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Description
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Brazil
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Brazil in the 23rd century is majority evangelical Protestant, not that their faith gets in the way of their love of biotech or cybernetics. As the strongest economy in the Western Hemisphere, and the second-largest economy on Earth (Zaire is number one), Brazil is home to 2.4 billion people and is a leader in technology and culture on Earth. A great many European and North American refugees fled to Brazil during the bloodshed and depravity in their homelands during the Heroic Winter of the 2070’s, and the large, closely-knit American-Brazilian communities in places such as Rio and parts of Nova Amazonia, remain common destinations for those living in the impoverished countries of North America, but are too poor or disqualified to leave Earth entirely. In the 23rd century, North Americans in Brazil and other parts of Latin America are still stereotyped as impoverished criminals and thugs.

In spite of deforestation and massive flooding, Brazil has resurrected the Amazon in the only way you ever really should. Rather than draining the Amazon Sea, the rotting remnants of the Amazon Rainforest today nourish the roots of the mighty yvyra trees - colossal mangroves up to a mile or more tall. Six yvyras are used to anchor an artificial island (grova) composed of woven roots, with topsoil added atop. Each yvyra has miles and miles of neurons and biocircuitry (along with pipes pumping water to the upper branches), and each serves as a massive brain for up to a hundred distributed human-level consciousnesses. Each yvyra is a sapient lifeform, counted as a citizen of Brazil, though with as many as a hundred wills and minds which make up a confederate, emergent self. These selves, or “inbota”, oversee the biopunk rainforest-cities built on each grova, which are powered by the yvyra’s abundance of biophotovoltaic (BPV) leaves. There are ninety-five of these hexagonal grovae, each separated by canals large enough for massive cargo ships to pass through, and together the grovae form “Nova Amazonia”, an expanding mega-project where humans, AI’s, cyborgs, uplifted animals (and plants), and a resurrected Amazonian biosphere can all coexist together.

While each yvyra is networked with every other yvyra, each inbota identifies only with the tree it is based within, and with its sibling inbota sired by that tree. An yvyra will produce and phase out many inbota throughout its lifespan, with the longest-lived inbota representing the strongest aspects of that tree’s personality. In order to facilitate meaningful interaction between the trees and their human constituents, yvyra are able to manifest with VR, AR, holo and puppet-android avatars, taking on the form of the same character across all of these formats, superficially reminiscent of the vocaloids of early 21st century Japan. In addition to overseeing municipal infrastructure, to encourage civic participation, these inbota will engage in various forms of public engagement, ranging from daily contests and charity VR competitions, to viral pop songs about the importance of voting and not tagging the trees with racist graffiti.

At the center of Nova Amazonia is the largest and oldest of the great trees, Grande Avó, grandmother of all yvyra, first planted in 2097. She is the only reproductive yvyra, and her basketball-sized seeds are exported all across South America, increasingly shipped to Venus, and have made it as far afield as several exosolar planets.

In addition to the yvyra, other sapient neotree clades are present in Nova Amazonia, along with three different animal uplift races. High up in the upper boughs of the mighty yvyra live the maricoxi, a race of cognitively-enhanced spider monkeys, who’ve opted to make their ancestors’ name a bit more literal. A simple manipulation of maricoxi HOX genes has gifted them with four functional arms and four functional legs, plus microscopic gripping claws on their tails, making them even more masterful climbers. Other native races of Nova Amazonia include tsunki (uplifted giant river otters) and boto (uplifted river dolphins). All three were originally gengineered to work symbiotically with the yvyra in maintaining the various biotic and artificial systems which keep the great trees functioning, and while these still form the cornerstones of maricoxi, tsunki and boto societies and cultures, they have since radiated and diversified, bringing their unique non-human perspectives on life to the big rainbow tapestry of Nova Amazonia. A true worthy successor to the Amazon Rainforest.

Further south, in the Venice-like arcoplex of Rio de Janeiro, one can find uplifted macaws calling themselves cocatriz. Out of pride for their dinosaurian ancestors, these guys have augmented themselves with retrogenic traits like wing-claws and longer tails, and today resemble archaeopteryxes with parrot-like beaks.

Coastal cities like Fortaleza, Bahia, Recife and São Paulo more or less moved further inland, becoming New Fortaleza, New Bahia, New Recife and New São Paulo, with their partially or fully-submerged areas becoming the “Historic Districts”, or perhaps aquamorph slums. Rio stood apart by embracing the surge waters and, rather than retreating further inland, pressurized as many of the buildings in the city as possible. In the time since the Surge, the underwater city has built its way up to the surface, but also has abundant floating buildings stretching high up and deep down.

And then there’s the capital, Brasilia, has grown noticeably larger, and is an entire world of concrete and glass, more reminiscent of the classic cyberpunk megacity than the other examples mentioned here. Inspired by abandoned and overgrown cities of the Global North such as Chicago or Nagoya, however, at the tail end of the 22nd century, there started a campaign to beautify and “re-wild” the parts of Brasilia which had been practically depopulated due to an especially careless form of gentrification. The result has been multi-level forests occupying different floors of mile-tall highrises, clear streams and creeks where roads once were, bridges made from living, bio-programmed trees traversing said streams, and of course, an uncountable number of GMO flowers glowing at night in place of neon. While once confined to the “Green Quarters”, more and more of Brasilia has been greening up over the last 90 years. Though it’s worth pointing out, the overgrowth in those northern cities isn’t nearly as pleasant or inviting.

Oh, almost forgot. GrandTransAt. One of two South American launch loops (the other being Chile’s Pinochet loop), GrandTransAt is a dynamically-supported non-rocket launch system, stretching across the South Atlantic, from Brazil to Angola. The loop is held up at an altitude of fifty miles, by the momentum of a belt that circulates around the structure via maglev rails. This circulation, in effect, transfers the weight of the structure onto a pair of magnetic bearings, one at each end, which support it (turning off the circulation would cause the structure to lower down onto the ocean). Very cheap launches are facilitated via the flat portion of the loop, which hangs above the atmosphere, and accelerates spacecraft to escape velocity, sending them into Earth orbit. In addition to serving as a launch system, GrandTransAt serves as a bridge between Brazil and Angola, and between Africa and South America, Earths two most prosperous regions in 2285.

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Gran Colombia
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At the top of South America, we have Gran Colombia. While still playing second-fiddle to Brazil, Gran Colombia is a very prosperous country, and rivals Brazil in terms of cultural exports (films, music, games, etc). Despite losing large portions of land to the Surge, Gran Colombia has bounced back, building their own “Nuevo Orinoco” with yvyra seeds that Bogotá will have you know they purchased with their own money.

What else about Gran Colombia is worth mentioning? Well, it’s the homeland of the original macaw uplifts, known as gwayota. Some gwayota have opted for simple lives in the countryside, where they run nut and fruit plantations, but most are very urban. Similarly to their cocatriz relatives down in Brazil, gwayota are talkative and social beings; the macaw races by and large tend to be atheists because they derive their sense of spiritual comfort and fulfillment from the relationships in their lives, rather than ritual or superstition. One of the more interesting occupations for gwayota (and one that never seems to go out of demand) is being a professional friend for socially-awkward people; gwayota aren’t just incessant talkers, they’re also very avid listeners, and conversationalists in general, and take the same pride in being someone’s friend-for-hire that an ancient blacksmith might put into his craft. Even with cheap subturing AI’s on the market, many people still seem to prefer these charismatic avians over machines. When a gwayota dies, they tend to have many people attending their funeral, which by gwayota custom is an upbeat celebration where people are encouraged to mingle and connect, rather than cry or mourn.

