medal remained untouched. Victims' cries went unanswered.
Borealia shrugged at the outrage. "Revocation requires forums. Dead soldiers never file on time. Besides, the annual report shines better than any bin meant for discarded honours."
Had the soldier crossed the border, Uncle Sam would have yanked that medal clean off, paperwork be damned. Three hundred medals were revoked after Gettysburg for failing to meet the newly invented standards of "real" heroism. According to Sam, medals were earned by dodging bullets, not by staying loyal.
Uncle Sam hoped Tsarina would squander his arsenal, wooing the Cossack Bride —sun-soaked and untameable. Their silence suited him; Sam had no desire to referee a family feud—especially while stewing over Tsarina's bigger stash, counting warheads like high-stakes chips. Marvelling at how the house always won when everyone else cut corners.
Borealia wasn't just staying out of the war—she was cashing in. While Uncle Sam buried his dead, she traded with anyone who had cash to spend. She called it peacekeeping; he called it freeloading. Borealia wasn't new to freeloading—every doctor's bill that landed on her doorstep was promptly stamped free. Sam couldn't even score Ozempic because she claimed it was a luxury, perpetually in "short supply.'
She ran a morality boutique: sanctuary by day, profit by night, and ethics sold separately. Sam slapped her hard with tariffs. If she was going to profit off his bleeding soldiers, the least she could do was pay a toll for the privilege.
Ricky earned his stripes in the Navy, scraped together enough to run for office and clawed his way through a system built to keep men like him out. Prisons overflowed—cells packed not with the dangerous, but the desperate. Petty theft. Drug charges. Mandatory conscription was a way out—a uniform instead of a jumpsuit, a paycheck instead of a rap sheet. If the country couldn't offer jobs, it could offer boot camps. War gave men purpose, structure, and a shot at dignity. The draft wasn't punishment. A lifeline—a way out for the forgotten, even if it meant trading one cage for another.
Ricky inherited Johnson's war. He couldn't admit the fire was already too big to smother. So he hurled two more nations into the flames, stoking it only to look victorious. Couldn't bear the thought of history stamping failure across his forehead. Better to torch two more countries than let the headlines say he'd lost one. If he faltered, what hope would NATO allies have under Uncle Sam's so‑called protection? Ricky couldn't afford allies slashing their defence budgets because they'd decided Uncle Sam's shield was more decoration than protection.
To Ricky, the presidency was a rigged table played with borrowed chips—an arena where the rules were outdated long before he arrived. He came from parents who worked themselves to exhaustion; his opponent had nannies, tutors, and trust funds at every turn.
So he "cheated": bribed, schemed, bent the machinery, convinced that once he held the office, nothing counted as breaking the law. People begged Ricky to break the law to put him into power when it was "in the nation's best interest." Ricky claimed to speak for the silent majority. Bombs don't need votes—just silence disguised as consent.
Ricky compiled an enemy list—anyone who had looked at him like he wasn't tall enough to ride the presidency. His cabinet had better bury the break‑in deep, far beneath the claws of the press vultures. Any government officials who got caught would be treated to the courtesy of a "conspiracy" charge-Haldeman, Ehrlichman, the fall guys.
Had Ricky ended conscription early, Merlot might have shrugged at his misdeeds; dragging you out of Saigon makes any schemer into a hero. Instead, the war dragged on until 1973—years passed, Ricky's pledge—because promises weighed nothing against a six-figure rain of bombs. Conscription didn't end for moral reasons; it ended when pretending to win got too expensive.
Ricky called for peace "with honour," which meant refusing to say the word defeat out loud. Never to be called dull, Ricky was interesting, his last job ending not in labour, but in whispers, headlines, and televised outrage.
By 1970, NATO allies cut their defence budgets, either convinced Uncle Sam would shield them forever or judged his armour—gouged by endless jungle patrols—not worth the repair bill. It hit a nerve for Ricky; the war would drain the U.S economy, with Allied support insufficient to ease the impact.
Ricky believed prolonging the war with the blue dragon would buy Uncle Sam time to win. Instead, it bought him crowds—angry protesters flooding the streets. Merlot's mother was among them, candle in hand outside the White House, her voice worn raw by chants for peace.
The war was unpopular, so Ricky doubled down, punishing anti-war activists and jailing draft resisters. Ironically, the crackdown fuelled suspicion; people began to wonder what he'd done behind closed doors to get into office.
