Civilization Unraveled

They called it urban renewal — but what came was anything but.

What began as compassion, evolved into decay. In the name of equity and justice, mayors and councils across the former United States tore down what they called the "old systems of oppression": sanitation enforcement, police presence, zoning laws, even basic health regulations. Anything that resembled structure was deemed exclusionary. The result? Civilization unraveled.

By 2041, the cities were no longer governed, only managed — and barely that. Bureaucrats handed out clean needles and pamphlets on consent to crowds half-lost to psychosis. Public restrooms were shuttered, replaced by “Compassion Zones” — corners of parks now ankle-deep in human waste and broken glass. Fires smoldered in trash heaps. Disease crept back into the vocabulary: typhus, cholera, plague.

But people remembered what once was.

Out in the periphery — in the quiet suburbs turned enclaves, in the farmlands, and in the ruins of former townships — a resistance took root. They called themselves The Restoration Bloc. Former engineers, medics, veterans, and teachers — those who still believed in sewers, order, and truth. They built communes with walls, dug wells, and reestablished rules. In some regions, they gained support from remnants of local law enforcement, disillusioned soldiers, and even the sickened urban refugees.

They believed that civilization must be fought for, and if necessary, retaken by force.

The Federal Authority, which no longer governed but only watched, branded them terrorists. A new agency was created: The Unified Domestic Enforcement Regiment — UDER — an amalgam of federal leftovers and private corporate militias. Their job was to “protect the reformed urban cores” from “militant reactionaries.”

What they really did was hunt.

Drone strikes lit up rebel safe houses in the Rockies. Restoration medical tents were napalmed in the Midwest under the pretense of biohazard containment. In the cities, informants and AI surveillance networks rooted out sympathizers, who were disappeared into "re-education programs" — high-tech gulags hidden behind abandoned Walmarts and old FEMA camps.

But the Bloc did not fold.

In the smoldering shell of Portland, Restoration scouts infiltrated sewer lines, planting slow-release sanitizers to decontaminate the river and make a point: We can fix this. In San Francisco, they hijacked broadcast nodes and streamed pre-collapse footage of clean, bustling streets, stunning viewers long raised in filth. Their message spread like fire:

"We remember the world before. We will build it again."

The people — especially the young, born into dystopia — began to listen.

Skirmishes turned into firefights. The cities, though choked in decay, became battlegrounds. Resistance cells operated in the shadows of skyscrapers, beneath broken bridges, inside husks of old hospitals. They armed themselves with scavenged weapons, 3D-printed drones, and repurposed tech. They didn't want revenge. They wanted restoration.

But the regime would not give up control so easily.

In a national address, the last vestige of the federal executive — a figurehead known only as The Custodian — declared the rebels enemies of the New Progress. He vowed to root out "sanitation supremacists" and launched Operation Clean Sweep — a cruel mockery of its name. What followed was the sterilization of entire blocks: flame, gas, and sound weapons that disoriented and killed without leaving visible wounds.

Still, the Bloc endured.

Because beneath the soot, beneath the blood, beneath the madness — was memory.

Memory of clean water. Of flushing toilets. Of civility. Of dignity.

And that was something no drone could bomb out of existence.