What else? Well, Bogotá’s pretty neat place in 2285. A 950-square-mile pyramid structure known as “El Firmamento” covers the entire Bogotá metro area, with four massive dynamically-supported pylons meeting many miles above the ground. The pylons serve to frame four gigantic translucent screens which function simultaneously as: solar panels, a filter from harmful UV rays, and a surface area for holographic billboards (hey, the megastructure needs to pay for itself). By day, the billboards in the sky are fairly sparse, but they fill the night sky. Who even needs stars, right? Additionally, the pyramid enclosure allows for Bogotá to have a wholly engineered climate; when your scantily-clad weatherman says it’s going to rain, it’s because that’s what the government schedule has planned.

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Guyana
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The Guyana Cooperative (officially the “Cooperative Republic of the Three Guyanas”) was a creation of Brazil, following its intervention in the region. The Space Boom helped with the development of Guyana, Suriname and French Guiana’s interiors, where multiple space-launch centers were built, mostly by the Commonwealth and Europeans. New cities were built in the highlands, and when the crowded coastlines were inundated during the Climate Surge, armed hordes of refugees surged towards these cities, which had benefited for so long at the expense of the people on the coast. The governments of the “Three Guyanas” had no choice but to pool their resources to hold back the revolutionaries, and in the end, only Brazil’s timely intervention was enough to clinch victory, and it was Brazil which piled weapons on top of Guyana to keep its authoritarian regime in power.

The Cooperative is a recovering authoritarian technocracy still in the process of democratizing, after decades of struggle culminated in the rebels going legit and securing victory in democratic elections in the 2130’s. More than a century later, many things still remain deeply ingrained in Guyana (such as a pervasive surveillance state that will not go away), but at least the days of robot death squads are in the past. To address overcrowding in the Guyanese megacities, the Cooperative purchased yvyra seeds from Brazil in the 2140’s, and has planted grovae off the Guyanese coast, in the shallow waters where the land once was.

Back in the interior, Guyanese spaceports are still getting a lot of use out of them, even with the elevators to the south. Much like Somalia’s “Rocket Coast”, Guyana benefits from the long lines and cargo regulations around Ecuadorian, Brazilian and Colombian elevators, or the Brazilian, and Chilean launch loops. Guyana by contrast provides affordable, no-questions-asked space launches with old-school rockets.

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Ecuador
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Ecuador was the site of one of the earliest space elevators, built by Chinese investors in the 2030’s, just outside of Quito. During World War IV, the European Defense Forces regarded Ecuador as a Chinese ally, and the Quito Elevator as a Chinese asset and a priority target. On September 17th 2067, EDF fighter craft on an unauthorized mission, severed the cable at a height of 25,000 kilometers above the Earth’s surface. The orbital anchor drifted into a higher orbit, while the rest of the cable fell back down to Earth, though concerns that it would wrap around the whole planet and sever other elevators in a cascading apocalypse were proven wrong, when the top half of the falling elevator burned up on atmospheric reentry, and the rest of it landed with the force of a sheet of paper due to air resistance on the way down, though it did cut a path of destruction across South America, narrowly missing Brazil’s own elevator, and with the frayed tip of the partially-incinerated cable landing in the Atlantic Ocean. This was one of the few catastrophes during WW4 that wasn’t apocalyptically hyperbolic.

However, the Quito Space Elevator was rebuilt in the 2080’s, and since that time, Ecuador has built three more. Despite losing Guayaquil to the Surge, as early as the Space Boom, Ecuador has been very well-situated for trade between Earth and the orbital countries of Exonesia; one of the oldest commercial spaceports in South America, Puerto Quito, was built in the 1980’s by the United States, and is still busy well into the 23rd century. This, in addition to its elevators makes tiny Ecuador competitive with Brazil when it comes to space trade.

Also of note, the Galapagos were not completely inundated by the Surge, but they did lose a lot of land, and all of the local ecosystem was destroyed by catastrophic superstorms in the 2070’s. However, beginning in the mid-22nd century, the Galapagos was rebuilt. The peaks of the islands which were still above the waters became the foundation for colossal elevated platforms shaped like sunken mushrooms along the slopes of Volcán Wolf (now with a gigantic geothermal power plant drilled deep inside the active volcano), supporting lazurogenic populations of various Galapagos plants and animals, including giant tortoises and iguanas. This wasn’t enough to attract tourists and therefore justify the costs, however, so the gengineers created tortoises the size of elephants and giant winged iguanas and a new “novelty finch” phenotype every month or so. Additional preservation/resurrection zones are anchored above the totally-submerged islands, in the form of pelastat arcologies, and the whole operation is overseen by...Charles Darwin. Yes, that Charles Darwin. The Ecuadorian government sank *a lot* of money into recreating Charles Robert Darwin, and were so successful that they had to explain to the Darwin AI what happened to his wife, Emma. And the fact that he technically wasn’t the same person who knew those people. It was an awkward conversation, and he needed some time to think over his existence.

But he got over it once he heard about this “DNA” thingamajig. As a distributed intelligence with a central server network sustained by the geo-power of Volcán Wolf, Charles Darwin is simultaneously able to divide his time between monitoring each of the New Galapagos biospheres, attending to each and every tourist, running the security systems and maintenance protocols, and engage in his own private research and experimentation (in the 23rd century, there are still many unanswered questions about the origins of life, and this Darwin has dedicated his life to uncovering the truth of abiogenesis, something he was unable to do in his first life). Similarly to the inbota of Nova Amazonia, Darwin manifests all across the New Galapagos, in VR, AR and in multiple remote-operated android bodies, dressed to the nines with period-accurate clothing, and each modeled after a different period in Darwin’s life, between ages seven and seventy-three. There’s little distinction between “Darwin the mind”, “Darwin the system”, “Darwin the bodies” and “Darwin the New Galapagos”. He is effectively a genius loci.

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Peru
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Lima was destroyed by a piece of Beijing.

The Beijing Impact of 2069 threw several megatons of rock into low Earth orbit, only to inevitably come back down, and one of these chunks landed on Lima - a city which thankfully was already in the midst of evacuation due to the floods of the Climate Surge. Following this, Peru moved its central government to Cusco, which has since grown into one of the largest megacities on the continent, with a population of 32 million as of 2285.

Peru has become something of a Mecca for weartech and smart fabric technology, and Cusco has become the fashion capital of the world (or at least Earth’s Western Hemisphere). On the Peruvian runway, models wear otherworldly clothes made of fabrics which play the entirety of *Citizen Kane*, complete with holographic subtitles orbiting the wearer’s body like Saturn’s rings. Going further, Cusco was the first city to recognize the rights of turingrade weartech AI’s. In Peru, when you go to vote, you might have to cast two ballots. One for yourself, and one for your outfit, which might have a different stance on tax policy relative to you.

