In 2030, two events had Americans more divided than they had been even during the polarizing Trump administration. The first was that years' 5-4 Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. The second was the acquital of LAPD officer Jeremy Bixler in the murder of Tonya Jackson, a thirteen year old black girl, and her 84 year old grandmother Wanda Jackson, which started riots country wide, and riots in LA so extreme that even the National Guard could not contain them and the city was placed under martial law. This was the first Battle of Los Angeles, but would not be the last.

In early 2031 American President Arturo Salieri (America's first Italian president) issued the infamous Salieri Proclamation, "temporarily" suspending the First and Second Amendments in order to prevent "incitement of violence" in the former case and because of the atmosphere of impending violence that hung over the country (and the still raging Battle of Los Angeles).
The Salieri Proclamation kicked off America's second civil war. Washington, Oregon, Montana, Idaho, California, New Mexico, and Texas all declared their secession from the union within one week, although not as one nation but as three.

Washington, Oregon, Montana, and Idaho formed the Northwest Secession Coalition or NSC, while New Mexico and Texas joined to form the nation of New Texas. California declared itself the Free State of California, or CalFree. Like his far-more-competent, far-more-popular predecessor Abraham Lincoln, President Salieri refused to acknowledge the sovereignty of any of these nation states, but nonetheless wound up at war with two of them.

Over the next five years, until the war ended in 2036 with the signing of the Treaty of Denver, the United States of America gradually fell apart. Hawaii was annexed by Japan, and Canada peacefully annexed Alaska and Maine. The NSC marched inexorably eastward, occupying Utah, Wyoming, both Dakotas, parts of Arizona, Colorado, and Nebraska, and the Oklahoma pan-handle. The ideological core of the NSC--reactionary states rights advocates who were indifferent to the murder of Tonya Jackson and actually in favor of Roe v. Wade being overturned--had been planning for this for decades, stockpiling a stunning amount of weaponry, including military grade gear and vehicles. The government had finally come for their guns, as they'd been waiting for and planning for since the Bundy Standoff of 2014 (Cliven Bundy's sons, Ammon and Ryan, were both given commissions as Generals in the NSC Coalition Military, and would both die in combat in two separate, disastrous battles). Molon Abe ("Come and Take Them") became the NSC's motto. The states comprising the NSC operated largely independently, with the militas coordinated by the high command (originally based in Spokane but eventually moved to Phoenix which would remain the NSC's capital) but given a great deal of autonomy in how they pursued the war effort, not unlike the Colonial Militias during the early parts of the Revolutionary War. The fact that the better organized, better funded, and better equipped US military, which also outnumbered then by a substantial margin, was fighting a war on two fronts was the deciding factor in the NSC's early success.

New Texas surrendered first, seeking the protection of the United States considering that they were in a position where they were militarily threatened by both Mexico to the South and the NSC to the West and North. The separate peace they made on January 1st, 2033 stipulated the reinstitution and full legal protection of the Second Amendment, their reason for seceding in the first place. The US military was then able to bring its full attention to bear on the NSC if not its full strengh. No serious attempts were made by either the NSC, the short lived New Texas, or the US to invade CalFree, which not only maintaned its independence but peacefully annexed a large swathe of Nevada, including New Mexico.

By 2035 the West and the East had fought to a stand still, with the NSC tenuously occupying most territory west of the Missispi river, with the United States reduced to just the 22 states of Vermont, New Hampshire, New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, the Carolinas, Virginia, West Virginia, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Alabama, and the newly reintegrated Texas and New Mexico. The US and the NSC contested the states of Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkansas, Missouri, Illinois, and Wisconsin. Very serious threats were made of nuclear attacks, with the US threatening a nuclear attack on Phoenix and the NSC threatening a nuclear attack on Chicago. Thankfully cooler heads prevailed, but most historians agree that it was a close thing (Chicago was partially evacuated, and had already been damaged extensively by bombing with conventional munitions).

The war ended with the signing of the treaty of Denver on April 21st, 2035. The treaty divided what had been the continental US into East and West along the line of the Mississippi river. The city of Denver itself was divided in two like Berlin at the conclusion of World War II, with everything west of I-25 NRC territory and everything east of Colorado Boulevard US territory. The stretch of city between Colorado Boulevard and I-25 became a buffer, officially the Demilitarized Zone, but Denverites (maintaining good spirits considering the degree to which the Second Civil War had devastated their city) generally referred to the DMZ as the "Denver Militarized Zone" or "Downtown Militarized Zone".

The NSC rebranded as the American Federation, and the eastern half of the former United States came to be known as the American Union.

In 2039, the second Mexican-American war erupted, started by Mexico, now unrepentantly a narco state controlled by its cartels. The war lasted just over a month, and ended with Mexico reclaiming most of the state of Arizona south of Phoenix, the entire state of New Mexico, and much of the state Texas south of Dallas.