Watergate aside, Ricky's fall was sealed. Voters had endured a war they never chose and a draft they never endorsed. By the time conscription ended, forgiveness was non-negotiable—his second term had begun, and the dead weren't bargaining.
Borealia held the umbrella like a tourist under a borrowed raincoat—safe, dry, and smug. Protection without participation. Security without sacrifice. Watched her citizens cross in relief, soldiers aching for paychecks her endless peace had denied them. Let Sam foot the bill—she'd wave from the snowbank, sipping syrup and counting savings. She didn't just sidestep the storm—she turned it into a business model. Let him sink beneath the waves of war debt, while she profited from the raft he couldn't afford. Sipped her tea, critiqued Uncle Sam's ethics, and counted the coins from trade deals that financed his bombs.
Denying any back‑door dealings with Sam's enemies was her standard line. Her habit of arming governments that treated human rights like optional accessories made her innocence hard to sell. A shame to let a lucrative deal go to waste.
Borealia condemned Ricky's war, hosting draft dodgers, sneering from her neutral perch—and turned him into a caricature of villainy. The perfect target. Hated by hippies, damned by historians, and caricatured forever as the man who handed out rifles instead of real jobs. His World War II service convinced him that bullets were the only effective employment program. Being allergic to work was contagious; Ricky chased birdies while the law chased others through jungles.
Ricky saw himself beneath a halo, a safety net stitched from duty. Borealia saw devil horns as he signed enlistment orders with the same detachment as teeing off for eighteen holes. In his televised interview, he'd made a boo-boo, a tape that belonged on the bonfire with Watergate. His famous 'quote' would go down in history as a 'Rickynism'—less presidential doctrine, more punchline. As if he'd traded a handshake with the King of Rock for a guest spot on Trailer Park Boys. Believed his war record was a get-out-of-jail-free card—good for all crimes, misdemeanours, and constitutional betrayals. His opinion never won the popular vote. Popularity was overrated when hush money could rig the silence.
Borealia begged exemptions from Ricky's 10% tariffs, citing her dodgy hospitality. Ricky's answer: No. Frosty charity didn't earn discounts. She'd dodge another war, leaving Sam to pay. After Ricky's burial, another president would rise, chanting: Protection isn't free.
Ricky's war on drugs favoured cells over clinics. Rehab, he scoffed, a revolving door—addicts lounged in therapy, then relapsed before the ink dried on the discharge papers. Leniency bred lawlessness. Cracks showed: overcrowded prisons, strained budgets, and recidivism mocked victory. The States became a warehouse for the unwanted, not liberty, but cells. Woodstock wasn't freedom to him—just filth: mud, music, wasted youth. Discipline, not daisies, was his patriotism.
Inflation wasn't born in the jungle—it was born in the silence of those who watched the fire and sold the water. If they'd offered more than invoices, maybe Sam wouldn't have had to max out his credit to keep the lights on. Slap a ten percent tariff on Borealia's energy.
Merlot felt the ache behind his eyes when he stared at his bank balance. His fingers hesitated before clicking "submit" on a grocery order. The cost of food had tripled, so he hoarded discounted instant noodles. Rent climbed like ivy—slow, relentless, choking the brick of his life. He used to buy books without checking the price. Now he borrowed them, dog-eared and overdue.
Stopped in his tracks and pulled the water bottle from his jogging pants' pocket. Borealia had perfected the art of being adjacent to conflict—close enough to profit, far enough to preach. It was like watching someone sell fire extinguishers while investing in matches. His jaw clenched. The War of 1812? Maybe the plan was to burn down the White House and then offer a bucket of water—at market price.
No wonder Uncle Sam was grovelling. Borealia didn't share water; she sold it at a premium. Capitalism pairs perfectly with passive-aggressively watching your neighbour burn—like selling water in the middle of a wildfire. Merlot took another sip.
Uncle Sam should've stocked up for emergencies instead of pleading for handouts. How do you plan for disaster when the only water flows from Borealia's overpriced tap?
Borealia didn't send troops; contracts did the fighting for her. When the fires came—literal or metaphorical—buckets weren't offered. Only invoices arrived.
Mastering adjacency, Borealia profited from war without firing a shot. Merlot wasn't writing fiction anymore. He issued warnings.