In addition to fashion, Cusco has become the new Paris in other ways. As Europe sank both literally and metaphorically, millions of French people fled to Africa and Latin America, with many settling in Cusco. Today, alongside Old Cusco’s ancient Hispanic charm, the hyper-modernized New Cusco is a curious blend of Hispanic, Neo-Inca and Parisian influences.

That Neo-Inca aspect has only grown in prominence since the destruction of Lima and the enhanced profile of Peru’s indigenous and mestizo majority. Spanish is now Peru’s second language, with the most widely-spoken tongue actually being Quechua.

Up in the Andes, one can find large numbers of luxury tensegrity spheres (or “tension spheres”), where Peru’s richest live in absolute decadence as they float between the Andean peaks. Rooms lined entirely with gold (this is a bit less impressive when you have access to gold from the asteroid belt), more nark than you can shake a stick at, squads of disposable sexbots, illegal sex-clones and pet humans. Occasional rumors of human sacrifices and other things that bored rich people get up to when they’ve spent too much time in simulations and want to kill things for real. But on the outside, at least the tension spheres look pretty.

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Chile
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The Grand Principality of Chile is number three in South America after Gran Colombia, but if you asked the average Chilean, they’d laugh, because they know they’re the best.

Chile’s political culture has evolved into that of an almost Prussian monarchy...or rather, the country is cosplaying as one. What actually started as memes and cosplay became a wholesale renovation of Chile’s political and cultural character. While the Grand Prince is hereditary (and indeed, a descendent of Pinochet), the rest of government is a strange sort of technocratic aristocracy. Full-body cybernetics are very common in Chile, as are corsets, greatcoats and ornate military uniforms. The average Chilean noble looks like someone else’s OC, and in the post-memetic era, their duties as nobles have certain theatrical expectations.

After a while, memes about “Espacio Vital” become less and less sarcastic (helps when you start losing actual coastline), and one sometimes becomes the far-right anime character that they portray, and when Argentina collapsed following the Surge, Chile joined in Paraguay’s “intervention”, grabbing territory on the other side of the Andes. They lost Magellanes, Los Lagos and Aysén to the Patagonian separatists, but Chileans will have you know that they were the REAL winners of that trade.

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Parbex Presents: Easter Island
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Parbex was a corporation based in Buenos Aires, which was founded in 2019 and by 2067 owned 60% of Argentina’s traffic lights, 30% of its roads, 45% of its vending machines, all of its vaccines, 20% of its drinking water, and 1,402 continents within the porno virspace, XMundo, to name just a few of its assets. When the Surge hit Argentina, they were already in the midst of packing up and cutting their losses, and temporarily relocated to the Argentinian space habitat, San Martin-2. In 2082, Parbex made an offer to the Chilean government to purchase Easter Island from them, which Santiago accepted, deeming the island a loss, and needing the cash after their expensive invasion and pacification operations in their new trans-Andean provinces.

Easter Island was not entirely submerged. While global sea levels did rise by ~100 meters, many parts of this small island were well above the new water level, such as Mt. Terevaka (507 meters), Mt. Puakatike (370 meters) and Rano Kau (324 meters), along with much of the lower lands in between them. However, Mataveri International Airport was submerged, along with the island’s largest settlement, Hanga Roa, and the majority of the island’s famous moai statues, which were at less than 50 meters above sea level, overlooking the coasts.

Parbex, at great expense, moved 524 submerged moai statues further inland, and that was where their good deeds ended. As part of a collaborative effort with UniGov’s Ministry of Heritage (remember this, and understand the sorts of things UniGov will sign its name to), Parbex has recreated pre-colonial Rapa Nui as an immersive augmented-reality experience. With special glasses, one can bear witness to an ultra-realistic AR recreation of ancient Rapa Nui culture and history - a fascinating and harrowing tale of ecological devastation, desperation, stone heads and bird-man cults. More than just a light-show, the characters one meets in “Parbex Presents: Easter Island” are each ultra-realistic sophwares with fully-realized AI personalities, and depending on your sync options, you will feel them when they touch you. You can hold conversations with them and learn about ancient Rapa Nui culture. Oh, right, there’s also insane amounts of ads. The Rapa Nuians will even work native advertisement of Parbex’s other products and services into their conversations:

Rapa Nui woman: “The tattoos on my cheeks are called pangaha’a, the tattoos on my hands are called rima kona, and for a limited time, Xmundo is offering the Diamond Membership Perk.”

Rapa Nui shaman: “Get 99+ free skins for your avatar, plus a starting budget of 1,500 perla [the in-virspace currency for Xmundo].”

Rapa Nui child: “Limited time offer expires in five hours, applicable only on Parbex-affiliate continents. Product rated for adults only.”

But all that is nothing compared to the dense cloud of holographic pop-ups obscuring the moai statues. Removing one’s AR glasses will not make them go away, and it costs 100 terras to remove the adverts from your gaze.

Per moai.

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Paraguay
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Speaking of Paraguay, needless to say, they did not win the fight against climate change. Being landlocked was not enough to save them from Poseidon’s wrath, as the Paraguay River betrayed them, swelled and ripped the country in half over the course of only five years. This was enough time to evacuate Asunción, though the sheer loss of territory threatened to collapse the nation, which was why they invaded Argentina as *it* collapsed, grabbed some extra land, and survived the post-Surge transition better than those sorry Argentinian bastards did.

Nueva Asunción is truly a marvel. It is the bridge that keeps Paraguay together. Literally. Nueva Asunción is a 100-mile-long, 10-mile-wide, dynamically-supported megastructure. A bridge-shaped arcology complex where 23.7 million inhabitants reside. Nueva Asunción also serves as a bit of a toll booth for Bolivia, allowing Paraguay to profit from Bolivia’s hard work.

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Patagonia
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As for Patagonia, some places are born from irony and short-sightedness. Prior to the Climate Surge completely boning Argentina, Buenos Aires (back when that was still a thing) saw climate change as a potential boon for the country. The cold, wind-swept wastelands of Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego were growing warmer and many suspected the region could become as fertile and welcoming as the Pampas in the future. To settle the region, Argentina accepted refugees from the Arabian Peninsula and Southeast Asia, where worsening droughts and floods created millions of climate refugees in the 2040’s. When Argentina started sinking in the Climate Surge and the vultures descended upon its corpse, the Argentinians saw virtually all of their industry go underwater in less than five years, and would have to rely on Patagonians for the seemingly-apocalyptic war effort. Instead of going down with the ship, the Patagonians seceded, leaving Argentina to a beggar’s peace.

Today, relations between Argentina and Patagonia have managed to recover at least somewhat, though many of the more provincial Argentinians resent Patagonians as backstabbing cowards. For her part, Patagonia is an interesting country, one-quarter Hispanic, one-quarter Mapuche Indian, one-quarter Arab and one-quarter Thai. Half the country is Muslim, the other half is Buddhist, Spanish is the dominant language, weartech versions of traditional Mapuche ponchos are very common (GIF patterns are especially popular). Patagonia might be one of the smaller players in South America, but it’s more that they’ve opted for a slower pace with higher tech to keep them comfortable.

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Mesoamerica
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Moving up north for a bit, let’s briefly examine Mesoamerica.

