January

Millenarian sects were nothing new, many had sprung up through the ages around the times of plagues, famines, wars, and round numbers of new centuries or millennia. But historians were hard pressed to find a period when they multiplied at such a rapid rate as they did now. While religiosity had been steadily declining in North America for decades, the continent retained its Judeo-Christian cultural background, even if just nominally. Just like for St. Augustine centuries ago, the returners served as a proof for the immortality of the soul, and by extension the existence of God. Better than a miracle, this was The Miracle, one that addressed humanity's oldest concern, its own mortality.

The Mormons were the quickest to adapt, and saw their ranks swell rapidly. Properly called the Church of Latter-Day Saints, the Mormons were founded by Joseph Smith in New York in the 1820s, who claimed to have been visited by an angel who revealed to him golden plates on which the Book of Mormon was written in an angelic language. The Book of Mormon long sparked controversy and ridicule, as it featured accounts of Jesus Christ appearing in North America and preaching to its inhabitants, following his resurrection. Though despite its unusual doctrine, thanks to a strong culture of proselytization, it had grown steadily over two centuries in the US and abroad.

With ground zero of the returner phenomenon being so close to New York, it only took a little tweaking to make it fit with Mormonism. Whereas the earlier doctrine stated that Jesus appeared in America as a kind of astral body following his resurrection, the new interpretation tied the resurrection to the Second Coming, The Resurrection, connecting the life of Christ as an individual in a kind of fractal mirroring to the life of the Church as a whole in the present. Thus, again, the people were said to be in the period between the Crucifixion and the Resurrection, when Christ was in the underworld, leading out the select dead through the grace of his love.

Scientifically, the story didn’t check out. Various religions tried asserting, for good or ill, that the returners were of a particular faith, but an analysis of the actual records did not support this. The distribution varied little in terms of a particular faith or lack of it. Yet, instead of disqualifying this explanation, it only seemed to reinforce it, as any religion could find at least some of its members among the returners, and thereby assert its own validity. Another instance of selection bias.

Nonetheless, in many cases, the religious groupings that appeared at the time ended up saving their members in much more immediate ways. Millenarian sects tend to spend their resources especially freely when the appointed end of times is at hand, so it was a blessing for many of the panicked refugees to be welcomed into communities with plenty of food, clothes, and medicine. While some communities did implode from overtaxed resources, the communities tended to become smaller and therefore more stable as the returner phenomenon spread outwards.

On the secular side, things often played out much worse. The US has the distinction of being the country with by far the most states, 50, and that’s not even counting DC or the different territories like Puerto Rico, Guam, Virgin Islands, etc. The runners up, for comparison, are Nigeria with 36 and Mexico with 31. In many ways, the great autonomy the individual states possess had strengthened the country over its history, but this was not one of those times. During the Covid epidemic, as with the influenza epidemic a century earlier, the self-determination that comes with statehood did little to stop the spread of the disease. Democratically elected officials answer to their constituency, rather than to science, the higher good, or even reason itself, and most people do not like feeling trapped during a plague, so as soon as one state border would close, another would open.

What was happening now was the inverse. While there was no evidence that the refugees brought any kind of contaminant with them, most states in time put restrictions on entry or closed their borders altogether. The issue was further aggravated by the fact that the returner phenomenon began in the northeast blue states, and within two months was spreading into the red ones, whose residents were much more resistant to welcoming their political rivals. The asymmetrical distribution of personal weaponry between the well-stocked South and Midwest, as opposed to the mostly empty-handed Northeast refugees resulted in conflicts and massacres that in some places were reported as Civil War 2.

The President of the US was hesitant to intervene. It was difficult to predict the location of potential conflicts ahead of time, so as to send the National Guard there as a preventative measure. There was the option of giving large groups of refugees a military escort for their protection, but this idea was viewed as an impingement on statehood, a kind of federal threat forcing states to allow in thousands whom they had neither the resources nor the desire to support. So, on the political level, the US international policy that had been allowing fewer and fewer foreign refugees, was now recreated fractally on the state level.

But while the US was devolving into a military feudalism of warring states, Canada, with its ten provinces and three territories, which divided the world’s second largest country, fared far better, albeit it did end up closing its border with the US following what would later be called the Battle of Montreal. In the sparsely populated, remote north, in fact, there were no signs that what for many seemed like the end of the world was even taking place.