Multinational Megacorporations were nothing new: they had been around at least since the beginning of the 20th Century. But as the greatest miltiary power in the world tore itself apart, the Megacorps were raising their own armies and becoming more powerful than any nation state on Earth, and not restricted by national borders. Three of the world's largest corporations, Walmart, Berkshire Hathaway, British Petroleum merged into the corporate Cerberus known as Axis Incorporated. ExxonMobile absorbed numerous smaller energy companies, the last of the American car manufacturers, and corporations in other fields, diversifying its portfolio, and reemerged as Eos Energy. Eos' headquarters city of Houston, now the Houston-Galveston Sprawl, is a functionally self-sufficient and independent corporate city-state within Mexican borders. Apple, Amazon and Google merged into Emerald Systems (acquiring several smaller companies in the process), headquarted in Seattle, the world's largest provider of hardware, software, internet access, and electronics by a huge margin. Far to the east, in Japan, the major Japanese Zaibatsu had merged with Samsung into the enormous multinational megacorp Mitsutomo Industrial Electronics, headquartered in the secure corporate enclave of Singapore, easily equalling Axis Incorporated, Eos Energy, or Emerald Systems in terms of size and power.

Axis Incorporated made an enormous fortune repairing the massive damage to the infrastructure of the American Union's major cities such as Chicago and Detroit.

In the face of unchecked greenhouse gas emissions Global Warming's impact proved to be devastating more than fifty years earlier than most climate scientists' worst-case projections. Throughout the 2040s, Superstorms battered coastal regions throughout the world, and flooding forever changed the face of or outright drowned entire cities. New Orleans, New York and D.C. were near total losses, with residents who could afford to do so fleeing inland, and the entirety of the city of Charleston and the entire STATE of Florida wound up completely underwater. On the West Coast, the Bay Area was entirely devastated, leaving Los Angeles and Las Vegas as the two largest cities in CalFree. Seattle had prepared sufficiently that the flooding of the city was more of a transition than a catastrophe, at least according to the corporate media. It can't be denied that the resulting city, with Venice-inspired canals down on street level and gleaming glass sky-bridges connecting skyscrapers and high-rises up above, was a thing of beauty.

The American Union relocated its capital to the Axis International North American headquarters city of Detroit.

Overseas, London, Bangladesh, the Nile Delta, Shanghai, Dhaka, Guangzhou, Ho Chi Minh City, Manila, Melbourne, Jakarta, Lagos, and Venice were all devastated, while Tokyo were completely transformed, as was Hong Kong even if it was not as successfully as Seattle's transformation (nearly two million of Hong Kong's poorest citizens were effectively left to drown while the middle class and the rich relocated to higher, dryer ground).

All in all, just under ONE BILLION HUMAN BEINGS lost their lives (or went missing, presumed drowned) during the flooding of the world's coastal and delta cities over the course of the 2040s.

In the early 2050s, using proprietary nano-aeroforming technology, Axis Incorporated airships began releasing nanomachines into the atmosphere to stabilize the climate. The superstorms began to fall off and the rise in greenhouse gas levels wasn't just slowed or stopped: the nano-scrubbers controlled by the Axis Aeroforming Platforms were actually reversing global warming, greenhouse gas levels actually FALLING due to human actions for the first time in the history of climate science.

While still working on alternate energy sources, the world's reliance on petroleum had reached all-new highs with the devastation caused by the second Civil War and drastic sea level rise. GCC, (Gulf Corporate Council), a Saudi based multinational, owned and controlled the proverbial "last drops". Depending on your historical perspective, the Resource Wars began some time between 2051 and 2053 and ended some time between 2058 and 2061. Axis Incorporated and the American Union, acting jointly, invaded the Persian Gulf region, which strategically forced the Russian Federation and the People's Republic of China to do so, creating a four-way free-for-all between GCC, the AI/AU Alliance, the Russian Federation and the PRC that devastated the Arabian Peninsula and the greater Middle East.

The result, besides millions more dead, was the utter destruction of the GCC, the withdrawal of the American Union/Axis International forces and the uneasy division of the Middle East between the Russian Federation and the People's Republic of China.

In the meantime, Eos Energy developed a stable fusion reactor and Emerald Systems developed the software needed to run it. A clean, safe, renewable energy source was finally available, and solely to the American Federation.