In the aftermath of the North American Wars of the 2030’s, Central America fell into complete chaos. Chinese influence in the region grew at this time, most notably in Costa Rica and Panama (where the Panama Canal was annexed directly into the PRC in 2035). In the former American Southwest, the Aztlan Liberation Army carved out a sphere of influence for itself in New Mexico and Arizona, bu in the Information Era, borders mean nothing, and the ALA formed enclaves of influence across the disintegrating Mexican state. The ALA started as a gang of radical Mexican-American memelords and Chicano ethnonationalists in the late 2010’s, but by 2041, the “Federation of the People of Aztlan” spanned from Arizona, New Mexico, Southern California and Southwestern Texas, to Nicaragua, with capitals in Gran Juarez (now including “liberated” El Paso), Tenochtitlan (formerly Mexico City) and Nuevo Kaminaljuyu (formerly Guatemala City). In the post-apocalyptic aftermath of World War IV (2067-2073), Aztlan fulfilled its long-desired territorial imperative and swept up Nevada, Utah, Colorado, and the rest of Texas and California, though it would never manage to completely subjugate these regions, despite heavy military investment in conquering and pacifying them.

While the ALA started as a Mexican-American Chicano nationalist movement, in evolved into something else rather quickly; not content to just separate themselves from American culture, the founders of the movement sought liberation from Hispanic culture as well, which was regarded as the “first oppressor”. In doing so, Aztlan fostered “national renewal” of Mesoamerican and Central American pre-Columbian traditions, languages and religions. In practice however, it was a lot like Jurassic Park: they didn’t have enough dinosaur DNA, and had to fill in the gaps with frog DNA. Or in this case, the gaps in ancient knowledge and indigenous wisdom were filled with modern, technological sensibilities.

But for all their efforts, in the north, Aztlan still retained most of its Hispanic heritage, while the southern Mexicans and Central Americans completely rejected it. Tenochitlan, Tlaxcala, Oaxaca, Michhuahcan and others came to speak pre-Columbian languages and worship the Old Gods much more fervently than those Chicano poseurs in the north. While Aztlan fought hard in World War V (2097-2101), they fought themselves much, much harder during the same period; by the 2090’s, Aztlan’s dream of a union of self-actualized and liberated indigenous nations had backfired, because they were not as “pure” as the people they had “liberated”, and they weren’t willing to fight a world war in the name of Gran Juarez. Aztlan was completely dismembered by UniGov at the end of the war, and was left only with its core territories in the Old Southwest. Today, Aztlan is a Third-World shell of itself. You can still find the rusty, hollow shells of pseudo-Aztec cosplay and faded murals of ideals that nobody believes in anymore, but most would say that it’s become a sad, humiliated parody of a culture at this point, after not even a century of existence. Aztlan rejected the United States, rejected Mexico, and in the end, lost faith in itself.

In the aftermath of Aztlan’s collapse, Sinaloa and Zacatecas experienced national revolutions which rejected the “Satanic” pre-Columbian ideologies which many felt were imposed on them by foreigners; if anything, these regions are even more Hispanic than ever before. This is true of Baijo to a lesser extent, though in truth Baijo has a much more mixed culture. On the opposite extreme end of the spectrum, the city of Tenochtitlan is big, cyberpunk, very Aztec, and UniGov is consistently frustrated by the police looking the other way when it comes to the cyborg blood-cults and the like, so, yeah, stick to the tourist-y areas, and maybe consider having some iron on your hip.

Meanwhile, back down south, China’s actions during World War IV (the biggest one being their instigation of an apocalyptic war with a global population-reduction campaign via genetically-keyed bioweapons, combined with follow-up death squad invasions and mass organ-harvesting masquerading as “relief missions”) led to a massive upsurge in anti-Chinese sentiment across the region. The Chinese were betting on winning and not being held accountable for their war crimes, but you know what they say about the best-laid plans of mice and men. It was *not* pretty for the millions of Chinese people in the region (PRC citizens living abroad, recent arrivals and immigrant communities who had been there for centuries), who were forced to flee from many parts of Central America, the Caribbean and even South America, and settled in Costa Rica and Panama, both of which became very thoroughly Sinicized (it helped that “wide-angle” scorchbugs decimated the local urban populations; the fact that the salvation of Chinese Central Americans was ensured by mass-murder in Costa Rica and Panama is...a touchy subject even in the late 23rd century). Today known as Gesidalijia and Banama, respectively, these two countries have historically been joint at the hip, and have even considered political union, but this has never come to pass for various reasons. Anyway, both countries are very Chinese in character, though still have many aspects of the original Hispanic culture, and even “neo-indignous” Aztlani elements. As of 2285, anti-Chinese attitudes have largely died down, and with UniGov abolishing hard borders, people from the less-prosperous northern states have immigrated down to Gesidalijia and Banama, to take advantage of their stable and prosperous local economies and lack of jaguar cults.

Oh, almost forgot. Yeah, the Surge made the Panama Canal a bit redundant. It also fucked up the Gulf Stream and plunged Europe into a brief Ice Age, which prompted UniGov to construct the Ramparts. These colossal mega-dams were built from the 2120’s to the 2150’s, to close up the Darien (Rampart One and Rampart Two) and San Juan (Rampart Three and Rampart Four) channels, thereby separating the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans once more. The Gulf Stream is still taking a bit longer to spin back up again than originally predicted, but Europe *is* getting warmer.

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Caribbean
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And finally, a trip to the east shows us the Caribbean. All of the islands of the Lesser Antilles and the Bahamas have been submerged since the 2040’s, and were among the first lands to sink beneath the waves (along with most of the islands of the Pacific), well before the Climate Surge began. The people of these islands were able to escape the rising tides via pelastat arcologies, and when the Climate Surge arrived, all they had to do was lengthen the anchor tethers between the pelastats and the sea floor.

In the aftermath of World War IV and the Climate Surge, the pirate-infested, refugee-addled, superstorm-ravaged, cyber-apocalyptic Caribbean re-forged the defunct West Indian Federation (1958-2042) as...the West Indian Federation 2. Yes, really. The WIF2. People at the time thought it sounded better than “New West Indian Federation”.

Cuba has been reduced to an archipelago. At the time of the Climate Surge, streams of refugees from Florida and the American South were fleeing war, only to bring it to Cuban shores. Amid the panic, Cuba fell into complete civil war and balkanized; neo-communist hardliners, apocalyptic cultists, charismatic warlords - each of them, and more, knew how to “save” Cuba, and all of them ensured it drowned and disintegrated. Nobody even remembers or cares who nuked Havana or why. The reunification of Cuba took several decades and heavy UniGov mediation. The pelastats you see on the map are much more recent than the Bahamian and Antillean ones.

You’re probably wondering what “Free Ship Syed” is. Well, it’s technically NOT an American polity, but will be for about a week, before it heads for Africa. When sea levels started to sink whole lands in the 2050’s, millions took to the ocean, and over time formed larger and larger “boat-people confederations”, which eventually became larger and larger ships. Free Ship Syed is a city-sized vessel and one of several Bangladeshi free-ships, which roam the ocean and visit ports they have treaties and special economic relationships with.

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Oh Right. Bolivia & Uruguay
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They exist, they’re rich, they’re high tech, they have higher living standards and are more conventionally-futuristic than those poor wretches in North America. Bolivia is very pleased with how climate change turned out, what with all of these nifty new ports. Uruguay is not so pleased.

