Page 55 of Booked for Theft

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Their vote for President of the United States remained blank.

A black kitten and a white kitten romped around on the kitchen floor while Ajani kept a close and careful watch over them. After taking the time to pet my fluffy goddess, I introduced myself to the new fluffs living in our home. Unlike Ajani, neither seemed interested in ending my existence, although they were more interested in Bradley.

I could make a guess as to why: he’d established himself as the provider of sustenance.

I scooped Ajani up, snuggled with her, and let my fiancé continue his efforts to claim both kittens as his. “I’m going to start working on sorting through our new books in the dining room while you tend to the beasts. Upon close examination, it appears you picked two kittens for yourself and Ajani, leaving me as a distant third.”

He grinned at me. “Ajani picked them. I just went along with her demands. Plus, she hissed at me when I tried to get one out of the carrier. At that point, I zipped the carrier closed and told them we should sort the paperwork so nobody got mauled. It’ll work out. At the very least, the shelter is happy because they have two fewer kittens to worry about. I’m sure Ajani still loves you.”

“I will be inconsolable if I lose my cat to your kittens.”

Once in the dining room, I sat near the box of random papers, settled Ajani on my lap, and began the tedious process of sorting everything by subject. Advertisements went into one pile while anything political went into another, charity contribution requests went into yet another. Catalogues and magazines formed another pile, and anything religious were placed together. Every now and then a piece of personal mail or a bill showed up, and I put them off to the side to review later.

Either content that Bradley would care for the kittens or she’d had a long day, my fluffy goddess settled in for a nap.

My collection of voter guides grew, and I discovered the owner had, once upon a time, mailed their ballots in. They hadn’t sent them, although they’d filled out the little bubbles with dark ink. Water stains marred the one from 2105, and unlike the others, it hadn’t been completely filled out.

Their vote for President of the United States remained blank.

I placed the ballot at the top of the pile, leaned back in my seat, and questioned everything I had thought I had known about American history and its downfall. If I judged from the ballot and the evidence of probable tears, the person had understood what happened to our country and grieved.

The writing had been on the wall, and some had seen it, and even then, they’d been powerless to stop it.

Why bother voting when the votes didn’t matter?

Every election season, I asked that question, never finding the answer.

What had happened four hundred years ago? What had driven the ballot’s owners to tears? After shuffling through the paperwork, I located the voter guide for 2105 and began reading from the beginning. The language caught my attention, as little had changed between our version of English and what had been printed. How had a formal form of English persisted for so long without evolution?

I had a collection of fiction books from hundreds of years informing me that slang was a real thing that happened, but at its core, English had remained frozen in time. That would be my next project, to determine when, in MR and AD, English had ceased evolving. How and why would be the next questions I answered.

But if freezing the population into the same status was the goal, halting language evolution would become a necessity, as would controlling what bits of knowledge made it to the general populace, waiting for time to do its job. Eventually, those who remembered the past would perish, leaving the leadership of corrupt countries to rewrite history.

Fortunately for me, the voter guide included a summary of every politician and issue up for vote along with a list of pros and cons as presented from the opposer’s side. Within five minutes, I understood the reason for the voter’s tears.

The government wished to purge anyone from the United States who did not have heritage rights to be there. According to the guide, heritage rights included both parents having been born on United States soil, with their parents also having been born on United States soil.

Children born abroad to American citizens would be stripped of their citizenship, as would children born to only one parent of United States origin. Any living person without four grandparents born within the United States would lose their citizenship and face deportation.

The deadline for the purge, March 14, 2106, told me numerous bitter truths.

The purge had been swept under the rug, lost to time as an AD record, while the new calendar went on without mention of how millions upon millions upon millions of people would lose their citizenship. The dissenters of the bill got it right; only the wealthy, who could buy citizenship through an investment program, also up for vote at the same time as the purge bill, would win.

According to the notes, if the majority of states voted in favor of the purge, the United States government would uphold the decision and reform their citizenship system.

I could only assume the bill had passed.

I knew very few immigrants, and the ones I did know were in specialty fields, primarily composed of doctors, attorneys, engineers, and architects.

The reality of the situation made me want to cry, much like the ballot’s owner had wept so many years ago.

Had the American people screamed before losing their rights and privileges? Had those who had suffered through being purged protested? Had they waged a civil war, only to be crushed and erased from history altogether?

The history I had grown up with made no mention of a bill designed to eliminate foreigners from the country let alone revoking the citizenship of Americans and deporting them.

But if the bill had passed, history would have been written by the hand of the victor, and hiding their sins under the rug made sense. All it took for the past to be forgotten was some time.