Going into the 2060s, it was clear that the American Union and Axis Incorporated were doomed if they could not acquire the priceless secrets of fusion power somehow. While of course government and corporate scientists were working on the project directly, there was little to indicate any hope of progress in a reasonable time frame. The result was a war unlike any the world had ever seen before, not a cold war, not a "hot war", but something completely new. In a sense it wasn't a war at all, but a campaign of industrial espionage on a grand scale with the highest possible stakes. The AU never invaded the AF, but they didn't HAVE to. Axis Incorporated initiated a series of raids, infiltrations, sabotage missions, and kidnappings "extractions" to try and acquire the key personnel, the key data, and the key technology needed to create a stable, reliable fusion reactor. Emerald Systems counterattacked almost entirely with a barrage of social media hit pieces designed to go viral and destroy Axis's public reputation, and cyber warfare attacks designed to destroy and disrupt Axis's ongoing operations: money is power, and data is money. Eos Energy on the other hand counterattacked with tactics similar to those being used against them by Axis Incorporated.

The death toll of this "war" is thought to be very low, but since all the actions in it were at least nominally covert, accurate casualty figures were impossible to even estimate. The war was not fought by soldiers or by armies, but by mercenaries, freelance operatives, security personnel, and hackers of all stripes (that is all hats: black, white, and gray). It is generally thought that many (non-combatant) employees of Axis and Eos were killed, but estimates of collateral casualties range all the way from the high hundreds to the low six figures, depending on which reporting agency you believe. Complicating matters further, nearly all English-language media outlets were owned by Axis or Emerald Systems, meaning they were in the business of producing not news but propaganda. While combat drones and exoframes had seen heavy use during the Resource Wars (which also saw the first large scale use of directed energy weapons in combat, although over 85% of military and security forces are still using conventional ballistic weapons even today), the corporate war saw the deployment of entirely new combat technologies, land-air-and sea capable stealth drones, designed for infiltration and espionage, not combat.

While Axis took its lumps during the war and lost several major pieces of proprietary technology that IT had developed, ultimately Axis managed to secure the key personnel, technology, and facilities to develop a working, stable fusion reactor. It then proceeded to charge the American Union a fortune for the implementation of the technology nationwide.

In 2068, a Mitsutomo Industrial Electronics naval fleet attacked the Free State of California. The CalFree militia put up a valiant defense, but before the turn of the decade, Zaibatsu forces had occupied Los Angeles and the Silicon Valley. Tied down by fighting a counter-insurgency war, the MIE/Japanese military did not advance towards the city of Las Vegas, if that was ever in MIE's battle plans.

Throughout the 2050s and 2060s, the People's Republic of China gradually nationalized all megacorporations with a major presence in China. Meanwhile, the inverse was happening in the American Union.

Axis Incorporated first privatized every prison in the American Union, providing it not just with a steady stream of income, but a robust supply of human "volunteers" for use in testing by the R&D departments of its shadier subsidiaries. Likewise, throughout these two decades, political scientists generally agreed that the Smythe Super-PAC (funded and owned by Axis Incorporated) was effectively the sole deciding factor in every US Presidential election. Up until 2064, when President Sara Wallace passed laws permitting Axis to privatize the police force of the city of Detroit as a "civic experiment", the resistance to Axis had been overwhelmingly peaceful (and largely slacktivism). The rapid, subsequent privatization of the police forces in several more American cities (Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and even the flooded ruins of Old New York) proved more than many Americans could stomach. Mass rioting broke out in many cities that had, were going to, or were in the process of the privatization of the metro police force. This was also the first time the terrorist organizations P.A.C.T. (Patriots Against Corporate Tyranny) and SoL (officially, the Sons of Liberty, but almost always referred to solely by the three-letter acronym, an example of the importance of graveyard humor to these "freedom fighters", as its members seem perversely proud of the fact that SoL also stands for "Shit Outta Luck", appeared in the news media. It would not be the last, as P.A.C.T. and SoL cells began a steady campaign of terror against Axis Incorporated facilities, personnel, and infractructure.

On Election Day 2072, Alistair Smythe, board member and CIO of Axis Incorporated, was elected President of the American Union. Resistance against Axis and SoL activity began steadily rising.

On May 10th, 2073--as it happens, 300 years to the day after the British Parliament passed the Tea Tax--over night, Axis Incorporated purchased almost the entirety of the American Union's $33 Trillion dollar national deficit from its various creditors around the world. (When the various states that eventually formed the American Federation seceded, they did not take any of the national debt with them.) By buying the American Union's enormous debt, Axis Incorporated had virtually bought the entire country, lock, stock, and barrel. Everything they couldn't control by controlling the Presidency and by financing virtually every candidate successfully elected to the AU's Senate and House of Representatives in the last decade they controlled now. The American Union owed a $33 Trillion dollar debt to not a group of nations but a single Megacorporation. Many of the American people (more precisely, the people of the American Union) were incensed by this, especially the ones that didn't have cushy jobs at Axis subsidiaries. P.A.C.T. and SoL activity increased dramatically, and cells of both organizations cropped up in cities that had never seen them before.