Description
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Brazil
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Brazil in the 23rd century is majority evangelical Protestant, not that their faith gets in the way of their love of biotech or cybernetics. As the strongest economy in the Western Hemisphere, and the second-largest economy on Earth (Zaire is number one), Brazil is home to 2.4 billion people and is a leader in technology and culture on Earth. A great many European and North American refugees fled to Brazil during the bloodshed and depravity in their homelands during the Heroic Winter of the 2070’s, and the large, closely-knit American-Brazilian communities in places such as Rio and parts of Nova Amazonia, remain common destinations for those living in the impoverished countries of North America, but are too poor or disqualified to leave Earth entirely. In the 23rd century, North Americans in Brazil and other parts of Latin America are still stereotyped as impoverished criminals and thugs.

In spite of deforestation and massive flooding, Brazil has resurrected the Amazon in the only way you ever really should. Rather than draining the Amazon Sea, the rotting remnants of the Amazon Rainforest today nourish the roots of the mighty yvyra trees - colossal mangroves up to a mile or more tall. Six yvyras are used to anchor an artificial island (grova) composed of woven roots, with topsoil added atop. Each yvyra has miles and miles of neurons and biocircuitry (along with pipes pumping water to the upper branches), and each serves as a massive brain for up to a hundred distributed human-level consciousnesses. Each yvyra is a sapient lifeform, counted as a citizen of Brazil, though with as many as a hundred wills and minds which make up a confederate, emergent self. These selves, or “inbota”, oversee the biopunk rainforest-cities built on each grova, which are powered by the yvyra’s abundance of biophotovoltaic (BPV) leaves. There are ninety-five of these hexagonal grovae, each separated by canals large enough for massive cargo ships to pass through, and together the grovae form “Nova Amazonia”, an expanding mega-project where humans, AI’s, cyborgs, uplifted animals (and plants), and a resurrected Amazonian biosphere can all coexist together.

While each yvyra is networked with every other yvyra, each inbota identifies only with the tree it is based within, and with its sibling inbota sired by that tree. An yvyra will produce and phase out many inbota throughout its lifespan, with the longest-lived inbota representing the strongest aspects of that tree’s personality. In order to facilitate meaningful interaction between the trees and their human constituents, yvyra are able to manifest with VR, AR, holo and puppet-android avatars, taking on the form of the same character across all of these formats, superficially reminiscent of the vocaloids of early 21st century Japan. In addition to overseeing municipal infrastructure, to encourage civic participation, these inbota will engage in various forms of public engagement, ranging from daily contests and charity VR competitions, to viral pop songs about the importance of voting and not tagging the trees with racist graffiti.

At the center of Nova Amazonia is the largest and oldest of the great trees, Grande Avó, grandmother of all yvyra, first planted in 2097. She is the only reproductive yvyra, and her basketball-sized seeds are exported all across South America, increasingly shipped to Venus, and have made it as far afield as several exosolar planets.

In addition to the yvyra, other sapient neotree clades are present in Nova Amazonia, along with three different animal uplift races. High up in the upper boughs of the mighty yvyra live the maricoxi, a race of cognitively-enhanced spider monkeys, who’ve opted to make their ancestors’ name a bit more literal. A simple manipulation of maricoxi HOX genes has gifted them with four functional arms and four functional legs, plus microscopic gripping claws on their tails, making them even more masterful climbers. Other native races of Nova Amazonia include tsunki (uplifted giant river otters) and boto (uplifted river dolphins). All three were originally gengineered to work symbiotically with the yvyra in maintaining the various biotic and artificial systems which keep the great trees functioning, and while these still form the cornerstones of maricoxi, tsunki and boto societies and cultures, they have since radiated and diversified, bringing their unique non-human perspectives on life to the big rainbow tapestry of Nova Amazonia. A true worthy successor to the Amazon Rainforest.

Further south, in the Venice-like arcoplex of Rio de Janeiro, one can find uplifted macaws calling themselves cocatriz. Out of pride for their dinosaurian ancestors, these guys have augmented themselves with retrogenic traits like wing-claws and longer tails, and today resemble archaeopteryxes with parrot-like beaks.

Coastal cities like Fortaleza, Bahia, Recife and São Paulo more or less moved further inland, becoming New Fortaleza, New Bahia, New Recife and New São Paulo, with their partially or fully-submerged areas becoming the “Historic Districts”, or perhaps aquamorph slums. Rio stood apart by embracing the surge waters and, rather than retreating further inland, pressurized as many of the buildings in the city as possible. In the time since the Surge, the underwater city has built its way up to the surface, but also has abundant floating buildings stretching high up and deep down.

And then there’s the capital, Brasilia, has grown noticeably larger, and is an entire world of concrete and glass, more reminiscent of the classic cyberpunk megacity than the other examples mentioned here. Inspired by abandoned and overgrown cities of the Global North such as Chicago or Nagoya, however, at the tail end of the 22nd century, there started a campaign to beautify and “re-wild” the parts of Brasilia which had been practically depopulated due to an especially careless form of gentrification. The result has been multi-level forests occupying different floors of mile-tall highrises, clear streams and creeks where roads once were, bridges made from living, bio-programmed trees traversing said streams, and of course, an uncountable number of GMO flowers glowing at night in place of neon. While once confined to the “Green Quarters”, more and more of Brasilia has been greening up over the last 90 years. Though it’s worth pointing out, the overgrowth in those northern cities isn’t nearly as pleasant or inviting.

Oh, almost forgot. GrandTransAt. One of two South American launch loops (the other being Chile’s Pinochet loop), GrandTransAt is a dynamically-supported non-rocket launch system, stretching across the South Atlantic, from Brazil to Angola. The loop is held up at an altitude of fifty miles, by the momentum of a belt that circulates around the structure via maglev rails. This circulation, in effect, transfers the weight of the structure onto a pair of magnetic bearings, one at each end, which support it (turning off the circulation would cause the structure to lower down onto the ocean). Very cheap launches are facilitated via the flat portion of the loop, which hangs above the atmosphere, and accelerates spacecraft to escape velocity, sending them into Earth orbit. In addition to serving as a launch system, GrandTransAt serves as a bridge between Brazil and Angola, and between Africa and South America, Earths two most prosperous regions in 2285.

============
Gran Colombia
============

At the top of South America, we have Gran Colombia. While still playing second-fiddle to Brazil, Gran Colombia is a very prosperous country, and rivals Brazil in terms of cultural exports (films, music, games, etc). Despite losing large portions of land to the Surge, Gran Colombia has bounced back, building their own “Nuevo Orinoco” with yvyra seeds that Bogotá will have you know they purchased with their own money.

What else about Gran Colombia is worth mentioning? Well, it’s the homeland of the original macaw uplifts, known as gwayota. Some gwayota have opted for simple lives in the countryside, where they run nut and fruit plantations, but most are very urban. Similarly to their cocatriz relatives down in Brazil, gwayota are talkative and social beings; the macaw races by and large tend to be atheists because they derive their sense of spiritual comfort and fulfillment from the relationships in their lives, rather than ritual or superstition. One of the more interesting occupations for gwayota (and one that never seems to go out of demand) is being a professional friend for socially-awkward people; gwayota aren’t just incessant talkers, they’re also very avid listeners, and conversationalists in general, and take the same pride in being someone’s friend-for-hire that an ancient blacksmith might put into his craft. Even with cheap subturing AI’s on the market, many people still seem to prefer these charismatic avians over machines. When a gwayota dies, they tend to have many people attending their funeral, which by gwayota custom is an upbeat celebration where people are encouraged to mingle and connect, rather than cry or mourn.

