I said yes and then began issuing invitations to all of the members of my party. After I finished, I said, “Can everyone hear me?” They all said they could so I continued on saying, “this is my mother, Grace Seebring.”

“Hello,” she said. “I’ve spoken with a couple of you before, Janet and Tanya. I know of Big Mike. My security detail kept me appraised. eGirl I’ve seen pictures of. Jake, would I be right in assuming that you worked for the City of Tulsa?”

“Um, yes,” he said. “I was the Planning Director. Back before all of this happened.”

“Ah,” she said. “I’ve heard good things about you from your staff.”

“You’ve talked to my staff?” he said. “They survived?”

“Some of them did, some we aren’t sure about. But your Administrative Assistant, your Community Engagement Planner, and the Principal Planner, Current Planning are alive and well. The rest we haven’t been able to reach,” she said.

“I’m so glad,” he said. “Thank you for telling me this.”

“Not a problem,” she said. “They miss you, miss having your leadership.”

“You mean they are still planning? Planning what?” he asked.

“The short answer is how we are going to survive monsters. How we can create cities to keep them out, how we can have an infrastructure with no technology, no electricity, no plastics, no insulation, no lumber mills, no nationwide or even local transportation, no real public transportation at all basically now, no grocery stores, no Walmarts or Kohls. How we can create safe spaces for our population.”

“I’ve got some ideas about that,” he said.

“Your team all thought you would,” she answered. “We need those ideas!”

“Wait,” said Big Mike. “I would like something clarified first.”

“Let me guess,” my mom said. “How did I become Duchess? What happened to the United States? What happened to Oklahoma? What happened to the President? What happened to the Governor? The Mayor? The police force? The Army, Navy, Airforce, or Marines? The National Guard? The Supreme Court? The Houses of Congress? ”

“Yes,” said Big Mike. “All that.”

“The day that you got the announcement about the population deaths, remember that?”

“Yes,” we all said.

“Well that morning, I got that announcement and another one following saying that I was appointed as the Duchess of Northern Tulsa. From what I learned then and over the next few days, there is now something called, in a very oriental fashion, the Mandate of Heaven. If you have it, you have the right, the ability, to rule, if you don’t, you don’t. They provide some fairly sophisticated tools to those with the mandate: Communications like we’re using now, the ability to conscript, the ability to tax, the ability to negotiate treaties, the ability to set laws for your domains including high and low justice, the ability to appoint subordinates to positions of power, and some fairly nice perks in housing, for instance my house is now literally becoming a castle with a town below it.”

“How did they choose you?” he asked.

“Do the names George Kaiser, Harrold Ham, David Greene, Tom Love, Lynn Schusterman ring any bells with you?

Consuelo answered first, “Rich people, right?”

“That’s right,” my mom said. “All of them are now Dukes or Duchesses,” she said. “We’re all Dukes or Duchesses.”

“You mean they just made the rich people our leaders?” asked Consuelo.

“I think so,” answered my mom. “I have chatted with George and he has been prying at the system. I didn’t know about imues until my brilliant boy told me about them, but now that I do, I can better understand where he’s getting some of his information. He said that the old government didn’t handle the Event and lost its Mandate. It passed to its successor which it turns out is us. Rich people. Well, mostly rich people. He said something about the past 20 years have demonstrated a weakening of Democracy and the rise of an Oligarchy or a Plutocracy. They just made it official.”

“I’m a Marine, damn it! I fought for the United States” Big Mike started.

My mom interrupted, “Are you? Before you get upset with me, I want you to try a little experiment for me. Say again, ‘I am a Marine’ and mean it with everything you’ve got! Remember all those morning drills, the training, the marches, the tours of duty, remember it all and say it again, say, ‘I am a Marine!’ Do it now, please.”

Big Mike stood up and said, “I am a Marine,” but by the end of the statement, it came out more like a question. He tried it again, “I am a Marine,” but if anything, this time it came out even weaker than before.

“You see,” my mom said. “Mandate of Heaven. If you don’t have it, you don’t have the right to armies, taxation, treaties, all of the rights, abilities, and responsibilities of government, gone. It’s wrong, but it is what it is.”

“They did this?” he asked.

“They did this,” she answered.

“Well shit,” he said.

“I know,” she answered. “I got this ton of responsibility dumped on me because I was a little bit better at chasing a dollar than the next person.”

“Mom,” I said, “you’re not Harold Hamm, George Kaiser rich, are you?”

She kind of laughed then and said, “Honey, I’ve been meaning to have a talk with you for a while about that. In a word, yes. Yes, I was. I’m not sure how they calculated it, but it looks as if they assigned us territories in proportion of our pre-Event wealth.”

I had to think about that for a while. Evidently, so did everyone else because there was a long silence then. “You know I was living out of a Cadillac, don’t you?” I asked.

“Your choice, but I could tell you were going to leave that behind soon,” she said. “You just needed to find your way.”

**7/08

“And I found it in an apocalypse,” I murmured.

“At least you found it,” she said.

“That’s nice and all,” said Big Mike, “but this is some pretty scary shit. I mean I was a Marine for about 20 years and now I feel no connection to the Corps at all. None. That is some jacked-up, janky shit right there.”

“Honey,” said Consuelo looking at their little girls who were listening in.

“Sorry, babe!” he said. “Girls, I don’t ever want to hear you repeating what I just said, you understand.”

They both nodded their heads.

“OK,” said eGirl, “what we need to know is what’s happening right now? What are you doing?” she asked my mother. “What can we do? All this other crazy stuff is kind of immaterial, isn’t it?”

