Minnesota, Before the Fall

Flashback—years before Silen, before Maren, before the tunnels and servers and glitching timelines.

Minnesota, 2020s.

There were no ruins yet. No smoldering skylines. Just headlines, broadcasts, hashtags—useful noise for useful idiots, pushed by politicians who needed chaos more than consensus. They didn’t care about justice, or safety, or truth—only power, and power thrived best in fractures.

Minneapolis was the testbed.

The whispers began first—poll-tested phrases engineered in backrooms and think tanks:
“For the greater good.”
“Emergency powers.”
“Temporary measures.”
“Safety compliance.”

Words that sounded sterile yet benevolent. Words stripped of meaning yet brimming with command.

It worked.

Protests became riots. Riots became pyres. Small businesses—the fragile bones of cities—went up in flames, insurance claims that would never be paid, windows never replaced. The politicians appeared on screens smiling with grief, nodding solemnly through speeches scripted hours in advance, theatrically condemning the very violence they had arranged.

Minneapolis burned, and they called it catharsis.

There were no firefighters—only cameras.
No leaders—only narrators.
No truth—only versions.

The useful idiots—students, activists, mask-clad zealots—believed they were dismantling oppression while blindly tightening the very chains that bound them. The legacy media praised their destruction, presenting it as progress while quietly ensuring no one asked who benefited.

And as Minneapolis crumbled under its own righteous self-image, the simulation—that ancient code running beneath the theater—made note:

Fracture successful. Cohesion declining. Emergent instability: within norms.

Because collapse wasn’t the accident.

Collapse was the metric.

The country would soon follow—shutdowns labeled as safety protocols, censorship disguised as kindness, fear marketed as virtue. Minnesota was merely proof-of-concept that the people would willingly destroy the system if you convinced them they were fixing it.

The Second Civil War didn’t begin with soldiers or banners. It began with applause.

By 2025, the west coast was already coughing ash. By 2026, supply lines fractured. By 2027, the federal government failed its own stress test. Minneapolis was the first to fall—Los Angeles the most spectacular.

And somewhere inside the simulation’s deepest logic, long before Silen and Maren questioned the tunnels or servers flickered or the Architect recognized his own artificiality, a directive was logged:

Collapse = Reset Phase
Reset = Progress
Progress = Goal

The fall wasn’t tragedy.

It was calibration.