What else? Well, Bogotá’s pretty neat place in 2285. A 950-square-mile pyramid structure known as “El Firmamento” covers the entire Bogotá metro area, with four massive dynamically-supported pylons meeting many miles above the ground. The pylons serve to frame four gigantic translucent screens which function simultaneously as: solar panels, a filter from harmful UV rays, and a surface area for holographic billboards (hey, the megastructure needs to pay for itself). By day, the billboards in the sky are fairly sparse, but they fill the night sky. Who even needs stars, right? Additionally, the pyramid enclosure allows for Bogotá to have a wholly engineered climate; when your scantily-clad weatherman says it’s going to rain, it’s because that’s what the government schedule has planned.

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Guyana
=======

The Guyana Cooperative (officially the “Cooperative Republic of the Three Guyanas”) was a creation of Brazil, following its intervention in the region. The Space Boom helped with the development of Guyana, Suriname and French Guiana’s interiors, where multiple space-launch centers were built, mostly by the Commonwealth and Europeans. New cities were built in the highlands, and when the crowded coastlines were inundated during the Climate Surge, armed hordes of refugees surged towards these cities, which had benefited for so long at the expense of the people on the coast. The governments of the “Three Guyanas” had no choice but to pool their resources to hold back the revolutionaries, and in the end, only Brazil’s timely intervention was enough to clinch victory, and it was Brazil which piled weapons on top of Guyana to keep its authoritarian regime in power.

The Cooperative is a recovering authoritarian technocracy still in the process of democratizing, after decades of struggle culminated in the rebels going legit and securing victory in democratic elections in the 2130’s. More than a century later, many things still remain deeply ingrained in Guyana (such as a pervasive surveillance state that will not go away), but at least the days of robot death squads are in the past. To address overcrowding in the Guyanese megacities, the Cooperative purchased yvyra seeds from Brazil in the 2140’s, and has planted grovae off the Guyanese coast, in the shallow waters where the land once was.

Back in the interior, Guyanese spaceports are still getting a lot of use out of them, even with the elevators to the south. Much like Somalia’s “Rocket Coast”, Guyana benefits from the long lines and cargo regulations around Ecuadorian, Brazilian and Colombian elevators, or the Brazilian, and Chilean launch loops. Guyana by contrast provides affordable, no-questions-asked space launches with old-school rockets.

=======
Ecuador
=======

Ecuador was the site of one of the earliest space elevators, built by Chinese investors in the 2030’s, just outside of Quito. During World War IV, the European Defense Forces regarded Ecuador as a Chinese ally, and the Quito Elevator as a Chinese asset and a priority target. On September 17th 2067, EDF fighter craft on an unauthorized mission, severed the cable at a height of 25,000 kilometers above the Earth’s surface. The orbital anchor drifted into a higher orbit, while the rest of the cable fell back down to Earth, though concerns that it would wrap around the whole planet and sever other elevators in a cascading apocalypse were proven wrong, when the top half of the falling elevator burned up on atmospheric reentry, and the rest of it landed with the force of a sheet of paper due to air resistance on the way down, though it did cut a path of destruction across South America, narrowly missing Brazil’s own elevator, and with the frayed tip of the partially-incinerated cable landing in the Atlantic Ocean. This was one of the few catastrophes during WW4 that wasn’t apocalyptically hyperbolic.

However, the Quito Space Elevator was rebuilt in the 2080’s, and since that time, Ecuador has built three more. Despite losing Guayaquil to the Surge, as early as the Space Boom, Ecuador has been very well-situated for trade between Earth and the orbital countries of Exonesia; one of the oldest commercial spaceports in South America, Puerto Quito, was built in the 1980’s by the United States, and is still busy well into the 23rd century. This, in addition to its elevators makes tiny Ecuador competitive with Brazil when it comes to space trade.

Also of note, the Galapagos were not completely inundated by the Surge, but they did lose a lot of land, and all of the local ecosystem was destroyed by catastrophic superstorms in the 2070’s. However, beginning in the mid-22nd century, the Galapagos was rebuilt. The peaks of the islands which were still above the waters became the foundation for colossal elevated platforms shaped like sunken mushrooms along the slopes of Volcán Wolf (now with a gigantic geothermal power plant drilled deep inside the active volcano), supporting lazurogenic populations of various Galapagos plants and animals, including giant tortoises and iguanas. This wasn’t enough to attract tourists and therefore justify the costs, however, so the gengineers created tortoises the size of elephants and giant winged iguanas and a new “novelty finch” phenotype every month or so. Additional preservation/resurrection zones are anchored above the totally-submerged islands, in the form of pelastat arcologies, and the whole operation is overseen by...Charles Darwin. Yes, that Charles Darwin. The Ecuadorian government sank *a lot* of money into recreating Charles Robert Darwin, and were so successful that they had to explain to the Darwin AI what happened to his wife, Emma. And the fact that he technically wasn’t the same person who knew those people. It was an awkward conversation, and he needed some time to think over his existence.

But he got over it once he heard about this “DNA” thingamajig. As a distributed intelligence with a central server network sustained by the geo-power of Volcán Wolf, Charles Darwin is simultaneously able to divide his time between monitoring each of the New Galapagos biospheres, attending to each and every tourist, running the security systems and maintenance protocols, and engage in his own private research and experimentation (in the 23rd century, there are still many unanswered questions about the origins of life, and this Darwin has dedicated his life to uncovering the truth of abiogenesis, something he was unable to do in his first life). Similarly to the inbota of Nova Amazonia, Darwin manifests all across the New Galapagos, in VR, AR and in multiple remote-operated android bodies, dressed to the nines with period-accurate clothing, and each modeled after a different period in Darwin’s life, between ages seven and seventy-three. There’s little distinction between “Darwin the mind”, “Darwin the system”, “Darwin the bodies” and “Darwin the New Galapagos”. He is effectively a genius loci.

====
Peru
====

Lima was destroyed by a piece of Beijing.

The Beijing Impact of 2069 threw several megatons of rock into low Earth orbit, only to inevitably come back down, and one of these chunks landed on Lima - a city which thankfully was already in the midst of evacuation due to the floods of the Climate Surge. Following this, Peru moved its central government to Cusco, which has since grown into one of the largest megacities on the continent, with a population of 32 million as of 2285.

Peru has become something of a Mecca for weartech and smart fabric technology, and Cusco has become the fashion capital of the world (or at least Earth’s Western Hemisphere). On the Peruvian runway, models wear otherworldly clothes made of fabrics which play the entirety of *Citizen Kane*, complete with holographic subtitles orbiting the wearer’s body like Saturn’s rings. Going further, Cusco was the first city to recognize the rights of turingrade weartech AI’s. In Peru, when you go to vote, you might have to cast two ballots. One for yourself, and one for your outfit, which might have a different stance on tax policy relative to you.