“That’s kinda the point,” I said. “The fact that you can even think that the US government is gone is immaterial, is kind of a big thing.”

“Not really,” eGirl said. “What is, is. We’re in the middle of an apocalypse, I’m choosing to think about only what I can do to survive. What helps me and mine survive is important, what doesn’t, isn’t. Besides, looking at the way that last man was running the government, there wasn’t much there for me or mine and he promised even less in the future.”

“Humph,” my mom snorted, but let it go. She was not a fan of our current president. “It turns out that creating a government from scratch is a lot of work,” my mom said. “I’ve just met with Duke Kaiser and Duchess Schusterman about the government that we want to form.”

“And that is?” asked eGirl.

“We’re going with the model founded on the aristocracy,” my mom said. “Basically what we’ve been given. I’m a Duchess, I exercise control over my lands, the same with him and her. We don’t have a lot of time to set something else up, our responsibility is to keep people from dying. What helps that is what we’ll use. As you’ve said, ‘what is, is’. We’re trying to fit us together as a Republic, we haven’t worked it out yet, but we will. Somehow, maybe we’ll bind ourselves together by treaties.”

“And how does this play out in the rest of the country? In the world?” asked Miranda.

“Not every country lost its mandate,” she said. “I know that some countries were more successful at keeping their population alive, for instance, Switzerland, Luxemburg, Sweden, Norway, England, Ireland, Denmark, Belgium, Germany, Iceland, most of Canada all survived relatively intact. Maybe others, I’ve been to busy to research.”

“How do you know that?” I asked.

“That map that you have?” she said. “I’ve got one too. Only mine is a lot more complete. It shows areas that have stabilized as normal, without the, what my advisors are calling the ‘fog of war’. Of course, the map isn’t interactive within their territories like it is mine, but it at least shows who is succeeding.”

“And who is succeeding in what used to be the US?” asked Jake.

“Well,” she said, “Utah looks good despite shrinking in size,” she said. “All of those Mormons were basically prepping for the apocalypse anyway. Maine is also good, other parts of New England look good, some of Michigan, Minnesota, some of Pennsylvania also good. But it’s hard saying, every state is forming a new government. Some of them have multiple duchies, some of them have only a single Duchy. It’s all broken, we’re all broken. Almost every state is bigger than it used to be. It’s like the whole planet grew. However, not every state grew. Remember how I said they assigned us territories in the exact proportion of our pre-Event wealth? Well, they did that all over the world. The poorer the country, the smaller it became, the richer, the larger it grew. The same thing happened in the states, for instance, Alaska is now just slightly larger than the size that Vermont used to be, Alabama is now the size basically of Maryland.”

“But Alaska was rich, it had minerals, oil, gold, land,” said Big Mike. “I thought about moving there after the Corps.”

“What it didn’t have was rich people, someone with actual wealth that They could grade. Do you know who was the richest person in America was according to the latest Forbes ranking?” she said.

“Jeff Bezos” said eGirl almost immediately.

“Correct,” my mom said. “Do you know what the current largest Duchy is? Amazonia. Set in what used to be Washington.”

“No way,” said eGirl.

“Yep,” said my mom, kind of smacking her lips on the p sound. “Currently it is basically the size that Alaska used to be. I don’t know how, but I think that it’s all-new land too. He didn’t get handed developed land from the neighboring states, they somehow created new land, whereas Alabama shrank by almost 20%.”

“What happened to the people in Alabama on the land that disappeared?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I’d like to think that they got moved onto existing land, but I don’t know. Perhaps they disappeared too. But that is literally kilometers and kilometers away from us. Fortunately, Oklahoma grew. I won’t have to deal with some landowner missing their back forty. So far it seems to be the opposite here. Everyone’s bitching about their neighborhood growing. Makes a difference when the only way to get around is foot or bike or horseback. By the way, cobblestone streets and bikes are not a great combination. In any case, their Dukes and Duchesses need to handle it.”

Jake asked, “You mentioned the ‘Mandate of Heaven’, how is that passed?”

“The old fashioned way, when I die, it goes to my heir. When he dies, it goes to his heir,” she said.

“And if he doesn’t have an heir?” asked eGirl.

“If we were both killed by someone that had a legitimate claim for the mandate, it would go to them. If we were killed by someone that didn’t have a legitimate claim, it would settle on the next claimant. If there were no legitimate claimants or too many, then it would need to be resolved somehow by the people affected.”

“You mean by war?” asked eGirl.

“That’s one way, I guess,” said my mother. “Probably the most likely way. However, voting, dance-offs, popularity contests, whatever method the people of the Duchy agreed to decide the issue would work.”

“And if no one steps forward?” I asked.

“In the unlikely event that no one steps forward, say, ‘I am a Marine’.”

“You mean,” I began.

“Yes,” my mother said. “There is no government, no law, no treaties, no taxes, no armies, just a bunch of individuals or groups trying to grab power, to achieve the Mandate.”

“That might not be such a bad thing,” began Big Mike.

“Tell that to Consuelo when a bandit or warlord or a sexual predator that’s been practicing his or her spells a lot wants to take your daughter,” my mom said. “No law means you control only what you have the strength to control and you can take what you have the strength to take.”

“That’s messed up,” said Big Mike, “but not too surprising. I saw some of that in Afghanistan.”

“Yes,” said my mom, “and that’s why I said yes when They made me Duchess.”

“So you had a choice,” said Jake.

“No,” she said. “Not really. I could have said no, but that would have left the Duchy unclaimed with no defined process to claim it. I didn’t see that as a valid option.”