In addition to fashion, Cusco has become the new Paris in other ways. As Europe sank both literally and metaphorically, millions of French people fled to Africa and Latin America, with many settling in Cusco. Today, alongside Old Cusco’s ancient Hispanic charm, the hyper-modernized New Cusco is a curious blend of Hispanic, Neo-Inca and Parisian influences.

That Neo-Inca aspect has only grown in prominence since the destruction of Lima and the enhanced profile of Peru’s indigenous and mestizo majority. Spanish is now Peru’s second language, with the most widely-spoken tongue actually being Quechua.

Up in the Andes, one can find large numbers of luxury tensegrity spheres (or “tension spheres”), where Peru’s richest live in absolute decadence as they float between the Andean peaks. Rooms lined entirely with gold (this is a bit less impressive when you have access to gold from the asteroid belt), more nark than you can shake a stick at, squads of disposable sexbots, illegal sex-clones and pet humans. Occasional rumors of human sacrifices and other things that bored rich people get up to when they’ve spent too much time in simulations and want to kill things for real. But on the outside, at least the tension spheres look pretty.

=====
Chile
=====

The Grand Principality of Chile is number three in South America after Gran Colombia, but if you asked the average Chilean, they’d laugh, because they know they’re the best.

Chile’s political culture has evolved into that of an almost Prussian monarchy...or rather, the country is cosplaying as one. What actually started as memes and cosplay became a wholesale renovation of Chile’s political and cultural character. While the Grand Prince is hereditary (and indeed, a descendent of Pinochet), the rest of government is a strange sort of technocratic aristocracy. Full-body cybernetics are very common in Chile, as are corsets, greatcoats and ornate military uniforms. The average Chilean noble looks like someone else’s OC, and in the post-memetic era, their duties as nobles have certain theatrical expectations.

After a while, memes about “Espacio Vital” become less and less sarcastic (helps when you start losing actual coastline), and one sometimes becomes the far-right anime character that they portray, and when Argentina collapsed following the Surge, Chile joined in Paraguay’s “intervention”, grabbing territory on the other side of the Andes. They lost Magellanes, Los Lagos and Aysén to the Patagonian separatists, but Chileans will have you know that they were the REAL winners of that trade.

========================
Parbex Presents: Easter Island
========================

Parbex was a corporation based in Buenos Aires, which was founded in 2019 and by 2067 owned 60% of Argentina’s traffic lights, 30% of its roads, 45% of its vending machines, all of its vaccines, 20% of its drinking water, and 1,402 continents within the porno virspace, XMundo, to name just a few of its assets. When the Surge hit Argentina, they were already in the midst of packing up and cutting their losses, and temporarily relocated to the Argentinian space habitat, San Martin-2. In 2082, Parbex made an offer to the Chilean government to purchase Easter Island from them, which Santiago accepted, deeming the island a loss, and needing the cash after their expensive invasion and pacification operations in their new trans-Andean provinces.

Easter Island was not entirely submerged. While global sea levels did rise by ~100 meters, many parts of this small island were well above the new water level, such as Mt. Terevaka (507 meters), Mt. Puakatike (370 meters) and Rano Kau (324 meters), along with much of the lower lands in between them. However, Mataveri International Airport was submerged, along with the island’s largest settlement, Hanga Roa, and the majority of the island’s famous moai statues, which were at less than 50 meters above sea level, overlooking the coasts.

Parbex, at great expense, moved 524 submerged moai statues further inland, and that was where their good deeds ended. As part of a collaborative effort with UniGov’s Ministry of Heritage (remember this, and understand the sorts of things UniGov will sign its name to), Parbex has recreated pre-colonial Rapa Nui as an immersive augmented-reality experience. With special glasses, one can bear witness to an ultra-realistic AR recreation of ancient Rapa Nui culture and history - a fascinating and harrowing tale of ecological devastation, desperation, stone heads and bird-man cults. More than just a light-show, the characters one meets in “Parbex Presents: Easter Island” are each ultra-realistic sophwares with fully-realized AI personalities, and depending on your sync options, you will feel them when they touch you. You can hold conversations with them and learn about ancient Rapa Nui culture. Oh, right, there’s also insane amounts of ads. The Rapa Nuians will even work native advertisement of Parbex’s other products and services into their conversations:

Rapa Nui woman: “The tattoos on my cheeks are called pangaha’a, the tattoos on my hands are called rima kona, and for a limited time, Xmundo is offering the Diamond Membership Perk.”

Rapa Nui shaman: “Get 99+ free skins for your avatar, plus a starting budget of 1,500 perla [the in-virspace currency for Xmundo].”

Rapa Nui child: “Limited time offer expires in five hours, applicable only on Parbex-affiliate continents. Product rated for adults only.”

But all that is nothing compared to the dense cloud of holographic pop-ups obscuring the moai statues. Removing one’s AR glasses will not make them go away, and it costs 100 terras to remove the adverts from your gaze.

Per moai.

========
Paraguay
========

Speaking of Paraguay, needless to say, they did not win the fight against climate change. Being landlocked was not enough to save them from Poseidon’s wrath, as the Paraguay River betrayed them, swelled and ripped the country in half over the course of only five years. This was enough time to evacuate Asunción, though the sheer loss of territory threatened to collapse the nation, which was why they invaded Argentina as *it* collapsed, grabbed some extra land, and survived the post-Surge transition better than those sorry Argentinian bastards did.

Nueva Asunción is truly a marvel. It is the bridge that keeps Paraguay together. Literally. Nueva Asunción is a 100-mile-long, 10-mile-wide, dynamically-supported megastructure. A bridge-shaped arcology complex where 23.7 million inhabitants reside. Nueva Asunción also serves as a bit of a toll booth for Bolivia, allowing Paraguay to profit from Bolivia’s hard work.

========
Patagonia
========

As for Patagonia, some places are born from irony and short-sightedness. Prior to the Climate Surge completely boning Argentina, Buenos Aires (back when that was still a thing) saw climate change as a potential boon for the country. The cold, wind-swept wastelands of Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego were growing warmer and many suspected the region could become as fertile and welcoming as the Pampas in the future. To settle the region, Argentina accepted refugees from the Arabian Peninsula and Southeast Asia, where worsening droughts and floods created millions of climate refugees in the 2040’s. When Argentina started sinking in the Climate Surge and the vultures descended upon its corpse, the Argentinians saw virtually all of their industry go underwater in less than five years, and would have to rely on Patagonians for the seemingly-apocalyptic war effort. Instead of going down with the ship, the Patagonians seceded, leaving Argentina to a beggar’s peace.

Today, relations between Argentina and Patagonia have managed to recover at least somewhat, though many of the more provincial Argentinians resent Patagonians as backstabbing cowards. For her part, Patagonia is an interesting country, one-quarter Hispanic, one-quarter Mapuche Indian, one-quarter Arab and one-quarter Thai. Half the country is Muslim, the other half is Buddhist, Spanish is the dominant language, weartech versions of traditional Mapuche ponchos are very common (GIF patterns are especially popular). Patagonia might be one of the smaller players in South America, but it’s more that they’ve opted for a slower pace with higher tech to keep them comfortable.

=============
Mesoamerica
=============

Moving up north for a bit, let’s briefly examine Mesoamerica.

In the aftermath of the North American Wars of the 2030’s, Central America fell into complete chaos. Chinese influence in the region grew at this time, most notably in Costa Rica and Panama (where the Panama Canal was annexed directly into the PRC in 2035). In the former American Southwest, the Aztlan Liberation Army carved out a sphere of influence for itself in New Mexico and Arizona, bu in the Information Era, borders mean nothing, and the ALA formed enclaves of influence across the disintegrating Mexican state. The ALA started as a gang of radical Mexican-American memelords and Chicano ethnonationalists in the late 2010’s, but by 2041, the “Federation of the People of Aztlan” spanned from Arizona, New Mexico, Southern California and Southwestern Texas, to Nicaragua, with capitals in Gran Juarez (now including “liberated” El Paso), Tenochtitlan (formerly Mexico City) and Nuevo Kaminaljuyu (formerly Guatemala City). In the post-apocalyptic aftermath of World War IV (2067-2073), Aztlan fulfilled its long-desired territorial imperative and swept up Nevada, Utah, Colorado, and the rest of Texas and California, though it would never manage to completely subjugate these regions, despite heavy military investment in conquering and pacifying them.

While the ALA started as a Mexican-American Chicano nationalist movement, in evolved into something else rather quickly; not content to just separate themselves from American culture, the founders of the movement sought liberation from Hispanic culture as well, which was regarded as the “first oppressor”. In doing so, Aztlan fostered “national renewal” of Mesoamerican and Central American pre-Columbian traditions, languages and religions. In practice however, it was a lot like Jurassic Park: they didn’t have enough dinosaur DNA, and had to fill in the gaps with frog DNA. Or in this case, the gaps in ancient knowledge and indigenous wisdom were filled with modern, technological sensibilities.

But for all their efforts, in the north, Aztlan still retained most of its Hispanic heritage, while the southern Mexicans and Central Americans completely rejected it. Tenochitlan, Tlaxcala, Oaxaca, Michhuahcan and others came to speak pre-Columbian languages and worship the Old Gods much more fervently than those Chicano poseurs in the north. While Aztlan fought hard in World War V (2097-2101), they fought themselves much, much harder during the same period; by the 2090’s, Aztlan’s dream of a union of self-actualized and liberated indigenous nations had backfired, because they were not as “pure” as the people they had “liberated”, and they weren’t willing to fight a world war in the name of Gran Juarez. Aztlan was completely dismembered by UniGov at the end of the war, and was left only with its core territories in the Old Southwest. Today, Aztlan is a Third-World shell of itself. You can still find the rusty, hollow shells of pseudo-Aztec cosplay and faded murals of ideals that nobody believes in anymore, but most would say that it’s become a sad, humiliated parody of a culture at this point, after not even a century of existence. Aztlan rejected the United States, rejected Mexico, and in the end, lost faith in itself.

In the aftermath of Aztlan’s collapse, Sinaloa and Zacatecas experienced national revolutions which rejected the “Satanic” pre-Columbian ideologies which many felt were imposed on them by foreigners; if anything, these regions are even more Hispanic than ever before. This is true of Baijo to a lesser extent, though in truth Baijo has a much more mixed culture. On the opposite extreme end of the spectrum, the city of Tenochtitlan is big, cyberpunk, very Aztec, and UniGov is consistently frustrated by the police looking the other way when it comes to the cyborg blood-cults and the like, so, yeah, stick to the tourist-y areas, and maybe consider having some iron on your hip.

Meanwhile, back down south, China’s actions during World War IV (the biggest one being their instigation of an apocalyptic war with a global population-reduction campaign via genetically-keyed bioweapons, combined with follow-up death squad invasions and mass organ-harvesting masquerading as “relief missions”) led to a massive upsurge in anti-Chinese sentiment across the region. The Chinese were betting on winning and not being held accountable for their war crimes, but you know what they say about the best-laid plans of mice and men. It was *not* pretty for the millions of Chinese people in the region (PRC citizens living abroad, recent arrivals and immigrant communities who had been there for centuries), who were forced to flee from many parts of Central America, the Caribbean and even South America, and settled in Costa Rica and Panama, both of which became very thoroughly Sinicized (it helped that “wide-angle” scorchbugs decimated the local urban populations; the fact that the salvation of Chinese Central Americans was ensured by mass-murder in Costa Rica and Panama is...a touchy subject even in the late 23rd century). Today known as Gesidalijia and Banama, respectively, these two countries have historically been joint at the hip, and have even considered political union, but this has never come to pass for various reasons. Anyway, both countries are very Chinese in character, though still have many aspects of the original Hispanic culture, and even “neo-indignous” Aztlani elements. As of 2285, anti-Chinese attitudes have largely died down, and with UniGov abolishing hard borders, people from the less-prosperous northern states have immigrated down to Gesidalijia and Banama, to take advantage of their stable and prosperous local economies and lack of jaguar cults.

Oh, almost forgot. Yeah, the Surge made the Panama Canal a bit redundant. It also fucked up the Gulf Stream and plunged Europe into a brief Ice Age, which prompted UniGov to construct the Ramparts. These colossal mega-dams were built from the 2120’s to the 2150’s, to close up the Darien (Rampart One and Rampart Two) and San Juan (Rampart Three and Rampart Four) channels, thereby separating the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans once more. The Gulf Stream is still taking a bit longer to spin back up again than originally predicted, but Europe *is* getting warmer.

========
Caribbean
========

And finally, a trip to the east shows us the Caribbean. All of the islands of the Lesser Antilles and the Bahamas have been submerged since the 2040’s, and were among the first lands to sink beneath the waves (along with most of the islands of the Pacific), well before the Climate Surge began. The people of these islands were able to escape the rising tides via pelastat arcologies, and when the Climate Surge arrived, all they had to do was lengthen the anchor tethers between the pelastats and the sea floor.

In the aftermath of World War IV and the Climate Surge, the pirate-infested, refugee-addled, superstorm-ravaged, cyber-apocalyptic Caribbean re-forged the defunct West Indian Federation (1958-2042) as...the West Indian Federation 2. Yes, really. The WIF2. People at the time thought it sounded better than “New West Indian Federation”.

Cuba has been reduced to an archipelago. At the time of the Climate Surge, streams of refugees from Florida and the American South were fleeing war, only to bring it to Cuban shores. Amid the panic, Cuba fell into complete civil war and balkanized; neo-communist hardliners, apocalyptic cultists, charismatic warlords - each of them, and more, knew how to “save” Cuba, and all of them ensured it drowned and disintegrated. Nobody even remembers or cares who nuked Havana or why. The reunification of Cuba took several decades and heavy UniGov mediation. The pelastats you see on the map are much more recent than the Bahamian and Antillean ones.

You’re probably wondering what “Free Ship Syed” is. Well, it’s technically NOT an American polity, but will be for about a week, before it heads for Africa. When sea levels started to sink whole lands in the 2050’s, millions took to the ocean, and over time formed larger and larger “boat-people confederations”, which eventually became larger and larger ships. Free Ship Syed is a city-sized vessel and one of several Bangladeshi free-ships, which roam the ocean and visit ports they have treaties and special economic relationships with.

===================
Oh Right. Bolivia & Uruguay
===================

They exist, they’re rich, they’re high tech, they have higher living standards and are more conventionally-futuristic than those poor wretches in North America. Bolivia is very pleased with how climate change turned out, what with all of these nifty new ports. Uruguay is not so pleased.